Romantic Prose Fiction (Comparative History of Literatures in Europlanpoe

Romantic Prose Fiction

A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF LITERATURES IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES SPONSORED BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION HISTOIRE COMPARÉE DES LITTÉRATURES DE LANGUES EUROPÉENNES SOUS LES AUSPICES DE L’ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL DE LITTÉRATURE COMPARÉE

Coordinating Committee for A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Comité de Coordination de l’Histoire Comparée des Littératures de Langues Européennes 2007 President/Président Randolph Pope (University of Virginia) Vice-President/Vice-Président Daniel F. Chamberlain (Queen’s University, Kingston) Secretary/Secrétaire Margaret Higonnet (University of Connecticut) Treasurer/Trésorier Vivian Liska (University of Antwerp) Members/Membres assesseurs Jean Bessière, Inôcencia Mata, Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza, Marcel Cornis-Pope, Elrud Ibsch, Eva Kushner, Fridrun Rinner, Laura Calvacante Padilha, Franca Sinopoli, Steven Sondrup, Svend Eric Larsen, Cynthia Skenazi

Volume XXIII Romantic Prose Fiction Edited by Gerald Gillespie, Manfred Engel and Bernard Dieterle

Romantic Prose Fiction

Edited by Gerald Gillespie Stanford University

Manfred Engel University of Oxford

Bernard Dieterle

Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Romantic prose fiction / edited by Gerald Gillespie, Manfred Engel and Bernard Dieterle.    p.   cm. -- (Comparative history of literatures in European languages = Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes, ISSN 0238-0668 ; v. 23)  Includes bibliographical references.   1. Fiction--18th century--History and criticism. 2. Fiction--19th century--History and criticism. 3. Romanticism. PN3500 .R66   2008 809.3/9145--dc22 2007038183 ISBN 978 90 272 3456 8 (alk. paper) CIP © 2008 - John Benjamins B.V./Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 36224 • 1020 ME Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA

Contents

Preface Introduction Gerald Gillespie

ix xiii

Part I. Characteristic themes The French Revolution and prose fiction: Allegorization of history and its defeat by Romance Gerhart Hoffmeister (UC Santa Barbara)

1

Wertherism and the Romantic Weltanschauung Bernard Dieterle (Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse)

22

Romanticism and the idealisation of the artist Gregory Maertz (St. Johns, N.Y.)

41

»Unheard melodies and unseen paintings«: The sister arts in Romantic fiction Mihály Szegedy-Maszák (Eötvös; Indiana Univ., Bloomington)

53

Music and Romantic narration Claudia Albert (Leipzig)

69

Nature and landscape between exoticism and national areas of imagination Wilhelm Graeber (Göttingen)

90

Mountain landscape and the aesthetics of the sublime in Romantic narration Paola Giacomoni (Trento)

107

The »Wanderer« in Romantic prose fiction André Lorant (Paris XII)

122

Night-sides of existence: Madness, dream, etc. Monika Schmitz-Emans (Bochum)

139

Doubling, doubles, duplicity, bipolarity Ernst Grabovszki (Wien)

168

Images of childhood in Romantic children’s literature Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (Tübingen)

183

Artificial life and Romantic brides Michael Andermatt (Zürich)

204

vi Romantic gender and sexuality Thomas Klinkert (Mannheim), Weertje Willms (TU Berlin)

Contents 226

Part II. Paradigms of Romantic fiction A. Generic types and representative texts The Gothic novel as a Romantic narrative genre Hendrik van Gorp (Leuven)

249

Variants of the Romantic »Bildungsroman« (with a short note on the »artist novel«) Manfred Engel (Oxford)

263

Historical novel and historical Romance Markus Bernauer (TU Berlin)

296

The fairy-tale, the fantastic tale Jörn Steigerwald (Gießen)

325

The detective story and novel Gerald Gillespie (Stanford)

345

Récit, story, tale, novella Santiago Rodriguez Guerrero-Strachan (Valladolid)

364

The literary idyll in Germany, England, and Scandinavia 1770–1848 Sven Halse (Odense)

383

B. Modes of discourse and narrative structures Address, relation, community: Boundaries and boundary crossing in Romantic narration Frederick Garber (Binghamton)

412

Torn halves: Romantic narrative fiction between homophony and polyphony Monica Spiridon (Bucharest)

435

The fragment as structuring force Remo Ceserani (Bologna), Paolo Zanotti (Pisa)

452

Mirroring, abymization, potentiation (involution) Sabine Rossbach (Melbourne)

476

Romantic novel and verse romance, 1750–1850: Is there a Romance continuum? John Claiborne Isbell (Indiana Univ., Bloomington)

496

Contents

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Myth in Romantic prose fiction Dorothy Figueira (Univ. of Georgia, Athens)

517

From historical narrative to fiction and back: A dialectical game Virgil Nemoianu (Catholic Univ. of America)

527

Romantic prose fiction and the shaping of social discourse in Spanish America Annette Paatz (Göttingen)

537

Part III. Contributions of Romanticism to 19th and 20th century writing and thought Narrative maneuvers in the »periphery«: The Spanish and Latin American novel during Romanticism Jüri Talvet (Tartu)

559

Romantic thought and style in 19th century Realism and Naturalism Jeanne J. Smoot (Univ. of North Carol., Raleigh)

580

Romantic legacies in fin-de-siècle and early 20th century fiction Joel Black (Univ. of Georgia, Athens)

596

Framing C.J.L. Almqvist: The narrative frame of Törnrosens bok and Romantic irony Steven P. Sondrup (Brigham Young Univ.)

610

Romanticism, occultism and the fantastic in Spain and Latin America José Ricardo Chaves (Univ. Nacional de México)

622

Romantic prose fiction in modern Japan: Finding an expression against the grain Takayuki Yokota-Murakami (Osaka)

643

Ludic prose from Laurence Sterne to Carlos Fuentes A. Owen Aldridge † (Univ. of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana)

655

Rewrites and remakes: Screen adaptations of Romantic works Elaine Martin (Univ. of Alabama, Tuscaloosa)

664

Conclusion Bernard Dieterle, Manfred Engel, Gerald Gillespie

695

Appendix (Table of Contents, vols. 1–4)

703

Index of Names in vol. 5

709

Preface

In preparing this volume, our editorial team sought to keep a variety of readerships in mind. We wanted the contents to be interesting both to specialists in particular literatures that had experienced their own kind of Romanticism and to literary generalists and comparatists curious about shared characteristics that had surfaced in several traditions. Equally important in our view was that the cross-cultural studies in the three parts of Romantic Prose Fiction be more readily accessible also to those readers on all continents who are not primarily pursuing European and Euro-American literatures but nevertheless would like to explore Romanticism because it enjoys a wide reputation as the most significant cultural development immediately antecedent to Modernism. As the Introduction and many of the chapters themselves will set forth, the unfolding status of Romanticism, from its first manifestations down to the present, is a central matter the volume addresses. While English, the working language here, is familiar as a lingua franca around the globe, some notes on our editorial choices will be helpful toward making this volume more »user-friendly«. Titles and quotations that were originally in English appear unaltered in the main text. Titles from other language streams appear in a conventional short form in the relevant language and are followed by an English version in parentheses. Non-English quotations always appear translated in the main text, and their original wording is given in an attached footnote. Quotations from languages that employ other alphabets or characters are transliterated into roman script. In the case of Russian, we use a modified version of the Library of Congress transliteration system. In order to avoid confusion in punctuation and indexing, ligatures have been eliminated. The final »soft sign«. (‘) has been dropped from personal names, while the medial soft sign has been replaced by i, except where in Russian this sign is followed by a consonant or an i. The soft sign has been retained, however, in transcriptions of Russian titles and in quoted passages of Russian text. Our Index arbitrarily treats the Russian letter ë (= yo) and e (=ye) in names by substituting a plain e; for example, Fedor (=Fyodor) Dostoevskii (=Dostoyevsky). The lack of any reference to the provenance of a translation always means that the writer of the chapter or one of the co-editors has furnished the English version. However, if the writer of the chapter draws on a published translation, that will be indicated by a reference interpolated in the main text. Every chapter carries its own bibliography. Whether a work listed therein pertains to primary or secondary literature or is a published translation, all titles stand in a single alphabetical order. Thus the reader can easily find the fuller bibliographical data for any short-form reference in the main text. The Bibliography of a chapter ordinarily does not carry all titles of works that the contributor may have found to be of some help but does not refer to explicitly or that are referenced in passing as well known classics. Although each Bibliography in general follows Anglo-American norms, it is not strictly »anglicized« in every detail; for example, sometimes the convention of another language may determine an element in an entry (e.g., the form München is often used in preference to the normal English form Munich as a place of publication).

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Bernard Dieterle, Manfred Engel and Gerald Gillespie

The Index constitutes a valuable resource for exploring the volume’s contents. But because Romantic Prose Fiction involves comparative literary history with its attendant rich cultural variegation, the reader is cautioned to expect differences in the naming habits from one language stream or culture to another. These variations, plus differences in the transliteration of names from languages which employ cyrillic letters, may affect the placement of the key element of a name in our alphabetical listing of figures. However, readers will be able to find prominent Russian names in the Index under their conventional American and British forms. Generally, names have been assimilated to Anglo-American conventions; in some few instances, however, the conventions of another language may be used to place the name. Another factor to keep in mind while searching the Index is that the naming conventions have shifted in many languages over the centuries. One of the most striking examples of this is the co-extant, sometimes variable use of personal names and of family names for figures in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance; these habits became fixed by custom and survived to our times in English (and, in addition, may vary among modern European languages). Hence Michelangelo Buonarroti is alphabetized under the letter M, while François Rabelais appears under the letter R. In the case of anonymous authors and pen-names, the probable or well-known »actual« name will ordinarily be shown in parentheses in the Index. As an extra aid, such names will frequently be cross-referenced. To achieve a desirable uniformity in punctuation, treatment of titles, footnoting, and bibliography, these were adjusted to conform to a recognized American standard, but not in every particular. For example, contemporary British treatment of the placement of quotation marks has been observed, while the quotation marks themselves are a widespread French and German kind. Whenever a contributor consistently employs British spelling (e.g., favour, levelled, harmonise, centre, gaol, as against favor, leveled, harmonize, center, jail), that original orthography has been preserved. In certain cases, the spelling of a name or proper noun has been normalized to the form commonly used in English. But while the transcription of names (or other locutions) into roman characters ordinarily follows a consistent system, the original version used in the particular chapter may be preserved in some cases for its special value. The process of communicating with colleagues from many nations in order to produce a collaborative, cross-cultural study of so multifarious a literary realm as Romanticism is far too complicated to describe here. We have incurred numerous debts in the course of our efforts. We have benefited from the advice of dozens of scholars, of members of ICLA’s Coordinating Committee for the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, and of the two outside experts, Angela Esterhammer (University of Western Ontario) and Fridrun Rinner (Université d’Aix en Provence), appointed to vet the results and suggest final touches. Special thanks are due to Dr. Uwe Spörl, who created our original webpage at the FernUniversität Hagen, and to the crew there who undertook the first major round of electronic »norming« of a diverse set of chapters, especially Sonja Zimmermann. The editors also express their gratitude to persons at the project’s second home, the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken, who assisted with further formatting and other technical help, especially Dr. Dorothea Lauterbach. Dr. Johannes Birgfeld, Kerstin Lauer, Hannah Löken, and Kathrin Reichart have earned our thanks for assembling the some forty parts of the completed volume manuscript in the form of a through-paginated electronic file and working out the initial version of the Index

Preface

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at Saarbrücken. Dr. Katja Brunkhorst, too, kindly offered various expert help in early stages. Marie Louise Wasmeier helped in the production of authors’ first proofs and in implementing the emendations needed in various chapters, as well as in preparation of the volume’s Index. Mary Shields Franklin, Marc Petersdorff and Benjamin Specht helped in reading the proofs and compiling the final version of the Index. The professional staff of Green Library at Stanford University have been of constant help throughout this endeavor. Stanford’s Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and School of Humanities and Sciences have generously given grants in support of Gerald Gillespie’s research and editorial efforts in the final stages of the project. The Coordinating Committee of ICLA has contributed welcome support toward checking citations and bibliographic details. At Stanford, William Leidy assisted the editors in checking transliterations from Cyrillic into roman characters and in general proof-reading. Gerald Gillespie is grateful to the former and current administrative assistants in the German Studies Department at Stanford, Linda Judd and Kate Steilen, for all their help with bureaucratic and practical chores in support of this project. Naturally, English was not the first working language of many experts who contributed to the volume, and we are grateful to them both for their patience in responding to our communications, often couched in English, and for their generous efforts to get their texts translated into English. André Lorant wishes to thank Alan Raitt (Oxford University) for assistance in checking the English text of his chapter. Our main contacts at John Benjamins Publishing, notably Isja Conen, have been very helpful to us in readying the volume for press. We feel fortunate in having attracted so many fine comparatists to participate in this project as either counselors or contributors. Yet, far more important than the numbers involved is the quality of the collaboration we have been privileged to experience. It has been heartening to discover the enthusiasm with which international comparatists will rally to a team project of great complexity when each individual knows his or her contribution must, by definition, exhibit the natural limits of any single topic, thesis, or approach. For this collegial spirit, sharing in a task that only a team can hope to manage and then can accomplish only in part, we express our sincere indebtedness. One purpose of a volume like Romantic Prose Fiction is to stimulate in the minds of the finest connoisseurs a sense of what remains to be done (an ideal agenda which, as the Conclusion will reiterate, constantly has nagged our thoughts). Of course, for those gaps, lapses and imperfections in the completed text which have somehow escaped our attention, we alone, not our collaborators, bear the responsibility. Bernard Dieterle (Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse) Manfred Engel (Oxford University) Gerald Gillespie (Stanford University)

Introduction

1.

The Romanticism subseries

Romantic Prose Fiction rounds out a subseries in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages. The present volume is preceded by Romantic Irony (1988), Romantic Drama (1994), Romantic Poetry (2002), and Nonfictional Romantic Prose (2003). The five volumes in the Romanticism sub-series are the products of collaboration by separately recruited teams of comparatists from many nations; each volume is thus an independent work, with its own distinct Introduction, and employs approaches appropriate to its subject matter and task. However, from the start the sub-series has benefited from the interest of a core advisory and editorial group, and certain decisions taken early on set the main channels through which these volumes gradually acquired the character of an interrelated group. In addition, a significant number of Romanticists contributed chapters to more than one volume, and their ability to treat particular topics compactly and to set them against an implicit larger background greatly strengthened the whole sub-series and helped profile important congruities and continuities within it, as well as to recognize significant divergences and special situations obtaining from one cultural territory to another. Thus we encourage readers to take advantage of the Appendix which carries the tables of contents of the earlier volumes in the Romanticism sub-series. The listing of chapters there can serve as a useful guide for exploring some topics across our generic divisions and for finding supplemental materials. There are several further volumes in the CHLEL series which naturally intersect with ours and which readers may also wish to consult. As its title indicates, Le tournant du siècle des Lumières 1760–1820: Les genres en vers des Lumières au Romantisme (The Turning Point of the Enlightenment Century: Genres in Verse from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, 1760–1820; 1982), edited by the late György M. Vajda, treats the very important decades which carry us readers to the Romantic threshold in lyrical, dramatic, and narrative poetry. And once that threshold has been crossed, the volume looks back at cultural indebtedness to, and disjuncture from, the Enlightenment era, including predecessor sentimentalism and “pre-Romantic” stirrings. The companion volume Die Wende von der Aufklärung zur Romantik 1760–1820 (The Turn from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, 1760–1820; 2001), edited by Horst Albert Glaser and György M. Vajda, explores discourses of the revolutionary age, cultural, religious, and philosophic currents, tendencies in the sciences, and aesthetic and poetic theories over the same span. Although the largest part of the two volumes of the History of the Literary Cultures of EastCentral Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2004, 2006), edited by Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, is dedicated to more recent political history and discourses, their project offers valuable avenues for supplementing the Romanticism sub-series. First and foremost, it amplifies attention to the huge set of regions that tend not to receive adequate care in studies by comparatists whose expertise hitherto has tended to be more concentrated in Western European areas. In addition, it picks up on a range of social, philosophical, and literary discourses that flow beyond Romanticism and into Modernism.

xiv

Gerald Gillespie

The idea of creating a Romanticism sub-series was championed by Henry H.H. Remak, one of the founders and an early chair of the Coordinating Committee, the self-renewing editorial council the International Comparative Literature Association placed in charge of supervising the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, the »super-series«. The first shaping moment for the projects on Romanticism occurred in the course of preparing the volume on Romantic Irony, under the editorship of Frederick Garber. Garber led the effort to appreciate Romantic creativity in terms of one of the major tendencies that had appeared in many different artistic media and literary genres, yet not to lose sight of the historical dimensions of the phenomena under examination or of crucial facts of variability — the relative prominence, weakness, or absence — of Romantic characteristics across a wide assortment of cultures. The contributors to Romantic Irony sought to avoid replicating any rigid concept of a single-minded stylistic period or dominant intellectual coding; rather, their aim was to present the evidence of new cultural impulses and currents that surfaced in the European »polyphony« of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, traits that came to be understood, often in retrospect, as characteristically Romantic. Another goal was to identify the persistence of these impulses and currents as factors in later phases of European literary culture and its extensions in the New World. Thus the volume Romantic Irony deliberately reached out in several directions. It acknowledged Romanticism’s own important literary and philosophical debts, as well as the facts both of cultural variability and of cross-cultural stimulation; and it stipulated that a fuller literary history would consider a wealth of reactions for and against Romanticism over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — a task subsequent volumes have sought to engage again in more detail. While national peculiarities were by no means neglected, Romantic Irony clearly suggested a new kind of framework for viewing literature as part of cultural life. The volume brought together the discussion of Romantic theory and the facts of Romantic innovation in treating generic expectations, especially in narrative and theater, and considered the inroads of Romantic attitudes in painting and music and other realms. Several understandings guided this first venture. The editorial group working with Frederick Garber believed that a literary history written in the late twentieth century had to go beyond »merely« giving an objective account of Romantic views at the time of their emergence and in the context of that past moment. Two centuries had passed since the main tide of Romanticism had begun to rise, and at least one century had elapsed since later authors had witnessed both its main receding and then its reappearances in a series of secondary waves. The editorial group believed that, unless contributors were explicitly embracing specific tenets as components of their own world view, they should not assume that positions key in the Romantic age were »correct« or »self-evident«. By the same token, contributors whose task was to exposit the positions taken by later generations of writers, artists, and critics vis-à-vis the Romantics were obligated to label their own agreements if they felt rapport with some historically nearer cultural moment in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. It was considered important to distinguish between one’s own intellectual predilections and the act of recognizing factors in a dynamic succession of historical moments. Not to acknowledge »point of view« (even if only by »shorthand« indicators, in the economy of available space) would seriously diminish the value of the volume as a literary history for

Introduction

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the non-specialist and for non-European readers whom it was also meant to serve, and would cloud issues even for specialists in specific literatures or topics. The initial team (principally Frederick Garber, Milan Dimič, Gerald Gillespie, and Virgil Nemoianu) also regarded the various nations and regions to be not fixed essences, but products of complicated historical processes which had to be appreciated, although that might occur for the most part tacitly (again for very pragmatic reasons of space). The latter-day »nations« of Europe were considered, within the particular temporal framework under examination, as constituting relatively stronger and weaker focal points of Romantic art, as being sometimes only minimally or partially interactive, and sometimes dynamically influential or receptive, — and as belonging to the bigger system of a polycentric civilization, a system that in fact had already extended itself in a variety of ways to other areas of the world beyond Europe. While many newer immigrant nations had evolved further since the Renaissance phase of overseas colonization, and in the course of their development had acquired their own distinct systemic coherences and complexities, literary relations of New World countries to the older homelands and the European super-system often were closer and more relevant two centuries earlier in key ways. Hence the Romanticism projects had to remain open to the possibility that artists in territories outside Europe might sometimes share certain important traits with primary Romantic creators in Europe, perhaps more so than did some nearer neighbors on the old continent. The editorial group also grappled with the challenge that the scope of the proposed subseries posed. Two perennial subjects recurred at conferences which the sub-series supporters sponsored (too many to cite here): recognition of how enormous and variegated was the literature to be addressed, and the question how to »inventory« it in a meaningful way without descending into taxonomic fragmentation. A red thread running through the earliest discussions was the desire not to reject any coherent approach, whether genetic, formal, or final, and to avoid erecting artificial divisions among kinds of literary art. A consensus emerged that it was necessary to explain to readers the rationale for divisions which purely organizational pressures imposed, and that a great deal of crosshatching between volumes should be permitted as a way to overcome natural limitations. The editorial group hoped, by inaugurating the subseries with the volume Romantic Irony, to break the mould of expectations which older »positivistic« (and usually »national«) histories of literature had established. The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives of the first volume could then be extrapolated for use in further volumes that were to be loosely structured around older generic divisions for organizational purposes. To »manage« the overwhelming treasury of Romantic writings, and to do so from comparatistic perspectives, was the daunting proposition. The general plan that was favored struck a compromise between reverting to generic models inherited from Renaissance and Enlightenment poetics and employing new ways to evaluate formal properties of literary art, to explicate themes across a body of works, and to detect epochal congruencies and breaks. It was thought that a volume on Romantic Drama, under my editorship, would be a productive way to follow upon the initiative of the volume on Romantic Irony. This allowed a re-beginning with a body of works that was relatively well-defined and less voluminous, yet exhibited some of the most pronounced examples of Romantic experimentation and innovation. An extra incentive was that the team’s views regarding the vitality of Romantic drama ran counter to the commonplace verdict

Gerald Gillespie

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about this period in many literary histories written within a national framework. The drama volume’s twenty-six chapters, gathered into four parts, underscored the combination of diachronic and synchronic evaluation. Part 1, »Renewal and Innovation«, dealt with Romantic debts and creative breakthroughs. Part 2, »Themes, Styles, and Structures«, compared primary dramatic concepts and phenomena of Romanticism across a range of cultures under topical headings. Part 3, »Affinity, Dissemination, Reception«, looked at the appearance or adoption of Romantic traits in several cultures in northern, eastern, and southern Europe and in the Americas, which ordinarily were neglected in studies that concentrated on the Romantic »golden triangle« of Britain, France, and Germany. Part 4, »The Romantic Legacy«, examined the consequences of Romantic innovation and vision in dramatic literature reaching down to the present. Angela Esterhammer next designed and carried to completion the volume Romantic Poetry. Esterhammer’s division of the volume into four parts exhibits a logic extensively similar to that of Romantic Drama. Part 1, »The Evolution of Sensibility and Representation«, deals with the emergence of symptomatic attitudes and themes in lyrical writing, with some attention to structure. Part 2 looks at the favored generic types and in a number of cases relates them to pronounced Romantic interests (idealist philosophy, mythology, religion, etc.). Part 3, »Romantic Poetry and National Projects«, examines how poets across Europe and North America contributed quite directly to refurbishing or creating meta-narratives of cultural origin and identity. Part 4, »Interpretations, Re-creations, and Performances of Romantic Poetry«, considers the oft-times delayed play-through of Romantic concepts and forms and the uses made of Romanticism by later poets and critics as recipients in the cultural stream. Romantic Poetry strives for methodological variety of approach, but one can describe its results in the aggregate as striking a balance between scrutiny of issues of periodization and attention to the particularity of regional aspects of poetry. 2.

The prose projects

Toward the end of the 1990s, the editorial team (now principally led by Gillespie and Nemoianu) turned its energies to devising a plan concerned with prose writings. The experience of the first three volumes had brought home forcefully the lesson that it was important to contextualize literary works not only on a »horizontal« axis of comparison, but on a »vertical« axis of historical moments and flows. The editorial team was keenly aware of the dilemma posed by the sheer bulk of prose writings, their extraordinary generic variety, and their metamorphoses and fortunes over time — not to speak of foundational, yet contested, definitions of narrativity, of fiction, and related issues. It seemed foolhardy to attempt to encompass the whole range of prose under a single cover in a colossal volume. That would mean joining comparative studies of particular forms considered high literary art, for example, the novella, with studies of such forms as the essay, the philosophic treatise, expositions of scientific theories, historiography, the diary, biography, newspaper accounts, political tracts, sermons, and much more. To be sure, it would be possible to discriminate habitual themes common across the board or to trace formalistic attributes common both to fictional narratives and to discursive prose. Many topics could legitimately be invoked as the collective rubrics under which to locate the most disparate

Introduction

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kinds of prose. Proposals by some of the most dynamic Romantic theoreticians to dissolve the boundaries among genres, to marry the critical principle with the artistic (F. Schlegel), to make prose poetic (Novalis), to create a »Gesamtkunstwerk« embracing all the arts (F. Schlegel, Hugo, Wagner), might be cited to justify a new literary history that straddled the universe of prose. But the editorial team had faced this question before, when choosing to organize volumes around two generic cores, drama and poetry. The analysis of Romantic innovations, in dismantling dramatic conventions, erasing the boundary of theatrical illusion, and anticipating modern anti-theater and theater of the absurd, did not abolish the accrued repertory of European theater and the persisting constants in the construction of plays, or consciousness of the larger saga of dramatic literature and of theater. The fact that dramas were sometimes written in verse, sometimes in prose, or that they often were mainly narratives, even epical or cosmic in scope, did not abolish the perceived survival of distinct modes of literary art which were principally poetic expression or prose narrative, and not drama. The fact that writers might cross over back and forth between standard forms of prose fiction and dramatic dialogue (Diderot), or internalize poems inside prose tales (Eichendorff), or create prose-poems (Baudelaire), or pen lyrical moments in prose that might include rhapsodic philosophical utterance (Novalis), did not abolish the separate polarities of drama and prose and poetry as ordinary readers and listeners in the several cultures recognized them. The editorial team was also already pledged not to write a literary history about Romanticism in subservience to Romantic theorizing, even though we regarded its influence as fascinating and virtually inescapable, as built into the general heritage; and likewise we were obligated not to endorse later brands of theory recycled or heavily derivative from the Romantic thinkers, at least not without making a clear avowal of our personal agreement and dependency. Hence our discussions behind the scene included pondering the place of critical modes such as »deconstruction«, which we agreed was in many respects an epigonal derivative of a negative drift in Romantic theory and inherently a-historical, thus methodologically unsuitable for use in a literary history — yet certainly worth notice as a subject matter in our kind of effort to follow the repercussions of Romanticism. Chapters in our volumes dealing with prose might report on the kind of relationship »deconstruction« bore to Romanticism or how key »deconstructionists« construed Romantic writings, but it turned out that no individual contributors volunteered to espouse markedly post-Romantic views as convictions they themselves held personally. Our conscious effort to distance ourselves from the Romantics, while attempting to respect their views in their own right, seemed to present the hardest problem. Yet the obstacles fell that might have inhibited taking the practical organizational step of pulling apart two vast realms of writing: one which on balance more obviously consisted of fictional narratives in prose and one which primarily consisted of discursive statements in prose. We did not feel ourselves bound intellectually by such events as attempts on the part of certain Romantics to »dissolve« generic boundaries, any more than we would feel bound by pre- or post-Romantic attitudes about genre. We nonetheless often felt regrets over making distinctions in borderline cases — for example, by placing biographical writing inside the frontiers of discursive prose, when in so many instances it so clearly spilled over into the territory of fiction. The main point, and partial consolation, was for editors and contributors to remain as conscious as possible of how specific works might fit under more than one register and »belong« to more than one volume.

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xviii

A certain amount of internal negotiation ensued as the co-editors of Nonfictional Romantic Prose (Nemoianu and Steven Sondrup, with Gillespie as associate) weighed the appropriateness of topics and subgenres, with a weather eye on the expected future design of Romantic Prose Fiction (to which I would eventually turn). In anticipation of these efforts, Esterhammer and the prose team agreed on some inherently arbitrary placements of topics. The prose poem could just as well have been assigned to Romantic Poetry, but for purely organizational convenience it was conceded to Romantic Prose Fiction. Similarly, it was decided to treat the long verse narrative in the latter volume in connection with Romantic fascination for »romance« forms of story-telling in prose as well as verse, in distinction to the »novel«. And the editorial group felt it was natural and desirable that a number of subject matters should be addressed on both sides of the fiction-discourse ledger with emphases appropriate to each volume — for example, the tensions and relationships between history and romance, between mythological shaping and historical consciousness of culture, and the like. Nonfictional Romantic Prose presented its contents within an innovative framework that utilized multiple categories for grouping discursive modes. Following the General Introduction as Part 1, Part 2 on Romantic Theoretical and Critical Writing has the place of honor and is the volume’s largest section. Part 3, Expansions in Time, treats approaches to history and myth, while Part 4, Expansions in Space, follows Romanticism in travel literature and in new nations overseas. Part 5, Expansions of the Self, examines genres that deal with identity formation. Part 6, Generic Expansions, is concerned with the peculiarly Romantic aspects of essay writing, periodicals, almanacs, and more. The chief emphases of Part 7, Intersections: Scientific and Artistic Discourse in the Romantic Age, are the rise of modern psychology, and renewal of art and music criticism. Part 7, Intimations of Transcendence, explores spirituality and belief as major factors in the Romantic world view and aesthetic expression. Part 9, or the Conclusion: The Explosion of Romanticism: Centrifugal Energies, is a synthesizing tour de force, which weaves a suggestive larger picture of the age’s dynamics. 3.

Romantic Prose Fiction

I agreed to serve as lead editor of the prose fiction project with Manfred Engel and Bernard Dieterle as co-editors. A well-attended workshop on Romantic prose fiction at the Sixteenth Congress of ICLA at Pretoria, South Africa, in August 2000, permitted several dozen Romanticists to confer there in person on pertinent questions. In the course of implementing the project, the editors conferred, mainly by e-mail, with some two hundred scholars who expressed interest in participating and submitted suggestions, sketches, and drafts in several languages. Out of this gratifyingly large set of proposals, some forty were selected for their appropriateness to the project as comparative studies and most were carried to completion, while in a couple of cases multiple proposals by the same author were merged to produce broader chapters. The reader now holds in hand the results of this international collaboration by comparative literature scholars. While we hope Romantic Prose Fiction will be of service for many decades to further generations of readers who find themselves attracted to aspects of Romanticism, the sheer variety and magnitude of the rich fare of Romantic literature dictates that other scholars

Introduction

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must supplement and renew our efforts. There must and will be future venues for this moveable feast, and we are confident newer banqueters will eventually »re-digest« the heritage. Our concluding remarks will evaluate what has been achieved under the main headings and will suggest some desiderata which future international comparatists might profitably consider addressing. I shall confine myself here to describing the structure of the volume in general terms as it evolved out of several intensive years of discoursing with dozens of Romanticists from many nations as well as in internal consultations among our editorial group and the Coordinating Committee. We regarded Part 1, »Characteristic Themes«, to be an indispensable general platform, and this heading was the most popular insofar as the number of proposals sent in by prospective contributors showed. However, this omnium gatherum rubric raised a number of obvious reservations in our minds. It is difficult to set limits in tracing themes and motifs, as many move through the centuries in some guise or other and can be deemed »universal« to that extent. And by their nature many themes immediately suggest related themes, and one is naturally tempted to expand to surrounding matter. One task is to perceive when a cluster of themes burgeons with particular implications so that one can detect in its prominence some clue as to the character of the then contemporary interest during a cultural period. Another task is to measure the intensity of a theme and/or its penetration crossing over the terrains of several or many cultures, so as to recognize that it clearly qualifies as a leading indicator. In view of the fact that we wanted Romantic Prose Fiction to acknowledge the indebtedness of Romantics to their own past, and not just to identify Romantic contributions or virtual inventions, it was only logical that we had to mix some thematic chapters that had a stronger diachronic side with some that were more decidedly synchronic in approach. There is a healthy, expected, considerable overlap among the volume’s parts. Part 2, the rather complex middle part, is caught in a natural field of tension between Parts 1 and 3. Similarly, it is divided into sections that reflect this interplay and tension. Section A of Part 2 moves to the level of »Generic Types and Representative Texts« and attempts to draw attention more formalistically to the shaping of literary works by Romantics and to their predilection for certain genres and text types, but it necessarily includes significant thematic materials, on the one hand, and discursive features, on the other. Section B of Part 2, »Modes of Discourse and Narrative Structures«, straddles the territory with a pronounced emphasis on discursivity within works of fiction. This includes artists’ manner of address, various habits of treating consciousness, society, the world, and the appearance of structuring forces as if from some interiority of the age. Part 2 is resolutely focused on what the Romantics accomplish. But it can come as no surprise that these accomplishments, and aspects of Romantic vision, have had multiple repercussions and summoned later commentators to ponder them. Paying tribute to this postlude or aftermath is the job of Part 3, for which our team saw a potentially broad and diverse portfolio. The basic activity would consist in viewing Romantic prose writings from perspectives established over time, and at special moments of critical intervention posterior to Romanticism proper; and in considering not just the metamorphoses and self-questionings of Romanticism in its heyday, but attacks upon and/or open or veiled cooptations of Romanticism. For example, it seemed legitimate to include material that examined Romantic writings in the light of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophies of culture

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(e.g., Positivism, Marxism, Jungian analysis, Foucaultian »archaeology of knowledge«, etc.), and of various stylistic or critical waves or movements after Romanticism (e.g., Decadence, Modernism, Expressionism, Postmodernism, etc.). Part 3 was also conceived as the principal place to house chapters on the uses of Romanticism as a cultural resource and on its territorial diffusions, receptions, and assimilations; to consider how Romanticism became built into successor cultural repertories as a legendary element (just as the Romantics themselves had earlier been attracted to recapturing the European past and speculating on human culture beyond Europe). Naturally, we anticipated that, to examine Romantic writing in its original and subsequent contexts, some potential contributors might draw on more formalistic approaches — for example, semiotic analysis or polysystem theory — pitched at various levels of complexity for dealing both with phenomena within defined cultural streams and with interactions among cultural streams. It stood to reason that investigations in Part 3 of features of genre, innovation, context, cross-influences among media (painting, music, architecture, etc.), tie-ins with social systems and technologies, and so forth, might revisit issues which made their initial appearance especially in Part 2 (and, naturally, might have surfaced also somewhere in the volume Nonfictional Romantic Prose and other volumes of the sub-series). It likewise stood to reason that some contributors might venture in Part 3 farther afield from »mere« discourse analysis, grounded on the known history, into the creative realm of »final« criticism, that is, to stake out their philosophical understanding of the bigger picture. Our team stood ready to accept »final« statements, if they were openly made in Part 3 (or indeed, if such statements were advanced at an appropriate point in Parts 1 or 2). After all, our kind of literary history proposed to examine not just »synchronic« slices of writers’ practices and ideas in a European grid, but also »diachronic« flows of practices and ideas. Clearly labeled attempts to synthesize »our« collective experience of Romanticism as of the opening decade of the new millennium would not be out of place. Thus our »history« of Romantic prose fiction is »comparative« in several regards. It routinely crosses linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical boundaries, and it deliberately re-contextualizes Romanticism in multiple generic strands and at many historical-cultural junctures. The present volume does not limit itself to monumentalizing Romantic imaginative writing and discourse as something marooned in the past, even though the peculiarities of its »pastness« are important in several chapters. Rather, the volume provides, at least in the form of a sketch or outline, a sense of how certain powerful moments or factors in culture — here in the instance of Romanticism — become built-in as active elements of the cultural repertory, maintain a certain discursive potency, inspire new imaginative writing, and serve as motivation or pretext for attempts to veer away in new directions. That is, the kind of literary history we seek to practice here, collectively, involves the combination of synchronic and diachronic analyses, and an openness to systemic aspects of literary culture as a living flow. At the same time, it requires an »anthropological« appreciation of deeply rooted human impulses that find expression in the arts. Our literary history acknowledges approximate temporal boundaries to the main wave of Romanticism in Europe at large and to its local appearances. But it also acknowledges the afterlife of Romanticism down to our own moment, and it does so without bowing to any ideological construct of our moment as an easy way of explanation (at least, does not tolerate bowing as an evasion, that is, any bowing without

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careful weighing of final principles). This particular literary history acquires a relevance and vitality by dealing with Romanticism with a sense of respect, a respect that involves consciousness of indebtedness but also rests on a sense of our own scholarly independence and participation in a different cultural moment. It does not attempt to overwhelm what seem like long-enduring facts of human activity connected with our research object: most notably, the frequently manifested attraction and appeal of Romantic imagination, thought, and writing. Gerald Gillespie

Part One: Characteristic themes The French Revolution and prose fiction Allegorization of history and its defeat by Romance Gerhart Hoffmeister According to the historian François Furet, the French Revolution was essentially a »cultural revolution« (Furet 1987–94) with far-reaching consequences for the intellectual life of the age and beyond. Anticipated for a long time by Europe’s intelligentsia, the actual outbreak of the Revolution initiated a strong desire for rethinking the role of both philosopher and poet in society. Not surprisingly, since 1800 strong analogies and even equations have been seen between the political revolution and the revolution in thinking that took place in philosophy, in the arts and in literature. As Hegel put it: »Our age is a period of birth and transition into a new era […]. Spirit has broken away from its previous world of existence and thinking and is about to send it to oblivion«.1 Perceptive minds tried to make sense of this period of upheaval early on, for instance the Hegel student Heinrich Heine perceived a definite analogy between »the material revolution in France« and Kant’s intellectual revolution (Heine 1979, 91). William Hazlitt, the great British critic, went a step further by declaring that the Lake school of poetry »had its origin in the French revolution or rather in those sentiments and opinions which reproduced that revolution« (Hazlitt 1819, 318). Hazlitt was referring to translations from the German Sturm und Drang, yet he did not mention philosophers from Montesquieu to Rousseau who had paved the way to the Revolution. However, his observation is important in the sense that it undermines any attempt to claim an exclusively political link between the Revolution and Romanticism, because literary and philosophical sources prove to be of equal importance. Although it is difficult to establish a cogent chain of cause and effect between literature and politics in the Age of the French Revolution, many volumes have been written about the theoretical interdependence of the »material« and intellectual revolution (see Hoffmeister 1990, 18–24). Especially in Germany, everybody among the Classical authors as well as among the younger Romantic generation at Jena, Berlin, and Heidelberg took issue with the events and the ideas of the Revolution and generally, after a short period of a first enthusiastic response, tried to come to terms with the challenge the subsequent chaos posed. As a matter of fact, Weimar Classicism, much maligned for its perceived escape from reality, can be viewed as an all-out effort to reform society through the arts. The same is true of the early Romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis who transferred the revolutionary principle of liberté to their innovative poetics with the intent of »creating an intellectual counterweight against the Revolution and despotism«.2 1.

»Unsere Zeit ist eine Zeit der Geburt und des Übergangs zu einer neuen Periode. Der Geist hat mit der bisherigen Welt seines Daseins und Vorstellens gebrochen und steht im Begriffe, es in die Vergangenheit hinab zu senken« (Hegel 1955, 15).

2.

»ein geistiges Gegengewicht gegen die Revolution und den Despotismus« (Schlegel 1969, vol. II, 138).

Gerhart Hoffmeister

2

To list the works which deal directly with the French Revolution, either from a theoretical viewpoint, from personal experience, or from a historical perspective, is a simple matter (see Hoffmeister 1989, 92, note 6). It is equally easy to collect a large number of poems, plays, and novels that either focus on liberté, the key idea of the age, in form and content (e.g. F. Schlegel’s Lucinde, 1799; Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs, 1796/97; E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Kater Murr, 1819–21) or that present revolutions in various historical settings as a mirror of the contemporary scene (see for instance V. Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris [The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831], with its gypsy attack on the cathedral or Hölderlin’s Hyperion, 1797–99). Whereas the Napoleonic times have produced major novels such as Tolstoi’s Voina i mir (War and Peace, 1868/69) and Stendhal’s works, transpositions of actual revolutionary events into prose fiction are rare and mostly late in coming. Several factors may have played a role in this outcome. Firstly, strict censorship rules were in place both before and after Napoleon’s fall from power in France as well as in neighboring countries (one well-known example: Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne, 1810). Secondly, no first-rate historical novel was available as a model until 1814 and W. Scott’s Waverley. Thirdly, many authors may have shied away from attempting a mimetic depiction of the teeming facts of living history. Fourthly, the only way to succeed as a writer outside France was to oppose the Revolution. Without neglecting smaller works of significance (e.g. by Goethe and Eichendorff), I will focus my attention in the subsequent pages on one seminal novel each from Germany, England, and France: Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, Geschichte eines Teutschen der neusten Zeit (History of a German of the Most Recent Past, 1798); Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859); Victor Hugo, Quatrevingt-treize (Seventeen Ninety-Three, 1874). The questions I will ask apply to all these works that cover the time span from 1795 (Goethe) till 1874 (Hugo). (1) How was it possible to distill the chaotic events of the Revolution into a meaningful plot; for example, how can the conflict between different generations, genders, and classes be presented? This is a question about narrative technique. (2) Do the authors try to provide a credible mirror of the Revolution in fiction or not, i.e. are their novels and novellas historical or anti-historical pieces tending toward romance? This is a question about genre. 1.

Germany

»To present the reactions of German authors to the French Revolution would entail nothing less than writing the history of German literature during this period«.3 — Some outstanding examples may suffice for our purpose. 1.1 Friedrich Maximilian Klinger Klinger, in his youth a member of the inner circle of the Sturm und Drang, had already been in Russian military service for 18 years when he published Geschichte eines Teutschen der neusten 3.

»Die Reaktion deutscher Autoren auf die Französische Revolution darzustellen, hieße dennoch nichts anderes als die Geschichte der deutschen Literatur dieser Zeit zu schreiben« (Schulz 1983, I, 118).

The French Revolution and prose fiction

3

Zeit in 1798, part of his ten-volume novel cycle. In view of the dearth of mimetic prose treatments of the Revolution, it is significant that his book was written in Russia and deals with the threat from France in a philosophical manner. It is the story of Ernst von Falkenburg’s and his friend Ferdinand’s education under their mentors Hadem, a follower of Rousseau, and thereafter Renot, a disciple of Helvétius (De l’esprit, 1758). Ernst’s rise in rank at a princely court leads to his marriage to Amalia, a politician’s daughter. His plans for social reform are opposed by his uncle, who incarnates the established system. On account of this, Ernst falls from power and experiences a catastrophe at home: Amalia betrays his love by yielding to Ferdinand’s passion and his only son dies in a fatal accident. Interspersed are Ernst’s journeys to England, where he encounters the exploitation of the masses, and to revolutionary France. In Paris, he is sentenced to the guillotine, but after being pardoned he returns to Germany, where once more he meets Hadem who inspires him with renewed hope. What is interesting is the pairing of figures, ideas, and intentions: as children Ernst and Ferdinand encounter two antithetical educational philosophies represented by their mentors; as adults, they have to make a choice between virtue and passion, between reforms and the ruling system; in addition, Ernst faces disaster in politics and at home. The question remains whether this story is basically a novel of education in the Enlightenment tradition, with the key protagonist perhaps making the wrong choices or at least misinterpreting Rousseau. This is only half the truth, because Ernst’s progress intersects with the turmoil of the times and raises the problem of how Germany’s intelligentsia ought to react to the Revolution. Thus Klinger had the intention to show how an individual inspired by Rousseau’s Emile (1762) can withstand the onslaught of a world in chaos. That his protagonist fails, however, does not imply that there is no hope, because at the end of the novel, having recognized his mistake, he envisages a better future in the name of Rousseau. Whereas Helvétius preached a materialistic sensualism, Emile reveals nature as the realm of an invisible moral order: »Nature ennobles the human being«.4 Ferdinand, the Sturm und Drang enthusiast driven by desire, chooses Helvétius. Ernst remains true to Rousseau and appears as a moral leader. As the narrator states in the beginning: »For me he was a phenomenon in the moral world«, signifying »an uncommon effect of nature«.5 Why did he not succeed? Because the resistance of the corrupt system proved stronger than his untested enthusiasm for virtue could handle. »Virtue« entails acting out of a sense of responsibility toward one’s own conscience and the common well-being, without chasing after chimeras; on the contrary, moderation and reason need to be integrated with the recognition of what specific situations require. Yet acting on moral principle would upset the existing power structure, and this is why German reactionaries blame Rousseau for the upheaval of the Revolution (II, 62) and why Ernst as his disciple is blackmailed as a Jacobin. At this juncture the educational story links up with the novel of contemporary history, because Ernst the reformer falls victim both to the Revolution and to the feudal Restoration. Essentially, Klinger uses his protagonist to elucidate Germany’s reaction to the French Revolution 4.

»Die Natur macht den Menschen gut« (Klinger 1810, I, 157).

5. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Für mich war er eine Erscheinung in der moralischen Welt […], eine nicht alltägliche Wirkung der Natur« (ibid., 7).

4

Gerhart Hoffmeister

with the goal of finding a solution to its threatened future. The key question raised by the leading intellectuals of the age of Goethe was: »Germany — but where is it located?«6 Klinger embarked on his novel in order to forge a reply to anyone who doubted Germany’s inherent strength (see 1810, I, 153). To be sure, Germany was in a dismal position when France reached the Rhine and occupied Mayence (Mainz) during the first Coalition War (1791–97). The initial enthusiastic response to the outbreak of the Revolution had rapidly given way to polarization in society (II, 60) and it became easy to reject everything the Revolution stood for. But Ernst manages to rise to a more considerate perspective above the fray (II, 62), because he cannot forget the reasons for the Revolution (II, 93). He devises a plan of reform to stop the chaos of the Revolution in its tracks before it swallows Germany (II, 96). He delivers a speech to the state council of noblemen challenging them to abandon their age-old privileges of oppression and power with their resulting corruption (II, 111–117). Although rejected and denigrated as a revolutionary Jacobin (II, 117), Ernst is neither for the Revolution nor for the old feudal system, but, inspired by Rousseauist morality, advocates a land reform instituted from above by a prince who is revered by his people and relies on enlightened noblemen. As Harro Segeberg explains (1974, 181 f.), in this sense Ernst von Falkenburg anticipates by a dozen years the Prussian reforms of Baron von und zu Stein that were to lead to the emancipation of the peasants during the Napoleonic Wars. If nothing is done to bring about reforms, Klinger implies, Germany would be an easy prey to France. Already the enemy has occupied German territory (II, 70) and in a spirit of patriotic fervor Ernst’s father joins the Coalition army. By injecting this kind of militant nationalism into the early stage of the Revolution, Klinger undermines not only his protagonist’s antifeudal stance (see Segeberg 1974, 174), but also the proclaimed concept of a »virtuous nation« (»Tugendnation«) as a response to France and to German polarization. The situation appears to be so desperate that several avenues toward a resolution are attempted. This is the main reason why the denunciations of the Germans are so strident (see the narrator II, 61; Ernst’s father II, 69 and Ernst II, 112) that they serve as a reminder of Hyperion’s reprimand in Hölderlin’s novel (part II, 1799). But this is not the final answer to the troubled times. Klinger creates a mythical vision of the revolutionary turmoil of the age in which the genius of mankind rises through several spheres of the heavens in search of the Lord (II, 100). Yet God remains silent. This silence provides narrator and protagonist with the key: »The eternal one should not undermine, by a clear declaration, the sense of selfreliance that is the foundation of our moral worth«.7 Moral strength does not come from above, but from within. Preserving an acute sense of the realm of morality allows Klinger to present his hero as an extraordinary »phenomenon in the moral world« (I, 7) who fails in conflict with the forces of history, but does not give up hope for change. Only this way does the poet fulfill his role as a beacon and a socially responsible writer.

6.

»Deutschland? Aber wo liegt es?« (Goethe, Xenie no. 95: »Das deutsche Reich«, WA I, 5i, 218).

7.

»Der Ewige sollte durch laute Erklärung das Gefühl der Selbständigkeit, auf welcher unser moralischer Werth beruhet, nicht erschüttern« (Klinger 1810, II, 101).

The French Revolution and prose fiction

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1.2 The female novel As will be seen, ideology determines the view of the Revolution. With censorship in place for more than half a century it was out of the question to endorse it (see Hoffmeister 1992, 164). Yet there are at least three contemporary novels about the French Revolution that appeared around 1800: August Heinrich Lafontaine’s ������������������������������������������������������������ Klara du Plessis und Klairant: Eine Familiengeschichte französischer Emigrierten (Klara du Plessis and Klairant: A Family Story of French Emigrés, 1794), Therese Huber’s Die Familie Seldorf: Eine Erzählung aus der Französischen Revolution (The Seldorf Family: A Tale from the French Revolution, 1795–96), and Caroline de la Motte Fouqué’s Magie der Natur: Eine Revolutionsgeschichte (Nature’s Magic: A Story of Revolution, 1812). The two female authors set individual lives against the background of major events of the Revolution, but whereas Fouqué’s protagonists try to escape from it, Huber’s family splits up and either joins royalist or Jacobin factions. In the case of her heroine Sara, a noble lover’s treachery causes her to swear revenge, to lead revolutionary soldiers in the September massacres and in the reconquest of the Vendée, then, disguising herself as a young man, to wreak havoc and destruction in order to regain a measure of human dignity. But in taking up the sword, both women, Antonie in Fouqué’s novel and Sara in Huber’s, overstep the boundaries of their gender, turn into incarnations of a world out of joint whose victims they become, reinforcing the equation between private and public betrayal. Both authors concocted a blend of historic and Gothic features, but what they really intended to show was how their heroines would act under the onslaught of the Revolution. With Antonie’s family saved and Sara’s destroyed, it is interesting to note the ideological divergence between the two authors. As the wife of the German Jacobite Georg Forster in French-occupied Mainz, »Huber’s main concern is with the manifestation of freedom, democracy and the common weal, as opposed to exploitation and terror« perpetrated by either faction (Hoffmeister 1992, 168). That Sara turns into a great but depraved Medea is mainly due to the corruption of the monarchy. In contrast to this, Fouqué, who spent her winters at the Prussian court in Berlin, blames the Revolution for the inversion of world order. In her view, Mother Nature provides the eternal model for the preservation of the old order based on evolution, tradition, and non-violence. 1.3 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe By and large Goethe has been received as the Olympian poet who, in his life and work, turned away from the din of political factions to withdraw into the ivory tower of Weimar Classicism, completely removed from political chaos. Gottfried Benn speaks for many others when he writes: »Goethe is sitting in Weimar composing Iphigenie [finished in 1786] while outside the battle of Jena and Auerstädt [1806] is raging; it irritates him, yet he continues to write, irrelevant but lasting words, the ›Parzenlied‹«.8 Yet, on closer inspection, several surprises emerge: Goethe had participated in the First Coalition War against France (1792) and in the siege of Mainz (1793). Moreover, utterly aware of the causes and consequences of the Revolution, he 8.

»Goethe sitzt in Weimar und dichtet die Iphigenie, draußen tobt die Schlacht von Jena und Auerstädt, sie irritiert ihn, doch er schreibt weiter, Abwegiges, aber Bleibendes, das Parzenlied« (Benn 1949, 43).

6

Gerhart Hoffmeister

devoted the second half of his life to coming to terms with »this most terrifying event« in plays and in fiction, not from a political stance but as an author, who admits that this topic had almost consumed his poetic creativity.9 To overlook his »incessant effort« in this regard is fairly easy for readers faced with a highly stylized and symbolic approach in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeymanship, 1821, 2nd ed. 1829) and Novelle (1828), but hardly justified in the case of Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Refugees, 1795), a novella cycle in the tradition of Boccaccio and Cervantes. Here, from the outset, a feeling of immediacy takes hold of the reader, who is introduced to those days »when the Frankish army burst into our land« (Goethe 1995, VI, 125; trans. Winston 1995a, 15). Contrary to G. Benn’s claim, »the cannon’s roar« (Goethe 1995a, 18) can be heard in the distance. Choosing sides for (Carl) or against the Revolution (Privy Councillor), for or against the besieged city of Mainz, leads to considerable disruption and even separation among the German refugees from France, when the Jacobin-inspired Carl wants to have the guillotine introduced in Germany. The key point for Goethe is how to deal with the disastrous effects of the Revolution with its promise of liberty yet its actual end in »arbitrariness« and »tyranny« (ibid.) mirrored in the distemper of this small circle of friends and relatives (22). Not for nothing does the Baroness compare the »whole social system« with »a ship that can transport a good many people […] across dangerous waters«.10 To counter this trend toward chaos, the Baroness bars »all mention of current events« (24) in the interest of promoting »civilized behavior« (23), i.e. the telling of tales in a pleasant manner that will boost mutual tolerance and self-control (23). The stories seem to deal with »personal histories«, with private affairs cut off from society and history at large (26), and yet tell of how to cope with unforeseen events analogous to the French Revolution. In both realms, the private and the historical one, moral decisions have to be made to overcome violence. Self-control and self-sacrifice as reflected in the good manners of story-telling are manifestations of the »classical humanity« that defeats brute force. In this fashion, the arts gain an important function: »but let us at least see by the form that we are in good society« (the Baroness, 42). Sometimes lauded as the first German social novel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, with its symbolic features and many inlaid stories has not found many friends among readers interested in historical novels. Yet even in his last novel it was Goethe’s uppermost goal to show how society can function well with protagonists such as Wilhelm trained to devote himself to the needs of the community, in the process renouncing all individual ambition and passion. As Erich Trunz states, »Die Wanderjahre is a book of human interaction«,11 and as such Goethe’s attempt to counteract the drive of some societies towards total emancipation from all moral conventions and rules of civil behavior. Guided by the clandestine Tower-Society, Wilhelm becomes acquainted with two Utopian societies, the Pedagogical Province and the Emigration Society, that demonstrate how it is possible for people to live together in a peaceful and mutually advantageous manner. Without mentioning the Revolution, but in clear reference to the spiritual turmoil it caused, the Pedagogical Province promotes a united front against the 9.

»[Die Revolution hat] mein poetisches Vermögen fast unnützerweise aufgezehrt« (Goethe 1893, 61).

10.

»Die bürgerliche Verfassung scheint wie ein Schiff zu sein, das eine große Anzahl Menschen […] über ein gefährliches Wasser […] hinüberbringt« (Goethe 1955, VI, 128).

11.

»Die Wanderjahre sind ein Buch des menschlichen Miteinanderseins« (ibid., VIII, 594).

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world12 that is based on a threefold reverence with the aim of controlling selfish isolation and indifference toward God, and hence freeing man from the cycle of fear and desire for freedom. A higher sense [of reverence] must be given to man13 in order to enable him to control passions and demonic powers that cause him to succumb to the urge for total liberation from all conventions. For the same reason, the Emigration Society proposes a »moral system« (379) that is »entirely practical« and based on various principles of belief as counterforces to the disruptions of the Revolution. Among them are religious tolerance, equal respect for different forms of government, and the insistence on private property as the foundation of existence in the service of the community (see 369). This is Goethe’s vision of a new society that takes the best of the old order and combines it with the idea of renunciation of selfishness, isolation, and individual ambition without usefulness for the community. Even Goethe’s Novelle, this highly symbolic tale about how to control elemental forces of violence and chaos in nature and man, raises fundamental questions of social stability in the wake of the disorder caused by the Revolution. At least indirectly Goethe refers to the Revolution: »The Prince’s father had lived to see the time when it became common conviction that all members of the commonwealth should pass their days in equal industry« (trans. Lange 1995b, XI, 265).14 As a matter of fact, it is possible to read the entire novella as an allegorical presentation of the Revolution, the conflagration it wrought and the solution suggested to prevent it from spreading. In this light, the bustling market square at the conjunction of mountain and flatland encapsulates the entire state (see Borchmeyer 1977, 337) that was destroyed by fire already once before and is now threatened again. Elemental aggression is multiplied by the escape of a circus tiger and a lion. Whereas Honorio’s killing of the former leads to a hollow victory that needs to be compensated for by a victory over his own passion for the princess, whom he gallantly wanted to save from the animal, the lion, despot of the woods (Goethe 1995, XI, 280), represents the Revolution and despotism in general. After the onslaught of chaos, a young flutist’s song tames the beast, thereby not only restoring peace in the community, but also showing that, of the two means of dealing with violence, force is not a match for gentleness expressed through the arts. The achievement of the latter rests in the transfiguration of artist and audience alike, indicating a harmonious synthesis of opposites such as nature and art, old times (symbolized by the old castle ruins) and the necessity of renewal, nobility and middle class (see Borchmeyer 1977, 346). In this sense, Goethe’s attitude toward the Revolution has markedly changed since the Conversations of 1795, because although he was an aristocrat himself, in this novella he expresses the equality of all classes that contribute to the welfare of the state and inverts age-old privileges of the nobility by proclaiming two principles adopted from the Revolution: »Let each in his own way, produce, earn, and enjoy«15 and: »What matters most in this particular season is that more should be received than spent«.16 12.

Ibid., X, 204.

13.

Ibid., 203 f.

»Des Fürsten Vater hatte noch den Zeitpunkt erlebt und genutzt, wo es deutlich wurde, daß alle Staatsglie14. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� der in gleicher Betriebsamkeit ihre Tage zubringen« (ibid., VI, 491). 15.

»jeder nach seiner Art erst gewinnen und dann genießen« (ibid., 491).

16.

»zu dieser Jahrszeit kommt es hauptsächlich darauf an, daß man mehr empfange als gebe« (ibid., 496).

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1.4 Joseph von Eichendorff With his magical poetry and his best-known story, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (Life of a Good-For-Nothing, 1826), Eichendorff has traditionally been considered one of Germany’s most successful and beloved authors, the arch-Romantic grounded in nature and religion to the exclusion of socio-historical concerns. But what is frequently overlooked is that Eichendorff was well aware of the dark forces in life and their threat to the Romantic idyll, as his novel Ahnung und Gegenwart (Presentiment and Present, 1815), his novella Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue, 1818), and even the Taugenichts itself all show. Yet the discovery of the politically engaged poet who gave those »dark forces« a historical dimension in Das Schloss Dürande (Castle Dürande, 1837) had to wait until the reorientation of German studies in the 1970s (see Schwarz 1972; Koopmann 1970). This novella is set in Provence with overgrown castle-ruins providing the backdrop for the story that explains the destruction at the outbreak of the French Revolution. It is a story full of mistaken identities, fatal misunderstandings, and final revelations, at first glance nothing unusual for an Eichendorffian tragedy of love. Renald the hunter who is in the service of Count Dürande believes that his sister Gabriele is being seduced by the nobleman. He places her in a nunnery and pursues the count all the way to Paris to obtain satisfaction, but no help is forthcoming from lawyers, police or Dürande himself. After a futile confrontation at the latter’s residence, the count has Renald institutionalized as a madman. After his escape, Renald is doubly determined to seek justice at all costs; he takes the law into his own hands by becoming a rebel leader who attacks the castle. Appearing in the ensuing turmoil as the count’s double, Gabriele takes the shot meant for him, thus sacrificing her own life to preserve his, but both perish declaring their eternal love for each other. Renald has become the murderer of his sister and her lover and, rather than accept the rebels’ offer to become the new master of the estate, he sets fire to it and commits suicide. It is important to realize that the love story is closely interlinked with the social upheaval of the Revolution; the two plot sequences actually merge during the encounter of Renald and Dürande in Paris, first highlight and turning point of the story, because from then on Renald, suffering from a fatal illusion of his sister’s seduction, in his quest for justice becomes the instrument of the subsequent spread of the Revolution to Southern France. By combining two plots, Eichendorff built a stark contrast between two locations (the countryside versus the city) and two classes of people (nobility versus dependent servants), with the nobility divided into the King (Louis XVI), the court and the country squires. Yet in this configuration, not just a black and white division is taking place, but people who remain the same throughout the story are confronted with persons who undergo a profound change. For instance, the old count Dürande represents the hollow rococo culture of the Ancien régime that has outlived its usefulness; unable to reform, he prefers isolation from his subjects as well as from the sea change surrounding him. Equally unchanged is Gabriele, whose unconditional love is absolute and strong because she trusts in her heart. A series of trials and tests during the Revolution cannot undermine her. She proves this by relinquishing any earthly claims and sacrificing herself even without knowing whether the count loves her. On the other hand, there are young Dürande and Renald, both undergoing considerable change in a process of losing and eventually finding themselves. Not

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surprisingly, the young count falls under suspicion of having seduced Gabriele, since he is used to living a life of privilege, of luxury and moral laxity, as his appearance at the Versailles court shows. However, with the spread of the Revolution he finds a way out of his confusion to a sense of responsibility toward his people and falls as a martyr of eternal love and as a representative of a reform-oriented younger nobility. His ascending line of development seems to contrast with the moral descent of Renald (see Lindemann 1980, 60), who, starting out as a loving and fair-minded brother, increasingly falls victim to a sense of confusion and delusion that leads to and finally pursues a hubris-like quest for revenge culminating in the destruction of the castle and its inhabitants. He is not only the agent who serves to integrate the two plot sequences, but also the instrument and representative of the Revolution in the sense that he incarnates its turmoil in his own moral crisis of distrust, overbearing revenge and destructiveness. According to Eichendorff ’s final admonition to the reader: »But beware of waking the wild beast in your breast«,17 the anarchy of the Revolution appears to have been unleashed by men who were unable to control »the wild beast within«, men like Renald suffering from a psychic and moral disorder. Yet his descent is not the poet’s last word, because, in the end, Renald realizes his horrible mistake and in an act of atonement ends his life. It seems that in 1836 when Eichendorff composed his novella he did not only want to clarify his stance on the Revolution in fiction but also to warn his readers of contemporary revolutionary tendencies after the July Revolution in France (1830) and the prohibition of Das junge Deutschland (1835). Although he realizes that history is in constant flux and changes need to be made to adjust to new circumstances, Eichendorff does not see any sense in the total destructiveness of the Revolution. From his secure ideological position of religious faith and aristocratic traditions, the ultimate cause of the Revolution does not have its roots in social and economic ills, but in the criminal activity of some individuals such as the French lawyer in the Parisian pub »The Red Lion«, who uses rational arguments to cover up his greed and bloodlust without even subscribing to the famous slogans of the Revolution. No wonder he is presented as a devilish leader (Eichendorff 1998, 296 f.), surrounded by a hodgepodge of marginal rabble rousers who re-emerge in the attack on the castle as hell-inspired vermin (317). The Revolution has a devilish origin reflected in the moral crisis of its leaders (see Renald’s St. Vitus’s dance, 314, and the devil as his companion, 322). Animal imagery and recurrent metaphors of fire, thunderstorm, and blood reinforce this interpretation, implying that the Revolution was both a psychological disorder as well as a natural catastrophe that destroyed the patriarchal interdependence of people in the nunnery (283) and at the grape harvest (289). By shifting the causes of the Revolution away from the historical reasons of exploitation and impoverishment of the third estate to the realm of the psyche and to an uncontrollable nature catastrophe, Eichendorff reveals his ideological blinkers. A case in point is his inversion of the desperate situation of the peasantry from the origin into the consequence of the Revolution (see the peasants and the nunnery after the Revolution, 313). Which side has won? The Revolution destroys the old order, and the pure realm of unconditional love and sacrifice also falls victim to its anarchy. And yet, toward the close of the story, the chaos subsides in the face of the victory of eternal love over death and destruction. 17.

»Du aber hüte dich, das wilde Thier zu wecken in der Brust« (Eichendorff 1998, 327).

Gerhart Hoffmeister

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A transfiguration of the lovers takes place, and even Renald, as if awakening from a nightmare, is about to restore order in an act of atonement.

2.

England

As in Germany, the Revolution was first greeted with enthusiasm by the younger generation (e.g. by Wordsworth in The Prelude, 1850), with outright repudiation by Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790), and with caution by Thomas Carlyle (The French Revolution. A History, 1837). Although the ideas of the French Revolution thoroughly transformed intellectual life across the Channel, at least according to the Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (The Period of the French Revolution, 1970), after war with France broke out in 1793, Burke’s philosophy became the dominant state position and led to censorship, arrest, and exile of all radical dissenters (see Hoffmeister 1989, 99, note 27). By 1859, when Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities, political strife had calmed sufficiently to permit history to be viewed more objectively. This is the story of Paris and London, how the Revolution affected their people and how and why one side won the ensuing struggle. The story is set up in accordance with Dickens’s Memoranda-statement: »Open a story by bringing two strongly contrasted places and strongly contrasted sets of people into the connection necessary for the story, by means of an electric message« (Forster 1874, III, 252). This is precisely what happens in the first couple of chapters where he juxtaposes events in London and Paris in 1775 and afterwards continues to switch between the two locations throughout the novel, after a brilliant opening paragraph that anticipates the structural divisions of the book, the clash between opposing factions, the ambivalent position of the narrator and perhaps even the success and failure of the entire work. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way (Dickens, 1).

What Dickens had intended to compose was the contrast between the feudal system represented by Marquis de St. Evrémonde and the »new philosophy« (117) of his own age represented by Charles Darnay, his nephew. Charles has renounced his noble family name as well as his heritage to leave France for London out of detestation of the cruelties of the ancien régime represented by his uncle. His mother had enjoined him to make amends for the predicament of a peasant family, including a girl raped by the Evrémonde brothers, her brother mortally wounded in the subsequent fight, and the disappearance of her sister, who later on turns out to be Madame Defarge, the implacable leader of the Revolution. Fate intertwines with Dr. Manette, a French physician who had been called to the peasant family and witnessed the outrageous behavior of the nobility, but who was, in order to secure his silence, imprisoned in the Bastille and then released to his former servant, Defarge, now a wine shop owner preparing the Revolution with his wife. In Manette’s former prison cell, Defarge found a blood-written letter that

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put a curse on the entire Evrémonde-line, unwittingly implicating Darnay as well, whose father had detained Manette for 18 years. The novel opens with the message that Manette has been »recalled to life«. Brought back to London, he slowly recovers. His daughter Lucie falls in love with Darnay, who marries her, but during the Terror Darnay sets out to Paris to rescue a faithful servant from the guillotine, is himself arrested as a French emigrant and is only able to flee because Sydney Carton, his look-alike, changes place with him in prison and sacrifices his own life out of selfless love for Lucie and her family. Most critics seem to agree that the brilliance of this novel does not rest on its characterization, which has been perceived as weak, conventional, and even hackneyed. Essentially, the protagonists are presented with an unusual lack of Dickensian dialogue, humor, and frequently in a black and white mode that fails to make them remarkable as persons but makes them subservient to the plot, where Dickens’s strength is apparent. Dickens’s contemporary Wilkie Collins described A Tale of Two Cities as the novelist’s »most perfect work of constructive art« (Collins 1969, 499). Beyond the level of romance motifs that drive the plot there are the pairings of characters, their confrontations and contrastive emblematic features that recur as leitmotifs. This raises the question of how Dickens managed to organize the teeming facts of the Revolution. One way to achieve control over the turmoil is for Dickens, from his double-pronged title on, to develop a definite structural parallelism between the chapters devoted to the situation in Paris and London and to contrast his leading figures with each other, whether male or female, French or English. To start with, character couplings, doublings and confrontations keep occurring throughout the novel. A major scene is the encounter that takes place in Paris between Darnay and his uncle the marquis, a scene that epitomizes the class conflict on the eve of the Revolution with each representative proclaiming his kind of rights, Darnay his »new philosophy« (Dickens, 114) of man, Defarge his insistence on privilege and power (110–121). Darnay himself is twice put on trial, once in London as a French spy, once in Paris as a former nobleman, illustrating the risks of being an emigré in both countries. In addition, Darnay the selfmade man of the middle class has as his double Carton, a wastrel who has lost all direction in life and needs to redeem himself. More striking is the contrast between Lucie and Madame Defarge, Lucie the virtuous dutiful daughter and loving wife, who weaves the »golden thread« of domestic bliss, as opposed to Madame who appears to be knitting away peacefully but reveals herself as a ruthless incarnation of the knitting Fates of vengeance and death. Based on Thomas Carlyle’s Théroigne de Méricourt who marched to Versailles in 1789 (Carlyle 1934, 208) she takes on superhuman features as the representative of the Revolution. »Opportunity had developed her into a tigress« (345) with a dagger at her waist and a pistol hidden in her bosom, cheering on the bloody work of the guillotine. Along with other women she was knitting the black list of the revolutionaries, until she took part in the storming of the Bastille, the massacre of the political prisoners, and the executions. Raised from a victimized individual to an allegorical figure that stands for the blind fury of the Revolution, Madame Defarge has rightfully been interpreted as the incarnation of the »Amazonian misrule« of the Revolution; through her sinister designs »revolutionary violence becomes an exhibition of female deviance« (Waters 1997, 125; 148). In order to present a broad picture of the turmoil, Dickens skillfully progresses from specific instances and figures to the general development of the situation at hand, with his

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protagonists taking on a universal semblance (e.g. Madame Defarge); conversely, he starts out with a typical case or character and individualizes it. There are many examples of this device, which Silvère Monod has called »a kind of ›zooming effect‹« (Monod 1971, 173), that always succeeds in broadening the horizon. In my judgment, the very best one is »Monseigneur in Town« (Book I, Chapter VII). Without any specification, »Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court« is introduced as he receives, after a night at the Grand Opera, his morning chocolate presented by four lackeys. This specific instance is quickly turned into a general statement: »Monseigneur was out at a little supper most nights, with fascinating company« (97), all »of the order of Monseigneur« (98), i.e. marked by »the leprosy of unreality« (99) and »perfectly dressed« as if for a »Fancy Ball that was never to leave off«, but would eventually »descend to the Common Executioner« (100). A little later Monseigneur, in his confrontions with his villagers (including Defarge) and his nephew Darnay, takes on individual features too, yet these do not last since in death he again becomes one of the stone faces that had ruled France for 200 years (120). As an individual gentleman he represents the class of the ancien régime that through its exploitation of the common folk sowed the seed of the Revolution (214). A case in point is the destruction of Madame Defarge’s family, but the irony of the story rests on her own victimization of Dr. Manette’s family which is in great danger of being destroyed by the excesses of the Revolution. Not only human figures are universalized but also landscape, architecture and driving forces such as Hunger in Saint Antoine, a village belonging to Monseigneur’s château, »a stony business altogether, with heavy stone balustrades, and stone urns, and stone flowers, and stone faces of men, and stone heads of lions, in all directions. As if the Gorgon’s head had surveyed it, when it was finished, two centuries ago« (110), the stoniness of its towers and statues signifies the rigidity of the terrifying system that crumbles during the outbreak of the Revolution, when the marquis is assassinated. Only then do the stone faces seem to come alive with amazement and turn to crimson, the Gorgon adding one more face to its collection (120). Driven by the allegorized figures of »Hunger« and »Vengeance« (27), a companion of Madame Defarge, the people rise up in arms and like a billowy vortex merge with Saint Antoine, church and village. Saint Antoine turns into a superhuman force incorporating the boiling rage of the citizenry. »Saint Antoine’s blood was up« (207), that is why »a tremendous roar arose from [his] throat« (202); he gains a voice, footsteps and a haggard appearance (208), that gradually transforms itself into Madame Defarge, »the leader of the Saint Antoine women« (209). In a similar fashion, Dickens describes the storming of the Bastille as the rising of a raging ocean in a style that is repetitive and at the same time ever more intense in order to convey the frenzy of the people involved, under the guidance of the Defarge couple: »As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled round Defarge’s wine-shop« (202). The imagery of the boiling sea undergoes many subtle variations; one of them is its translation into mob scenes. For example, the Carmagnole dance of the revolutionaries approaches as a »storm of coarse red caps and coarse woolen rags«, that deteriorates into a dance of perverted men and women with »the maidenly bosom bared«, »the delicate foot« stepping into »this slough of blood and dirt«. Complementary to this scene of the »disjointed time« (264 f.) is »The Grindstone«- chapter (244–250) referring to the stone that is used to sharpen the instruments of murder during the Reign of Terror. Covered »with spoils of women’s lace and silk and ribbon«,

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men dripping blood and wine offered to them by savage women, this episode of frenzied bloodlust serves as the epitome of gender perversion, of carnage, and even of cannibalism (see Waters, who interprets social disorder as gender confusion and »female deviance«; 1997, 134–137). It is interesting to see how Dickens contrasts, fuses, and extends imagery, in the process creating a skillful web of connections that tie the parts of the novel into a homogeneous whole. Of equal importance to the sea image is the wine metaphor, introduced at the breaking of a cask in front of Defarge’s shop, an event that at first glance gives rise to some innocent frolics and dancing among the poor people. Yet then the wine takes on a symbolic meaning, with its red color not only having stained the narrow streets but also having provided some faces with »a tigerish smear«: »The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there« (26). Wine becomes blood. Reminders of the breaking of the cask recur at the storming of the Bastille (208) as well as in the Reign of Terror, when even the sun would be unable to remove the red from the grindstone (250). »Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine« (353). The light in which the Revolution is presented depends on the narrator’s stance. Silvère Monod distinguishes the narrator’s triple function as the omniscient »narrator proper, the historian, and the polemicist«, admitting that the latter two are not easily distinguished (Monod 1971, 169). From the depiction of hunger among the people, from the luxurious lifestyle of »Monseigneur as a class« and also from the narration of rape and exploitation, it appears that Dickens sympathizes with the need for the Revolution, whose seed had been sown over a long time (see the dying boy’s accusations, 309). But in the face of the subsequent chaos, the excesses, and the bestiality of the Terror he changes his position in favor of the victims of the Revolution, the English family that holds the key to a productive life in Lucie’s »golden thread« of domestic bliss — thereby countering Madame Defarge’s knitting of violence. And yet it remains a balanced picture of the Revolution with both political factions receiving even-handed criticism and punishment, the French nobility for its »Lucifer’s pride« and blindness to the people (221), the revolutionary people for its perverse »devilry« (265). Monseigneur as well as Madame Defarge meet their deserved deaths. During the grindstone-scene the narrator cannot help aiming »a well-directed gun« at the mob (249). The mob at the Bastille he calls »mad« (208), the Tribunals suicidal and unjust toward innocent victims (300). No wonder the Revolution produces a »Republic of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death« (258). Sydney Carton represents both author and narrator when he states: »I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth« (358). What Dickens achieved is a sweeping and breathtaking presentation of the revolutionary movement in all its horrors through a network of close-knit structural couplings and extended metaphors. In keeping with his allegorical approach is his creation of two unforgettable »stony« figures, Monseigneur and Madame Defarge. In order to prevent his view of the Revolution from becoming too statuesque and stylized, he used a family (Dr. Manette’s French-English family) caught between the political factions to individualize the impact of the Revolution and, paradoxically, at the same time to »attempt to depoliticize and dehistoricize the events« (Waters 1997, 124). For the author, it is a »Catch‑22« predicament in the sense that the two contending tendencies do not allow a full psychological development of his heroes (Lucie, Darnay etc.). Only toward the end of the novel does the narrator leave all allegory behind, identifying with

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his readers as well as with Dr. Manette’s family on its flight back to England, »the whole wild night […] in pursuit of us« (341). 3.

France

Victor Hugo, the grand figure of the Romantic movement in France, dedicated the second postRomantic phase of his career to the interpretation of history and civilization in novels — e.g. Les Misérables (The Wretched, 1862) — and epic poems — e.g. La Légende des siècles (Legend of the Ages, 1859). His novel Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-three), the story of Royalist insurrection during the Revolution, appeared in 1874. What drew him to this subject matter was the fact that his father had participated in the civil war on the Royalist side and that Hugo needed to come to terms with the turmoil of his own time. In 1793, the year with which the novel deals, The National Convention decreed the execution of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. It was the period of struggle among different factions of the Republic (Jacobins and Girondins) and of the ongoing Revolutionary Wars against the foreign coalition; both the Civil War (La Guerre de Vendée, 1793–96, in the forests of Brittany) and the Terror in Paris began. The novel consists of three parts, »On the Ocean«, »In Paris«, and »In the Vendée«. In the exposition of the first chapter the groundwork is being laid for the turning point of the novel as well as for its subsequent climax: a mother with three children on the run from the civil war in the Vendée is cornered by revolutionary soldiers sent from Paris, who try in vain to find out which political side she is on and finally adopt her and the fatherless children as protegés of their battalion. At about the same time, Marquis de Lantenac has arrived from England and takes control of the insurrection, almost annihilates the soldiers, and takes the children hostage. When the scene shifts to Paris, a fictitious meeting takes place among the revolutionary leaders Danton, Marat, and Robespierre first in a pub, then in the Convention, showing the divergent personalities, their struggle for power and for the realization of their ideas. It is decided not to pardon any of the rebels and to execute Republican leaders who give in to feelings of mercy. An ex-priest called Cimourdain is sent to the western provinces to take control of the military campaign led by General Gauvain, Lantenac’s nephew as well as a former pupil of Cimourdain, whom the latter considers his spiritual son. In the interim, after having taken refuge from Gauvain’s Republican forces in Lantenac’s old fortress, the insurgents escape, leaving the three children in the burning tower. Mother Michelle who had been searching for them, suddenly discovers their faces in the flame-threatened window of the tower and lets out a scream that drastically changes the established political antagonism: the battlefield recedes in the face of the urgent need to save the endangered children, conscience becomes the place of battle. Although he has escaped from the tower, Lantenac returns, rescues them and is arrested, certain to be guillotined. But Gauvain, realizing his uncle’s transformation from fiend to human being, helps him to freedom by taking his place in the cell, thereby surprising his former mentor, the judge of the subsequent court martial. Faced with a decision between a revolutionary theory of absolute violence for the sake of the Republic and affection for his pupil, he chooses the guillotine for Gauvain, but shoots himself. France has been betrayed by Gauvain, the rebellion continues, but at this point, does the Revolution matter?

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Well, Hugo managed to link three plots or subplots (the children’s fate, the insurgents and the Revolution), but was his intention to present a historical panorama of the year 1793 in the French Revolution? In the first place, his family background, his extensive studies of the documents, and his presentation of the two opposing camps, Paris and the Vendée, with their respective ideologies, lead us to believe that he did. There are detailed descriptions of the western forests with their underground refuges and ambushes (part I, Chapter 1; III, 1), the execution of the king, the great confrontation between the leaders in Paris as well as in the countryside between Lantenac and Cimourdain, Lantenac and Gauvain (part III, book 6, Chapter 3), Cimourdain and Gauvain (III, 2, 7), each one expounding a different ideology of the perfect state, i.e. the monarchy, the absolute republic ruled by Paris (Cimourdain), and the ideal republic of philosophers (Gauvain). Obviously, Hugo felt awed by the revolutionary forces in action and tried to aggrandize things and characters accordingly, mixing historical with fictitious ones. Among the objects that take on a life of their own is the cannon that breaks loose on Lantenac’s ship, mangles half a dozen sailors and eventually contributes to its sinking off the coast of the Bretagne (part I, book 2), a cannon that develops such a destructive force that it encapsulates the bloody mayhem of the Revolution. Even more obvious than this is the final confrontation between feudal tower and revolutionary guillotine, towards which Hugo has gradually been leading the entire third book: La Tourgue. A monster of stone facing a monster of wood. They say, once a person has touched wood or stone, they are not wood or stone any longer and take on a human quality. A building is a dogma, a machine is an idea. La Tourgue was the fatal result of the past that was called Bastille in Paris, the Tower of London in England, the Spielberg in Germany, the Escorial in Spain, the Kremlin in Moscow, the Castello Sant’Angelo in Rome. The tower contained 1500 years, the Middle Ages, serfdom and vassal service; the guillotine represented one year, ’93; and these twelve months held their own vis-à-vis those 1500 years. La Tourgue, that was the monarchy; the guillotine, that was the Revolution.18

As the text states, the crimes of the past had created its daughter, the terror of the present, of which the world of yesterday was utterly afraid. In the course of the novel, protagonists too are raised from the human to the superhuman sphere (see Mann 1968, 385), primarily as representatives of political ideas. For instance, the self-destructive violence of the Revolution is engineered by Robespierre, Danton, and Marat, terrible voices of titans, divided among themselves into snakes and lions (Hugo 1963, 166). The plot itself is propelled by the interaction of Lantenac, Gauvain and Cimourdain, each one of them an allegory of a defined political stance. Lantenac stands for the rigidity of tradition as well as the cruelty of feudal rule; Cimourdain is the absolute intellectual of the revolution, who 18.

»La Tourgue. Un monstre de pierre faisant pendant au monstre de bois. Et, disons-le, quand l’homme a touché au bois et à la pierre, le bois et la pierre ne sont plus ni bois ni pierre, et prennent quelque chose de l’homme. Un édifice est un dogme, une machine est une idée. La Tourgue était cette résultante fatale du passé qui s’appelait la Bastille à Paris, la Tour de Londres en Angleterre, le Spielberg en Allemagne, l’Escurial en Espagne, le Kremlin à Moscou, le château Saint-Ange à Rome. Dans la Tourgue étaient condensés quinze cents ans, le moyen âge, le vasselage, la glèbe, la féodalité; dans la guillotine une année, 93; et ces douze mois faisaient contre-poids à ces quinze siècles« (Hugo 1963, 483).

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accepts nothing but logic and reason (see Mann 1968, 384); Gauvain represents the idealist who becomes the main character of the novel because, released from a world of privilege and prejudice by Cimourdain, he rises above him by proclaiming his ideal of a »république de la clémence« (Hugo 1963, 282) as opposed to the »république de la terreur« of his former teacher. He commits treason by setting Lantenac free and yet sacrifices himself for what he believes in, thereby gaining a moral triumph over his »dark half« (284). The disciple defeats his mentor. It appears that, from the very beginning, mother, children, and beggar (Tellmarch, part I, Chapter 4) have been beacons of light in a violent world; they too have become allegorical figures, but this time of the simple life in nature that subtly interlinks with Gauvain’s vision of a humane republic. So the question needs to be posed again whether Hugo really intended to write a historical novel about the year 1793? Considering all the evidence it seems likely that Hugo composed an anti-historical novel that buries past and present events under a new message for a better future. From the moment of the mother’s scream the bloody strife between the warring factions is suddenly halted and replaced by a joint effort to save the children. »The civil war doesn’t exist, barbarism and hatred don’t exist […], this dawn suffices, childhood. In no other battle had Satan — and God for that matter — become more visible. The battleground had been a conscience, Lantenac’s conscience«.19 The view that Hugo was set to focus on this inward battle is corroborated by Gauvain’s action in releasing Lantenac, for he thereby rejects the material revolution and transcends history. In a related act, the children in the tower destroy a famous edition of the gospel of St. Bartholomew and with this symbolic allusion to the massacre of Saint Bartholomew in 1572, an entire historical epoch along with its religious fanaticism is summed up (345). The narrator, referring to fiction as legend, makes it very clear: »History has its truth, legends have their own. The truth of legends is of a different nature from historical truth«.20 A higher truth manifests itself, emanating from God, »the mighty editor […] of the great pages« of history.21 With the transfiguration of two of the leaders of the civil war in the Vendée, Hugo has opened a vista to the ideal republic of harmonious human relations. The battlefields of the Revolution are left behind and are replaced by scenes of pastoral nature. As Gauvain tells Cimourdain: »Above the scales there is the lyre. Your republic measures, divides, and gives rules to man; mine carries him aloft to the blue sky. This is the difference between a theorem and an eagle«.22 Does this imply that Hugo presented a lopsided picture of the Revolution? To be sure, his political views had changed considerably over his life span. He had started out as an ultra-Royalist, then he accepted the constitutional monarchy of King Louis-Philippe (1830–48) and during the Second Empire (1851–70) went into exile in Guernsey. In this novel the eternal republic 19. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »la guerre civile n’existe pas, la barbarie n’existe pas, la haine n’existe pas […] il suffit de cette aurore, l’enfance. Jamais, dans aucun combat, Satan n’avait été plus visible, ni Dieu. Ce combat avait pour arène une conscience. La conscience de Lantenac« (ibid., 433 f.). »L’histoire a sa vérité, la légende a la sienne. La vérité légendaire est d’une autre nature que la vérité histo20. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� rique« (ibid., 220). 21.

»Le rédacteur énorme et sinistre de ces grandes pages a un nom, Dieu« (ibid., 208).

22.

»Au-dessus de la balance il y a la lyre. Votre république dose, mesure et règle l’homme; la mienne l’emporte en plein azur; c’est la différence qu’il y a entre un théorème et un aigle« (ibid., 472).

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of the spirit wins out over the historical republic, but this victory cannot endure in time and space. It remains intangible. So Hugo has to come to terms with the actual Revolution. And he does so in a very even-handed manner, for instance allowing his narrator to criticize the empty heart of Cimourdain, ex-priest and absolute theoretician (134), to question the terrifying violence of the upheaval (139). Michelle even asks why they kill each other all around her (14 f.). The National Convention and the Vendée are the best examples. Book II, Chapter 3 presents an objective assessment of »La Convention« as turning point and climax of history, in all its glory and its terror: »At the same time as it unleashed the Revolution, this assembly produced civilization«.23 Part III is situated in the Vendée in Brittany. The narrator refers to its rebellion as a »miscarriage« (»La Vendée a avorté«, 237), because it was based on the misconception that the Revolution was a new version of centuries-old suppression and exploitation: »usual mistake of slaves«.24 In a word, it was a glorious act of resistance, but essentially in vain and stupid (241). From the retrospective of 1873, the Revolution in Paris also takes on an objective hue. Its progress is seen in terms of a dream followed by the Terror, the dance of Hell and Madness, which subsides in a cynical phase of orgies and finally turns the previous tragedy into parody (132). And yet, despite all these interesting sidelines on the Revolution, the fact remains that Hugo told his tale as a novelist who uses historical material to lend more credibility to his romance. »Neither do we have a history of the Revolution nor […] a history of 1793 […]. So the organizational principle of the book is not history […] but the necessities of the plot«.25 4.

Conclusion

The French Revolution was the watershed between the ancien régime and a Republican future in France, with her neighboring countries straining to stem the tide of change. With the exception of Hugo’s novel at the outer limit of the »Romantic Century«, all the works selected are foreign responses to the Revolution, the contemporary ones coming from Germany since 1795. Reviewing the works surveyed, some striking similarities emerge in the narrative treatment of the Revolution as well as in the transposition of history into fiction. 4.1 Narrative technique To make sense of the upheaval of the Revolution, most authors chose structural pairing or coupling, a device that comprises the formation of plot, configuration and setting, and lends itself well to the presentation of the struggle between two opposing factions. Dickens, Hugo, Eichendorff, and Goethe all provide convincing examples of double-pronged plots of love and history. Generally, people are divided into nobility represented by rigid old men (Eichendorff ’s 23.

»En même temps qu’elle dégageait de la révolution, cette assemblée produisait de la civilisation« (ibid., 202).

24. »Méprise habituelle aux esclaves« (ibid., 225). »Nous n’avons ni une histoire de la Révolution, ni […] une histoire de 1793. […] Enfin le principe organi25. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� sateur du livre n’est pas historique […] sont les nécessités de la fable« (Rosa 1975, 330–332).

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old Dürande; Dickens’s Monseigneur; Klinger’s Uncle), commoners stirring up trouble in a pub (Eichendorff ’s young Dürande encounters revolutionaries in a Paris pub, see also Hugo’s triumvirate and Dickens’s Defarge couple), and men who try to make a personal choice for or against the Revolution and accordingly either suffer a moral decline (Eichendorff ’s Renald, Klinger’s Ferdinand) or experience a transformation (Goethe’s Honorio) even in defeat (young Dürande, Klinger’s Ernst, Dickens’s Sydney Carton, Hugo’s Gauvain and Lantenac). Female protagonists essentially fall into two categories, those who remain true to themselves as mothers and lovers (Gabriele in Eichendorff, Lucie in Dickens, Michelle in Hugo) and those who, having fallen prey to uncontrollable passions of love or revenge (Amalia in Klinger, Antonie in Fouqué), turn into incarnations of revolutionary havoc (Sara in Huber, Madame Defarge in Dickens) and ultimately examples of female deviance. Reinforcing the contrastive configuration are the landscape-settings that take on allegorical significance. In one sweeping brush-stroke Goethe’s market square in his Novelle emerges, in Lange’s words, as »the sum total of all national economy« (Novella, trans. Lange 1995, 268). The clash between two cities (London-Paris, Dickens) may change to a confrontation between country and city in Hugo as well as between castle (or tower) and village in Hugo, Dickens, and Eichendorff. How to present the Revolution involves not only the choice of human agents but also of beacons of landscape architecture such as towers and castles that represent the old system (see the castle ruins in Goethe’s Novelle) and, through an extension of the metaphorical process, may lead to their development as formidable participants in the unfolding plot, towering over village life until the village’s own demonic forces of vengeance awaken, as in the case of Dickens and Hugo. In the end, conflagrations ruin market, castles and towers (Goethe, Eichendorff, Dickens, Hugo), signifying the apparent victory of the Revolution. By juxtaposing the tower of the Old Regime with the guillotine as the embodiment of the people’s rule, Hugo’s novel achieves the most extended allegory. Through metaphoric language, authors from Goethe to Hugo seek to make their fiction more vivid, describing the unleashing of the Revolution either in terms of fire, thunderstorm, an ocean in uproar, and thereby portraying it as a natural catastrophe, or as a beast that has broken loose (Goethe). The latter conveys a moral meaning when referring to a specific character (such as »the tigress« Madame Defarge, who reaches superhuman dimensions in Dickens) and may play an important role in the closure of a plot, when the protagonists are able to tame the wild beast in their breast (Honorio in Novelle; Renald in Eichendorff, Gauvain and Lantenac in Hugo). Incidentally, Dickens is the unchallenged master of the leitmotif technique, in particular with his use of the unmovable stone statues at Monseigneur’s castle, symbols of the rigidity and injustice of the ancien régime, and opposed to the wine that turns into the blood spilled by the revolutionaries’ guillotine. 4.2 History or romance According to genre theory, the fiction discussed here falls into two categories, the tales contemporary with the French Revolution (Goethe, Klinger, Huber, Fouqué) approaching the practice of the »Zeitroman« and novels set in a past period (Dickens, Hugo). However, both types generally depict fictional and historical people as agents or victims of historical events, founded

The French Revolution and prose fiction

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on close study of documentary evidence in keeping with the authors’ aim of being as accurate and credible as feasible. Because of its highly allegorical treatment of the Revolution, Goethe’s Novelle does not fit this definition. But his novella matches the power of transformation that key characters in moral crisis experience in these tales. These transformations can come in various guises, as moral insights, as an act of atonement, or as transfiguration of the protagonist. In the case of Klinger’s Ernst, who undergoes a process of education in the late Enlightenment spirit of Rousseau, it is the realization that moral strength does not come from above but from within. In spite of his failures, he recommits himself to his mentor and thus preserves a sense of hope for the future. After lives of excess in the service of the Revolution, both Eichendorff ’s Renald and Hugo’s Cimourdain commit suicide as a final act of atonement, but Dickens’s Carton goes a step farther in redeeming his own wasted life, sacrificing it out of selfless love for Lucie and her family. Responding to the violence unleashed by the Revolution, both Goethe and Eichendorff opt for a process of taming »the wild beast« that is propelled by unruly passions within. Yet only Goethe achieves a moment of transfiguration that unites Honorio, the flute player and the lion, whereas in the hour of their doom, Eichendorff ’s Gabriele and Dürande celebrate the victory of eternal love over death and destruction. Finally, when Lantenac retraces his steps to save the children and Gauvain takes Lantenac’s place at the guillotine (Hugo), both of them sacrifice their lives on purpose, triumphing morally over the forces of history and turning themselves into sublime figures. This gives rise to the key question: are we dealing here with historical fiction focusing on the French Revolution or with anti-historical novels and novellas that demonstrate how moral convictions defeat history through romance? Although some of our authors do provide a vivid and sometimes breathtaking close-up of the Revolution (e.g. Huber, Goethe in Conversations, Dickens, Hugo), a certain distance to its events prevails in others (Klinger, Fouqué, Eichendorff, Goethe in Novelle), perhaps because they were too far removed from it in place (Klinger, Fouqué) and time (Eichendorff, Goethe). However, more decisive is the intentional distancing toward history that almost inevitably occurs at the end of each tale by way of a transformation of character. What C. Waters views in Dickens as »an attempt to depoliticize and dehistoricise the events« (Waters 1997, 124) can also be applied to other works, especially to Hugo, who according to G. Rosa achieves a total »dissociation of history and fiction« (Rosa 1975, 340) from the turning point of Michelle’s scream that turns the battlefield into an inward battle of conscience. Thus it appears that the conventions of romance win over mere historical narrative, a victory that is in line with Hegel’s definition of Romantic art as »the inner struggle of man and his reconciliation […] in the course of which all developments are transferred to the realm of the mind«.26

26. [��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Ziel der romantischen Kunst ist] »den inneren Kampf des Menschen in sich und die Versöhnung« darzustellen; »aller Prozeß [wird] in das menschliche Innere hineinverlegt« (Hegel 1928, XIII, 2, 130 f.).

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Bibliography Benn, Gottfried. 1949. Drei alte Männer. Wiesbaden: Limes. Borchmeyer, Dieter. 1977. Höfische Gesellschaft und französische Revolution bei Goethe: Adliges und bürgerliches Wertsystem im Urteil der Weimarer Klassik. Kronberg: Athenäum. Carlyle, Thomas. 1934. The French Revolution: A History. Ed. by Cerf and Klopfer. New York: The Modern Library. Collins, Wilkie. 1969. The Woman in White. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Dickens, Charles. n.d. A Tale of Two Cities. New York, Philadelphia, Chicago: The Nottingham Society. Eichendorff, Joseph von. 1998. Das Schloß Dürande. Sämtliche Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Vol.1. Ed. by Karl Konrad Polheim. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Forster, John. 1874. The Life of Charles Dickens. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall. Fouqué, Caroline de la Motte. 1989. Magie der Natur: Eine Revolutionsgeschichte. Ed. by Gerhart Hoffmeister. Bern: P. Lang. Furet, François. 1987–1994. The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture. 4 vols. Oxford, New York: Pergamon Press. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1893. »Bedeutende Förderniß durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort«. Goethes Werke. Weimarer Ausgabe II. Abteilung, vol. 11: 258–264. ———. 1955. Novelle. Vol. 6 of Goethes Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe. 14 vols. Ed. by Erich Trunz. Hamburg: Wegner. ———. 1955a. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre oder die Entsagenden. Ed. by Erich Trunz. Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. 8. Hamburg: Wegner. ———. 1988. Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens. Vol. 4.1: Wirkungen der Französischen Revolution 1791–1797, I. Ed. by Reiner Wild. München: Hanser. ———. 1995. Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten. Ed. by Benno von Wiese and Erich Trunz. Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. 6. Hamburg: Wegner. ———. 1995a. Conversations of German Refugees. Trans. by Jane K. Brown. Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or The Renunciants. Trans. by Kate Winston. The Collected Works. Vol. 10. Princeton: Princeton UP. ———. 1995b. Novella. Trans. by Victor Lange. The Collected Works. Vol. 11. Princeton: Princeton UP. Hazlitt, William. 1819. Lectures on the English Poets. London: Taylor and Hessey. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1928. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. 3 vols. Sämtliche Werke. Vols. 12–14. Ed. by Hans Glockner. Stuttgart: Frommann. Heine, Heinrich. 1979. »Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland«. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke. Vol. 8/1. Ed. by Manfred Windfuhr. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe. Hering, Christoph. 1966. Friedrich Maximilian Klinger: Der Weltmann als Dichter. Berlin: de Gruyter. Hoffmeister, Gerhart. 1989. The French Revolution and the Age of Goethe. Hildesheim: Olms. ———. 1990. Deutsche und europäische Romantik. 2nd. ed. Stuttgart: Metzler (Sammlung Metzler). ———. 1992. »The French Revolution in the German Novel around 1800«. European Romantic Review. 2: 163–172. ———. 1996. A Reassessment of Weimar Classicism. Lewiston: E. Mellen. Huber, Therese. 1831. Die Familie Seldorf: Eine Erzählung aus der Französischen Revolution. Erzählungen von Therese Huber. 6 vols. Leipzig: Brockhaus. Hugo, Victor. 1963. Quatrevingt-Treize. Ed. by Jean Boudet. Paris: Garnier. Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian. 1810. Geschichte eines Teutschen der neusten Zeit. Leipzig: n. p. Koopmann, Helmut. 1988. »Eichendorff, das Schloß Dürande und die Revolution«. Ansichten zu Eichendorff: Beiträge der Forschung 1958–1988. Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke. 119–150. Lindemann, Klaus. 1980. Eichendorffs Schloß Dürande: Konservative Rezeption der Französischen Revolution. Paderborn: Schöningh. Mann, Heinrich. 1968. »Nachwort«. Victor Hugo, Dreiundneunzig. Leipzig: List. 375–386.

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Monod, Sylvère. 1971. »Dickens’s Attitudes in A Tale of Two Cities«. Dickens Centennial Essays. Ed. by Ada B. Nisbet and Blake Nevius. Berkeley: California UP. 166–183. Petrey, Sandy. 1980. History in the Text: »Quatrevingt-Treize« and the French Revolution (Purdue Monographs in Romance Languages 3). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Rosa, Guy. 1975. »Quatrevingt-treize ou la critique du roman historique«. Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France. 75: 329–343. Schlegel, Friedrich and August Wilhelm (eds.). 1969. Athenaeum: Eine Zeitschrift. 2 vols. Ed. by Curt Grützmacher. Reinbek: Rowohlt. Schulz, Gerhard. 1983. Das Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution 1789–1806 (De Boor-Newald, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur. 7.1). München: Beck. Schwarz, Egon. 1972. Joseph von Eichendorff. New York: Twayne. Segeberg, Harro. 1974. Friedrich Maximilian Klingers Romandichtung. Heidelberg: Winter. Waters, Catherine. 1997. A Tale of Two Cities: Dickens and the Politics of the Family. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Wertherism and the Romantic Weltanschauung Bernard Dieterle 1.

Werther as a prototype

It may come as a surprise to find a contribution on Wertherism in a volume dedicated to Romanticism. After all, Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther) was published in 1774 (revised in 1787), a date which lies quite far outside the period of European Romanticism (whose dates admittedly are very variable). The same is true of what are called the »Wertheriads« — in other words the imitations of Werther that were produced in some quantity in the last decade of the eighteenth century. And yet this novel affords a particularly clear prospect of Romanticism as a phenomenon of literary history, i.e. its constitutive elements, its self-perception, and the extremely convoluted manner of its reception. In Germany, Goethe’s novel has never been received as a Romantic work (every schoolchild today learns that it is a product of European Sensibility and German Sturm und Drang). In the rest of Europe, by contrast, Werther is either considered to belong to »pre-Romanticism«, a period designation in use in comparative literature, or it is classified quite straightforwardly as Romantic. While German literary historians divide the eighteenth century carefully, though not all too clearly, into the periods of Enlightenment, Sensibility (Empfindsamkeit) and Sturm und Drang, and divide the early 19th century fairly strictly into Classicism and Romanticism, their colleagues elsewhere in Europe regard German culture of the period — taking their cue essentially from Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (On Germany, 1810) — as Romantic in its entirety, Goethe himself being perceived as an exponent, or at least a forerunner, of Romanticism (cf. Hoffmeister 1984). In particular, what in Germany is termed Sturm und Drang (sometimes rendered in English as »Storm and Stress«, in French as »Tempête et passion«) is not considered to be a separate historical phase at all in many countries, especially in Eastern Europe, but is seen instead as the beginning of a genuinely Romantic movement. Accordingly, the outstanding literary product of the period, Goethe’s Werther, has had a unique destiny. Only if we bear this circumstance in mind we will understand the effect that Werther had in Europe. This effect, moreover, must not be isolated from the reception of Goethe in general. For, outside his own country Goethe was for many years, to his frustration, famed above all as the author of Werther (when Napoleon met Goethe in Erfurt in 1808 he still wanted to talk to him about Werther, his favourite novel). In later years he continued to be held one of the Romantics as the author of Faust (1808/32). Romanticism was in fact a rather vaguely defined entity (sometimes an oppositionist catchword); people were wont to associate it with a particular country or particular authors — one need only read the most influential programmatic »theoretical« work in the European context, August Wilhelm Schlegel’s widely translated Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, 1809–11), initially given in 1808 in Vienna, to realise how easily »Romanticism« was equated with certain prevailing characteristics of a period or a nation in a way which is quite alien to us.

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Another fact that justifies, indeed necessitates, a discussion of Werther in this publication is the extraordinary extent and duration of the book’s popularity. The success was primarily of a literary nature, in spite of the fact that — as Remi Hess has recently demonstrated — the triumph of the waltz throughout Europe was itself also connected with Werther’s success, since Werther’s and Lotte’s love first burgeons during their encounter at the ball, which culminates in their dancing a waltz, as is described in detail in the key letter of 16 June (Hess 2003, 19–45). Not only the Wertheriads, but also and above all the sheer number of works of the 19th century in which the figure of Werther is simply mentioned, testify to the extent to which he had become a type. The best evidence for this is Stendhal’s book De l’amour (On Love, 1822), in the final chapter of which Werther’s love is contrasted with Don Giovanni’s love (i.e. the Don Juan figure as recently refashioned by Mozart / Da Ponte). Here Stendhal crowns, as it were, the process by which the Werther figure becomes a prototype of the Romantic lover. To pick two more examples out of a hundred: in chapter XIV of Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie (1853), a story about love and youthful dreams, the narrator seals his disillusionment simply with a laconic reference to Werther; no more is needed to indicate that a Romantic attitude has been overcome. Werther was often perceived as both a lover and a Romantic, hence as a Romantic lover. This he never was, strictly speaking, since his romantic rapture betrays morbid elements, too. Moreover, in contrast to, say, Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Henry von Ofterdingen, 1802) or Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia (1855), the love identified with Werther does not admit the possibility of recovering a lost unity. Equating Romanticism with love as an absolute — echoes of which may still be discovered in the Surrealist amour fou as championed by André Breton — obscures the dissonances of Goethe’s book. Werther was considered to be the key work of Goethe’s youth, a fiery testimony of love from a poet who became more sedate in his later, Weimar years, and there was always a distinct tendency to identify the novel with its author. When for instance Germaine de Staël, one of the greatest Goethe admirers, speaks of »Werther Goethe« at one point in De l’Allemagne, her lapse which conflates author and hero is thoroughly characteristic of Romantic thinking: in general, Romanticism asserted that there was an intimate bond between life and art, between an imaginary figure and its creator. And because outside Germany, as already mentioned, Goethe was not seen as distinct from the Romantic movement — indeed the Poles Kazimierz Brodziński and Mickiewicz and the Russian Pushkin later saw him very much as an exponent of Romanticism — it was inevitable that Werther would come to be identified with Romanticism. Werther as a prototype: Goethe’s protagonist became — as we shall see below — a paradigm for a whole string of young men (female Werthers being rather rare) who suffer as a result of love, themselves and the world. This constitutes the essence of Wertherism, which as a phenomenon is not indeed restricted to prose fiction, but none the less achieves greatest significance in that genre. The various transformations of Goethe’s Werther in the genres of drama and poetry were considered by Stuart Atkins in 1949. This might appear at first glance to be an extraordinary limitation, Werther being after all a work of fictional prose, but it can be understood from Atkins’s positivist perspective: it is much more difficult to establish the history of the work’s effect in fictional prose, because it is often impossible to differentiate clearly between adaptation, imitation, continuation, allusion, quotation, in short: between various forms of intertextuality. It is equally hard to define a category of »Wertheriad«, especially since

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all translations would have to be included in the category as well (this incidentally would be a highly involved and engrossing project, sadly not yet undertaken in an extensive comparative manner). And yet the value of such registering endeavours should not be overstated; analysis of all manifestations of the Werther material would prove to be of little interest because even if the constitution of a great work of world literature could be measured by the breadth and depth of its reception, the literary historian is interested in it only if it also brings forth quality, i.e. aesthetically valuable and innovative works which themselves produce an effect. The breadth of reception moreover does not need to be examined in any detail (it is often enough for one to take account of it): the fact that unknown playwrights at the end of the eighteenth century wrote worthless Werther dramas, that countless second-rate Werther poems were composed, proves the extraordinary intensity of the Werther vogue — as does the crockery decorated with Werther motifs. The sheer width of the vogue is shown, for example, by the so-called »Russian Werther«, which was written in 1792 by a very young author named Suskov, who killed himself shortly afterwards (cf. Eggelin 1988). How long the vogue lasted is also remarkable, and is evidenced by the production of a play by the Spaniard Joaquín Dicenta, El suicidio de Werther (The Suicide of Werther, 1888), in which a painting showing Werther’s death plays a key part (in Spain the most important phase of Goethe reception began at the end of the 19th century!) and the appearance, in 1892, of the much reprinted novel Werther der Jude (Werther the Jew) by Ludwig Jacobowski in Germany. What matters is what goes beyond mere documentary value. Thus, ignoring inconsequential operatic efforts on the subject of Werther (cf. Sondrup 1990, 178), there is the Werther opera of Edouard Massenet (1892), which is still regularly performed today. And from the same period, there are Les Cahiers d’André Walter (The Diaries of André Walter, 1891) by the Goethe admirer André Gide, a work in the form of a »novel in notes« borrowed from Werther — it was later to be employed by Rilke in Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910). Beyond that there is Lotte in Weimar (1939), Thomas Mann’s ironic continuation of the story; and the play that updates the story, Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The New Sufferings of Young W., 1972), with which Ulrich Plenzdorf had a huge success in Germany (both east and west); not to omit Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (A Lover’s Discourse. Fragments, 1977), in which Goethe’s Werther is the principal reference. These works (together with the large number of literary studies of Werther which also influence reception history) document the lasting effect of Goethe’s novel and its extraordinarily rare capacity to be relevant to a variety of problems and in a variety of contexts. It appears accessible to all genres but film, no doubt as a result of its monologue character; indeed there are no films at all apart from Max Ophüls’s Le roman de Werther (The Novel of Werther, 1938). In the field of plastic and graphic arts, also, no relevant Werther representation exists. 2.

Wertherism

Wertherism, as a literary historical phenomenon of the Romantic era, lies somewhere between contemporary fashion (as manifested most substantially in the »Wertheriads« of the 18th century) and the long-term effect sketched above. It can be described as a syndrome: it consists

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of texts which present a Werther-like figure as an exponent of a suffering typical of the age. In contrast to the Wertheriads, which are immediately recognisable as imitative works, these texts frequently reveal nothing of their debt to Goethe (just as Goethe is quite silent regarding his own debt to Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse ; Julie, or The New Eloise; 1761). To some extent the debt is not actually present but merely arises a posteriori since the authors labour on the same »suffering« that the reader thinks epitomized by Werther. But what does this syndrome consist in? Or to put it differently: what is the Werther sickness and how did it come to have a European Romantic significance? In his meticulous (and critical) reappraisal in Book 13 of Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth, part III, 1814) Goethe attributes the extraordinary effect of his »little book« to the circumstances of the period: »The effect of this little book was great, indeed immense, and primarily because it came at exactly the right time«.1 He speaks of the »exaggerated demands«, »unsatisfied passions« and »imaginary suffering«2 of the period, and critics and biographers have subsequently confirmed this diagnosis with varying degrees of emphasis (e.g. Boyle 1997, 168–178). There have been extensive studies on how the text, above all from a sociological point of view, is rooted in its time, although this of course does not explain why its effect was so lasting; for if the book struck the »nerve of the time« and was symptomatic of it, its lasting popularity would force one to conclude that the social situation did not change greatly even into the 1830s. Goethe himself (probably out of modesty) stresses only the material’s potential to have an effect. To this, however, must be added the fact that he managed to capture a great number of contemporary »problems« and the Zeitgeist. And then of course there is also the book’s aesthetic quality: Werther was innovative also in terms of genre. Goethe was exploiting the successful genre of the epistolary novel, but he radicalised it by reducing its length (in comparison with other novels it really was a »little book«) and above all by increasing its intensity by means of strict monological treatment (which Richardson had partly experimented with in Pamela in 1740) since the reader hears only Werther’s voice, whether in letters or diary entries. Only after the protagonist’s death does his »friend« and publisher intervene to provide us with some necessary information. Goethe creates an utterly new dimension in the presentation of the subjective — meaning here restricting the narrative perspective to one single figure and limiting the focus to the internal action. His style, emphasizing the characteristics of authenticity, intensified the action even further, and all this together causes the reader to be emotionally involved to a greater degree, particularly since the shortness of the book permitted a greater concentration of the reading experience. If we are interested in reception processes, we must also consider the question of genre. Specifically: what is the attitude of Romanticism to the epistolary novel? To what extent can the Werther effect be reconciled with the historical demise of what is an 18th-century novel form (although it recurred sporadically, for instance in Bram Stoker’s Dracula of 1897, where the letter and diary entry device is employed very skilfully to heighten the Gothic and crime-story element)? Wertherism implicitly poses the question of what new forms of presenting the subjective need to be developed if one is to be able to tell Werther-like stories. 1.

»Die Wirkung dieses Büchleins war groß, ja ungeheuer, und vorzüglich deshalb, weil es genau in die rechte Zeit traf« (Goethe 1985, 623).

2.

»übertriebenen Forderungen«, »unbefriedigten Leidenschaften«, »eingebildeten Leiden« (ibid.).

Bernard Dieterle

26 3.

Werther and his brothers

One aspect of the literary reception process is that a work is never received in »splendid isolation«. This point is in fact often emphasized in the case of Werther since the protagonist or the book — »Werther« can after all mean both — is commonly mentioned in one breath with other figures. Sometimes this is done by way of contrast (as in the already mentioned »Werther vs. Don Giovanni« by Stendhal), but mostly it is done in support of a supposed affinity: Werther and Ossian, Hamlet, Saint-Preux, Jacopo Ortis, René, Childe Harold… It was inevitable that Goethe’s hero, regarded as a prototype, would be compared and contrasted with other figures. The first of these associations — with Ossian — is prefigured by the work itself, for in the course of the story Werther becomes an avid reader, admirer and even translator of Ossian (the translations are Goethe’s own); Ossian supplants Homer and opens the way to Weltschmerz. Goethe’s Werther was an important station in the European craze for Ossian, and hence this association is constitutive: Wertherism and Ossianism do go hand in hand — not only for Napoleon, who admired both and promoted the Ossian cult. Of the other names we may say the following: Hamlet was considered to be a paradigm of melancholy and therefore an ancestor of all those who suffer because they doubt the meaning of life. Here we must bear in mind the Shakespeare reception which culminates in the Romantic era and which Goethe himself of course contributed to in his Sturm und Drang phase, influencing it significantly through the Hamlet interpretation he gives in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years, 1796). Saint-Preux, the hero of Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse, is a key model of the sensitive hero; moreover Rousseau’s novel is the secret backdrop of Werther (cf. Jauss 1982). Ossianism, Rousseauism (hence also a criticism of civilization) and Shakespeare reception are consequently three of the more or less evident cultural pillars on which Wertherism stands. The other names — Jacopo Ortis, René, Childe Harold — lead us decidedly into the realms of Romanticism (as we shall see presently): Ortis can be regarded as a descendant of Goethe’s novel, but this cannot be said of the heroes of Chateaubriand and Byron. The latter are related by means of a construction of thought. By way of example we may cite a significant statement by Sainte-Beuve. In an essay of 1855 he defends Goethe’s famous assertion that the Romantic is morbid and the Classical healthy and he relates this to Werther (Sainte-Beuve 1948, 369; Goethe 1986, 300). Classical literature, he declares, would neither lament nor complain; it is not susceptible to ennui. While the Classical spirit finds serenity in activity, the Romantic cultivates a sense of nostalgia and, like Hamlet, seeks its ideal in the clouds. »Hamlet, Werther, Childe-Harold (sic), the pure Renés, are ill so as to sing and suffer, to enjoy their pain; they are Romantics more or less by dilettantism: illness for illness’ sake«.3 Of course, this quotation from »De la tradition en littérature« also expresses Sainte-Beuve’s opposition to Romanticism, which he himself had formerly extolled, but what is important for our purposes is the juxtaposition of names which together map out a philosophical horizon, evoke a Weltanschauung. The same gesture is to be 3.

»Hamlet, Werther, Childe-Harold [sic!], les Renés purs, sont des malades pour chanter et souffrir, pour jouir de leur mal, des romantiques plus ou moins par dilettantisme: la maladie pour la maladie« (Sainte Beuve 1948a, 371).

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found for instance in Flaubert, who read Werther intensively (cf. Giersberg, 2003), when he says of the protagonist of L’Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education, 1869): »He read again René and Werther, these books which disgust one with life«.4 4.

Wertherism I: Italy and France. Foscolo, Nodier, Germaine de Staël, Mme de Krüdener, Chateaubriand, Senancour

What is from the point of view of literary history the most important phase of the Werther reception occurred around 1800, i.e. against the historical background of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Wertherism is closely connected with historical and political events. As a variety of ennui (or indeed Weltschmerz or mal du siècle — though these concepts are not interchangeable) it goes hand in hand with a sense of loss and forlornness, a sense of the meaninglessness of the world in the face of an overpowering reality which robs the ego of its illusions and allows, or seems to allow, the individual no freedom of action in society: a sense that Werther himself experiences as a result of ossified social circumstances and which spread particularly during Napoleon’s rule and again immediately thereafter during the Restoration. This incidentally explains why predominantly French works are represented in this first phase. However, there is one important exception: Ugo Foscolo’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1802), a novel that is highly significant to our discussion. Foscolo always denied that his novel was a transposition of Werther, but he demonstrably knew Goethe’s book and very obviously took his lead from it (which is apparent above all in the first, incomplete version of 1798, in which the influence of Ossianism is also much more in evidence; at one point Werther is even mentioned by name). He wrote to Goethe on 16.1.1802: »You will receive from Signore Grassi the first volume of a little work by me, to which your Werther perhaps gave life«.5 (Goethe, however, did not acknowledge the work.) The freedom-loving patriot Jacopo Ortis is obliged to leave his native Venice for political reasons (as was Foscolo himself) following Napoleon’s transfer of the city to Austrian hands in 1797 under the peace treaty of Campo Formio and the ensuing persecution of patriots. Jacopo withdraws to the nearby hills, where he falls in love with Teresa, the daughter of an émigré aristocrat from Venice. Teresa, however, just like Lotte, is already betrothed and dares not go against her father’s desire for her to enter into a — thoroughly rationalistic and conservative — union with the noble Odoardo. When she marries, Jacopo’s life is deprived of meaning to the point where suicide (of which he often thinks) is the only possible means of release. Foscolo’s novel may be regarded very much as a Wertheriad for several reasons (a French translation from 1820 even bears the title Amour et suicide ou Le Werther de Venise!). Firstly because of the chosen form: the text, like Goethe’s Werther, consists largely of letters that Jacopo sends to his friend (however, this friend, who also publishes the letters, intervenes frequently as a narrator, giving potted accounts of the action). Secondly because of the constellation of figures and the course 4.

»Il relut René et Werther, ces livres qui dégoûtent de vivre« (Flaubert 1964, vol. I, 321).

5.

»Riceverete dal signore Grassi il primo volumetto di una mia operetta a cui forse diè origine il vostro Werther« (Foscolo 1949, 129 f.).

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of events. Thirdly because of the hero’s personality. Of course, in Foscolo, all this takes place in a different setting, insomuch as the historical events — the French Revolution, Napoleon’s conquest of Italy, his »liberation« of Venice and his cession of it to the Austrians, the lack of freedom in the Italian republics — are incorporated into the story and are made jointly responsible for the hero’s pessimistic disposition. This is much more consequential and »real« than the pressure of social constraints to which Werther feels subjected. Foscolo’s novel is, one might say, a piece of protest literature in which, from the first line, liberty is praised or its loss lamented; it is at the same time the first novel of Italian Romanticism and the earliest literary expression of the Risorgimento. (The fact that Foscolo could not consider himself to be a Romantic in 1802, and that later he did not consider himself an exponent of the Romantic movement either, does not contradict this classification: rather it is a basic paradox of Italian Romanticism occurring also with Manzoni and Leopardi.) A national-Romantic passion for liberty pervades the entire novel: Jacopo’s friend, who publishes and supplements his letters, does so in exile, Jacopo’s acquaintance Lauretta loses everything (and dies insane) as a result of the advent of the Austrians, and the adored Teresa bows to the exigencies of the political situation when she enters into marriage with Count Odoardo. In Foscolo’s work the love acquires a different colouring to that in Werther as a result of the analogy that operates between Teresa and Venice / Italy (an analogy that fortunately is not extended to an explicit allegory). In both cases circumstances rob Jacopo of the object of his adoration: Teresa is given away to Odoardo by her essentially well-disposed and politically progressive father, just as Venice is given up to the Austrians by the actually welldisposed and politically progressive French. (The letter of 17th March denouncing Napoleon as a tyrant was added later, in 1815.) The sufferings of the young Jacopo Ortis — which in many respects is based on Ugo Foscolo’s own, and this kind of autobiographical foundation is a basic trait of Wertherism — add, as it were, a historical dimension to the sufferings of young Werther. The hope for a radical change to the old social order is thoroughly dashed; Jacopo wanders through northern Italy from one disillusionment to another and, like so many Werther figures, finds the world to be a wasteland since historical events only occasion the eternal recurrence of the same thing (i.e. the ancien régime), which drives the progressive hero to the brink of despair. Nature (the beauty of the Italian landscape) is unable to afford him any consolation: that is, it appears to him to be bereft of meaning and purpose, like history itself; it has fallen silent (which for a Romantic soul is probably the worst of all evils); in its beauty it is isolated from the sufferings of the subject. In Foscolo there is above all one type of experience at play, one which will acquire symbolic character in the mal du siècle and in ennui: exile. This is both a reality experienced by several authors (for example Chateaubriand, Foscolo himself, Germaine de Staël, Byron, Pushkin — though somewhat differently —, Mickiewicz to name but a few authors from our literary historical context) and an existential metaphor. In the modern era — let us say since Rousseau — it became easy for the artist or writer to view himself as an outcast and a victim of persecution; and while in Rousseau this was still primarily metaphorical (or partly pathological) in nature, from 1789 onwards it came to take on extremely concrete form. The parallelism of love of liberty and adoration of Teresa reveals an important component of Jacopo’s emotional constitution, namely the fact that passion (Foscolo uses the terms amore, passione, desiderio) exists here as a force which means more than simple love for a person and more than the absolute sensibility of the subject: it represents an all-powerful, meaningful

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emotion that reconciles the individual with his own existence or instils a sense that he is really living. Werther has been accused of self-deception, since he deludes himself about the reasons for his passionate love and idealizes Lotte. This may also be observed in the case of Jacopo: Teresa is idealized into nothing less than »freedom« by Jacopo, and the fact that she is shown very soon to be an impossible object for his love contributes to this idealization. In a letter of 17 March 1798 Jacopo indicates that one passion enflames the other and can be enflamed by others in turn (Foscolo 1986, 45); indeed he even states that it is possibly the disappointment of a passion that makes love all-powerful. Thus Teresa, to a greater degree than Lotte, appears as only a hazily delineated suffering figure, her personality only sketchily developed; she has no weight, no independent existence, for she exists solely in the eyes, i.e. in the idealization of the man who loves her. Germaine de Staël’s epistolary novel Delphine, also published in 1802, is quite a different matter: here the events are seen from the point of view of a woman (as Gsteiger — 1980, 102 — rightly stresses). It should be noted at the outset, however, that Madame de Staël cannot be reckoned automatically as a Romantic. While it is well known how active she was in disseminating German thought in France and in criticizing French culture after her travels in Germany in 1804/05 and thanks to her long association with August Wilhelm Schlegel, she nevertheless remained constant in her adherence to the Enlightenment (the Enlightenment and Romanticism should not be regarded simply as consecutive historical periods). This may be seen in two respects in the novel Delphine: Firstly in the fact that she chose a form of epistolary novel that is traditional insofar as it operates with several letter-writers, with the letters giving rise to philosophical reflections. Secondly the French heroine’s view of the world is unambiguously of the Enlightenment; she fights against prejudice, for an improvement in the position of women and for political tolerance. As far as religion is concerned she defends Protestant stances above all with regard to the right to divorce — which was certainly one reason why Napoleon, who at the time was flirting with the Catholic Church, dismissed this work, among others, of his future opponent. For our purposes this novel is interesting primarily because Madame de Staël, who was an avid reader of Werther (initially in the French translation of Aubry) and praised the novel as a masterpiece (cf. de Staël 1998, 240–242, and 1968, 42 f.), obviously aspires to cast Goethe’s model in female form and thus create a female Werther. Benjamin Constant, in a defence of his friend’s novel, points out that its characters’ gender relationship is a mirror image of that in La nouvelle Héloïse. Yet there can be no doubt that Werther was also an inspiration, as is evident from the diary entries in Part 5. In Werther the substratum beneath the action consists, among other things, of a triangular relationship (two men, one woman), a love as impossible as it is invincible, a deep attachment to nature (which oscillates between idyll and Ossianic landscapes), and a failed attempt to escape the lover’s dilemma, which leads to suicide. Could this be reproduced if the central character were a woman? The women (Lotte, Teresa) in Goethe and Foscolo are not only weakly drawn, they are also weak in terms of their social status and position within the family; a reversal of this situation would predicate the conception of an autonomous woman vis-à-vis a weakly drawn male character — which could rapidly degenerate, of course, into a pure parody of Werther. In consequence, Delphine is characterized very much as a »strong«, hence emancipated woman, but her lover, the aristocratic Leonce, is anything but a weak personality, his Spanish background endowing him with the traditional attributes of

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pride, romantic passion, and a fiery temper. He is paired off, however, with Delphine’s cousin Mathilde by two matchmaking mothers, above all for financial reasons. Mathilde’s mother is incidentally a figure of the same type as Madame de Merteuil from Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons, 1782), which is further evidence of Germaine de Staël’s sympathy for models from the ancien régime. The result is a triangular relationship reminiscent of Werther, the heroine is helplessly in love with a man who loves her too but is bound by his vow to another. Since however the partners are on equal terms and Mme de Staël is writing a social (and in part highly critical) novel, she reverses the radicalization of novel form introduced by Goethe and creates a longer, more traditional and multi-voiced work in which characters, attitudes and problems are dealt with in depth — with Delphine’s voice being louder than the others. The novel thus becomes more long-winded, but the various positions can be staked out and above all the social interweaving can be made explicit (great importance is attached to this by the author, who makes use of her own experiences in the salons and in the realms of power). In De la littérature (On Literature, 1800) Germaine de Staël praises Goethe’s Werther for depicting passion in its conflict with society, which is manifested in the hero’s feeling of being offended (Staël 1998, 240). Conflict is traditionally engaged in by men (Werther and Jacopo), while women give themselves up to the marital destiny that has been laid down for them. It is quite a different matter in Delphine (1802), where a female character drives the action. Furthermore the novel is set in 1791–92, largely in France and in Paris, so that, as in Foscolo, the historical dimension has a considerable bearing on the events, all the more so since the aristocratic Léonce throws in his lot with the ancien régime and thereby brings about his and Delphine’s death. Delphine takes poison when she learns that Léonce has been sentenced to death; whereupon Léonce, who would have been able to escape at the last moment, calls for the sentence to be carried out immediately: for both of them, life without the other is unthinkable. Suicide is — as in Werther — the only answer to the perceived hopelessness of existence — except that here we are faced with a historically and politically determined Liebestod, as it were, which proves the unconditional passionate nature of Romantic love. Love interests the author only insofar as it is amour-passion, hence an absolute emotion that controls the individual and subverts social organization — which is hardly conceivable for her without a tragic outcome. She wishes to show what forces oppose the free development of one’s emotional life and to what extent morality can be reconciled with the radical demands of passionate love. She is also interested in the extent to which love has a different function according to one’s gender: for women it is the chief, most meaningful concern of their lives, because they have no other areas of activity or passion, whereas for men — and here we diverge notably from Werther — love has only an episodic character, since men can exercise their passions in other fields like power, fame, play, hatred, crime and political fanaticism. The power of social esteem, the opinion of society, is ever-present in Germaine de Staël’s thinking, and Delphine and Léonce are, in consequence, constantly preoccupied with public opinion. As social beings they cannot afford — especially in revolutionary times — to cut their ties with society completely in order to withdraw to a rural idyll, as Werther does. Charles Nodier, who in the 1820s became the most important exponent of fantastic literature of a Romantic character, is to be regarded only as a symptom because his novel — Le Peintre de

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Salzburg (The Painter of Salzburg, 1803) is of poor literary quality. When he wrote a preface in 1832 to distance himself from this product of his youth, he emphasized that Werther, Götz von Berlichingen (1773) and Schiller’s Räuber (The Robbers, 1781) were among the books read by young people in that period. And indeed these are the three German works which were known throughout Europe prior to Germaine de Staël’s De l’Allemagne. This documents that Werther was not only perceived as a melancholic or a contrary lover figure to Don Giovanni, but also represents a type of person who suffers passively in contrast to the active rebel and law-breaker as in Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen or Schiller’s Karl Moor. Nodier’s novel takes the form of a journal kept by a painter by the name of Charles Munster. Right at the start he learns that the woman he loves has married a gentleman called Stronk (the names Munster and Stronk are supposed to sound typically German, in the same way as Voltaire’s Baron von Thunderten-Tronckh in Candide, 1759, or Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh in Sartor Resartus, 1833/4). Munster lives in Salzburg because he has been exiled from Bavaria. This prompted two years of wandering (a motif familiar from Foscolo), which took him from the Danube all the way to the highlands of Scotland, hence to Ossian’s own terrain! On his journey he was tempted by the thought of killing himself. Exile, the artist, unhappy love, suicidal tendencies: the Werther syndrome of existential rootlessness and endangerment is reconstituted here (without great subtlety). Thus it hardly comes as a surprise when, near the end, Ossian, the »divine« Klopstock and even Werther are mentioned by name; Nodier thus makes it clear that his novel is a remake of Werther — at least in its conception since, in order to lend the story a personal note, he melodramatizes the ending, which is reported by the publisher, and in doing so he makes use of motifs that are clearly drawn from Goethe’s story. By so doing he lays particular emphasis on another characteristic of Werther’s: the fact that he is an artist (Werther draws). And when one thinks of the number of Romantic novels about art or artists, one realizes that Werther, insofar as he sees himself essentially as an artist (who knows the 18th century’s theories of art well, and rejects them), can certainly be said to possess a further, prototypical trait of the Romantic era, albeit one that scholars have paid little heed to thus far. Another novel that clearly owes a debt to Werther is Valérie ou Lettres de Gustave de Linar à Ernest de G…, written by Barbara Juliane von Krüdener and published in 1803. The author came from Riga, was influenced by reading Swedenborg, wrote in French and generally exhibited a great affinity with French culture (including Mme de Staël). Valérie is an epistolary novel in the Werther tradition, having as it does the character of a monologue: the reader predominantly hears the voice of the protagonist Gustave de Linar (who is named in the subtitle; Valérie is the woman he loves). The protagonist lays himself bare in letters to his best friend and occasionally in diary entries (which sometimes recall Werther in their style, just as Madame de Krüdener’s preface virtually quotes Goethe’s). Other voices are rarely heard; near the end, his friend Ernst and above all the count (Valérie’s husband) speak, but this is only so as to depict Gustave’s agony, and thus corresponds approximately to what the fictive publisher does in Werther. Gustave does not kill himself but instead falls victim to what Werther calls »eine Krankheit zum Tode«, literally »an illness to death«, i.e. he lets himself die of love; consequently this agony is rendered in some detail and indeed is the reason for the incorporation of earlier notes written by ������ Gustave’s mother which bear witness to his melancholy character, his cult of friendship, his reading of

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Homer and above all Ossian, his inclination to day-dreaming: in a word, the creation of his fatal disposition. In his mother’s eyes Gustave’s dreamy, literary disposition is fatal because it allows him to be seized by a passion at an age at which he cannot withstand it. It is fatal furthermore because Gustave conceives what is an ethereal, unreal ideal of womanhood which necessarily leads to calamity in his emotional life. (The fact that Gustave has his mother’s written reflections with him at all times and incorporates them at this key moment is a clear indication of the maternal component of his love). It is above all the constellation of figures, however, that is reminiscent of Werther: The young Swede Gustave, who suffers from the selfsame vague des passions as Chateaubriand’s René and Goethe’s Werther, falls in love with Valérie, the young wife of a count who is travelling from Stockholm to Venice in order to take up the post of ambassador there. The count functions much like Albert in Goethe’s novel, a notable difference being that he is much older and comes over as a father figure, with the result that Gustave — unlike his precursors Werther, Jacopo and René — is involved in an oedipal triangle (Oedipus is even mentioned once, cf. Krüdener 1974, 158). Gustave accompanies the married couple on their journey to Venice and reports back to his friend in Sweden about his deepening passion. The novel is set largely in Italy before the fall of the Venetian Republic (1797). The French Revolution is alluded to only indirectly, so that the historical background is still effectively the ancien régime. This is significant insofar as Gustave, unlike Jacopo Ortis for example, displays no passion for liberty and all in all can hardly be said to rebel against the social order — which Werther certainly does, however, inasmuch as his expansive subjectivity breaches all boundaries. Whereas Foscolo gives the Werther figure a national-Romantic slant, Madame de Krüdener romanticizes him by portraying Gustave’s love as an emotional absolute. The author, who married a diplomat in 1782, went with him to Venice, Copenhagen and Berlin, and wrote Valérie in 1802 in Paris where René and Delphine had just appeared. She reinterprets Werther in a slightly mystical way by clinging to a concept of love which is clearly identified as a supernatural experience by Gustave’s mother with her reference to Swedenborg in the journal. And yet the novel is demonstrably based on personal experiences from the first year of her marriage and it is located unambiguously in the social circles and overall intellectual context of the 18th century. The literary landscape of the book, where Ossian and Klopstock figure alongside Racine and the neoclassical Jacques Delille (1738–1813), indicates an aesthetic-intellectual position that is not clearly outlined, with the result that it is not possible to determine any decisive step in the direction of Romanticism in terms of form or content. Nodier’s inconsequential work, Krüdener’s novel, which is interesting, if nothing more, and even Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis show how hard it is to produce »Wertherist« epistolary novels of any quality. Foscolo, by politicizing the action, does certainly add a new dimension to the Werther story. On the other hand, works that rely too closely on the essential Werther paradigm and emulate its form are not very innovative. Chateaubriand, who along with Madame de Staël is the most significant French author of the period, is to be credited with making a new departure, which he achieved in spite — or because — of the fact that he was writing in opposition to Wertherism and abandoned its epistolary form. René, probably the most important and certainly the shortest of the texts discussed here, was first published in 1802 in Chateaubriand’s extensive apology of Christianity and the

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Christian aesthetic, Le Génie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity, 1802), in which the religious criticism of the Enlightenment is systematically refuted and love in its morbid form is criticized as a blind passion that turns the self away from God. This work contains the formulation le vague des passions (vague in the sense of vagueness) by which Chateaubriand seeks to describe a modern-era disposition of the soul which leads to an unbridling of passion, a rejection of the world, and existential nausea (1978, 714–716). He does not mention any literary hero by name, but Wertherism is clearly meant. René is then incorporated as an illustration of the syndrome. The story (originally planned for the novel Les Natchez, The Natchez, 1826) was soon removed from this context and published separately in 1805 (with the reflections on »le vague des passions« serving as a preface). The religious connection is not nullified, however, since religion plays an important role in the story of René and his flight from civilization: firstly because his sister withdraws to a nunnery in order to put a stop to her incestuous passion, and above all because (this is the framework story) René reveals his sufferings to a priest (Father Souël) who — speaking for Chateaubriand — roundly condemns them: »One is not, sir, a superior man because one perceives the world in an odious light. […] Solitude is harmful to him who does not live with God«.6 The deep impression that René’s tribulations make is naturally not banished by this condemnation, and with René, which was supposed to be a kind of riposte to Wertherist tendencies and to a »sickness of the soul«7, Chateaubriand effectively, though unintentionally furthered Wertherism! The author was explicit about the connection in a chapter of his autobiography that deals with Lord Byron: he is candid about the significance of reading Ossian and Werther in his youth and furthermore he declares a direct filial relationship between Byron’s Childe Harold and René (1957, 416 f.) — before damning them all: »Lord Byron opened a deplorable school: I presume that he was as distressed by the Childe-Harolds to which he gave birth as I am by the Renés day-dreaming around me«.8 The use of the plural here is a kind of circumlocution for what we understand by the term Wertherism. Also of interest is the use of the present tense in the second part of the sentence, especially when one considers that Chateaubriand wrote these lines in 1840. We can conclude, therefore, that Wertherism still flourished in the early forties — whether as a pose or a genuine »sickness of the soul« it is never easy to say. Chateaubriand is aware that René is a typical character of modern literature and regrets having written the story because it made a sickness of the soul a (Romantic) fad. There is a certain parallelism with the Werther effect, and René can be seen in many respects as the first truly Romantic version of the Werther syndrome (with the emphasis on the flight from civilization). As in the case of Goethe, it can be shown incidentally that aesthetic aspects (style of landscape description, first-person perspective, terse narrative style, etc.) are partly responsible for this. Another work of outstanding quality (though harder to come by) is Senancour’s Obermann, a novel published in 1804 but not really read until 1833, when a new edition was issued with an 6.

»On n’est point, monsieur, un homme supérieur parce qu’on aperçoit le monde sous un jour odieux. […] La solitude est mauvaise à celui qui ne vit pas avec Dieu« (Chateaubriand 1969, 144 f.).

7.

»maladie de l’âme« (Chateaubriand 1957, 462).

8.

»Lord Byron a ouvert une déplorable école: je présume qu’il a été aussi désolé des Childe-Harold auxquels il a donné naissance, que je le suis des Renés qui rêvent autour de moi« (Chateaubriand 1957, 418).

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important introduction by Sainte-Beuve at a time when he was still positively disposed towards Romanticism. Inclusion of it in this discussion requires some explanation because the book displays few characteristics of Werther. Firstly, it is not really a novel — as the fictive publisher underlines. External action is largely absent since the author has little regard for the novelistic (»romanesque«) and is interested exclusively in the Romantic, understood as the experience of, and meditation upon, an »������������������������������������������������������������������� état d’âme��������������������������������������������������������� «, a purely inner life far removed from the chance occurrences of everyday life and the demands of society. The protagonist is concerned with the intensification of existence, of finding his true self in a world that is perceived as bleak and fundamentally marred by ennui. Lack of action, however, is precisely what Werther was criticized for as a novel, and in this respect Senancour’s book represents a radicalisation of Goethe’s model. The lack of action is due to the protagonist not really becoming involved in a love incident, with the result that his existence is devoid of interpersonal drama. And yet there is a minimal fiction: Obermann is not simply a pseudonym for Senancour, but a protagonist who is genuinely endowed with an interior life and who is subject to the coordinates of space and time which have been conceived with regard to him. While the Swiss landscapes which form the backdrop to the greater part of his quest are quite real, the passage of time certainly is not: the passing years — seven in all — are numbered according to his new life, with the first letter being written for example in the »first year«. The book opens very much in the style of Werther: Obermann turns to a friend to inform him of his departure from Lyons and the start of a new life. Thus the book begins, like Goethe’s (and Foscolo’s) novel, with a rupture or caesura in the protagonist’s life, an »incipit vita nova«, although it does not take a romanesque direction as the result of an encounter with a woman, as in Werther, but instead it initiates a search for an abode that is true to the self and that makes life bearable — and this is what makes Senancour radical. A love story or romance is therefore more or less out of the question here (just as in René, though for different reasons): the self is left to its own devices; the philosophical search for one’s self and for one’s place in the world precludes, in effect, any devotion to another person. Even though a love affair is hinted at in Obermann, nothing can come of it — neither from the protagonist’s viewpoint nor in the author’s conception, because Obermann’s emotions are directed towards the world: he seeks and experiences in ecstatic moments a fundamental harmony with nature. Obermann is clearly not a Wertheriad, but it does nonetheless belong in the category of Wertherism. Later, indeed, the protagonist would often be mentioned in the same breath as Werther and René, and rightly so. We might put it this way: Obermann is a Werther without Lotte and hence without suicide (even though he considers the possibility occasionally and quite undramatically). He writes letters to a friend which sound like a long lament about the meaninglessness of a life without love (while there is no love story in Obermann’s life, the emotional dimension still plays a not unimportant role, even if only as a wish or a possibility). In terms of form the book is an example of the diary genre and as such anticipates many later works like André Gide’s Cahiers d’André Walter and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. This means that while Wertherism necessarily ceases to exert an influence in the course of the 19th century in the framework of the epistolary novel, it lives on in the genre of the diary novel — though this of course extends beyond the age of Romanticism.

Wertherism and the Romantic Weltanschauung 5.

35

Wertherism II: Sutsos, Byron, Wilhelm Müller, Mickiewicz, Pushkin

This aspect of the poetics of genre is exemplified by a novel written by Panagiotis Sutsos (who came from Phanar, the Greek quarter of Constantinople, and who is regarded as the founder of Greek Romanticism) and published in 1834: O Leandros. This work is a traditional, multi-voice, epistolary novel which is considered to be the first novel of modern Greek literature (just as Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis is regarded as the first novel of modern Italian literature, which attests to the potency of Werther material!). The novel tells of a pair of lovers called Leandros and Coralia, who are separated by political conflict and the reciprocal hatred of their families. When they both meet again in 1833 in Athens, their love is still intact, but Coralia is married and the mother of a child. She advises Leandros to travel, whereupon he wanders around Greece, plagued by love and moral doubt. When he returns he finds Coralia dying and kills himself, holding his lover’s portrait — not unlike Jacopo Ortis. Indeed, Ugo Foscolo’s novel is essentially the godfather, as it were, to this renewed excursion into Werther terrain (Werther and Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis are both mentioned in the preface) since the Italian author wrote what is clearly the most political Wertheriad. However, Sutsos’s novel is only of interest as a document: it shows that Wertherism was still very much available and influential as a model if one wanted to make a Romantic assertion of freedom. Moreover it shows ex negativo that Werther consists not only of an assortment of motifs and a narrative structure, but also of a style — namely the style of authenticity, the language of the heart, in which any rhetoric judged to be artificial was (supposedly) rejected. Sutsos’s idiom was not the living vernacular, however, but literary Greek. This fact, together with the retention of the by then obsolete epistolary form (sixty years after Werther!), accounts for the success of O Leandros being of very limited duration and scope. In Europe by this time Wertherism had moved off in a new direction, so that use of the GoetheFoscolo model represented the wrong decision in aesthetic terms. It is important to consider briefly at this juncture the new departure that Wertherism took. Although it occurred primarily in genres other than prose fiction, the works in question always had narrative character. Lord Byron, whom we have mentioned several times already, played the leading role in this. His narrative poems, above all the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812, the third canto appeared in 1816, the fourth in 1818) and Don Juan (1819–1824, and before that also his drama Manfred, 1817) presented identification figures for the Romantic generation which in some respects did not supersede Werther so much as extend him. As an unmistakable sign of this, the names were often once cited together: Werther — René — Childe Harold (sometimes Manfred, occasionally also Obermann). All these works share a strongly autobiographical character and a hero who is melancholy, weary of the world, and in search of intensity in his life (in Byron this is sometimes mixed with a metaphysical element). Today this type of hero is hard to imagine since his differences seem glaring to us, and yet the tendency to level out such differences is what characterizes the Romantic period: world-weariness, longing for a unfulfillable love, escape (America in René; in Childe Harold the Iberian peninsula, Greece and above all Albania), introspection, a life without prospects merge into a type, into the tale of a life, which is regarded as being definitive of the epoch. Werther, René or Childe Harold: this trinity of

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names (sometimes with the addition of Obermann) evokes and epitomizes (somewhat indiscriminately, to be sure) the suffering of an epoch. Wertherism thus necessarily dissolves and resolves itself into European Byronism (cf. Hoffmeister 1983), a Byronism that remains diffuse because it is constituted from Byron’s fictional heroes (Childe Harold, Manfred, Don Juan) and Byron’s own biography, i.e. from such diverse ingredients as Weltschmerz, inner conflict, dandyism, outsiderism, promethean revolt, Satanism and philhellenism, among others. In Byron, in contrast to the other authors, no references to Goethe’s novel may be observed. This is in spite of the fact that he must have known the work, since the text was widely read and echoes of it crop up in many fictional texts, even in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Chap. XV), where reading The Sorrows of Werter [sic!] moves the monster to tears. The Byronic hero is really only a hero of the time; there is no intertextual kinship of any kind; the affinity is solely one of intellectual history. »The girl spoke of love, / Her mother even of marriage, — / Now the world is bleak, / The path covered by snow«.9 There could scarcely be a pithier formulation of the Wertherist experience of the abrupt change from expectation of love to inconsolable misery than this verse from »Gute Nacht« (»Good Night«), the first poem of Wilhelm Müller’s Winterreise (Winter Journey, 1823), a cycle that Schubert set to music in 1827. Wilhelm Müller — a poet very well-versed in Byron incidentally — had already told a love story in a sequence of poems in Die schöne Müllerin (The Fair Miller-Maid, 1821), but with Winterreise he went much further inasmuch as a radically pessimistic mood is established for the affaire de cœur from the very first poem by the simple means of folk song. The »Winterreise« of the title is in fact not a journey at all; it refers to the wandering of a person who, bereft of his love, has lost his way in life and is doomed to roam aimlessly and endlessly through a cold bleak landscape, mainly at night. A quite different conception of the Weltschmerz motif of wandering — this time directly following on from Werther — may be found in what is perhaps the most hybrid work of European Romanticism, Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady (The Forefathers, 1823–1832). Polish Romanticism is of great importance in the study of Wertherism because, in that country, the reception of Werther occurred simultaneously with the reading of Germaine de Staël’s De l’Allemagne and in parallel with that of Goethe and Byron. Werther was not translated until 1821; the translator was Kazimierz Brodziński, who had celebrated Goethe as a Romantic author in 1818 (and who later condemned Werther along with Hamlet and Schiller’s Die Räuber as a bad influence on young people). »Romantic« meant: a national identity, an interest in the folk aspect, and an enthusiasm for the fantastic and the irrational. These are also components that are crucial to Dziady. The title itself refers to a pagan custom, a rite for the dead (on November 2) which, among other things, affords help to the wandering souls of the dead. This dramatic poem, which comprises various genres and whose structure kept changing throughout its composition, begins in the first version with an incident concerning a protagonist named Gustaw (recalling Sophie de Krüdener’s novel, which incidentally is mentioned in an unfinished dramatic Part IV as the female protagonist’s favourite reading, Mickiewicz 1998, 129), whose Romantic love cannot be fulfilled. Mickiewicz then replaced this with a longer narrative poem, »Upiór« (The Ghost), in 9.

»Das Mädchen sprach von Liebe / Die Mutter gar von Eh’ / Nun ist die Welt so trübe, / Der Weg gehüllt in Schnee« (Müller 1994, 170).

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which the ghost of a suicide returns to the world, impelled by love. This is strongly reminiscent of the programmatic poem entitled »Romanticism« of 1821, in which Mickiewicz offered a variation of what is probably the best known German ballad of the Sturm und Drang period, Bürger’s »Lenore«. The Schauerroman, an aspect of reception history that is activated here, is of interest because »Lenore« was written in 1773, Werther in 1774, which attests that Sturm und Drang works were absorbed directly into the Romantic imagination. What is especially interesting, however, is the fact that Mickiewicz, by focusing attention on the question of suicide, combines Sensibility with the Schauerroman and in doing so he invests Wertherism with a new dimension that has hardly been discussed in research to date. The individual’s suffering in the world — in the context of a popular culture imbued with pagan traditions and Catholicism — is here diverted into the Schauerroman. Gustaw is the hero of Part IV, which is cast in dialogue form but is interwoven with cantos and narrative passages. In this section a hermit appears who, referring explicitly to Werther (1998, 78), tells the sorry tale of his love affair and suicide, which do indeed remind the reader of Werther. The hermit turns out to be Gustaw’s ghost, who is permitted to appear on All Souls’ Day, but must resume his wanderings in the after-world before midnight. The last author to be discussed in our admittedly selective sketch is Pushkin, whose Evgenii Onegin (Eugene Onegin, 1825–33) represents a new and specific interpretation of Wertherism and Byronism. The work will be dealt with only briefly here because its genre — »a novel in verse« — is treated in this volume by John Isbell. All the same, this question of form and narrative technique should be borne in mind when we consider Wertherism: Byron’s narrative art cannot be separated from his use of verse, i.e. from a strongly self-referential narrative form in which the fiction, shaped as it is by metre, rhyme and stanza, is broken from the outset and held at a distance, giving the impression of a conscious and masterly composition by a narrator. Werther, René, Obermann are narrative forms of authenticity; what we are confronted with in the letters, diaries or »confessions« (as in René) is a supposed spontaneous description of life, never literature. Narrative verse, on the other hand, requires a mastery of language which regularly reveals an awareness that literature is being produced and which repeatedly foregrounds the author’s voice while relegating the fictional world to the background. This ironic dissociation — it is characteristic of Heinrich Heine’s »Zerissenheit« (inner conflict) and, in narrative fiction, is most pronounced in Laurence Sterne, and proclaims itself in constant excursions — requires a narrator that is either humoristic or disillusioned (these are not mutually exclusive) and treats the hero sometimes as the plaything of higher powers and sometimes as an intimate friend, as is the case with Childe Harold or indeed Eugene Onegin. Whereas in Wertherism the protagonist carries and formulates all the suffering, in Byronism the weight shifts on to the narrator, which makes the Weltschmerz gesture appear more complex as well as broken. Thus Pushkin’s narrator talks of the loss of his illusions (in I, 46). In addition to this, the hero is far removed from the Werther type: Eugene Onegin is a nobleman from the capital St Petersburg, a man of social entertainments and the theatre, a dandy inclined to ennui, who displays Byronic affectations and above all is incapable of responding to nature, country life and Tatiana’s simple love: he rejects the latter and at the end realises his mistake. The Werther type is represented in the novel twice: indirectly in the figure of Vladimir Lenskii, who has studied in Göttingen and espouses a conventional kind of Romanticism (chap. II, stanzas 6–19), and secondly in Tatiana’s

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reading (chap. II, stanzas 9–10); here mention is made of Werther, the »restless martyr« being accompanied by other figures like Saint Preux, Gustave (from Sophie de Krüdener’s Valérie) and Delphine (the heroine of Germaine de Staël). While Eugene enjoys the Byronic pose, Tatiana is given to an attitude of sentimentality, in which the name of Werther is mentioned and not by chance. An external sign of this distance from Wertherism is the absence of the personal form of expression which in Werther was still anchored in the epistolary culture of the 18th century; Onegin and Tatiana write nothing at all to each other, except for the pair of letters, exchanged several years apart, in which they confess their love for each other. 6.

Conclusion

The immense effect of Werther is to be attributed to the extraordinary breadth of this epistolary novel and to its innovations in terms of form and content. Goethe’s work offers, moreover, a paradigm for a modern-era suffering as a result of love and a reference for suffering as a result of the world and of the self-affirmation of subjectivity in the sense of a rejection of social conventions and cultural templates, as a model for introspection, as a mix of rebellion and melancholy. It is clearly anchored in contemporary history, characterized as a pre-Romantic product in terms of literary history, and yet exerted a lasting effect throughout the Romantic age. It was constantly referred to in Romanticism because Werther in a somewhat pathological way constitutes an archetype of it; while not thoroughly romanticizing the world, he perceives it by the light of his desires and, trusting the power of emotion, rebels against the prosaic state of society. The work’s vast affective potential — fed by that of Rousseauism, Ossianism and then Byronism — made it into a score which could be orchestrated extremely easily with Romantic content of a highly diverse nature and could therefore be construed as genuinely Romantic. Let us mention in conclusion four later dates from the reception history that are relevant for the 20th century. In 1892 Massenet’s Werther opera was premiered in Vienna, and enjoyed undiminishing success in France in the first half of the 20th century. Massenet considerably enhances the role of Charlotte, doing so in response to the demands of the opera genre, although not altogether in the spirit of Romanticism. When the director Max Ophüls, in 1938, was searching for material that could embody the typically »German-Romantic« culture as a mix of the assertion of the spirit and the insistence on the primacy of feeling against the barbarism of National Socialism, it was on Goethe’s Werther that his choice fell. When in 1972 Ulrich Plenzdorf wanted to provoke a debate on the rights of the individual and of feeling in the ossified society of the German Democratic Republic, he too returned to Goethe’s novel with his play Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The New Sufferings of Young W.). And when Roland Barthes in the same decade focussed on a new approach to love by publishing his Fragments d’un discours amoureux, he selected Werther as a paradigm, posing the following question, as a-historical as it is characteristic: »In Werther, is it the lover who cries, or is it the romantic?« (Barthes 1977, 213).10 This reveals not only the variety of possible ways in which a masterpiece

10.

»En Werther, est-ce l’amoureux qui pleure ou est-ce le romantique?« (Barthes 1977, 213).

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might exert an influence, but also the lasting fascination of a story which, though not genuinely Romantic, nonetheless is genuinely connected to Romanticism. (Translation Giles Shephard) Bibliography Atkins, Stuart Pratt. 1949. The Testament of Werther. Harvard: Harvard UP. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Fragments d’un discours amoureux. Paris: Seuil. Boyle, Nicholas. 1997. Goethe: The Poet and the Age. Vol. I: The Poetry of Desire (1749–1790). Oxford, New York: Oxford UP. Byron, George Gordon, Lord. 1984. Poetical Works. Ed. by Frederick Page. Oxford: Oxford UP. Chateaubriand, François-René de. 1957. Mémoire d’Outre-tombe. vol. I. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). ———. 1968. Essai sur les révolutions; Le Génie du Christianisme. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). ———. 1969. René. Œuvres romanesques et voyages. Vol. I. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). Chevrel, Yves. 1990. »Le ›mythe de Werther‹ dans la littérature européene, une expérience des limites?« Actes du XIIe Congrès de l’AILC. vol. 4. München: Judicium. 337–344. Dobijanka-Witczak, Olga. 1979. »Goethes Werther in Polen«. Goethe-Jahrbuch. 96: 304–316. Eggeling, Wolfram and Schneider, Martin. 1988. Der russische Werther: Analysen und Materialien zu einem Kapitel deutsch-russischer Literaturbeziehungen. München: Otto Sagner. Flaubert, Gustave. 1964. L’éducation sentimentale [version of 1845]. Œuvres complètes. Ed. by Jean Bruneau and Bernard Masson. Paris: Seuil. Foscolo, Ugo. 1949. Epistolario. Ed. by Plinio Carli. Vol. 1. Firenze: Felice le Monnier. ———. 1986. Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis. Introduzione di Walter Binni. Milano: Garzanti Editore. Frenzel, Elisabeth. 1998. »Werther«. Stoffe der Weltliteratur. 9., überarbeitete und erweiterte Ausgabe. Stuttgart: Kröner. 826–829. Genette, Gérard. 1992. Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré. Paris: Seuil. Giersberg, Dagmar. 2003. »Je comprends les Werther« — Goethes Briefroman im Werk Flauberts. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Gide, André. 1986. Les Cahiers d’André Walter. Ed. by Paul Martin. Paris: Gallimard. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1985. Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens [Münchner Ausgabe]. Vol. 16: Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit. Ed. by Peter Sprengel. München: Hanser. ———. 1986. Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens [Münchner Ausgabe]. Vol. 19: Gespräche mit Eckermann. Ed. by Heinz Schlaffer. München: Hanser. ———. 1987. Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens [Münchner Ausgabe]. Vol. 1.2: Der junge Goethe 1757–1775. Ed. by Gerhard Sauder. München: Hanser. 196–299. Gsteiger, Manfred. 1980. »Wandlungen Werthers (Goethe, Foscolo, Chateaubriand)«. Wandlungen Werthers. Bern: Francke. 76–115. Helmreich, Christian. 1999. »La Traduction des Souffrances du jeune Werther en France (1776–1850): Contribution à une histoire des transferts franco-allemands«. Revue Germanique Internationale. 12: 179–193. Hess, Remi. 2003. La Valse. Paris: Métailié. Hoffmeister, Gerhard. 1981. »›Krankheit zum Tode‹: Bemerkungen zu Goethes Werther, Foscolos Jacopo Ortis und André Gides André Walter«. Goethezeit: Studien zur Erkenntnis Goethes und seiner Zeitgenossen; Festschrift für Stuart Atkins. Ed. by Gerhart Hoffmeister. Bern, München: Francke. 81–90. Hoffmeister, Gerhard. 1984. Goethe und die europäische Romantik. München: Francke. Hösle, Johannes. 1976. »Die französische Werther-Rezeption«. Arcadia. 11: 113–125. Huch, Ricarda. 1951. Die Romantik. Blütezeit — Ausbreitung und Verfall. Tübingen: Wunderlich.

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Jacobowsky, Ludwig. 1892. Werther, der Jude. Berlin: Hoffschlager. Jäger, Georg. 1974. »Die Wertherwirkung: Ein rezeptionsästhetischer Modellfall«. Historizität in Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. by Walter Müller-Seidel. München: Fink. 389–409. Jauss, Hans-Robert. 1982. Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Jonnard, Norbert. 1998. L’Ennui dans la littérature européenne. Paris: Honoré Champion. Jost, François. 1969. »Littérature et suicide: De Werther à Madame Bovary«. Revue de littérature comparée. 42: 161–198. Krüdener, Julianne de. 1974. Valérie ou Lettres de Gustave de Linar à Ernest de G… Paris: Klincksieck. Kuhn, Reinhard. 1976. The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Laclos, Pierre Ambroise Choderlos de. 1956. Les Liaisons dangereuses. Paris: Le Livre Club du Libraire. Manacorda, Giorgio. 1973. Materialismo e masochismo: Il »Werther«, Foscolo e Leopardi. Firenze: La Nuova Italia. Mann, Thomas. 1996. Lotte in Weimar. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer. Mickiewicz, Adam. 1998. Les Aïeux [Dziad: Poema]. Montricher: Éditions Noir sur Blanc. Müller, Wilhelm. 1994. Die Winterrreise. Gedichte I. Berlin: Gaza. Nerval, Gérard de. 1993. Sylvie. Œuvres, vol. III. Ed. by Jean Guillaume. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). Nodier, Charles. 1968. Le Peintre de Salzbourg. Œuvres, vol. II. Genève: Slatkine Reprints [orig. ed. of Œuvres, Paris 1832–37]. Plenzdorf, Ulrich. 1976. Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Pushkin, Aleksandr. 1990 Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse. Trans. by Vladimir Nabokov. Paperback Edition in two volumes, vol. I. Princeton: Princeton UP. Rémusat, Charles de. 1859. »Werther, René, Jacopo Ortis«. Critiques et études littéraires ou Passé et présent. Paris: Didier. 117–127. Rougemont, Denis de. 1995. L’Amour et l’Occident. Paris: Plon. Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin. 1927. »Senancour«. Les grands écrivains français: Les romanciers, vol. I. Paris: Garnier. ———. 1948. »Werther«. Causeries du lundi, vol. XI., and »De la tradition en littérature«, Causeries du lundi, vol. XV. Paris: Garnier. 289–315 and 356–382. ———. 1948a. Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l’Empire. Paris: Garnier. Senancour, Etienne Pivert de. 1984. Obermann. Paris: Gallimard. Sondrup, Steven P. 1990. »Wertherism and Die Leiden des Werthers«. European Romanticism: Literary CrossCurrents, Modes and Models. Ed. by Gerhart Hoffmeister. Detroit: Wayne State UP. 163–179. Staël, Germaine de. 1968. De l’Allemagne. 2 vol. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion. ———. 1985. Corinne ou l’Italie. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1998. De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales. Ed. by A. Blaeschke. Paris: Garnier. ———. 2000. Delphine, 2 vol. Paris: Flammarion. Stendhal. 1965. De l’Amour. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion. Suskov, Mikhail Vasilyevich. 1988. »Der russische Werther« [1792, 1801]. Der russische Werther: Analysen und Materialien zu einem Kapitel deutsch-russischer Literaturbeziehungen. Ed. by Wolfram Eggeling and Martin Schneider. München: Otto Sagner. 75–100. Sutsos, Panagiotis. 1834. O Leandros. Nauplia: Tompras. Villers, Charles de. 1927. »Sur la manière essentiellement différente dont les poètes français et les allemands traitent l’amour (1806)«. [Included in:] Edmond Eggli, L’»Erotique Comparée« de Charles de Villers, Thèse Univ. Strasbourg, Paris: Librairie Universitaire.

Romanticism and the idealization of the artist Gregory Maertz The birth of Romanticism in British, European, and American literature can be traced to idealized representations of artists and poets in prose fiction published at the start of the »long nineteenth century«. In these works, representative examples of which will be discussed below, a dominant trope emerges: the artist or poet as hero, sage, priest, messiah, superman, and privileged decipherer of nature’s immanence and meaning. The special status, sacred vocation, and reverence due the artist for his special powers is acknowledged in many, if not all, European traditions, and in works that comprise an enormous range of genres and sub-genres of prose fiction — fairy tales, dream visions, novellas, variations on the Bildungsroman as well as realistic fiction and historical novels, including Wackenroder and Tieck’s Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of an Art-loving Friar, 1797); William Godwin’s St. Leon (1799); Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802); Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (Corinne, or Italy, 1807); E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Rat Krespel (Counsillor Krespel, 1818), Das Fräulein von Scuderi (Mademoiselle Scudéry, 1819), and Kater Murr (Tomcat Murr, 1820); Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); Thomas Carlyle’s Wotton Reinfred (1826/27); Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich (Green Henry, 1854/55); Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860); Fedor Dostoevskii’s Zapiski iz podpol’ia (Notes from Underground, 1864), and Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Crime and Punishment, 1866); George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871); Louisa May Alcott’s The Modern Mephistopheles (1877); J.P. Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne (1880); Knut Hamsum’s Sult (Hunger, 1890); and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901), »Tonio Kröger« (1903), and Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice, 1911). In these works, interrogating the status and function of art and the artist takes center stage. Building upon the Sturm und Drang cult of the genius, the Romantics and their post-Romantic heirs assert that the artist’s authority is derived not from the clout of wealthy patrons, but from his originality, vision, and imagination. The elevated status of the artist comes, however, at the price of his or her alienation from the bourgeoisie and the philistine work-a-day world. The protagonist of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years, 1795/96) was the original Romantic »bourgeois manqué«, whose descendants include Byron’s Childe Harold, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Hoffmann’s gallery of mysterious artists, homicidal jewelers, and shadowy musicians, Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, George Eliot’s Will Ladislaw, Dostoevskii’s Raskolnikov, Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne, and Mann’s Tonio Kröger. In a certain sense, the artist’s exile seems warranted for the artist is often figured as dangerous, a threat to society, as the warning in Coleridge’s »Kubla Khan« (1798/1816) makes clear: »And all should cry, Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair! / Weave a circle around him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise« (Coleridge 1995, 298). The Romantics’ response to the alienation of the artist, to the impossibility of comfortably mingling with bourgeois society, varied according to each writer’s ideology. Conservative Romantics, such as Novalis, Carlyle, and Keller, longed for the revival of an idealized medieval past. By contrast, progressive Romantics, e.g. Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Shelleys,

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sought redemption in a Utopian future in which social and individual fragmentation would be healed. Immediately after the publication of Wilhelm Meister, the novel’s Bildungsroman pattern, which valorizes the suffering of the would-be artist, was challenged by a new and ultimately dominant »anti-Bildungsroman« tradition in Romantic and post-Romantic prose fiction. Examples of this latter type include St. Leon, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Corinne, Notes from Underground, Middlemarch, Niels Lyhne, Sult (Hunger), and Tonio Kröger, in which the alienating experience of modern life is not validated or redeemed. Indeed, the suffering and detachment of the artist are represented as neither purposeful nor redeemable. While several Romantic and post-Romantic prose narratives depict a world constructed according to an artist-friendly design, e.g. Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883), other prose narratives of the period explore the vocation of the artist as an unrelieved nightmare (St. Leon, Frankenstein, Hunger, and Notes from Underground). Still others examine the conflict between artists or artistically inclined protagonists and the resistant, alienating medium of reality. In Middlemarch, for example, Dorothea Brooks, Will Ladislaw, and Tertius Lydgate, »the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity« in George Eliot’s provincial world in the 1830’s, »struggle amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state« (Eliot 2004, 31, 640). Past and Present (1843), Thomas Carlyle’s contribution to the sub-genre of conservative »looking backwards« narratives, is an instructive example of the impact of nostalgia in shaping the Romantic imagination. With the publication of his idealized portrait of life among artisans in pre-modern England, Carlyle aligns himself with the chief concerns in Novalis’s treatise Die Christenheit ����������������������� oder Europa (Christianity or Europe, 1799), and Coleridge’s Church and State (1830), and he anticipates Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s rallying cry of the nineteenth-century Russian reform movement in Chto delat’? (What is to be done?, 1863) when he poses the question, »What is to be done, what would you have us do?« (Carlyle 1899, 28). There are ideological and generational as well as generic distinctions in the Romantic representation of the artist. In British High Romanticism, for example, the assertion of the artist’s special vocation as a visionary and healer is most closely associated with the major Romantic poets — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Blake. It is only later, in the early Victorian era, following the importation and dissemination of German Romantic literature, that the problem of the artist becomes a major concern of British novelists. This similarity becomes clear if we compare statements on the vocation of the artist and poet and on the function of art and poetry from the writings of German, British, and French writers. Because they seek to obliterate the distinction between prose and poetry, and between literature and the other arts, in the following passages the distinction between critical commentary and imaginative writing breaks down: Novalis: »The artist stands on other human beings, like a statue on its pedestal«.1 Schlegel: »The true poet however is always a priest, just as the true priest has always remained a poet«.2 Blake: »And I know that This World Is a World of imagination & Vision. I see Every thing I 1.

»Der Künstler steht auf dem Menschen, wie die Statue auf dem Pedestal« (Novalis 1946, 24).

2.

»Der echte Dichter ist aber immer Priester, so wie der echte Priester immer Dichter geblieben« (Schlegel 1945, 25).

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paint in This World, but Every body does not see alike […]. Some See Nature all Ridicule & Deformity, & by these I shall not regulate my proportions; & Some Scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers. You certainly Mistake, when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination« (Blake 1988, 60 f.). Wordsworth: »What is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him? — He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind« (Wordsworth 1968, 255 f.). Coleridge: »The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity« (Coleridge 1983, 15 f.). Shelley: »But poets […] are not only the authors of language and Music, or the dance and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion« (Shelley 1977, 482). Keats: »As to the poetical Character itself […] it is not itself — it has no self — it is every thing and nothing — It has no character — it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated — It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago and an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. (Keats 1958, 386 f.). »The poet seeks out in the stars which route the finger of God indicates to us«.3 And, finally, Keller: »Why should it not be a grand and beautiful calling, always to be sitting in solitude before those works of God which have to this day kept their innocence and their complete beauty, to understand them and to honor them, and to worship Him by trying to reproduce them in their peacefulness? When one is drawing just a simple little bush, every branch fills one with reverence because it has grown thus and not otherwise, in accordance with the laws of the Creator; but when one becomes capable of painting, faithfully and truly, a whole wood or a wide field with its sky, and when at last one is able without a model to produce the like from one’s imagination, forests, valleys and mountain chains, or just little nooks, freely and independently, and yet exactly as they are to be seen somewhere or other, then this art seems to me to be kind of true participation in the joys of Creation«.4

3.

»Le Poète cherche aux étoiles quelle route nous montre le doigt du Seigneur« (Vigny 1950, 679).

4.

»Warum sollte dies nicht ein edler und schöner Beruf sein, immer und allein vor den Werken Gottes zu sitzen, die sich noch am heutigen Tag in ihrer Unschuld und ganzen Schönheit erhalten haben, sie zu erkennen und zu verehren und ihn dadurch anzubeten, dass man sie in ihrem Frieden wiederzugeben versucht? Wenn man nur ein einfältiges Sträuchlein abzeichnet, so empfindet man eine Ehrfurcht vor jedem Zweige, weil derselbe so gewachsen ist und nicht anders nach den Gesetzen des Schöpfers; wenn man aber erst fähig ist, einen ganzen Wald oder ein weites Feld mit seinem Himmel wahr und treu zu malen, und wenn man endlich dergleichen aus seinem Innern selbst hervorbringen kann, ohne Vorbild, Wälder, Täler, und Gebirgszüge, oder nur kleine Erdwinkel, frei und neu, und doch nicht anders, als ob sie irgendwo

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44 1.

Wilhelm Meister as epochal marker

Friedrich Schlegel described the three major European phenomena of the early nineteenth century as the French Revolution, J.G. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (Doctrine of Knowledge, 1794/95), and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Indeed, a powerful factor in the development of Romanticism was the varied, rich, and creative response to Wilhelm Meister, for and against, throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, the importation of ideas from Germany about the artist’s place in society molded the discussion of this relationship in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States following the French Revolution. This influence was deeply felt in New England, where an independent cultural life was just starting to assert itself in the activities of the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller and their fellow travelers in Boston and Concord. Meanwhile, in Switzerland the French novelist Germaine de Staël, whose Corinne presents one of the few examples of a female poet-artist in the entire Romantic canon, identified German Classicism and Romantic culture as a potentially important source of spiritual authority for the rest of Europe. In De l’Allemagne (On Germany), which was published in an English translation in London in 1813 before it appeared in France, Staël identifies Goethe as a living classic. Romantic and early Victorian writers in Britain found in Staël’s idealized vision of German culture a subversive alternative to the soulless, mechanistic thinking of the Enlightenment, against which the Romantics had originally rebelled. Staël’s portrayal of Germany as the land of poets and thinkers gave impetus to the transformation of Goethe’s public image from that of the dangerous author of Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther, 1774; 1787), to the cultural hero who published Wilhelm Meister, which was embraced throughout Europe and the United States as a kind of self-help book for poets and artists. At a time when Goethe was decidedly less popular than Kotzebue, Schiller, and Wieland, Staël made the bold claim that he, and not his more prominent contemporaries, »unites all that distinguishes the German mind« and possesses »the chief characteristics of the German genius«.5 Indeed, Thomas Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1824) ignited the first »culture war« on the threshold of the Victorian era in Britain, as writers on the left and right debated the merits of erecting German cultural idols in the Anglo-American literary landscape. According to Carlyle, the most staunchly pro-Goethe Victorian writer before G.H. Lewes, Werther had given voice to »the cry of that dim, rooted pain, under which all thoughtful men of a certain age were languishing« (Carlyle 1899, vol. 26, 215), affirming Goethe’s cultural authority as an expression of his capacity for redemptive suffering. Wilhelm Meister, in Carlyle’s translation, appealed to English readers more than Werther, because it suggested links between the growth of aesthetic sensibility and ethical self-awareness and indicated a hopeful solution to the artist’s dilemma. Thus Carlyle credits Goethe with having gone further than any other man of his time by breaking through the paralysis of reflection and demonstrating the possibility of meaningful action in the modern world. Goethe’s fusion of allegory and realism, of entstanden und sichtbar sein müssten, so dünkt mich diese Kunst eine Art wahren Nachgenusses der Schöpfung zu sein« (Keller 1986, 178 f.). 5.

»Réunit tout ce qui distingue l’esprit allemand«; »les traits principaux du génie allemand« (Staël 1968, 189).

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wisdom, literature, and lyric poetry in Wilhelm Meister presented an allegory of the nineteenth century, containing »a picture full of the expressiveness, of what men are striving for, and ought to strive for, in these actual days« (Carlyle 1899, vol. 26, 233). The realism of Wilhelm Meister therefore acted as a counterbalance to the »wild suicidal Night-thoughts of Werther«, the representation of the artist as suffering and alienated, deracinated, classless (Carlyle 1899, vol. 26, 234). Goethe’s realism is valuable because its »figurativeness« has a »supernatural« quality. That is, Goethe’s »singularly emblematic intellect; his perpetual never-failing tendency to transform into shape, into life […] the opinion, the feeling that may dwell in him. Goethe’s figurativeness […] manifests itself as the constructing of the inward elements of a thought, as the vital elements of it«, and this »emblematic« faculty is »the very essence of Goethe’s intellect« (Carlyle 1899, vol. 27, 438). Carlyle was sufficiently impressed with Goethe’s novel to use it as a model for his own Bildungsroman, the posthumously published Wotton Reinfred (1892). 2.

Herzensergiessungen as Romantic response

The first important response to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister was Wackenroder and Tieck’s Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797), and German Romanticism can, in fact, be said to have been born in Wackenroder and Tieck’s evocation of the divinity of art and the sacred mission of the artist, which was inspired by their discovery of the medieval and Renaissance art and architecture of Nuremberg and the impressive Baroque churches they visited in Franconia. This was combined with a sympathetic orientation toward Roman Catholicism and a contemporary influence, that of the aesthetic theory and practice of a small group of German artists, active in Rome. The quasi-monastic Nazarenes anticipated the Pre-Raphaelites in their efforts to revive the color, composition, and pre-perspectival simplicity of medieval and early Renaissance painting, and they included J.F. Overbeck, Franz Pforr, Peter von Cornelius, and Philipp Veit. The Nazarenes’ medieval revival lies at the heart of Romanticism and anticipated the central place of medievalism and the Gothic revival in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Wackenroder and Tieck were also deeply impressed by the Goethe cultist, novelist, travel writer, and antiquarian Karl Philipp Moritz, whose lectures on art history they attended at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. Moritz’s anti-rationalistic, emotional teaching that art may be felt but not easily comprehended is evident throughout Herzensergiessungen and in the works of the Romantics generally. This work’s characteristically Romantic trait, the fusion of genres — essays, fictionalized autobiography, anecdotes, epistolary essays, biographical sketches, prose that verges on, at times merges with, and often gives way to verse — anticipates Richard Wagner’s conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk as manifested in the music dramas Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Isolde, 1865), Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung, 1853–1874), and Parsifal (1882). Such striving after a universal, all-inclusive work of art is denoted as definitively Romantic in Friedrich Schlegel’s »Athenäum Fragment«, No. 116 (Athenäum fragment, No. 116, 1798): Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. It is destined not merely to reunite the separate genres of poetry and to link poetry to philosophy and rhetoric. It would and should also mingle and fuse poetry and prose, genius and criticism, artistic poetry and natural poetry,

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make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetic, poeticize wit, fill and saturate the forms of art with worthy cultural matter of every kind, and animate them with a flow of humor. It embraces all that is poetic, from the greatest art system that enfolds further systems, down to the sigh, the kiss uttered in artless song by the child creating its own poetry […]. Romantic poetry alone can, like the epic, become a mirror to the whole surrounding world, an image of its age (Schlegel 1980a, 4 f.).6

The mouthpiece selected by Wackenroder and Tieck — a fictitious Baroque friar — indicates their deep affinity with Roman Catholicism and its rich pageantry and ceremony, in which the spiritual and the sensuous are fused. As interpreted in their revolutionary hybrid of prose fiction, in the Catholic imagination art in all forms — painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and drama — is subordinated to the transmission of religious experience. The link between religion and art, the central concern in Herzensergießungen, is clear in the following passage: The language of words is a precious gift of Heaven, and it was to our everlasting benefit that the Creator loosed the tongue of our first ancestor so that he might name all the things which the Almighty had put in the world around him, and the spiritual images which He had implanted in his soul and so enrich his spirit by endlessly combining this wealth of names. By means of words we have dominion over all of nature; by means of words we acquire with ease all the treasures of the earth. Yet words cannot call down into our hearts the invisible spirit which reigns above us (Wackenroder/Tieck 1975, 59).7

3.

Heinrich von Ofterdingen contra Wilhelm Meister

Another influential early response to Wilhelm Meister that lies at the core of the Romantic canon is Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (published posthumously in 1802). During Novalis’s student years in Jena, Leipzig, and Wittenberg, his acquaintances included many of the architects of Romantic aesthetic ideology, J. G. Fichte, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich and A.W. Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, and Wilhelm Wackenroder. The turning point in his life occurred in 1797 when his thirteen year-old fiancée, Sophie von Kühn, died of tuberculosis, foreshadowing his own 6. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Die Romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie. Ihre Bestimmung ist nicht bloss, alle getrennten Gattungen der Poesie wieder zu vereinigen, und die Poesie mit der Philosophie und Rhetorik in Berührung zu setzen. Sie will, und soll auch Poesie und Prosa, Genialität und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie bald mischen, bald verschmelzen, die Poesie lebendig und gesellig, und das Leben und die Gesellschaft poetisch machen, den Witz poetisieren, und die Formen der Kunst mit gediegnem Bildungsstoff jeder Art anfüllen und sättigen, und durch die Schwingungen des Humors beseelen. Sie umfasst alles, was nur poetisch ist, vom grössten wieder mehrere Systeme in sich enthaltenden Systeme der Kunst, bis zu dem Seufzer, dem Kuss, den das dichtende Kind aushaucht in kunstlosem Gesang […]. Nur sie kann gleich dem Epos ein Spiegel der ganzen umgebenden Welt, ein Bild des Zeitalters werden […]« (Schlegel 1980, 204 f.). 7.

»Die Sprache der Worte ist eine grosse Gabe des Himmels, und es war eine ewige Wohltat des Schöpfers, dass er die Zunge des ersten Menschen löste, damit er alle Dinge, die der Höchste um ihn her in die Welt gesetzt, und alle geistigen Bilder, die er in seine Seele gelegt hatte, nennen und seinen Geist in dem mannigfaltigen Spiele mit diesem Reichtum von Namen üben könnte. Durch Worte herrschen wir über den ganzen Erdkreis; durch Worte erhandeln wir uns mit leichter Mühe alle Schätze der Erde. Nur das Unsichtbare, das über uns schwebt, ziehen Worte nicht in unser Gemüt herab« (Wackenroder/Tieck 1948, 51).

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death from this disease in 1801. In 1800 he broke with Schiller’s classicism and Goethe’s realism as he sought to represent his Romantic longing in a totally new and revolutionary voice. In contrast to the classical Bildungsroman tradition inaugurated by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, in which human development appears as the highest goal, in Heinrich von Ofterdingen there is no developmental telos, only the pursuit of self-forgetting in longing, dreams, and death. The significance-laden blue flower, for which the eponymous hero of Heinrich von Ofterdingen pines, takes on ultimate reality; its hieroglyphs are indecipherable except to the dreaming poet. In contrast to Nature’s »grosse Künstlichkeit« (great artfulness), which is visible to the naked eye everywhere, Novalis interrogates the magical, mysterious, secret nature of poetry as reconceived by the Romantics — an esoteric art, analogous to alchemy or magic: There is nothing of the art of poetry to be met with anywhere, externally. Nor does this art work with tools or hands; the eye and ear perceive nothing of it; for the mere hearing of words is not the real effect of this secret art. It is altogether a matter of the soul, and as those other artists delight the outer senses with pleasurable sensations, so the poet fills the inner sanctuary of the spirit with new, wonderful, and pleasing thoughts. He knows how to stir those secret powers in us at will, and by means of words he enables us to perceive a glorious unknown world« (Novalis 1964, 31).8

For Henry, the aspiring poet, the source of poetry is love and the higher world that is hidden but simply requires being made manifest by the poet: Language is really a little world in signs and sounds. As man is Lord over it, so he would also like to be lord over the great world. And be able to express himself freely in it. And precisely in this delight of revealing in the world what is beyond the world, of being able to do that which is really the original motive of our being here, therein lies the fountainhead of poesy (Novalis 1964, 116).9

4.

Wotton Reinfred as a British response

The major concern of British Romantic prose fiction is, with few exceptions, the extension of the Gothic, historical, picaresque, satirical, and country house tropes and themes associated with the eighteenth-century novel. In contrast to the German tradition, the British response to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister was, as noted above, delayed until the mid-1820’s and after. The fragmentary, posthumously published Wotton Reinfred was written in 1826/27, exactly in the 8.

»Dagegen ist von der Dichtkunst sonst nirgends äusserlich etwas anzutreffen. Auch schafft sie nichts mit Werkzeugen und Händen; das Auge und das Ohr vernehmen nichts davon: denn das blosse Hören der Worte ist nicht die eigentliche Wirkung dieser geheimen Kunst. Es ist alles innerlich, und wie jene Künstler die äussern Sinne mit angenehmen Empfindungen erfüllen, so erfüllt der Dichter das inwendige Heiligtum des Gemüts mit neuen, wunderbaren und gefälligen Gedanken. Er weiss jene geheimen Kräfte in uns nach Belieben zu erregen und gibt uns durch Worte eine unbekannte herrliche Welt zu vernehmen« (Novalis 1981, 335).

9.

»›Die Sprache,‹ sagte Heinrich, ›ist wirklich eine kleine Welt in Zeichen und Tönen. Wie der Mensch sie beherrscht, so möchte er gern die grosse Welt beherrschen und sich frei darin ausdrücken können. Und eben in dieser Freude das, was ausser der Welt ist, in ihr zu offenbaren, das tun zu können, was eigentlich der ursprüngliche Trieb unsers Dasein ist, liegt der Ursprung der Poesie‹« (ibid., 335).

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middle of Thomas Carlyle’s formative, decade-long engagement with German literature, and it suggests that the reception of Wilhelm Meister was a crucial influence in the development of late British Romanticism. A fusion of the German Bildungsroman, philosophical dialogue, and wisdom literature, Wotton Reinfred was chiefly inspired by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years, a translation of which Carlyle published in 1824, and Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which was the chief model for Carlyle’s major work of prose fiction, Sartor Resartus (1834), to be published in his lifetime. There are, in addition, traces of Carlyle’s distinctive fusion of English and German Romantic aesthetics, philosophy, and nature worship, including a rudimentary expression of »natural supernaturalism«. At the same time Wotton Reinfred is replete with Goethean homilies on the sanctity of work, renunciation, and anti-eudaemonism — features also associated with the mature Carlyle. Because Carlyle considered Enlightenment culture soulless, ego-driven, and emptily mechanistic, and his native land bereft of contemporary heroes worthy of the name, he frequently expressed his sense of estrangement from contemporary Britain, a lament that is also echoed in Wotton Reinfred. Thus for the overall blueprint underlying this rich intertextual extravaganza Carlyle turned to Goethe, his primary literary and spiritual master, whose influence on the young Scottish writer was as pervasive and enduring as it was on Wackenroder, Tieck, Schlegel, and Novalis. The dialogues that the narrative comprises contain a concise exposition of Carlyle’s aesthetics in relation to the thought of his time in Germany and Britain, and constitute a defense of his appropriation and naturalization of German thought. 5.

St Leon and Frankenstein: The problem of creativity

Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelley’s great science fiction parable of the suffering and persecution of a philanthropic scientist steeped in alchemy and his maligned creature, was preceded by her father’s novel on a remarkably similar theme, St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799). In both novels the protagonists’ use of alchemy becomes the perfect symbol for art and the status of the artist in the Romantic era. As a revision of Godwin’s novel, Frankenstein illustrates the dialogic progression from Mary Shelley’s appropriation of her father’s discourse to the emergence of her authorial originality, and thus also functions as an allegory of the author’s education and literary apprenticeship. At the center of St. Leon is a presentation of the »education« of the protagonist Reginald de St. Leon alternately through alchemy and exile. Reginald’s travels, however, embody an inversion of the Goethean Bildungsreise: his education is based on a process of disillusionment rather than instruction, enlightenment, and growth. Hounded by authorities from one end of Europe to the other, his freedom is purchased only by continual flight. As the bearer of a monstrous secret Reginald embarks on an endless odyssey, »hated by mankind, hunted from the face of the earth, pursued by atrocious calumny, without country, without a roof, without a friend« (Godwin 1799, vol. II, 9). Emulating Reginald’s and Victor’s search for ideal companionship, empowering knowledge and opportunities to undertake something »great and good«, Shelley’s creature also embarks on an odyssey that begins with the discovery that he lives in a hostile world, rejected by his »father«, Victor Frankenstein, and denied the chance to procreate and to live a »normal

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life«. His Bildungsreise ends with a murderous inversion of Godwinian altruism as he lashes out at Victor, destroying all those with whom he enjoys emotional intimacy in order to render his condition identical to his own. The rebellion of the creature, which proceeds from inarticulate rage to the discovery of speech and the art of discourse, invites comparisons with Mary Shelley’s efforts simultaneously to assimilate and to overcome her father’s and husband’s more authoritative discourse. Mary’s and the creature’s obsession with language, this »godlike science«, that can produce golden music out of arbitrary signs and sounds, is akin to Reginald’s obsession with the alchemy and Victor’s with the »new science«. St. Leon and Frankenstein are myths of misguided benevolence in which well-intended but hubristic transgressions of social, religious, and scientific conventions are punished by enforced exile from human society. The ostracism of Reginald, Victor, and the creature mark them as members of the tribe of Romantic outcasts. Formally transgressive in a way that reinforces their transgressive subject matter, St. Leon and Frankenstein are militantly anti-canonical, composite literary forms that explore the outer boundaries of the novel’s possibilities as a genre and combine and appropriate such narrative sub-genres as the Gothic novel, science fiction, the Bildungsroman, and travel and sentimental fiction. 6.

Schopenhauer and Romantic aestheticism: A legacy for modernism

The Romantic idealization of the artist culminates in the artist-centered philosophical writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. Indeed, no other philosopher in the nineteenth century assigned such an integral role for art in the workings of his metaphysical system than Schopenhauer. Unlike predecessors and contemporaries such as Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, Schopenhauer does not consider art an intellectual narcotic, a deviation from the path of serious philosophical inquiry, or just a handy servant to superior masters. On the contrary, according to Schopenhauer, art and the artistic genius offer the most accessible means to achieving nothing less than the salvation of the entire world. In contrast to the scientist, who is concerned with the phenomenal world and establishing laws for its behavior, the artist, in league with the philosopher, pursues higher, eternal truths: Not merely philosophy but also the fine arts work at bottom towards the solution of the problem of existence […]. Accordingly, every work of art really endeavors to show us life and things as they really are; but these cannot be grasped directly by everyone through the mist of objective and subjective contingencies. Art takes away this mist […]. The works of poets, sculptors, and pictorial or graphic artists generally contain an acknowledged treasure of profound wisdom, just because the wisdom of the nature of things themselves speaks from them. They interpret the utterances of things merely by elucidation and purer repetition. Therefore everyone who reads the poem or contemplates the work of art must of course contribute from his own resources towards bringing that wisdom to light (Schopenhauer 1958, 406 f.).10 10. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ »Nicht bloss die Philosophie, sondern auch die schönen Künste arbeiten im Grunde darauf hin, dass Problem des Daseins zu Lösen […]. Jedes Kunstwerk ist demgemäss eigentlich bemüht, uns das Leben und die Dinge so zu zeigen, wie sie in Wahrheit sind, aber, durch den Nebel objektiver und subjektiver Zufälligkeiten hindurch, nicht von Jedem unmittelbar erfasst werden können. Diesen Nebel nimmt die Kunst

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By the power of the artistic genius, whose talent consists in perceiving and then representing not specific phenomena which have their existence only in the relation, but the ideas of such things, the mist of illusion is cleared. The Veil of Maya is torn back and the inner meaning of reality is revealed in the eternal ideas, existing outside space and time. Artistic creation or the contemplation of a work of art has the power to free the intellect from its original subservience to the will, allowing the intellect to rise above the trammels of everyday existence and beyond the illusory satisfactions of the world of appearances. With the mist obscuring perception cleared, the observer is blessed with enlightenment. He is momentarily relieved of his attachment to the will and is free to contemplate his relation to the world, disinterestedly, as will-less subject of knowledge. Thus, as Nietzsche observes, »the heroism of truth consists in ceasing one day to be time’s plaything. In becoming, all is hollow, deceptive, superficial and contemptible; the riddle which man is to solve can only be solved in the unchangeable, in being, in being such-and-no-other« (Nietzsche 1965, 47).11 Released from subservience to the senses and the will to live, the subject ceases to be merely individual and becomes the pure will-less subject of knowledge, the »clear eye« and mirror of »the inner nature of the world«: Raised up by the power of the mind, relinquish the ordinary way of considering things, and cease to follow under the guidance of the forms of the principle of sufficient reason merely their relations to one another, whose final goal is always the relation of our will. Thus we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what. We lose ourselves entirely in the object of contemplation […]. We forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it (Schopenhauer 1958, vol. I, 178).12

hinweg […]. Die Werke der Dichter, Bildner und darstellenden Künstler überhaupt enthalten anerkanntermaassen einen Schatz tiefer Weisheit: eben weil aus ihnen die Weisheit der Natur der Dinge selbst redet, deren Aussagen sie bloss durch Verdeutlichung und reinere Wiederholung verdolmetschen. Deshalb muss aber freilich auch Jeder, der das Gedicht liest, oder das Kunstwerk betrachtet, aus eigenen Mitteln beitragen, jene Weisheit zu Tage zu fördern« (Schopenhauer 1877, vol. II, 464). 11.

»Jener Heroismus der Wahrhaftigkeit besteht darin, eines Tages aufzuhören, sein Spielzeug zu sein. Im Werden ist Alles hohl, betrügerisch, flach und unserer Verachtung würdig; das Räthsel, welches der Mensch lösen soll, kann er nur aus dem Sein lösen, im So- und nicht Anderssein, im Unvergänglichen« (Nietzsche 1899, 47).

12.

»Wenn man, durch die Kraft des Geistes gehoben, die gewöhnliche Betrachtungsart der Dinge fahren lässt, aufhört, nur ihren Relationen zu einander, deren letztes Ziel immer die Relation zum eigenen Willen ist, am Leitfaden der Gestaltungen des Satzes vom Grunde, nachzugehen, also nicht mehr das Wo, das Wann, das Warum und das Wozu an den Dingen betrachtet; sondern einzig und allein das Was; auch nicht das abstrakte Denken, die Begriffe der Vernunft, das Bewusstsein einnehmen lässt; sondern, statt alles diesen, die ganze Macht seines Geistes der Anschauung hingiebt, sich ganz in diese versenkt und das ganze Bewusstsein ausfüllen lässt durch die ruhige Kontemplation des gerade gegenwärtigen natürlichen Gegenstandes, sei es eine Landschaft, ein Baum, ein Fels, ein Gebäude oder was auch immer; indem man, nach einer sinnvollen Deutschen Redensart, sich gänzlich in diesen Gegenstand verliert, d.h. eben sein Individuum, seinen Willen, vergisst und nur noch als reines Subjekt, als klarer Spiegel des Objekts bestehend bleibt; so dass es ist, als ob der Gegenstand allein da wäre, ohne Jemanden, der ihn wahrnimmt« (Schopenhauer 1877, vol. I, 210).

Romanticism and the idealization of the artist

51

In the process of gaining a remarkable new capacity for seeing into the truth of things one also attains »the painless state, prized by Epicurus as the highest good and as the state of the gods; for the moment we are delivered from the miserable pressure of the will. We celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still« (Schopenhauer 1958, vol. I, 196).13 Not only does artistic contemplation yield insight into the immutable profound truths of existence, it also emancipates us from the tyranny of the will. Liberated from subservience to the will, knowledge then becomes pure perception, pure objectivity, pure repose. As Nietzsche puts it, »Schopenhauerian man« is he who »voluntarily takes the pain of truthfulness upon himself, and this suffering serves to kill his individual will to prepare that complete revolution and reversal of his being, the attainment of which is the actual meaning of life« (Nietzsche 1965, 43).14 By making such large claims for the production and contemplation of art, Schopenhauer’s thought was naturally the artist’s philosophy par excellence. And from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Schopenhauer found among artists and connoisseurs his most enthusiastic admirers and most fanatical converts. Countless artists and writers found an antidote to their own suffering and alienation as well as hope for the redemption of mankind in his prescription of art as the means to achieve victory over the will. Some of Schopenhauer’s most fervent and prominent admirers on the Continent included Tolstoi, Nietzsche, Wagner, Hamsun, Viacheslav Ivanov, Edvard Munch, and Thomas Mann. In Britain Schopenhauer’s following among writers and artists associated with the rise of aestheticism and Modernism included Pater and Wilde. Indeed, the embrace by European Modernism of both the pose of self-conscious alienation and aspects of the aesthetic idiom of the Romantic artist suggests an essential continuity in the representation and idealization of the artist throughout the long nineteenth century. Bibliography Blake, William. 1988. »Letter to Dr. Trusler, 23 August 1799«. The Oxford Authors: William Blake. Ed. by Michael Mason. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP. Carlyle, Thomas. 1892. Wotton Reinfred. Last Words of Thomas Carlyle. Ed. by Richard Preuss. London: Longmans. ———. 1899. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Ed. by H.D. Traill. London: Chapman and Hall. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1995. »Kubla Khan«. Coleridge: Poetical Works. Ed. by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP 298. ———. 1983. Biographia Literaria. Ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP. Eliot, George. 2004. Middlemarch. Ed. by Gregory Maertz. Peterborough: Broadview.

13.

»Es ist der schmerzenslose Zustand, den Epikuros als das höchste Gut und als den Zustand der Götter pries: denn wir sind, für jenen Augenblick, des schnöden Willensdranges entledigt, wir feiern den Sabbath der Zuchthausarbeit des Wollens, das Rad des Ixion steht still« (ibid., 231).

14.

»Der Schopenhauerische Mensch nimmt das freiwillige Leiden der Wahrhaftigkeit auf sich, und dieses Leiden dient ihm, seinen Eigenwillen zu ertödten und jene völlige Umwälzung und Umkehrung seines Wesens vorzubereiten, zu der zu führen der eigentliche Sinn des Lebens ist« (Nietzsche 1899, 43).

52

Gregory Maertz

Godwin, William. 1994. St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. Ed. by Pamela Clemit. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP. Keats, John. 1958. The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821. Ed. by Hyder Edward Rollins. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Keller, Gottfried. 1985. Green Henry. Trans. by A.M. Holt. London: John Calder, New York: Riverrun Press. ———. 1986. Der grüne Heinrich. Ed. by Peter Goldammer. Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1899. »Schopenhauer als Erzieher«. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, vol. II. Leipzig: Naumann. ———. 1965. Schopenhauer as Educator. Trans. by James W. Hillesheim and Malcolm R. Simpson. Intro. by Eliseo Vivas. South Bend: Regnery/Gateway. Novalis. 1945. Blütenstaub. Gesammelte Werke, vol. II. Ed. by Carl Seelig. Zürich: Bühl. ———. 1946. Fragmente des Jahres 1798. Gesammelte Werke, vol. III. Ed. by Carl Seelig. Zürich: Bühl. ———. 1964. Henry von Ofterdingen. Trans. by Palmer Hilty. New York: Ungar. ———. 1981. Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Werke in einem Band. Ed. by Hans-Joachim Mähl and Richard Samuel. Munich, Vienna: Hanser. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1980. »Athenäum Fragment, 116« and »Ideen, 43«. Werke in zwei Bänden. Ed. by Wolfgang Hecht. Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau. ———. 1980a. »Athenäum Fragment, No. 116«, European Romanticism: Self-Definition. Ed. by Lilian R. Furst. London, New York: Methuen. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1877. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Ed. by Julius Frauenstädt. 2 vols. Leipzig: Brockhaus. ———. 1958. The World as Will and Representation. Trans. by E.F.J. Payne. 2 vols. New York: Dover. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1977. »A Defense of Poetry«. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. by Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York, London: Norton. Staël, Anne-Louise-Germaine de. 1968. De l’Allemagne. Ed. by Simone Balayé. 2 vols. Paris: GarnierFlammarion. Vigny, Alfred de. 1950. Stello. Œuvres complètes, vol. I. Ed. by F. Baldensperger. Paris: Gallimard (Édition Pléiade). Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, and Ludwig Tieck. 1948. Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders. Ed. by A. Gillies. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1975. Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar. Trans. and intro. by Edward Mornin. New York: Ungar. Wordsworth, William. 1968. »Preface«, Lyrical Ballads. Ed. by R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones. London, New York: Routledge.

Unheard melodies and unseen paintings The sister arts in Romantic fiction Mihály Szegedy-Maszák 1.

Use and mention

How can the sister arts »appear« in a work of literature? At the outset, a distinction can be introduced between the ideal types of »use« and »mention«. Genette gives the following examples: »In the sentence ›Paris is a great city‹, the word Paris is used transitively […]; in ›Paris consists of two syllables‹, the name of the city is mentioned (cited)«.1 The actual presence of the sister arts in a literary work can never be a clear-cut case of use or mention. To refer to specific examples, in Chapter 3 of Notre-Dame de Paris we are closer to the second of the two ideal types when those characters around the Flemish ambassador are described as »good Flemish heads in the final analysis, worthy and severe faces, in the same family as those which Rembrandt makes stand out so strong and serious against the black background of his Night Watch«.2 By contrast, the cathedral known as »Notre-Dame de Paris« plays a decisive role in the novel and thus represents the first rather than the second of the two possibilities. What follows is a brief comparative analysis of some of the basic options for the literary treatment of nonliterary art. The assumption is that music and painting were given a prominent role in the fiction written in the era that was tempted by the ideal of a »Gesamtkunstwerk«. Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck (Chevalier Gluck, 1809) and Don Juan (1813), Balzac’s Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece, 1831), Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille (Venus of Ille, 1837), Poe’s The Oval Portrait (1842), and Nerval’s Sylvie (1853) will represent short fiction, whereas Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black, 1831), Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831), and Pál Gyulai (1847) by the Transylvanian-born Zsigmond Kemény will serve as examples of novel writing in which music or the visual arts function as structural principles. Interarts studies are an attractive field but they have one pitfall: since few scholars can have the same competence in literature and the other arts, the literary critic may be inclined to develop literary interpretations of painting or music. This type of distortion is especially frequent in the comparative analysis of opera and literature. Kierkegaard’s brilliant interpretation of Don Giovanni in Enten-Eller (Either/Or, 1843), for instance, is based on the analysis of the libretto rather than on that of the music.

1.

»Dans une phrase comme ›Paris est une grande ville‹, le nom Paris est employé, de manière transitive […]; dans ›Paris a deux syllabes‹, ce nom est mentionné (cité)« (Genette 1999, 235 f.).

2.

»bonnes têtes flamandes après tout, figures dignes et sévères, de la famille de celles que Rembrandt fait saillir si fortes et si graves sur le fond noir de sa ronde de nuit« (Hugo 1844, 32).

Mihály Szegedy-Maszák

54 2.

Ut musica poesis

An allusion to an opera may serve two purposes: the behavior of a character during a performance may provide information about his/her personality, and the plot of the work performed can function as a »mise-en-abyme«. Both can be seen in Le rouge et le noir. In part 2, Chapter 30, Julien Sorel goes to the opera. He appears in the box of Madame de Fervaques with the explicit purpose of making Mathilde de La Mole jealous and urging her to marry him. The allusion to the »opera buffa« performed — Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto (The Secret Marriage, 1792) — serves to underscore the hero’s hypocrisy: Luckily he found the Maréchale’s box filled with women, and was relegated to near the door and completely hidden by their hats. That position saved him from ridicule; Caroline’s divine accents of despair in The Secret Marriage made him dissolve in tears.3

The episode may also illustrate Julien’s lack of understanding opera. In this respect this chapter is comparable to Chapter 15 in part 2 of Madame Bovary, in which Emma identifies with the heroine of Verdi’s Lucia di Lammermoor. In a more obvious way, the plot of Cimarosa’s work can be taken as an ironic anticipation of an event that follows the scene in the opera: the secret marriage of Mathilde de La Mole and Julien Sorel announced by Mathilde in a letter addressed to her father, in Chapter 31. Unlike Stendhal, Hoffmann was a practicing musician. This may explain why »cross-system quotation« (the term is borrowed from Goodman 1978, 52–55) is more functional in the literary works of the German Romantic. The crucial section of Ritter Gluck describes a stranger’s response to the overture of Iphigenia in Aulis. The structure of the music is reflected in gestures and facial expressions described by the storyteller. The musical events are partly narrated with the help of musical terms, partly translated into visual phenomena, which, in turn, are conveyed with the help of language. This technique has been described by one critic as a »verbal pantomime« (Scher 1968, 62, 77). There is, however, another level at which the story can be read. The stranger is not satisfied with the performance of the overture. He has a different interpretation in mind. The final words of the text — »I am Chevalier Gluck!«4 — may suggest not only that the stranger is insane — the tale is »A Recollection from the Year 1809«,5 whereas Gluck died in 1787 — but also the absurdity of an »authorial interpretation«. »The narrator’s love for music once again takes him into the sphere of the miraculous«.6 This comparative remark underlines what is common in the structures of Ritter Gluck and Don Juan: the narrator attends a performance. In the later tale fragments of the Italian libretto are quoted and references to the music are made with the help of musical terminology. The presentation of the finale of Act I is heightened by an allusion to Ariosto: 3.

»Par bonheur il trouva la loge de la maréchale remplie de femmes, et fut relégué près de la porte, et tout à fait caché par les chapeaux. Cette position lui sauva un ridicule; les accents divins du désespoir de Caroline dans le Matrimonio segreto le firent fondre en larmes« (Stendhal 1955, 428).

4.

»Ich bin der Ritter Gluck!« (Hoffmann 1982, 1: 15).

5.

»Eine Erinnerung aus dem Jahre 1809« (ibid, 1: 3).

6.

»Wieder gerät der Erzähler durch seine Liebe zur Musik in die Sphäre des Wunderbaren« (Nehring 1981, 71).

Unheard melodies and unseen paintings

55

He strikes the steel dress sword out of the bridegroom’s hand and clears the way for himself through the lowbred crowd which he scatters in tumult, as the valiant Roland did the army of the tyrant Cymork, so that everybody was turning somersaults in a truly comic fashion.7

While watching the performance, the narrator develops an interpretation with a focus on the title hero’s relations with Donna Anna. In contrast to the »connection with the cold, unmanly, vulgar Don Ottavio«,8 these relations are associated with Don Giovanni’s nostalgia for the supernatural. During the intermission the narrator is visited by the woman who is singing Donna Anna, and the last words of the supplement to the story subtitled »Afternoon Conversation at the Landlord’s Table, as Postscript« (»Gespräch des Mittags an der Wirtstafel, als Nachtrag«) are about the »fits of nerves«9 of the singer in the second act. To the narrator’s question: »we get to hear Signora again soon, don’t we?« a »clever man, taking a pinch from his snuff box«, gives the following answer: »Hardly, for Signora died this morning at two o’clock precisely«.10 Don Giovanni is portrayed as a tragic hero, and Mozart’s opera is interpreted as a Romantic work. Life and art are viewed as interrelated, art having the upper hand: »Only the poet alone understands the poet; only a Romantic sensibility can enter into the essence of the Romantic«.11 Both Ritter Gluck and Don Juan contain autobiographical and discursive components. Narrative is more or less subordinated to confession and essay in the series known as Kreisleriana. This is true not only of Der Musikfeind (The Enemy of Music, 1814), a tale based on childhood reminiscences, in which the numerous musical references are coupled with the fanciful idea that cats have a musical talent, whereas dogs are unable to understand music, but also of Johannes Kreislers, des Kapellmeisters, musikalische Leiden (The Musical Sorrows of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, 1810), an account of the narrator’s performance of the Goldberg Variations. »All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music« (Pater 1986, 86). This wellknown dictum is anticipated by Hoffmann. The interpretations of various works of music given in his tales point towards the thesis formulated most consistently in Gedanken über den hohen Wert der Musik (Thoughts on the Lofty Value of Music, 1812), an ironic presentation, partly in the form of a dialogue, of the role of art in bourgeois life. The ambiguity of the link between aesthetic and bourgeois values is intensified by the argument about the superiority of music to literature and the visual arts. A characteristically Romantic prejudice underlies the claim that the response to a painting is a shorter process than the understanding of a piece of music, because the meaning of a painting can be discovered, whereas the interpretation of music can

7. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Er schlägt dem Bräutigam den stählernen Galanteriedegen aus der Hand und bahnt sich durch das gemeine Gesindel, das er, wie der tapfere Roland die Armee des Tyrannen Cymork, durcheinanderwirft, daß alles gar possierlich übereinanderpurzelt, den Weg ins Freie« (Hoffmann 1982, 1: 20). 8.

»Verbindung mit dem kalten, unmännlichen, ordinären Don Ottavio« (ibid., 1: 28).

9.

»Nervenzufälle« (ibid., 1: 29).

10.

»wir hören doch Signora bald wieder?«, »kluger Mann mit der Dose, eine Prise nehmend«, »Schwerlich, denn Signora ist heute morgens Punkt zwei Uhr gestorben« (ibid., 1: 29).

11.

»Nur der Dichter versteht den Dichter; nur ein romantisches Gemüt kann eingehen in das Romantische« (ibid., 1: 24).

Mihály Szegedy-Maszák

56

never be definitive. By contrast, »how unpredictable are the profits to be gained from a lovely piece of music!«12 3.

Imaginary works of art

Although the visual arts are less suited for suggesting the immanence of meaning, they may provide a starting point for an emphasis on the self-referentiality of art. In Poe’s first-person tale The Oval Portrait, the background sets the tone for such an orientation. An »unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque« were »in a remote turret« of a château which is described as an example of »bizarre architecture« (Poe 1966, 568). The building reminds the narrator of »the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe« (ibid.). The crucial part of the text is about the »effect« (569) of the portrait of a young woman on the narrator. No painter is named, although the story teller is reminded of the »style« of Thomas Sully (1783–1872), an American artist of English birth. Fascinated by »the secret of its effect«, the narrator »sought eagerly the volume which discussed the oval portrait« (Poe, 569). The last and fairly long paragraph pretends to be a quotation from a book. This story within the story is about a painter working on the portrait of his young bride. While working on this portrait, the artist »had grown wild with the ardor of his work, and turned his eyes from the canvas rarely« (Poe, 570). By the time the work is completed, the model is dead. The contrast between the artwork and its model is reminiscent of the »real« Gilberte and the »imaginary« woman painted by Frenhofer, the hero of Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu, and foreshadows both The Real Thing (1892) by Henry James and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde. On the one hand, it is a variation on and a distortion of the story of Pygmalion, suggesting that art is an imaginative activity rather than representation; on the other hand, it belongs to what Derrida calls the »literature of murderous works«.13 The irony is heightened by the fact that the message of the fictitious nonverbal artwork is tied to a fictitious text. The Oval Portrait resembles Hoffmann’s tales in so far as it transforms the nonliterary into a self-interpretive device. In other works visual art is given functions radically different from the one that musical compositions have in prose narratives. In Pál Gyulai, a historical novel by Zsigmond Kemény, a portrait is used as a starting point for the plot. This work is an epitome of Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic ideal of the novel as an encyclopedic genre: some sections are in dramatic form, others incorporate letters, diary entries, and lyric verse. Chapter one starts with the death of Kristóf Báthory, Prince of Transylvania, in 1581. The brother of the deceased ruler, István Báthory, King of Poland, has commissioned a Florentine artist to make a portrait of the heir apparent. The painting is taken to the Polish court by the title hero, a young poet. The old king and the young Transylvanian nobleman differ in their readings of the portrait. István Báthory’s conclusion is that the character of the model 12. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Das Beschauen eines Gemäldes kann nur sehr kurz dauern; denn das Interesse ist ja doch verloren, sobald man erraten hat, was es vorstellen soll«; »wie unabsehbar sind die Vorteile einer schönen Musik!« (ibid., 1: 38). 13.

»littérature des œuvres meurtrières« (Derrida 1990, 41).

Unheard melodies and unseen paintings

57

of the portrait, Zsigmond Báthory is full of flaws. Pál Gyulai’s radically different interpretation is based on the idea that painters create rather than imitate. Both attempt to verbalize the nonverbal. Their efforts to formulate the semantic vacuum point in opposite directions: the old monarch seeks a definitive, authoritative explanation; the young page views interpretation as open-ended. Two modes of »explication d’image« are contrasted, and the narrator’s remarks on the fundamental difference between Italian and Dutch painting further emphasize the dependence of the understanding of art on different conventions. The disagreement between the two characters is also due to the fact that the old monarch stands for political pragmatism, whereas the title hero lives in the autonomous world of creative imagination. The ambiguity of this opening scene is fully developed in the novel. The language is so self-reflexive that the mimetic view of art is constantly undermined. At the same time, the character of Zsigmond Báthory develops in the direction foreseen by his uncle, the old king, who dies shortly after the opening scene. Although the tension between imitation and creation remains unresolved, painting is used as a means of characterization. Another function is given to the visual arts in Mérimée’s novella La Vénus d’Ille (Venus of Ille, 1836). In the early nineteenth century most of the music performed was contemporary music. In the visual arts, however, the legacy of the past constantly reminded the public of the age of works of art. The son of two artists, Mérimée was one of those who developed a historical awareness during his extensive travels in the Mediterranean world. La Vénus d’Ille manifests not only the Romantic emphasis on »couleur locale« but also on the claim that Classical Antiquity had been misinterpreted by the previous generations. The mutability of values is suggested, in a temporal and spatial sense. The story is about the close link between the work of archeologists and the activity of art historians. The larger context is constituted by a succession of discoveries in the territory of the Catalan-speaking community, a region known for its rich legacy. »You will see everything; Phoenician, Celtic, Roman, Arabian, and Byzantine monuments«,14 says M. de Peyrehorade, a local connoisseur, to the narrator, who is initiated into the gradual discovery of the monuments of the distant past. The focus is on how a piece of sculpture is found and transformed into a work of art. Ironically, the statue is recovered unbroken but a man is hurt during its transportation. The living body proves to be weaker, more vulnerable and less enduring than the artwork. »So it’s you who broke Jean Coll’s leg! If you were mine, I’d break your neck«,15 says a local resident. His companion’s response suggests that the art of the past resists appropriation: »She’s of copper, and so hard that Etienne broke his file trying to cut into her. It’s copper from the time of the pagans; it’s harder than anything I know«.16 It is significant that the statue is of a goddess. The story — »a version of the old legend of a love-pledge between a mortal and effigy of a goddess« (H. James 1957, 171) — is about the transformation of a religious »idol« into an object for contemplation. The temporality of the

14.

»Monuments phéniciens, celtiques, romains, arabes, byzantins, vous verrez tout« (Mérimée 1964, 286).

15.

»C’est donc toi qui as cassé la jambe à Jean Coll! Si tu étais à moi, je te casserais le cou« (ibid., 289).

16.

»Elle est du cuivre, et si dure qu’Etienne a cassé sa lime dessus, essayant de l’entamer. C’est du cuivre du temps des païens; c’est plus dur que je ne sais pas quoi« (ibid., 290).

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58

life of the work of art is signaled by »a blackish-green patina that time lent to the statue«.17 As in the Hungarian novel, the object is offered as a starting-point for a discussion of the meaning of the work of art. The author of The Figure in the Carpet paid a special attention to this tale by Mérimée and translated it into English (H. James 1856, 292). His interpretation has become an integral part of the history of the reception of the French story. Reading it from the perspective of the numerous self-reflexive tales by James, it is possible to argue that what Mérimée’s work highlights is the dilemma of illusion and fiction. The Romantic writer rejects the Classicist idea of imitation; his interest is in the viewer rather than in the creative activity of the artist. Illusion is a matter of effect rather than one of intention. »These brilliant eyes produced a certain illusion reminiscent of reality, of life«.18 This statement by the narrator is accompanied by a remark by his guide, questioning the existence of the artist’s model: »I doubt that Heaven has ever created such a woman«.19 The suggestion is that understanding art is not a finite process. »I myself was not satisfied with my own interpretation«,20 the narrator admits after having considered the two inscriptions. M. de Peyrehorade relies on Phoenician etymology, but the narrator is either doubtful of his explanation or questions the idea that a statue can be understood with the help of its inscription. Instead, he tries to make a drawing. Having made twenty sketches, »without being able to capture the expression«,21 he confesses his failure. The rest of the story can be read as a manifestation of the Romantic interest in the supernatural and in the disturbed mind. While playing tennis, Alphonse, the son of M. de Peyrehorade, puts the ring he is about to give his future wife on the finger of the statue. When he tries to recover it, on the day of his wedding, he cannot detach it from the finger of the statue. At night the young woman has a vision of the statue visiting and killing Alphonse. Is it possible to suggest that »la Vénus d’Ille« takes vengeance on anyone who is unwilling to have the proper respect for her? Is the tale a self-referential parable about the relations between life and art, reality and fiction? Alphonse certainly fails to contemplate the statue as a piece of art. The ironic »Post Scriptum« informs the reader about the aborted attempt by those who lacked understanding of art to transform the statue into a useful object: »After the death of her husband, the first concern of Mme de Peyrehorade was to have it cast as a bell […]. Since that bell has been sounding at Ille, the vines have frozen twice«.22

17.

»la patine d’un vert noirâtre que le temps a donnée à toute la statue« (ibid., 292).

18.

»Ces yeux brillants produisaient une certaine illusion qui rappelait la réalité, la vie« (ibid.).

19.

»je doute que le Ciel ait jamais produit une telle femme« (ibid.).

20. »Je n’étais pas moi-même fort satisfait de mon explication« (ibid., 294). 21.

»sans pouvoir parvenir à en saisir l’expression« (ibid., 300).

22.

»Après la mort de son mari, le premier soin de Mme de Peyrehorade fut de la faire fondre en cloche […]. Depuis que cette cloche sonne à Ille, les vignes ont gelé deux fois« (ibid., 314).

Unheard melodies and unseen paintings 4.

59

»Real« paintings

Unlike Mérimée’s nouvelle, Sylvie contains references to actual buildings, paintings, and pieces of music dating from various periods. Together with the literary allusions, they are functional rather than merely decorative. The most important among them occurs in Chapter 4 entitled »���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Un voyage à Cythère��������������������������������������������������������������������������� « (Voyage to Cytherea). The narrator recalls a meeting with the title heroine. »I found myself at Loisy at the moment of the feast of their patron saint«.23 The participants of the banquet set out for an excursion. The goal is to visit an island on a lake. »The lake crossing had perhaps been thought up to recall Watteau’s Voyage to Cytherea«.24 The subtitle of the tale — »������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Souvenirs de Valois������������������������������������������������������������������������ « (Memories of Valais) — and the larger context make it difficult to decide to what extent retrospection is responsible for the »mise-en-scène«: »They had reproduced an image of the gallant solemnities of another age«.25 The significance of this episode increases during the story. The eighteenth century is again remembered in Chapter 6, when Sylvie and the narrator put on clothes that the girl’s aunt and her bridegroom had worn on the day of their wedding. »She had the air of the village fiancée from Greuze«, and »I was transformed into a husband of that earlier century«.26 Watteau’s »Le Pèlerinage à l’Isle de Cythère« (Pilgrimage to the Island of Cytherea, 1917; in the ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Musée du Louvre��������������������������������������������������������������������� ) — a painting that has also a somewhat later version known as »����� L’Embarquement pour Cythère« (Embarkation for Cytherea, c. 1718–19; in Schloß Charlottenburg, Berlin) — serves as a point of departure for hints questioning the identity of the self; »I found her different from herself«,27 the narrator says about Sylvie, in the chapter relating the excursion to the island. During the narrative the island becomes an emblem of the world of the imagination. The story is about a loss of illusions. Temporality is emphasized in a way that makes it perfectly understandable why Proust was to take a serious interest in Sylvie. »And we would have liked to have written these pages of Sylvie«.28 This remark about the »dream worlds in which Gérard walked«29 may remind us that today it is virtually impossible not to read Sylvie from the perspective of A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Just as La Vénus d’Ille, so Sylvie proves the influence of rewriting on interpretation. Watteau’s work has been described as a picture that »is imbued with a poignant sense of the losing battle against the reality of time« (Levey 1992, 63). In Nerval’s tale the painting is a »mise-en-abyme« suggesting that the narrator’s return to the past is a visit to a world created by his imagination. As in Kemény’s novel, the certainty of denotation is contrasted with an open 23.

»Je me retrouvai à Loisy au moment de la fête patronale« (Nerval 1961, 129).

24. »La traversée du lac avait été imaginé peut-être pour rappeler le Voyage à Cythère de Watteau« (ibid., 130). 25.

»on avait reproduit une image des galantes solennités d’autrefois« (Nerval 1961, 130).

26. »Elle avait l’air de l’accordée de village de Greuze […] je me transformai en marié de l’autre siècle« (ibid., 137). 27.

»je la trouvais différente d’elle-même« (ibid., 131).

28. »Et nous voudrions tant avoir écrit ces pages de Sylvie!« (Proust 1971, 241). 29. »ces pays de rêve où se promena Gérard« (ibid.).

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field of possible connotations. Some of these call for interarts comparisons. The arrangement of the group painted by Watteau reminds the viewer of theatre and ballet, and the participants in the festivity are absorbed in conversation, suggesting the inferiority, perhaps even inadequacy of writing in comparison with speaking, yet the substance of the conversation remains unknown. Several couples are involved in intimate »tête-à-tête«: the man’s pose answers that of the woman and makes eye contact with his partner. The couple in the middle seems an exception: the woman’s eyes send us to the two couples on the right side of the painting. Yet even this case may confirm that the painting is an image of the celebration of talk. The difference is that the tall lady seems to ignore the words uttered by the man whose face we cannot see since he is standing with his back to us. In his left hand he is holding a stick, while with his right hand he is trying to touch his partner. She turns her face towards others, in striking contrast to the other females, who show an absorption in the speech of the other. Yet we cannot be sure of our interpretation, for in the silent medium of painting legible gestures are the only means of suggesting talk. In contrast to allegorical painting, where the figures’ gestures can be read on the basis of some well-known text, Watteau’s work is not illustrative or even narrative. The indeterminacy in the word-image relationship characteristic of this painting becomes an important component of self-commentary in Nerval’s tale. »As for the laurels, have they been cut, as says the song of the young girls who refuse to return to the woods?«30 On his return to Loisy the narrator tried to find his past in vain. »I was eager to leave this room where I found nothing of the past«.31 Coming from Paris, he looks for old songs. When he asks Sylvie to sing one of them, she informs him that they are no longer popular. Instead of singing one of them, she praises an aria from an opera by Porpora. While he tries to forget the books he has read, she looks upon the landscape around them through the eyes of Walter Scott. The narrator takes Watteau’s conversation painting as a likeness of his own story: »illusions fall one after another like the parings of a fruit, and the fruit is experience«.32 That the storyteller himself is one of the principal actors of the »fête galante« may remind the reader that s/he not only receives a vision but seems him/herself part of a vision. There are three young women who attract the narrator’s attention: Adrienne, »la religieuse« (the religious), Sylvie, and Amélia, the actress. All three loves remain unfulfilled. Sensuality is displaced and deferred. The narrator’s position is similar in all the three cases: a figure assumes clothes for a part. Ironically, it is the actress who draws this conclusion: »you look for a drama, it’s that simple, and the climax seems to escape you«.33 The reader may remember the function of the statue in the right foreground of Watteau’s painting, aptly described by an art historian in the following manner: »Venus, however much she looks like a nude woman, remains a statue. As a symbolic representation of sensual love, she stands not for what is present in the painting but for what is absent from it« (Vidal 1992, 36). 30. Quant aux lauriers, les a-t-on coupés, comme le dit la chanson des jeunes filles qui ne veulent plus aller au bois?« (Nerval 1961, 145). 31.

»J’étais pressé de sortir de cette chambre où je ne trouvais rien du passé« (ibid., 146).

32.

»les illusions tombent l’une après l’autre, comme les écorces d’un fruit, et le fruit c’est l’expérience« (ibid., 156).

33.

»vous cherchez un drame, voilà tout, et le dénouement vous échappe« (ibid., 156).

Unheard melodies and unseen paintings 5.

61

The »real« and the »imaginary«; line vs. color

»There are two writers in Balzac — the spontaneous and the reflective one«, wrote Henry James less than three decades after the death of the author of La Comédie humaine (James, 1978, 109). His assessment anticipated those later interpretations that focused on the self-reflexive at the cost of the more descriptive works. The shift of emphasis can be felt in the two longer essays which the American-born writer devoted to the works of the French author. In the late 1870s he characterized Balzac as a »realistic novelist,« in 1902 he emphasized »the romantic side of him« and made a comparison between his prose and the paintings of Turner (James, 1978, 95 f., and 1963, 210, 196). One of the consequences of this reinterpretation was a growing interest in works that focus on the mode of existence of the work of art. Among these are three tales. Balzac’s Gambara (1838) is about the creation, Massimilla Doni (1839) about the interpretation of music. The somewhat earlier Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece, 1831) — which Poe and Nerval may have read — is more enigmatic than either of the other two works. The complexity is inseparable from two factors. There are three painters among the characters: the young Poussin, Porbus, and the old Frenhofer, who claims to have been the only pupil of Mabuse. Critics have called attention to the somewhat superficial analogy with Der Baron von B. (1819), Hoffmann’s tale about three fictitious musicians, as well as with those works by the German author which touch upon the activity of the painter: Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs, 1813–16), a novel that contains a recreation of the legend of Pygmalion, and such stories in the collection Die Serapions-Brüder (The Serapion Brotherhood, 1819–21) as Der Artushof (King Arthur’s Court), a tale about an old painter who presents an empty canvas as his masterpiece to a younger colleague, and Die Fermate (The Fermata), a highly original text that transforms »Die Fermate« (in the ���������������������������������������������������������������� Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München��������������������� ) — a painting exhibited in 1814 by Erdmann Hummel (1769–1852) — into a narrative. The picture shows two musicians, a conductor, and their audience, so Hoffmann’s tale can be read as the translation of a translation. Balzac may have read most of these works by Hoffmann. The first translation of Der Baron von B. was published in 1828, in Le Gymnase (The Gymnasium), a periodical for which the French writer worked as printer, and the second French version appeared in L’Artiste — a »revue« started in 1831 with the explicit purpose of defending the Romantics’ emphasis on color, in sharp contrast to David’s insistence on the primacy of line — in April 1831, a couple of months before the first version of Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu was published in the same periodical. In comparison with Hoffmann’s tales, the originality of Balzac’s »conte« lies in the combination of the »real« and the »imaginary«. The »real« names of Nicolas Poussin and Franz Porbus (1570–1622), a Flemish artist known chiefly as the painter of a large portrait of Catherine de Médici, are supplemented by a name created by the author. Even more important is that there is no definitive text: both the identity of the painting in the story and that of the text may be questioned. This is the second reason for the complexity of the meaning of Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu. The tale of the effects of revision exists in at least four different versions. The first, subtitled »Conte fantastique« and published in two installments (31 July and 7 August) in the periodical L’Artiste in 1831, is not radically different from the second,

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which appeared in book form in the third volume of Romans et contes philosophiques (Novels and Philosophic Tales) in September of the same year, but the third, part of the seventeenth volume of the author’s Études philosophiques (Philosophic Studies, July 1837), is considerably enlarged and has a different ending. Some philologists believe that this third version is partly the work of Théophile Gautier, who also made a contribution to several other works by Balzac. René Guise, the editor of the text for the Pléiade version of La Comédie humaine is one of those who believe that Gautier’s contribution was minimal. He makes the following points: (1) »in December 1836, while completing preparation of the copy of Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, Balzac then dutifully kept records, was able to read Théophile Gautier’s articles in La Presse«; (2) »in May 1837 […] Gautier had to mention his articles of March 1837 to Balzac and authorize him to use them«; (3) »Toward the end of June, with Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu practically finished, Balzac was eager to thank Gautier and show him what he had made of his texts«.34 The text published in volume 2 of Le Provincial à Paris (The Provincial in Paris, 1847) is slightly different from the previous version and the author’s own copy of La Comédie humaine has further corrections, so it is possible to assume that he never stopped working on the text. In the early stage of composition the alterations were hardly perceptible. In the first version, Poussin makes the following remark to his mistress: »He will not see the woman in you, he will see beauty: you are perfect!«35 In the second version, published a month later, the original sentence is transformed into two units: »He will only be able to see the woman in you. You are so perfect!«36 Charles Rosen’s interpretation of the change is somewhat comparable to Wordsworth’s line of argument, starting from the idea of »the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings« and pointing towards »emotion recollected in tranquillity« (Wordsworth 1988, 297): In the first version ›woman‹ is physical, sexual, and vulnerable […]. In the second, woman has become a concept, abstract and general. This suggests the way revision in Romantic art moves away from direct experience to a mediated reflection (Rosen 1998, 7).

The different variant states of the tale suggest that Romanticism undermined the Classicist ideal of the finished work of art. Some of the great achievements of Romantic literature — from Hölderlin’s Empedokles to Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude or Keats’s Hyperion — exist in several versions; others have a fragmentary character. The canonical view of the artwork as an object with clear-cut outlines had been replaced by an emphasis on indeterminacy. Balzac’s tale can be read as a parable showing the questionableness, vulnerability, and perhaps even irrelevance of the concept of the masterpiece, its dependence on reception. In the same way as Nerval viewed Watteau with the eyes of a Romantic, Balzac ascribed to his seventeenth-century artists the ideas current in the age of Turner, such as the superiority of 34.

(1) »en décembre 1836, quand il achève la préparation de la copie du Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, Balzac, qui dut alors se documenter, a pu lire les articles de Th. Gautier dans La Presse«; (2) »en mai 1837 […] Gautier dut indiquer à Balzac ses articles de mars 1837 et l’autoriser à les utiliser«; (3) »vers la fin de juin, Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu pratiquement terminé, Balzac tint à remercier Gautier et à lui montrer ce qu’il avait fait de ses textes« (Balzac 1979, vol. 10, 1406–1407).

35.

»Il ne verra pas la femme en toi, il verra la beauté: tu es parfaite!« (ibid., 1423).

36.

»Il ne pourra voir que la femme en toi. Tu es si parfaite!« (ibid., 429).

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63

color to line (drawing). This is much more evident in the 1837 version than in the earlier ones. Henri Evans attributes these reflections to Balzac’s collaborator: »It’s without doubt Gautier who redid these passages«.37 The other major difference is the ending: »le vieillard« (the old man), seeing the hostile response of the two young artists, throws them out: He cast a deeply crafty glance at the two painters, full of scorn and suspicion, and silently showed them out the door of his studio with convulsive promptness. Then he said to them on the threshold to his lodgings: »Goodbye, my little friends.« That goodbye chilled the two painters. The next day Porbus came back to see Frenhofer and learned that he had died during the night, after having burned his canvases.38

Fiction and fact have become inseparable. The old Frenhofer’s explicit allusion to »the gentleman Pygmalion« (le seigneur Pygmalion) suggests self-referentiality, and the 1837 conclusion of the story moves into the realm of dissemination. What the »fictive« painter Frenhofer calls his masterpiece, the »real« artist Poussin cannot see at all: »I see nothing there but confused masses of color contained by a multitude of bizarre lines«.39 These words resemble the characterization made by conservative viewers of the later works of Turner. During his stay in London, the Transylvanian-born Miklós Barabás (1810–1898), one of the leading representatives of Central European Biedermeier art, called one of Turner’s paintings »a piece of canvas colored without reason, meaning, and sense« (Barabás 1944, 180). One other revision may suggest that there is also another possible meaning of the story. The canvas by Frenhofer may remind us of the gap between model and artwork or of the tension between the material and ideal, immanent and transcendental aspects of the work of art. This is the way we may understand why one sentence in Frenhofer’s monologue was changed by the author in 1837. »This woman is not a creation but a creature«.40 The alteration is simple but not negligible: »This woman is not a creature but a creation«.41 Art as a finished product is contrasted with art as an open-ended process. 6.

Architecture: The Romantic interpretation of the past

Although Notre-Dame de Paris has none of the complexities of Sylvie or Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu, its multiple reliance on monuments of nonverbal art deserves attention. Cross-system quotations have at least three distinct functions in this novel. The first is similar to what we have seen in several other works: nonverbal art plays an interpretive role. In the opening chapter of 37.

»C’est sans doute Gautier qui refit ces passages« (Balzac 1964, vol. 12, xi).

38.

»Il jeta sur les deux peintres un regard profondément sournois, plein de mépris et de soupçon, les mit silencieusement à la porte de son atelier, avec une promptitude convulsive. Puis, il leur dit sur le seuil de son logis: ›Adieu, mes petits amis.‹ Cet adieu glaça les deux peintres. Le lendemain, Porbus revint voir Frenhofer, et apprit qu’il était mort dans la nuit, après avoir brûlé ses toiles« (Balzac 1979, 438).

39.

»Je ne vois là que des couleurs confusément amassées et contenues par une multitude de lignes bizarres« (ibid., 436).

40. »Cette femme n’est pas une création, mais une créature« (ibid., 1428). 41.

»Cette femme n’est pas une créature, mais une création« (ibid., 431).

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book 7, Captain Phoebus de Châteaupers turns to Damoiselle Fleur-de-Lys, asking her about the subject of the »ouvrage de tapisserie« she is working on. »This is the grotto of Neptunus«,42 she replies. The captain seems to remember this when later (in Chapter 8 of the same book) he makes a confession to la Esmeralda: »I hope the great devil Neptunus will skewer me if I don’t make you the happiest creature in the world«.43 The appropriation of »the figure in the carpet« suggests the captain’s insincerity. The irony is reinforced by the plot: shortly after his insincere confession Phoebus is almost killed by Frollo. On other occasions cross-system quotation is a mode of characterization. The solitary cell in which Claude Frollo, »l’archidiacre« (the archdeacon), spends his long hours of meditation is not described. Instead, a work by Rembrandt, »������������������������������������������� ce ���������������������������������������� Shakespeare ���������������������������� de la peinture�������������� « (that Shakespeare of painting) is presented: Among so many wonderful engravings, there is in particular an etching which, one supposes, represents Dr. Faust and which is impossible to contemplate without astonishment. There is a sombre cell: in its centre stands a table loaded with hideous objects: death-heads, spheres, alembics, compasses, hieroglyphic parchments. The doctor is seated at that table, dressed in his ample gown and crowned to his eyebrows under his furlined cap. Only half his body is visible. He has half risen from his immense armchair; his balled fists rest on the table, and with curiosity and terror he contemplates a great luminous circle formed of magic letters which sparkles on the back wall like the solitary spectre in the dark chamber. This cabalistic sun appears to tremble and fills the pallid cell with its mysterious radiance. It is horrible and it is beautiful.44

Although both the pictorial »mise-en-abyme« and the substitution of the description of a picture for the description of a site play a structural role, this role is much more apparent in those passages of Hugo’s novel which portray the destruction of fine buildings. In the Preface the fate of old churches is lamented: »Mutilations assault them from every direction, both from within and without«.45 The opening chapter starts with a description of the partly gothic, partly renaissance Palais de Justice that was destroyed by fire in 1618. A substantial part of the first chapter of book 3 — an essay entitled »Notre-Dame« — contains an analysis of the violation of the integrity of the cathedral. The reader is constantly reminded of paintings and etchings dating from periods that succeeded the fifteenth century and of buildings in Paris that either disappeared or were transformed between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. No one reading the novel 42.

»C’est la grotte de Neptunus« (Hugo 1844, 228).

43.

»Je veux que le grand diable Neptunus m’enfourche si je ne vous rends pas la plus heureuse créature du monde« (ibid., 285).

44.

»Parmi tant de merveilleuses gravures, il y a en particulier une eau-forte qui représente, à ce qu’on suppose, le docteur Faust, et qu’il est impossible de contempler sans éblouissement. C’est une sombre cellule; au milieu est une table chargée d��������������������������������������������������������������������������� ’�������������������������������������������������������������������������� objets hideux: têtes de mort, sphères, alambics, compas, parchemins hiéroglyphiques. Le docteur est devant cette table, vêtu de sa grosse houppelande et coiffé jusqu’aux sourcils de son bonnet fourré. On ne le voit qu’à mi-corps. Il est à demi levé de son immense fauteuil; ses poings crispés s’appuient sur la table, et il considère, avec curiosité et terreur, un grand cercle lumineux, formé de lettres magiques, qui brille sur le mur du fond comme le spectre solitaire dans la chambre noire. Ce soleil cabalistique semble trembler à l’œil et remplit la blafarde cellule de son rayonnement mystérieux. C’est horrible et c’est beau« (ibid., 253).

45.

»Les mutilations leur viennent de toutes parts, du dedans comme du dehors« (ibid., 2).

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65

170 years after its composition can forget continuity and discontinuity between the Paris of 1830 and the year 2000. Throughout the novel the preservation of the past is regarded as an unquestionable value. In harmony with many earlier works of Romantic literature, continuity is said to be guaranteed by organic growth. The thing occurs without trouble, without effort, without reaction, following a natural and peaceful law. It is a graft that survives, a sap that circulates, a vegetation that regenerates. […] Time is the architect, the people are the masons. […] The trunk of the tree is immutable; its vegetation is capricious.46

Book 3 as a whole is discursive in character. Chapter 2 — »Paris à vol d’oiseau« (Paris from a bird’s-eye view) — contains a history of the old districts — »la Cité«, »l’Université«, and »la Ville« — with special emphasis on their architecture and with multiple references to the Paris of the narrator and »the reader«. The cathedral is presented as inseparable from the hero. As he was growing up and developing, Notre-Dame had been for him successively the egg, the nest, the home, the fatherland, the universe. […] There was a sort of mysterious and preexistent harmony between this creature and this edifice.47

Claude Frolle, »l’archidiacre«, is a man of learning. His cell is full of inscriptions. When his brother Jehan visits him (Book VII, Chapter 4), he finds him »bent over a vast manuscript decorated with bizarre pictures«.48 In the first chapter of Book V the archdeacon makes the following declaration: »The book will put an end to the building«,49 i.e. printing will put an end to (church) architecture. What follows is an interpretive essay entitled »One will kill the other« (Ceci tuera cela). The opening statement is more complex than it seems at first sight. The decline of the architecture is foreseen as a consequence of the diminishing power of the church. This change is linked to another shift: oral culture is replaced by literature. This fundamental change in the forms of memory leads to a decrease in the influence of tradition. In short, architecture and literature are characterized as manifestations of specific stages in history. The rise of literature is regarded as the outcome of historical necessity; »architecture would not be able to reproduce the new state of the human spirit«.50 The idea that the Renaissance represents the first stage in a process pointing towards decadence in architecture is a characteristically Romantic preconception. After the Middle Ages, architecture »is no longer a total art«;51 it is relegated to the status of one of the arts. Unity is re46.

»La chose s’accomplit sans trouble, sans effort, sans réaction, suivant une loi naturelle et tranquille. C’est une greffe qui survient, une sève qui circule, une végétation qui reprend. […] Le temps est l’architect, le peuple est le maçon. […] Le tronc de l’arbre est immuable; la végétation est capricieuse« (ibid., 107 f.).

47.

»Notre-Dame avait été successivement pour lui, selon qu’il grandissait et se développait, l’œuf, le nid, la maison, la patrie, l’univers. […] il y avait une sorte d’harmonie mystérieuse et préexistante entre cette créature et cet édifice« (ibid., 141).

48.

»penché sur un vaste manuscrit orné de peintures bizarres« (ibid., 255).

49.

»le livre tuera l’édifice« (ibid., 165).

50. »l’architecture ne pourrait reproduire ce nouvel état de l’esprit humain« (ibid., 170). 51.

»n’est plus l’art total« (ibid., 175).

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placed by division, »sculpture becomes statuary, imagery becomes painting, the canon becomes music«.52 The disintegration of art corresponds to the disintegration of faith: »Gutenberg is the precursor of Luther«.53 Diversity is viewed as inferior to homogeneity. The two are contrasted as chaos and order: »there is a chaos of languages […] Mankind experiences the second Tower of Babel«.54 Notre-Dame de Paris can be read as a novel about the relations between image and writing, architecture and literature. Buildings have inscriptions and names, and decline is associated with the end of the unity of the verbal and the nonverbal. The »������������������������������� Note ajoutée à la huitième édition« (Note Added to the Eighth Edition, 1832) also makes a link between Gothic architecture and national identity: »in awaiting new monuments, let us conserve ancient monuments. Let us, if possible, inspire in our nation love of national architecture. Therein, the author declares, resides one of the principal goals of this book«.55 Yet it would be misleading to read Notre-Dame de Paris as a didactic work about the superiority of medieval art. The multiple allusions suggest a wide range of aesthetic qualities. This emphasis is especially clear in the scene marking the climax (book VIII, Chapter 6). La Esmeralda is taken into the cathedral. »She resembled her former self like a Virgin by Masaccio resembles a Virgin by Raphael: frailer, thinner, more gaunt«.56 Three choirs are singing three different songs: a psalm, an offertorium, and the mass of the dead. The scene both summarizes and transcends the human condition and the title of the chapter — »Trois cœurs d’homme faits différemment« (Three Human Hearts Differently Constituted) — raises the multiplicity to a level of abstraction. »It is horrible and beautiful«.57 This statement quoted earlier suggests the self-contradictory character of aesthetic qualities that can be regarded as the most important principle underlying the cross-system quotations in Hugo’s novel. Quasimodo is deaf, yet he makes music by manipulating the bells of the cathedral: »he urged on the six singers by voice and gesture, like the conductor of an orchestra spurring on intelligent virtuosi«.58 Beauty and ugliness, art and life are shown to be interrelated. Phoebus is handsome and superficial, Quasimodo is ugly and morally sophisticated. Mutually contradictory values are ascribed to both human beings and homemade objects. »Grès et cristal« (Stone and Crystal), the title of book IX, Chapter 4 refers to two vases placed in Esmeralda’s window by Quasimodo:

52.

»La sculpture devient statuaire, l’imagerie devient peinture, le canon devient musique« (ibid.).

53.

»Gutenberg est le précurseur de Luther« (ibid.).

54.

»il y a confusion des langues […]. C’est la seconde tour de Babel du genre humain« (ibid., 179).

55.

»en attendant les monuments nouveaux, conservons les monuments anciens. Inspirons, s’il est possible, à la nation l’amour de l’architecture nationale. C’est là, l’auteur le déclare, un des buts principaux de ce livre« (ibid., 4).

56. »Elle ressemblait à ce qu’elle avait été comme une Vierge de Masaccio ressemble à une Vierge de Raphaël: plus faible, plus mince, plus maigre« (ibid., 331). 57.

»C’est horrible et c’est beau« (ibid., 253).

58.

»il animait les six chanteurs de la voix et du geste, comme un chef d’orchestre qui éperonne des virtuoses intelligents« (ibid., 249).

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One was a vase of crystal, very beautiful and very brilliant, but cracked. It had let out the water with which it was filled, and the flowers it contained were faded. The other was a grease pot, crude and common, but it had conserved all its water, and its flowers had remained fresh and bright red.59

Notre-Dame de Paris — unevenly organized as it is — may help us understand that one of the distinctive features of Romanticism is the undermining of the Platonic ideal of unchanging, »objective«, transcultural, a-historical values. The comparison of the two vases — just as Hoffmann’s interpretation of Gluck and Mozart, Nerval’s view of Watteau or Frenhofer’s concept of a masterpiece — may remind us of the diversity and mutability of aesthetic values. These values are not »out there« waiting to be recognized but come from inside those who create rather than perceive them. The conclusion is inescapable that the effect of the frequent »appearance« of nonverbal art in Romantic fiction is that the reader understands that values in art are not to be found but created through the process of interpretation. Bibliography Balzac, Honoré de. 1979. La Comédie humaine, vol. 10: Études philosophiques. Ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1964. L’Œuvre de Balzac. Ed. by Albert Béguin and Jean A. Ducourneau. Vol. 12. Paris: Le Club Français du Livre. Derrida, Jacques. 1990. Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux. Genette, Gérard. 1999. Figures IV. Paris: Seuil. Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Cambridge, Indianapolis: Hackett. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. 1982. Werke. Ed. by Gerhard Schneider. Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau. Hugo, Victor. 1844. Notre-Dame de Paris. Paris: Perrotin. James, Henry Jr. 1874. »Mérimée’s Last Tales«. The Nation. February 12; repr. Literary Reviews and Essays, 169–172. ———. 1878. French Poets and Novelists. London: Macmillan. ———. 1956. Autobiography. New York: Criterion. ———. 1957. Literary Reviews and Essays. New Haven: College and UP. ———. 1963. Selected Literary Criticism. London: Heinemann. Levey, Michael. 1992. Rococo to Revolution: Major Trends in Eighteenth-Century Painting. London: Thames and Hudson (1st edition 1966). Márkosfalvi Barabás, Miklós. 1944. Önéletrajz. Kolozsvár: Erdélyi Szépmíves Céh. Mérimée, Prosper. 1964. Colomba. Ed. by Pierre Jossderand. Paris: Gallimard. Nehring, Wolfgang. 1981. »E.T.A. Hoffmanns Erzählwerk: Ein Modell und seine Variationen«. Zu E.T.A. Hoffmann. Ed. by Steven Paul Scher. Stuttgart: Klett. Nerval, Gérard de. 1961. Les filles du feu. Ed. by Kléber Haedens. Paris: Le Livre de Poche. Pater, Walter. 1986. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1966. Complete Stories and Poems. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 59.

»Un matin, elle vit, en s’éveillant, sur sa fenêtre deux vases pleines de fleurs. L’un était un vase de cristal fort beau et fort brillant, mais fêlé. Il avait laissé fuir l’eau dont on l’avait rempli, et les fleurs qu’il contenait étaient fanées. L’autre était un pot de grès, grossier et commun, mais qui avait conservé toute son eau, et dont les fleurs étaient restées fraîches et vermeilles« (ibid., 364).

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Proust, Marcel. 1971. Contre Sainte-Beuve. Ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre. Paris: Gallimard. Rosen, Charles. 1998. Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard UP. Scher, Steven Paul. 1968. Verbal Music in German Literature. New Haven: Yale UP. Stendhal (i.e. Henri Beyle). 1958. Le rouge et le noir. Ed. by Roger Nimier. Paris: Gallimard. Vidal, Mary. 1992. Watteau’s Painted Conversations: Art, Literature, and Talk in Seventeenth- and EighteenthCentury France. New Haven, London: Yale UP Wordsworth, William. 1988. Selected Prose. Ed., introd. and annot. by John O. Hayden. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Music and Romantic narration Claudia Albert

1.

Music — a German passion? Forms and fortunes of the theme

If one considers the themes and styles of Romantic narrative art between the late eighteenth and mid nineteenth centuries, one could easily concur with the cliché that music is a genuinely German passion. Not only does one of the first-ever tales of musicians, Wilhelm Wackenroder’s Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar, 1796, published posthumously in 1797), lead from painting to music and portray the suffering of the musician Berglinger as imitatio Christi (cf. Albert 1995, 19 ff.); the complex of musical motifs remains present in Germany for about thirty years, mediated through Jean Paul, Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Joseph von Eichendorff. The engagement with music is played out on at least three levels: firstly in the creation of characters who are musicians (and who usually meet with failure or go mad); secondly in the attempt of, for instance, Tieck or Hoffmann to invent a »musical language« or »verbal music« (cf. Scher 1968; Theilacker 1990, 159); thirdly in the contrast between a world of harmony, infinity or even ineffability with everyday bourgeois life. In all three areas the German authors do real pioneering work: apart from Diderot’s early precursor work, the dialogue Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew, 1762–74), which was unknown to the German Romantics until Goethe’s translation, no narrative in European or American literature before 1830 thematises music and musicians. When Balzac, Heine, Odoevskii or Grillparzer take up the theme in the 1830s and 40s, Bécquer even as late as the 1850s and 60s, it is on the one hand mediated through the reception of German authors, especially of E.T.A. Hoffmann, and on the other hand informed by the aim of social criticism. The bourgeois realist version of the musician has lost the aura of the chosen (if suffering) one — he becomes an eccentric and outsider, wrapped up in his own world, which is incomprehensible to those around him. It is no coincidence that Balzac’s Gambara engages with Bach, organ music and counterpoint, musical references that struck the literati of the nineteenth century — and not only them — as highly suspect. From 1830, the literary preoccupation with music is limited, moreover, to one or two narratives from each author. Either they turn elsewhere; more specifically, to painting as a medium of artistic self-reflection, as does Mörike in Maler Nolten (Painter Nolten, 1832), or their project is to depict the whole of bourgeois society, like Balzac, and they consider the artist only as one social type among many. The frequent framing of the music narratives which Theilacker observes in German literature, and which usually allows the musician to speak in the inner narrative, also exists here. Yet it has a completely different function, with the musician exposing his weaknesses under the stern gaze of an observer rather than arousing understanding, still less sympathy. »With the narration of the story the musician pastes together the rubble of his history. Narration becomes therapy« (Theilacker 1990, 159) — in Germany, this applies at most to Grillparzer’s Der arme Spielmann (The Poor Minstrel, 1848) and Hoffmann’s Rat Krespel (Councillor Krespel, 1818). In the non-German texts, on the other hand, the narrators do

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experience »reactions of revulsion towards the unfamiliar« (Theilacker 1990, 161), which make it impossible to simply exchange the playing of the music for the »play of narrative« (165). When the poor minstrel or Grillparzer’s Roderer narrate, they are appealing for sympathy from their listeners; when Gambara (or Frenhofer, in the »tales of painters« genre) narrate, they provide material which is used by the external narrator to denounce and pathologise them; the musician’s »foreign text« cannot be integrated but becomes, in turn, an object of analysis. But why choose music, of all the arts, as medium of the inexpressible, secretive, mysterious? Perhaps because it »affects us the more powerfully and is all the more likely to set our bodies into tumult, the deeper and more mysterious its language is« (Wackenroder 1971, 150),1 or because »where words can no longer reach, notes speak. What shapes cannot express, a sound can paint«.2 Between 1790 and 1830, these topoi of ineffability vary but little; in the medium of music, that which is outside the realm of normal language seems possible: immediate self-expression, direct contact with nature and its secrets, unity and completeness. Astonishingly, however, even the musicians created by Wackenroder and Tieck, Hoffmann and Kleist are completely unqualified and unable to fulfil such demands. They neither create a masterpiece, nor have any special ability to inspire their audience. Hoffmann’s Kreisler either does not write down his compositions at all or burns the scores immediately after doing so, and occasionally even throws his guitar into the bushes. Thus the reputedly universal language of music tends, even at the beginning of its treatment in literature, to become a private language — unless, that is, it has already become frozen into conversation and cliché, as in Hoffmann’s parodic scenes from high society. The artist responds to such experiences of alienation with illness, alcohol consumption or insanity; he is the very epitome of failure. He finds happiness — if at all — in the reclusive life of the eccentric, which Balzac ascribes to Gambara, and Grillparzer to the Poor Minstrel. Even less successful are the authors’ attempts to actually translate music into language: Hoffmann’s talk of »contrapuntal intricacies« (Hoffmann 1989, 99 f.)3 can only be transposed consecutively in Kater Murr (Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, 1819–21); Tieck’s attempts to musicalise language lead only to the endless murmuring of the forest and to the wealth of poems with which Franz Sternbald (1798) is interspersed. The highest aspiration, finally, the claim to harmony as reconciliation between the human being and nature, a claim consecrated by a two-thousand-year-old tradition, is not borne out by any of the texts and is only rarely thematised. When Hyperion perceives in Diotima’s song »pure language and soul«,4 Hölderlin has to condemn her to complete silence before he can allow his protagonist such sentiments — which are, furthermore, only reported in the retrospective written account. Right from its earliest phases, then, Romantic prose about music is, on the level of content, a testimony of disappointment and failure. However, Romantic writers never lack words with 1.

»[die] um so mächtiger auf uns wirkt, und alle Kräfte unsers Wesens um so allgemeiner in Aufruhr setzt, je dunkler und geheimnißvoller ihre Sprache ist« (Wackenroder 1991, 134).

2.

»wo Worte nicht mehr hinreichen, sprechen die Töne. Was Gestalten nicht auszudrücken vermögen, malt ein Laut« (Grillparzer 1964, 887).

3.

»kontrapunktische Verschlingungen« (Hoffmann 1982, 54).

4.

»lauter Sprache und Seele« (Hölderlin 1994, 64).

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which to describe and circumscribe those experiences, raising the suspicion that Romantic narration creates for itself, through attention to music, an endless agenda of writing and reflection. Thereby Romantic prose reassures itself not only of its limits, but also of the infinite nature of its own strivings. If, from about 1830, Balzac, Mörike and, later, Stifter transfer this role to painting, this may be because the ethereal impetus of the volatile medium of music has worn out, and the explanation and transfiguration of everyday bourgeois life required a more visual medium in order to track down »real reality«.5 But even the motif of the (forever incomplete) painting seems no guarantee for the creation of meaning: in both Stifter’s and Balzac’s works the painting is burnt at the end; the difference is merely that Balzac’s Frenhofer is burnt along with it, while his German-Austrian colleague Roderer gets married. It was left to the »escaped Romantic« Heinrich Heine, who had emigrated to Paris, to settle accounts with the various stylisations of the figure of the artist, and with the real loss of meaning which music had suffered: in his Florentinische Nächte (Florentine Nights, 1836/37), the year in which Balzac’s Gambara was published, he has a deaf painter write opera reviews; this character is able to judge the »more or less skilful execution« of the piece by the »movements of (the musicians’) fingers« (Heine 1887, 198).6 The narrator Maximilian also claims to have a »musical second sight«, which allows him to see the »figure equivalent to the sound« (ibid., 201)7 for every note. At least he can talk about it, and perhaps he has read enough music reviews to be able to insert the right quotations in the right place. There is only one mystery which Heine, despite all premonitions of the culture industry and small talk of the nineteenth century, preserves: dance. Onto this he projects that very topos of ineffability which he takes over from the Romantic discourse on music. The »personal history in motion« of Laurence appears as the »meaning« of the dancer’s own unclear origin (Heine 1948, 546).8 But perhaps this also springs from the talk of the »old crones« (Heine 1948, 558).9 »Be silent and dance!« (Hofmannsthal 1963, 77):10 this was, at least, what Hugo von Hofmannsthal recommended to his Electra in 1903. In her medium, the »synthesis of the arts« exhibited in opera, music once again takes its place in literary self-reflection, supported by the comprehensive concepts of culture articulated by Schopenhauer, Freud, Nietzsche and Wagner, and winged by an even stronger impulse of transgression. 2.

Romantic narration and musical (gender) order

Romantic literature in Germany reassures itself comprehensively of the ways in which meaning is constituted — and therefore also of the meaningfulness of narrative itself. Both poststructurally 5.

»wirkliche Wirklichkeit« (Stifter 1978, 409).

6.

»die mehr oder minder gelungene Exekution […]; Fingerbewegungen« (Heine 1968, 575).

7.

»musikalisches zweites Gesicht […] die adäquate Klangfigur« (ibid., 578).

8.

»Signatur […] getanzte Privatgeschichte« (ibid., 594).

9.

»die alten Spinnweiber« (ibid., 610).

10.

»Schweigen und tanzen!« (Hofmannsthal 1979, 234).

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and hermeneutically oriented scholars in this field agree that no genre is more affected by this than narrative, which, after all, traditionally assures continuity between the orders of knowledge and social organisation. Brentano’s confrontation of the serene grandmother and the increasingly helpless writer, later merely scribe or clerk, in the Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl (Story of Good Kasperl and Beautiful Annerl, 1817), bears witness to the state of uncertainty in which writing finds itself. Whereas before (or at the same time, in the case of the Bildungsroman, and still more the trivial devotional novel), writing could present goal-oriented life stories and exemplary developments, now every kind of order is becoming confused, and the continuity of the text itself is dragged into the maelstrom. Narrative constantly questions its own aims and foundations; the characters in the novel engage in a continual (and oppositional) dialogue with themselves and with the orders surrounding them. This is the reason why German narrative around 1800 includes so many tales of artists; it is also the reason why it presents above all artists who are incomplete, unsuccessful or at least unsatisfied with themselves. The tale of the artist could therefore be understood as a medium for testing how meaningful a wellregulated life is — or it could call into question the categories of »education« and »development« themselves, by presenting their realisation as impossible (or trivial). The more eccentric the individual who is to be educated, the deeper the drop from the norm of the ideal life and the greater the potential for criticism of »normality«. And thus it emerges that the much-praised category of the German Bildungsroman is actually — especially in its musical variant — calling into question the ideal of education itself (cf. Engel 1993). The image of the female musician, while seldom seen, seems at first glance to be more hopeful, if one considers Wilhelm Heinse’s successful opera singer Hildegard von Hohenthal (1795/96) or Kleist’s tale of Cäcilie (St Cecilia or the Power of Music, 1810). But both are fed by the classical fantasies of femininity, which allow Heinse to connect, in his character, song and nudity, with the immediate experience of nature and self. As in Hölderlin’s work, the female voice is either »all nature« and therefore not fit for polite society — a fate which Diotima shares with Hoffmann’s figure of the niece of Röderlein — or the female voice prepares the way for masculine creative acts. The female musician (or the music-making female figure, since she naturally cannot yet be a professional musician, except as an opera singer) cannot offer a reliable counterposition to the growing uncertainty of male orders of life and narrative. Whether she inspires or destabilises — either she is »overtaken« by the progression of the narrative and remains by the wayside as a muse or she is removed into such abstract heights that she exists only as illusion or phantasm. Musicians as married couples or families, for which the Bachs, Mendelssohns or Schumanns would have offered real points of reference, do not appear in Romantic tales of musicians; at most, Balzac offers us, in Gambara (1837), a parody of the relationship between artist and muse, in which the latter is, above all, responsible for replenishing the alcohol supply. At least the Romantic narratives of musicians do not — as do those of the fin de siècle — overstrain gender relations to the point that the price of male inspiration is a woman’s dead body.

Music and Romantic narration 3.

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Dissonance, clowning and hoarseness: Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew) as precursor

Naturally, a text which was written in 1761 and published in 1774 does not belong to the canon of Romantic tales of musicians. Yet it was only discovered in Germany in 1804, by Schiller, and translated in 1805, after Schiller’s death, by Goethe. Since then it has been working its fascination on all those interested in literary presentations of music and the musician. Alongside obvious borrowings such as that in Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck (1809), there exists a level of intertextuality, which has so far been little researched, a level that becomes visible, for example, in the description of the young Johannes Kreisler: the »little nephew« is »foolish enough« (Hoffmann 1969, 87),11 according to his numerous aunts and uncles; they thus connect the strange circumstances of his birth — the spilt pea soup, the snapped lute strings, unclear family background — with his potentially inscrutable being. It cannot be proven without doubt whether Hoffmann counts among those who read Goethe’s 1805 translation of Diderot, but at least for the formative phase of the German tales of musicians there is evidence of an intensive reception. On all three levels — the thematising of the character of the musician, the musical style and the connection of musical theories with interpretations of the world — Diderot’s text offers provocative starting points, particularly as he privileges dissonance, rather than the classic paradigm of harmony (of world and spheres). »Nothing is less like him than himself« (Diderot 1966, 34)12 — with this maxim the nephew, who remains nameless throughout, turns himself into a cynic, parasite and entertainer; there is dissonance not only in his existence on the fringes of polite society, but also in his whole mode of thought and self-presentation, which often drives him to the brink of exhaustion and self-dissolution. It is no coincidence that Hegel and Foucault chose the nephew as a model of doubt and self-division. With the authority of the artist, the issue of dilettantism and the linking of music and sexuality, Diderot sketches themes which will not be taken up again with such sharp focus until the later nineteenth century, most intensively at its end. The Romantic storytellers, for their part, mainly use the motif of the outsider, the man suffering from himself; yet they do not take it to the same satirical extreme as Diderot. He — in particular through the form of a dialogue confronting the nephew’s self-presentation with the critical objections of the »philosopher« — leaves open the question of whether the character is not more of an entertainer and clown than an artist. The German narrators stop short of such a diagnosis. The three great musical pantomimes of the text offer, in addition to this, a comprehensive inventory of the ways in which music can be translated into language; they also, however, draw attention to the limits of such a translation: the simultaneity of the nephew’s facial expressions, gestures and voice can only be reproduced in sequence. The rapid changes of gestures and emotions, »in turn raging, pacified, imperious, scornful« (Diderot 1966, 102),13 can be hinted at with infinitive participial forms and with cascades of verbs, but not really depicted. After all, the nephew does not only imitate single pieces, but also whole operas, which he simultaneously 11.

»kleine Neveu […] närrisch genug« (Hoffmann 1996, 105).

12.

»Rien ne dissemble plus de lui que lui-même« (Diderot 1972, 32).

13.

»successivement furieux, radouci, impérieux, ricaneur« (ibid., 106).

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comments on and corrects. His physical exertion, which repays him with hoarseness and extreme thirst, makes him the model for those somnambulistic states that overcome the Romantic musician at the moment of highest inspiration, but even here Diderot is sharper and more concrete than his successors when he speaks of sweat, dripping make-up and the laughter of the spectators. Nonetheless, in its dissolution of unitary thinking, in the undermining of textual coherence and the constant mixing of narration and (self-)commentary, Diderot’s text proves to be testimony to a pre-Romantic aesthetic. 4.

Contrapuntal writing or »gyration«?

Alongside attempts at »verbal music«, which aim to create, on the level of sound and possibly also of syntax, a unity of word and tone, language and music, Romantic narration tries to achieve the reproduction of genuinely musical formal principles: Hoffmann speaks in his review of Beethoven of the »wonderful contrapuntal intricacies« of the »inspired rhapsody« and of the »close relationship of the themes to each other« (Hoffmann 1989, 99 f.).14 He correspondingly attempts to produce the fiction of simultaneity in his texts. This is evident in Kater Murr in the parallel between the Murr and Kreisler plots, in the Kreisleriana in an episodic structure of twelve (actually thirteen, as explained below) individual parts in which many motifs are doubled or interlinked. Although Hoffmann himself never explicitly claimed that these methods were musical in character, literary scholarship has been at extraordinary pains to prove the »contrapuntal« or even »polyphonic« style of these texts, be it Jocelyne Kolb connecting the bass line of the piano chords in Kreislers musikalisch-poetischer Klub (Kreisler’s Musico-Poetic Club) with the meaning of Höchst zerstreute Gedanken (Highly Random Thoughts) (and thereby having to reduce the 13 parts of the cycle to 12); Erwin Rotermund trying to find parallels between musical and poetic »Arabeske«, without reflecting on the metaphorical use of his own term; or, finally, Wolfgang Wittkowski claiming that the Kreisleriana follow a structure of augmentation by degrees. In all these cases, statements made by the characters, or musical terms used by them or the author, are simply adopted as categories for textual analysis. No attention is paid to the fact that a literary text can at best produce a network of motifs, which may then (perhaps) form a complex synthesis in the head of the reader. The scholars’ longing for an overall musical effect seems to be so great that they overlook elements which clearly indicate distance on the part of the narrator: in the previous Kreislerianum, after all, Hoffmann had dismissed the oft-quoted »contrapuntal intricacies«15 as foolish play and »thrillingly mysterious series of combinations« (Hoffmann 1989, 94).16 And even Kater Murr contains, in spite of its »two-track« form, clear hints that the illusion of the »contrapuntal« association between the Murr and Kreisler narratives is untenable. For one thing, both levels are clearly separated from each other and each is self-sufficient. The segments of Murr’s biography even fit together perfectly. At the same time 14.

»wunderbare kontrapunktische Verschlingungen […] geniale Rhapsodie […] innige Verwandtschaft der Themas untereinander« (Hoffmann 1982, 54).

15.

»kontrapunktische Verschlingungen« (ibid.).

16.

»schauerlich geheimnisvolle Kombinationen« (ibid., 47).

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the Kreisler section is at least a third longer than the Murr section, so that equal (and simultaneous) perception of two independent structures is out of the question. And finally, even Hoffmann’s fiction of the »writing cat« does not stand up to scrutiny, for the cat produces only text — and not ink spots and scratch marks, even if the recent writer Sarah Kofman implies this in the title Autobiogriffures. Hoffmann could not quite bring himself, then, to engage in the kind of graphic games played by Sterne or Jean Paul, nor does he seize the opportunity to tell a life story backwards — following the model of retrograde order. Thus the reader must either become »the poet’s accomplice« (Scher 1976, 37) — a route taken by most literary scholars, often against the grain of the text — or in fact engage with the intertextual plane. And here we find in 1820/22 a depressing assessment of the Romantic discourse on music — and an assessment by the late Hoffmann of his own writing: conversation and cliché triumph over the high aspirations which he himself had formulated in his earlier works; everyone — not just the cat, but also Kreisler — can talk pleasantly of music, and everyone, from the philistine to court society, can use the formulae of pathos to convince each other of the marvellous nature of music. If Hoffmann divides his sharp criticism of culture and discourse between Murr and Kreisler and thereby stops short of the cynicism of Rameau’s nephew, this is largely in the hope of salvaging, in Kreisler’s alleged insanity, some last remnant of the German musical utopia. This remnant, however, is constantly belied by pathological traits, such as his strange »leaping humour« (Hoffmann 1969, 120)17 and the electric shocks which he occasionally gives with his handshake. Perhaps unintentionally, Hoffmann presented music so frequently, in his later work, »as curse and escape« (Hartmann 1988, 181), indeed as »Romantic illusion« (cf. Dobat 1984), that it was easy for his successors in Western and Eastern Europe to dismantle the German idealist paradigm entirely. It may be seen as evidence of how much the role of the artist had been destabilised that for over ten years no more narratives of artists were published, and that Balzac, in the Chef d’oeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece, 1831), first turned to painting, before taking up the myth of the musician in a satirical manner in Gambara and Massimilla Doni (1838). In Germany, on the other hand, the (increasingly disillusioned) invocation of music as the one true poetry shifted to philosophy. From there it was to inspire the late nineteenth century »synthesis of the arts« with an even more powerful force (cf. Caduff 1997, and Günther 1994). 5.

Music in (everyday) life

Not only are the non-German authors less knowledgeable about music — Balzac in fact wrote, »I was, six months ago, of a hybrid ignorance in matters of musical technology. A book of music has always appeared to me as a sorcerer’s book of spells; an orchestra has never been anything to me but a strange and misguided assembly«.18 And Balzac had the German composer Jacques 17.

»springender Humor« (Hoffmann 1996, 147).

18.

»J’étais, il y a six mois, d’une ignorance hybride en fait de technologie musicale. Un livre de musique s’est toujours offert à mes regards comme un grimoire de sorcier; un orchestre n’a jamais été pour moi qu’un rassemblement malentendu, bizarre« (Balzac 1979, letter to Schlesinger 1837, 1448).

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(Jacob) Strunz supply him with the extravagant musical analyses which he puts into Gambara’s mouth (cf. Claudon 1992, 211). Music is also far less invoked, or evoked in the sound of language, in other literatures. It serves instead as a »referential, cultural, artistic mode« (6). Non-Germans cite music not mainly to deal with problems of narrative and the constitution of the subject, but with the state of society and the status of art. In the tales of musicians at least there is evidence for what has been one of the topoi of national comparisons since Madame de Staël: while the Germans construct a vast realm of the imagination, their (Western) European neighbours are more preoccupied with the practical aspects of everyday life. This is why, from 1828 on, Hoffmann is more often translated, adapted and adopted than any other German author (cf. Teichmann 1961); this is also why other writers, the French in particular, take inspiration from his critical depictions of society, while the topos of music as universal language features, if at all, as a strange view held by outsiders. The higher degree of worldliness and social relevance not only manifests itself in the presence (also important for Hoffmann) of eating and drinking, manuscript paper and the precise description of instruments; it also means that more significance is attached to the reception of music, which in its turn acts as indicator of music’s social significance. Visits to the opera in particular, with their manifold layering of text, music and stage action on the one hand and the sociable/erotic activity in the boxes on the other offer Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert the opportunity to create complex social portraits, in which, however, music is more occasion than theme (cf. Ley 1995). The »rational/fantastic« aspect (Brunel 1987, 323) of Balzac’s narrative style — with his tales of artists, he wanted to become a French Hoffmann — replaces the German topos of ineffability with the cool gaze of the observer, be it in the guise of the Italian aristocrat Andrea Marcosini, who subjects the composer Gambara to an alcoholic cure out of psychological interest, but is actually more interested in Gambara’s wife, or through the ironic attitude of the external narrator, which clearly demonstrates the clichéd character of such behaviour. Gender relations, too, benefit from this disillusioned view of the music market; the female figures are no longer just muses or soulful voices; they feature as confident, active characters, no strangers to erotic desire. In 1842 George Sand even makes her protagonist Consuélo the central focus of a wide-ranging novel, set in several countries and spanning over a thousand pages. Music and eroticism make an almost ideal match; after all, opera itself is predestined to be a practice-ground for the battle of the sexes, and the Italian primadonnas often take on the traits of the characters whom they play. Loss of voice and impotence, infidelity and jealousy belong to the standard repertoire of characters in both opera and text; what was implied by Diderot’s nephew continues via the French tales of musicians and, in the late nineteenth century, re-imported into Germany from France, leads to the man-eating heroines of Heinrich Mann or Frank Wedekind and to the operas of Hofmannsthal/Strauss. But to what extent is the French authors’ obviously realistic, often satirical conception of music still Romantic? Perhaps the following statement by Balzac provides a key: Hoffmann »felt too acutely, he was too much of a musician to talk about music; I have the advantage over him of being French and hardly a musician at all, I can give the key to the palace where he became intoxicated«.19 What remains intact is the ideal of art as a comprehensive reflection of life, as 19.

»[Il] sentait trop vivement, il était trop musicien pour discuter; j’ai sur lui l’avantage d’être français et très peu musicien, je puis donner la clef du palais où il s’enivrait« (ibid., 1451).

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sensory pervasion of the outside world. And thus does music, in particular that of Rossini (baffling though this is to the German reader), regain in Balzac’s work the place which it apparently had to relinquish to the power of reality. It comes to represent that »total art« (Claudon 1992, 216), which penetrates the nature of things — even if, when it comes to the physical performance, the opera stars will always be more successful than the champions of the ideal. This is how Massimilla Doni, who — in accordance with the structural principle of the Comédie humaine — appears at the end of Gambara, formulates the drama of the Romantic artist: »this man has remained faithful to the IDEAL which we have killed« (Balzac 1899, 94).20 Balzac aims at general aesthetic questions, at the claim to be able to fathom the limits and possibilities of the absolute in art, and it is no coincidence that, within the overall construction of the Comédie humaine, his tales of artists find their place in the Études Philosophiques (cf. Ley 1995, 404 f.). Music, which he perceives, through the mediation of Hoffmann, as the most abstract of the arts, provides the necessary space to discuss problems of public reception and of the anchoring of the artist’s existence in society. The cold gaze of the social critic does serve a higher cause, but it relentlessly tests the prospects of this higher cause in reality. The social relevance which distinguishes even the most eccentric products of French Romanticism manifests itself here in the search for the limits of normality, beyond which the artist can only be insane — and therefore an object of pity, but not empathy. In the excess of his own aspirations Gambara — like the painter Frenhofer — is lost to the world; the lovesick tenor Genovese, on the other hand, is able to discipline his passion for the primadonna Tinti to the extent that his voice no longer deserts him when he performs with her. Thus Balzac — without explicit judgement — provides a panorama of the different approaches to art, which ranges from integration into bourgeois society, complete with pregnancy and marriage, through the alternation of self-criticism and euphoria, to total outsiderhood. As mediators we see women like Marianna (or Gillette for Poussin in the Chef d’oeuvre inconnu), responsible for replenishing the artist’s supply of money and alcohol. But they too are free from idealisation; they cannot compare with the pure maidens of the German Romantics. In their oscillation between adaptation to and detachment from bourgeois society, Balzac’s musicians may be distant relatives of Rameau’s Nephew (moreover, the author resumes the late eighteenth-century debate about the pre-eminence of harmony or melody, cf. Ley 1995, 324; Claudon 1992, 215 f.), but he, like Diderot, denies his readers that degree of empathy which German Romanticism granted even the most eccentric of its characters. For Balzac, then, it is definitely literature, with the linguistic logos peculiar to it, which is able to formulate all these problems (cf. Ley 1995, 238); the German longing for a language beyond the discursive remains completely foreign to him, indeed he, along with Stendhal and Flaubert, sees it as a danger for the precision of linguistic expression (cf. ibid., 13). This has, as always, the highest rank in the system of the arts. When Flaubert, inspired by Balzac, has Charles and Emma Bovary interpret Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor »wrongly«, that is in a clichéd manner, he is drawing attention as much to the seductive power of music as to the analytical capacity of language. Relentlessly he exposes how Emma, after the disappointment with Rodolphe, first remembers the books she read in her youth, Walter Scott for example, and then projects her pitiful affairs onto the characters in the opera, while Charles is at first bored 20. »Cet homme est resté fidèle à l’IDEAL que nous avons tué« (ibid., 516).

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and only becomes interested in the opera when the heroine wanders through the woods, hair unfastened: »She’s got her hair down — looks like being tragic, this does« (Flaubert 1950, 239).21 Emma on the other hand is busy, through the whole of the third act, remembering her futile passion for the clerk Leon, who reappears forthwith. Music as dream or as trauma — the point to retain about Balzac’s tales of artists and Flaubert’s satires is that both carried on Hoffmann’s project »in the Parisian manner« (Claudon 1992, 212). In parallel, at around the same time, the same thing was being done by the Russian composer, music critic and later civil servant Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevskii, who for his part wanted to become a »second Faust« or a »Russian Hoffmann«. Inspired by the »serapiontic« principle of the German model, he constructs his Russkie Nochi (Russian Nights, 1844) as conversations of a circle of friends interested in philosophy. Within the conversations about art and inspiration, mysticism and rationality, the inner narratives Beethoven’s Last Quartet (written in 1830, published in 1831) and Sebastian Bach take sixth and eighth place. The upsetting of historical continuity is probably motivated by the fact that Beethoven is meant to be the incarnation of the endangered artist, Bach that of the healthy artist who integrates art and life. Thus the sixth night limits itself to Beethoven’s late work and to the last days of his life, while Bach’s biography is written up in its entirety, with a few distortions. The Beethoven section partakes conspicuously of the formulae of pathos used by German Romanticism — and of Hoffmann’s Rezension zur 5. Sinfonie (Review of the 5th Symphony) from 1810. He presents the musical production and reception of the deaf master as activity beyond all reason, which must inevitably remain incomplete and inaccessible to the world. Beethoven thus unites characteristics from Kreisler, Councillor Krespel or the Baron of B.; his attendant Luise is his only connection to reality. This is why the tale is written in such a way as to culminate in the anecdote about the missing money for Beethoven’s funeral. Odoevskii’s Bach, on the other hand, clearly connects music with religion. He does — like Wackenroder’s Berglinger in Bamberg — have an ecstatic experience of initiation during an organ concert, but the mysterious language of music can be transposed into the everyday practice of living; indeed, the large Bach family becomes the very epitome of harmony. »On one appointed day in the year they all united, like the isolated notes of one and the same accord, devoted a whole day to music, and then parted again and returned to their previous occupations«.22 Magdalena too is »such a lovely and necessary note in this harmony, that their love came into being and passed through all its phases almost imperceptibly, even for the young people themselves«.23 The only disturbing element in this tableau of harmony between art and life is language — contrary to historical fact, Odoevskii is determined to present Bach as an instrumentalist, who, at the organ, is spared the »errors of our will: (the organ) is eternally

21.

»Elle a les cheveux dénoués; cela promet d’être tragique« (Flaubert 1951, 534).

»No v naznachennyi den’ v godu noi vse soedinialis’, kak razroznennye zvuki odnogo i togo zhe sozvu22. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� chiia, posviashchali tselyi den’ muzyke i snova raskhodilis’ k svoim prezhnim zaniatiiam« (Odoevskii 1975, 107). 23.

»stol’ stroinyi, neobkhodimyi zvuk v etoi garmonii, chto samaia liubov’ ikh zarodilas’, proshla vse svoi periody pochti nezametno dlia samikh molodykh liudei« (ibid., 123).

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calm, passionless, as nature is passionless«.24 And so the conflict has to come — somewhat stereotypically — from outside, in the form of a black-haired Italian singer, who with his sensuous coloratura shows first Magdalena and then also Bach himself the emptiness of his existence: »he realized that he was, in his family, only a professor among students. He had found everything in life: […] except life itself«.25 Odoevskii leaves it to the reader to decide whether to believe the expansive portrait of harmony or the few pages of disillusionment. In any case the status of music remains, here as in Balzac, that of an indicator of fundamental problems in the production and reception of art, the anchoring of art in society, and the limits of its acceptance. (The cultural exhaustion and slackening of Western Europe forms the background for a utopia in which it is rescued by a fresh, young Russia.) Even more than Balzac and Odoevskii, George Sand subordinates the music in the novel Consuélo (written 1843) to her project, the construction of a partly political utopia of freedom. It would be entirely possible to interpret the novel in the light of the plethora of political events between Austria, Bohemia and Prussia, without ascribing to music anything more than the status of a metaphor. It is no coincidence that the gifted opera singer Consuélo only finds true freedom after she loses her voice (in the fortress of Spandau, near Berlin) and can therefore give up her stage career for the sake of her husband Albert, who improvises with his voice, like the peasants and tradesmen. She for her part begins to keep a diary — another form of improvisation — and a displacement of the aesthetic project. More a Bildungsroman than a novel about an artist, Consuélo combines the people, in particular the gypsies, popular improvisation and true art into the »imaginary museum of Romanticism« (Claudon 1992, 226). Be it the opposition of artistic and popular music, of opera and chamber music, of ambition to please and inner harmony, or finally that of fidelity to the text and improvisation — all these illustrate the opposition between artifice and authenticity. Thus they take on that pathos of transgression, unconventionality, and indeed truth, which the German authors had transferred into music itself. Thus the multi-talented musician becomes a model for the inwardly harmonious person, the philosopher (cf. Claudon 1992, 240). At this point, he no longer needs music, and perhaps it is no coincidence that for the construction of her utopia of origin and freedom, with its feminist tendencies, Sand took inspiration from such composers as Liszt and Chopin, who were very firmly anchored in society (cf. Powell 1992, 125). Consuélo for her part becomes muse, mediator and autobiographer. But the punch line of her life story is only accessible to those familiar with the French tongue: »Consuélo ����������������������������������������������������������� perd sa voix����������������������������������������������� , au ��������������������������������������������� moment même où elle trouve sa voie�������� « (»Consuélo loses her voice at the very moment at which she finds her way«) (Kouassi 1992, 50). 6.

Late echoes and stylistic quotations

At first glance it seems as though the history of the Romantic tale of music was going to end harmoniously, with a tale more harmonious than any of its numerous predecessors. Mörike 24. »zabluzhdeniia nashei voli: on vechno spokoen, besstrasten, kak besstrastna piroda« (ibid.). 25.

»on uznal, chto v svoem semeistve on byl — lish’ professor mezhdu uchenikami. On vse nashel v zhizni: […] krome samoi zhizni« (ibid., 232).

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chooses in Mozart (1855) a protagonist whose light-hearted disposition (and music), like his happy marriage, is one of the topoi of biography. In his narrative he furnishes these with all the traits of rococo elegance. Sociability, grace and joie de vivre find their centre in the engagement party of Eugenie and the Baron, which is then also accentuated with The Marriage of Figaro and a piano concerto. Mozartian light-heartedness shapes the conversations of the guests as well as the self-presentation of the master; it is further underlined by the adventure of the oranges and its immediate transformation into music. The production and reception of art are unproblematically intertwined here and enhance each other. It is not until the »Commendatore« scene from Don Juan, complete with the depiction of its nocturnal creation and of Mozart’s own fantasies of death, that we find hints of the set of associations which predominated in the early tales of musicians: genius which, a stranger in this world, devours itself and has access to transcendental spheres. It is to the bride Eugenie, of all people, that Mörike ascribes insight into this problem, while allowing the other characters involved to perceive in her attitude only exaggerated pessimism. The tale ends, however, with Mörike’s own poem »In the woods, who knows where,/ Stands a green fir-tree« (Mörike 1997, 71)26 — a fantasy of death. The connection between music and death is also the subject of two leyendas by Bécquer, Maese Pérez el organista (Master Pérez, the Organist), and El Miserere (The Miserere, both 1871). But they do not share Mörike’s light-hearted/melancholy tone — inspired by the notion of genius; they are concerned instead with the potential of the fantastic — an indication of the late reception of English and German Romanticism. Some authors, such as Tietz, believe for this reason that the Spanish reception of Hoffmann was a failure, and in fact the image which the Spanish have of German literature is formed more by the writings of Heine and Madame de Staël than by their own readings of the originals. Regardless of the accusation that they trivialise and falsify Hoffmann through the use of translations from French, an accusation confirmed by the fantastic nature of the two stories, they do also illustrate the productivity which the theme of music continues to display over a period of decades. With the church organ, the Christmas mass and a blind organist, Bécquer draws from the stock of the early Romantic tales of musicians; the two different narrative voices, the sceptical reporter and the pious woman of the people, create (as in the work of Kleist and Hoffmann) two levels of reality which explain the »miracle« — the organ plays itself after the death of the organist, or has he risen from the dead? — in different ways. It comes as no surprise that the descriptions of music cover the concepts of »nature«, »heaven« and »harmony« and are linked with the rite of the Christmas mass. The phantom of the organist appears right on time for the transsubstantiation, recreating the voice of God in a »gigantic explosion of harmony«.27 Music thus takes on the character of a stage prop for the ineffable. But whereas Hoffmann, for all his realism, still invokes its inherent value, Bécquer uses it only as a medium to describe a mysterious event. The tale Miserere also refers, with the unfinished score of a German composer, to several formulae of pathos from the German tradition. An isolated monastery, which burns down at the very moment when the monks are starting to sing the miserere on Maundy Thursday, heightens the impression of the fantastic, especially when the dead suddenly begin to sing again. In the face of this overwhelming 26. »Ein Tännlein grünet wo,/ Wer weiß, im Walde« (Mörike 1973, 75). 27.

»explosión de armonía gigante« (Bécquer 1992, 225).

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synaesthetic experience, however, the witness to this event goes insane, and the attempt to write down what has been heard is also doomed to failure. The connection between music and transcending reality is considerably more tangible in Bécquer’s work, since music does not transcend reality in itself and by virtue of its own materiality, but remains tied to religious forms and institutions. He does not take the step towards absolute music, and it will be left up to lyric poetry — here and in the decades to come — to produce »verbal music«. 7.

The complicated case of Romantic opera

Romantic opera is a genre full of contradictions: One would expect to find it mainly in Germany, the centre of Romantic transfiguration of music. But, in fact, Romantic opera had a series of triumphs in Rome, Milan, Naples, and Paris. The disappointment of such an expectation seems to be the price for putting too great an expectation on music as the language of the soul, the subconscious, or the absolute: When music has to assume liability for the shortcomings of language (or for the deficiencies of middle-class life), a compelling plot can hardly be constructed any more. In that case, the philosophy of music leads directly to philosophical music, which distances itself from trivial necessities such as plot, suspense, or major arias. So it is no accident that musical encyclopaedias do not associate the Romantic opera with C.M. v. Weber and A. Lortzing, but with V. Bellini, G. Donizetti, or H. Berlioz. Between 1800 and 1830, approximately ten German operas were created; the Italian and French repertoire was predominant in Germany. Romantic composers like R. Schumann or F. Schubert achieved philosophically sustained instrumental music, but not the Romantic opera. It was not until Richard Wagner that opera reached artistic maturity in the name of the »total work of art« (Gesamtkunstwerk) and »music drama«. In the chapter »Unheard Melodies and Unseen Paintings (The Sister Arts in Romantic Fiction)«, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák includes some brief examples of how writers employ music in two main ways. One way involves primarily »mention« whereby music in general or specific works of music appear as part of the contents of a narrative, sometimes as internal keys to the story’s action. A second way involves primarily »use« insofar as the writer draws on music or specific compositions to achieve some structural aim in the manner of narration. Here I shall treat the relation of music and narrative more broadly, and one prominent subject will be how differences in the cultural role of or discourse about music affected narrative practices across several literary streams. 7.1 The German opera on its way to the »total work of art« The philosophical demand hardly left opportunities to the German musical narratives for compelling plots and for major dramatic controversies required by nineteenth-century opera. Besides, there had been no German tradition of this genre before 1800. So it was no accident that Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert (Eckbert the Fair, 1797), an essential text in the history of literature, was not set to music until 1994, by the Welsh composer Judith Weir.

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The composer in Hoffmann’s novella Der Dichter und der Komponist (The Poet and the Composer, 1813) conceived the Romantic opera as a work of art so all-embracing that one wonders what kind of text could possibly be appropriate. Music was supposed to spring immediately and necessarily from poetry, so Romantic composers were constantly looking for subjects suitable for creating this effect of totality. Works that have long fallen into oblivion used to be denoted »heroic-Romantic opera« (Schubert’s Fierrabras, 1823), »Romantic folk-saga« (Franz de Paula Roser’s Schreckensnacht am Kreuzwege [Night of Horror at the Crossroads)], 1816), or »historic-Romantic comedy« (Franz von Suppé’s Der Juwelier oder der Festmarkt auf Kronborg [The Jeweler, or the Market Fair at Kronborg], 1854). Indicating disintegration, these genres challenged old binary concepts on different levels: Comedy and tragedy, amusing and serious parts of the plot, and the different spheres of reality were supposed to merge. The delusive or the miraculous were realised in manifold variations of the Undine-motif. This aspect of the German Romantic tradition was still deployed in 1831 by Bellini in La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalking Girl), and in 1835 by Donizetti in Lucia di Lammermoor. Furthermore, the motif of Loreley enjoyed a certain popularity up until the late nineteenth century. Together with the conventions of the genre, the typologies of roles were abandoned: baritone- and bass parts ceased to signify the »evil«, but indicated the tragic inner turmoil; the separation of recitative and aria was abandoned and folkloristic genres like song and ballad were deployed. The enhancement of instrumental possibilities and the shaping of characters through typical motifs already pointed to Wagner’s fundamental reform of opera. Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz (The Marksman, composed 1817–21, première 1821 in Berlin) remains the only German opera composed during that period (still very popular nowadays) which successfully combined elements of the singspiel with forms that satisfy the aesthetic demands of Romantic literature. It deploys folkloristic choirs and strophic songs as well as sentimental scenery and uncanny scenes. The most famous is the Wolfsschluchtszene (Wolf ’s Glen Scene), presented in Act 2: The genre of supernatural stories the libretto was taken from was updated by advanced harmony, ghost-choirs, the clatter of horse’s hooves, and wind-machines. In the end, »good« nature emerges victorious; the devil Samiel is granted only a speaking voice. As von Weber tried to achieve popularity, the characters of his operas were not heroes and lords, but members of a rural community, huntsmen and foresters. This setting reflects the German sense of national identity in the nineteenth century. The Marksman gained its reputation as a national opera not only for its artistic expression; it also benefited from the time and place of its première. This took place on the 18th of June 1821, the sixth anniversary of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, and it was performed at the Schauspielhaus in Berlin, a theatre built by Friedrich Schinkel. Heinrich Heine referred to the songs and choruses, especially to »Jungfernkranz«, with the dubious compliment that they hunt the listener directly to death. However, even although this opera was extremely popular, it was not successful in establishing itself against the French and Italian repertoire. Subsequent German-language operas used the vampire-motif and chivalrous subjects like Ivanhoe, partly influenced by English Romanticism. But it was not until Wagner’s middle work, Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman, 1843), Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg (Tannhauser and the Singing Contest on the Wartburg, 1845), and Lohengrin (1850), that German operas achieved lasting

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success. Apart from specific aesthetic and musical characteristics, as mentioned before, Wagner was especially interested in a kind of recitation that would turn the singer into an instrument, dismissing the traditional genres of recitative and aria, just as he abandoned periodic structures altogether. Thus he initiated the integration of all opera elements into the notion of »music prose« and subsequently into the »music drama«. 7.2 Romantic Opera: A national project or an international event? In the CHLEL volume Romantic Drama (1994), Ulrich Weisstein’s chapter »What is Romantic Opera? — Towards a Musico-Literary Definition« treats opera as a special kind of multimedia stage work which cannot be adequately approached solely from the perspective of the history of music, or without duly distinguishing between ideal projections about art in Romantic theorizing and the culturally bound, actual practice of Romantic artists. Here I propose to expand briefly not on the relationship of opera to drama, but on the impact which actual operas and interest in opera had on narrative processes, and reciprocally, the influence which narrative forms had on opera. My attention will be devoted to the natural tension between opera and Romantic story telling, in the light of variant cultural conditions in Europe. As non-German opera composers did not have to deal with aesthetic debates on the »total work of art« and new mythology, they were able to exhaust the reservoir of eerie and ghostly subjects provided by German and English literature. So the genre of »literary opera« emerged, and the librettist became a dramaturgical adviser rather than an inventor and producer of a text. Naturally, this had an impact on the written records of opera and led to results such as, for instance, four different versions of Verdi’s Don Carlos. Furthermore, opera gained a certain political significance concerning ideas of national emancipation: the Italian nation-state in Verdi’s works was inspired by Schiller’s emotive notion of freedom; to a certain extent, this also applied to the popular subjects of East European composers like Glinka and Smetana. All works mentioned used the notion »Romantic« as a motif aiming at subjects of national importance, although remote in time (like the Middle Ages), or in place (like Scotland or the Celtic kingdom). Thus, operas by Donizetti, Bellini, or Verdi were aesthetically less innovative; the traditional arrangement was not altered: noble characters and major »numbers« were predominant, although there were no more classical arias. The popular and »national« subjects provided patterns to identify with easily: impressive scenes, major confrontations, and all-too-human conflicts, such as love, hatred, and family controversies. Librettos were partly taken from Walter Scott, as is the case with Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The dramaturgical interest in »strong« appeals for freedom also explains why Verdi chose dramas like Shakespeare’s Othello (1884–86), Macbeth (1846/47), Schiller’s Don Carlos (1867) and Luisa Miller (1849). This is the reason why Schiller is generally regarded as a Romantic author in non-German-speaking Europe. Despite the display of conventional instrumental magnificence, the operas of the 1830s and 1840s and, for example, Rossini’s operas differ in their intentions. The famous pieces of bravura, »Casta Diva« in Bellini’s Norma (1831) or the scene of madness in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor were not only show-pieces for the outstanding techniques of the soloists, but represented quick changes of emotions, sensitivity, and doubts on stage. Therefore, the Italian Romantic opera in particular introduced a new voice in addition to the traditional coloratura

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soprano: the »soprano dramatico d’agilità«. This voice had to cope with major lyrical slurs, and it needed power and volume to stand up to the orchestra. Due to instrumental innovations, opera got noisier and more colourful. Accordingly, the prima donnas of those days celebrated their triumphs with these parts (as contemporary singers still do). As opera became more and more oriented towards literary drama, or spoken theatre, there was an increase in duets and ensemble scenes: As a counterpart to the aria of bravura, the dramatic controversy between two or more characters was supposed to render psychological credibility to the opera. Thus, the plot became less predictable, more exciting, and even more realistic. The works of the Italian Romanticists (as well as the early works of Richard Wagner) quickly found their way to Paris. Therefore, a national point of view is out of the question. Contemporary musicology doubts whether there was such a thing as a particular French Romantic opera, or, to be more precise, whether the »Grand opéra«, with its extravagant technique, its ballet interludes, and its magnificent set intended to be »Romantic« at all. Promoted by flourishing music criticism and by composers’ contributions to theory, it was precisely the French opera that pushed ahead an internationalisation of music. Additionally, it can be considered as a contribution to the »artwork of the future« (Döhring 1997, 4), an idea which sometimes made use of a rhetoric of redemption while promising to solve different aesthetic and national problems. This might explain the importance of the historic »opera of redemption«. Even though opera was mostly visible in Paris for the first half of the nineteenth century, it would be a misleading conclusion to assume French cultural chauvinism. It was rather a result of cultural exchange between Berlin, Naples, and Milan. Furthermore, there were two important institutions at hand, the »Théâtre des Italiens« and the »Opéra Comique«, both of which were closely linked to the »conservatoire«. Here, technical means were used that German and East-European composers could only wish for while they were trying to establish their specific national opera. 7.3 Meyerbeer and Berlioz: Opera as social phenomenon Both composers were central figures within the Western-European debates on Romantic opera. Giacomo Meyerbeer, born as Jakob Meyer Beer, contributed to this debate with his Faust-opera Robert le diable (Robert the Devil, 1831) and with his work Die Hugenotten (The Huguenots, 1836), while Berlioz came into play with melodramatic pieces like Les Troyens (The Trojans, 1856–58), Lélio, ou le Retour à la vie (Lélio or The Return to Life, 1831) and the monumental opera La damnation de Faust (The Damnation of Faust, 1846). The audience was particularly interested in Meyerbeer’s combination of German intellectual ideas with French orchestral techniques; at the same time, opera as a genre became a social event, interpreted by Heine as the confluence of money, »juste-milieu«, and music after the July Revolution in 1830. Wagner on the other hand was determined to recognise in Meyerbeer’s operas the artwork of the future — of course he considered himself to have reached the completion of this project (cf. Döhring/ Henze-Döhring 1997, 8). At the same time, different levels of reception rose to prominence: the inner turmoil of the protagonist, the dramatic situation, choirs and inflamed orchestral passages, and the domination of harmony over melody were enjoyed aesthetically and could also

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be analyzed according to historic and ideological assumptions — the latter was a task to which music critics of the nineteenth century were fully devoted. At the same time, however, a formation of different groups and parties took place; a phenomenon similar to the »Querelle des anciens et des modernes«. By introducing confrontations of Rossini and Meyerbeer, or between groups like Chopin, Donizetti, and Bellini versus Liszt, Mendelssohn and Wagner, opera became a platform for rather general, not only aesthetical, debates. This is why Heine felt free to informally combine his visits to a showing of the Huguenots and to a ball at the Rothschild’s, comparing Meyerbeer and Goethe on this occasion: Money, the erotic and the spirit have become interchangeable. In addition to that, the Huguenots was an historic opera, devoted to showing the contrast of political power and idyllic love. Subsequently, authors like Balzac used opera to reflect social conflicts: In his narrative Gambara (1838), a visit to an opera frames aesthetic debates and treacherous conversations about truth and lies, art and money. Hector Berlioz increased every aspect of this phenomenon. The son of a provincial doctor, and without any musical education, he only learned to play the flute and the guitar, but never the piano. His passion for the English Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson (Liszt and Heine were witnesses at the wedding ceremony) made him a central figure of gossip in society life in Paris. His monumental symphonic poems went beyond even the genre of »Grand-Opéra«. He was interested in the creation of a moving or historical-mythological atmosphere rather than in compelling plots. The Trojans was inspired by Virgil’s Aeneis (Aeneid), The Damnation by Goethe, Harold in Italy (1834) by Alfred de Musset. Furthermore, his orchestral works like Symphonie fantastique (Subtitle: »Episodes in the life of an artist«; 1830) and the opera Benvenuto Cellini (1834/38) expound the problems of artistic existence — a classical theme in Romantic literature. The generalisation of opera led to the sacrifice of specific features of its genre. Berlioz’s works were never given a complete performance; numerous parts of his compositions became considerably more famous than his œuvre, for instance the overture of Benvenuto Cellini, known under the title »The Roman Carnival«, or the Blocksbergszene in The Damnation of Faust. Thus, opera reached the threshold that Romantic literature also failed to cross. If one wants to say everything, one needs a language which does not consist of ordinary words: music. Bibliography Ackermann, Peter. 2000. »Romantische Oper«. Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik. 2nd edition. Ed. by Ludwig Finscher. Vol. 8. Kassel et. al.: Bärenreiter, Metzler. 507–517. Albert, Claudia. 1995. »Zwischen Enthusiasmus und Kunstgrammatik: Pergolesi als Modell für Wackenroders Berglinger-Ezählung«. Ton-Sprache: Komponisten in der deutschen Literatur. Ed. by Gabriele Brandstetter. Bern, Stuttgart, Wien: Haupt. 5–27. ———. 1998. »Allharmonie und Schweigen — musikalische Motive in Hölderlins Hyperion«. Hyperion — terra incognita — Expeditionen in Hölderlins Roman. Ed. by Hansjörg Bay. Opladen, Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. 161–175. ———. 2002. Tönende Bilderschrift: »Musik« in der deutschen und französischen Erzählprosa des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Heidelberg: Synchron.

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Asmuth, Christoph, Scholtz, Günther, and Stammkötter, Franz-Bernhard (eds.). 1999. Philosophischer Gedanke und musikalischer Klang: Zum Wechselverhältnis von Musik und Philosophie. Frankfurt/M., New York: Campus. Balzac, Honoré de. 1899. Comédie Humaine. Trans. by Thos. H. Walls and George Burnham. Philadelphia: George Barrie. ———. 1979. La comédie humaine. Ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex. Texte présenté par René Guise. Vol. X: Etudes philosophiques. Paris: Gallimard (La Pléïade). Barricelli, Jean-Pierre. 1990. Balzac and Music: Its Place and Meaning in His Life and Work. New York, London: Garland. Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo. 1992. Leyendas. Ed. by Pascual Izquierdo. Madrid: Cátedra. Behler, Ernst. 1983. »Der Roman der Frühromantik«. Handbuch des deutschen Romans. Ed. by Helmut Koopmann. Düsseldorf: Bagel. 273–301. Brentano, Clemens. 1998. Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl. Ed. by Gerhard Schaub. Stuttgart: Reclam. Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1994. Nur über ihre Leiche: Tod, Weiblichkeit und Ästhetik. München: Kunstmann. Brunel, Pierre. 1987. »La tentation hoffmannesque chez Balzac«. E.T.A. Hoffmann et la musique: Actes du colloque international de Clermont-Ferrand. Ed. by Alain Montandon. Frankfurt/M. et. al.: Lang. 315–324. Brzoska, Martin. 1995. Die Idee des Gesamtkunstwerks in der Musiknovellistik der Julimonarchie. Laaber: Laaber. Caduff, Corinna. 1997. »Die diskursive Karriere der Musik im 19. Jahrhundert: Von der ›Herzenssprache‹ zur ›wahren Philosophie‹«. Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift. 71: 537–558. Claudon, Francis. 1992. La musique des romantiques. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1980. Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts. Wiesbaden: Athenaion. ———. 1984. »Die romantische Oper als Idee und als Gattung«. Jahrbuch der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen: 52–64. Diderot, Denis. 1966. Rameau’s Nephew; D’Alembert’s Dream. Trans. by Leonard Tancock. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ———. 1972. Le Neveu de Rameau et autres dialogues philosophiques. Ed. by Jean Varloot. Paris: Gallimard. Dieckmann, Herbert (ed.). 1980. Diderot und die Aufklärung. München: Kraus. ———. 1972. »Diderots Le Neveu de Rameau und Hegels Interpretation des Werkes«. Diderot und die Aufklärung. Ed. by Herbert Dieckmann. München: Kraus. 161–194. Dobat, Klaus-Dieter. 1984. Musik als romantische Illusion: Eine Untersuchung zur Bedeutung der Musikvorstellung E.T.A. Hoffmanns für sein literarisches Werk. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Döhring, Sieghart and Henze-Döhring, Sabine. 1997. Oper und Musikdrama im 19. Jahrhundert. Laaber: Laaber. Engel, Manfred. 1993. Der Roman der Goethezeit: Vol. 1: Anfänge in Klassik und Frühromantik. Transzendentale Geschichten. Stuttgart: Metzler. Fauser, Annegret and Schwartz, Manuela (ed.). 1999. Von Wagner zum Wagnérisme: Musik, Literatur, Kunst, Politik. 1999. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Flaubert, Gustave. 1951. Madame Bovary. Oeuvres. Vol. I. Ed. by A. Thibaudet and R. Dumesnil. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1977. Madame Bovary: A Study of Provincial Life. Trans. by Alan Russell. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1991. Sämtliche Schriften nach Epochen seines Schaffens [Münchner Ausgabe]. Vol. 7. Ed. by Karl Richter. München: Hanser. Grillparzer, Franz. 1964. Sämtliche Werke. Vol 3. Ed. by Peter Frank and Karl Pörnbacher. München: Hanser. Gruber, Bettina. 1999. »›Nichts weiter als ein Spiel der Farben‹: Zum Verhältnis von Romantik und Ästhetizismus«. Romantik und Ästhetizismus: Festschrift für Paul Gerhard Klussmann. Ed. by Bettina Gruber and Gerhard Plumpe. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. 7–27. Günther, Hans (ed.). 1994. Gesamtkunstwerk: Zwischen Synästhesie und Mythos. Bielefeld: Aisthesis. Hartmann, Annelie. 1988. »Geschlossenheit der ›Kunst-Welt‹ und fragmentarische Form: E.T.A. Hoffmanns Kater Murr«. Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft. 32: 148–190.

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Hausdörfer, Sabrina. 1987. Rebellion im Kunstschein: Die Funktion des fiktiven Künstlers in Roman und Kunsttheorie der deutschen Romantik. Heidelberg: Winter. Heine, Heinrich. 1887. The Prose Writings. Ed. by Havelock Ellis. London: Walter Scott. ———. 1948. The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine. Ed. by Frederic Ewen, trans. by Aaron Kramer and Frederic Ewen. New York: Citadel. ———. 1968. Sämtliche Schriften. Bd. 1. Ed. by Klaus Briegleb. München: Hanser. Heinse, Wilhelm. 1903. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. by Carl Schüddekopf. Leipzig: Insel. Hölderlin, Friedrich. 1994. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Vol. 2. Ed. by Jochen Schmidt. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassikerverlag. Hörisch, Jochen. 1992. Die andere Goethezeit: Poetische Mobilmachung des Subjekts um 1800. München: Fink. ———. 1995. »›Der Quell des Zentrums‹ oder die Gabe der Poesie: Vom Ur/Sprung romantischen Erzählens«. Romantisches Erzählen. Ed. by Gerhard Neumann. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. 141–152. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. 1969. Selected Writings. Vol. ��������������������������������������������������� 2. Ed and trans. by Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight. Chicago, London: Chicago UP. ———. 1972. 1986. Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern. Ed. by Hartmut Steinecke. Stuttgart: Reclam. ———. 1982. Fantasie-Stücke in Callots Manier. Ed. by Hans-Joachim Kruse and Rudolf Mingau. Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau. ———. 1989. Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism. Ed. by David Charlton, trans. by Martyn Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. 1964. Selected Plays and Libretti. Ed. by Michael Hamburger. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1979. Dramen II. 1892–1905. Gesammelte Werke in 10 Einzelbänden. Ed. by Bernd Schoeller. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Janz, Marlies. 1986. Marmorbilder: Weiblichkeit und Tod bei Clemens Brentano und Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Königstein: Athenäum. Juden, Bryan. 1971. Traditions orphiques et tendances mystiques dans le Romantisme français (1800–1855). Paris: Klincksieck. Kleist, Heinrich von. 1986. Werke und Briefe in vier Bänden. Band III: Erzählungen. Ed. by Siegfried Streller. Frankfurt/M.: Insel. Kofman, Sarah. 1984. Autobiogriffures: Du chat Murr d’Hoffmann [1st edition 1976]. Paris: Christian Bourgois]. Paris: Editions Galilée. Kolb, Jocelyne. 1977. »E.T.A. Hoffmanns Kreisleriana: A la recherche d’une forme perdue?« Monatshefte. 69.1: 32–44. ———. 1986. »Presenting the unpresentable: Goethe’s Translation of Le Neveu de Rameau«. Goethe Yearbook. 3: 149–165. Kouassi, Jennifer. 1992. »Consuélo la possédée«. Magazine littéraire. 295: 48–50. Laurich, Claudia. 1983. Der französische Malerroman. Salzburg: Institut für Romanistik der Universität Salzburg. Ley, Klaus. 1995. Die Oper im Roman: Erzählkunst und Musik bei Stendhal, Balzac und Flaubert. Heidelberg: Winter. Laußmann, Sabine. 1992. Das Gespräch der Zeichen: Studien zur Intertextualität im Werk E.T.A. Hoffmanns. München: tuduv. Lehmann, Jürgen. 1996. »Der ›reine Ton‹ und die ›innere Sprache‹: Vladimir F. Odoevskijs Russische Nächte und ihre Beziehung zur deutschen Romantik«. Hermenautik — Hermeneutik: Literarische und geisteswissenschaftliche Beiträge zu Ehren von Peter Horst Neumann. Ed. by Holger Helbig, Bettina Knauer, and Gunnar Och. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. 381–390. Locatelli, Aude. 1998. La lyre, la plume et le temps: Figures de musiciens dans le »Bildungsroman«. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

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Lubkoll, Christine. 1995. Mythos Musik: Poetische Entwürfe des Musikalischen in der Literatur um 1800. Freiburg: Rombach. Lypp, Bernhard. 1972. »Die Lektüren von Le Neveu de Rameau durch Hegel und Foucault«. Diderot und die Aufklärung. Ed. by Herbert Dieckmann. München: Kraus. 137–159. Metzler, Jan Christian. 2000. »Mir ward es seltsam kalt«: Weiblichkeit und Tod in Heinrich Manns Frühwerk. Hamburg: Argument. Mongrédien, Jean. 1986. La Musique en France des Lumières au Romantisme (1789–1830). Paris: Flammarion. Mortier, Roland. 1967. Diderot in Deutschland 1750–1850. Stuttgart: Metzler. Mörike, Eduard. 1973. Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag: Novelle. Stuttgart: Reclam. ———. 1997. Mozart’s Journey to Prague; Selected Poems. Trans. by David Luke. London: Libris. Neubauer, John. 1986. The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics. New Haven, London: Yale UP. ———. 1991. [Commentary to Rameaus Neffe]. Goethe 1991: 1072–1076. Odoevskii, Vladimir Fedorovich. 1975. Russkie nochi. Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo »Nauka«. Oesterle, Günter. 1992/93. »Dissonanz und Effekt in der frühromantischen Kunst: E.T.A. Hoffmanns ›Ritter Gluck‹«. E.T.A. Hoffmann-Jahrbuch. 1: 58–79. Powell, David A. 1992. »Improvisation(s) dans ›Consuélo‹«. Revue des sciences humaines. 226.2: 117–134. Puschmann, Rosemarie. 1988. Heinrich von Kleists Cäcilien-Erzählung. Kunst- und literaturhistorische Recherchen. Bielefeld: Aisthesis. Reschke, Claus, and Pollack, Howard (eds.). 1992. German Literature and Music: An Aesthetic Fusion 1890–1989. München: Fink. Rieger, Angelica. 2000. Alter Ego: Der Maler als Schatten des Schriftstellers in der französischen Erzählliteratur von der Romantik bis zum Fin de siècle. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau. Rotermund, Erwin. 1984. »Musikalische und dichterische ›Arabeske‹ bei E.T.A. Hoffmann«. Literatur und Musik. Ed. by. Steven Paul Scher. Berlin: Schmidt. 278–299. Sand, Georges. 1959. Consuélo: La Comtesse de Rudolstadt. 3 vols. Ed. by Léon Cellier, Léon Guichard. Paris: Garnier Frères. Scharnagl, Hermann (ed.). 1999. Operngeschichte in einem Band. Berlin: Hentschel. Scher, Steven Paul. 1976. »Kater Murr und Tristram Shandy: Erzähltechnische Affinitäten bei Hoffmann und Sterne«. Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie. 95 (Sonderheft E.T.A. Hoffmann): 24–42. ———. 1968. Verbal Music in German Literature. New Haven, London: Yale UP. ———. (ed.). 1984. Literatur und Musik: Ein Handbuch zur Theorie und Praxis eines komparatistischen Grenzgebietes. Berlin: Schmidt. Sitbon, Yvan. 1992. »Peindre avec des mots, peindre avec des sons, peindre avec des gestes: La musique dans Le neveu de Rameau«. Etudes sur »Le neveu de Rameau« et le »Paradoxe sur le comédien« de Denis Diderot. Cahiers Textuels. 11: 61–74. Stefano, Giovanni di. 1995. »Der ferne Klang: Musik als poetisches Ideal in der deutschen Romantik«. Euphorion. 89. 1: 54–70. Stifter, Adalbert. 1978. Werke. Bd. 2. Ed. by Uwe Japp and Hans-Joachim Piechotta. Frankfurt/M.: Insel. Sumi, Yoichi. 1985. Le Neveu de Rameau: Caprices et logiques du jeu. Tokyo: Librairie-Edition France Tosho. Tadday, Ulrich. 1999. Das schöne Unendliche: Ästhetik, Kritik, Geschichte der romantischen Musikanschauung. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. Teichmann, Elisabeth. 1961. La Fortune de Hoffmann en France. Paris: Droz. Tyrrell, John (ed.). 2001. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 20 Vols. London: Macmillan 2nd ed. Theilacker, Jörg (ed.). 1989. Der hohe Ton der Sängerin: Musik-Erzählungen des 19. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt/M.: Luchterhand. ———. 1990. »Männer — Phantasie — Hirngeburt: Gescheiterte Musiker des 19. Jahrhunderts«. Neue Aspekte der musikalischen Ästhetik IV: Die Chiffren Musik und Sprache. Ed. by Hans Werner Henze. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. 154–172.

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Thewalt, Patrick. 1990. Die Leiden der Kapellmeister: Zur Umwertung von Musik und Künstlertum bei W.H. Wackenroder und E.T.A. Hoffmann. Frankfurt/M. et. al.: Peter Lang. Tietz, Manfred. 1980. »E.T.A. Hoffmann und Spanien«. Mitteilungen der E.T.A. Hoffmann-Gesellschaft. 26: 51–68. Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich. 1971. Confessions and Fantasies. Trans. by Mary Hurst Schubert. University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State UP. ———. 1991. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Vol. I.: Werke. Ed. by Silvio Vietta. Heidelberg: Winter. Weisstein, Ulrich. 1992. »Le Neveu de Gluck? E.T.A. Hoffmanns Erinnerung aus dem Jahre 1809 im Spiegel von Diderots Dialog«. Europa Provincia mundi: Essays in Comparative Literature and European Studies������� . Festschrift für Hugo Dyserinck. Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi. 495–518. Wittkowski, Wolfgang. 1984. »Stufe und Aufschwung: Die vertikale Grundrichtung der musikalischen Struktur in Hoffmanns ›Kreisleriana I‹«. Literatur und Musik. Ed. by Steven Paul Scher. Berlin: Schmidt. 300–311. Zima, Peter V. 1995. Literatur intermedial: Musik — Malerei — Photographie — Film. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Zimmermann, Christine. 1995. Unmittelbarkeit: Theorien über den Ursprung der Musik und der Sprache in der Ästhetik des 18. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt/M., et. al.: Lang.

Nature and landscape between exoticism and national areas of imagination Wilhelm Graeber The notion of Romanticism, far older than the epoch it finally describes, initially only refers to old romances and thus to the fantastic and attractive or charming. Increasingly it moves away from its etymon, being used in a tight combination with a certain experience of landscape and nature. A romantically felt nature appears suggestive and appeals to the sensations of the reader. Although the term and combination of »Romantic« and landscape were first expressed in England, it was a Frenchman, René-Louis de Girardin, who gave a first definition of a Romantic scene of nature, distinguishing it from the »picturesque situation« and the »poetic situation«, as it unites the perspective effects of the former with the beauties of the latter. After several pages of long, synaesthetic examples, Girardin resumes that a Romantic situation can only be found in a space created by nature which gives man a last refuge of peace and liberty (Girardin 1777, 124–134). In his »Fifth Rêverie« (1782), Rousseau similarly prefers the »more primitive and Romantic« borders of Lake Biel to those of Lake Geneva, as they are still unspoilt and characterized by natural meadows instead of farmland (Rousseau 1964, 95). His descriptions of the Swiss Alps prelude Romantic descriptions of nature hardly imaginable without this model, and sparked a Europe-wide enthusiasm for the Alps. By developing a new concept of nature and landscape, prose led poetry by two decades, the latter being far more orientated to formal examples due to its poetical restrictions (Rusam 1992, 92). The idea of a Romantic nature crystallizes first in non-fiction descriptive texts, such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Etudes de la nature (Studies on Nature), dated 1784, and Senancour’s Rêveries de la nature primitive de l’homme (Reveries on the Primordial Nature of Man), dated 1799, before being used in novels. In Romantic prose fiction, the synonymously employed terms nature and landscape are as varied as the topographies depicted, but generally they are based on a common understanding: Authors do not strive for a mimetic reproduction, they see nature as mainly related to human sensations, and they assume a deeper meaning below the surface of visible nature. The historical development of Romantic prose has the leading role in the following exposition. In an early phase, prose writers show a predilection for exotic landscapes, then treat the relationship between nature and art, see nature as a mirror, and, finally, moving towards more »realistically« depicted landscapes, overcome the characteristically Romantic concept of nature. The main historical evolution proceeds from the foreign to the accustomed, from the exotic to a landscape that is recognized by fellow countrymen, thus contributing to national identity. 1.

Virgin wilderness and sublimity: Exotic landscapes

Thanks to the increasing travel literature of the eighteenth century, uninhabited areas and lush vegetation as found overseas had a particular impact on the imagination of European readers. When Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, as an immediate successor to Rousseau, chooses a paradisiacal tropical island instead of the Swiss Alps as the location for his narration, this is but the logical

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consequence of Rousseau’s concept and reflects the yearning for the natural and original far from the civilized world (Hudde 1982, 135). The author first recalls his travel impressions from the Island of Mauritius, with which he had become familiar in 1768–1770, in his Etudes, and struggles for the linguistic means to depict this kind of nature appropriately. His description of the island is dominated by the concept of all-embracing harmony. His novel Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia), published in 1788 as an appendix to the third edition of his Etudes, relates to this topography. The immediate success of this work is mainly based on exoticism: Bernardin emphasizes the unknown not only in the ideas of his characters, but also in the nature surrounding them, and thus satisfies the post-revolutionary desire of many contemporaries for an idealized virtue and a pure primordial state, such as before the Fall of Man. Being conscious of doing something new, the author in his preface explicitly declares that he had searched for foreign nature and vegetation to serve as the background for his protagonists’ love story. While in prose it was common to show lovers by streams, in meadows or below the foliage of beeches, he had placed them »on the seashore, at the foot of rocks, below the shadow of coconut trees, banana trees and flourishing lemon trees«.1 This exoticism, therefore, is due to Bernardin’s search for a poetological niche. He likewise explains the moral aim of his »pastoral« with his need for innovation: »I’ve desired to reunite the beauty of tropical nature and the moral beauty of a small society«.2 The ethical condition of these humans living in a natural environment finds its outer reflection in a paradisiacal landscape, which, however, appears to be strongly idealized and hardly corresponds to Bernardin’s letters, in which he had complained about unbearable heat and drought. In the novel, nature becomes a refuge for man who has experienced misfortune in civilization. After her husband’s death, the pregnant and impoverished Mme de la Tour can retreat from town to a rocky landscape »as to a nest«.3 The narrator generalizes this as an »instinct of all sensitive and suffering souls« to seek shelter and comfort in a wild and natural environment.4 Nature, however, is not always benevolent, as the hurricane scene in the middle and the storm over the sea at the end of the novel prove. In both cases, however, the destructive power of nature reflects the sensations of the protagonists who, during adolescence, are afflicted by stirring passions. The parallel between inner emotional life and outer nature is particularly obvious in the impressive description of the hurricane. The thunderstorm destroys a part of the idyllic island in which Paul and Virginie have grown up just at the moment when the latter, oppressed by new excitements, is admonished to be virtuous by her mother. The intense description of the hurricane in which the sultriness of nature is discharged serves as a mirror for the emotional state and the spiritual development of man. The paradisical primordial state appears to be limited to childhood innocence and, therefore, must be transitory. Chateaubriand, as well, situates a work of his, Atala (1801), overseas, namely in Louisiana. Although having stayed in America, he himself was not familiar with the Mississippi delta and 1.

»sur le rivage de la mer, au pied des rochers, à l’ombre des cocotiers, des bananiers, et des citronniers en fleurs« (Bernardin 1966, 177).

2.

»J’ai désiré réunir à la beauté de la nature entre les tropiques la beauté morale d’une petite société« (ibid.).

3.

»comme à un nid« (ibid., 83).

4. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »C’est un instinct commun à tous les êtres sensibles et souffrants de se réfugier dans les lieux les plus sauvages et les plus déserts« (ibid.).

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thus had to depict it by means of literary sources, seeing it as a heavily symbolic environment, an Eden with savages not yet spoilt by civilization. This exoticism and yearning for a sane primordial state echoes a post-revolutionary disillusionment. The old Indian Chactas’s narration is preceded by a prologue with an enthusiastic description of a landscape, depicting the tableau of natural harmony destroyed when the Europeans discovered the Mississippi. The characterization of the river banks is based on contrasts: While an impression of vastness, silence and majesty prevails on the western side, the other bank shows a colourful and vivid animal kingdom. This effusive presentation satisfies the readers’ hunger to see, almost enabling them to evoke pictorially the colourful and plentiful fauna and flora. However, in spite of topographical names and a detailed description of animals and plants, this is not a real but an idealized landscape composed of literary elements — though the author assured his contemporaries plausibly that he was depicting reality (Hudde 1982, 146). To the multitude of colours a polyphony is added which fills the deserted country »with a tender and wild harmony«5 behind which the Creator’s Hand can be felt. Nonetheless, in the end, the narrator must capitulate before the mass of indescribable items in these »primitive fields of nature« and has to content himself with the topos of the inexplicable. Chateaubriand adds to this outside view of the former colony the viewpoint of the old Indian Chactas who recognizes nature as a native, describing it in a language rich in imagery (»the genius shook his blue hair«6), but, having visited the France of Louis XIV, he is equally able to concur with French ideas. Thus, he qualifies the loneliness of the American landscape as being »picturesque« and brings his description closer to the imagination of his French listener, René, when talking of the effect of a »tapestry made from white wool« or of »these gleaming hotels prepared by the Great Spirit«.7 In spite of this effusive presentation, the wilderness in Atala seems to be anticipating colonization as the Indians seem to wait for their conversion to Christianity. Before a luxuriant landscape, the missionary holds a Christian service, and, in the face of this wilderness becoming cultivated, the narrator Chactas admires »the triumph of Christianity over wild life«.8 After all, Chateaubriand sees in the primordial state of man as well as in this untouched nature an early state of pre-civilization. An echo of Chateaubriand’s conception of nature and of his enthusiastic picture of primordial American landscape can still be found as late as 1879, when Juan León Mera opens his novel Cumandá o un drama entre salvajes (Cumandá or a Drama amongst Savages) by evoking Atala. Although the Ecuadorian writer had actually visited the primeval forests of the Andes and although he pretends to offer the counter-part to Cooper’s North American forests, his introductory chapter seems to be an imitation of the French author’s topography. His description of the Chimborazo region with its raging torrents and steep mountains is dominated by the impression of a virgin nature explicitly contrasted with the civilized world. For this purpose, the narrator borrows the point of view of a foreign observer who is overwhelmed by this sublime 5.

»d’une tendre et sauvage harmonie«; »champs primitifs de la nature« (Chateaubriand 1964, 73).

6.

»Le Génie […] secouait sa chevelure bleue« (ibid., 85).

7.

»tapisserie en laine blanche«, »ces riantes hôtelleries, préparées par le grand Esprit« (ibid., 95).

8.

»triomphe du Christianisme sur la vie sauvage« (ibid., 112).

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and majestic nature that makes him feel how tiny, weak and transitory mankind is. Finally he realizes that words fail to give an exact idea of this landscape’s beauty, its harmony and the feelings it conveys and which can only be expressed by the word poetry: »here, in the entrails of these forests, which are the daughters of the centuries, it can be felt more vividly, more actively, more strongly than in the noisy and transitory splendour of civilization«.9 Chateaubriand similarly has a late influence on María (1867), the popular novel by the Colombian Jorge Isaacs, who gives a detailed and exact description of the valley of the Cauca River, with its exuberant vegetation and its wild beasts. This is a strongly idealized picture of his country, for in spite of all the dangers hidden in the forests, nature still appears to his first-person narrator Efrain as benevolent as a mother: »the most loving of mothers when pain dominates our soul, and when happiness caresses us, she smiles at us«.10 The Gothic novels flourishing at the turn of the century offer a particular exoticism with the conventional function of creating atmosphere. The story removes the reader from his familiar world, while a sublime and simultaneously threatening landscape prepares the mood for unusual and dreadful events. In an exemplary way, this can be analysed in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), whose plot is situated against the background of the Inquisition in Southern Italy of 1758. Like many other Romantics, Ann Radcliffe describes most of her landscapes second hand, never having visited these regions (Cottom 1985, 38). However, it is not so much the locality itself that is of importance, but rather the ideas it conveys about the characters. On the one hand, their sensations seem to reflect the landscape, on the other, they also appeal to the readers’ imagination. By using Italian stereotypes for her landscape, the author satisfies the readers’ desire for escapism. The scenery around Vesuvius creates an impressive, splendid setting, as ambivalent as the main character, the dark monk Schedoni. The nightly rumbling of the volcano emitting single flames leads to a menacing atmosphere, in addition to being the symbol of sinister passions. Landscape and nature always reflect the mood of the protagonists: »The solemnity of the scene accorded with the temper of his mind«, the inner narrator over-emphasizes the analogy between the perception of nature and the moral condition (Radcliffe 1981, 11). Wild mountain streams, moonlight, the reflection of rocks in the sea as well as the outlines of ruins are part of the scenery. At the same time, the author shifts from shadow to light, from a dark rocky landscape to a view of spaciousness, thus creating an echo of Ellena’s sensations, »whose mind was capable of being highly elevated, or sweetly soothed, by scenes of nature« (90); and the contrast with the »gleams of sunshine-landscape« (254) reinforces the prevailing night scenery. The Romantic villain Schedoni, however, due to the darkness of his soul, remains insensitive to the beauty of this landscape: »Over the gloom of Schedoni, no scenery had, at any moment, power; the shape and paint of external imagery gave neither impression or colour to his fancy«. (255). By contrast, Ellena, innocence pursued, looking at »the lofty region of the mountains«, obtains »temporary, though feeble, relief« (62) by contemplating this sublime nature.

9.

»aquí en las entrañas de estas selvas hijas de los siglos, se la siente más viva, más activa, más poderosa que entre el bullicio y caduco esplendor de la civilzación« (Mera 1976, 46).

10.

»La naturaleza es la más amorosa de las madres cuando el dolor se ha adueñado de nuestra alma; y si la felicidad nos acaricia, ella nos sonríe« (Isaacs 1970, 126).

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The Romantics’ interest in the »naturally sublime« has been understood as a reaction to the Copernican Turn, which had destroyed the geocentric world picture and created a menacing concept of the infinity of space. When the protagonists, however, conceive of nature as creation and recognize it as a revelation of God’s omnipotence, this infinity also offers comfort (Weber 1983, 47; 121). Thus, for Ellena, the mighty landscape loses all its horrors because, behind it, she presumes God’s presence. The key terms »majesty«, »sublime«, and »grandeur« also emphasize the splendour of a nature, which, at the same time, is both threatening and comforting for the protagonists: »with a mind thus elevated, how insignificant would appear to her the transactions, and the sufferings of the world!« (Radcliffe 1981, 90 f.). In these novels, landscape is mainly characterized through its foreign aspects, and the descriptions are largely limited to an outer, visible level: In spite of all its strangeness this nature is not mysterious, but completely related to man and his sensations. By contrast, in German novels of this epoch, the protagonists recognize in the visible nature signs of a secret message addressed to them by the Creator, without being able, however, to decipher this language. It is the artist’s mission to serve as a mediator who provides mankind with at least a vague idea of this message. 2.

The semiotics of nature

To what degree can art conceive the language of nature? Ludwig Tieck poses this question at a central point of his novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (Franz Sternbald’s Ramblings, 1798) which is set in the Middle Ages. On his way to the old hermit who lives in the mountains, Franz is overcome by his impressions of the surrounding nature. Even the bare rocky landscape through which he travels will later prove to be part of a varied and beautiful nature when seen from the top of the mountains. The young painter feels that he himself is being addressed by nature, but is incapable of interpreting its voice, which he thinks is the voice of God. Faced with this harmony, which he compares to organ music, the stammering of art appears to be the expression of incompetence: In a sobering experience, he realizes the gap between infinite nature and the artist’s extremely limited facilities of expression. The latter can only grasp a faint notion of nature, being unable to convey an exact conception of this hieroglyph by which the Creator expresses Himself. The hermit Anselm, a painter himself, confirms Franz’s recognition that God has concealed in the aspects of nature »secret ciphers« that man can identify but not read. As an artist knowing about this semiotic code and, therefore, renouncing a mimetic presentation of landscape and nature, Anselm tries to convey moods in his pictures. That is why art cannot be reproduction, but only allegory. Sternbald himself agrees with this concept: »I do not want to copy trees or mountains, but my soul, my mood which reigns over me at this hour, these I want to fix for myself and to communicate to those who are able to understand«.11 The rejection of a mimetic depiction of nature is characteristic of German Romantics: Their nature

11. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Ich will nicht Bäume und Berge abschreiben, sondern mein Gemüth, meine Stimmung, die mich in dieser Stunde regiert, diese will ich mir selber festhalten, und den übrigen Verständigen mittheilen« (Tieck 1843, 282).

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is mainly based on stereotypes, primarily fulfilling an allegoric function and, thus, is the result of an imaginative effort (Kremer 1997, 49). In his narration Runenberg (Rune Mountain, 1804), Tieck points out this allegory even more clearly, as his protagonist Christian experiences the conflict between the sublime pleasure of art and love on the mountain of runes and the everyday banality of his domestic plight. This flat country stands for piousness, and thus his father warns him of the temptations of the mountains with their steepness and raging streams, of a nature which will finally take possession of Christian. The father’s interpretation reduces landscape (which in no way is a reproduction of reality) to the allegoric function of a playground (ibid.): The real, everyday world contrasts with the unreal world of the fairy tale, the rocks being mirrors of a torn mental landscape, as generally the individual locations have a referential function resulting from the interaction of one location with the other. The artificial locations emerge only from imagination; in their totality, however, they relate to reality. By these means, Tieck realizes the artistic program of his hermit in Sternbald: An immediate reproduction of nature being impossible, the cryptic language has to be transformed into a human, artistic enigma. Thus, the artist becomes the medium of a partial revelation of the deity concealed in nature. »Nature« is also a key-word in Novalis’s fragmentary novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Henry von Ofterdingen, 1802), which deals with the protagonist’s maturation as a poet, and nearly every reference to nature has a meaning beyond the reproduction of the outwardly visible. Set in the Middle Ages, the plot begins with Heinrich’s dream of the Blue Flower he sees against the background of a striking topography. Distance, wilderness, a canyon, a dark forest and finally the clearing on a hill — all these are motifs of Romantic nature, arranged by the author in such a way as to symbolize the movement from darkness to light and the ascent not only as the way to knowledge but also as a secularised form of the quest for salvation. After having heard the story and song of the old miner, Heinrich sees the surrounding nature in a different light and suddenly recognizes the expression of everything familiar and known to man who, however, is unable to understand because nature presents it in such a lavish way. Heinrich obviously perceives his inner world in outer nature. When looking with Klingsohr and Mathilde over the vastness of nature from a hill, he exclaims: »to me, this rich landscape is like inner imagination. How mutable nature is, though immutable its surface seems to be«.12 In this way, nature also bears significance for Novalis by remaining an artificial space, and, naturally, the hermit’s cavern does not mean a real cave, but a subterranean realm that simultaneously contains the secrets of nature and history: In his descent into the interior of the earth, which, at the same time, symbolizes the intrusion into the unconscious, Heinrich finds the Book of Nature that will lead him home (Kremer 1997, 74). In Joseph von Eichendorff ’s narrative writings, landscape does not possess any concrete mimetic relation to reality, but it is part of a semiotic system that must be interpreted by the reader. This is made easy because the reader should be familiar with the semiotic value of these signs, as many German Romantics recur to the same repertory of artificial topoi (Kremer 1997, 49 f.). In spite of its precise localization near Regensburg, the Danubian landscape at the 12.

»die reiche Landschaft ist mir wie eine innere Fantasie. Wie veränderlich ist die Natur, so unwandelbar auch ihre Oberfläche zu seyn scheint« (Novalis 1982, 327).

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beginning of Ahnung und Gegenwart (Presentiment and Presence, 1815) refers to an allegoric significance, for the narrator identifies the whirl in the middle of the stream with a »terrible circle pulling down all life into its unfathomable chasm«13 — a symbol of the conditio humana marked by mortality. Human life appears as a current rushing restlessly to its sinister destination (Seidlin 1985, 36). As Eichendorff tries to give expression to the same existential situations of man, a limited stock of recurring elements is sufficient for his descriptions of nature: moonlight, forest, river and the panorama view from a hill. In his landscapes, the outer world is always closely related to the moods of its observer: »In the morning, the area was sparkling up to their windows in an enchanting gleam. […] the whole scene was extremely pleasant, as if nature in cheerful exuberance had wanted to embellish herself«.14 It is typical of German Romantics to assume a significance behind the visible phenomena of nature, which the artist then tries to communicate to his readers by means of a new coding. For these authors, nature talks to mankind and makes it hear, although not understand, God’s voice. In contrast to these meaningful landscapes, to other contemporaries it is »mute«, void of a sense of its own, being only the echo of human sensations. 3.

Nature as »an expression of relations created in our hearts«

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe anticipates this Romantic vision of nature depending on the individual’s changing moods. In his Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther, 1774; 1787), nature is closely connected to the protagonist’s sentiments: While, at the beginning, Werther enjoys the loneliness of a paradisical landscape where he feels God’s omnipotence, a reversal of events at the end of the first part makes him see nature as a threatening monster, the rural idyll being replaced by a cold, objective outer nature (Schmidt 1998, 763). This concept, then, reappears in Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1802), when Ugo Foscolo opposes the idealized landscape and classless community of the first part to the rest of Italy, which is a locus horribilis torn by civil war (Wehle 1991, 251). The young exiled patriot Jacopo Ortis does not only suffer from the state of Italy but also from the unattainability of his beloved. His letters to his friend Lorenzo, a record of his feelings between hope and despair, prove how deeply the state of mind influences the perception of external nature: According to this view, there is no objective experience of nature. During the walk to the house where Petrarca died it becomes evident that Jacopo, in spite of this exact location in the Euganean Hills near Venice, does not paint a specific topography, but projects his feelings onto the countryside. Retrospectively, he narrates the intense experience of nature to his friend, and although he founds his enthusiasm upon the nature that surrounds him (»I’ve seen Nature more beautiful

13.

»der furchtbare Kreis, der alles Leben in seinen unergründlichen Schlund hinabzieht« (Eichendorff 1977, 450).

14.

»Am Morgen strahlte die Gegend in einem zauberischen Glanze in ihre Fenster herauf. […] das Ganze war ungemein erquicklich, als hätte die Natur aus fröhlichem Übermute sich selber aufschmücken wollen« (ibid., 514).

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than ever«15), the reader accepts as plausible that during a walk Jacopo discovers at the same time his spiritual affinity with nature and his affection for Teresa. The numerous allusions to Dante confirm the stylised and indirect character of the description. Foscolo does not intend to reproduce nature mimetically, but tries to capture the symbolism which man believes to find in it. Jacopo shows a pantheistic attitude in personifying »Night, Sun, Nature« by capitalization and in suspecting behind the sunrise »the care of Deity«.16 In this letter dated 20th of November, he relates the feeling of perfect harmony with nature (»the universe was smiling« and »You would have heard a solemn harmony vaguely spreading«17), but this is primarily based on his own sensations. In his supposed fusion with nature, Jacopo temporarily overcomes his isolation and even qualifies as »miserable« (»sciagurato«) anybody remaining untouched by such a spectacle of nature and not moved to tears of gratitude. Thus the intensity of his experience of nature becomes the benchmark for the sensitivity of the human being. While Teresa is overwhelmed as he is by these impressions and becomes herself the reflection of nature’s beauty (»all her faculties seemed to be invaded by the sacred beauty of landscape«18), her fiancé Odoardo remains unaffected by this beauty, as if he were in nightly darkness or in a hostile desert. Similarly, in his description of Teresa’s kiss, he merges the different feelings of nature and love, and again the depiction of nature acts as a means to explain his own individual affection at a more general level: »Yes, I have kissed Teresa; the flowers and plants at that moment exhaled a sweet scent; all the breezes were harmony«.19 By juxtaposing syntactically the description of the kiss and the experience of nature, Jacopo suggests that this amorous encounter is part of an allembracing harmony — nature seems to resonate his own emotions. The accordance with nature and the perceptible presence of the Creator seem to justify his approaching Odoardo’s fiancée. In the very next letter, though, he expresses a presentiment that not nature itself, but his own emotional condition is responsible for his euphoria, and that external beauty and harmony are projections of his own individual sensations. Generalizing, he even declares love to be the basis of all aesthetic apprehension and reproduction: »Oh Love! The fine arts are your daughters«.20 However, as the outer world is only an echo of individual feelings, the fragility of this harmony between man and nature is already announced. If he should lose Teresa, Jacopo fears, the world to him will appear hostile and menacing: »If you escaped, the World would become inhospitable; the animals would become enemies to each other; the Sun a malicious fire, and the World would become tears, terror and universal destruction«.21 Being a Romantic individual, Jacopo sets his own state of mind as the benchmark of nature. Shortly after he 15.

»Io ho veduto la Natura più bella che mai« (Foscolo 1992, 55).

16.

»Notte […], Sole […], Natura«; »le cure della Divinità« (ibid.).

17.

»l’universo sorridea«; »Avresti udito una solenne armonia spandersi confusamente« (ibid., 55 f.).

18.

»tutte le sue potenze parevano invase dalla sacra beltà della campagna« (ibid., 56).

»Sì; ho baciato Teresa; i fiori e piante esalavano in quel momento un odore soave; le aure erano tutte armo19. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ nia« (ibid., 104). 20. »O Amore! le arti belle sono tue figlie« (ibid., 105). 21.

»Se tu fuggissi, la Terra diverrebbe ingrata; gli animali, nemici fra loro; il Sole, foco malefico; e il Mondo, pianto, terrore e distruzione universale« (ibid.).

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becomes aware that his love cannot be fulfilled, nature, which had made him conceive beauty in accordance with his hope, can no longer offer him any comfort, as it does not exist independently of his sensations. Consequently, he desperately calls for the beauty of a nature which he is no longer able to discern, even though it has remained unchanged: »Where is Nature? Where is its immense beauty?«22 The mountainous landscape of Roja close to the frontier is set in contrast to the domestic landscape near Venice. It is a nature hostile to man, where the harmony of creation can no longer be felt: »Here Nature is lonely and threatening, and expels all the living from this realm«.23 Again, the context explains the perception of nature as resulting from individual sentiments: What appears as the expulsion from nature can be explained by Jacopo’s feelings of guilt at having caused the death of a human being. After leaving the Euganean Hills, he wanders homelessly, recalling again Italy’s political situation, which had momentarily been driven from his consciousness by the thoughts of Teresa and of nature. In Jacopo Ortis, nature is no longer an entity of its own, but has been reduced to a mere echo of human emotions. Senancour’s monological epistolary novel Oberman[n] (1804), a highlight of early Romantic experience of nature, follows Rousseau’s model. The protagonist flees from society, searching in the Swiss Alps for a purity of nature yet unspoiled by the progress of civilization. In letters to his friend, Oberman recalls as a dominating impression the immensity of a landscape experienced visually and acoustically; however, in contrast to Jacopo Ortis, he is well aware of the fact that the perception of nature and landscape results from human projections, instead of being based on objective external characteristics. Man experiences nature as a reflection of his own emotions. »Nature would be mute«, Oberman recognizes in his thirty-sixth letter and continues: »The fertile earth, the immense sky, the passing waters are nothing but an expression of relations created and contained in our hearts«.24 The notion of relations and the idea that only an associative process makes things talk to man are echoes of Diderot’s aesthetics. The third fragment is of programmatic importance for the Romantic concept of nature insofar as Senancour defines the term »Romantic« here with regard to nature and separates this term from the »Romanesque«, which above all appeals to vivid and superficial minds, while the Romantic has its effect on the »profound minds« by evoking true sensitivity. Romantic effects, however, are on the retreat — obviously to the same extent at which civilization progresses. That is why Romantic harmony represents the freshness and the youth of the primordial state. Oberman, accordingly, contrasts the scarcely developed, unspoilt regions to the »old territories«.25 He directly addresses the elite of those »primitive men« still living within society who communicate in a language unknown to the majority, namely the language of natural sensation. It is to these few that he pictures an alpine valley having this Romantic effect. According to this understanding, nature gains beauty only through its observer, therefore Oberman exactly states the position at the mountain slope that the reader’s mind should take. In the following description 22.

»Dov’è la Natura? Dov’è la sua immensa bellezza?« (ibid., 112).

23.

»La Natura siede qui solitaria e minacciosa, e caccia da questo regno tutti i viventi«. (ibid., 160).

24. »La terre féconde, les cieux immenses, les eaux passagères ne sont qu’une expression des rapports que nos cœurs produisent et contiennent« (Senancour 1984, 143). 25.

»terres vieilles« (ibid., 154).

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of this valley, the anthropomorphisms characterize nature as a power directly related to man. Dawn even increases the Romantic effect of the valley. His description is not very precise, but he limits himself to the representation of light and shadow and the effects they have on the observer. The last beams of daylight, he writes, »yellow the numerous chestnut-trees […], they brown the mountains; they ignite the snow; they make the air glow«26 — this picture already anticipates in its pronounced subjectivity elements of impressionistic style. When describing the valley to his friend, Oberman, at the same time, apodictically explains that Romantic nature finds its strongest expression in sounds, because visual perception appeals strongly to the mind, while acoustic perception, sounds as well as silence, can even be felt. Utter silence accompanies the rising darkness and seems to annihilate any feeling for space and time; the horizon can no longer be seen because dusk blurs the transitions between mountains and sky: »the ideas are different, the sensations unknown, you have left common life«, he addresses his imaginary coobserver whom he seems to take with him. This effort to obtain for the reader an idea of the alpine world and its impressions strangely contradicts the notion that any individual experience of nature is based on the inner state of the mind, no other man being able to see the world in the same way. Thus, individual sensations and thoughts, the »relations« already cited, impede the view on the essence of nature: »We see the relations and not the essentials«.27 Natural experience, not being a guarantee for constancy and the »relations« being tied to the individual, has to fade in the end: »Everything imperceptibly decolourizes«.28 Therefore Senancour’s depiction of nature and landscape is neither enthusiastic nor picturesque, but mainly sober. Central to it is a desperate quest for a meaning which appears to be hidden behind the majesty and silence of nature which defy any attempt to decipher it. Nature cannot permanently give comfort, for in the midst of its vastness the individual feels his loneliness on earth. In his novel Geroi nashego vremeni (A Hero of Our Time, 1840), Mikhail Lermontov, who had also worked as a painter, transfers techniques of the visual arts to the literary description of landscape. His protagonist Pechorin, the first-person narrator of the last three sections, seeks identification with nature, which means to him a regression to childhood innocence, in the empty Gud mountains (Marsh 1988, 40). Being a Romantic individual, he distinguishes himself from the other persons by his tight relationship to nature, but his intense feeling of the deserted exotic mountain landscape does not express his innate goodness, rather it is a reflection of nature’s inconsistency and of her moral indifference. The topographical elements are »isolated«, thus producing an interruption of the narrative flow and at the same time the illusion of timeless moments of contemplation which, however, underline the impression of time passing (ibid., 46). Situating Corinne ou l’Italie (Corinne or Italy, 1807) between Northumberland in Northern England and Naples, Mme de Staël makes use of the typical Romantic contrasts between the cold north and the warm south. Although she gives precise descriptions of landscapes, at 26. »jaunissent les nombreux châtaigniers […], ils brunissent les monts; ils allument les neiges; ils embrasent l’air« (ibid., 269). 27.

»Nous voyons les rapports, et non les essences« (ibid., 287).

28. »tout se décolore insensiblement« (ibid., 269).

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least as far as Southern Italy is concerned, she takes less interest in topography itself than in the effects climatic conditions have on man. While cold and mist spoil the pleasure of beautiful landscapes in the north, just like »a wrong note in a concert«, a perfect well-being and the benevolence of nature can be felt in Naples.29 In the same way, the nature of the south in Naples contains vitality and tranquillity and thus satisfies all human desires. Though antiquity is omnipresent in the ruins, vitality still appears to be the predominant feature of Italy. The region around Naples is stylized as a »happy countryside«,30 the preserve of a happy primordial state (Schöning 1999, 59). Nonetheless, the experience of nature remains tightly connected to the mental condition. When returning to Italy Corinne feels nothing but sadness, and even in Tuscany, despite the charming countryside and the view of flourishing Florence, she is melancholic, having just renounced the fulfilment of her love for Oswald. As man is distinctively marked by the individual climatic conditions, the main character cannot feel at home in Britain, with the vegetation and light of the north standing in utmost contrast to her southern native country. »The beautiful sun, the sweet air of my home country was replaced by fog; fruit hardly ever ripened, I never saw any vineyards, flowers were growing only reluctantly«.31 Moreover, the civilization of the north is more advanced, not permitting Corinne to deploy her improvising art based on naturalness, while in Italy she still senses the original harmony of art, nature and mankind (Schöning 1999, 61). According to Mme de Staël’s concept of cultural comparison, man is determined by landscape and nature, but because she contrasts north and south, elements of a precise »national« topography still remain subordinate. This will change with Sir Walter Scott’s novels, which introduce a late phase of the Romantic representation of nature. 4.

Towards »Realism«: Landscape and national identity

In Scott’s novels, nature and landscape obtain a new quality, no longer being the expression of individual sentiment, but necessarily contributing to collective identity. Against the background of the Scottish rebellion of 1745, Scott’s first novel Waverley or ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814) deals with the declining popular culture of the Highlands. It became not only the prototype of the historical novel, but also influenced authors, such as Vigny and Balzac, by combining, for the first time, descriptions of landscape with the problem of cultural identity. In Chapter 22 entitled »Highland Minstrelsy«, Flora Mac-Ivor outlines to the protagonist the function of this patriotic poetry supposed to save Scottish culture from oblivion. When Waverley is led to Flora’s favourite locality where he listens to the folklore of the Highlands, he is confronted with a wild, primordial landscape with mountain torrents, waterfalls, bizarre rock formations and even a »sylvan amphitheatre«. Here Scott defines his understanding of Romanticism when he repeatedly makes the narrator qualify this nature as being »Romantic«. The vast countryside with its 29. »C’est comme un son faux dans un concert« (Mme de Staël 1880, 239). 30. »Cette terre de Naples, cette campagne heureuse« (ibid., 237). 31.

»Le soleil si beau, l’air si suave de mon pays était remplacé par les brouillards; les fruits mûrissaient à peine, je ne voyais point de vignes, les fleurs croissaient languissamment« (ibid., 319).

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vivid past appears to Waverley as »the land of romance«, he himself feeling like »a knight of romance«. The picturesque element of the setting is explicitly denominated: In contrast to the wild nature of the pathway to this location, the place itself is characterized by its »wild beauty« and appears to the observer as »an Eden in the wilderness«. Neither do the few trees added by man spoil the »Romantic wildness of the scene« (Scott 1885, 153). It is this background that Flora has chosen for her patriotic »Battle Song«, the Celtic muse being at home only in these foggy hills with the natural sound of mountain streams. And only the individual who prefers the wild and rocky landscape to the fertile and populated valley can be sensitive to this popular music, which represents the Highlanders’ cultural identity. The description of landscape is functionalised to conjure up a great past and to remind the compatriots of their innate relationship with their wild, picturesque countryside. To the visitor Waverley, »the wild feeling of Romantic delight« is almost painful (154). Scott’s choice of average protagonists embedded in a country that conditions them was imitated throughout Europe. Following the generic conventions, Alessandro Manzoni also situates his historical novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1825/26) in a precise frame of time and space: The Plague of Milan in 1627/28 forms the background for the love story of Renzo and Lucia, the scenery being, besides Milan, the countryside around Lake Lecco, a part of Lake Como. This place is the starting-point of the plot, and its description at an exposed position at the beginning of the novel emphasizes the characteristic closeness of man and nature. The narrator involves the reader in his description, »showing« him the topography, deploying it like a »spectacle« in front of his mental eye. The multitude of allusions, comparisons, and anthropomorphisms makes this landscape appear to have been created for the senses of the observer, whose view the narrator directs. This description over two pages produces an exact idea, making the place recognizable even to the modern observer. It closes with a phrase summarizing the effect of an almost idyllic harmony: »and the delightfulness, the homeliness of these mountain slopes tempers gratefully the wilderness and even intensifies the splendour of the other views«.32 But this initial idyll is destroyed right in the beginning when the cowardly minister Don Abbondio is blackmailed by two »Bravos«; even at the end of the novel, harmony will not be restored, as neither guilt nor sacrifice can be undone. A scene complementary to the introduction sees Renzo return to his vineyard in Lecco — as his vineyard has been destroyed in the meantime, however, he becomes aware that he will not be able to truly come home. The nature that had guaranteed tranquillity and security in the beginning no longer exists and, although it had seemed a timeless paradise, it has now become a space subject to history, in which the protagonists must cope with their fate (Herting 1990, 107). Besides this precise topographic setting, nature also has universal features and, in this, a referential function for human moods as well as for the historical situation. Underneath the superficial structure, an additional level of meaning becomes evident: Firstly, the social aspect under which the description of landscape signifies a threatening situation; for instance, the description of a clear and bright autumn evening with coloured foliage and a setting sun is directly linked with hints at the starving rural population (104). Like other Romantics, Manzoni 32.

»e l’ameno, il domestico di quelle falde tempera gradevolmente il selvaggio, e orna vie più il magnifico dell’altre vedute« (Manzoni 1981, 7).

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also uses the means of contrast when opposing the idyllic scene of Lake Lecco to the fortress of sinister Innominato. As it is set »on the rim of a mount protruding from a harsh chain of hills«, Innominato dominates the valley like »an eagle from his bloody nest«.33 The description of this rough and inhospitable landscape around the castle lying in the dusk fulfils a reflecting function, anticipating this villain’s hostile character, whose mental pains and unexpected conversion will later be announced by means of depicting natural phenomena, such as light effects of sun and moon (Herting 1990, 105). Scott’s novels, translated throughout Europe from 1820, set off numerous imitations. In his early historical novel Cinq-Mars (Cinq-Mars, 1826), Alfred de Vigny follows this model even in describing landscape, for his extensive setting in the Touraine bears, just like the passage in Waverley, nationalistic features. It depicts a perfect and timeless harmony between present and past as well as between man and nature. The attributes of this landscape are purity, fertility, simplicity, and sweetness. Even the ancient, apparently dilapidated buildings are still inhabited by human beings, which, according to the narrator, proves »their love of such a beautiful native country«.34 Geographically as well as climatically, the Touraine appears as the golden mean between northern and southern extremes, and nature, in its turn, has an immediate effect on the character of the people (»sweet like the air they breathe, and strong like the earth they cultivate«35): Their simplicity and earthiness makes them resemble Scott’s Highlanders. As a climax to this general topographic setting, the narrator hints at this country’s importance for French national history; France owes its language as well as its monarchy to this region: »the cradle of the language is there, close to the cradle of the monarchy«.36 Thus, the function of landscape is, superficially, one of projection for the French cultural community and, being the only French province never occupied by enemies, appears to be the predestined starting point of the old aristocracy’s patriotic movement against Richelieu’s centralistic and absolutist efforts that threaten the monarchy. Chapter 23 gives a contrasting description of nature: Although hostile to man and depicted as a locus horribilis, the Pyrenees have a strong attraction, which Vigny is the first poet to discover: »In the middle of this long and superb chain of the Pyrenees which forms the jagged isthmus of the peninsula, in the middle of these blue pyramids covered with snow, forests and meadows, there opens a narrow gorge«.37 Nevertheless it is significant that it is the border country and therefore atypical of France. In a centralist France, Vigny’s effort to include the province in the struggle for national identity appears premature, and in his Journal d’un poète (Poet’s Diary, 1829) he complains about the difficulties of transferring Scott’s model. While the

33.

»sulla cima d’un poggio che sporge in fuori da un’aspra giogaia di monti […] come l’aquila dal suo nido insanguinato « (ibid., 271 f.).

34.

»leur amour d’une aussi belle patrie« (Vigny 1980, 34).

35.

»doux comme l’air qu’ils respirent, et forts comme le sol qu’ils fertilisent« (ibid.).

36.

»le berceau de la langue là, près du berceau de la monarchie« (ibid.).

37.

»Au milieu de cette longue et superbe chaîne des Pyrénées qui forme l’isthme crénelé de la Péninsule, au centre de ces pyramides bleues chargées de neige, de forêts et de gazons, s’ouvre un étroit défilé« (ibid., 377).

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latter’s Scottish readers take a lively interest in every single mountain, French readers remain indifferent towards their provinces. The central theme of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823–46) is the opposition of Old and New World and, linked to this, the conflict between spreading civilization and the immeasurable vastness of untouched nature. His archaic protagonists obtain their rules of behaviour from their confrontation with the American landscape; wishing to escape from the dictates of the masses and from human laws, they seek the solitude of nature. Although descriptions of landscape and nature are of significance for Cooper’s works, they obtain a particular quality in his later novels. Referring to some conventions of landscape painting, with which he had become acquainted in Europe, he makes his American compatriots see their own primordial nature with new eyes (Nevius 1976, 111). His landscapes remind us of a painter’s design as well as of theatre scenery, and, in fact, the narrator emphasizes this resemblance. In spite of its immense vastness, Cooper sees nature primarily related to mankind. In The Deerslayer (1841) he narrates the protagonist’s encounter with Hurry Harry March, making both emerge from »this virgin wilderness«, with centuries-old trees and a cycle of seasons eternally unbroken (Cooper 1987, 16). When placing his characters in a clearing with uprooted trees in the opening scene of The Pathfinder (1840), Cooper equally evokes this theatrical impression, a sort of staging for the four adventurers (Cooper 1981, 8). From their elevated position, they view the landscape, enabling the reader to follow their view: At the beginning and the end of this description, their point of view is clearly emphasized. Thus, the narrator promises a scene »deeply to impress the imagination of the beholder«, and finally resumes: »It was the vastness of the view, the nearly unbroken surface of verdure, that contained the principle of grandeur« (9). In its vastness, Cooper’s landscape is sublime, and this immensity makes young Mabel compare the forest to the ocean, a comparison the narrator himself had already anticipated in his metaphor: »the eye ranged over an ocean of leaves« (8). On his way to Muskrat Castle, a particular landscape unfolds before Deerslayer’s eyes, deeply impressing him by the luxuriance of a prolific nature and by its solitude: »this native scene, which lay bathed in the sunlight, a glorious picture of affluent forest grandeur« (Cooper 1987, 36). In the face of this untouched landscape Deerslayer reverently remarks that God’s hand is still at work. The protagonist is not only moved by the view of the picturesque, but also by an atmosphere of »deep repose« produced by this deserted landscape; thus he feels »that soothing of the spirit which is a common attendant of a scene so thoroughly pervaded by the holy calm of nature« (47). In the middle of the lake, Hutter has built his house on stilts, and this exerts a particular attraction on the observer. By such means, Cooper contrasts the wide primordial landscape with an element of civilization which he had come to know and appreciate during his journey to Europe. The castles in the midst of the European countryside are to him testimonies of history, and, missing them in the New World, he merges real topography with fictional elements, offering to his American readers a collective identity: »the ›associations‹ which originate in the romancer’s imagination survive as vividly as those established by actual history« (Nevius 1976, 95). Honoré de Balzac’s extensive narrative work illustrates the gradual transition from a Romantic concept of nature to a more realistic reproduction of locality. While Romantic elements still persist in his early writings, he increasingly turns to a real setting, because according to the

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scientific findings of his time, man is conditioned by his environment. Writing Le Lys dans la vallée (The Lily in the Valley, 1836) he had already overcome his pretence to become the French Walter Scott, although this foreign model still remains visible in his description of nature. In his view of the Touraine, he merges man and nature into a single entity. The perceptions of his first-person narrator Felix are marked by the interaction of a subjective, individual experience of nature and the aesthetic notions of contemporary France: What had been a wild, uncivilized nature in Scott’s novels is now transformed into a benevolent landscape pervaded by harmony and order. In this early novel, he confers to the topography of the Touraine exactly this »poetry of landscape«, which is felt by the adolescent protagonist Felix on his arrival in the country. His vision remains completely subjective, for he narrates his unhappy love to the married Mme de Mortsauf in retrospect, thus mingling landscape impressions with erotic emotions. Unconsciously to him, his depiction of nature evokes an effect of vulnerability and decay because, while everything is moving and developing, time seems to stand still at Frapesle Castle. By requiring his listener to »frame the whole with ancient walnut trees«,38 Felix tries to fixate this locality outside history and time (Kadish 1987, 131). Felix possesses an almost mystical concept of landscape, which, to him, is synonymous with love and which he identifies entirely with Mme de Mortsauf. Less than nature itself and its innate beauties, he depicts its anthropomorphic features. In his belief that he will find the beloved lady at Frapesle, he also sees the world around him imbued with love, as if it had been tuned to his own state of mind: »Nature had made itself up just like a woman preparing to meet her lover«.39 At the first glance over the valley, the winding river, the rows of poplars, the oak forests and the blurred horizon already appear to be an expression of infinite love. However, this promise proves as deceptive as the monarchist point of view Balzac takes in this novel, and landscape recedes more and more, having been not a real space, but rather a projection of the enthusiastic first-person narrator. Balzac’s overcoming of a Romantic concept of nature becomes particularly evident in his unfinished novel Les paysans (The Peasants, 1844/55). In his introductory letter to his Parisian friend Nathan, the journalist Blondet outlines a scenery with almost bucolic qualities: It is the view of a townsman searching for the beauties of a nature unknown to him and transmitting an effusive depiction of his first impression. Burgundy seems to be the true Arcadia, nature and art being blended in a unique way: »a country where Art finds itself mixed with Nature, without one spoiling the other, where Art seems natural, where Nature is artistic«.40 Blondet believes to have found what he had always been looking for as a result of his reading novels, but here it already becomes evident that his view of reality is reduced by his expectations. His senses react most vividly to this sight as it appears to be destined for a love story. However, when Blondet, just like the reader, prepares himself for a novel about love, he is bitterly disappointed: The subjective sensation of landscape proves to be deceitful, for violence and decay will be the predominant impressions (Grimm 1980, 153). The peasants are not picturesque at all, rather, they 38.

»Encadrez le tout de noyers antiques« (Balzac 1995, 68).

39.

»La Nature s’était parée comme une femme à la rencontre du bien-aimé« (ibid., 73).

»une campagne où l’Art se trouve mêlé à la Nature, sans que l’un soit gâté par l’autre, où l’Art semble na40. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� turel, où la Nature est artiste« (Balzac 1978, 51).

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behave like savages excluded from civilization. They are like animals. By contrasting them in this way to the countryside setting, Balzac destroys the idyll of the rural novel and refuses to fulfil the expectations of his public used to seeing man in a harmonious relationship with the landscape surrounding him. In Les Paysans, the Romantic concept of nature only persists in the first superficial urban view from the outside. Finally, the rude social reality has caught up with the novel, no longer permitting escapism into exotic regions, neither the search for a meaning written into nature by God nor the appeals to the creation of a space of national imagination: The reader is made conscious of the artificial character of these features, which, for more than three decades, had been essential to Romantic prose fiction. Bibliography Balzac, Honoré de. 1978. La Comédie Humaine. ���������������������������������������������������������������� Ed. by Pierre-Georges-Castex. ���������������������������������� Vol. IX. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). ———. 1995. Le Lys dans la vallée. Ed. by Gisèle Séginger. Paris: Librairie Générale Française. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri. 1966. Paul et Virginie. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion. Chateaubriand, François-René de. 1964. Atala; René. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion. Cooper, James Fenimore. 1887. The Deerslayer or, The First War-Path. Historical introduction and explanatory notes by James Franklin Beard. Albany: State of New York UP. ———. 1981. The Pathfinder or The Inland Sea. Ed. with an historical introduction by Richard Dilworth Rust. Albany: State of New York UP. Cottom, Daniel. 1985. The Civilized Imagination: A Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Eichendorff, Joseph von. 1977. Werke in einem Band. Ed. by Wolfdietrich Rasch. München, Wien: Carl Hanser. Foscolo, Ugo. 1992. Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis. Ed. by Guido Bezzola. Milano: Rizzoli. Girardin, René-Louis de. 1777. De la composition des paysages, ou Des moyens d’embellir la Nature autour des habitations, en joignant l’agréable à l’utile. Genève, Paris: Delaguette. Grimm, Reinhold F. 1980. »Natürliche Gesellschaft — gesellschaftliche Natur. Zur Auflösung des Idyllischen in den Landromanen Balzacs«. Honoré de Balzac. Ed. by Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Karlheinz Stierle and Rainer Warning. München: Fink. 143–174. Groh, Ruth and Groh, Dieter. 1991. Weltbild und Naturaneignung: Zur Kulturgeschichte der Natur. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1996. Die Außenwelt der Innenwelt: Zur Kulturgeschichte der Natur II. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Herting, Joachim. 1990. »Renzos und Lucias Landschaften: Erzähltechnik und Funktionen von Naturbeschreibungen in Alessandro Manzonis I promessi sposi«. Italienische Studien. 12: 97–107. Hudde, Hinrich. 1982. »Naturschilderung bei den Rousseau-Nachfolgern«. Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft: Europäische Romantik II. Ed. by Klaus Heitmann. Wiesbaden: Athenaion. 135–152. Isaacs, Jorge. 1970. María. Ed. by Donald McGrady. Barcelona: Editorial Labor. Kadish, Doris Y. 1987. The Literature of Images: Narrative Landscape from »Julie« to »Jane Eyre«. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP. Kremer, Detlef. 1997. Prosa der Romantik. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. Le Gall, Béatrice. 1966. »Le paysage chez Mme de Staël«. Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France. 66: 38–51. Manzoni, Alessandro. 1981. I promessi sposi. Ed. by Vittorio Spinazzola. Milano: Garzanti. Marsh, Cynthia. 1988. »Lermontov and the Romantic Tradition: The Function of Landscape in A Hero of our Time«. Slavonic and East European Review. 66: 35–46. Mera, Juan León de. 1976. Cumandá o un drama entre salvajes. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.

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Nevius, Blake. 1976. Cooper’s Landscapes: An Essay on the Picturesque Vision. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: California UP. Novalis. 1982. Werke in einem Band. Ed. by Hans-Jürgen Mähl and Richard Samuel. München, Wien: Hanser. Radcliffe, Ann. 1981. The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents: A Romance. Ed. by Frederick Garber. Oxford et. al.: Oxford UP. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1964. Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. Ed. by Jacques Voisine. Paris: Garnier Flammarion. Rusam, Anne Margret. 1992. Literarische Landschaft: Naturbeschreibung zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne. Wilhelmsfeld: Egert. Schmidt, Alfred. 1998. »Natur«. Goethe-Handbuch. Vol. 4/2. Ed. by Hans-Dietrich Dahnke and Regine Otto. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. 755–776. Schöning, Udo. 1999. »Die Funktionalisierung des Ortes in Mme de Staëls Corinne ou l‘Italie«. Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte. 23: 55–67. Scott, Sir Walter. 1885. Waverley or ’tis Sixty Years Since. Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black. Seel, Martin. 1991. Eine Ästhetik der Natur. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Seidlin, Oskar. 1985. Versuche über Eichendorff. 3rd edition. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Senancour, Etienne-Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Ignace Pivert de. 1984. Obermann. Ed. by ������������������������������� Beatrice Didier. Paris: Librairie Générale Française. Staël, Mme de. 1880. Corinne ou l’Italie. Nouvelle édition. Ed. by N. de Saussure. Paris: Charpentier. Tieck, Ludwig. 1843. Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen: Eine altdeutsche Geschichte. Schriften. Bd. 16. Berlin: G. Reimer. Vigny, Alfred de. 1980. Cinq-Mars. Préface de Pierre Gascar. Ed. by Annie Picherot. Paris: Gallimard. Weber, Ingeborg. 1983. Der englische Schauerroman. München, Zürich: Artemis und Winkler. Wehle, Winfried. 1991. »Italienische Modernität: Foscolos Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis: Abschied von der Ästhetik der Naturnachahmung«. Romantik: Aufbruch zur Moderne. Ed. by Karl Maurer and Winfried Wehle. München: Fink. 235–273.

Mountain landscape and the aesthetics of the sublime in Romantic narration Paola Giacomoni Any man who observes nature is always inclined to question its precise order. The analogies and regularities of natural phenomena have often suggested a predetermined design, a benign creator, a sublime artist: thus nature appears to be his masterpiece. The persuasive quality of the so-called physical-theological proof of the existence of God is well known, a theory that perceives the creator’s perfection in the incredible and spectacular workings of the cosmos. The knowledge gained from the examination of the order and harmony of the universe suggests an aesthetic dimension which, born from the thrill of wonder and amazement, rises to beauty or to the sublime. But even the most convinced supporters of natural theology, which was a particularly popular theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, used for justifying and singing the praises of the cosmos, cannot fail to see certain incongruities or irregularities, not obvious enough to cause doubt in the unity of nature, but certainly enough to render its reconstruction more complicated. As far as the origins of the universe are concerned, not everything appears to be ascribable to a perfect and conclusive order, to a harmonious and totally regulated cosmos, especially since, in this era, it is understood that nature possesses a history of its own, and it can be viewed as transformation. One of the most difficult issues which comes to the fore in the »earth sciences« is the »unevenness« of the earth’s crust which is visibly recognisable in mountain landscapes. Ever since ancient times theoretical speculation on nature has been unable to overlook the question of the imperfections of the earth’s crust, of its imprecise geometrical conformation. While a sort of empathy for a nature which was represented by the locus amoenus, a relaxing and pleasant type of country landscape bearing the signs of man’s »interventions of advancement«, was established very early on, for a long time the phenomena representing nature’s wilder side carried no positive meaning and were described as loci horridi. For a long time nature was merely a place for refuge, for rural peace, not a place in which to search for deeprooted emotions or an aestheticism of contrasts. In modern times, as step by step technical instruments such as the telescope and the microscope opened up new horizons, philosophers and scientists gradually realised that what they had before them was a cosmos, the order of which appeared more and more complex, in which unclassifiable phenomena were more and more numerous and frequent. This scientific and philosophical attitude, particularly starting from the eighteenth century, brings a new sensitivity that ascribes aesthetic worth to the beauty of wild and irregular landscapes. It follows that anything which does not appear to comply with a certain universal law or rule, which appears to be irregular or even deformed, opens up a whole new dimension of beauty, which goes far beyond convention. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke’s theorisation of the sublime clarifies a new idea of beauty, which highlights the central position of terror as a basis for modern sensitivity to anything which flouts the rules of classical reason. The revival of Longinus’s ancient theory concerning the sublime as opposed to the beautiful marks a turning point in

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eighteenth-century aesthetics: the elements of vastness, of potency and of irregularity illustrated by Burke, which dominate the faculties of the human mind, reappear later in Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgement, 1790), a systematic proposal of a renewed aesthetics, open to the conflicting elements which are expressed in the idea of the sublime. They rise, in fact, from our consideration of a nature less automatically geared towards man’s well-being, at times mysteriously destructive, yet for that very reason captivating, in a completely new way. The direct knowledge of mountain landscapes, which educated travellers acquired through study-trips, becomes in this sense crucial. Already at the end of the seventeenth century it had appeared to some scientists, such as Thomas Burnet, as the result of the fall or the destruction of a previous world of perfection, a spoilt paradise, which cannot be considered a divine creation but more likely the result of a catastrophe similar to the Deluge. However, at the beginning of the following century its attraction begins to produce such ideas as the »terrible joy« of John Dennis and the »agreeable kind of horror« of Joseph Addison. This compels the scientist to reformulate his theory of an all-comprehensive cosmos in a more complex manner, taking into consideration the conflicting and dynamic phenomena which are expressed in the earth’s morphology. Simultaneously it challenges the writer to use a new and daring type of language, a language which recognises and accepts the transgression and the discontinuity, and converts them into the positive value of fragment poetry, or exhibits them in a prose which is often written in letter style in order to give as much room as possible to a new individuality. The sensation of impending catastrophe provoked by mountain landscape and the sublime which it inspires represents a dynamic element, a place of transformation. 1.

Rousseau

The famous story of the two lovers of different social class, whose love is opposed by social conventions, is set near Lake Geneva, in the middle of Nature, which however has little significance within the entirely »sentimental« plot of the novel. Nature in the novel expresses and reflects human emotions, its presence gives them a »setting«, providing them with a suitable background. Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (Julie or the New Heloise) wins considerable acclaim in Europe in 1761. Among the reading public, it starts a definite fashion for Switzerland as a »romantic« country. Despite the setting, Rousseau is not particularly adept at describing and comprehending nature. However, it does appear, at least as a background, in two decisive moments, in the scene of the kiss and in that of the separation that paves the way for the scene of seduction. The first scene takes place in a wood, a typical locus amoenus, suitable for a meeting between lovers, while the separation takes place during an excursion made by Saint-Preux, to the Vallese Mountains in the great Rodano valley, which leads to the Gottard, surrounded by spectacular glaciers. The famous letter XXIII is similar to Petrarca’s letter from Mont-Ventoux: the landscape is explicitly considered from the viewpoint of someone who is focused on his own emotions. But the landscape also distracts, drawing the character out from the closeness of his own interior world, placing him before something that by no means leaves one indifferent.

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Sometimes huge cliffs hung like ruins above my head. Sometimes high and thundering waterfalls drenched me in their thick fog. Sometimes a perpetual mountain stream opened by my side an abyss the depth of which eyes dared not fathom. On occasion I got lost in the darkness of a dense wood. On others, on emerging from a chasm a pleasant meadow suddenly delighted my sight. A surprising mixture of wild and cultivated nature revealed throughout the hand of men, where one would have thought they had never penetrated […] It was not only man’s labor that made this strange countryside so oddly contrasted; nature also seemed to take pleasure in striking an opposition to herself, so different did one find her in the same place at various angles (Rousseau, trans. Stewart 1997, 63).1

The mountain appears as a place of opposing elements: a combination of garden and ancestral wood, a locus amoenus poised precariously upon a landslide. This is what Rousseau’s hypersensitivity immediately captures: the emergence of contrasts, the confusion of the elements. Nature herself is not simple and refuses to follow one single line of expression. It is a different shifting nature, a »new world«, governed by different rules, inhabited by extravagant flora and fauna in a strange climate. It is not the same world which we are already familiar with on the plains, it is a world of highly concentrated variety, of an almost exotic, uncommon beauty, unknown and surprising. Rousseau loves to walk in the midst of nature, in the woods and over meadows; he dislikes bare rocks. He observes from below a world, the origins and structure of which do not particularly interest him, though he does recognise its potency. What he does grasp is the powerful influence upon the soul. Nature, though silent and motionless, is never inexpressive: it can affect human passions and has a surprisingly calming effect upon them. Even if one reaches a high perspective from which it is possible to observe the formation of hurricanes down below, the sensation is nonetheless one of serenity. Paradoxically, Rousseau describes a world that, due to its absence of simplicity, corresponds perfectly to a complex and destructive sensitivity, such as that which the writer projects through Saint-Preux. Nothing can represent the novel’s lavish descriptions of lacerating conflicts, like this landscape can. In fact there is a sort of symmetry to the irregularity, the »mixture« of elements of the inorganic blend with the confused sentimental situation of the protagonist. Ascension is nonetheless considered, in a Petrarchan way, as a spiritual ascent, as a purification. A metaphorical elevation occurs in relation to all that which appears tied to the earth, opposing a spiritual force of gravity which binds us invincibly to passions and desires. Meditations there take on an indescribably grand and sublime character, in proportion with the objects that strike us, an indescribably tranquil delight that has nothing acrid or sensual 1. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Tantôt d’immenses roches pendoient en ruines au dessus de ma tête. Tantôt de hautes et bruyantes cascades m’inondoient de leur épais brouillard. Tantôt un torrent éternel ouvroit à mes côtés un abîme dont les jeux n’osoient sonder la profondeur. Quelquefois je me perdois dans l’obscurité d’un bois touffu. Quelquefois, en sortant d’un gouffre une agréable prairie rejouissoit tout à coup mes regards. Un mélange étonnant de la nature sauvage et de la nature cultivée, montroit par-tout la main des hommes, où l’on eut cru qu’ils n’avoient jamais pénétré […]. Ce n’étoit pas seulement le travail des hommes qui rendoit ces pays étranges si bizarrement contrastés; la nature sembloit encore prendre plaisir à s’y mettre en opposition avec ellemême, tant on la trouvoit différente en un même lieu sous divers aspects« (Rousseau 1964a, 77).

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about it. It seems that by rising above the habitation of men one leaves all base and earthly sentiments behind, and in proportion as one approaches ethereal spaces the soul contracts something of their inalterable purity. There, one is grave without melancholy, peaceful without indolence, content to be and to think: all excessively vivid desires are blunted; they lose that sharp point that makes them painful, they leave deep in the heart nothing but a light and sweet emotion, and thus it is that a favorable climate causes passions to contribute here to man’s felicity which elsewhere make for his torment. I doubt that any violent agitation, any case of vapors could stand up to a comparably prolonged sojourn, and I wonder that baths of the salutary and beneficial air of the mountains have not become one of the principal remedies of medicine and morality (ibid., 64).2

All is carried up high, abandoning that which is heavy, that which is most tied to the earth’s surface. We are not dealing here merely with the Longinian theme of the great and the elevated — the sublime — but also with the much more modern subject of the sublimation, of the dislocation of entirely earthly impulses and instincts into thoughts of a higher order, into wider dimensions, of a less personal nature. As Weiskel argued (1986, 30), sublime and sublimation are closely related: sublimation implies the passage from the »natural« impulse of love to a substitutive and erotic-objective which dampens the energy in the passage from an earthly »low« to a spiritual »high«. In the same way the disproportion between the potency of an object and the mind necessitates metaphorical language, because of the insufficiency of ordinary language. In both cases the necessity of going beyond nature becomes the primary requirement. And this requires a new capacity for seeing and above all a new capacity for feeling. Indeed, the mountain landscape »has something indescribably magical and supernatural about it that ravishes the spirit and the senses« (Rousseau, trans. Stewart 1997, 65),3 in which it is difficult to get one’s bearings: a whole new world has been discovered. 2.

Goethe Did it really have to be like this? — that the source of Man’s contentment becomes the source of his misery? […] At other times, when I gazed from the crags across the river to those hilltops yonder, taking in the entire fertile valley and seeing all about me burgeoning and putting forth

2.

»Les méditations y prennent je ne sais quel caractere grand et sublime, proportionné aux objets qui nous frappent, je ne sais quelle volupté tranquille qui n’a rien d’acre et de sensuel. Il semble qu’en s’élevant au dessus du séjour des hommes on y laisse tous les sentimens bas et terrestres, et qu’à mesure qu’on approche des régions éthérées l’ame contracte quelque chose de leur inaltérable pureté. On y est grave sans mélancolie, paisible sans indolence, content d’être et de penser: tous les désirs trop vifs s’émoussent; ils perdent cette point aigue qui le rend douloureux, ils ne laissent au fond du Cœur qu’une émotion légère et douce, et c’est ainsi qu’un heureux climat fait servir à la félicité de l’homme les passions qui font ailleurs son tourment. Je doute qu’aucune agitation violente, aucune maladie de vapeurs put tenir contre un pareil séjour prolongé, et je suis surpris que des bains de l’air salutaire et bienfaisant des montagnes ne soient pas un des grands remèdes de la médicine et de la morale« (Rousseau 1964a, 78).

3.

»Le spectacle a je ne sais quoi de magique, de surnaturel qui ravit l’esprit et les sens« (Rousseau 1964a, 79).

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new life; when I saw the mountains, clad from foot to peak with thick and mighty trees, and the winding valleys shaded by the most delightful woods, and the river flowing gently amongst the whispering reeds and mirroring the lovely clouds which a soft evening breeze wafted across the heavens at such times, […] how ardently my heart embraced it all: I felt as if I had been made a god in that overwhelming abundance, and the glorious forms of infinite Creation moved in my soul, giving it life […]. It is as if a curtain had been drawn from before my soul, and this scene of infinite life had been transformed before my eyes into the abyss of the grave, for ever open wide. […] what wastes my heart away is the corrosive power that lies concealed in the natural universe — in Nature, which has brought forth nothing that does not destroy both its neighbour and itself (Goethe 1989, 65 f.).4

In the typical appearance of a view from above, spaciously widespread and rich in detail, the function of mountain landscape immediately appears to be ambivalent. From beginning to end, Goethe’s literary and scientific career is accompanied by a passion for rocks and stones, which he collects in large quantities throughout all of his travels, and which inspire interesting scientific essays and famous poems. It is not only the world of living nature which captures his interest, but also the »inorganic« world, with its subterranean secrets, which he had occasion to examine during his appointment at the Ilmenau mines, and the »irregularities« of the earth’s surface which, from 1775 onwards, he covered during his Alpine excursions. He used this direct knowledge of mountain landscapes for the settings and background of many of his novels, often characterised by a typical ambivalence. In Werther (1774) and in the three versions of Wilhelm Meister, the mountain landscape is both a place of great serenity, of unshakeable strength, of solid meridianity, and a disquieting, dangerous and demonic place. At the beginning of Werther, the protagonist wanders in the forest of Wahlheim reading Homer, and the image is of a locus amoenus: green hills, gently running rivers, all seen from the top of a mountain which looks out over a vast, calm, serene and patriarchal landscape. Nature in its variety appears as an abundance of shapes arranged harmoniously to correspond with the gladness of a heart which lives »days as happy as any God sets aside for his saints« (Goethe, trans. Hulse 1989, 44).5 The natural setting reflects and projects the sentiments of the leading character, his initial naive and happy love for Lotte, which gradually deteriorates until the final tragedy, which conversely is accompanied by a dark and tormented horizon. In the letter of

4.

»Müßte denn das so sein, daß das, was des Menschen Glückseligkeit macht, wieder die Quelle seines Elendes würde? […] Wenn ich sonst von Felsen über den Fluss bis zu jenen Hügeln das fruchtbare Tal überschaute und alles um mich her keimen und quellen sah; wenn ich jene Berge, vom Fuße bis auf zum Gipfel, mit hohen, dichten Bäumen bekleidet, jene Täler in ihren mannigfaltigen Krümmungen von den lieblichsten Wäldern beschattet sah, und der sanfte Fluß zwischen den lispelnden Rohren dahingleitete und die lieben Wolken abspiegelte, die der sanfte Abendwind am Himmel herüberwiegte […] wie faßte ich das alles in mein warmes Herz, fühlte mich in der überfließenden Fülle wie vergöttert, und die herrlichen Gestalten der unendlichen Welt bewegten sich allbelebend in meiner Seele. […] Es hat sich vor meiner Seele wie ein Vorhang weggezogen, und der Schauplatz des unendlichen Lebens verwandelt sich vor mir in den Abgrund des ewig offenen Grabes. […] mir untergräbt das Herz die verzehrende Kraft, die in dem All der Natur verborgen liegt; die nichts gebildet hat, das nicht seinen Nachbar, nicht sich selbst zerstörte« (Goethe 1981,VI.1: 51).

5.

»Ich lebe so glückliche Tage, wie sie Gott seinen Heiligen aufspart« (ibid., VI.1: 28).

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12th October »Ossian has ousted Homer from my heart« (ibid., 95)6 and the setting changes: no longer do calm streams flow down from the mountains but stormy winds and the wails of the »spirits of the caverns«, destructive and perturbing elements, arise: natural ingredients, unchanged in their physical consistency, now veer towards the horrific, in accordance with the leading character’s changed existential being. In Mignon’s song from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years, 1795/96), the Italian landscape appears to be emblematically pleasant, from its »blue skies« to its lemon trees and orange leaves, but at the same time it is overshadowed by mountains covered in clouds and mist, by caverns home to the traditional dragons and by clefts from which menacing torrents flow freely. Moreover, the delineation of Mignon’s character has a lot in common with this background. The girl dressed in men’s clothes, the incompletely formed androgynous being, this dark-skinned creature with irregular features, who expresses herself better with music than with words, feels both nostalgia for Italy, for Lake Como where she was born, and an instinctive desire to climb to the edge of the snow at the top of the mountains, with the lightness of a bird, the skill of an acrobat. The mystery of her fleeting and disquieting nature is explained later in the well known story of the unwitting incestuous relationship between Augustin and Sperata in book VIII, which decidedly makes Mignon the symbol of a nature made up of many faces, not all harmonious, but all necessary to the world of man as well as of other natural beings. Furthermore, in the Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeymanship, 1821, 2nd edition 1829), the third version of Meister, Mignon makes yet another appearance, in the portrait which an artist has painted of a girl-boy, against a background of sheer cliffs, waterfalls and mountain gorges (a situation gracefully depicted, yet nonetheless narrow and menacing, with no visible means of communicating with the rest of the world), as well as the inevitable caves inhabited by dragons but rich in sparkling crystals (Goethe 1981, 227 f.). Mignon is placed between the Mediterranean beauty of the lake and the disquieting mountain landscape, depicted intentionally in a mysterious version, rich in perfect geometrical mineral forms as well as, at the same time, traditional dark beings, evoked or imagined. The entire story of Wanderjahre is colored by the importance of the mountain environment: right from the first scene in which Wilhelm, under the shade of a great rock, situated near a steep footpath, is joined by his son Felix, who, having found some stones and believing them to be gold, wishes to know their nature. In the scene which depicts the meeting with JarnoMontan, Felix once more expresses his curiosity for the world of rocks and stones. Montan, who has in the meantime become a seeker of crystals and therefore perfectly adept in this Alpine setting, answers the boy’s questions in one of the many scenes set high up in the mountains, and in which, in just a few lines, the landscape below is described according to Goethe’s theories on geology. »Right now you’re sitting on one of the oldest mountains in the world« says Montan to Felix, and, when asked if the world were created all in one go, he answers: »It’s very unlikely: important things take time«.7 6.

»Ossian hat in meinem Herzen den Homer verdrängt« (ibid,, VI.1: 82).

7. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »du gegenwärtig auf dem ältesten Gebirge […] dieser Welt sitzest«; »Schwerlich, gut Ding will Weile haben« (ibid., VIII.3: 31, 32).

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The idea is the same as that which Goethe had already expressed in 1784 in his essay on granite, which picked up on Adam Gottlob Werner’s geological theories: granite, which is the main component of the western Alps as well as of the Harz, is the emblem of primary rocks, the first to be formed, slowly, by water crystallisation, while the other sedimentary or conglomerate rocks are much more recent. Although this classification was historically overthrown by research carried out by the British geologists Hutton and Lyell at the end of the century, it did however represent valid criteria of scientific analysis as well as of personal research for Goethe. Sitting on a high bare peak, looking down upon a vast region, I’m able to say to myself: you are right on top of a foundation which goes to the very heart of the earth, no recent layers, no haphazard pile of ruins separates you from the firm surface of the original world itself, you are not walking now as in those beautiful fertile valleys where your feet tread upon tombs, these peaks have neither produced nor devoured a living thing, they are before all life and above all life.8

The inorganic here exercises a new attraction as an element totally without life, as possible evidence of what preceded life itself, of that which sits, silent and immovable, at the basis of our very being, before all movement, before all life or death. A sure foundation connected to the centre of the earth, a simple and abstract, primordial world, pure, barely formed rock, but directly linked to the origins, the silent and compact cosmos, untouched by birth and putrefaction, a sidereal, enigmatic world endures, in parts, still visible in its essentiality. In this case the granite does not represent a place of disquieting spectres but is rather the image of a primordial world as yet untouched by throbbing life; the empiric and symbolic experience of a primal solidity of being, of a restrained, apparently denied, genesis. Granite is, according to Goethe, the most profound of rocks, if not the terrestrial nucleus, of which we are denied first hand experience; it is at least its innermost skin. And quiet and still, it crouches below the earth’s surface, while its backbone rises high in the mountains; granite is simultaneously the highest and most profound, »das Höchste und das Tiefste« (ibid., 254). Although not described in so many words, the stability and solidity symbolised by the granite is clearly recognisable in several scenes of the Wanderjahre: for example, it can be found in the warm and safe environment which is the setting for the story of Saint Joseph the second, the story of a mountain nativity. Here, in this context, comes the affirmation that life in a mountain environment has a more humane quality than life on the plains, because men, though they may appear less intimate, by necessity of the situation live more closely together. Ambivalence then is the dominating feature of mountain landscapes in Goethe’s literature: solidity, the moving closeness of the world’s origins, as well as perturbing effects, still tied to mysterious spectres and to an inextinguishable element of menace, which however do not represent an impediment to knowledge or experience, but rather present an element of new attraction which expresses well the conflicting emotions of modern man. 8.

»Auf einem hohen, nackten Gipfel sitzend und eine weite Gegend überschauend, kann ich mir sagen: Hier ruhst du unmittelbar auf einem Grunde, der bis zu den tiefsten Orten der Erde hinreicht, keine neuere Schicht, keine aufgehäuften zusammengeschwemmten Trümmer haben sich zwischen dich und den festen Boden der Welt gelegt, du gehst nicht wie in jenen fruchtbaren schönen Tälern, über ein anhaltendes Grab, diese Gipfel haben nichts Lebendiges erzeugt und nichts Lebendiges verschlungen, sie sind vor allem Leben und über alles Leben« (ibid., XIII.1: 255).

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Ludwig Tieck

The complexity and myriad definitions of the world of rocks and mountains emerge quite clearly in some of Ludwig Tieck’s more famous novellas, such as Der blonde Eckbert (Eckbert the Fair, 1797), or Der Runenberg (Rune Mountain, 1804). In both cases the mountain appears above all as a refuge from an unhappy present: we see this in the story Eckbert’s wife Bertha tell, with sinister overtones, of her departure from a poor family to whose welfare she was incapable of contributing in any way. Her flight takes her to a mountain village, which, set among bare rocks, appears initially to be desolate, but which later, with its woods and valleys, turns out to be welcoming, protective, silent and enchanted, almost a passage from hell to paradise (Tieck 1985, 130). The old lady whom Bertha meets, all dressed in black, has all the characteristics of the menacing, demonic being, living alone in the woods, capable of communicating with animals, therefore nearer to nature and its secrets. However, her house in the woods is clean and tidy and Bertha is welcomed with warmth and kindness. So, above all, the search for an identity which has been denied is set in a place which is full of mystery but not oppressive; the old woman, its tutelary spirit, is arcane but ready to offer assistance to a solitary soul. Bertha, a simple creature, is impervious to the strange surroundings and learns from the old lady things which her parents had refused to teach her, and more precisely the possibility of constructing one’s personality through reading and writing. Later Bertha, portrayed in a condition of solitude, using the common expedient of a challenge, finally achieves serenity and stability, and understands that it is possible to be perfectly happy in a simple and solitary but not hostile world, a world in which the imagination can run away with itself and develop freely. The mountain landscape is shown as a possible Eden, perceived by a sensitive soul as a chosen place, where, in the search for identity, one may find temporary sustenance, as well as a place from which to strike out for freedom. In fact, in a subsequent moment of solitude, the girl begins to feel, along with the sensation of safety that the woods generate in her, a new and typically romantic restlessness: the ardent desire to see the world, to experience new emotions. Having decided to leave, Bertha assumes a part of the identity of the old lady, taking with her the enchanted bird and some of the old lady’s precious stones which the bird produces. And at this point everything goes terribly wrong: disobedience towards a demonic being unleashes all the destructive potential of which the mountain landscape is the expression. The precious stones represent wealth, which however is incapable of alleviating the pain of her parents’ death, and moreover becomes a source of anxiety, when, once married to Eckbert, she has a constant fear of being robbed. Eckbert, when confiding in his friend Walther, describes Bertha as unique, and attributes her strange character to the solitary and enchanted place in which she previously lived, that sort of mysterious Eden which has made her special. Besides, Eckbert too is portrayed as a solitary cavalier, melancholy and sensitive, living on the slopes of the Harz, therefore the union is based on an affinity of souls to which the mountain environment, distant and mysterious, is well suited. The final plot, with the revelation of the unwitting incestuous relationship between Eckbert and Bertha, somewhat like the incest theme in Goethe, adds dark overtones to the narrative, and together with the discovery of the old lady’s transfigurations, casts an arcane shadow over the whole story. This closes in an emblematically Romantic manner, in which the

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landscape represents perfectly the emotional conditions of the characters. Sensitivity, mystery, exchange of identity, hermitage and exclusive friendships, mixed with suspicion which is linked to an attraction for precious stones, make up the typical aspects of an atmosphere in which the landscape is not merely an irrelevant backdrop, but the natural setting for all that which appears conflicting, lacerating and disturbing. The Runenberg too, which, like Der blonde Eckbert, was included in the Phantasus collection, illustrates the story of a solitary soul who, feeling trapped by everyday life, chooses the mountain landscape as a pleasant and welcome refuge, but who discovers instead, among the cliffs and crevices (Tieck 1985, 185), a whole new country, a »new world«. The Runenberg also exploits a fascination for the life of the crystal seeker, and for the algid and abstract seduction of stones. More generally, the whole world of minerals assumes here a primeval attraction, the seduction of an eternal and incorruptible world, steeped in absolute light and perfection. Here we find the image of an unforgettable beauty in the brief glimpse of the woman amongst the ruins at the Runenberg, the sinuous and magnificent body of »beauty in the woods«, who magically appears amongst the rocks and crystals. The combined sorcery of the stones and the woman’s beauty come together in a symbol of perfection, in relation to which all life-forms appear as wounds, as a sort of violation of a bright and uncorrupted body. When the protagonist tears at a root, he hears the lament of a living but unhappy underworld, in which the plants talk not of the abundance of growth and life, but of pain, of the world’s suffering. The typical Romantic consonance with a disquieting, irregular and mysterious world, perfectly illustrated by Tieck, becomes moreover the symbol of original perfection, in relation to which any generation appears as a decline or laceration. The contrast between the world of stones and the living world is in fact presented as the contrast between the eternal and the perishable, between that which lasts forever such as an image of ideal beauty and that which is generated, and through putrefaction changes. The wild sterility of the mountains does not lessen in value when compared to the richness of the plains: on the contrary, its disorderliness is now reversed. And it becomes the lasting and perfect order of the geometry of minerals. The brightness of the stones becomes the symbol of the brightness of the soul, its attraction is irresistible and the protagonist of Runenberg, even after having discovered the peace and sweetness of family life, the experience of becoming a father, is unable to resist it. His choice of a normal life, though well deliberated, is not enough to keep him away from the wild call of the mountains or the abstract appeal of the minerals. According to Tieck, only in minerals can real beauty be found, a beauty that cannot be touched, cannot be destroyed by the bland replica of simple human beauty. And the final outcome of ruin, of family abandonment and the subsequent return to the village with the illusion of wealth, does not dissolve the arcane appeal of a gelid rather than human beauty, in relation to which the protagonist’s emotions are intimate, clear and taut. The reason for Tieck’s attraction to the world of stones is linked closely to his interest in Naturphilosophie, to his friendship with Henryk Steffens, a pupil of Schelling, and to his interest in the hidden, mysterious world of caves and minerals, which is also characteristic of Novalis. The mountain interior, the grottos; all that which represents a mysterious and unreachable abyss, is in fact the object of a great deal of interest, given that it may be considered an archive, a repository rich in documentation on the earth’s origins and consequently on everything else.

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If it may be said that the living world is at the heart of Naturphilosophie, then the fascination of minerals represents the attraction of all that which is perceived as primeval, original, to which even the essence of human life can be traced. Tieck’s style produces darker overtones than that of Goethe and the literary transfiguration which he formulates from cold metal and gelid minerals deals with the subject of origin and essence, set beyond time, in an abstract and ideal dimension. This dimension however can turn out to be concrete if interpreted as a source of wealth, converted in the form of currency. If the earth is the beginning of everything, then paradoxically all else must be considered in terms of decadence, corruption, putrefaction, therefore as pain and unhappiness. Here, in a manner far more abstract than that employed by Goethe, the stability of minerals represents the culmination of a perfection and of an aesthetic, which however recognises also the irregularity and sinister aspects of the mountain environment. This realm has become an apt symbol of the complexities of the Romantic spirit. 4.

Ugo Foscolo Shine, come forth and shine, Nature. Comfort human beings for their worries. You’ll never shine again for me. I’ve known all of your charms; I’ve worshipped you. Your beauty has brought joy into my life. But that was while I saw you as beautiful and kind — when you spoke to me with a divine sweetness to tell to keep on living. But in my hopelessness I have pictured you with hands dripping wet from blood; the fragrance of your flowers was like poison to me; your fruit tasted bitter. You seemed to be a cannibal devouring his own children. The one difference is that you use your beauty and charm to lure men to suffer pain (Foscolo, trans. Radcliff-Umstead 1970, 146).9

The teachings of Rousseau and Goethe are brought to Italy by Ugo Foscolo. His Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1802) deals with sentimental as well as political events, and for the setting of the story he chooses the much contested Italian borders situated between the regions of Veneto and Liguria, characterised by the Pre-Alpine and Alpine landscape. The importance of landscape is an entirely new concept for Italian literature at that time, an innovation which provides a backdrop capable of tinting the story with light and shadow, of giving imaginary depth to a narrative, which, being in letter style, is entirely »subjective«, so that consequently the emotions of the characters find resonance in intensely suggestive glimpses of the landscape. At Arquà, suggestions of Petrarca inspire the representation which comes from above of a perfect locus amoenus, symbol of a nature which is all harmony and equanimity, the perfect icon of the protagonist’s sentimental enthusiasm. From the plants and the animals to all four elements, earth, wind, fire and water, all coming together in a »universal exultation«, Foscolo achieves an idyllic picture of a nature created for man’s maximum pleasure and well-being; it is 9.

»Splendi, su splendi, o Natura, e riconforta le cure de’ mortali. Tu non risplenderai più per me. Ho già sentito tutta la tua bellezza, e t’ho adorata, e mi sono alimentato della tua gioia; e finché io ti vedeva bella e benefica, tu mi dicevi con una voce divina: Vivi. — Ma nella mia disperazione ti ho poi veduta con le mani grondanti di sangue; la fragranza dei fiori mi fu pregna di veleno; amari i tuoi frutti; e mi apparivi divoratrice dei tuoi figlioli, adescandoli con la tua bellezza e co’ tuoi doni al dolore« (Foscolo 1983, 142 f.).

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expressed in the coolness of the brooks, the leafy shadows, the scented exhalations of the earth. The affirmation that landscape is a feeling is striking in this literary work, written at a time when political events and cultural tendencies suggested maximum political tension and poetic incisiveness. The landscape here has nothing ornamental about it, we are far from Baroque or Arcadian atmospheres: it is the direct and intense expression of a new sensitivity which is bursting forth in Italian culture, and at the same time does not forget the classics as well as references to Alfieri and Parini. Indeed, immediately after the scene at Arquà, the discovery of the beloved Teresa’s unhappiness brings about raging winds and pouring rain and the idyllic picture instantly assumes gloomy and melancholy overtones which tend towards the horrific in the letter dated 19th January from the Euganean hills. Here nature appears »incomprehensible« and certainly not created for men’s pleasure. The view from the mountains »whose tops were covered over by a black cloud of icy fog that was falling and adding to the mournful atmosphere of the cold and darkened air« (Foscolo, trans. Radcliff-Umstead 1970, 53),10 is depressing, and the sweetness of April is offset by the mortal ice of winter. Of course, Foscolo is not Goethe, despite a certain »Wertherism« in Ortis. To be precise, the character of Jacopo, like Goethe (or like Rousseau in the Fifth Promenade), always carries with him his Linneo, subsequently losing it, just as he forgets where he has placed the plants which he had gathered with the intention of classifying them. Also present are the unmistakable views from up high. After the splendid contemplation of Teresa’s languid, sleeping form, accompanied by the realisation that the protagonist can never love her, the extensive view of the mountain »fills the soul« provoking veneration and at the same time fear. The gentleness of the rolling hills covered in crops is tainted by the nearby ravines, over which the evening shadows grow dark, and which resemble the »mouths of chasms«. The lush vegetation of the far off plain seems to have been cultivated with great fatigue rather than to have grown spontaneously; a passage in the style of the Roman philosopher Lucretius deals with the theory according to which matter constantly reverts back into itself, and the human condition is characterised by incessant, incomprehensible transformations (Foscolo 1983, 73 f., trans. Radcliff-Umstead 1970, 78). To be sure, at the top of the mountain the lover and impassioned patriot certainly feels free, and under the influence of nature, terrible and all powerful, he forgets his ailments and is liberated from the confines of a closed room, which has begun to feel (in the Goethean manner) similar to a sepulchre. The »terrible majesty of nature« inspires intense Romantic ideas, but after having kissed Teresa, the hero’s tormented heart sends him running over mountains and precipices from which the views spread out over the countryside below. This view offers, in place of the fruitful crops, an ever changing vision of nature, the logic of which is hard to grasp. The variety of the landscape corresponds to the turbulence of his feelings: the chasms and cliffs provide a backdrop perfectly suitable for the laceration of the soul. A Rousseau-inspired wood with streams

10.

»Il vertice dei quali era immerso in una negra nube di gelida nebbia che piombava ad accrescere il lutto dell’aere freddo ed ottenebrato« (Foscolo 1983, 38).

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and sounds of rustling leaves seems to offer protection and a sense of peace which for a moment calms the exacerbated soul, but may also be a premonition of death. The awareness of the degree of subjectivity is explicit in these descriptions: »we fabricate reality to suit our needs« (Foscolo, trans. Radcliff-Umstead 1970, 85).11 The landscape accompanies scenes of enthusiasm and soul searching, it condenses images in which nature, rather than being strange or indifferent, is directly experienced both as man’s projection and as a suitable setting for his actions and sentiments. Locus amoenus and locus horridus alternate and combine, giving cosmic significance to the emblematic events of the story of the tormented intellectual at the end of the century. The entire universe groans together with Jacopo when he realises he is incapable of changing either his own personal situation or the political situation in Italy: at this point the cliffs and precipices prevail, concealing more and more the gentle, fertile hills which he loves so much, and the whole atmosphere darkens. Decadence and death, as well as senseless and sterile transformation now prevail as the ciphers used to project the presence of nature. The search for solitude high in the mountain peaks is no longer experienced as a desire to meditate on the complex workings of the world, but rather as a desperate lament in the face of a nature which is the mirror of the soul, a nature which the sun no longer makes vital and pulsating, but leaves merely bitter and harsh. Though incomprehensible and impelled in the style of Lucretius in an eternal cycle, the world of nature is never extraneous or far away, but always an indispensable environment in which to create the typically modern Romantic atmosphere. After Jacopo’s frenetic travelling around Bologna, Florence and Milan in the second part of the book, the landscape of the Maritime Alps near Genoa rises as the last symbol of the soul’s desperate torment, devoid of hope and by now resigned to death as the only possible choice. The Alps, perceived in all of their discordant beauty, faithfully represent both the emotional turmoil, the intolerable contrast between inclination and convention, and the historical difficulties of the construction of a spiritual, cultural, and political identity in Italy. The landscape of the maritime Alps is characterised by a solitude which embodies an absence of life rather than a beneficial peace: »Nature sits here solitary and threatening while it chases away all living things« (ibid., 134).12 This harsh background which bites violently into the sweetness of the Mediterranean, is also the place where the search for concord between the »brothers of Italy« illustrates all of its difficulties. Neither a protective barrier, nor a useful source of life, the Alps appear as a place of laceration, of clashing dispute and terror. Their spatiality is however significant, the ambivalent and symbolic secondary role which they previously played now becomes the principal setting for the actions and emotions of the protagonist, who, just before committing suicide, goes back to visit »his« mountains, »his« solitude, those open spaces, home to a Romantic spirit from which they have drawn significance. And at the end of the novel, significantly, it is here, on the fir mountain, that Jacopo is buried. Thus, in various ways, the mountain environment has become, in this age, the ideal place in which to express interior conflict: it has a symbolic role, unimaginable in classical aesthetics. Nature is torn to pieces to represent a broken heart, and irregularity perfectly expresses 11.

»Ci fabbrichiamo la realtà a nostro modo« (ibid., 74).

12.

»La natura siede qui solitaria e minacciosa, e caccia da questo suo regno tutti i viventi« (ibid., 130).

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conflict and laceration. In this sense, the great relevance of nature, observed during this period in literature, as well as in science and philosophy, implicates the non-exclusion of elements of disorder and deformity. This complicates as well as enriches the situation, and is therefore perfectly suited, in literary transfiguration, to the representation of the most complicated of Romantic spirits. 5.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

It is well known that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) was conceived during her Swiss vacation in 1817 with Percy B. Shelley and George Byron. The Swiss landscape characterises the whole novel and is the background to the key scenes of the plot. The landscape plays an essential role in the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young science enthusiast, whose areas of research »were directed to the physical secrets of the world« (Shelley 2000, 75), studying first the hermetic sciences and then chemistry and anatomy at the University of Ingolstadt. His birthplace, Geneva, transforms the mountain landscape into the point of departure, the origin, the distinctive criterion for the character, his perspective on the world. Therefore the Alpine landscape appears as a native landscape, and in that way it inspires in the protagonist feelings based on recognition and a sense of belonging. It represents explicitly a locus amoenus, shown as a »genial and sunny climate« (ibid., 176) and it is opposed to the various northern landscapes in which he follows or is followed by the monster, from the Orkneys to the North Pole — a landscape that he seems to recognise in the places he loves most on his journeys, such as the banks of the Rhine or the Scottish landscape. Every time Victor comes back to Switzerland from his travels, the Alpine valleys bring about a self-reconciliation, a newly recovered harmony with the world. On the way to Geneva after the first murder, the landscape of Lausanne placates his soul, and during his excursion to the Chamonix valley the solemnity of Mont Blanc neither depresses nor rejects him: nature appears to be »maternal« and consequently makes him feel »waited on« and tranquillised. The burden on his soul is relieved and the majesty and eternity of the Chamonix valley seem to recover his lost harmony. According to the protagonist (ibid., 91), the awful element itself and the sublime do not connect to an idea of destruction and decline, but to one of duration as well as eternity. We are dealing with a landscape of the soul, a landscape in which self has first taken form, a serene and restful landscape, in which he literally returns home. These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling; and, although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillised it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded for the last month. I retired to rest at night; my slumbers, as it were, waited on and ministered to by the assemblance of grand shapes which I had contemplated during the day. They congregated round me; the unstained snowy mountain-top, the glittering pinnacle, the pine woods, and ragged bare ravine; the eagle, soaring amidst the clouds — they all gathered round me, and bade me be at peace (ibid., 91).

Besides this however, it appears clear that the Alps seem to represent »another earth«; they appear as »the habitations of another race of beings« (ibid., 89), almost a separate world, different

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and enchanting, as well as stunning and astonishing. The highlands of the mountain appear as something special and elevated, maternal yet miraculous; a supernatural nature which appears benign as well as superior to mortal powers. Each time that Mont Blanc makes its appearance, there are thunderbolts and storms drifting around it, even though the rest of the sky is unclouded. Behind the delightfulness of the scene lurks a disturbing and alienating medium, and in the heart of this peace, the dark and destructive side of nature makes its appearance. During the ascent to Montavert, the destructive force of the mountain appears close up: in the signs left by the landslides, in the gushing water of the waterfalls; the landscape appears to be deserted and the benign presence which seemed to have waited upon earlier now appears to have vanished. From the top of the mountain he is afforded a view which encompasses the entire majesty of the glacier, but the extraordinary landscape now provokes in him feelings of melancholy and pain. This is the moment in which, while contemplating Mont Blanc, he turns to the wandering spirits, entrusting to them both his happiness and his pain, and his creature appears bringing havoc and a dissipation of energy. And what is immediately clear is that the creature appears to be perfectly at ease among the crevasses, living fearlessly among the caverns and the icebergs. Those same skies which now seem desolate appear to be the perfect refuge for the monstrous, inhuman creature, instinctively recognised as such even by the child, who will consequently be killed precisely for this reason. Having been banished from the world of men, it finds shelter in these desolate places, among the Alpine and Polar icebergs, which at this point are places on the same level. »The caves of ice which I only do not fear« (ibid., 94): here the element of terror which the extreme aspects of the landscape inspire is all-consuming. These places are unsuitable to the presence of man, and what had seemed like »another earth«, here unfolds not as a place inhabited by superior beings but as a medium for that which is devious, inhuman, monstrous, a suitable background for man’s darker side, for Dr. Frankenstein’s deformed double. Moreover, every time the mountain makes its appearance, it appears initially as a place of recognition and of peacefulness, but then almost immediately it veers towards the horrific, both in the scene when he returns to Geneva and for the first time sees the monster up on the Alps, outside of the city, and at the end of the novel when, during his outing on the lake with his wife, Victor admires the surrounding mountains, from Mont Blanc, to Salève and Giura. The role of the landscape then, is always ambivalent: both calming and at the same time disturbing. The elevation and awareness which it brings are not the only relevant aspect. The mountain landscape lends itself perfectly well to the creation of an atmosphere suitable to a play on the parts of the two aspects of man, on the one hand Promethean and creative, and on the other essentially lawless and inhuman. The landscape clearly symbolises Frankenstein’s ambivalence, his thirst for knowledge and his hubris, which diffuses the impetus in the deformed and the monstrous. The choice of the mountain background therefore has an essential meaning in the economy of the novel: in this way it becomes clear that the locus horridus is merely the reverse side of the locus amoenus, and that there is no counter-position or contrast. Precisely that which appears familiar and restful, essentially human, at the same time, to a Romantic being, appears to be destructive and monstrous. Neither humanity nor nobility of the spirit exist, which are not at the same time unaware of their own personal abyss.

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Bibliography Abrams, Meyer. 1953. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford UP. Bloom, Harold. 1982. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. Oxford: Oxford UP. Broc, Numa. 1991. Les montagnes au siècle des Lumières. Paris: Edition du Comité des travaux Historiques et Scientifiques. Engel, Claire Eliane. 1930. La littérature alpestre en France et en Angleterre aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles. Chambery: Dardel. Foscolo, Ugo. 1970. Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis. Trans. by Douglas Radcliff-Umstead. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP. ———. 1983. Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis. Ed. Carlo Muscetta Torino: Einaudi. Giacomoni, Paola. 2001. Il laboratorio della natura: Paesaggio montano e sublime naturale in età moderna. Milano: Franco Angeli. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1981a (1963). Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe. Ed. by Erich Trunz. vol. VI: Romane und Novellen 1. Ed. by Benno von Wiese. München: Beck. ———. 1981b. »Über den Granit«. Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe. Ed. Erich Trunz. vol. XIII: Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften 1. Ed. by Dorothea Kuhn. München: Beck. 253–258. ———. 1981c. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe. Ed. by Erich Trunz. Vol. VIII: Romane und Novellen 3. Ed. by Erich Trunz. München: Beck. ———. 1989. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Trans. by Michael Hulse. London: Penguin Books. Hipple, Walter John. 1957. The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press. Joutard, Philippe. 1986. L’invention du Mont Blanc. Paris: Gallimard. Monk, Samuel. 1935. The Sublime: A Study of Classical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP. Mornet, Daniel. 1980 (1907). Le sentiment de la nature en France de Jean Jacques Rousseau à Bernardin de SaintPierre. Genève, Paris: Slatkin Reprints. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. 1959. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. New York: Cornell UP. Poggi, Stefano. 2000. Il genio e l’unità della natura: La scienza della Germania romantica. Bologna: Il Mulino. Pries, Christiane (ed.) 1989. Das Erhabene: Zwischen Grenzerfahrung und Größenwahn. Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora. Rousseau, Jean Jacques. 1964a. Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse. Œuvres complètes. Vol. II. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1964b. Les Rêveries du Promeneur solitaire. Œuvres complètes. Vol. I. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1997. Julie or the New Heloise. The Collected Writings. Vol. VI. Trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché. Hanover, London: New England UP. Shelley, Mary. 2000. Frankenstein. Ed. by Johanna M. Smith. Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martin. Tieck, Ludwig. 1985a. »Der blonde Eckbert«. Schriften. Ed. by Manfred Frank. Vol. VI. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. ———. 1985b. »Der Runenberg«. Schriften. Ed. by Manfred Frank. Vol. VI. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Tuveson, Ernst. 1951. »Space, Deity and the ›Natural Sublime‹«. Modern Language Quarterly : 12. 20–38. Weiskel, Thomas. 1986. The Romantic Sublime. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Wozniakowki, Jacek. 1987. Die Wildnis: Zur Deutungsgeschichte des Berges in der europäischen Neuzeit. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Zelle, Carsten. 1987. »Angenehmes Grauen«: Literaturhistorische Beiträge zur Ästhetik des Schrecklichen im 18. Jahrhundert. Hamburg: Meiner.

The »Wanderer« in Romantic prose fiction André Lorant Champfleury, a novelist and art critic contemporary of Balzac, Flaubert and Baudelaire, notes in his Histoire de l’imagerie populaire (History of Popular Imagery, 1869): »Since the beginning of the century the woodcut of the Wandering Jew has decorated everywhere the hut of the poor, facing that of Napoleon. It seemed that the popular mind gave an equal place to these two wanderers«. The legendary figure that crosses the ages and the historical figure entering into a legend join here. They personify the theme of wandering which is written down according to King David the Psalmist in our destiny: »I walk through the valley of the shadow of death« (Psalms, 23:4). This subject became a characteristic feature of Romantic literature in the first half of the nineteenth century. The historical and fictional sources of this recurrent theme are multiple. Illustrious adventurers travel through royal and princely courts all over Europe, before the French Revolution. The Count of Saint-Germain claims to have been alive for many centuries and to guard the secret of the elixir of long life. He is venerated as one of the invisible and tutelary masters of the theosophical societies of his days. Giuseppe Balsamo, known as Alexander Count of Cagliostro, alchemist, healer, founder of the »Egyptian freemasonry of the two sexes«, famous in Paris and in Rome, is involved in the scandal of the »necklace of the Queen«. Franz Anton Mesmer, theoretician and practitioner of animal magnetism, perpetuates the philosophy of Illuminism. He moves from Austria to France and leaves Paris after 1789. Giovanni Giacomo Casanova, alias Knight of Seingalt, carries his magic wand throughout Europe and ends his career as a humiliated librarian of the Count of Waldheim in Bohemia. During the pre-Revolutionary period, these travelers, these Wanderer, amuse the European elite. The success of their enterprises seems characteristic of the crisis of consciousness of this cosmopolitan society, which, on the eve of great historical disruptions, has lost all trust in itself and has no better consolation or aim than to believe in the reality of the magic tricks of the great illusionists passing through Paris, London, Venice, Naples, Vienna or Saint Petersburg. The intellectual and literary sources of the Wanderer theme are to be found in pre-Romanticism. The English contemporaries of Rousseau discover in the 1760s the literature of Nordic and Celtic peoples, authentic works or invented for the needs of a new sensibility. The Edda poems, the Songs of Ossian (actually written by James Macpherson, 1763), and the Scottish ballads published by Bishop Thomas Percy in his collection Reliquaries of Ancient English Poetry (1765) dedicate a particular worship to the past and make reappear venerated heroes of glorious days, ghosts who will haunt the prose writers of early Romanticism. Edmund Burke’s treatise, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), has been highly influential in its support of a new aesthetics challenging the rigid rules of French classicism. From now on, terror is considered an emotion qualified to inspire literary works and to give rise to pleasure. Ruins and wrecks, persecutions and physical abuse represent the cursed part of human imagination and the hidden anarchy of instinct. They arouse fear which reflects the desire and anguish to live outside of a reassuring, but narrow system. In Gothic literature, troubled sentiments agitate the heroines, prisoners of powerful and capricious tyrants, in their dank cells. They not only await the arrival of

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the chaste prince who will redeem them, but through suffering and pleasure long for fusion with the universe. These fictitious persons disturb the compromise of reason and feeling, the confused arrangement at the root of the convenient concept of »natural man«. Imprisoned in the »castle of subversion«, they venture into the domain of uncertainty which the philosophers of this time dare not explore. The ghosts of Gothic fiction belong to this lawless universe of nightmare. The French Revolution, especially the Jacobin Terror, enacts the worst fantasies of persecution and murder dreamt up by a Marquis de Sade; the political and ideological requirements of a Saint-Just have a fantastic as much as historical dimension. The Napoleonic campaigns shatter Europe from the Atlantic Ocean to the Urals, provoke »battles of nations« and awaken a nationalistic spirit inspired by an heroic past, real or imaginary. The defeat of Napoleon, the Restoration, the political system of the Holy Alliance, no longer succeed in restraining the literary implementation of inspiration rooted in this unconscious, which the theoreticians of early German Romanticism had considered as a unifying force. Shakespeare, Milton and Ossian are the great liberators of Romantic imagination in France and Germany, and the spectre of Hamlet’s father haunts these authors, who struggle against the still surviving traditions of Neo-classicism. The theme of wandering does not initially exhibit a frenetic dimension. Primarily it takes a very interiorized form in the »novel of apprenticeship«: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years, 1795/96) is a »journey into the self« and Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Henry von Ofterdingen, 1802) an initiatory voyage toward the kingdom of poetry. The theme evolves and passes through a period of frantic despair in the works of Maturin, Mary Shelley and Balzac, enters into a cycle of fantastic metamorphosis (Polidori, Balzac), and, finally appeased, disappears. 1.

Reflexive phase, or the peregrinations

In the eyes of contemporaries, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, starting point of our reflection on wandering as a literary theme, is a »totalizing« novel. In an article on »Goethe’s Meister« in the inaugural volume of the important Romantic journal Athenäum (1798), Friedrich Schlegel writes about the relations between the episodic aspects and what appears as universal in this work: It is this kind of representation that lets the most restricted element appear simultaneously as a quite specific and independent entity, yet also as a mere variation, a new metamorphosis of universal human nature, unified in all of its transformations, as a small part of the infinite world. This is precisely the grandeur in which every educated person will believe that he merely recognizes himself, while he is raised far beyond himself, and this is just as if it were necessarily so, and yet far more than one could ask for.1 1.

»Die Art der Darstellung ist es, wodurch auch das Beschränkteste zugleich ein ganz eignes selbständiges Wesen für sich und dennoch nur eine andere Seite, eine neue Veränderung der allgemeinen und unter allen Verwandlungen einigen menschlichen Natur, ein kleiner Teil der unendlichen Welt zu sein scheint. Das ist eben das Große, worin jeder Gebildete nur sich selbst wiederzufinden glaubt, während er weit über sich selbst erhoben wird, was nur so ist, als müßte es so sein, und doch weit mehr, als man fordern darf« (Schlegel 1964; also cited in Goethe 1997, vol. VII, 649).

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In Wilhelm’s journey to himself, everything contributes to his harmonious blossoming: love, culture, theatrical experience, Shakespeare and his Hamlet, initiation to Masonic wisdom, future prospects of social activity. His itinerary reflects the ideal of the formation of the great German minds in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Wilhelm knows both of the great values and the limits of the bourgeois culture; he appreciates and criticizes the art of aristocratic life; he is initiated into the meritocratic Masonic Society of the Tower, which is authoritarian insofar as it seeks to direct members by its principles, but is unpredictable in its particular applications. »Erring« (Wilhelm’s wandering, truancy, deviations, committing mistakes), in accordance with the philosophy of the secret Tower Society, is integral to Wilhelm’s education; in spite of his doubts and torments, his dreams and deceptions, his apprenticeship takes place under the sign of reason. At the same time, Goethe introduces in his novel other aspects of wandering which concern the irrational, the fatal, or a morbid sensibility degenerating into madness. Mignon, child of an incestuous brother and sister (each of them involved in a monastic order), incarnates this condition of youthful yearning. Sick of nostalgia for her beautiful native Italy, Mignon is doomed to die, because her instinctive and universal wisdom is inaccessible to »reasonable« people. Murderous impulses agitate the Harpist, the unfrocked monk. His suicidal insanity prevents him from acknowledging that he is the father of Mignon. At the end of his wandering from the North Italian lakes to Germany, suffering from a manic nervous breakdown, he puts an end to his life. The themes of apprenticeship and the search for happiness, dominant in this novel, absorb and sublimate the irrational and tragic features. Certainly not the wandering in itself, but the obligation imposed by the Society of the Tower on Wilhelm not to stay more than three days in the same place, consequently a constant travelling, determines the basic but loose structure of the sequel novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, oder die Entsagenden (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeymanship, or the Renunciants, 1821), a pedagogical work of the old Goethe. Wilhelm just crosses through the terrain of the novel; however, he is the repository of the secret of several people who long for each other. He is a »weaver« hero, making a tissue of personal fates. The readers of the Lehrjahre recognize America in the new continent across the Atlantic, where the Society of the Tower wishes to achieve its utopian ideal in the Wanderjahre. The last pages of this book praise the land where the principles of the »eternal«, the »necessary« and the »law« coincide in the framework of a patriarchal society. After praising the courage of merchants, artists and even of sovereigns, for whom mobility is an incitement to action, the spokesman of the Society of the Tower exalts the adventurous mind of the migrant farmers who leave their native places for a new enterprise (Goethe 1997b, 8: 420). The Goethean idea of »wandering« emerges from a carefully organized system of ideas. The rigour of utopian thought represses the anguish about emigration, »(aus)wandern«. Industrialization in Europe threatens to destroy the civilization of local crafts; but this type of »wandering« with a future goal in mind may well also echo serious distress and fear. In its own way, the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen by Novalis also recounts a »journey towards oneself« of a mystic nature. This book is not a moral apprenticeship in the Goethean sense of the term, but that of initiation into a vision of universal harmony. A first journey is the achievement of Heinrich’s dreaming in the opening paragraph: In search of a mysterious blue flower that has

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troubled his sleep, the young man is carried away towards remote countries and experiences strange adventures; these occur as a colorful pageantry in his premonitory dreams (Novalis 1987, 10). The idea of journeying towards the South, of undertaking real travel, animates all the family. Heinrich’s father and mother consider that this trip could bring back to reality their son lost in the world of ideality. The artistic project of recounting the journey of Heinrich seems to delight the narrator himself. He is glad to live in a period of transition where, he estimates, »a high spiritual power« (»eine hohe, Geistliche Macht«) reveals itself. Progressively, and that is an essential feature of the whole novel, Heinrich feels intuitively the unity of the physical and spiritual world. The unexpected encounter with the hermit, who in fact is the Count Hohenzollern, helps him integrate history, his own past and that of humanity, into the present time where he lives. The poet Klingsohr, a literary incarnation of Goethe himself, reveals to him that historical crises are favorable to poetry, which has to respect technical and artistic skill. Heinrich is now mature enough for his initiation to life in poetry. The last stage is reached with the help of Mathilde, daughter of Klingsohr. She communicates to him her own spiritual forces related to what is beyond earthly ties. Finally, the determining event that decides Heinrich’s poetic vocation is not the kiss on the cheek of the beloved, but the death of Mathilde already announced by Heinrich’s dream in the first part of the novel. From now on he lives in the realm of the imagination. His personal consciousness is echoing a »universal poem«. He has become aware of the true nature of earthly love, a mere shadow of the emotional ties that link us to spiritual beings beyond our universe. Peter Schlemihls wunderbare Geschichte (Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story, 1814) by Adelbert de Chamisso belongs to a period of transition in the literary history of »wandering«. The author, born into minor Breton nobility, follows his father in emigration throughout Europe (Liège, The Hague, Düsseldorf, Würzburg, Bayreuth), finally settles in Berlin, and enters into the service of the King of Prussia. He returns to France in 1810, but he feels ill at ease in his native country. He joins Madame de Staël, banished by Napoleon, at Coppet. It is there that his decision to devote himself to botany, zoology and medicine develops. He joins the recently founded Berlin University, and from the uprising of Prussia against France until the battle of Leipzig, he retires to a friend’s house in order to write a treatise on botany and to invent the character of Peter Schlemihl. The expatriate Chamisso discovers his true home, the German language — of which he was to become an illustrious representative. In his own way, his fictional character Peter is a migrant. Coming from overseas without money, Peter lands in a rich harbor city (Hamburg). He is amazed by the fortune of his host, who despises impecunious people. The host declares: »A man who has not at least a million at his disposal, he maintained, that man is […] — please forgive me the word — a wretch« (Chamisso 2002, 18).2 Schlemihl is astounded by the magic tricks of the steward of the house, the »Grey Man« capable of moving the oriental scenery of the Thousand and One Nights in the garden of this rich merchant, without creating any astonishment among the society assembled. Peter yields to the grey tempter, who, practically devoid of physical presence, is servile and seems inoffensive. He sells him his shadow for an apparently inexhaustible well-lined purse. 2. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Wer nicht Herr ist wenigstens einer Million […] der ist, man verzeihe mir das Wort, ein Schuft!�������� « (Chamisso 1992, 158).

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The loss of his shadow expels Peter from now on from all human community and the garden of love. Migrant at the beginning of his story, he becomes now a hunter of his own shadow, of his »normality« illuminated by the sun. For a last time, Peter succeeds in meeting his tempter, who proposes that he buy back his shadow in exchange for his soul. But Peter saves his soul by throwing his purse in an abyss. Peter then becomes a wanderer who leaves the world of civilization for primitive nature. With the help of his magic boots, assuming the roles of the Wandering Jew and also Tom Thumb, he passes from Tibet to »Thebes of a hundred doors«, jumps over the strait of Bering and lands in Australia. He takes off his boots in Europe, spends the rest of his money in London and Paris, collapses in the »Schlemihlian« asylum, founded in his memory by his friends, without being recognized by his faithful servant and the beloved person whom he had wished to marry in his young days. Still deprived of his shadow, he retires in his laboratory of sciences to write a book about natural phenomena: I have, in so far as my boots could take me, come to understand more thoroughly than anyone before me, the earth, its forms, heights, temperature, climatic variations, manifestations of magnetic force, the life it bears on its surface, in particular in the plant kingdom. I established in several works facts as exactly as possible, following a clear classification, and put down succinctly my conclusions and points of view in several treatises (Chamisso 1993, 78).3

This wanderer, reconciled finally with his infirmity, which the loss of his shadow symbolizes, settles down and finds a kind of stoic happiness in his study. The figure of Schlemihl haunts the imagination of Romantic writers. We find it in »������� Die Geschichte vom verlornen Spiegelbilde« (The Story of the Lost Mirror Image, part of Die Abenteuer der Sylversternacht [New Year’s Eve Adventures], 1815) by E.T.A. Hoffmann. The philosophical preoccupations that Chamisso integrated in his novel and the frenetic elements of Peter Schlemihl’s tragi-comic story, admirably tamed by its supposed author’s will, grow ever more intense in the years to come and seem to liberate themselves from any auctorial control. 2.

Gothic phase of frantic despair and provocation

As background for our study of desperate wandering in Romantic prose fiction, a number of poetic works have a special pertinence. In the poems of Shelley, principally The Wandering Jew (about 1820), Queen Mab (1813) and »Hellas« (1822) the tragic figure of Ahasverus reappears, who, at the end of the eighteenth century, complains of being excluded from the cycle of life and death — a complaint echoed in Schubert’s »Der Ewige Jude« (The Eternal Jew; Text by Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Müller, 1783), »a lyrical rhapsody«. In the works of Shelley, this »immortal mortal« defies his divine oppressor, who has condemned him to wander, and revolts against the suffering of innocents. Cain, such as Byron imagines him in his dramatic »mystery play« in 3.

»Ich habe, so weit meine Stiefel gereicht, die Erde, ihre Gestaltung, ihre Höhen, ihre Temperatur, ihre Atmosphäre in ihrem Wechsel, die Erscheinungen ihrer magnetischen Kraft, das Leben auf ihr, besonders im Pflanzenreiche gründlicher kennengelernt als vor mir irgendein Mensch. Ich habe die Tatsachen mit möglichster Genauigkeit in klarer Ordnung aufgestellt in mehreren Werken, meine Folgerungen und Ansichten flüchtig in einigen Abhandlungen niedergelegt« (Chamisso 1992, 190).

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verse (1819), protests against the divinity that punishes knowledge by exile and prefers bloody sacrifice of animals to pacific offering of fruits. After the murder of Abel, Cain discovers the reality of Death praised by Lucifer. Cursed by Eve in a fit of delirium, Cain leaves his parental family forever accompanied by his faithful wife Adah, one of the first incarnations of the »saving« Romantic woman. Prose fiction in Romanticism shares much of such intense lyricism. The terrifying aspects of wandering are in keeping with those of the »Gothic« novel, and, generally speaking, with the aesthetic category of the »sublime« (Burke), which includes »terror« as a source of emotional pleasure. The rediscovery of Shakespeare and the reading of Goethe’s Faust also contributed to the revival of literary demonology. A fragment of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) echoes directly the poem of Schubart (recapitulated by Shelley) on the Wandering Jew. Lewis’s novel is about the Capuchin Ambrosio, who, seduced by Mathilde, violates his sister and murders their mother. In the intricate structure of the novel the encapsulated »History of Don Raymond, Marquis of Las Cisternas« occupies an important place. In this fragment appears an anonymous character marked on his brow by a cross in fire, an exorcist who relieves the inhabitant of a German castle from the terrifying spectre of the Bloody Nun. In her lifetime, she was a blood-stained and debauched person; after having been stabbed, she reappears periodically and her ghost prevents Don Raymond from joining his fiancée; the fiancée is cloistered against her will in a cell contiguous to that of Ambrosio’s. The exorcist, an incarnation of the Wandering Jew, complains bitterly about his fate. His words, images, examples transcribe into prose the lyrical expressions of Ahasverus in Schubart’s poem. This wanderer ignores the constraints of time and space which recall the laws of human condition: »No one«, he replied, »is adequate to comprehending the misery of my lot! Fate obliges me to be constantly in movement: I am not permitted to pass more than a fortnight in the same place. I have no Friend in the world, and from the restlessness of my destiny I never can acquire one. Fain would I lay down my miserable life, for I envy those who enjoy the quiet of the Grave: But Death eludes me, and flies from my embrace. In vain do I throw myself in the way of danger. I plunge into the Ocean; The Waves throw me back with abhorrence upon the shore: I rush into fire; The flames recoil at my approach: I oppose myself to the fury of Banditti; Their swords become blunted, and break against my breast; The hungry Tiger shudders at my approach, and the Alligator flies from a Monster more horrible than itself. God has set his seal upon me, and all his Creatures respect this fatal mark!« (Lewis 1980, 169).

Among unnatural survivors of past centuries, an important place has to be reserved for Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), hero of the Irish Reverend Charles Maturin’s novel. This work combines various elements borrowed from Faust and the legend of the Wandering Jew. Melmoth the Irishman has sold his soul to the Devil to prolong his existence and to obtain omnipresence, a divine attribute. He will not find the peace of the tomb until another mortal will sell to him his hope of salvation. Melmoth is in search of a human being who, in a desperate situation, would yield to him his part of eternity. Cynic, anxious about metaphysics, he continually visits lunatic asylums and prisons of the Inquisition and drives his victims to utmost despair without obtaining their renouncement of the joys and consolations in the world to come.

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Melmoth’s last prey is a young girl of the Spanish aristocracy who, before rejoining her family in Madrid, lives exiled on an island of the Indian Ocean. In the presence of Immalee, he seems to forget for a short while the curse which weighs heavy on him. However, this new Cain does not succeed in repressing savage passions. This diabolic, perverse person, cursed by his omnipresence and his destructive power, has no pity for himself either and is overwhelmed by his evil impulses. Immalee attempts the impossible: to save him from himself, to make him discover love and hope. Melmoth seems to wish to save her by revealing that she loves a wandering man who approaches his brothers only to lead them into perdition: The Indian remained prostrate and aghast. »Immalee«, said the stranger, in a struggling voice, »Do you wish me to tell you the feelings with which my presence should inspire you?« — »Nono-no!« said the Indian, applying her white and delicate hands to her ears, and then clasping them on her bosom; »I feel them too much«. — »Hate me — curse me!« said the stranger, not heeding her, and stamping till the reverberation of his steps on the hollow and loosened stones almost contended with the thunder; »hate me, for I hate you — I hate all things that live — all things that are dead — I am myself hated and hateful!« — »Not by me«, said the poor Indian, feeling, through the blindness of her tears, for his averted hand. »Yes, by you, if you knew whose I am, and whom I serve.« Immalee aroused her newly-excited energies of heart and intellect to answer this appeal. »Who you are, I know not — but I am yours. — Whom you serve, I know not — but him will I serve — I will be yours for ever. Forsake me if you will, but when I am dead, come back to this isle, and say to yourself, The roses have bloomed and faded — the streams have flowed and been dried up — the rocks have been removed from their places — and the lights of heaven have altered in their courses, — but there was one who never changed, and she is not here!« (Maturin 1977, 422 f.).

Finally, she marries Melmoth, gives herself to him in a ruined pagoda. Dark storm overruns the sky, the thunder rumbles. Flashes of lightning crisscross the sky and make the convulsed features of this man appear, who is conscious of his damnation and who seizes his new prey. As it was forbidden for the characters of this novel to formulate in an explicit way the terms of the pact proposed by Melmoth, the dying Immalee — Isidora since her return to Spain and her reinstallation in her aristocratic family — confides to her confessor the secret of the visits of the wanderer to her prison. But her voice dies in her throat when she would reveal the condition of liberation he suggests: »Oh, my father, I am very young, and life and love sounded sweetly in my ears, when I looked at my dungeon, and thought of dying on this floor of stone! But — when he whispered the terrible condition on which the fulfilment of his promise depended — when he told me that« – Her voice failed with her falling strength, and she could utter no more (Maturin 1977, 690).

The works of Balzac occupy an important place in the literature of »Wandering«. The hero of Le centenaire ou les deux Béringheld (The Centenarian or the Two Beringhelds) — a novel Balzac wrote under the pseudonym of Horace de Saint-Aubin and published in 1822 — has supposedly lived through four centuries. At the beginning of the novel, he returns from a Spain hardly conquered by Napoleon. A superhuman grandsire, father of a general of the Grand Army, an extraordinary healer (he vaccinated plague-stricken people in the military hospital of Jaffa), he is also a vampire of a special kind. He survives thanks to the »vital breath« of his mesmerized victims.

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At the time of the creation of his centenarian, Balzac certainly had Melmoth in mind. But Balzac’s novel is not simply a new version of Reverend Maturin’s fiction. In search of a victim ready to renounce salvation in exchange for escape from the prison of the Inquisition or the chains of madhouse, Melmoth visits these places where the individual has no power or right to control his own destiny: Accustomed to look on and converse with all things revolting to nature and to man, — for ever exploring the mad-house, the jail, or the Inquisition, — the den of famine, the dungeon of crime, or the death-bed of despair, — his eyes had acquired a light and a language of their own — a light that none could gaze on, and a language that few dare understand (Maturin 1977, 431).

The centenarian of Balzac is also an expert in the field of great distress, as he tells Marianine, the fiancée of his own son, who lives in poverty: »Child«, he went on to say, »nobody knows the true nature of adversity better than I do; pain is my vassal: the condemned man walking to the scaffold, the young woman driven mad by love, […] the son unable to turn his eyes away from the sufferings of his father, the man who refuses to continue to live after dishonour, the mother who loses her child, the man on the point of committing a crime, the soldiers who, on the battlefield, plead for death because their wounds are incurable, in a word anyone who suffers and longs for death finds it in my company… I am the judge and the executioner… Incessantly, I visit all the repositories of misery, the prisons, the revolting madhouses, the caverns of luxuriantly satisfied opulence, the deathbeds of crime, and no man is clever enough to outwit me… Young woman… you merest hint of a dawning day, you suffer«.4

This supernatural and apparently omniscient being ignores the identity of his prey. He hands over gold to Marianine which enslaves her; she is obliged to relinquish her freedom to him. In his cave under the Louvre, the four-centuries-old man plunges her into a »magnetic ecstasy«. In this state, Marianine sees with her mind’s eye her fiancé, the general of Napoleon, back in France from Russia. But we may assume that this gift of second sight is actually that of the author, who makes reality appear on the screen of her imagination. Maturin’s Melmoth is a man of medium height. His survival during two hundred and forty years does not affect his physical appearance, he remains unchanged. On the other hand, Balzac’s wanderer is gigantic. He is marked by decline, having over time become an ossified, fleshless figure, whose eyes nevertheless shine with a strange light. At the beginning of the novel, he is described by Balzac through the observation of his own son, the general of Napoleon, in the neighborhood of Tours. 4. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ »����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Enfant, dit-il alors, personne, sur la terre, ne connaît le malheur comme moi; les douleurs sont mes vassales: le condamné qui doit marcher à la mort, la jeune fille folle d’amour, […] le fils qui ne peut soutenir la vue de la souffrance de son père, celui qui ne veut pas survivre à son déshonneur, la mère qui perd son enfant, l’homme prêt à commettre un crime, les soldats qui, sur le champ de bataille, appellent la mort quand leurs blessures sont incurables, enfin tout ce qui souffre et désire la mort, la trouve avec moi… Je suis le juge et l’exécuteur… Sans cesse, je parcours les réceptacles de la misère, les prisons, les dégoûtants hospices des aliénés, les cavernes de l’opulence rassasiée, les lits de mort du crime, et il n’est donné à aucun homme de me tromper… Jeune fille… ombre d’un jour à peine à son aurore, tu souffres« (Balzac 1999, I: 1009 f.).

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In a strange manner, Melmoth is a moral person; he is tormented by metaphysical problems, whereas the Centenarian is essentially amoral. Melmoth is pursued by the vision of his crimes, by his past, whereas the Centenarian lives in the present. He is a passionate researcher who, like his creator, finds in the »vital fluid« of animal magnetism the universal principle that eliminates the borders between the material and the spiritual world and joins the individual and the universal. The Centenarian is eager for scientific knowledge to free the mortal from the constraints of his condition. He is at the same time a monomaniac of power that neither time nor space could limit, an evil character who is animated by Faustian enthusiasm. In a Parisian café, he speaks with much contempt to the bourgeois and praises the new human omnipresence due to scientific progress which rivals that of God (Balzac 1999, I: 1023 f.). Balzac writes about the literary sources of his character: »At last, a scientist would have thought that a new Pascal, combining the talents of Boheravbe, Agrippa or Prometheus, had succeeded in creating an artificial human being«.5 It seems probable that he refers here to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus, published in 1818 and translated into French three years after. Treatises of Albert the Great, Paracelsus, and Cornelius Agrippa are well known by Victor Frankenstein. He is a student of Professor Waldmann at the University of Ingolstadt. Frankenstein is fascinated himself by the prospect of »bestowing animation upon lifeless matter«, and he gives life to a »demonical corpse«. This anonymous being, »gigantic in nature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions« (Shelley 1992, 126), who has no family and ignores organic growth, foreshadows the enormous stature of the Centenarian. Balzac’s Centenarian is fleshless: »I have seen his dry bones with no flesh on them«,6 declares Lagradna, a midwife who saw him in the castle of the family. The Shelleyan monster has »straight black lips«, those of the four centuries old Balzacian wanderer seem to have been cauterized and look like a black spot. The Centenarian ignores the devastating emotions of the artificial man, who is devoured by hatred and perversion, and feels himself excluded from any human community. Each of the monsters is a murderer of children. Milton’s Paradise Lost is an important reference both for Mary Shelley and Balzac. »Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me« (Shelley 1992, 126), says Frankenstein’s creature. The Centenarian, in turn, seems to appear to his son like »The King of Hell portrayed by Milton, rising up in Pandaemonium and mocking the angels«.7 The resemblance between the monster created by Victor Frankenstein and the ghost dreamed by Balzac is limited to a few physical features. Nevertheless, there exist more essential connections between these two works, which are characteristic of the intellectual orientations of our authors. Mary Shelley reads the works of Humphry Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) or »A Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry« (1810) and is interested at the same time, as the novel shows, in occult sciences of the sixteenth century. As for young Balzac, he has frequent contacts with physicists, mathematicians — André-Marie, 5.

»Enfin, un savant aurait pensé qu’un nouveau Pascal, réunissant les talents de Boerhaave, d’Agrippa, ou de Prométhée, avait créé un homme factice« (ibid., 873).

6.

»j’ai vu ses os desséchés et aucune chair dessus« (ibid., 871).

7.

»Le Roi des Enfers tel que l’a dépeint Milton, se levant dans le Pandémonium et se moquent des anges«

(ibid., 889).

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Etienne and François Arago among others — and, at the same time, he becomes initiated in magnetism and mystic philosophy. In general, the Romantics are in search of a unitary vision of world. They read alternately the volumes of the Bibliothèque du magnétisme animal and that of the Annales de médecine.����������������������������������������������������������������������������� It is of a great interest for our subject that this double orientation, scientific and mystic, is present in the major book of Romantic prose fiction about »wandering«. Walter Scott’s The Pirate (1821) is one of the literary sources of the first novels of Balzac. The action of this novel takes place in the archipelago of Shetland, in the North of Scotland, and principally on an island called Jarlshof by Scott, who is interested in Nordic mythology. Clement Cleveland, saved from shipwreck, is received with much reserve by the inhabitants of the island. Cleveland is a »wanderer« of the sea, an incarnation of the pirate gentleman, courageous and cruel like the fatal hero of Byron’s »The Corsair« (1814): Feared — shunned — belied — ere youth had lost her force, He hated man too much to feel remorse, And thought the voice of wrath a sacred call, To pay the injuries of some on all. He knew himself a villain — but he deemed The rest no better than the thing he seemed; And scorned the best as hypocrites who hid Those deeds the bolder spirit plainly did (Byron 1986, 249).

Cleveland, whose past is unknown to the people of Jarlshof, falls in love with pure-hearted Minna. She is one of the daughters of Magnus Troil, descendant of Vikings and owner of the oldest manor, who considers himself the »King« of this country. Scott, whom Balzac reproaches for not being able to exploit all the passions of the feminine soul, nonetheless takes a close interest in Minna. Cleveland recounts the history of his life to her. He never knew his mother. His father fought against the Spanish, and he harassed them by piracy persuing their ships until the Bermudas. Subtle bonds join these two young people, though apparently they are separated from each other by wholly different moral views (Scott 1886, 256). After having met the pirate’s companions, Minna is convinced that Cleveland needs long years to expiate his crimes. She says an eternal farewell to him, for she despairs of the happiness of which they dream. Cleveland, accused of piracy, is condemned to death by the justice of his country. Pardoned, he is engaged in the Navy of His Majesty ready to attack the Spanish. Minna is then satisfied with the change of Cleveland’s destiny. However — Scott emphasizes it with force and conviction — she is not like Senta, the woman who brings salvation to the beloved, that Wagner will create in 1839 in Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman). Walter Scott has certainly the merit to set up a thematic network characteristic of this type of novel. The »wanderer of the Ocean«, shipwrecked, here enters into fiction. (We should note that in Maturin’s Melmoth the sea is raging at the beginning and the end of the novel, at the appearance and disappearance of the wanderer.) The pirate discovers that he is the illegitimate son of Norna, the Sybil of the village, who, to hide her suffering after his disappearance, mentally takes refuge in the universe of Nordic legends which inspires her in her prophecies. The pirate is seduced by the purity of a young girl whom he needs, and the virgin herself is fascinated by the gloomy and enigmatic man whom she wishes to bring back to the right way. Scott innovates, creates a local poetic colour and widens the Romantic imaginative prospects.

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The figure of the pirate reappears in Annette et le criminel (Annette and the Criminal, 1824), the last novel published by Balzac under the pseudonym of Horace de Saint-Aubin. Argow, an ancient mutinous mariner, is an original character: He has attacked ships, stolen cargoes, murdered crews and participated with his troop of criminal sailors in the war of Independence. He »lands« in this novel not shipwrecked but as a victim of a road accident: His diligence hurtles down a slope and crashes. In a church of Valence, in the South of France, he catches a glimpse of Annette, a pious bourgeois girl of the Marais, a quiet and almost provincial district of Paris at this time. Annette is fascinated by the powerful and mysterious character. Argow falls in love with Annette although a deep gulf separates them, for he is an atheist. As a result of a sermon pronounced by the spiritual advisor of Annette, a priest who meditates about the divine gaze on unpunished crimes, Argow finds the faith of his childhood again: He confesses his crimes, but does not believe in the absolution of his misdeeds. He aspires to be »baptized« on the scaffold, whereas Annette revolts against the society that pursues the repentant criminal whom the church (»ego te absolvo«) grants remission of his sins. After the execution of Argow, Annette, inanimate, falls into the grave of her husband. It is through this »death by love« (»Liebestod«) that the book ends still echoing the novel of Maturin. But Balzac grows away from his literary model: In Annette et le criminel, he is preoccupied by problems of spirituality, in particular those of the expiation of crimes and active repentance, an antidote against despair, and profitable for society. In order to avoid misunderstanding in Le juif errant (The Wandering Jew, 1844–45), Eugène Sue relegates Ahasverus and his sister (a newly invented person) to being only supernumeraries on the stage. This novel denounces the intrigues of Jesuits who want to seize the fortune of rich heirs. The action takes place at the time of the epidemic of cholera of Paris in 1832 and degenerates into macabre and violent scenes in this successful serial novel. 3.

Cycle of fantastic metamorphosis

The sources of this cycle are still lyrical. The English Romantics wake up the vampires to a new life. This vampirism is often allegorical, imitating German poetic models of the previous generation (e.g. Goethe, »Die Braut von Corinth«), lyrical works which personify the dead under the features of a young girl or a young man of the next world: Their love embraces are fatal. Among the works in prose, »The Vampyre: A Tale« by the medical doctor John William Polidori, a fellow traveler of Lord Byron on the continent in 1816, occupies an important place. This short story, published for the first time in the New Monthly Magazine (1819), attributed often to Byron himself, deserves close attention. During the London winter season (at an indefinite date, presumably that of the publication of the work), Lord Ruthven exerts an irresistible attraction on mundane society. He has a penetrating look, a pale complexion and he is apparently indifferent to his conquests. Aubrey, a young aristocrat, recently disembarked at London, confuses the dream of the poet with daily reality. Nevertheless, he denies the actuality of supernatural phenomena which could influence our destiny here below. He joins Lord Ruthven for his European tour, which is a part of the formation of a well-educated young aristocrat of his time.

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During their travels, Aubrey discovers the true character of his companion. Lord Ruthven encourages vice and debauchery and bankrupts several heirs of honorable families. His eyes betray pleasure when he provokes the misfortune of others: »his eyes sparkled with more fire than that of the cat whilst dallying with the half dead mouse« (Polidori 1992, 239). Aubrey saves an Italian girl on the point of being seduced by Lord Ruthven. Finally, the two companions separate. Aubrey, at Athens, sketches in his notebook the ruins which testify to the bygone greatness of Greece. He finds accommodation under the same roof where Ianthe, a Greek girl, lives, a true »gazelle« with dancing steps. She incarnates innocence, youth and beauty. She tells him stories about vampires and their nocturnal orgies. Aubrey notices with horror that the description of these monsters matches Lord Ruthven directly. During an excursion in Ianthe’s company, Aubrey is caught by a storm. The rumble of thunder cannot cover the cries of a woman and the exultant laugh and mocking of a man. Aubrey discovers a horrible scene in the hut where he has sheltered the inanimate Ianthe: There was no colour upon her cheek, not even upon her lip; yet there was a stillness about her face that seemed almost as attaching as the life that once dwelt there: — upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein: — to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, »A Vampyre a Vampyre!« (ibid., 244 f.).

The young man is delirious and his incoherent words concern Ianthe and Lord Ruthven: He implores him to save the young girl. Lord Ruthven, the wandering vampire, reappears at Athens and succors his friend Aubrey. The convalescent is struck by the expression on his face: »his gaze fixed intently upon him, with a smile of malicious exultation playing upon his lips«. Grateful for Lord Ruthven’s care, Aubrey proposes that they visit a region of Greece which they have not explored before. Caught by thieves in a narrow gorge, Lord Ruthven is mortally wounded. Apparently insensitive to suffering, he becomes more and more anxious: He feels that his strength declines and that his last hour approaches. He obliges his friend to swear not to reveal his death. This scene recalls the end of the first act of Hamlet. The oath will be fatal for Aubrey: »Assist me! you may save me — you may do more than that — I mean not my life, I heed the death of my existence as little as that of the passing day; but you may save my honour, your friend’s honour.« — »How, tell me how? I would do any thing«, replied Aubrey. — »I need but little — my life ebbs apace — I cannot explain the whole — but if you would conceal all you know of me, my honour where free from stain in the world’s mouth — and if my death were unknown for some time in England — I — I — but life.« — »It shall not be known.« — »Swear!« cried the dying man, raising himself with exultant violence. »Swear by all your soul reveres, by all your nature fears, swear that for a year and a day you will not impart your knowledge of my crimes or death to any living being in any way, whatever may happen, or whatever you may see.« — His eyes seemed bursting from their sockets; »I swear!« said Aubrey; he sunk laughing upon his pillow, and breathed no more (ibid., 247 f.).

Aubrey does not stop thinking of his oath. The next day, when he prepares the burial of Lord Ruthven, he meets one of their aggressors who lets him know that the thieves have accomplished

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the last will of the deceased: They have exposed the corpse at the top of the mountain in such a way that the first moonbeam could light the lifeless body. Aubrey does not find his friend at this place: He supposes that the thieves have stripped his fellow traveler before burying him. Aubrey becomes, in turn, a wanderer. Suffering from a »superstitious melancholy«, he arrives at Smyrna. While waiting for a boat to Otranto or to Naples, he opens a box which belonged to Lord Ruthven. He discovers a poniard whose sheath lay in the fatal hut near Athens. On his way back to England, he stops at Rome. There he gets to know that the parents of the young Italian girl (whom he wished to snatch from the claws of Lord Ruthven) were ruined and despaired because of the daughter who disappeared. Aubrey fears that the seductive Roman girl and the Greek Ianthe were the victims of the same person. In his family manor, comforted by his sister, he forgets his obsessive fears. His charming sister makes her debut in his parents’ reception room. A terrifying surprise waits for Aubrey: Aubrey was there with his sister. While he was standing in a corner by himself, heedless of all around him, engaged in the remembrance that the first time he had seen Lord Ruthven was in that very place — he felt himself suddenly seized by the arm, and a voice he recognized too well, sounded in his ear — »Remember your oath.« He had hardly courage to turn, fearful of seeing a spectre that would blast him, when he perceived, at a little distance, the same figure which had attracted his notice on this spot upon his first entry into society (ibid., 250).

He would like to denounce the misdeeds of this monster, a living corpse, but his oath binds him to be silent. Isolated henceforward from the rest of the world, he gives way progressively to his madness. Aubrey hears that his sister will marry soon the young Earl of Marsden. He surprises his family by his wish to attend the nuptials. But he is choked by rage when he notices the traits of Lord Ruthven, now Earl of Marsden, in the pendant miniature of his sister. Lord Ruthven pretends to take an interest in the well-being of his future brother-in-law and hastens the celebration of the wedding, in order to occupy shortly a post of ambassador, which he has obtained. The warning letters, written by Aubrey to his sister in a desperate and almost manic form, are intercepted by her doctor. One day, Aubrey gets ready to burst into his sister’s apartment, but he is stopped on the steps by Lord Ruthven, who reminds him of his oath. Moreover, he threatens to dishonour his sister. Aubrey, suffocated by rage, tries to alert his sister’s servants but dies during Miss Aubrey’s wedding, after a brain hemorrhage. Is her Ladyship Ruthven the latest victim of her husband, the wandering vampire? Among the numerous stage adaptations of Dr. J.W. Polidori’s short story on the Continent, Le Vampire (The Vampire), a melodrama by Charles Nodier, founder and theoretician of the »frantic school« in French Literature, performed for the first time in Paris on 13 June 1830, occupies an important place. Some elements of the plot should be remembered here. Sir Aubrey, lord of the island of Steppa, gets ready for marrying his sister Malvina to the brother of his best friend Lord Rutwen, murdered at Athens during a journey they made together. To the great surprise of Sir Aubrey, it is Lord Rutwen himself who reappears in the castle, saved — he says — after the aggression in the outskirts of Athens. Lord Rutwen pays court to Malvina, impassioned to marry her. The young girl feels that she cannot resist his advances.

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Accompanied by his friend, Lord Rutwen leaves Steppa to attend the marriage of Edgar, the steward of his castle, with Lovette, on an island not too far away. Lord Rutwen, imitating Don Juan, tries to seduce the fiancée. Edgar shoots his landlord and mortally wounds him. Before expiring, Lord Rutwen promises to his friend Aubrey that they will meet again soon. The same Lord Rutwen, killed in the presence of his friend, returns to the castle of Steppa and presses Malvina to conclude the marriage. Aubrey has a fit of madness. He raves, but succeeds in preventing the marriage of his sister with this ghost. At one o’clock, the thunder rumbles. On the scene of the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, Lord Rutwen is pursued by »young women« covered by veils; they »show him their still bleeding breast«, according to the stage settings. Oscar, an Ossianic bard, the genius of marriages, wanders through this melodrama. At the end of this melodrama, the spectre is annihilated by the raging elements. This vampire survives by feeding on blood, while Balzac’s Centenarian draws his energies from the »vital breath«, a mysterious mesmerian fluid, of his prey. The melodrama of Nodier popularizes the figure of the aristocratic, domineering and attractive vampire. Stoker’s title figure in Dracula (1897) will be an illustrious incarnation of this personage. 4.

Towards the eclipse of the Wanderer theme

Balzac is in constant dialogue with great literary myths. In Le centenaire (The Centenarian, 1822), he imagines a »wanderer« whose longevity has some common features with that of Maturin’s Melmoth. He is interested in what is permanent in literary myths and in the special way they can explain contemporary reality. In La peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin, 1831), he proposes a very original interpretation of the Faustian pact. In his view, the Faustian impulse has a mortal character, because the economic and social system of the Restoration exacerbates passions, lust for wealth, and sexual desire, which consume the limited vital energy of each human being. L’élixir de longue vie (The Elixir of Long Life, 1830) is a »variation« on the theme of Don Juan and illustrates the social character of the Oedipus conflict. Balzac opines that the law of heritage laid down in the Constitutional Charter of 1814 revives this conflict between fathers and sons. This novel is written in a frantic style. The figure of the debauched sinner venerated like a blessed person foreshadows that in Balzac’s short novel Melmoth réconcilié (Melmoth Reconciled, 1835), a work which, in my opinion, announces the fading of the myth of the wanderer. The plot of the story (classified as an »Étude philosophique« in La comédie humaine) can be briefly summarized. Melmoth finds an ideal victim in the person of Castanier, cashier of the Baron de Nucingen, a famous banker of Paris. Melmoth is ready to save the reputation of this dishonest employee who, after having stolen a substantial sum at his bank, is just about to leave France in the company of his mistress. But Castanier has to yield his part of eternal salvation in exchange for Melmoth’s supernatural powers. After having concluded the agreement with the cashier, Melmoth, the cynic and desperate wanderer, dies piously and is watched by a priest of Saint-Sulpice, who endows him with a reputation as a saintly person. The cashier, omnipotent and omniscient, like the novelist, is nostalgic for the Kingdom of Heaven. He rushes to the Stock Exchange of Paris, gives up his condition of superman to an unfortunate

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speculator, who sells it to a clerk in love with a prostitute. The satanic power, put on the market like a quoted value and transformed into sexual energy, is depreciated, and in effect it murders its last owner, whose vital forces are finally exhausted. The story ends mockingly: The clerks deride demonology. For a better understanding of Balzac’s original contributions, certain aspects of the novel deserve to be illustrated here. It is the social type incarnating Maturin’s Melmoth who reappears in the cashier’s cage, a cage protected by bars: The oblong shape of the stranger’s face, the doomed contours of his forehead, the sallow colour of his skin, as well as the cut of his clothes, made it clear that he was English. This man stank of Englishness. From the collar of his frock coat, his puffed cravat nestling against the shallow frills of his jabot, the whiteness of which brought out the permanent lividity of his expressionless face, in which the cold red lips seemed made to suck the blood out of corpses, from all this one could divine the black gaiters buttoned up to his knees, all the semi-puritanical accoutrements of a rich Englishman going out for a walk. The glare of the stranger’s eye was unbearable, producing in one’s heart a poignant impression, heightened by the stiffness of his features. This thin, fleshless man seemed to have in him a revening principle which could never be satisfied. He appeared capable of digesting his food so quickly that he could probably eat ceaselessly without bringing a flush to a single line of his cheeks and of swallowing a whole barrel of that Tokay wine, called inheritance wine, without causing his penetrating gaze to waver or disturbing that cruel reasoning which seemed to reach the heart of things. He had something of the savage and serene majesty of the tiger.8

Balzac imagines the cashier and his mistress in a theatre. Melmoth, who is sitting by his side, makes him discover on the stage a different spectacle from what is represented for theatre public: The cashier, spectator of this piece, discovers the treachery of his mistress and assists at his own arrest. In the carriage that brings them home, the cashier believes he hears a »celestial music«, but his mistress remains deaf to these hallucinatory sounds which »come from on high«. This music is evidently an echo of intertextuality. In Maturin’s novel, Stanton, a young Englishman, meets Melmoth in a London theatre: It was at this moment that, in a seat opposite to him, he discovered the object of his search for four years, — the Englishman whom he had met in the plains of Valentia, and whom he believed the same with the subject of the extraordinary narrative he had heard there. 8.

»La coupe oblongue de la figure de l’étranger, les contours bombés de son front, la couleur aigre de sa chair, annonçaient, aussi bien que la forme de ses vêtements, un Anglais. Cet homme puait l’Anglais. À voir sa redingote à collet, sa cravate bouffante dans laquelle se heurtait un jabot à tuyaux écrasés, et dont la blancheur faisait ressortir la lividité permanente d’une figure impassible dont les lèvres rouges et froides semblaient destinées à sucer le sang des cadavres, on devinait ses guêtres noires boutonnées jusqu’au-dessus du genou, et cet appareil à demi puritain d’un riche Anglais sorti pour se promener à pied. L’éclat que jetaient les yeux de l’étranger était insupportable et causait à l’âme une impression poignante qu’augmentait encore la rigidité de ses traits. Cet homme sec et décharné semblait avoir en lui comme un principe dévorant qu’il lui était impossible d’assouvir. Il devait si promptement digérer sa nourriture qu’il pouvait sans doute manger incessamment, sans jamais faire rougir le moindre linéament de ses joues. Une tonne de ce vin de Tokay nommé vin de succession, il pouvait l’avaler sans faire chavirer ni son regard poignardant qui lisait dans les âmes, ni sa cruelle raison qui semblait toujours aller au fond des choses. Il avait un peu de la majesté fauve et tranquille des tigres« (Balzac 1976, 350).

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He was standing up. There was nothing particular or remarkable in his appearance, but the expression of his eyes could never be mistaken or forgotten. The heart of Stanton palpitated with violence, — a mist overspread his eyes, — a nameless and deadly sickness, accompanied with a creeping sensation in every pore, from which cold drops were gushing, announced the… Before he had well recovered, a strain of music, soft, solemn and delicious, breathed round him, audibly ascending from the ground, and increasing in sweetness and power till it seemed to fill the whole building. Under the sudden impulse of amazement and pleasure, he inquired of some around him from whence those exquisite sounds arose. But, by the manner in which he was answered, it was plain that those he addressed considered him insane (Maturin 1977, 85).

In Balzac’s creative twist to the wanderer tradition, Stanton, chained to the wall of an asylum for lunatics, does not yield to Melmoth’s temptation. Another novel of this same year, 1835, confirms Balzac’s intention to prove that the wanderer theme has become irrelevant for his day. Colonel Chabert, the novel’s eponymous hero, a Napoleonic dignitary, is buried alive under a heap of corpses during the battle of Eylau in 1807. Thanks to his extraordinary will to survive, he gets through the pile of the dead who suffocate him and climbs up again to the surface. Wandering, he travels through Europe, from Königsberg to Paris. It is a phantom, livid, dry and thin, who introduces himself to his notary in order to be recognized and regain his civil status, as he had been declared dead at Eylau. All his attempts remain vain. He cedes to the cupidity of the wife who is remarried to a returned émigré count. This ambitious woman, a former prostitute of the Palais Royal, knows perfectly well that Chabert has survived. Finally, Chabert, weary of life, gives up struggling and renounces even his patronymic: »I am only the poor devil Hyacinthus, who asks only his place under the sun«.9 His wife places him at Bicêtre, the poorhouse for old people, where he will vegetate until the end of his life. What remains of the glorious Grande Armée? — a half conscious old wreck. Whereas at the time of the Restoration, the literary figure of the wanderer was omnipotent and frightful, now he is miserable and seems to disembark from another planet. The Romantic myth of wandering has lost all its timeliness. Bibliography Balzac, Honoré de. 1931. Melmoth Reconciled. Christ in Flanders and Other Stories. Trans. by Clara Bell. London: J.M. Dent. ———. 1979. Le Colonel Chabert. La Comédie humaine. Ed. by Pierre-George Castex. Vol. 3; Études de mœurs: Scènes de la vie privée, Scènes de la vie de province. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). 291–373. ———. 1979. Melmoth réconcilié. La Comédie humaine. Ed. by Pierre-George Castex. Vol. 10: Études philosophiques. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). 329–388. ———. 1999. Annette et le Criminel; Le Centenaire, ou les deux Béringheld. Premiers romans, 1822–1825. Ed. by André Lorant. Collection Bouquins. Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont. Byron, George Gordon, Lord. 1986. »The Corsair«. Byron. Ed. by Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Oxford UP. Chamisso, Adelbert von. 1992. Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte [bilingual edition]. Ed. by Bernard Lortholary. Trans. by Albert Lortholary. Paris: Gallimard. 9.

»Je ne suis pas plus qu’un pauvre diable nommé Hyacinthe, qui demande seulement sa place au soleil« (Balzac 1979, III: 325).

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———. 1993. Peter Schlemihl. Reprint of the original translation by Sir John Bowring, new introduction by Wulf Koepke. Columbia: Camden House. Champfleury, Jules. 1869. Histoire de l’imagerie populaire. Paris: Dentu. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1997a. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Werke. Vol. 7. Ed. by Erich Trunz. München: C.H. Beck. ———. 1997b. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre oder die Entsagenden. Werke. Ed. by Erich Trunz. Vol. 8. München: C.H. Beck. ———. 1974. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels. Trans. by Thomas Carlyle. New York: AMS Press. Lewis, Matthew Gregory. 1980. The Monk. Ed. with an introduction by Howard Anderson and James Kinsley. Oxford: Oxford UP [1st edition 1973]. Maturin, Charles Robert. 1997. Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale. Ed. with an introduction by Alethea Hayter. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nodier, Charles. 1980. Le Vampire. Œuvres dramatiques, I. Ed. by Ginette Picat-Guinoiseau. Genève: Droz. Novalis. 1987. Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Schriften. Ed. by Paul Kluckhohn und Richard Samuel. Vol. 1: Das dichterische Werk. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. 193–334. Polidori, John William Dr. 1992. »The Vampyre: A Tale«. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Appendix C. Ed. with an introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 233–255. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1964. »Über Goethes Meister«. Kritische Schriften. Ed. by Wolf- dietrich Rasch. München: Carl Hanser. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Ed. with an introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Scott, Walter. 1886. The Pirate. Edinburgh: Adam & Black. Sue, Eugène. 1844–45. Le Juif errant. Paris: Paulin.

Night-sides of existence: Madness, dream, etc. Monika Schmitz-Emans 1.

Post-rationalistic explorations of the world’s »night-side« »The night hour struck; I wrapped myself in my quixotic disguise, took in hand the pike and horn, went out into the gloom and called out the hour, after I had protected myself against the evil spirits with a sign of the cross« (Klingemann 1972, 29).1

The word »Nachtseite« (night-side) originally has an astronomical meaning: it refers to those parts of a planet’s surface which are turned away from the sun. Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’s treatise Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Aspects of the Night-side of Science, 1808), a formative influence on several Romantics, knows well enough about this original meaning (Schubert 1997, 125, note 11), but uses the expression in a metaphorical sense to stand for topics and problems which have not before been inquired into, because they were regarded as hallucinatory products of superstition (ibid., 2). Schubert wants to compensate for this deficiency by his investigations into human nature. His Geschichte der Seele (History of the Soul, 1830) celebrates the night as omnipotent mother of all things, as the very source of spiritual existence, and as the dark realm from which all thoughts and notions as well as all sentiments and imaginings arise. Madness, dream, somnambulism and all kinds of visionary experiences are located on the night-side of human nature. Schubert’s Geschichte der Seele is dedicated to the significance of dream life, as in this passage cited by Wellek: The series of events in our lives seem to be joined approximately according to a similar association of ideas of fate, as the pictures in the dream, in other words, the series of events that have occurred and are occurring inside and outside of us, the inner theoretical principle of which we remain unaware, speaks the same language as our soul in a dream. Therefore, as soon as our mind speaks in dream language, it is able to make combinations that would not occur to us when awake […]. Dreams are a way of reckoning and combining that you and I do not understand; a higher kind of algebra, briefer and easier than ours, which only the hidden poet knows how to manipulate in his mind (Wellek 1969, 13).

There is something paradoxical about the project of illuminating the night-sides of nature and of the human mind, for, on the one hand, it implies the acceptance of irrational forces and unconscious motivations as real and powerful, while on the other hand it is linked to the project to extinguish all mysteries and to close all abysses. Casting the light of reason upon the night-sides of nature necessarily means overcoming darkness, translating something incomprehensible into human terms and destroying its original quality. A large number of Romantic texts are dedicated to the question whether this is possible at all and to what degree. And one should be aware of another implication connected with the astronomical metaphor of »day- and night1.

»Die Nachtstunde schlug; ich hüllte mich in meine abenteuerliche Vermummung, nahm die Pike und das Horn zur Hand, ging in die Finsternis hinaus und rief die Stunde ab, nachdem ich mich durch ein Kreuz gegen die bösen Geister geschützt hatte« (Klingemann 1974, 5).

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side«: As soon as the sunlight reaches the former night-side of a planet, the former dayside falls into darkness. We may regard this process as an ironic metaphor for the development of science in postEnlightenment times: The dark realms of nature and the human mind are explored, but in the course of these explorations human reason itself turns opaque and becomes incomprehensible to itself. It would be an illegitimate simplification to define Romanticism simply as anti-rationalism. It can rather be regarded as meta-rationalistic, as far as the belief in a general (and rational) natural order of things and their intelligibility for the human mind is concerned. Philosophy, psychology and physics are involved in the discussion about mental and natural order and about the reasons and consequences of deviation from the ordinary. In the late eighteenth century insanity, which often had been criminalized and punished analogously to crime, was re-interpreted as mental »disease«. In spite of the humanisation of the treatment of the mentally disabled — they were systematically submitted to medical care — this still implied exclusion from the »normal« and the definition of madness as the opposite of »reason«. The asylum was no less oppressive than other kinds of places where the »abnormal« had been locked up. In the Romantic period, empirical psychology establishes its position as a modern discipline, and there is a notable change in medical practices concerned with cases of madness. Obviously, the exclusion of the »other« is of constitutive importance for the definition of normality, and the exclusion of the unreasonable is a necessary condition to define the reasonable (in the literal sense of demarcation and exclusion). Madness, as the most extreme expression of the unreasonable, is more than a deficient mental condition, more than a lack of sense which could be judged reasonably, and more than a deviation from natural normality which could be corrected by the choice of the right way of thinking: It is the powerful counterpart of reason, calls the reasonableness of reason as such into question. Literary fiction profits extensively by the psychological, medical, physical, and philosophical discourses about madness, and Romantic authors like Hoffmann receive much inspiration from the works of physicians and psychologists (as, for example, Schubert, Reil, Pinel). Often their narrations resemble modified versions of case studies of mental sickness, often they actually are inspired by real cases reported in the physicians’ treatises, and often enough they in turn have been quoted by psychologists and psychiatrists as illustrations of the latter’s models and concepts. Complementary to the profit which literary fiction found in the physical and medical sciences, literary imagination in Romanticism stimulated the scientific and philosophical discussion about mental diseases and madness. The permanent background of the interdisciplinary interest in these topics is formed by the interest in post-rational concepts of »order«, the search for a universal law of nature. Step by step the idea of occurrences and experiences which are definitely beyond any »order« emerges. Experience is interspersed by the modern notion of contingency. It is Romantic literature which paves the way for this development. 2.

The dark forces of imagination »We nightwatchmen and poets care little indeed about the doings of men in the day; for by this time it belongs among the settled truths that when they act, men are very much creatures of

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daytime, and one may gain some interest in them at the most when they dream« (Klingemann 1972, 45).2

In eighteenth-century literature madness and insanity were generally represented from an outside point of view. Certainly, different authors tried to describe those cases in a sensitive, often even an empathetic way, but the eye of reason was supervising the process of description. Idées fixes and obsessions thus appeared to be real only for the insane mind, not objectively. As one consequence of this view from the outside, until the end of the Enlightenment era, madness and hallucinations could be treated in a humoristic and satirical way, for instance, when poetic imagination was satirized as a hallucinatory disease. Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704) encloses a »Digression concerning the Original, the Use and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth«. Here Swift refers to the pseudo-Aristotelian concept of melancholy as characteristic of great spirits, and ironically turns it into the thesis of intellectual greatness as the product of disturbed minds. And he proposes to appoint the inhabitants of Bedlam to political functions in order to profit from their »wonderful talents«. Correspondingly, Lichtenberg — indirectly satirizing the Sturm und Drang ideas about poetical genius — proposes to promote madmen to poets, in order to provide for ingenious poetry. In his explanations of William Hogarth’s representations of a A Rake’s Progress, Lichtenberg especially interprets the Bedlam scene, which shows a group of lunatics, with obvious irony, as the visual equivalent to solipsism and the radical consequence of idealistic philosophy: Everybody here, he asserts, is closed up in his own world, as the »world« is created by the human mind, so that there is one world for each individual. Each is a world to himself and none provides light for the others, and none eclipses the other; each has its own light. If there is anyone who does not yet know that it is the head which makes the world and not the world which makes the head, he should look here (Lichtenberg 1966, 267).3

It is exactly this idea which will be extremely stimulating for Romantic fictional prose. From the ordinary and »reasonable« point of view, the forces of imagination were a subject of profound suspicion. Their contribution to cognitive processes appeared to be restricted, if not even generally doubtful. However, complementary to a tendency of excluding imagination from cognition, its significance for aesthetic production was stressed. In 1764 Kant, who tried to define the fields of different mental activities clearly, characterized madness in a »Versuch über die Krankheiten des Kopfes« (Essay on Mental Diseases). In his opinion, madness interrupts and disturbs the regular functioning of sensory perception. As a consequence, imagination and reality are confounded, and those who suffer from this kind of confusion should be sent to a hospital. This concept of madness will be of formative influence on Romantic ideas, though there 2.

»Wir Nachtwächter und Poeten kümmern uns um das Treiben der Menschen am Tage in der Tat wenig; denn es gehört zur Zeit zu den ausgemachten Wahrheiten: Die Menschen sind wenn sie handeln höchst alltäglich und man mag ihnen höchstens wenn sie träumen einiges Interesse abgewinnen« (ibid., 15).

3.

»Jeder ist eine Welt für sich, wovon keine der andern leuchtet und keine die andere verfinstert: jede hat ihr eignes Licht. Wer noch nicht weiß, daß der Kopf die Welt macht, und nicht die Welt den Kopf, der sehe hierher« (Lichtenberg 1972, 905 f.).

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it is interpreted just the other way round: Since the confusion of the real and the imaginary is the prerogative of poetical minds, it is not by chance that hospitals and lunatic asylums are the places where poets can be found. Aesthetic reflection becomes closely connected to medical discourse in Romanticism. The beautiful and the arts are regarded as objects of anthropological science, and especially the topic of genius is reflected upon from an anthropological and medical point of view. Though Plato’s concept of enthusiasmos is still remembered well, madness, on the one hand, may be viewed as a pathological syndrome. On the other hand, a certain degree of oddness seems to be almost indispensable for artistic creativity. Aesthetic production can be interpreted as a symptom of insanity, but also as a kind of self-therapy or substitutional therapy. As Odo Marquard has pointed out (1975, 351), there is a turn of philosophy towards medicine, and vice versa in the early nineteenth century. Remarkable documents of the Romantic spirit were written by physicians such as Kielmeyer, Eschenmayer, Windischmann, Ritter, Treviranus, Oken, Troxler, Schubert, Baader, and Carus. And a number of philosophies of disease were developed, which interpret disease either as the expression of disharmony, of regression, or even of sin, as testimony to the Fall of Man. The forces of imagination are a main topic in any case. The discovery of the complexity of man’s self required subtler concepts of identity and prepared the ground for the idea that there are non-domesticated regions and forces within everybody’s self — sectors that cannot be perfectly controlled by reason. The pre-Romantics already regarded irrational behaviour as a more authentic expression of the vitally feeling human creature than rationalistic theories would ever have admitted. Even fiercer outbursts of insanity could be interpreted as manifestations of emotional forces beyond the control of reason, of man’s violently suppressed nature. Friedrich Schelling’s and Arthur Schopenhauer’s theories of »genius« are closely linked to their ideas about madness. Different kinds of discourses are concerned with the question of what insanity is and how to distinguish it from sanity: anthropological theories about the nature of man as well as psychological discussions on the self and its internal constitution, gnoseological theories as well as ethical precepts. Even physicists are involved from the moment when certain groups and schools popularise the idea that specific forms and utterances of madness reveal the hidden relation between the soul and the universe. The interest which Romantic literature takes in madmen, mad dreamers and visionaries supports the suggestion that the modern age begins with Romanticism, if modernity is conceived as the Occidental subject’s loss of orientation and self-confidence, for modernity is characterized by the distrust of all certainties concerning the nature of man as well as the nature of things, as the increasing notion of contingency, as the expression of an unhappy conscience, as the experience of an irreversible alienation between individuals and the orders of the world with which they have to accommodate themselves. 3.

Literary reflections about madness

The reasons for the interest that literary authors take in the subject of madness are at least as numerous as the different types and forms of appearance of madmen. One of the dominant thematic interests is in the dark and shadowy aspects of the self detected in its often mysterious

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relations towards nature. But the forces of the unconscious are perceived as deeply ambiguous. Often enough their effects seem more authentic and are more closely related to the individual than the actions of the conscious self, and often enough the force of intuition seems more powerful and reliable than any kind of reasoning. This, however, does not lead to a confident and trustful reliance on intuition, because the knowledge of being dependent on something unconscious and uncontrollable undermines the notion of identity and destabilizes the self deeply. For instance, Heinrich von Kleist’s protagonists — such as the title figures of Die Marquise von O… (The Marchioness of O…, 1808) and Käthchen von Heilbronn (Cathy of Heilbronn, 1810) — show as instructive examples the ambiguous consequences of intuition: On the one hand, intuitions are true, and intuitive behaviour allows the self to communicate more intensely and efficiently with the nature of things than reasoning and self-control ever could. On the other hand, the characters who submit their actions to intuition nevertheless feel alienated from themselves, and they even lose the notion of personal identity, as they become aware of the insoluble difference between the reflecting self and the acting self. Some works of fictional prose do not even suggest any attempt to illuminate the enigmatic world by the means of description as a form of objectification, but stress and deepen the shadows covering man and nature. This implies the abandonment of a concept of objective writing. A permanent process of contamination linking the subject’s sphere to other realms beyond the control of reason is reflected in the structure of certain literary texts. For example, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (The Sandman, 1817) strikingly exhibits the confusion which can be produced by multi-perspective narration. And Hoffmann’s narrators in general are conceived in a way that makes them doubtful witnesses, be it the narrator of Ritter Gluck (Chevalier Gluck, 1809) who obviously has an abundantly imaginative mind, be it »Tomcat Murr« who interprets things in his subjective manner. Romantic fictional writing can be described as a great laboratory in which different kinds of experiments are carried out. Different modes of writing are experienced not just for reasons of curiosity, but as the very serious reaction to the idea that conventional literary and rhetorical means are not sufficient to reflect the modern self and its world. By means of narration, conventional objects and experiences are subjected to alienation, established notions and convictions are questioned, the self-confidence of the mind is shattered. Persons and things reveal their double faces, and often it is impossible to identify a »subject« responsible for what happens to somebody or a »subject« responsible for the data and interpretations which form the text. The difference between truth and lying and even the difference between good and evil comes into question. Romantics are fascinated by magic and supernatural appearances, by demons, ghosts, revenants, and doubles of the self, by Gothic thrills and abnormalities of various kinds; their thematic interests concentrate on dreams and utterances of madness, psychological deviations and mental adventures. It is especially fantastic literature (in the sense which Tzvetan Todorov has given to this term) which serves as a vehicle for the Romantic interest in the ambiguity and enigmaticity of reality. Consequently, in works of fantastic literature pictures of the obscure are predominant, and the topics of insanity, lunacy, dream and hallucination play a key role. And stories about visionaries, dreamers, madmen, hallucinating eccentrics and other types of characters transgressing the borderline of mental normality are always at least implicitly, if not explicitly, pieces of self-reflexive literature. We can distinguish typologically different

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kinds of Romantic »madmen« in literature, and each of them serves as a mirror-image of the poet in a specific respect: Firstly, there is, as the noblest of all lunatics, the inspired visionary as a mouthpiece of divine (in the sense of supernatural) forces, a contemporary descendant of the ancient poeta vates. This visionary is not only repeatedly created by Romantic imagination, he has also served as a model for critics to interpret real poets and artists who were supposed to be partially or temporarily insane, as, for instance, Hölderlin and William Blake. Secondly, there is the withdrawn dreamer, the unworldly lunatic, living in the world of his fantastic imagination rather than in reality, and confusing realities and visions, as, for instance, in Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck. Thirdly, there is the solipsist, who takes all realities to be the creations of his own imagination and is torn between the self-confident conviction of his own omnipotence on the one hand, and the feeling of desperate solitude on the other, as, for instance, Jean Paul’s Leibgeber in the Clavis Fichtiana (The Fichtean Key, 1800). There is, fourthly, the social outsider and eccentric who mainly by his strange behaviour gives the impression of being insane, though he sometimes appears as the descendant of the medieval fool telling the truth which nobody else dares to tell, revealing the superficiality and falsehood of social life and insisting on the right of the individual against conventions, regularities and orders. Nikolaus Marggraf in Jean Paul’s novel Der Komet (The Comet, 1820–22) is a thoroughly sympathetic and moral character in spite of his madness. Fifthly, there is the melancholic, representing the depressive state of mind characteristic of mankind, because it is alienated from its natural origins and condemned to live in an imperfect world. Examples of this type can already be found in the early Romantic narrations of Wackenroder and Tieck, as for instance the musician Josef Berglinger in the Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar, 1796). Sixthly, there is the raving madman, victim of a real obsession which can have very different causes. Often the narrations about obsessed lunatics are characterized by ambiguities in regard to the question whether the reasons for his fixed ideas are external or internal ones. Hoffmann’s musician and composer Johannes Kreisler in Kater Murr (Tomcat Murr, 1819–21) and Nathanael in Der Sandmann thus fall victim to rage for ambiguous reasons. Seventhly, there is the dissociated mind, the subject who suffers from a loss of identity and from internal antagonisms, culminating in outbursts of schizophrenia or in visions of a doppelgänger. In Tieck’s narration Der blonde Eckbert (Eckbert the Fair, 1797) the protagonist finally loses his identity. Leibgeber/Schoppe in Jean Paul’s novel Titan (1800–03) ends up as a literally doubled self, and there are others to follow him, as for instance the protagonist in Dostoevski’s Doppelgänger novel Dvoinik (The Double, 1846). There is an eighth group consisting of individuals who rebel against orders of any kind, who claim for themselves a certain knowledge or a deeper insight into hidden truths; they are not insane in a stricter sense but represent — under different aspects — an idea of deviation from normalcy which at least resembles the deviations of lunacy. Jean Paul’s humoristic figures as, for instance, Schoppe (before his tragic death) and Peter Worble (Der Komet) behave strangely in order to reflect the world’s strangeness.

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We can, on the foundation of this typology, also distinguish between certain subjects and topics in Romantic fictional prose. (1) The first subject, or rather the first group of subjects, can be characterized by the key words appearance and reality, experience and imagination, truth and fiction. The topic is closely related to the transcendental philosophical question of what experience actually consists of and in how far there is any distinction between experience and imagination at all. Important representatives of Romantic literature are inclined to ignore this difference. Jean Paul in his treatise Über die natürliche Magie der Einbildungskraft (On the Natural Magic of the Imagination, 1797) discusses the close relationship between imagination, memory and experience. He is convinced that imagination participates in all mental activities and subjects the objects of memory and even those of present sensory experience to its formative power. One important consequence of the emphasis which Romantic theorists of imagination put upon the imaginative character of the experienced world itself is that poetic representation is regarded as more than just imitation of a pre-existent reality. Memory is merely a more restricted kind of imagination. […] People whose heads are filled with poetic creatures will not find less poetic beings on the exterior. To the real poet all life is dramatic, all neighbors are dramatis personae, all pains from which the others suffer to him are sweet illusionary pains, everything appears to him as mobile, elevated, arcadian, elusive and joyful, and he never becomes aware of how bourgeois and restricted a poor archival secretary with six children feels — supposing that he himself was such a person. Because if he himself is discomforted in his everyday life, […] he feels as if playing a guest role in Gay’s Beggars Opera. Fate is the playwright, and wife and children are the resident actors.4

(2) As another topic, the problematic relation between the artist and the society of so-called ordinary and normal people is reflected in accounts of insane outsiders. A consequence of the change in the social role and function of the artist in general is that the poet’s existence has become uncertain and unstable in the course of the eighteenth century. While the eccentric genius is often highly esteemed for his incompatibility with anybody else, his social existence in the bourgeois age is questioned more than ever before. More than one poet in the context of Romantic fiction becomes insane as a consequence of his isolation and society’s disrespect for his works. The Romantics are deeply convinced of the creative forces of imagination. Madness, however, is often interpreted as the exaggerated state of imaginative productivity. Literature adapts stories about madmen to reflect upon itself, upon creativity and its dark sources. Karl Philipp Moritz, one of most important predecessors of Romanticism in Germany, in vol. 3 of his Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (Magazine of Empirical Psychology, 1785) reports a strange case 4.

»Gedächtnis ist nur eine eingeschränktere Phantasie. […] Leute, deren Kopf voll poetischer Kreaturen ist, finden auch außerhalb desselben keine geringern. Dem echten Dichter ist das ganze Leben dramatisch, alle Nachbarn sind ihm Charaktere, alle fremde Schmerzen sind ihm süße der Illusion, alles erscheint ihm beweglich, erhoben, arkadisch, fliehend und froh, und er kommt nie dahinter, wie bürgerlich-eng einem armen Archivsekretär mit sechs Kindern — gesetzt er wäre das selber — zumute ist. Denn ist er selber bürgerlich unglücklich […]: so kommt es ihm vor, als mach’ er eine Gastrolle in Gays Bettleroper; das Schicksal ist der Theaterdichter, und Frau und Kind sind die stehende Truppe« (Jean Paul 1962, IV: 195, 198).

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of inspiration: about verses written by a sleeping author, who after having woken up, cannot even remember his work by night. Psychologists like Moritz and physicians like Schubert with their descriptions of strange mental experiences and aberrant states of mind provide Romantic literature with a rich fund of models, concepts, and exemplary cases, just when madness is becoming a literary subject of pre-eminent interest, because it is a suitable metaphor for the poet’s own existence. So, for instance, August Wilhelm Schlegel defines poetry as a state of dream, as »a deliberate and conscious dreaming«.5 The generally ambiguous attitude of Romanticism towards poetry as the counterpart of ordinary life is mainly reflected by stories about insane characters. Especially those authors who are sensitive to the discrepancy between the idea of an autonomous Romantic poetry on the one hand, and Christian values on the other, as for instance Brentano and Eichendorff, usually stress the affinities between poetry and madness in a warning sense. In Brentano’s novel Godwi, we meet a character called Werdo, who is the plaything of madness and poetry in their struggle to seize power over his mind: »It seems to me as if madness and poetry were struggling with each other for Werdo’s spirit, one or the other grasping him victoriously. Madness to me is the unfortunate brother of poetry«.6 Eichendorff ’s novella Das Schloß Dürande (Castle Dürande, 1837) closes with a warning addressed to the reader — the warning not to wake up the wild beast sleeping within one’s own breast, because it might break out and tear one to pieces. The Romantic interest in madness is at least to some degree stimulated by the fact that a remarkable number of contemporary poets suffered from mental diseases and obsessions or became addicted to drugs or alcohol (Hoffmann, Nerval, Poe, De Quincey spring to mind among the most popular poets). 4.

»Nachtwachen« and »Nachtstücke« »The character of the times is patched and pieced together like a fool’s coat, and worst of all, the fool buttoned in it would like to appear serious…« (Klingemann 1972, 49).7

The narrator of Bonaventura’s Nachtwachen is not a madman in a stricter sense of the word, but he sympathizes with several forms of melancholy and mental eccentricity, which finally culminate in real insanity. In his portrait of a dark and disordered world he depicts a lunatic asylum as the mirror image of society itself. Each lunatic in his separate cell is obsessed by another idée fixe, and the narrator himself is one of the asylum’s inhabitants, as he does not represent any superior point of view in the novel. There is no reasonable point of view from which the world’s madness could be criticized; there is no truth which could serve as a measure to judge dreams and illusions; there is no mental sanity correcting obsessions.

5.

»ein freiwilliges und waches Träumen« (A.W. Schlegel 1963, 283).

6.

»Es ist mir, als stritten Wahnsinn und Poesie sich um Werdos Geist, und siegend faßte ihn diese oder jener. Der Wahnsinn ist mir wie der unglückliche Bruder der Poesie« (Brentano 1970, 126 f.).

7.

»Der Zeitcharakter ist zusammengeflickt und gestoppelt wie eine Narrenjacke, und was das Ärgste dabei ist — der Narr, der darin steckt, möchte ernsthaft scheinen« (Klingemann 1974, 17).

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So it goes […] in the general lunatic asylum out of whose windows so many heads are looking, some partially, some totally insane; even in here there are yet smaller madhouses built in for particular fools. Into one of these smaller ones they now brought me out of the large one, presumably because they considered the latter to be too densely populated (ibid., 149).8

All the central subjects of Romantic fiction are integrated into Bonaventura’s Nachtwachen. Mainly the inner dissociation of the self, which causes the loss of the subject’s identity, and the lack of distinctiveness between reality and appearance can be regarded as leading topics. A series of pictures, similes and traditional concepts are functionalised to reflect on these topics: the world as an asylum and the world as a stage, man as an actor hidden behind more than one mask and, in the final analysis, identical with his masks, so that when they are all pulled away, there is nothing left behind them. The sixteen »watches« of Bonaventura’s Nachtwachen are characterized by their radical attacks on every system of rules, especially the rules and orders of reason. Since the world itself and as a whole is regarded as unreasonable, insanity is the presumptive normal mental condition, and the narrator consequently adapts to the insanity of the other characters, though his insanity is only one mask among others. As there is, however, no real identity behind the masks, his madness is no disguise of a true face, but the ultimate truth to be gained. Bonaventura’s small novel is a programmatic text: Romantic literature in general may be characterised as a night-watch, leading from one dark episode to another, casting light only on different kinds of madness, pointing to the indifference between life and dream, provoking the question whether occurrences are caused by fate or by chance. The Nachtwachen reveals the human soul as the darkest area in the whole world. As its narrator is transgressing the borderline between the day- and the night-side of the world and of the human mind, he indirectly reflects the self-interpretation of early Romantic literature, following directly upon the Enlightenment but now turning to realms beyond the reach of clear notions as well as beyond unambiguous moral evaluation. His imagination is, in spite of his emotions and passions, still controlled by reason. Subsequent Romantic fictional characters will get closer to madness themselves, while their poetical self-reflections will continue to serve to underline the autonomy of art: Because it becomes impossible to tell plainly where experience ends and imagination begins, where reason ends and folly begins, so the poetical interpretation of the world, represented by the view of the »un-normal«, no longer can be criticised from the perspective of reason, morality, religion, and science. While the outside viewpoint vanishes, the moment of reflection remains, reflexiveness being the main structural characteristic of Romantic literature which claims to be autonomous. E.T.A. Hoffmann called a collection of his stories Nachtstücke (Night-Pieces, Nocturnes). This term is derived from art criticism. The light in the darkness of a painted »Nachtstück« can spring from different sources: from lamps and candles in the hands of human characters, but from heaven as well. Representative examples were painted by Caravaggio and Rembrandt, 8. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Ebenso ist es mit dem allgemeinen Irrenhause, aus dessen Fenstern so viele Köpfe schauen, teils mit partiellem, teils mit totalem Wahnsinne; auch in dieses sind noch kleinere Tollhäuser für besondere Narren hineingebaut. In eins von diesen kleinern brachten sie mich jetzt aus dem großen, vermutlich weil sie dieses für zu stark besetzt hielten« (ibid., 77).

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Georges de la Tour and Claude Lorrain. Hoffmann knew well and admired Correggio’s famous »Night« painting, which was exhibited in the Dresdner Gemäldegalerie. Whereas the expression »Nachtstück«, in Germany, originally applied only to paintings, the English equivalent »night-piece« applied to other kinds of art works as well. The analogous term in music was the nocturne. Jean Paul and August Wilhelm Schlegel too use it as the name of a literary genre. The expression »Nachtstück« acquires a double sense: the night piece can be interpreted not only as a representation of a nightly scene or mood, but also as a »piece« of the night — as a piece of mystery which itself can not be lighted up entirely. Romantic fiction in general claims to be the one as well as the other: »night-watch« and »night-piece« at the same time. 5.

National varieties of reports from the »night-side« »Everyday experience teaches that one tolerates fools in all places« (Klingemann 1972, 217).9

Authors from all over Europe and America — late heirs such as Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce included — take part in the exploration of the night-side. Hence, different emphases in the literary reflection upon madness and related phenomena allow us to speak about particular »national« interests, though with a certain reservatio mentalis. The following sections deal with specific varieties of dream, madness and vision labelled as »national«, but this is not meant in an exclusive sense. There are examples of texts belonging to the »French« variety in German literature, there are others exhibiting affinities to the »Russian« variety, and so forth. 5.1 Night-sides, madness, dream and vision, I: The French variety The »French variety« of Romanticism is characterized by continuous reflections about the limits of »reason« and about the order of things. Tzvetan Todorov in his Introduction à la littérature fantastique defines fantastical effects as contrasts to a background of the idea of a reasonable order of the world. Reason is challenged, and reason must respond: either by integrating the moments of disorder into its own map of the world, or by accepting its own limits. The concept as such may be called »French«, but only in regard to its discursive provenience: Roger Caillois and Tzvetan Todorov are the heirs of the French Enlightenment. Their traditional French confidence in reason is superseded in Romantic discourse by other general and integrative metaphysical concepts of the universe. This »French« interest in universal laws likewise forms the background for the nineteenth-century reception of Romantic medicine, nature philosophy, mesmerism, and psychology in France. Authors like Nerval, Gautier, Lamartine, and Balzac adapt the idea of magnetism to depict a world of universal correspondences, which include the realms of dream and hallucination and the experience of a night-side of the world by integrating it into a spiritual order of things. Mesmerism interprets the universe in a new way, and it claims to be an experimental and empiric science. Romantic physics in their general attempt to integrate the night-sides of the world into holistic concepts stick to the idea of »order«, even under radically transformed preconditions. 9.

»die tägliche Erfahrung lehrt, daß man an allen Plätzen Narren duldet« (ibid., 124).

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In his dreams, man discovers a second life which forms the counterpart of his everyday reality, and he becomes aware of his integration into universal correspondences. The forces of the unconscious are regarded as proofs of the mysterious coherence of all beings in the universe — of a mysterious, but powerful »order«. Nerval’s narrative poem in prose Aurélia (1855) at its very beginning characterises dream as a gate to the dark side of the world. Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world. The first moments of sleep are an image of death […]. Little by little a vague underground cavern grows lighter and the pale gravely immobile shapes that live in limbo detach themselves from the shadows and the night (Nerval 1957, 115).10

The protagonist in Aurélia becomes convinced that his visions of the other side of reality reveal to him profound truths about the universe, and he feels initiated into a spiritual order which links body and mind, man and nature. Even ordinary appearances must be regarded as manifestations of a universal spirit, and each creature can be a messenger of the mystery, even unconsciously. Many times the idea has occurred to me that in certain serious moments in life some Spirit of the outer world becomes suddenly embodied in the form of an ordinary person, and influences or tries to influence us without the individual in question having any knowledge of it or remembering anything about it (ibid., 120).11

From an enlightened, rationalistic point of view, ideas of this kind might be regarded as insane, as proofs of madness or rapture, or at least of an inclination to hallucinatory dreams, but Nerval does not denounce his protagonist as the victim of a mental disease. On the contrary, he uses him as his mouthpiece to proclaim Romantic ideas about the world’s universal laws, including the reality of a night-side of nature and mind. In spite of the positive consciousness which may be supported by such ideas of man being integrated into nature without any rupture, there is, however, one aspect of this concept of universal coherence, which makes it a nightmare nevertheless: The forces of the spiritual world appear as more powerful than man’s individual will. And so he must be suspicious that he might not be the real subject of his thoughts and actions, but an instrument of something beyond his own consciousness, a simple object, moved by the forces of nature. From the outlines of leaves, colours, sounds, and smells, emanated for me hitherto unknown harmonies. »How have I been able to live so long,« I asked myself, »outside Nature without identifying myself with it? Everything lives, moves, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays, emanating either from myself or from others, cross the limitless chain of created things

10.

»Le Rêve est une seconde vie. Je n’ai pu percer sans frémir ces portes d’ivoire ou de corne qui nous séparent du monde invisible. Les premiers instants du sommeil sont l’image de la mort […]. C’est un souterrain vague qui s’éclaire peu à peu, et où se dégagent de l’ombre et de la nuit les pâles figures gravement immobiles qui habitent le séjour des limbes« (Nerval 1960, I: 357).

11.

»Cette idée m’est revenue bien de fois, que, dans certains moments graves de la vie, tel Esprit du monde extérieur s’incarnait tout à coup en la forme d’une personne ordinaire, et agissait ou tentait d’agir sur nous, sans que cette personne en eût la connaissance ou en gardât souvenir« (ibid., 363).

150

Monika Schmitz-Emans unimpeded; it is a transparent network which covers the world, and its slender threats communicate themselves by degrees to the planets and stars. Captive now upon earth, I commune with the chorus of the stars who share in my joys and sorrows.« Then I shuddered to think that even this mystery might be surprised. »If electricity,« I told myself, »which is the magnetism of physical bodies, can be forced in a direction imposed on it by laws, that is all the more reason why hostile and tyrannical spirits may be able to enslave the intelligences of others, and make use of their divided strength for their own purposes of domination (ibid., 167).12

Magnetic and mesmeristic experiments seem to prove this human inclination to transform oneself into an object of the »Other«, to lose one’s state as a self-governed subject. And, again, dream, madness, rapture, and similar mental aberrations appear as the gates through which the »Other« enters into the subject’s territory. There is a remarkable number of examples of Romantic prose fiction about magnetic sleep, mesmeric dreams, and other forms and results of hypnotic practice. At least indirectly all these stories raise the question about the order of things, which can be formulated as an alternative: Either the visions of a night-side of the world are true; or they are illusionary and can be integrated into scientific concepts of mental aberration and disease — in this case the only nightside of nature is the human inclination to misinterpret and misunderstand the order of things and to fall victim to autosuggestion. What kind of laws govern the world? Across the Rhine, we find a related probing. E.T.A. Hoffmanns story The Sandman, integrated into his Nachtstücke (Night-pieces), is arranged in a way which confronts different perspectives. The fate of Hoffmann’s protagonist Nathanael is presented from the point of view of reason as well as from the point of view of somebody who believes in the reality of supernatural forces. To the representatives of reason, Nathanael, who takes on the second part, appears insane from the beginning and finally even behaves like a raving madman. The very beginning of his first letter, which forms the first part of the whole text, expresses Nathanael’s fear of evil forces and of a loss of self-government, but also his awareness of a »reasonable« discourse which will object to his own viewpoint. He tries to adopt the reasonable interpretation of his experiences, but he can not conceal what is actually moving him: a feeling of horror. Nathanael’s mind is troubled by dark images of mysterious threats, though he obviously tries to convince himself that his ideas are ridiculous. He even anticipates the reasonable admonitions of the others who regard him as a day-dreamer. Hoffmann in his composition of letters and framing narration simulates two different discourses which proclaim two different orders of the world: the rationalistic discourse, represented by Nathanael’s fiancée Clara, who is convinced that Nathanael is mad and that the world can be made 12.

»des découpures de feuilles, des couleurs, des odeurs et des sons, je voyais ressortir des harmonies jusqu’ alors inconnues. ›Comment, me disais-je, ai-je pu exister si longtemps hors de la nature et sans m’identifier à elle? Tout vit, tout agit, tout se correspond; les rayons magnétiques émanés de moi-même ou des autres traversent sans obstacle la chaîne infinie de choses créées; c’est un réseau transparent qui couvre le monde, et dont les fils déliés se communiquent de proche en proche aux planètes et aux étoiles. Captif en ce moment sur la terre, je m’entretiens avec le chœur des astres, qui prend part à mes joies et à mes douleurs!‹ Aussitôt je frémis en songeant que ce mystère même pouvait être surpris. ›Si électricité, me dis-je, qui est le magnétisme des corps physiques, peut subir une direction qui lui impose des lois, à plus forte raison des esprits hostiles et tyranniques peuvent asservir les intelligences et se servir de leurs forces divisées dans un but de domination‹« (ibid., 403 f.).

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transparent (»clear«) by human reason, and non-rationalistic discourse, represented by Nathanael, who insists on the opacity of world’s laws, which are more powerful than the human mind and which are incorporated in the mysterious character of the »sandman«. Clara’s view of the world appears at the same time to be sensible and superficial. Because she represents the discourse of enlightened psychology, her admonitions appear as ambiguous: They can, on the one hand, be read as encouraging and moral, or, on the other hand, as an intricate part of the big trap in which Nathanael is bound to be caught. The »sandman«, as the very centre of Nathanael’s nightmare, does not really exist in Clara’s opinion, and she regards Nathanael’s idea that he is controlled and manipulated by the dark mysterious forces of an unknown fate as an idée fixe. According to Clara, infantile feelings of disgust towards a person, the impressiveness of a fairy-tale motif, and other psychological conditions have caused Nathanael’s horror. To her, everything can be explained »naturally«, and to some degree, her psychological explanations appear convincing. Hoffmann’s narrative strategy is subtle enough to confuse the reader concerning what he should believe himself, and which order of things exactly is reflected by Nathanael’s case. The text as a whole is characterized by irritation strategies: Nathanael’s outbursts of violence and raving are depicted from the »reasonable« point of view, which means: from the »outside«; but the episodes in which his »madness« slowly invades normality are told from his own perspective, so that the perspective of the »other« subverts the idea of objectivity, and the borderline between experience and hallucination becomes questionable. At any rate — even if Clara’s psychological explanation is true — man must be regarded as the object of dark and mysterious forces. She seems not to be aware of the desolate picture of the human mind implied in her own interpretation, which locates everything in the self. Maybe it is even more desolate than Nathanael’s belief in the supernatural. If there is a dark power which treacherously attaches a thread to our heart to drag us along a perilous and ruinous path that we would not otherwise have trod; if there is such a power, it must form inside us, from part of us, must be identical with ourselves; only in this way can we believe in it and give it the opportunity it needs if it is to accomplish its secret work. If our mind is firm enough and adequately fortified by the joys of life to be able to recognize alien and hostile influences as such, and to proceed tranquilly along the path of our own choosing and propensities, then this mysterious power will perish in its futile attempt to assume a shape that is supposed to be a reflection of ourselves (Hoffmann 1969, I: 146).13

Not accidentally, Clara’s admonitions to return to reason are formulated in the form of conditional sentences: If the individual’s mind is clear and solidly self-confident, it can resist any dark forces, if man governs himself by reason, he escapes from the government of mysterious fate — but what if not? 13. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Gibt es eine dunkle Macht, die so recht feindlich und verräterisch einen Faden in unser Inneres legt, woran sie uns dann festpackt und fortzieht auf einem gefahrvollen verderblichen Wege, den wir sonst nicht betreten haben würden — gibt es eine solche Macht, so muß sie in uns sich, wie wir selbst gestalten, ja unser Selbst werden; denn nur so glauben wir an sie und räumen ihr den Platz ein, dessen sie bedarf, um jenes geheime Werk zu vollbringen. Haben wir festen, durch das heitre Leben gestärkten, Sinn genug, um fremdes feindliches Einwirken als solches stets zu erkennen und den Weg, in den uns Neigung und Beruf geschoben, ruhigen Schrittes zu verfolgen, so geht wohl jene unheimliche Macht unter in dem vergeblichen Ringen nach der Gestaltung, die unser eignes Spiegelbild sein sollte« (Hoffmann 1985, III: 18 f.).

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152 5.2 Night-sides, madness, dream and vision II: The German variety

While the quest for the »order« of things either according to or in opposition to rationalism may be regarded as characteristic of the »French« variety of »night-side literature« (a variety which is represented by a large number of texts from all over Europe), the idea of different and antagonistic individual and subjective perspectives on the world may be called typical for »German« literary reports from the night-side of existence. Madmen, dreamers, opium-eaters, alcoholics, and — most significantly — poets take over the part of those who interpret reality according to very personal opinions and theories. As a consequence of their subjective reading of reality, they are in a certain sense locked up into their own world like solipsists. The solipsist is just the twin or the mirror-image of the idealistic philosopher. German Romanticism’s affinities to idealistic thought can be illustrated by the critical, yet fascinated reception of Fichte’s radicalised version of subjective idealism by his contemporaries. Ludwig Tieck, in his tale Der Blonde Eckbert, superficially imitates the folk-tale: His protagonist is a knight, there is a magic forest, an old woman resembling a witch, and sudden metamorphic transformations which appear as magic. The story of Eckbert’s wife Bertha is conceived according to folk-tales about poor children who are fortunate and achieve a higher social position: As a formerly poor girl she gains possession of a treasure and later gets married to a knight. But upon a closer look, everything is different. The witch-like old woman is betrayed by Bertha, and the treasure is stolen from her by the ungrateful girl, who is, however, in a certain sense, the victim of subtle seduction. The couple’s existence rests on the foundation of this guilt, and revenge is inevitable. This revenge of the old woman is incorporated by a man who seems to be a friend but is just a disguised personification of the »other«. Bertha becomes aware of the deep ambiguity of all things, and she dies under mysterious circumstances; and Eckbert himself suffers as well from analogous ambiguities: He no longer can tell good from evil, nor friends from enemies. Faces and characters lose their shapes, everything which seemed to be clear suddenly shows its dark and mysterious reverse. Eckbert gets self-suspicious; he is afraid of being mad and is unable to decide whether his hallucinations transform reality into a hieroglyphic maze of ambiguous apparitions, or if the world by itself is such a maze: »There were moments when he thought he was mad and that everything was merely the product of his imagination« (Tieck 1993, 32).14 Identities dissolve, finally even the identity of Eckbert himself, and neither the protagonist nor the reader can distinguish dream from reality any more. Nothing is resistant to hallucinatory transformation. Even his former life with his deceased wife to Eckbert’s suspicious and doubtful mind seems to have been only a dream. All his wits and senses now deserted him. He no longer knew whether he was living a dream or whether it was really a woman called Bertha who had been the dream; the supernatural became confused with the everyday, the world around him was bewitched and he was incapable of summoning up a thought or a memory (ibid., 32 f.).15 14.

»Oft dachte er, daß er wahnsinnig sei und sich nur selber durch seine Einbildung alles erschaffe« (Tieck 1997, 22).

15.

»Jetzt war es um das Bewußtsein, um die Sinne Eckberts geschehn; er konnte sich nicht aus dem Rätsel herausfinden, ob er jetzt träume oder ehemals von einem Weibe Bertha geträumt habe; das Wunderbarste

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The final scene of Tieck’s story shows us the protagonist lying on the ground, fallen into actual madness, and about to die from desperation: There is no solution to his doubts, no return to any solid reality: The knight is a solipsistic self locked up into his individual perceptions which never reveal to him any reliable truth about the mysterious world. The past is present, present is his guilt, and the indiscernible voices of nature torture the mind of the insane with incomprehensible messages. »Now totally out of his mind, Eckbert lay on the ground, dying, his head filled with the confused babble of the old woman talking, the dog barking and the bird singing its song over and over again« (ibid., 33).16 In spite of its fairy-tale motifs, Tieck’s story is already very modern as is the portrait of insanity deriving from the alienation between the self and the other. And there are numerous successors to the hopelessly solipsistic knight Eckbert. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories are filled with madmen and melancholics, dissociated selves and lunatics, visionaries and eccentric dreamers. Each of them seems to be locked up in a realm of personal obsessions, and often enough there is no »Clara« to represent the order of reason. The narrators, at any rate, refuse to take over the part of a mouthpiece of rational discourse. Hoffmann’s career as a writer started with the narration about »Ritter Gluck«, an eccentric who is either the ghost of the deceased composer Gluck returned to earth or a real lunatic, but in any case an insane character, an artist locked up in his imaginary world of sounds and synaesthetic visions. In addition to this, Gluck’s interlocutor, the narrator himself, is suspicious of being at least an unworldly day-dreamer whom the reader should not believe too confidently. With Ritter Gluck, Hoffmann has already developed the fundamental strategy of ambiguous narration which is altogether characteristic of his entire work and which confronts the reader permanently with the unanswerable question of how to distinguish mad dreams from real experiences. There is no absolute truth, the reader has to learn, as everybody reads the illusionary world of appearances according to his own pattern. Romantic narrators themselves provide only subjective interpretations, and often they are suspicious of mental »abnormality«. But there is no »normality« to which the so-called »ab-normal« could be compared, and so reality dissociates into different realities. In the centre of each reality, there is the single subject. The Serapiontic brotherhood is a group of young men who alternately tell stories forming Hoffmann’s novella cycle named after their eponymous hero, a lunatic identifying with the legendary hermit Serapion who lived in the early Christian age and suffered martyrdom. This young man is characterized by many talents; he is intelligent and well-informed and, moreover, he is a poet. His poetic gifts and his idée fixe do not exclude each other. On the contrary, it seems as if there were a special affinity between the poet’s force of imagination and outbursts of lunacy. This hermit had once been one of the most brilliant intellects, one of the most universallyaccomplished men […]. In all that did not touch the idea that he was the hermit Serapion who

vermischte sich mit dem Gewöhnlichsten, die Welt um ihn her war verzaubert und er keines Gedankens, keiner Erinnerung mächtig« (ibid., 23). »�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Eckbert lag wahnsinnig und verscheidend auf dem Boden; dumpf und verworren hörte er die Alte spre16. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� chen, den Hund bellen und den Vogel sein Lied wiederholen« (ibid., 24).

154

Monika Schmitz-Emans fled into the Theban desert in the days of the Emperor Decius, and suffered martyrdom in Alexandria, his mind was completely unaffected« (Hoffmann 1886, 11 f.).17

Each attempt to subject this madman to a cure of reason is condemned to failure, as he has detected reality’s dependence on the respective point of view and insists on his right to interpret the world according to his own ideas. A first venture to re-integrate him fails, and a sympathetic medical doctor — after experiencing the limits of his therapy — lets him escape again. When a well-meaning visitor tries to convince him that he is not the Christian hermit but a contemporary member of society, and that he is not living in the Theban desert but in a forest near Bamberg, the lunatic reproaches his reasonable counterpart for being mad himself, because — as the hermit very reasonably explains — either reality really conforms to Serapion’s ideas, which would mean that the reasonable visitor is wrong, or Serapion is actually mad — and in this case the attempt to convince him by the means of reason would be a thoroughly insane enterprise. This response is more than a slightly paradoxical joke about incurable madness: It points to the general problem of interpreting the world which arises from the very instance in which reality is regarded as produced and formed by subjective interpretation. It is insanity that is in question between us. But if one of us two is suffering from that sad malady, it is evident that you are so in a much greater degree than I. […]. Now, if I am really insane, none but a lunatic can think that he could argue me out of the Fixed Idea which insanity has engendered to me« (ibid., 16).18

Serapion, living happily in the world of his own imagining and within the society of imaginary people who visit him and talk to him, is a solipsist and a poetic visionary at the same time. The senses, according to his theory — which is inspired by subjective idealism — are only machines coordinated and supervised by the mind, and it is the mind which creates and forms the world according to its own structures and notions. As, therefore, the human spirit is the real organ of perception, then it is spirit as well which must judge the reality or unreality of things and events, and hence whatever mind declares to be real is real. Hoffmann’s artists are altogether dreamers as well as madmen. Like Ritter Gluck and Serapion, the composer and conductor Johannes Kreisler is an emblematic character, reflecting the incommensurability of the artist’s consciousness to what ordinary people regard as true reality. Obsession is irrefutable in Hoffmann’s world, especially artistic obsession. Although the artist’s and the poet’s points of view differ from the normal way of interpreting the world, the conventional ideas about reality do not represent the truth; they give proof of another kind of obsession, the obsession of reason believing in its own power.

17.

»Dieser Einsiedler war sonst einer der geistreichsten vielseitig ausgebildetsten Köpfe […]. Bis auf die Idee, daß er der Einsiedler Serapion sei, der unter dem Kaiser Dezius in die Thebaische Wüste floh und in Alexandrien den Märtyrertod litt, und was aus dieser folgte, schien sein Geist gar nicht zerrüttet« (Hoffmann 1985, IV: 19 f.).

18.

»Es ist vom Wahnsinn die Rede, leidet einer von uns an dieser bösen Krankheit, so ist das offenbar bei Ihnen der Fall in viel höherem Grade als bei mir. […] Bin ich nun wirklich wahnsinnig, so kann nur ein Verrückter wähnen, daß er imstande sein werde mir die fixe Idee, die der Wahnsinn erzeugt hat, auszureden« (ibid., 19, 24).

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Jean Paul is, like Hoffmann, very intensely concerned about the solipsistic tendencies of Romantic-idealistic spirit. As novelist and theorist, he reflects several times explicitly upon Fichte’s idealistic philosophy, which proclaims the transcendental subject to be the origin of the world — of a world which is »set up« by the subject. Malignly and ironically, Jean Paul transforms Fichte’s transcendental subject into an empirical subject and presents to the reader solipsists imprisoned in their inner worlds, convinced of their omnipotence, but tragically isolated. Leibgeber, the fictitious author of Jean Paul’s »Clavis Fichtiana«, the appendix to the novel Titan, is the most impressive mouthpiece of radical solipsism. Leibgeber’s dream is a vision of omnipotence — and at least metaphorically it points to the omnipotence of absolute poetical imagination which deliberately creates new worlds. The reverse of Leibgeber’s self-confidence as a godlike creator is, however, a vision of destructiveness and solitude. Everyone, according to the radical solipsist, creates his own universe, and he may tear it down, destroy it and rebuild it as he likes; he will never get into contact with any other subject. In Bonaventura’s Night Watches there is an analogous character pointing to solipsism as the very challenge to Romantic philosophical reflection: the »Insane World Creator« holding a »Monologue«, in which he describes the universe as »a queer thing here in my hand« (Klingemann 1972, 149), and, of course, he is the inhabitant of an insane asylum. With such a vision of a universe which is conceived according to idealistic notions, Jean Paul not only parodies Fichte’s philosophy, he also crosses the borderline between strictly logical thought and imagination, and, moreover, he provides for an arrangement in which philosophy itself goes mad. One of the most problematic consequences of those solipsistic dreams for Jean Paul is the dissolution of morality: If there is no communication between the solipsistic selves, there can be no ethical dimension to life, as moral or immoral behaviour is necessarily a behaviour towards other subjects. Leibgeber, convinced of his identity as the world’s creator, and in his own opinion caught up in his own universe, falls definitely into madness. I am not only […] my own redeemer, nay, I am also my own Devil, Scourge master, and Goodman Death […]. All around me a vast petrified mankind — no love, admiration or prayer, no hope and no purpose glows in the black uninhabited silence — Myself so alone, nowhere a heartbeat, no life, nothing around me, and apart from me nothing but nothing (Jean Paul 1992, 235).19

Both as a novelist as well as in his theoretical works, Jean Paul has continuously reflected on the tension between the world of the bourgeois and the eccentric ways of poetic minds, about the conflict between imaginative transformations of the world and everyday-judgement about so-called realities. In different respects the borderline between sanity and insanity is questioned, especially in cases where Jean Paul’s eccentric heroes play the part of fools who confront the world with uncomfortable truths. »Humorism« (»Humor«), in the special meaning Jean Paul gave to this term, implies a paradoxical combination of despising the world and loving it for its insufficiency, of being continuously aware of the finite nature of all things and at the same time 19. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Ich bin nicht bloß […], mein eigner Erlöser, sondern auch mein eigner Teufel, Freund Hein und Knutenmeister […] Rund um mich eine weite versteinerte Menschheit — In der finstern unbewohnten Stille glüht keine Liebe, keine Bewunderung, kein Gebet, keine Hoffnung, kein Ziel — Ich so allein, nirgends ein Pulsschlag, kein Leben, nichts um mich und ohne mich nichts als nichts« (Jean Paul 1980, III: 1056).

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feeling sympathetic towards their finiteness. Paradoxical attitudes produce paradoxical forms of behaviour which — as Jean Paul’s humoristic characters show exemplarily — from an ordinary point of view can scarcely be distinguished from lunatic behaviour. The eccentricity of these humoristic figures often alienates them from society, and it is but a step into solipsistic isolation. Apart from the humorists’ party in Jean Paul’s world there are various kinds of characters which can in different respects be compared to them — sentimental poets and day-dreamers as well as the cynic Dr. Katzenberger — and who contribute to making the idea of reasonable »normality« questionable and, finally, untenable. The protagonist of Jean Paul’s last fragmentary novel Der Komet, Nikolaus Marggraf, is mainly characterized by traits of the poetical day-dreamer. He is raised as the son of the pharmacist Henoch Elias Marggraf, although his mother has on her deathbed declared him to be the illegitimate son of a prince. In his early years the boy already shows his inclination to play roles and to identify with them. Alternately he is a saint, a hero, a famous man — and a secret prince. When he grows up, he sticks to the secret prince’s identity, first confirmed by his own stepfather, later by a fantastic stroke of luck: He succeeds in creating artificial diamonds from ordinary carbon, and so he is enabled to travel about the world in search of his noble father. His permanent conviction of his identity as a prince causes strange and often ridiculous misunderstandings and misinterpretations. As an allegorical representation of his specific concept of the world, he acquires an artificial small town consisting of portable pieces of scenery and gathers people around himself as his personal »royal household«. Each member of this household is eccentric in an individual and specific way, and among them there is the author Jean Paul himself in his youth, calling himself »Kandidat Richter«. In his portrait of the artist as a young man, Jean Paul stresses the unworldliness of the future poet Jean Paul. In more than one respect Jean Paul arranges his novel as a repetition of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1805–15), as his hero again follows a fixed idea and interprets all the world according to it. The world itself is populated by characters all of which appear as insane or eccentric in different respects. No one of them represents a reasonable point of view, as there is no reliable reason at all, neither in nature and history nor in the human mind. Peter Worble, who is Nikolaus Marggraf ’s Sancho, regards things from a sober point of view, even arranging and manipulating them, but nevertheless refuses to take the part of reason, because he does not believe in it. Not by chance, he is a specialist in hypnotic practice and somnambulistic dreams. Apart from him there is another character complementary to Nikolaus Marggraf, Kain, the »leather man«, the most diabolic character ever invented by Jean Paul, but nevertheless another deplorable inhabitant of a world which is in profound disorder. In mad visions Kain falls victim to solipsism, hatred and the desire for destruction but, though only temporarily, there are other dreams which transform him into somebody who loves mankind and tries to be good. This means a secular and relative salvation — the only kind that remains possible in a world of dreams, contingencies and as-ifs. In his last novel, Jean Paul not only reinstates the constellation of characters in Don Quixote but also creates literary doubles of the Saviour, Peter (Petrus) and the Devil (Kain), and tells a parable about truth and fiction, experience and imagination, in which the future author Friedrich Richter (Jean Paul’s actual name) acts as one odd person among others. This novel, therefore, illustrates the two important consequences of the Romantic discourse about reason and madness: Reality becomes ambiguous and ultimately »multiple« because there is no

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consensus about how to describe and to interpret it any more. The social world appears to be an asylum where everybody is governed by his own fixed idea about reality and about himself. Nobody represents a standard of normality. The fool can even represent the utopian forces of art and the idea of humanity, because he has escaped the government of reason, which may imply self-alienation and terror. Apart from the multiplication of realities, which is drastically illustrated by group portraits of lunatics, each one of them living in his own cell, or by the subversive effects of narrative constructions in which the narrator himself is mad, and apart from the tendency to separate the reasoning about truth and fancy from the ethical reasoning about good and evil, there is another predominant interest of Romantic discourse reflected in the representation of madness, and, again, Jean Paul’s last novel may serve in illustration: The identity of the self has become questionable, and instead of remaining the one and fixed point from which the world can be judged and governed, it too escapes self-judgment and self-government. In various forms and modifications Romantic fiction reflects on the dissociated, multiple and fragmentary self. In Jean Paul’s novel the characters can superficially be identified in their respective specificity, but their identity nevertheless appears to be questionable for several reasons. First, the novel reflects the idea that the individual’s mind is infiltrated by dreams and hypnotic practices; Second, the process of representation is explicitly reflected as a process of dissociation (as the protagonist, who is portrayed by a number of painters, is thus transformed into a corresponding number of persons); Third, the close relationship between the different characters suggests that they might be understood as different manifestations of one complex personality (an idea which is also suggested by Jean Paul’s novel Flegeljahre [The Awkward Years, 1804/05] or by Siebenkäs, 1796/97); and, finally, there obviously is no originally individual character in the novel in the first place: All protagonists are copies of former literary characters. It is Nikolaus Marggraf ’s specific obsession to believe in his identity and distinctness, though this is no more than the foolish dream of somebody who has been dreamt of by other fools before. Two important discursive movements can be detected with extreme clearness in the »German« variety of Romantic fictions about madmen, insane characters and dreamers: (1) The modern mind being aware of the world’s contingency in accordance with the idea that there is no absolute order of things and notions, but an infinite multiplicity of models and concepts of the world, none of which is absolutely true. The further development of subjective idealism is ambiguous in itself, as it leads to constructivistic concepts on the one hand, to radical scepticism on the other. In the aftermath of Romantic discourse, experience has been characterized by the idea of an »as if«: Things can be experienced and described as if they were true, and communication between different individuals can be established as if there were a common foundation called reality. (2) The progressive distinction between discourses about realities, about good and evil, and about art. The madman who falls victim to obsessions and mental deviations is not necessarily bad, and he may even be of eminent poetic talent. As a kind of newly discovered idol, Don Quixote makes his way from Romanticism through to early modernism. An obsessed fool on the one hand, he is exemplarily good on the other — and he is a leading model of all heroes of imagination.

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5.3 Romantic inheritance in America: E. A. Poe’s »Tales of Mystery and Imagination« Edgar Allan Poe’s tales can be regarded as the continuation of what started with Hoffmann and even earlier with Bonaventura: The distinction between madness and normality, insanity and sanity has become impossible in a world of enigmatic shadows, of characters who keep crossing the borderline between being awake and dreaming. There is, however, an intensification in respect to the literary evocation of madness, as Poe’s narrators themselves very often represent the discourse of insanity, whereas Hoffmann’s narrators in most cases, at least ironically, simulate normality. In Hoffmann’s polyperspectival »Sandman«, one of the narrators is actually the insane person himself, Nathanael, whose interpretation of reality contrasts with the reasonable, psychological interpretation of his female counterpart, and in Bonaventura’s novel the first-person narrator himself, Kreuzgang, has different faces, a reasonable and an eccentric one. In Poe’s works, finally, we often have good reason to doubt the reliability of what we are told on the literal level of narration, as the narrators’ minds often appear to reflect the disordered state of the world and the defeat of reason. Poe’s perhaps most important contribution to modern literature is the creation of a refined version of the unreliable narrator. His unreliability appears the more scandalous as he usually gives testimony in a kind of trial concerning a horrible event which is performed for the reading audience who are supposed to act as judges. However, where mental insanity determines the point of view, objective judgement about »facts« is impossible — and as a consequence of this, ethical judgement as well. Thus, Poe provides for arrangements which undermine, first, the idea of objective knowledge about facts and the distinction between truth and lie, and Second, the possibility of moral judgement. Typically of Poe’s stories, »The Black Cat« (1843), for instance, begins with a self-reflexive remark indicating plainly that the difference between truth and lie (not just the possibility to identify them, but the possibility to distinguish between them in principle) will be subverted in the course of this narration. We only see the world from a point of view within the ambiguous and mysterious events which are about to be reported; there is no outside, as the narrator, the only one whom we are able to listen to, is a solipsistic self imprisoned in his fears and imaginings. His assertion he is not mad makes clear indirectly that the safe viewpoints of »normality« and reason, the preconditions under which it had hitherto been possible to regard somebody as »mad«, have been dissolved: He is located on the borderline to darkness. In respect to the question whether he is dreaming or not, the narrator does not even dare to decide plainly. He expresses his hope that some one among his readers might be able to interpret the events from a superior perspective. For the most wild yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not — and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburden my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified — have tortured — have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but horror — to many they will seem less terrible than baroque. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the commonplace — some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my

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own, which will perceive, in the circumstance I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects (Poe 1975, 223).

Poe takes over the double heritage of the »French« variety of Romantic fiction, which is characterized by the arrangement of conflicts between the »reasonable« and the »irrational« view of the world (the »reasonable« view, however, has faded to a minimum of persuasiveness here), and the »German« variety, which implicitly always points to the solipsistic subjectivity of any experience. Another predecessor of Poe’s narrators and protagonists, and another heritage the author profits from, deserves mention here: Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821–22) had confronted the perplexed public with a work of literature which went far beyond the limits of ordinary moral discourse. De Quincey, who himself had been severely addicted to opium, describes precisely his mental and physical experiences with the hallucinatory drug, and although he also gives advice how to cure an opium addiction, his autobiographical work can be read as a testimony of the creative and liberating forces of imagination which are stimulated by opium consumption. In spite of the severe damage to his health suffered as a consequence of his addiction, De Quincey propagates the richness of visions he has experienced. According to him, stimulating drugs appeal to the divine part of man. And he is convinced of the superior truth of dreams as compared to everyday reality. This reflection process is continued in Poe’s works. The more Poe’s narrators declare themselves not to be mad, the more we become confused about the question how to distinguish madness from normality — especially when those narrators reveal themselves as victims of most excessive and murderous obsessions. For instance, the protagonist of »The Tell-Tale Heart« (1843), though he reveals himself to be a mad murderer, begins his report with an evocation of »truth«. But what kind of truth can we expect? Is there any borderline between acute sensual perceptions and hallucinations? And can we regard hallucinatory perceptions as »unreal«, if they stimulate murder, as we learn later? True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and I am; but what will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story (Poe 1975, 303).

Though these stories about lunatics deal with vicious crime, the protagonists’ deeds are in a certain sense beyond moral evaluation, because their will is not free. They are obsessed with the »other« of fixed ideas and hallucinatory perceptions, although the origin of these manifestations of the »other« may lie within their own souls. But they do not govern and control them; they are, on the contrary, themselves governed by them. »It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night« (ibid.). Only later will the reader understand that »the idea« is the fixed idea of a senseless and useless murder. In »The Cask of Amontillado« (1846), just to mention another very well-known story of Poe’s, the narrator and protagonist again is a murderer, who obviously is obsessed with a fixed idea, the idea of inevitable »revenge«. In the tale »William Wilson« (1839) the ambiguous doppelgänger of the protagonist may be regarded as the projection surface of his

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own conscience which has acquired a different quality of »realness« for himself than it has for others. The narrator in »The Fall of the House of Usher« (1839) only superficially represents the discourse of normality compared to Roderick Usher’s more obvious madness. We learn, however, in the course of his narration, that the narrator too is experienced in consuming drugs, we learn that he has assisted Roderick in his sinister funeral of Lady Madeline, and, as Madeline’s illness and decease are more than ambiguous events, we may even become suspicious about the narrator’s integrity itself: Is he actually more deeply involved in the events than he wants to tell? The reader himself never reaches a fixed vantage point in Poe’s world. And he is rather inclined to accept the interpretation of reality which is proposed by the narrators, who have fallen victim to addiction and madness, rather than to search for any »reasonable« interpretation which would have to declare the chain of events as accidental. Poe’s tales are explorations in this subversive tendency. Not only does the reader learn by hints and suggestions that the narrator whom he depends on is an alcoholic, an opium eater, or somebody who has become guilty and now suffers from obsessions, so that all pieces of information are to a high degree peculiar and suspicious, but he must even be aware of the possibility that the narrator lies and deceives — if he is not already beyond truth and lie, because he is incurably insane. And there is no fixed point from which insanity could be judged reasonably, no corrective to all the obsessions by which an identical truth might be constructed from the fragments of distorted experience. The trials of reason become a farce in the course of Romantic writing, and the reader, who for the sake of the forces of his reason had been promoted to the role of judge by Enlightenment literature, becomes part of the parodic imitation and simulation of inquiry games and judgements. The intrusion of madness into the narrator’s discourse is also characteristic of the late Romantic Théophile Gautier’s narrative strategy. In his novel Jettatura (1856) he presents the tragic case of a group of persons who believe in the power of the evil eye. For some time the reader may expect the narrator to comment on this superstition from the distance of reflection, all the more considering that the narrator is not personally involved in the events, and, as an auctorial narrator capable of looking into his characters’ souls, he should be able to identify obsessive ideas for what they are. More and more, however, the suspicion arises and hardens that the narrator participates in the insanity of his characters. At a culminating point of the dramatic occurrences he admits in a way which only superficially seems »casual« that one might go insane as a consequence of such experience. The probably most distorting idea which is suggested by the strange case of the »Jettatore« is that as soon as an obsession is shared by a collective, the object of this obsession cannot be distinguished from truth anymore. The power of the evil eye is believed to be a true fact by all characters; hence it becomes real. 5.4 Night-sides, madness, dream and vision, III: The »Russian« variety Russian Romantic tales often present characters similar to those which occur in Western European literature. Especially as madmen and visionaries are concerned, the relations are obvious. In Odoevskii’s Russkie nochi (Russian Nights, 1844) there is a story that recalls Hoffmann’s Ritter Gluck, titled »Opere del Cavaliere G. Piranesi« (Works of the Chevalier G. Piranesi). An insane artist similar to Hoffmann’s Gluck figure restlessly strolls around the world like the

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Wandering Jew and cannot die, because he is unable to realize his architectural visions. Only when he succeeds in realizing his plans, which means transforming his excessive visions into a structure and giving an order to overwhelming imagination, will he be allowed to die. In Russia, experiences of the supernatural, visions, hallucinations, and cases of madness normally indicate deeper truths — especially moral truths. While Western European Romantic fiction largely profits from such themes as crime and seduction, dark immorality and monstrous, sinful deeds, Russian authors are for the most part convinced that literature should reject those subjects — except for such reasons as can claim to be moral. Nikolai Karamzin in 1793 asserts that a poet should only be allowed to write if he was living a moral life. While in Western European fiction the motifs of madness, dream, hallucination and other experiences from the night-side of existence took over the function of reflecting on the autonomy of the poetical view of the world, there is no function like this in Russian fiction. On the contrary, Russian stories assert the close relationship between poetical imagination and ethical values. Romantic stories about madness, dreams and hallucinations in most cases can be subsumed under the genre of fantastic literature. I will concentrate here upon a selection of Russian ghost stories, which deal with cases of mental aberration, either with cases of obsession by a fixed idea or by hallucinatory experiences. In spite of their different forms and contents, all these stories have at least two things in common: the apparently central signification of the ghost motif, and their ethical and at least indirectly didactic accentuation. There is a rich variety of representatives of fantastic literature in Russia; among the most important authors one might list Aleksandr S. Pushkin, Vladimir F. Odoevskii, and Nikolai V. Gogol. Influences of Western European Romantic fiction are additionally to be seen in the works of Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Leskov, and Anton Chekhov. The introduction to Pushkin’s famous narration Pikovaia Dama (The Queen of Spades; or in French, Pique Dame, 1834) is arranged according to the model of Hoffmann’s Serapionsbrüder: On the occasion of an evening meeting, somebody tells a mysterious story about a successful gambling adventure. One of the young men listening to the narration is involved afterwards in an intrigue which finally gives him the chance to repeat the successful gambling experience, but which also causes the death of an old lady who was supposed to know the secret formula for gambling success. The new gambling experiment executed by the protagonist is at least suspect of depending on supernatural forces. After his success he wants to continue gambling, but he loses, most probably as the consequence of the old lady’s revenge; she appears to him as a ghost in the figure of Queen of the Spades. Hermann, the protagonist, goes mad. The reason for this fate is not just the intrusion of supernatural forces into his reality, but also his guilt. Pushkin’s story, in spite of some ironical accents, is a moral story about guilt and punishment. Pushkin, in his comment on Lobanov’s opinions about the spirit of international and national literature (1836), explicitly comments on the close relation between morality and taste. He calls for certain liberties for the poet in respect to moral taboos, but in general he insists on the didactic functions of literature and the congruence of art and morality. Vladimir Odoevskii’s story Salamandra (The Salamander, 1842) follows the pattern of preRomantic and Romantic tales about elemental spirits as we know it from Cazotte, Tieck and Hoffmann. Again, there is a narrator in the frame scene, who narrates the story about supernatural forces and spirits, and, similar to Hoffmann’s frame constructions, there is a discussion

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between the narrator and his listener about the credibility of these stories. But in length and content this dialogue is of minor importance compared to the supernatural story itself, and a final comment by the sceptical listener ironically appears inadequate. Within the main story, there are doubtlessly supernatural occurrences, and, again, there is a moral message, an arrangement pointing to the correspondence between human guilt and heavenly or hellish punishment. The protagonist and his mentor, who are occupied with alchemical experiments, appear in some respect insane, but their obsessions are related to realities, to a world divided into a day and a night side. Gogol’s narration Zakoldovannoe mesto (The Enchanted Place, 1831/32), is subtitled, »A true story, narrated by the verger of *** church«, and the narrator obviously believes in the reality of demonic craft. In spite of some ironical accents, the story itself does not raise the question whether the devil is real. The protagonist of this story, the narrator’s grandfather, appeals to his family not to believe the devil but Jesus Christ, but for him as well as for his grandson there is obviously no doubt that one should believe in the devil. Gogol, by the way, regards morality as the most important quality of an author of fiction. Ethical deficiency should only be admitted as a starting point for moral improvement — in respect to authors as well as to their characters. Mikhail Lermontov’s Shtoss (Unfinished Novella) indeed does not tell explicitly what finally happens to the protagonist, Lugin, but there is actually no doubt about his ending: Persecuted by a dead spirit and alienated from society and everyday realities, he is driven to a state of mind in which he is — as the text says — forced to make a decision. This decision will be to commit suicide. The forces of evil are present in the contemporary world; this is what the text tells us, in analogy to Pushkin’s, Odoevskii’s and Gogol’s stories which are likewise inspired by a Manichaean concept of the world. Though in their quality as literary texts they stimulate us to reflect on the fact the authors operate on the basis of folklore motifs and superstitious ideas, what is not really questioned is the distinction between good and evil. The obsessions of people and the enchantment of places which cause madness may be hallucinatory, but the moral message that man should stick to the good and avoid seduction is beyond all doubt and ambiguity. This diagnosis is confirmed by Ivan Turgenev’s »Strannaia istoriia« (Strange Story, 1870). The narrator, here, reports on his own experiences with a mentally handicapped man who is said to possess divine forces, as for instance the force to make dead persons appear. As the story’s real protagonist we see the madman, scarcely able to utter articulated words, but obviously deeply impressive to all people who meet him. According to popular customs he is worshipped like a prophet, and in spite of his obvious insanity he is respected as the representative of the good in a world which, again, is interpreted in Manichaean terms as divided into good and evil. The reality of his visions may be more than doubtful, and those who follow him — in this story especially a young girl — behave unreasonably; but beyond all scepticism there are moral truths which cannot be refuted, as they prove themselves through the medium of man’s moral conscience. In Anton Chekhov’s tale »Chernii monakh« (The Black Monk, 1894), the protagonist — a writer — is repeatedly pursued by the hallucinatory appearance of a black monk who asserts that he is a genius chosen by God. As long as the protagonist believes in the monk’s message he is fortunate and makes other people happy; when he begins to doubt, he becomes desolate and cruel to his family. The monk can be interpreted as the product of his insane mind, but in spite of this he reveals a truth: An artist must believe in his own mission to be a good artist (in the double sense of aesthetic and ethical value). Chekhov’s story resembles Hoffmann’s Serapion

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tale, as the hallucinating protagonist himself reasons about the hallucinatory character of his vision. The monk, his imaginary counterpart, even admits that he is phantasmagoric, but this is not of major importance. In all these Russian stories about borderline phenomena the difference between the real and the imaginary is questioned in a way which is comparable to the German and French stories about eccentrics, madmen and dreamers; the idea of morality, however, is unquestioned. Moral categories such as guilt and punishment, good and evil can be used to interpret the stories’ meaning, whereas, on the contrary, Hoffmann’s narrations often are very indifferent in this respect. Here, Christian motifs like the devil and the saints are elements in an aesthetic pattern. 6.

Doubled selves: Romantic tales about the dark — Man’s ordinary existence reversed

Probably there is no motif more characteristic of the imaginary world of Romanticism than the doppelgänger; and more than any other image, the image of the doubled self reflects the notion of a night-side to the human subject’s existence. The figuration of the »other«, incorporated in the shape of one’s own self, reminds this self of his connection to a dimension of the world which is beyond reason and control, and often points to an inner dissociation, which tears up the self in the final analysis. The protagonist of Hoffmann’s novel Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs, 1815/16), Medardus the monk, has at least one doppelgänger, but it is impossible to decide just how many there actually are, because the idea of identity as such is subverted by the novel, and there no longer are truly differentiated characters which might be enumerated. Medardus has got a twin brother, but in a mysterious way, this twin — with whom he temporarily exchanges roles in a complex intrigue — can as well be regarded as the dark side of his own self. Medardus’s case is an example for inner dissociation, and the mysterious devilish elixir on the surface of the novel’s plot serves as a device to cause this dissociation. After having consumed it, his character is divided more and more into an animal and a reflexive »identity«. One half of his self uncontrollably becomes addicted to evil, the other half reflects on his vices and tries to regain control. But the origins of this dissociation lie deep in the family history of Medardus, and so it is not his individual self ’s guilt which causes the catastrophic loss of identity, but the »other« is from the beginning present in the self ’s world. The experience of losing identity and self-control are almost necessarily connected to outbursts of madness and raving. Medardus’s nightly encounters with his dark double are located on the borderline of real experience and imagination. It is impossible to decide whether he has fallen victim to hallucination, or if the ghost of the »other« is actually present, but at any rate the encounter as such consequently leads to madness. In one key scene of the novel, the horrible mirror-image of Medardus, who is locked up in a prison cell, rises from the ground of his cell, calls Medardus his brother, and invites him to escape with him. On the one hand, the appearance can be interpreted as Medardus’s »real« brother who has become mad; on the other hand, he is the incorporation of the monk’s dark desires, his »sinful« soul. Medardus calls him a madman, and he is then not only addressing his doppelgänger, but also himself, who in more than one sense is confronted with his mirror-image by the raving,

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murmuring and howling ghost. Medardus’s encounter with the other Medardus may have been a nightmare instead of a supernatural apparition. But at any rate, Medardus’s identity is broken up, and he appears as dissociated into two halves, of which one is a creature of the night. Either the dissociation and doubling is real on a physical level of reality — in this case, the evil is incorporated in the man who can not be distinguished from the monk himself; or the monk is a lunatic, and the rupture goes through his very mind. Edgar Allan Poe’s story about »William Wilson« takes up the doppelgänger motif as a Romantic heritage. The second William Wilson is an ambiguous character again: On the one hand, this almost voiceless »other« can be interpreted as a real figure on the same reality level as the first Wilson, who tells his life to the reader. On the other hand, the second William Wilson is maybe only a hallucinatory appearance, produced by the imaginative force of the narrator. At any rate, the first Wilson is mad — either because he projects all his hate and aggression onto a real character in a way which must be called obsessive and completely unreasonable, or because he suffers from hallucinations which to his insane mind have the quality of »realities«. Again, Poe creates a narrator-protagonist who leads the reader himself into ambiguities which can not be solved. Madness has invaded the text — either the madness of somebody who pretends to interpret reality in a way that convinces us and makes us share his opinions, or the madness of somebody who can not distinguish between experience and dream any more. With impressive clearness the narrator proves that inner dissociation and the loss of identity are already inevitable at the very moment in which the self begins to reflect upon itself and to question itself. The ambiguity of the narrator’s relation to the »other« is never resolved, even when the narrator tries to depict the other Wilson from the outside perspective. If we compare the case of Medardus to the case of William Wilson, they prove to be very similar, especially in the two quoted scenes, as they both deal with imitations of personal habits by the respective other. There is only one small, but important difference: In Hoffmann’s novel, the mysterious »other« represents the darker half of the dissociated self, while the ostensible narrator Medardus represents the conscious and reflexive part of the self which is at least able to feel guilty. In Poe’s story, the part of the evil is taken over by the narrator, and the alter ego is the personification of his bad conscience. Differently from Hoffmann and Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson in »The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde« (1886) finally resolves the mystery of the evil appearance of the »other«: Mr Hyde is doubtlessly real, and far from being only a hallucinatory projection of Jekyll’s imagination, he appears regularly as the result of a scientific experiment that has remarkable consequences for different persons. Jekyll is not confronted with this dark side of his own self in the way Medardus and William Wilson were, because the presence of one of them excludes the presence of the respective other. But the dissociation of the self, again, is connected with madness. Jekyll and Hyde, the creature of the night, incorporating the »hidden« reverse of a moral character, suffer from different forms of madness: Jekyll finally falls mad as a consequence of his bad conscience; the loss of identity from which he is suffering can be characterized as the discrepancy between the moral and the intellectual self. The criminal Hyde, on the contrary, is beyond the control of reason from the very moment he appears. In his nightmare-like apparition the abysses in the soul of any moral subject are incorporated: vice and aggression as original and atavistic forces, which may temporarily be domesticated but never exterminated.

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Folly and madness serve as leitmotifs in Stevenson’s story. Jekyll’s friends regard him as mad for some time, but Hyde as well seems to be mad, and when finally the mystery is revealed to them, on the one hand it becomes clear that Jekyll was not suffering from hallucinations; but on the other hand, there is no return to a healthy and normal state of mind for anybody. The nature of man reveals itself to be mad in its underpinnings, and each of the reasonable gentlemen in Stevenson’s story feels to a certain degree attacked by insanity as soon as he detects the truth. 7.

Conclusion

As the scholar Wolfgang Lange has pointed out in his contribution to a volume about myth and modernity, modernity, on the one hand, was unable to produce new gods and heroes, but the inclination to produce myths, on the other hand, was and still is alive. Important inspirations for creating myths were fascinating and enigmatic artists and poets like Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Rimbaud and others. The arcanum of madness seems to be one of the last refuges of mythopoetic energy in a demythologized world. Romantic prose fiction has contributed significantly to the development of modern consciousness, by indicating the dependency of realities on the model of description which is used, and by positing the inexistence of any superior level of reasoning from which one could distinguish between truth and lies, hence the impossibility to distinguish definitively between sanity and insanity. A particular phase of literature arises from specific discursive constellations, reflects them from a distance, and finally will subvert them. Although — or rather: because — Romanticism had its roots in the age of reason, the point of view of reason was truly subjected to radical criticism by Romantic literature. Bibliography Brentano, Clemens. 1970. Godwi [1852]. Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. by Christian Brentano. Frankfurt/M.: Sauerländer; Repr. Bern: Lang. Vol. 5. Caillois, Roger. 1966 »L’image fantastique: De la féerie à la Science Fiction«. Anthologie du fantastique [préface]. Ed. by Roger Callois. Paris: Gallimard. Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich. 1977. Chernii monakh. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo »Nauka«. 8: 226–257. De Quincey, Thomas. 1960. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater [1821/22]. Introd. by John E. Jordan. London: Dent. Eichendorff, Joseph von. 1999. Das Marmorbild; Das Schloß Dürande. Ed. by Adolf von Grolman. Stuttgart: Reclam. Engel, Manfred. 1998. »The Theory of the Dream in Romantic Anthropology«. Romantic Dreams. Ed. by Sheila Dickson and Mark G. Ward. Glasgow: Glasgow UP. 1–15. ———. 1998. »Sueños del Romanticismo europeo: Novalis, Nodier, De Quincey«. El movimiento romántico. Ed. by Christoph Jamme. Madrid: Tres Cantos. 57–72. ———. 2002. »Naturphilosophisches Wissen und romantische Literatur: Am Beispiel von Traumtheorie und Traumdichtung der Romantik«. Wissen in Lite­ratur im 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. by Lutz Danneberg, Friedrich Vollhardt et al. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 65–91. Gautier, Théophile. 1856. Jettatura. Conte. Paris: Ed. France-Empire.

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Gogol, Nikolai Vasilyevich. 1966. Zakoldovannoe mesto. Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo »Khudozhestvennaya Literatura«. 1: 235–246. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. 1984. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Repr. München: dtv. Hoffmann, E.T.A. 1886. »The Story of Serapion«. The Serapion Brethren. Trans. by Major Alex. Ewing. London: Bell. ———. 1967–69. E.T.A. Hoffmanns Briefwechsel. 3 vols. Collect. by Hans von Müller and Friedrich Schnapp; ed. by Friedrich Schnapp. München: Winkler. ———. 1969. The Sandman. Selected Writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Vol. 1: The Tales. Ed. and trans. by Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight. Chicago, London: Chicago UP. 137–167. ———. 1977. Selected Letters of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Ed. and trans. by Johanna C. Sahlin, introd. by Leonard J. Kent and Johanna C. Sahlin. Chicago, London: Chicago UP. ———. 1985. Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden. Ed. by Hartmut Steinecke et. al. Vol. 2.1: Fantasiestücke in Callot’s Manier; Werke 1814; vol. 2.2: Die Elixiere des Teufels; Werke 1814–1816; vol. 3: Nachtstücke, Klein Zaches, Prinzessin Brambilla; Werke 1816–1820; vol. 4: Die Serapionsbrüder; vol. 5: Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr; Werke 1820–1821. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. ———. 1992. The Golden Pot, and Other Tales. Trans. and ed. by Ritchie Robertson. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP. ———. 1996. English Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner: Pages from the Diary of a Travelling Romantic. Trans. by Joseph M. Hayse. Schenectady: Union College Press. ———. 1999. The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr: Together with a Fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper, Edited by E.T.A. Hoffmann. Trans. and annot. by Anthea Bell; introd. by Jeremy Adler. London: Penguin. Jean Paul. 1962. »Über die natürliche Magie der Einbildungskraft«. Werke. Ed. by Norbert Miller. Vol. 4: Kleinere erzählende Schriften. München: Hanser. ———. 1963. Der Komet. Werke. Ed. by Norbert Miller. Vol. 6. München: Hanser. ———. 1980. Titan. Werke. Ed. by Norbert Miller. Vol. 3. München: Hanser. ———. 1992. Titan / Comic Appendix / Clavis Fichtiana. Jean Paul: A Reader. Ed., introd. by Timothy J. Casey. Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins UP. Kant, Immanuel. 1968. »Versuch über die Krankheiten des Kopfes« [1764]. Werkausgabe. Ed. by Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. II: 887–901. [Klingemann, August]. 1972. The Night Watches of Bonaventura. Ed. and trans. by Gerald Gillespie. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP (Edinburgh Bilingual Library of European Literature). ———. 1974. Die Nachtwachen: Von Bonaventura. Ed. by Wolfgang Paulsen. Stuttgart: Reclam. Kretzschmar, Dirk. 2000. Identität statt Differenz: Zum Verhältnis von Kunsttheorie und Gesellschaftsstruktur in Rußland im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Habilitationsschrift [Bochum]. Lange, Wolfgang. 1983. »Tod ist bei den Göttern immer nur ein Vorurteil: Zum Komplex des Mythos bei Nietzsche«. Mythos und Moderne. Ed. by Karl Heinz Bohrer. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. 111–137. Lermontov, Mikhail Iurievich. 1962. Shtoss. Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh. Moskva, Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR. 4: 480–500. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. 1966. Lichtenberg’s Commentaries on Hogarth’s Engravings. Trans., introd. by Innes and Gustav Herdan. London: Cresset P. ———. 1968. Sudelbücher. Schriften und Briefe I. Ed. by Wolfgang Promies. München: Hanser. ———. 1972. Ausführliche Kommentare zu den Hogarthischen Kupferstichen. Schriften und Briefe III. Ed. by Wolfgang Promies. München: Hanser. Marquard, Odo. 1975. »Über einige Beziehungen zwischen Ästhetik und Therapeutik in der Philosophie des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts«. Materialien zu Schellings philosophischen Anfängen. Ed. by Manfred Frank and Gerhard Kurz. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. 341–377. Moritz, Karl-Philipp (ed.). 1986. Gnothi seauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde [1783–93]. Die Schriften. Ed. by Petra and Uwe Nettelbeck. Nördlingen: Greno. Vol. I–X. Nerval, Gérard de. 1960. 1957. Selected Writings. Trans., ed. by Geoffrey Wagner. New York: Grove Press.

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———. Aurélia. Œuvres. Ed. by Jean Richer. Paris: Gallimard. Vol I: 357–414. Odoevskii, Vladimir Fedorovich. 1841. »Salamandra«. Otechestvennie Zapiski, vol. 14, no. 1. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1975. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Vintage Books Edition. Pöggeler, Otto. 1960. »Schopenhauer und das Wesen der Kunst«. Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung. 14: 353–389. Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich. 1960. Pikovaia Dama. Sobranie sochinenii v desyati tomakh. Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury. 8: 233–262. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. 1962. Von der Mythologie; Die Kunstlehre. Kritische Schriften und Briefe II. Ed. by Edgar Lohner. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich. 1997. Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaften [1808]. Schriften des romantischen Naturphilosophen Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert. Ed. by Heike Menges. Karben: P. Wald. Vol. 2. ———. 1830. Geschichte der Seele. Stuttgart: Cotta. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1990. The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Foreword Joyce Carol Oates. Lincoln: Nebraska UP. Swift, Jonathan. 1979. »A Tale of a Tub: Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind« and »The Battle of the Books: An Account of a Battle between the Ancient and Modern Books in St. James’s Library«. With twelve plates by William Hogarth. Simon: J. Simon. Tieck, Ludwig. 1993. »Eckbert the Fair«. Six German Romantic Tales. Trans., introd. by Ronald Taylor. Chester Spins, PA: Dufour Editions. 16–33. ———. 1997. »Der blonde Eckbert«. Der blonde Eckbert; Der Runenberg; Die Elfen. Märchen. Ed. by Hanne Castein. Stuttgart: Reclam. 3–24. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1970. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris: Edition du seuil. ———. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. by Richard Howard. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP. Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich. 1965. Strannaia istoriia. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v dvadtsati vos’mi tomakh. Moskva, Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo »Nauka«. 10: 161–185. Wellek, René. 1969. »Introduction«. Selected Writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Ed. and trans. by L.J. Kent and E.C. Knight. Chicago, London: Chicago UP.

Doubling, doubles, duplicity, bipolarity Ernst Grabovszki The motifs of doubling, doubles, duplicity and bipolarity are a typical feature of Romantic literature, even though they cannot be said to be new, because examples can be traced back as far as ancient comedy. However, these motifs underwent an enormous increase in both quantity and quality in the nineteenth century; numerous authors were attracted by them as a means to discuss human identity from a psychological point of view. The motif of a physical or psychological split is among the dominant motifs in German Romanticism but also appears in other European literatures to a certain extent. The beginning of the nineteenth century also generally witnessed increased discussion of the culturally and geographically alien. The following variations of the mentioned motifs will be discussed: doubling caused by a split of the human body and the interaction of these bodies and personalities; doubling caused by a split of the human psyche; the dream as a means of multiplying one’s levels of experience (i.e. dream as an alternative to reality, the shifting between appearance and reality, dream as artistic inspiration and so forth); the bipolarity of the self and the »Other«, as the image, the ideal, or the opposite of the self; and finally, the motif of a man caught between two women. An essential feature of Romantic prose fiction is the distinct contrasting, even opposition of figures and motifs: day is confronted with night, dream with reality, reason with insanity, the strange with the familiar, and the like. But the conflict resulting from opposing features or traits is rarely dealt with on a rational level. Instead, it remains unresolved in a human dimension inaccessible to the reasoning mind at subconscious or emotional levels. The first part of this article therefore deals with physical doubles, that is with figures who are confronted with a person who looks just like them and shows the same outward appearance. The second part is concerned with doubling on a psychological level: figures who suffer from a split personality. Finally, the third part will outline the bipolarity of different cultures. First and foremost, the depiction of duplicity or the appearance of doubles is a clear allusion to the identity of the self and also to the means by which it can be disturbed. It seems that the Romantic split self dissolves the rational self of the Enlightenment. The appearance of doubles, machines, automatons, split personalities and the like is actually just a symptom of an increased interest in the inner life of a human being and in the seemingly lost traditions or »original« creations of art and literature. The effort to sound the human psyche is caused by the development of new sciences that are also reflected in literature: occultism and mesmerism for instance promote sophistication as a way of viewing the rational world, which is not a mere rational world anymore but which offers new and unknown dimensions of consciousness. Jean Paul, for instance, was active as a mesmerist and hypnotist, while Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was deeply interested in the »night-side« of science, as was Mary Shelley. Edgar Allan Poe finally came up with some adequate experiences in his narrations »Mesmeric Revelation« (1844) and »The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar« (1845).

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Physical doubles

As early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, the physical aspect of doubling and its mind-expanding possibilities were widely used: doubling represents and highlights a person’s mental or emotional conflict or the dissolving of the personality under stress. The concentration on the psychic range of personality often gets along without the physical aspect of doubling, that is, the wide-spread description of (pseudo-)scientific or technical equipment used to split a person’s mind. Viktor Frankenstein, for instance, would never have managed to give life to his creature without the use of modern laboratory equipment. Furthermore, the splitting of the human psyche allows an intensive confrontation of opposing forces — a conflict that can be resolved both negatively and positively in the end. In most cases, the motif of doubling refers to a figure’s interior world in order to identify a particular state in its development, a »liminal« process which leads the figure from one state of mind to another. This condition of »liminality«, as Victor Turner pointed out (Turner 1995, 35), puts a person into an intermediate stage of leaving a certain condition behind and getting into another. The range of the physical split and of doubling is already visible in early texts of German Romanticism, for instance, in Jean Paul’s novels Die unsichtbare Loge (The Invisible Lodge, 1793), Hesperus (1795), Siebenkäs (1796/97) and Flegeljahre (The Awkward Years, 1804/05). The author shows some typical variations of doubling, such as the questioning of personality and identity and the mostly negative influence of the double on the »original’s« social surroundings. The play of names and identities culminates in Jean Paul’s novel Siebenkäs. In a footnote the author explains his notion of the double: »doubles are such people who see themselves«.1 Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkäs and Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber are not only friends but also look very much like each other except for one physical detail: Leibgeber walks with a limp. They used to interchange their names just for fun when they were students. But this swapping of identities finally proves to be fatal when Siebenkäs’s wife Lenette learns about her husband’s joke and therefore questions not only her husband’s identity but also doubts her own. Siebenkäs fakes an apparent death, Lenette marries Stiefel, who is superior in rank to Siebenkäs, and dies while giving birth. When Siebenkäs returns in the shape of Leibgeber, he learns of his wife’s desire to meet him in the realm of the dead. At this moment Siebenkäs feels responsible for Lenette’s death. Siebenkäs is not depicted merely as a normal human being. One time he is wearing a crown of thorns and another he claims that the earth stands out from all the other planets in the universe because of the love and death of Jesus Christ. Siebenkäs’s life therefore corresponds with the Passion of Jesus: The Passion story, secularized in such a way, already contains the seed for punishing blasphemy within itself, because Leibgeber has to atone for his doubling in Jean Paul’s novel Titan (1800/03), in which he appears by the name of Schoppe and feels persecuted by his alter ego and is driven into madness and death by this confusion of identity. […] Christian religion and

1.

»So heißen Leute, die sich selber sehen« (Jean Paul 1928, 54).

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Ernst Grabovszki the philosophy of Fichte merge in the parody. But the term »Doppelgänger«, coined by Jean Paul, came into vogue in many languages of the world with the rise of psychology.2

In his novel Flegeljahre, Jean Paul once again takes on the constellation of Siebenkäs and Leibgeber: Gottwalt and Vult, the protagonists, do not just correspond in their character traits. They are twins and, therefore, hardly differ from each other in their outward appearances. They seek to translate their intellectual interests into reality by means of a »double-novel«. Their supposed congruence should not obscure those aspects which separate them: Gottwalt for instance is attracted by a drawing showing a Janus-face which, he believes, represents both himself and his brother. And even the room in which they were born was divided by the national border. The almost complete unity they nearly obtain is further damaged when both of them show an interest in a young girl who finally falls for Gottwalt. This relationship finally puts an end to the harmony they had been striving to create. Jean Paul’s physical doubles tend to emphasize the spectrum of harmony and disharmony but also illustrate the quality of human relations which are threatened by the characters willingly transgressing their own identity. What seemed to be realistic on a purely fictional level in the double-novel — the integration of a rational view of the world and human relationships — comes to grief in reality. The realization of another identity or at least the adoption of certain features in order to broaden a figure’s character in a positive way always depends on the context in which the figure lives. This context — the women in Jean Paul — limits any changing or broadening of identity or at the very least makes obvious the fatal nature of this longing. The individual is then forced to fall back into its previous state of being because of an inability to transgress its own inner boundaries. E.T.A. Hoffmann often uses the motif of the double. His novel Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs, 1815/16) was influenced strongly by Matthew Gregory Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796). The intertextuality of these works is also of a physical nature: Hoffmann’s female protagonist Aurelia is deeply stirred when reading The Monk. An issue this book raises and which might particularly interest her is Antonia’s love, which also gives some idea about Aurelia’s own affection for Medardus. Hoffmann’s novel tells the story of the monk Medardus who is confronted with his double, his brother Viktorin. Thanks to Lewis’s influence, Die Elixiere des Teufels contains several features of the Gothic novel such as numerous meetings with a double in the dark, and the interplay of light and shadow, which all help to give an atmospheric touch to the scenery. An essential difference between this work and The Monk is Hoffmann’s first person narrative, which enables him to concentrate on the protagonists’ psyches, to question their identity, and to stress their search for identity and self-knowledge. Finally, Hoffmann’s novel affords a view of the subconscious and of repression. Viktorin represents the negative side of Medardus with all his suppressed thoughts and emotions. He does what Medardus is 2.

»Aber die auf solche Weise säkularisierte Passionsgeschichte trägt den Keim zur Strafe für die Blasphemie bereits in sich, denn die Doppelgängerei muß Leibgeber in Jean Pauls Roman Titan (1800/03) büßen, wo er unter dem Namen Schoppe auftritt, sich nun von seinem anderen Ich verfolgt fühlt und durch diese Identitätsverwirrung in Irrsinn und den Tod getrieben wird. […] Christliche Religion und Fichtesche Philosophie fusionieren in der Parodie. Das Wort ›Doppelgänger‹ aber, das Jean Paul prägte, fand mit dem Aufschwung der Psychologie seinen Eingang in viele Sprachen der Welt« (Schulz 1996, 95).

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not able to do due to his moral and ethical beliefs, which often enough are put aside by his alter ego. It is not only the uncanny aspects that are reminiscent of Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), but also the strange sounds the double utters: Medardus’s double is also equipped with traits from Hoffmann’s broad technical and mechanical repertoire, as he acts like a marionette or a machine, making him uncanny and inhuman. Viktorin has fallen into insanity, dresses in rags and is hardly able to utter a coherent sentence. This alone makes it obvious that every human impulse has receded in his mind and that, subsequently, his identity is reduced to just a physical presence. Small wonder, then, that Viktorin’s doubling is nothing but a strategy to keep himself alive: Viktorin acts like a vampire in a figurative sense, although he does not suck out Medardus’s blood, but rather his identity, as a way of avoiding the loss of his own ego. His body, containing neither soul nor emotions, is filled with life and thought. Within the spectrum of the supernatural, the figure of Viktorin is nothing special or peculiar. Even from Hoffmann’s absurd stock of figures Viktorin hardly stands out. His appearance is rather a variation of doubling on the narrative level: »While all other figures are characterized indirectly, Medardus introduces himself in a double perspective of living and reliving. Medardus is the only character in the novel for whom a comprehensive psychological picture is offered«.3 This is the necessary precondition for Viktorin’s transformation. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Viktorin commits murder when he feels at variance with himself and finally lays the blame on Medardus. But their relationship contains a certain dynamic: When one person’s traits are transferred to another, doubling in this case means having a bearing on each other — which is intensified by their being brothers — and furthermore underscores the motif of the twins as opposing forces of good and evil. Viktorin, subordinate to Medardus, is about to lead him astray from his Christian goals in life. The double has a dual function: It serves as a figure in the novel as well as a particular mental state of mind affecting Medardus. In Fedor M. Dostoevskii’s novel Dvoinik (The Double, 1846), the protagonist Goliadkin experiences a split in both consciousness and body when his professional and private life are about to develop in unexpected directions: He is shocked when somebody else is promoted instead of him and when his beloved Klara plans to marry someone else. On the same night, when the lovers realize that they will not be able to spend their lives together, Goliadkin meets his double, who bears the same name and is of identical appearance, then sits facing him at his desk the next morning. This causes the struggle between them. Goliadkin’s split in consciousness is also due to the gap between the »real« world of work and the social norms he tries to live up to, a conflict which subsequently becomes inescapable as he struggles to balance these two parts of his life. Goliadkin is not able to meet the demands of society and his career. The appearance of the double figure is a result of the protagonist’s conflict with his own reality. Moreover, Goliadkin’s double measures up to the very qualities Goliadkin himself has always striven for: He is successful in his career and liked by his superiors. Therefore the relationship between the double and his image results in rivalry and conflict, which mostly prove a disadvantage for the real person. In Dostoevskii’s novel this rivalry consequently leads to the detriment of Goliadkin 3.

»Während alle übrigen Figuren indirekt charakterisiert werden […], stellt sich Medardus selbst vor, und zwar in doppelter Perspektive, der des Erlebens und der des Nachlebens. Medardus ist die einzige Gestalt des Romans, von der man ein umfassendes psychologisches Bild bekommt« (Nehring 1997, 369).

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when he is put in a home for the mentally ill. The author characterizes features of the double which are frequently used in Romantic prose fiction: Doubles are essentially quite contrary to the image of the person they refer to by accentuating the person’s bad traits and thus highlighting these conflicting aspects of character. In his narration »William Wilson« (1839), Edgar Allen Poe depicts the connection between a figure of reality and its double in a similar way. Like Goliadkin, William Wilson is affected in character and mental disposition by family affairs. He is extremely irritable and lacking willpower. It is not surprising, then, that Wilson runs into a crisis after having met his double who matches his outward appearance, customs and even his date of birth. The double functions as Wilson’s clear conscience by trying to prevent him from leading a disorderly life. When their relationship breaks up, the double disappears and Wilson becomes a criminal until his double returns to prevent him from falling into criminal behavior again. Finally, they fight a duel in front of an imaginary mirror which manifests their inseparable unity: You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead — dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist — and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself (Poe 1978a, 448).

Like Goliadkin, Wilson has to cope with social isolation, because the image he creates of himself does not correspond with the demands the »real« world makes on him. The double deeply questions Wilson’s self-image. In analogy to Dostoevskii (see below), Wilson’s double appears at night and makes clear that his alter ego belongs to the »night-side of existence«, representing an alternative to his own life. The appearance of the double in Edgar Allen Poe’s »William Wilson« is always connected to aural and visual prerequisites. The double only appears in darkness in a manner that »the light in its gradations indicates the gradual decay of the protagonist who develops from a boastful child into a shady fraud and for that reason loses the ability to recognize his ideal ego which has taken shape in the double«.4 Since William Wilson is not able to see his double, it has to work on him by means of his voice. Other props that support the motif of doubling are marionettes, automatic machines, puppets or living statues — things that suggest human life working only on a technical level, in other words the continuation of human impulse by technical means, which amounts to a demonstration of the loss of humanity. In Bratia Karamazovy (The Brothers Karamazov, 1880), Dostoevskii once again makes clear his notion of the double as a representation of the reverse side and all the evil traits of man which normally remain invisible. Ivan Karamazov’s double, Smerdiakov, is not only his halfbrother but also the devil, simultaneously. The brothers function in a similar way to those in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels. Smerdiakov thinks and acts in the way Ivan aspires to but is not quite able to translate into action. In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, the protagonist Victor Frankenstein is in the grip of a conflict which takes its fatal starting point from the creation of a creature made by the hand of man. From the beginning, his creation slips from his control and destroys Frankenstein’s family, 4.

»das Licht in seinen verschiedenen Abstufungen […] den graduellen Verfall des Helden [indiziert], der sich vom großsprecherischen Kind zum zwielichtigen Betrüger entwickelt und deshalb sein ideales Ich, das im Doppelgänger Gestalt angenommen hat, nicht mehr zu erkennen imstande ist« (Hildenbrock 1986, 167).

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as is the case in Jean Paul’s novels Siebenkäs and Flegeljahre. Like many doubles the monster is an exceedingly subversive character, who repeals current moral and ethical norms, subverts legal conventions and calls for a new order. Furthermore, the monster is an expression of the attempt to profane the divine creation. It represents the possible artificiality of nature — a contradiction in terms — which affects all things natural destructively. Therefore, it is consistent that Frankenstein and his creature always meet without talking to each other, without any witnesses and under extreme circumstances: in the icy cold, on mountain tops or in thunderstorms. Frankenstein falls into his monster’s own clutches since he has equipped it with such powerful abilities, making it almost impossible to resist its strength. His fatalism is a result of being unable to prevent the inevitable clash with a creature of his own design. It is not so much the monster that is to blame for the deeds it commits but Frankenstein himself, since the monster is not conscious of any moral values. This characterizes the scientist’s conflict: The soulless creation, lacking emotional bonds and social experience, is not able to survive in a society whose members behave according to specific social rules and norms. But these norms are emphasized even more by this negative foil, as is the case with most doubles and figures they are related to. The artificial human being is created out of ideal ambitions its constitution is totally inconsistent with. The ape in Poe’s »Murders in the Rue Morgue« (1841), for instance, does not have any real conscience in this sense either, and so is not aware of his deeds in a sense of right or wrong. The spectrum of doubles and bipolarities therefore serves to stress the canon of values of a given time by showing its contrasting features. It not only defines the human but, beyond that, the artist’s existence as a way of trying to justify a certain life style against current societal norms. In this respect, Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821/22) might serve as a good example. This is why Romantic identity should be differentiated from the identity of the Enlightenment, which tends to stress the unity of personality corresponding to nature and soul: Due to the new sciences originating and developing in the nineteenth century, the human body and psyche become somewhat more translucent; their operation is perceived as a profane process largely due to scientific investigation and interest in man’s inner world. It is no coincidence that Victor Frankenstein is a natural scientist intending to force his way beyond the limits of science in order to understand the divine power of creation. Frankenstein, though a talented researcher, has not created the actual image but rather the counter-image of nature. The sight of it even strikes him with aversion and horror. The challenge to identity may also be read on a narrative level. The superior auctorial narrator is suspended in favor of a personal view: The story is told from the point of view of Walton, who takes down Frankenstein’s oral accounts, which are completed by the narration of the monster in the first person. Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859) sums up the causes and effects of the French Revolution by contrasting two cities, London and Paris, concentrating the conflict not only on the figures themselves but also on the level of local mentalities particular to them. The motive of the physical double becomes apparent in an important paragraph. Sidney Carton, an English lawyer, looks strikingly like the French aristocrat Charles St. Evrémonde, who lives in England as Charles Darnay. Charles is about to be executed for having saved a friend of his family from the revolutionaries’ revenge. Instead, Carton ascends the scaffold. This decision is a dramatic climax for one main reason: Carton loves Charles’s wife and because of the intense love for her he gives up his own life in order to save her husband. Beyond that, this novel’s

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bipolarity is reflected mainly in the characteristics of London and Paris — including their inhabitants, as a sort of medium of these characteristics — during the French Revolution. Paris is depicted as the realization of revolutionary ideals on the one hand, London as the reserved and mistrustful metropolis on the other. Dickens’s own opinion of the revolution was ambivalent; to him it seemed a historical necessity, although he could never sanction its cruelties. Madame Defarge, for instance, who calls for Charles’s execution, is a true and accurate product of those revolutionary cruelties. Dickens’s novel shows that doubling is not necessarily confined to human figures but may be observed through objects or backdrops as long as they have some bearing on the figures’ behavior. It is appropriate to look at Nikolai Gogol’s narrative »Nos« (The Nose, 1836), at the end of our analysis of the physical double in Romantic fictional prose for two main reasons: Firstly, this motif is carried to extremes by treating it with irony and, secondly, the author makes use of numerous fantastic elements which tend to parody the broad repertoire of Romantic imagination. In his narrative Gogol tells of a barber who cuts off a customer’s nose while he is shaving him — at least he assumes this because later he finds the nose in a piece of bread while having breakfast. In a state of panic he throws it into the river Neva but is observed by a policeman, who arrests him. Kovalev, the unlucky customer, finds a blank space in his face but is happy enough to meet his nose walking through the city in the clothes of a bureaucrat of higher rank. Soon, however, Kovalev is nearly driven to despair when he realizes that he cannot be helped. Finally, the policeman who had observed the barber’s deed is able to hand him back his nose wrapped in paper but Kovalev is not able to put it back in place. Incredibly, he wakes up one morning to find his nose back in place on his face. There are certain characteristics in this narrative that differ clearly from those of the works mentioned above: First, Gogol’s work does not contain any uncanny or mysterious elements. Although Kovalev experiences the farce of having lost his nose, the author then develops a realistic story. Second, Gogol’s protagonist remains distanced from the reader, who is not given the opportunity to identify with the protagonist. It is evident that Gogol deals with an aspect central to many Romantic prose works: Kovalev loses his nose and therefore a part of his identity. Although he is able to regain the missing part, the reader is left uncertain why Kovalev lost his nose in the first place, why he got it back and how he managed to reattach it to his face. At the end of the narration, the author even queries the story’s purpose. The most obvious purpose, one might suggest, is the unforeseeable loss of identity and its unexpected reappearance due to completely irrational forces. 2.

Split personalities

The protagonist of Das Fräulein von Scuderi (Mademoiselle de Scudéry, 1819) also suffers from a split personality. Its two parts are bound up with day and night, respectively: The artist Cardillac makes jewelry during the day and then sells it, only to steal it back at night. His behavior derives from a prenatal experience. His mother had refused an officer’s proposition when she was pregnant. When reaching for his golden necklace the officer drops dead. It is small wonder, therefore, that Cardillac feels miserable and unworldly after his nightly raids. His split personality

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shows the dichotomies of day versus night, good versus evil, civic versus non-civic, worldly versus unworldly, and fact versus fiction. Hoffmann’s narration is an outstanding example of the influence of a split personality. Cardillac does not belong to the world alone, for his identity covers the rational as well as the irrational, the conscious and the subconscious, the accessible as well as the inaccessible. With that the author characterizes the essential features of Romantic identity moving through all the spheres of the real and unreal more or less confidently. Cardillac is an uncompromising wanderer across various limits and boundaries of consciousness as well as geographical frontiers, limits of time, social conventions and ethical norms. Adelbert von Chamisso introduces another variety of doubling. In Peter Schlemihls Wunderbare Geschichte (Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story, 1814) the protagonist does not have to experience a physical split, but falls foul of a conflict anyway when he trades his shadow for a magic purse which is permanently filled with coins. Schlemihl’s materialism turns out to be fatal when his relationships continuously break up, including that with his girlfriend. Although he is able to recover his shadow, he has to sell his soul in the process. The significance of the shadow has been discussed frequently since the publication of this short narration, which is furnished with numerous motifs of fairy tales and myths. In his preface, the publisher Julius Eduard Hitzig devotes a chapter to the shadow-casting body and emphasizes Chamisso’s thought that the shadow can be depicted as a medium of both shadow and bodily space or solidity. Schlemihl has lost this solid and steady aspect of life by longing for money, Chamisso continues. If one follows the author’s idea, this narration is not just the »story of a man who loses his identity and, with that, his soul and happiness in love«.5 Schlemihl uses the shadow rather as a medium to reflect on material and immaterial values of human existence and to delimit his identity in a setting which has made the subject’s moral and ethical limits permeable due to the increasing materialism of the nineteenth century. Chamisso adds another facet to the discussion of Romantic identity by questioning its fragility and its being prone to material values. Finally, Schlemihl’s guilt causes total devotion to a life spent in nature, but not before he has got over the liminal situation of being without shadow and money and has rediscovered a natural form of existence even when he has become an outsider. Schlemihl’s conflict is resolved: »If you want to live among men, try to adore the shadow, then the money. If you intend to live for yourself and your better self, oh, then you do not need any advice«.6 The bipolar pattern of doubling may be supplemented by a tripolar pattern, the motif of a man who has to decide on a woman. The tripolar and the bipolar pattern have in common the protagonist’s feeling of insecurity. An example of this is Edgar Allen Poe’s »Ligeia« (1838). In his narration Poe depicts the double as a revenant: The late Ligeia, idealized by her husband, returns into the deceased body of his second wife. Through this motif, Poe makes the limits of life and death permeable, as well as those of reality and unreality; in his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) the protagonists continuously shift from reality to unreality.

5.

»Geschichte eines Menschen, der seine Identität verliert und damit die Seele und sein Liebesglück« (Ueding 1988, 571).

6.

»willst du unter den Menschen leben, so lerne verehren zuvörderst den Schatten, sodann das Geld. Willst du nur dir und deinem bessern Selbst leben, oh, so brauchst du keinen Rat« (Chamisso 1993, 78 f.).

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Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia (1855), written shortly before the author’s suicide, tells of the loss of a beloved woman and the narrator’s attempts to come to terms with this stroke of fate, which leads him to extensive elucidations of the relationship between dreams and real existence. Similar to De Quincey, Nerval uses the dream as a means of self-analysis, for »The dream is a second life«,7 even more than that: Gérard’s »other« life within his dreams can be considered as a necessary addition to his real one. He comes to realize that he is guilty of Aurélia’s death. In his posthumous adoration for this woman a double plays a key role: After having adopted divine features Aurélia is wrenched from Gérard’s double, who turns out to be a godly messenger and who punishes him for adoring Aurélia instead of God. When Gérard realizes that his repentance is belated he loses his beloved again. Finally, she appears to him as the queen of dreams, a mixture of Aurélia, the Madonna and his own mother. Now he has advanced to the essence of his love and found peace of mind. In this narration, the double appears as a figure who helps the protagonist to come to terms with himself, and finally produces harmony at a stage of Gérard’s personal development when he feels in complete disharmony with himself. If the works mentioned point out the porous nature of identity because of an increased inspection of the several spheres of consciousness and of motifs that emphasize the ever changing mental conditions, Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater varies these features. In this autobiographical work, De Quincey tells about his opium consumption that served him as a means of leaving reality behind in order to open up previously unknown areas of thought. The author does not focus on a fictional figure but on himself as a Romantic author. De Quincey also makes clear the price there is to pay for purposely moving from reality into a world of pure imagination. The physical decay and, accordingly, the loss of creativity are the negative sides to such a quest for the unknown sides of human life. De Quincey once again raises the issue which informs most of the Romantic narrations dealing with doubling and bipolarity: the creation and destruction of human life and the forces that cause them. In De Quincey’s case, it is the author himself who destroys his own creative power and finally loses control over the negative forces that gradually cause his decay. In Suspira de Profundis (1845) — which the author identified as the sequel to his Confessions — De Quincey further develops his idea of dream and reality, using among other devices a mysterious shadow force, the Dark Interpreter, who, as the author states, intrudes into his dreams and is characterized as a mere reflex of his inner nature, a representative of himself. This figure is nothing other than a mediator between daylight and nightly darkness, that is, between thoughts that do not seem to be accessible for a reasonable mind but are made accessible by the Interpreter’s force. He reduces the power of the unconscious and, by so doing, strengthens the perception of the real world unaffected by drug addiction. 3.

The bipolarity of cultures

A theme related to doubling and polarity in some early Romantic texts is the confrontation or interaction of the self and the Other. In Romantic literature the relationship between the self 7.

»le rêve est une seconde vie« (Nerval 1993, 695).

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and the Other is often depicted by means of a figure which does not stem from the author’s culture. Such a figure, for instance, is the »noble savage« who satisfies a number of desires, including the reader’s longing for exoticism, and serves the depiction of the supposed incompatibility of European and non-European cultures or ways of living. That relationship can be discussed with the help of modern ethnography (see Marcus and Fischer 1986; Berg and Fuchs 1995), posing the following questions: Is the author or the figure he writes about away from home or is he writing from within his familiar context? To what extent do the »others« get a hearing? Is the text written while the author is abroad or is it the product of remembrance replacing first-hand knowledge? These questions may help to explain the differences between Joseph von Eichendorff ’s Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Goodfor-Nothing, 1826), Eine Meerfahrt (A Voyage on the High Seas, 1835/36), and François René de Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801). Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts portrays an outsider far from bourgeois conventions. He travels to Italy without intending to improve his mind but merely to satisfy his spirit of adventure. For him his home remains ambivalent anyway. In spite of purposelessly tramping around, he is a seeker whose wanderlust and religious curiosity make him unable to find what he really wants in life. His traveling turns out to be a pilgrimage when he longs for a woman whose properties he compares to those of the Madonna. Over and above that, he is determined to go to Rome. Eichendorff ’s protagonist is a quintessential Romantic figure: He searches for the unity of art and life, does not want to exploit nature but longs to be a part of it, and ridicules the ideals of Enlightenment such as reason and advantage by his spontaneous behavior. But the rogue remains isolated away from home, as communication seems to be impossible: But I could say whatever I liked, the chap always just kept saying: »Si, Si, Signore!« […] The old woman asked me to follow her very politely by means of all sorts of signs […] I entered into all kinds of courteous conversation but she did not understand me.8

Eichendorff exposes his protagonist to the foreign but the experience of it remains incomplete because of the rogue’s inability to communicate. Although his experience seems to be confined to nature and its beauty, he finds his way back into society by marrying his beloved. At the end of the novella, he is likely to set out for Italy again together with his spouse in order to experience an orderly bourgeois life marked by Christian values. In Chateaubriand’s Atala the bipolarity of home and abroad becomes apparent through the figure of the »noble savage«. With this work, Chateaubriand anticipates the demand of modern ethnography to experience the Other not from home but by being abroad, with one restriction though: In the foreword to the first edition Chateaubriand describes the savage as a mixture of ferocity and European education:

8.

»Aber ich mochte sprechen, was ich wollte, der Kerl sagte immer bloß: ›Si, Si, Signore!‹ […] Die alte Frau aber bat mich sehr höflich durch allerlei Zeichen, ihr zu folgen […] Ich knüpfte allerlei galanten Diskurs mit ihr an, sie verstand mich aber nicht« (Eichendorff 1996, 784, 786, 787).

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Ernst Grabovszki He has to express himself in a mixed style, suited to the path he wanders along, between society and nature. This has given me considerable advantages, by letting him talk as a savage in my depiction of mores, and as European for dramatic and narrative purposes.9

By Europeanizing the »savage«, that is by absorbing the unknown and making it familiar, Chateaubriand avoids sounding the difference between »wild« and European tradition and culture. Lastly, this figure serves to juxtapose further contrasts: civilization and non-civilization, the exotic and the reality of central European society, nature and religious education. These contrasts seem to be neutralized by the protagonists’ love for each other. Atala is the daughter of a white man and an Indian woman and was educated in a Christian manner. But the decision whether to live by Christian values or to live with an Indian is a dilemma she is unable to handle. Finally, she decides to die voluntarily. Atala makes Chateaubriand’s conversion from Rousseauism to Christianity clear, as it is mirrored in the figures’ conflict. Both Eichendorff ’s and Chateaubriand’s works make it obvious that the Other may stand its ground within the frame of Romanticism, but only in an idealized or aesthetically colonialized manner. Eichendorff ’s conceptions of traveling and of the Other coincide with the Romantic conceptions, which differ totally from Chateaubriand. Eichendorff is not interested in a topographical description of a journey; furthermore he avoids realistic accounts almost completely: In the literary texts of the Romantics, the new travel ideal becomes evident: Planning and orientation towards a goal are contrasted with improvisation. The Romantic lets chance dictate his itinerary and is prepared to engage with any kind of distraction. […] In the rambling depicted in literature, the Romantic experiences a reality different from the rationalized, bourgeois one; what is more: he explicitly designs its counter-image.10

In this manner, Romantic traveling differs from that of preceding centuries, because it seems to be »useless« and self-indulgent. The traveler is characterized by his behavior and attitudes towards the Other, which is the ultimate rationale for the uselessness of his travels: The Other is left untouched inasmuch as it is just considered as a medium of cultural authenticity which can help to improve personality and widen cultural horizons. Eichendorff ’s rogue is essentially an anti-colonial figure, whereas Chateaubriand’s noble savage has to cope with the tension between European and non-European culture — a conflict he or she is not able to master. Atala propagates a Christian view of life which does not tolerate any alternatives. It is interesting that Chateaubriand has never witnessed Indian habits in the Mississippi region, where his story is set, although the reader might think so because of the author’s extensive descriptions of native customs in his writings.

9.

»Il doit donc s’exprimer dans un style mêlé, convenable à la ligne sur laquelle il marche, entre la société et la nature. Cela m’a donné de grands avantages, en le faisant parler en Sauvage dans la peinture des mœurs, et en Européen dans le drame et la narration« (Chateaubriand 1969, 17).

10.

»Aus den literarischen Texten der Romantiker läßt sich das neue Reiseideal ablesen: Der Planung und Zielorientierung wird die Improvisation gegenübergestellt. Der Romantiker läßt sich seinen Weg vom Zufall vorgeben und ist bereit, auf jede Ablenkung einzugehen. […] Der Romantiker erlebt im literarisch dargestellten Wandern eine andere als die rationalisierte bürgerliche Wirklichkeit; mehr noch: er entwirft ausdrücklich ein Gegenbild zu ihr« (Brenner 1990, 330 f.).

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In his novella Eine Meerfahrt Eichendorff is again concerned with the geographically alien. Unlike Chateaubriand, Eichendorff intends to bridge the gap between different religious beliefs and cultural backgrounds. In 1540 Don Antonio, a student in search of his uncle Don Diego, discovers a tropical island which is ruled by a pagan queen. Don Diego, who lives as a hermit on the island, had fallen in love with a woman related to the queen but could not save her from the Spanish invaders. The queen’s niece, Alma, falls in love with Don Antonio and she finally follows him to his homeland Iberia where she converts to Christianity. Eichendorff emphasizes the possibility of living in harmony despite seemingly unbridgeable differences. Regardless of her non-European origin, which in her case involves paganism and a hatred of both men and marriage, the author depicts his female protagonist as a figure of moral integrity. Often enough he refers to the tropical island as an uncanny and primitive place, whereas Don Antonio’s homeland is only portrayed in a positive light. This framing pattern of traveling to unknown places and returning to the known and congenial coincides with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, setting the domestic against an adventurous existence. The three narrators in Shelley’s novel rove about islands and mountains, telling their stories in an environment anything but inviting. The creature disappears in the darkness of the polar sea. Whereas characters like Frankenstein are frequently allowed to return to civilized England or a comparably safe place, in Shelley’s novella the transgressor scientist dies with his creation in the icy sea and is separated from the narrator as an alter ego or role that is rejected. The motif of the double or bipolarity is often intensified, predicted or treated with irony by the use of other motifs that cause a doubling effect as, for instance, the mirror. At the very beginning of Dostoevskii’s novel The Double Goliadkin, just woken up from a long sleep, finds himself in a twilight state of being awake and dreaming, when a mirror confronts him with everyday life. In this case the mirror appears as an attribute of reality, of being awake and fully conscious. In Hoffmann’s Prinzessin Brambilla (Princess Brambilla, 1820) the mirror is used metaphorically. The doubling of Carton and Evrémonde in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities is also supplied by the mirror as a prop: When Carton looks into the mirror he thinks about his resemblance to Evrémonde. The order of everyday life and the fantastic world is not only reversed during carnival but also serves as a way of finding one’s identity: »It is the ability to think about oneself and the world, to reflect about oneself and the world, both in the literal and the figurative sense: to be reflected«.11 Siebenkäs also sees his image multiplied. His existence in the real world is shaky and insecure because it is split into several appearances resembling his natural one. He is allowed to take a glimpse of himself not least because of Jean Paul’s definition of the double (»doubles are such people who see themselves«, note 1) and to question the tension between outward appearance and inner identity.

11.

»es ist die Fähigkeit, über sich selbst und über die Welt nachzudenken, sich selbst und die Welt zu reflektieren, in der wörtlichen und in der übertragenen Bedeutung des Wortes: sich zu spiegeln« (Zimmermann 1992, 101).

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Conclusion

In Romantic prose fiction, the double not only represents a state of mind but is used to emphasize the increasing interest in the human psyche. The progress of natural sciences in the nineteenth century as well as the growth of industrialization demystifies the view of nature as a source of myth and mystery to a great extent. »Nature« also comprehends the human body as well as its psychic »life« and finally also the irrational spheres of thought and emotion. The motifs of doubling and bipolarity most often cover these irrational conditions of life. It is no coincidence that many novels and narrations contain living puppets, revenants, ghosts or strange persons. From this range of wondrous figures the double stands out mainly in one respect: It directly raises the issue of identity by confronting a figure with its mirror-image. The confrontation of two figures who strikingly resemble each other in their outward appearances but whose interior worlds differ just as strongly is the most common constellation in the texts discussed here. Confronting people with their double always results in conflict because they are forced to grapple not only with the Other but, as a consequence, also with themselves. In other words, doubling always leads to self-analysis and, ideally, to self-knowledge. Hildenbrock’s statement on William Wilson’s double holds true for many other doubles in Romantic prose fiction: The internalization of norms and values sanctioned by society explains why he [William Wilson] does not succeed in getting rid of his »pursuer« and in escaping his »impertinent supervision«: For the double is an instance of his ego which he refuses to accept as real, and therefore experiences as strange and hostile. […] In Poe’s »William Wilson«, as well, the double gets its strength from the ego-weakness of his original.12

All in all, the double figures stand for the »lowest point«13 in the range of figures Romantic literature has to offer. Their fathoming the depths of the human soul leads them to contempt, and finally to the psychic or physical destruction not only of themselves but also of others. The bipolarity of cultures also relates to doubling and bipolarity. By contrasting two (or more) cultural traditions and by treating the geographically alien, authors such as Chateaubriand and Eichendorff highlight the gaps which separate European from non-European cultures, especially different religious beliefs. Whereas Chateaubriand’s »noble savage« is not able to master the conflict arising from the intention to become a Christian, Eichendorff ’s protagonists are striving for harmony in their beliefs and values which is always subject to a compromise: Alma, for instance, has to cast off her original and inborn qualities in order to be able to live in accordance with »civilized« norms. Doubles are either »good« or »bad« creatures: They may help their mirror-images to improve their personality (»William Wilson«), to gain insights into previously covered realizations (Aurélia, »Ligeia«), to question the progress of science (Frankenstein), to subvert ethical 12.

»Die Internalisierung der gesellschaftlich sanktionierten Normen und Werte erklärt auch, warum es ihm [William Wilson] nicht gelingt, seinen ›Verfolger‹ abzuschütteln und seiner ›impertinent supervision‹ […] zu entgehen: denn der Doppelgänger ist ja eine Instanz seines Ichs, die er nicht wahrhaben will und deshalb unbewußt als fremd und feindlich erlebt. […] Auch in Poes ›William Wilson‹ bezieht der Doppelgänger seine Stärke aus der Ich-Schwäche seines Urbildes« (Hildenbrock 1986, 168).

13.

»den tiefsten Punkt der Skala« (Schulz 1996, 108).

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and moral norms (Die Elixiere des Teufels, Peter Schlemihl’s wundersame Geschichte), or to emphasize irrationality (»Nos«). As a consequence, numerous novels and narrations discussed here are narrated in the first person or from a character’s point of view which not only allows the figure’s interior to develop more clearly but also to reveal the conflicts that have arisen and the figure’s struggle for another condition of life. But one aspect still has to be added: Bipolarity and doubling are not used just for their own sake but to demonstrate a synthesis of originally opposite features. All prose works discussed here aim to resolve the conflict between the persons involved. Doubling, duplicity and bipolarity therefore are always characterized by disorder followed by a regained harmony or, at the very least, by a state that has subdued a condition the figures were exposed to. Bibliography Berg, Eberhard, and Fuchs, Martin (ed.). 1995. Kultur, soziale Praxis, Text: Die Krise der ethnographischen Repräsentation. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Brenner, Peter J. 1990. Der Reisebericht in der deutschen Literatur: Ein Forschungs-überblick als Vorstudie zu einer Gattungsgeschichte. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Chamisso, Adelbert von. 1980. Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte. Sämtliche Werke in zwei Bänden. Vol. 2. Ed. by Werner Feudel and Christel Laufer. München, Wien: Hanser. 15–79. Chateaubriand, François-René de. 1969. Atala. Œuvres romanesques et voyages. Vol I. Ed. by Maurice Regard. Paris: Gallimard. 3–99. De Quincey, Thomas. 1985. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings. Ed. by Grevel Lindop. Oxford: Oxford UP. Dickens, Charles. 1937. A Tale of Two Cities. Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press. ———. 1938. Our Mutual Friend. Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press. Dostoevskii, Fedor Mikhailovich. 1996. Bratia Karamazovy. Sobranie sochinenii. Vols 6 and 7. Moscow: Leksika. ———. 1996. Dvoinik. Sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 1. Moscow: Leksika. 219–392. Eichendorff, Joseph von. 1996a. Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts. Werke in einem Band. Ed. by Wolfdietrich Rasch. München, Wien: Hanser. 747–832. ———. 1996b. Eine Meerfahrt. Werke in einem Band. Ed. by Wolfdietrich Rasch. München, Wien: Hanser. 873–929. Gogol, Nikolai Vasilyevich. 1976–1978. Nos. Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. Ed. by S.I. Masinskii and M.B. Khraptsenko. Vol. 3. Moscow: Khudozhestvennia literatura. 174–246. Hildenbrock, Aglaja. 1986. Das andere Ich: Künstlicher Mensch und Doppelgänger in der deutsch- und englischsprachigen Literatur. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Hoffmann, E.T.A. 1993a. Das Fräulein von Scuderi. Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden. Vol. 4. Ed. by Wulf Segebrecht and Hartmut Steinecke. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker-Verlag. 780–853. ———. 1993b. Die Elixiere des Teufels. Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden. Vol. 2, 2. Ed. by Wulf Segebrecht and Hartmut Steinecke. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker-Verlag. 9–352. Jean Paul. 1928. Siebenkäs. Sämtliche Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Vol. I.6. Ed. by Kurt Schreinert. Weimar: Böhlau. ———. 1934. Flegeljahre. Sämtliche Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Vol. I.10. Weimar: Böhlau. ———. 1933. Titan. Sämtliche Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Vol. I.8 and I.9. Weimar: Böhlau. Marcus, George E., and Fischer, Michael M. J. (ed.). 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago, London: Chicago UP. Maturin, Charles Robert. 1989. Melmoth the Wanderer. Ed. by Douglas Grant. Oxford: Oxford UP.

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Nehring, Wolfgang. 1997. »Nachwort«. E.T.A. Hoffmann: Die Elixiere des Teufels. Ed. by Wolfgang Nehring. Stuttgart: Reclam. 357–375. Nerval, Gérard de. 1993. Aurelia. Œuvres complètes. Vol. 3. Ed. by Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard. 693–756. Poe, Edgar Allen. 1978a. Collected Works: Tales and Sketches 1831–1842. Vol. 2. Ed. by Thomas Ollive Mabbott. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP. ———. 1978b. Collected Works: Tales and Sketches 1843–1849. Vol. 3. Ed. by Thomas Ollive Mabbott. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP. Schulz, Gerhard. 1996. Romantik: Geschichte und Begriff. München: C. H. Beck. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. 1996. Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Responses, Modern Criticism. Ed. by Paul Hunter. New York: Norton. Turner, Victor. 1995. »Das Liminale und das Liminoide in Spiel, »Fluß« und Ritual: Ein Essay zur vergleichenden Symbologie«. Vom Ritual zum Theater: Der Ernst des menschlichen Spiels. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. 28–94. Ueding, Gert. 1988. Klassik und Romantik: Deutsche Literatur im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution 1789– 1815. München: dtv. Zimmermann, Hans Dieter. 1992. »›Der junge Mann leidet an chronischem Dualismus‹: Zu E.T.A. Hoffmanns Capriccio Prinzessin Brambilla«. E.T.A. Hoffmann. Text und Kritik, Sonderband. Ed. by Heinz Ludwig Arnold. München: edition text + kritik. 97–111.

Images of childhood in Romantic children’s literature Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer In his Vorlesungen über die deutsche Wissenschaft und Literatur (Lectures on German Science and Literature, 1807), the German literary historian Adam H. Müller holds the opinion that the observation of children and the occupation with childhood should be the »best and most noble source of historical research«.1 Müller’s treatise has a special position among the early literary histories insofar as it contains a long section concerning the Romantic image of childhood. According to Müller the observation of the child’s play and behaviour as well as the interest in child language is a necessary condition both for the contemplation of lost childhood in literature and for the preservation of a childlike sense without becoming childish (119). In addition, these aspects also are important for the historiography of literature. However, Müller does not conclude from the importance of childhood for historical research and literature that children need their own literature which should play an important part in the child’s development. For Müller the preoccupation with the phenomenon of childhood is exclusively determined by a retrospective approach. This view can also be found in autobiographical novels around 1800, which are characterized by a reflection of one’s own life and, therefore, also of one’s own childhood. Childhood as a special stage of life and the experiences of children have moved increasingly towards the centre of interest since the end of the eighteenth century. Prototypical works of this interest are Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les confessions (The Confessions, 1782–88) and Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser (1785–90). As editor of the journal Magazin für Erfahrungsseelenkunde (Magazine for Experiential Psychology, 1783–93), Moritz demanded, on the one hand, the analysis of childhood autobiographies and, on the other, the precise observation of children for a fully developed psychology of childhood. These autobiographical novels could be interpreted as »ethnographic accounts of childhood«,2 because the authors are concerned with a stage of life which proves to be »strange« for the adult observer on closer examination. In a further step the retrospective involvement with the child’s perception leads to a new experience: Childhood is not interpreted as a stage of preparation for adulthood anymore, but as an autonomous phase thus obtaining more and more independence. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the discourse of childhood did not take place in children’s literature, but in pedagogical-philosophical treatises and in literature for adults. Starting from a sharp criticism of the utilitarian thinking of the Enlightenment, especially of the philanthropic ideal of education in Germany, the foundations were laid for an image of childhood that has influenced children’s and adult literature until the present. As a countermovement to the Enlightenment, the Romantic movement was important for the development of children’s literature for four reasons: the creation of an image of childhood by the early Romantics contrary to the ideas of the Enlightenment; the classification of children’s literature by traditional genres (folktales, legends, nursery rhymes) during late Romanticism; the replacement of the moral tale, which was favoured during the Enlightenment, by fairy tales 1.

»Erste und edelste Quelle der Geschichtsforschung« (Müller 1807, 118).

2.

»Kindheitsethnographische Berichte« (Steinlein 1999, 281).

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(both folktales and literary fairy tales) as the main genre of Romantic children’s literature; and the constitution of new literary children’s characters. As a result, the motifs of the »lively imaginative child« (lebhaft fantasiereiches Kind) and the »strange child« (fremdes Kind) or »eternal child« (ewiges Kind) attain great significance. These motifs found their prototypical expression in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s fairy tales for children, Nußknacker und Mausekönig (Nutcracker and Mouse King, 1816) and Das fremde Kind (The Strange Child, 1817). In every respect Romantic children’s literature holds an outstanding position in Germany. Compared to Romantic children’s literature in other countries, it unfolded relatively early, in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. In addition, translated into other European languages it played a decisive role in the development of international children’s literature. 1.

Pre-Romantic concepts of childhood

Before analyzing the Romantic image of childhood in seven countries (Germany, England, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Russia) on the basis of selected children’s books, it is helpful to explain the underlying aspects of this image of childhood, which can be reduced by and large to the ideas of the Enlightenment (specifically the ideas of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Johann Gottfried Herder) and to the works written by the Pre-Romantics and early Romantics (William Blake, Jean Paul, Charles Lamb, Novalis, Henrik Wergeland, William Wordsworth). These authors created models of interpretations constitutive for the philosophical, anthropological, aesthetic and educational discourses of childhood since the end of the eighteenth century. Although Rousseau argued in Émile ou de l’éducation (Emil, or on Education, 1762) that »We do not know childhood«,3 and Novalis noted in his Fragmente und Studien (Fragments and Studies, 1799–1800): »Study of pedagogy — children are still terrae incognitae«,4 attempts were made during the age of Enlightenment to examine the phenomenon of childhood from pedagogical and philosophical points of view. The works of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder play a significant role. In his treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), John Locke emphasized the importance of children’s play and children’s imagination respectively. With his claim to combine instruction and diversion in children’s literature, Locke caused a paradigm shift. Whereas Locke described the child as »wax, to be molded and fashioned as one pleases« (325), Rousseau regarded it as a »young plant«.5 The tension between these metaphors reveals the ambivalence characteristic of the Romantic approach to childhood. To a greater extent than Locke, Rousseau laid the foundations for the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth and E.T.A. Hoffmann. His greatest achievement consisted in drawing attention to childhood as a period of life in which mankind is very close to the natural state. In this regard Rousseau’s main claim was that the child should be perceived as a being in itself and not as a small adult. According to Rousseau, innocence was the 3.

»Nous ne connaissons pas l’enfance« (Rousseau 1962, 33).

4.

»Studium der Pädagogik — Kinder sind noch terrae incognitae« (Novalis 1983, Fragment No 146, 575).

5.

»Jeune plante« (Rousseau 1962, 246).

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child’s essential quality. Therefore, he came to the conclusion that children must be brought up as naturally as possible. Because of his sceptical position towards science and culture he disapproved of books as means of education suitable for children. Books as reading matter were not allowed until children were able to understand their content and meaning. Books, by and large, were anathema, aside from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which taught self-sufficiency and survival in the natural world. As for Rousseau, he did not consider education possible before the age of fourteen. Although Rousseau thus denied the raison d’être of children’s literature, his demands were pioneering for a new pedagogical literature for children characterized by the idea of a model of development. As a result childhood was considered an independent stage of life. According to Rousseau the child is not important because it embodies the state of mankind before the Fall, but because the child represents an ideal of humanity that deviates from the JudeoChristian doctrine of innate sin. In this sense Rousseau challenged the traditions that viewed children as potential adults, and presented a revolutionary, but simple view that celebrated the natural tendencies of childhood. In addition, Rousseau maintains the child’s natural innocence and kindness, which is menaced by social institutions like family, school, church and state. This view of childhood drew upon the cult of the »noble savage« in the eighteenth century and was adopted by the Romantics. From then on children were regarded as unknown beings. Adults have to take up an observer’s position towards them in order to fathom their character. In England Rousseau’s image of childhood exerted a great influence on William Blake. In his Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), the idea of childhood as absolute innocence is allied with the belief in the innate evil in mankind — a combination which reveals Blake’s ambivalent attitude. For Blake, innocence and experience represent two »States of the Human Soul« which have to complement each other in order to attain intellectual maturity. Blake’s concept of childhood envisions three phases. Firstly, childhood presents itself as a heavenly state (for example in »The Echoing Green« and »Laughing Song«). However, this perspective is not suitable according to the rules of human society. But even the standpoint of experience is incomplete since it does not offer any alternatives to the unbalanced rational worldview based on Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy. Although the child must leave the state of innocence, its naïve perception establishes a vision of a better life, expressed for instance in Blake’s poem »Holy Thursday«. Innocence and experience as points of view are incomplete unless they complement each other in »Imagination«. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Johann Gottfried Herder, Jean Paul, Friedrich Schiller and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi brought about a turning point in pedagogy. This is characterized by a break with the Enlightenment’s concept of education, which focuses on the utility principle. In this regard Schiller, in his essay Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1795/96), described the child as »a lively representation to us of the ideal, not indeed, as it is fulfilled, but as it is enjoined; hence we are in no sense moved by the notion of its poverty and limitation, but rather by the opposite: a notion of its pure and free strength, its integrity, its eternality«.6 The representatives of a new humanist pedagogy 6. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Eine Vergegenwärtigung des Ideals, nicht zwar des erfüllten, aber des aufgegebenen, und es ist also keineswegs die Vorstellung seiner Bedürftigkeit und Schranken, es ist ganz im Gegenteil die Vorstellung seiner reinen und freien Kraft, seiner Integrität, seiner Unendlichkeit« (Schiller 1993, 87).

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put special emphasis on the child’s human education. This principle also applies to children’s literature whose purpose no longer lies in imparting vocational knowledge and moral instruction. The contrast between pedagogical convention on the one hand and aesthetic value on the other, which played an important role in the evaluation of children’s literature, gave way to a pedagogical discussion about the aesthetic autonomy of children’s books claimed above all by Pestalozzi. The discovery of the child’s intrinsic value also revealed its special state of mind, whose active centre is marked by imagination. In his Palmblätter (Palm Leaves, 1786), Herder addressed the issue of adequate reading matter for children and recommended the stories from A Thousand and One Nights, because they stimulate the child’s imagination and impart a sense of poetry. In Iduna oder der Apfel der Verjüngung (Iduna, or the Apple of Rejuvenation, 1796), Herder commented on the child’s fondness for magical incidents and foreign atmosphere: »A child never feels happier than when it imagines and invents strange situations and people«.7 This thesis is more comprehensible against the background of Herder’s philosophy of history, which assumes a relationship between childhood and »oriental tales«; such tales are seen as works from a historical period that is interpreted as the childhood phase of mankind. Since the child’s imagination must be turned toward good and noble things, literary works from this early period were considered to be more suitable than the widespread fables or moral verses for children common during the Enlightenment. Herder obtained his image of childhood from the supposed analogy of ontogenesis and phylogenesis by comparing the individual’s stages of development with the course of human history. Therefore, Herder rejected Rousseau’s identification of childhood and the state of nature in favour of the child’s close relation to an archaic state of mankind. Whereas the representatives of the Enlightenment defined childhood as a mainly forward-looking transitional period that reaches its goal in adulthood, considering, as John Locke did, the child’s mind a »tabula rasa«, Herder regarded the child as a complete human being from the beginning. For the first time, the small child became the centre of attention: All specific abilities already exist as innate talents and merely need activation. Whereas Rousseau assumed that these abilities develop naturally without any help, Herder emphasized the parents’ function as educators. With their assistance the child will be acquainted with human language and the emotional world. Since the child is distinguished by enthusiasm, imitative instinct, trustfulness, confiding nature and obedience, its personality can easily be moulded. Because of its spontaneous imagination the child is open to music, dance and poetry. Herder’s conception of the child as gifted with linguistic talents and lively imagination was adopted by the Romantics for their own idea of the child as poetical personality. 2.

Early Romantic images of childhood

In the following section I will concentrate on the various aspects that characterize the Romantic image of childhood, in particular its proximity to nature and more direct relationship to 7.

»Ein Kind fühlt sich nie glücklicher, als wenn es imaginiert und sich sogar in fremde Situationen und Personen dichtet« (Herder 1883, 485).

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transcendence. All other Romantic aspects can be deduced from these ideas. The complex of proximity to nature involves qualities like naivety, respect towards creation, vitality, but also savagery and sensuality, which were disliked by society. Proximity to transcendence gives rise to qualities like creativity, imagination and contemplation, but it also entails rather tragic motifs, such as isolation, longing, melancholy and premonition of death. Because of its association with an immediate experience of nature and contact with the divine, the Romantics ascribed to the child a role as mediator. The child is provided with ingenious qualities like comprehension, intuition and participation in divine knowledge. These abilities distinguish a large number of literary child characters after Goethe’s Mignon. The early Romantic interest in childhood began with a sharp criticism of enlightened rationalism and the rejection of utilitarianism, which was disparaged as a futile accumulation of knowledge and pseudo-erudition. For this reason the child’s yearning for magic, love and religion was ignored in the Enlightenment. But education has to be geared to the child’s nature, as Jean Paul claims in Levana oder Erziehlehre (Levana, or Doctrine of Education, 1806). The child should represent a »revolt against the spirit of the times«.8 Jean Paul and other Romantics acknowledged the child’s individuality and autonomy and emphasized its intrinsic value. Exactly this acknowledgement is an important condition for the early-Romantic transformation of their image of childhood into a myth of ideal mankind. Jean Paul’s works already indicated a cult of childhood, which linked an anthropological with a metaphysical level of reflection. Thus the Romantics revered the child as the embodiment of a »divinity in man«. Behind the connection of nature and transcendence as a prominent quality of childhood, the idea of a specific Romantic view of art is concealed. Romantic child characters often adopt the function of a genius of poetry or art. In this case the interest in childhood paved the way for projections and longings by interpreting childhood as the »other« in contrast to adulthood. Following Neo-Platonic mystical images of childhood, the Romantics considered the child’s existential state of mind to be of absolute perfection and original integrity. Novalis had posited: »Where there are children, there is a golden age«.9 In the spirit of early-Romantic philosophy Novalis regarded the child as a symbol of hope quite close to the Divine and betokening a past (but also future) human state, in which man lived (or will live) in harmony with nature. The idea of the Golden Age, in connection with the philosophical paradigm of a triadic progression: natural state — social alienation — future expectation, assigns a double function to the child as representative of a past and also as prophet of a future Golden Age. Schiller had already indicated the child’s messianic function in his famous statement: »They are what we were, they are what we want to be again«.10 Fulfilment in God is thus the first and original quality of the child: It is distinguished by natural purity, moral kindness, sense of virtue, beauty and truth. The child’s distance from society corresponds with its proximity to nature. The child experiences infinity in nature and to this — as a reflection of the divine — its longing is directed. This inclination to the animation of nature is connected with the spontaneity of the child’s imagination, which, like reason, is an organ of the divine to be found in man. Since reason normally 8.

»Erhebung über den Zeitgeist« (Jean Paul 1937, 567).

9.

»Wo Kinder sind, da ist ein goldenes Zeitalter« (Novalis 1983, Fragment No 96, 456).

10.

»Sie sind, was wir waren, sie sind, was wir wieder werden wollen« (Schiller 1993, 695).

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awakes late, imagination exerts an almost unlimited influence on children. Imagination enables the child to animate things, to imagine transcendence and to integrate these experiences into its daily routine. This ability destines the child to represent a poetic being: It becomes the prototype of the poet. According to the Romantics, the child’s divinity gets lost when the naivety of the child’s consciousness is destroyed by the emergence of reason. The range of Romantic images of childhood was complemented by Wordsworth’s ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1807) and his autobiographical story in verse, the Prelude (1850), in which Rousseau’s concept of the »child of nature« became the focus of attention again. These works expressed an intense feeling of the irretrievable loss of childhood and thus caused a revision of early-Romantic ideas. The English tradition suggested a distinction between the child as a signifier for a childlike apprehension of the world, and the recollections of innocence, so familiar to readers of Wordsworth. The hope of the adults’ return to a »second, higher childhood«11 expressed by Novalis in his Fragment No 480 is not possible anymore. The relations between these qualities and a special stage of life lead Wordsworth and numerous other representatives of the late Romantics to demand that the child should be protected from dangers, but also to a sentimental view of childhood as a lost paradise, which could only be brought back by memory. Nevertheless, the Romantic discussion of the child’s importance always deals with the nature of mankind. The reference to the child serves to point out that the child has a soul, dreams, an unconscious, imagination, religion and proximity to nature, a closeness withheld from mankind by the Enlightenment. Therefore, a topical potential is inherent in the Romantic discourse on childhood. Childhood is a cipher for freedom from duties and work; these are contrasted with the child’s pure play and its devotion to the moment. Within the scope of an aesthetic movement that aims at a »poeticization of the world«, the Romantics stylize childhood into a literary and historical-philosophical cipher of high symbolic value. In a next step they transform childhood into a sentimental myth without any reference to the social reality of a child’s life. 3.

The central position of the fairy tale in Romantic children’s literature

Accordingly, the early Romantic discourse on the child does not take place in children’s literature at all, as a children’s literature primarily dedicated to children was not considered necessary. The Romantics argue that children already have suitable reading matter in folk poetry. The philanthropic attempt to establish a pedagogy of imagination was taken up and modified by the late Romantics. The refusal of utilitarian purposes and the revaluation of both imagination and the world of sense paradoxically lead to the withdrawal of the process of independence for children’s literature. Childhood and traditional poetry (folktale, folk song, legend, myth) were related to each other more or less in accordance with Herder’s ideas about ontogenesis and phylogenesis. In Novalis’s considerations concerning the special affinity between the child’s

11.

»Zweyte höhern Kindheit« (Novalis 1983, vol. III, 345).

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philosophy of life and the fairy tale as »confessions of a true synthetic child, an ideal child«,12 the fairy tale was favoured as suitable reading matter for children. In addition, where childhood was considered to be a state of heightened sensitivity to all things spiritual, rather than something to be grown out of and improved upon, then the fairy tale also attracted those who wished to recuperate the child-sensitivity in themselves. For the first time the Romantics laid special emphasis on the demand for the child’s aesthetic-literary education. In late Romanticism, this resulted in a tendency to submit folk poetry to pedagogical claims. Going back to Herder’s concept of childhood, the German poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, who edited the three-volume Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn, 1805–1808), containing an appendix with children’s songs, maintained that the orally transmitted songs and rhymes for children represent an adequate literary form especially for small children. However, their postulate that orally transmitted forms should be gently revised in order to satisfy artistic demands was rejected by the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. In the first edition of Kinderund Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales, 1812; 1815), the Grimms claimed to record folk poetry faithfully without any revision. But the increasing success of the fairy tale collection as a children’s book prompted the Grimms to make various changes in later editions, as they filled out gaps in the text, compiled different versions and adjusted the fairy tales stylistically. The Grimms created a purportedly special »children’s tone« distinguished by contamination, direct speech, addition of traditional sayings and a tense shift from present into imperfect. The Grimms thus helped to establish the folktale as a pedagogically relevant reading matter for children. The rewriting of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen as a »book of education«, as it was termed in the preface to the last edition, formed the basis for legitimatizing the functionalization of the fairy tale as a didactically important genre for children. This image of childhood only took up certain aspects of Romantic discourse and already anticipated features of Biedermeier children’s literature. But its pioneering vitality waned, because the discussion about the analogy between childhood as a stage of life and orally transmitted folk literature caused a recalling of virtues like simplicity, purity, proximity to nature and religious awe, which were ascribed both to the simple people and to the child. All passages not corresponding to this ideal — such as erotic content, ironic comments, and social criticism — were eliminated or reduced in order not to destroy the image of a light-hearted idyll of childhood. The activity of collecting fairy tales and other folk literature, initiated by the brothers Grimm, encouraged collectors and specialists in almost all European countries to publish popular folktales that were adapted to the child’s intellectual grasp, such as the collections of George Stephens/Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius: Svenska folksagor och äfventyr (Swedish Folk Legends and Adventures, 1844–49), Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald: Eestirahwa Enemuistesed jutud (Old Tales of the Estonian People, 1866), Svend Grundtvig: Danske Folkeeventyr (Danish Fairy Tales, 1884), Fernán Caballero: Cuentos, oraciones, adivinanzas y refranes populares infantiles (Tales, Prayers, Riddles and Popular Children’s Proverbs, 1877), and Joseph Jacobs: English Fairy Tales (1890–94). Even outside Europe many scientists and writers were stimulated by the success of the Grimms’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) to record folktales handed down orally. Thus Silvio Romero edited Cantos populares do Brasil 12.

»Bekenntnisse eines wahrhaften, synthetischen Kindes, eines idealischen Kindes« (ibid., 281).

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(Brazilian Folk Tales, 1883), Sazanami Iwaya published Nihon Mukashibanashi (Old Tales of Japan, 1894–96), and Richard Chase collected folktales from the Appalachian mountains for The Jack Tales (1943). An outstanding example is the fairy tale collection Norske Folkeeventyr (Norwegian Folktales, 1841–44) by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. A selection intended for the youth with the title Nor, ein billedbog for den norske ungdom (North, a Picturebook for Norwegian Youth, 1838) had already been published some years earlier. At first, the editors adjusted to the Romantics Adam Oehlenschläger and Ludwig Tieck, as they interpreted the folktale merely as a subject matter for their own poetical creation. However, over the years the Children’s and Household Tales, which were translated in parts by Asbjørnsen into Norwegian, exerted more and more influence on their fairy tale conception. From now on they considered folktales as cultural-historical documents reflecting an early phase of Norwegian national literature and having an equivalent in childhood as a stage of life. Beside the achievement of putting orally transmitted folktales down in writing, thus rescuing them from oblivion, the editors rendered outstanding services to the revival of Norwegian as a written language by the careful literary revision of the folktales and the blending of the predominant Danish language with Norwegian dialects. Together with the literary endeavours of the Norwegian Romantics (e.g. Henrik Wergeland) their work contributed to the development of national identity. In Russia the folktale collectors Aleksandr Afanasyev (Narodnye russkie skazki — Russian Fairy Tales, 1855–63) and Ivan Khudiakov (Velikorusskie skazki — Russian Fairy Tales, 1860) rendered a great service to the publication of folktales. These often were revised in later editions in order to adapt them for children. Even the authors Petr Ershov and Aleksandr Pushkin took up popular folktales. Nevertheless, they wrote their versions in verse and thus established the tradition of the rhymed fairy tale in Russia. By the synthesis of folktale and fairy tale, Pushkin and Ershov created at the same time a new genre in children’s literature, refraining from moral comments and aphorisms. From the Russian folktales they adopted the realistic description of the day-to-day life in villages or towns. The combination of fairy-tale-like vagueness and concrete representation of places, typical of the Russian folktale, turned up again in their works. In contrast to these models Ershov’s Konek-gorbunok (The Little Hunchbacked Horse, 1834) and Pushkin’s fairy tale poems Skazka o Tsare Saltane (The Tale of Tsar Saltan, 1831), Skazka o rybake i rybke (The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish, 1835) and Zolotoi petushok (The Golden Cockerel, 1834) predominantly represent a critique of contemporary society. For this reason both authors came into conflict with the tsarist censorship. Ershov’s fairy tale was considerably abridged because of its anti-monarchist tendency and the siding with the simple Russian folk. It was published in extracts in a literary journal in 1834; a complete edition was edited two years later. The connection of folktale and fairy tale as a typical feature of the popular French »conte de fée« also affected Nouveaux contes de fées (New Fairy Tales, 1856) by Sophie Comtesse de Ségur, whose image of childhood was obviously influenced by French Romanticism. All collectors of folktales and legends which could be ascribed to European Romanticism share the view that the orally handed-down folk literature represents the only suitable reading matter for children. This sanctioned reading matter was both confronted with the rejected children’s literature of the Enlightenment and the non-sanctioned light fiction for children and youth. This light fiction gained great acceptance on account of the expanding

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book market since the end of the eighteenth century and was not noticeably influenced by Romantic discourse. Nevertheless, in the first half of the nineteenth century many children’s books contained traits of the early Romantic image of childhood. Above all this was the case with the small amount of genuinely Romantic children’s books, but also with many children’s books which could not be ascribed to Romanticism, since their authors merely adopted and partially even trivialized elements of Romantic ideas. The contribution of the fairy tale to Romantic children’s literature is considerable: In Germany the fairy tales of Ludwig Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Clemens Brentano should be mentioned first. However, because of their complexity, these fairy tales, intended for children, were ascribed to adult literature by literary historians and literary critics until the 1980s. The two-volume collection Kinder-Mährchen (Fairy Tales for Children, 1816–17), containing fairy tales by Carl Wilhelm Contessa, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué and E.T.A. Hoffmann, played an important part. As a result the Romantic fairy tale for children was chronologically ahead of the folktale in Germany, since the folktale was declared suitable reading matter for children only in the second edition of the Children’s and Household Tales (1819) by the brothers Grimm. That the tradition of the Romantic fairy tale for children did not break off at all upon the publication of the Grimms’s collection is evident from the fairy tales written by Hans Christian Andersen, Clemens Brentano, Wilhelm Hauff, John Ruskin, George Sand and Zachris Topelius. 4.

Constitution of new literary child-characters

The literary child characters in Romantic fairy tales are distinguished by a certain variety. Beside the motifs of the »lively imaginative child« and of the »strange child« (or »eternal child«), one also finds child characters who slip into the role of an outsider or serve as a satirical portrayal of the enlightened ideal of childhood. The latter type is generally represented by minor characters, such as the noble brother and sister, Adelgund and Hermann von Brakel, in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Das fremde Kind (The Strange Child). Above all it is surprising that, contrary to all expectations, the early Romantic model of the divine child, living in accord with nature and not affected by social demands, is found extremely rarely in Romantic children’s literature. A work typical of the idyllic representation of childhood is the Norwegian story Lille Alvilde (Little Alvilde, 1829) by Maurits Hansen, which was presented as a classic text in reading books. Four-year-old Alvilde is characterized as a pious girl, endowed with traits of an innocent angel. She moves freely out in the open and is not afraid of wild animals, which become tame and friendly towards her. The modernity of this story is not a result of the homogeneous, almost sentimental image of childhood, but of the strict concentration on the child’s perspective, and of the narrative technique, which is distinguished by a simple linguistic style and an imitation of oral storytelling. Clemens Brentano’s fairy tale Gockel, Hinkel, Gakeleja (Rooster, Hen and Little Cluck, written in 1815/16, published in 1838) and William Roscoe’s »papillonade« The Butterfly’s Ball (1807) hold a special position. Roscoe attributes childlike qualities, such as taking joy in pure play and little pleasures like dancing feasts, disguises and giving delicacies to animals. The identification

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of small animals and children is emphasized both by the frontispiece (a boy invites a group of children to come into the garden) and by the illustrations presenting animals as human figures. In Brentano’s fairy tale, human and animal existence is mixed up, symbolically expressed by the animal-like names of the three major characters, which have human shape but occasionally act like hens. The Christian interpretation, disclosed by several allusions to the Bible, amalgamates with the fairy tale level and represents human development from loss to restoration of the heavenly state. The action’s wave-like movement (interplay of states of misery and states of happiness) and the chronological linkage of incidents occurring at different times suggest that a development does not really happen. On the contrary, the story demonstrates the eternal recurrence of the same. The influence of the Romantic image of childhood is shown both in the characterization of Little Cluck and the endeavour to regain the heavenly state of childhood, as well as in the last scene when all figures present change into children sitting on a meadow and listening to a fairy tale told by Rooster. The poet has also changed into a child and sits right in their midst. In his fairy tale Nußknacker und Mausekönig, written for children, E.T.A. Hoffmann tried to unfold the inside world of a »lively imaginative« child. Hoffmann radicalized the late-Romantic pattern of the »dualistic fairy tale«, which already hinted at the dualism between magical and empirical events in fairy tales. He thus created with his works a new type of fairy tale characterized as »realistic fairy tale«,13 assessed by many literary scholars as a precursor of modern fantastic children’s literature. The action is no longer shifted to an uncertain place, but allows access to the daily routine of children from the urban upper middle class at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The child’s world of play is described in detail, as are family life and the parents’ educational practice. The representation of daily life is arranged according to the laws of modern psychological realism, which, strictly speaking, excludes the magical. The tale focuses on a seven-year-old girl, Marie Stahlbaum, as she broods increasingly over her imagination and nightmares, thereby alienating her from her own family. Her parents embody the principle of enlightened reason, whereas the girl gains experience which gives her access to another level of reality. The clash between experience of reality and experience of wonder becomes ambiguous; it can be interpreted as dream, illusion, reality or a crisis of consciousness. Both approaches to experience happen in the girl’s inner world, thus mirroring a mental conflict. Since her parents express doubts regarding the truthfulness of Marie’s experience and disapprove of her superstition, the girl is depressed by a sense of increasing isolation which cannot even be overcome by her godfather Droßelmeier. He is the only adult who shows any understanding for her situation. Even the narrator seemingly stands by Marie, but on closer examination he points to the story’s ambiguous state, which is counterbalanced by childlike and adult points of view. From the adult’s point of view the fairy tale reveals itself as a gloomy story of disease; from the child’s point of view the story changes into an optimistic fairy tale. This ambiguity is also shown in the last scene. The marriage and the retreat into a gingerbread country can either be interpreted as a euphemism for a delusion or as a cheerful fairy tale ending. With this pessimistic view of the dangers to which »lively imaginative« children are exposed on account of their parents’ lack of understanding, Hoffmann created an image of 13.

»Wirklichkeitsmärchen« (Thalmann 1952).

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childhood which is in radical contrast to the pre-Romantic utopias of childhood. The crucial novelty of Hoffmann’s literary discourse consists of taking the child’s perception and imagination seriously, thus denying its interpretation as abnormal behaviour in the sense of enlightened middle class reason. In this fairy tale a new literary poetics of the strange and uncanny in connection with the hardly known dimension of the child’s imagination is developed. This concept is diametrically opposed to the predominant pedagogical-rhetorical aesthetics of contemporary children’s literature, which struggles against the presentation of horrors and magical events in reading matter for children. Literary critics disapproved of Hoffmann’s work because of its strangely disturbing representation of the child’s inner life. In addition, they denied that Nußknacker und Mausekönig was a fairy tale for children, since the intended readership would not be able to understand the complicated narrative structure and the ambivalent ending. Hoffmann integrated this fairy tale into his four-volume collection Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brethren, 1819–21) and tried to argue for its status as children’s literature in the frame story: »In my reservation it is generally a great misunderstanding to believe that lively imaginative children, about whom we are talking, are satisfied with shallow drivel often presented as fairy tales. Oh! They probably demand something better, and it is astonishing with what precision and liveliness they grasp some things which totally escape many a very intelligent father. Learn this and show respect!«.14 Hoffmann expressed a poetics of the fairy tale for children that aims at the transgression of the border between children’s literature and adult literature, thus anticipating ideas of the twentieth century. Even if Hoffmann admits, concerning this »fairy tale for big and small children«, that children cannot fully grasp the type of character and its meaning down to the last detail, he concedes that they have access to this story thanks to their imagination, which probably even exceeds the understanding of an adult reader. Accordingly, the child, with his ascribed proximity to poetry and magic, serves as an example for the adult. Behind these ideas Hoffmann’s concept of an ideal childhood is revealed: a childhood that is not bound to the biologically determined stage of life, but can be preserved as an infinite possibility in the mind. The »serapiontical principle« also applies to Nußknacker und Mausekönig. This principle states that the higher reality, commonly regarded as madness, emerges from the poet’s visionary power. However, the fantastic world of imagination is not allowed to break free, but has to be in contact with reality. Nußknacker und Mausekönig has been translated into almost all European languages and has influenced the development of Romantic children’s literature in England, France, Sweden and Russia for a long time. In Germany, by contrast, there was no reaction to this work in children’s literature during the nineteenth century; only Erich Kästner picked up the thread with his fantastic children’s novel Der 35. Mai oder Konrad reitet in die Südsee (The 35th May or Konrad Rides to the South Sea, 1931), opening an intertextual dialogue with Hoffmann’s fairy tale in the twentieth century. 14.

»Es ist […] überhaupt meines Bedünkens ein großer Irrtum, wenn man glaubt, daß lebhaft fantasiereiche Kinder, von denen hier nur die Rede sein kann, sich mit inhaltsleeren Faseleien, wie sie oft unter dem Namen Märchen vorkommen, begnügen. Ei — sie verlangen wohl was Besseres, und es ist zum Erstaunen, wie richtig, wie lebendig sie manches im Geiste auffassen, das manchem grundgescheuten Papa gänzlich entgeht. Erfahrt es und habt Respekt!« (Hoffmann 1999, 306).

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In his early fairy tales, the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen referred above all to Hoffmann’s image of childhood. Numerous common aspects can be found, for instance between »Den lilla Idas Blomster« (Little Ida’s Flowers, 1835) and Nußknacker und Mausekönig. It is left open whether the nocturnal adventure of the middle class girl Ida, who is informed about the true nature of the wilted flowers and is allowed to participate with her doll Sophie in a festive flower ball in her parents’ living room, is a dream or reality. In contrast to Hoffmann’s model, Andersen’s fairy tale lacks the sense of earnestness and threat. Andersen describes an idyllic childhood and takes the edge off the child’s ambivalent experience such as found in Hoffmann’s Marie Stahlbaum. Andersen’s Eventyr, fortalte for børn (Fairy Tales, Told for Children, 1835–48) achieved fame because of their aesthetic sense of childhood. The author presents not only the child’s immediate surroundings, distinguished by an exact description of places and landscapes, but also imitates the language of the child. Furthermore, Andersen consciously adopts the child’s point of view by moving small ordinary things into the centre of the story. In these »fairy tales of things«, inanimate things like toys or household articles (which carry childlike qualities) dominate the action. The allegorical fairy tale »Sneedronningen« (The Snow Queen), which is distinguished by a skilful combination of realistic and fantastic events, stands out because of its composition. This work is often classified along with Hoffmann’s fairy tale as the precursor of fantastic children’s literature. Andersen succeeded in reconciling his deistic world view with the Romantic construction of childhood. After many trials the selfless love of the girl Gerda overcomes the Snow Queen, regarded as the personification of abstract reason, and liberates the boy Kay from her magic spell. Both children become more mature and even almost adult through their experience, but in their hearts they are still children and preserve childlike qualities such as faith in God, a love of nature and an inclination to art. The fairy tale’s philosophical expressiveness is enhanced by setting the action in the narrator’s immediate present with the last sentence »And it was summer, warm, wonderful summer«.15 Inspired by Andersen, the Swedish-speaking author Zachris Topelius, who is regarded as the founder of Finnish-Swedish children’s literature, addressed Hoffmann’s fairy tale poetics. The first result was his fairy tale collection Sagor (Fairy Tales, 1847), but Topelius indicates his own poetical view only in the preface to his eight-volume anthology Läsning för Barn (Reading Matter for Children, 1865–84). He expressed a programme of an aesthetic poetry for children, combining Romantic ideas of childhood, especially Hoffmann’s concept of the »lively imaginative child«, with an anthropomorphological view, and he proposed a pedagogics concentrated on the child’s angle. In Russia Antonii Pogorelskii, who was a renowned expert in German Romanticism and highly appreciated E.T.A. Hoffmann’s works, carried on where the Romantics had left off with his fairy tale for children Chernaia kuritsa, ili Podzemnye zhiteli (The Black Hen, or the Underground People, 1829). As in Hoffmann’s Nußknacker und Mausekönig a lonely, sensitive child, who often daydreams and is misunderstood by the adults, is the focus of attention. In this story it is not clear at all whether the fantastic incidents happen in reality or whether they should be interpreted as dreams. Things which the main character Alesha gets from fantastic figures contribute to the reader’s uncertainty. Although a connection in the story to disease is established 15.

»Og det var sommer, den varme, velsignede sommer« (Andersen 1995, 253).

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(where the fantastic incidents are hints of the child’s madness), Pogorelskii decided against an open ending. He conforms to the contemporary literary conventions by making the loss of the child’s world of dreams and imagination the subject of discussion on the one hand, and by presenting Alesha’s change into a self-confident boy who has both feet firmly on the ground on the other. The loss of the world of imagination is accompanied by a melancholic atmosphere already indicated at the beginning, as the narrator wistfully describes in the introduction the look of the city centre and suburbs of St. Petersburg in the early nineteenth century and complains about the loss of familiar places of his youth. The tendency to adopt themes and motifs from Nußknacker und Mausekönig, but often also to reduce the ambivalent meaning and to present an unambiguous harmonious solution instead of an open ending, characterized almost all post-Romantic fairy tales. Typical works are the Swedish children’s classic Lille Viggs äventyr på julafton (Little Vigg’s Adventures on Christmas Eve, 1871–75) by Victor Rydberg, the fantastic children’s novel The Cuckoo Clock (1877) by Mary Louisa Molesworth, or L’histoire d’un casse-noisette (The Story of a Nutcracker, 1845) by Alexandre Dumas. Until recently, many scholars have mistakenly classified Dumas’s fairy tale as a faithful translation of Hoffmann’s story. However, because of its adaptation to the upper middle class milieu in France, the shift from a realistic to a magical frame narrative, the reduction of the grotesque, the integrated moral comments, the adjustment to the tradition of the French fairy tale and the revised ending, L’histoire d’un casse-noisette goes far beyond a mere translation. In comparison to Hoffmann’s original, Dumas’s adaptation turns out to be a step backward, as Dumas adapted his image of childhood to contemporary pedagogical demands. The fallacy that both fairy tales are identical is one reason why the modernity of Hoffmann’s works is underestimated. There was no reaction to the idea of the role of the »lively imaginative child« as a victim in fantastic children’s literature for a while, except in realistic Romantic children’s literature, for instance in the collection of short stories I Brønden og i Kjærnet (In the Well and in the Lake, 1851) written by the Norwegian author Jørgen Moe. The six stories describe the adventures of the siblings Beate and Viggo, who represent the same qualities as Marie and Fritz Stahlbaum in Nußknacker und Mausekönig. The book’s title refers to two dramatic events: Beate falls into the well and is saved from drowning by holding on to her doll (which is as important to her as the nutcracker is to Marie Stahlbaum) at the well’s edge; Viggo breaks through the frozen surface of the lake during ice-skating and is saved by his dog. Some analogies are obvious: Beate’s and Viggo’s being rescued by their best friends (doll, dog) and the place of danger (well, lake). The collection of stories is determined by a contrast of two literary movements. Whereas the stories about Beate are influenced by the Romantic movement, the stories about Viggo display features of Naturalism. Beate experiences a discrepancy between her hopes and reality and finally she resigns herself to this. This development is particularly evident in »Den flydende ø« (The Flying Island). At first sight an idyll is represented, characterized by innocent play and daydreams. However, Beate disturbs the peacefulness of nature because of her inattentiveness. Her feeling of guilt is confirmed by the loss of her doll and by the fact that her father punishes her. Beate submits to the social demands and gradually falls into the role of a victim. Her brother, however, who has both feet firmly on the ground and vigorously takes the initiative, has a great future. Although Moe clearly demonstrates his sympathy for the female

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character, he already indicates a certain scepticism towards the self-assertion of the Romantic image of childhood. Romantic concepts of childhood also come to light in Jules Michelet’s Mémorial (Memorial, 1820–22) and in Alphonse Daudet’s Le petit chose (The Small Thing, 1868). Although both works were not initially intended for children, they eventually gained acceptance as children’s reading matter. Michelet’s autobiography was revised by his widow after his death and published as a children’s book with the title Ma Jeunesse (My Youth, 1884). The abridgements and revisions resulted in an overly simplistic version, which reminds us of the Romantic myth of childhood. In favour of the predominant pedagogical function ironic passages were eliminated in order to emphasize the main character’s exemplariness. Despite this apologetic tendency, Michelet’s autobiography remained a realistic and moving representation of a child’s physical and psychological sufferings. For this reason the novel can be assigned to the literary motif of the child as a misunderstood victim of society, established by E.T.A. Hoffmann. This pattern is even more evident in Daudet’s autobiographical novel Le petit chose. In this work the main character is not assigned a proper name. With the deprecating term »small thing«, he is deprived both of his individuality and of his gender (in order to conceal from the reader for a long time that the story is about a boy). The uneasy, claustrophobic atmosphere and the adults’ lack of understanding for the child’s interests contribute to the novel’s gloomy mood. Due to its modernity and radical views, which were unrivalled during that time, the work is seen as a continuation of Hoffmann’s late-Romantic concept of childhood, as expressed in Nußknacker und Mausekönig. 5.

»Strange children« in children’s literature

Another pioneering fairy tale for children, Das fremde Kind (The Strange Child, 1817), was also written by E.T.A. Hoffmann. Although the motif of the strange child had already appeared in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795/96), Novalis’s Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (The Disciples of Sais, 1802) and Ludwig Tieck’s Die Elfen (The Elves, 1812), it was Hoffmann who realized this significant motif in its complexity and thus added a new facet to the Romantic image of childhood. The strange child is unusual for several reasons: the mysterious background (the strange child comes from the kingdom of fairies, which is not commonly accessible to people), the family situation (it has lost its father) and its loneliness. In addition, the strange child has inexplicable magic abilities: It can fly and understand the language of nature. As for its looks (»face of the sweetest child brightly illuminated by the sun«),16 it gets close to the tradition of the Romantic genius, which is emphasized by its voice, resounding like music, and by the ability to fly. Further clues involve the peculiar details concerning its age and name. The strange child has no proper name and is addressed either as »strange child« or »dear child«. As it originates from a fairy queen, it is even immortal and ageless. Furthermore, a division into three areas of life catches the reader’s eye: the strange child’s sanctuary, the immediate surroundings and the distant hostile world. The contrast between education and 16.

»Das von der Sonne hell erleuchtete holde Antlitz des lieblichsten Kindes« (Hoffmann 1987, 166).

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play is also characteristic of this motif. The strange child never goes to school. The mechanical learning at school, which suppresses the child’s imagination, opposes the play in the strange child’s sanctuary. Its enemy, therefore, is a teacher. The strange child is at the mercy of Magister Tinte (i.e. Master Ink, also known as the gnome king Pepser). So the strange child is on a collision course with society’s rules. In Hoffmann’s fairy tale an attempt is made to articulate the opposition between childhood and adulthood as the subject of discussion. Beside these features the relationship between the strange child and his playmates is decisive. This meeting comes about when the siblings Felix and Christlieb are bored and long for a friend. However, one interesting aspect of the motif of »the strange child« is the observation that most of the child figures embodying this type are of ambiguous sex or may be perceived as different, even contradictory in terms of their sex by other characters in the text. The strange child’s appearance is described just at the moment when it meets its new playmates for the first time. This description is based on the playmates’ point of view. The naming and first description underline the strange child’s gender neutrality in Hoffmann’s Das fremde Kind. However, the brother and sister obviously perceive it in different ways. This state of affairs is disclosed when both are asked by their parents to describe the strange child and they begin to quarrel about its looks. At this moment the strange child loses its status of gender neutrality. Whereas Felix portrays it as a boy with green garment and a huntsman’s equipment, Christlieb represents it as a girl with a dress made of roses who is fond of dolls (171). From the siblings’ gender perspectives, the supposed bisexuality of the strange child is revealed. Felix and Christlieb are not aware of the discrepancy in their statements, because at the next meeting they call it »princess« (Christlieb) and »prince« (Felix), respectively. It is interesting that neither the neutral term »child« nor the contradictory gender perspectives are denied by the strange child. On the contrary, when asked whether it is a princess or a prince, it answers the siblings »certainly«.17 Whereas Felix and Christlieb are determined by their gender, the strange child transgresses the borders marked by gender. From a narratological point of view, two levels of gender perspective must be differentiated: the gender marking carried out by the narrator and the gender marking established by the observers appearing in the text. The narrator describes the strange child as a gender neutral character, but in the siblings’ perspective it gets an ambiguous gender status, because Christlieb takes it to be a girl, while Felix interprets it as a boy. This ambivalence is supported by the strange child’s approving reaction. In view of this fact one could assume that the strange child represents a Romantic genius whose origin is of subjective character. It implies both the male and the female sex and thus presents for the siblings a reflection of their own sex. Against this background the strange child’s gender neutrality, a Romantic ideal of childhood appears to be represented, which leads to a reversal of the binary gender pattern. The strange child embodies a sexless being, a »third sex« equivalent to the neuter gender. According to this premise Hoffmann’s fairy tale can be interpreted as an attempt to achieve in literature a symbiosis of female and male sex in childhood. In this case the symbiosis is not realized by androgyny, which is often found in adult literature, but by gender neutrality. These gender perspectives, and the resultant relativity concerning the strange child’s gender marking, explain the melancholic ending of the story. It is a characteristic feature of the 17.

»Allerdings« (ibid., 176).

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strange child that it cannot grow up. Whereas the playmates cross the threshold of childhood and become conscious of growing older, the strange child remains in the stage of eternal childhood. This state occasionally enables the friends to preserve their own childhood by the recollection of the strange child. But the strange child’s refusal to grow up involves an increasing detachment from the playmates. After their final separation, it is delivered to a state of growing isolation. In Hoffmann’s fairy tale the siblings and the strange child must separate, but Felix and Christlieb know for sure that they will be able to recall the strange child in dreams. Whereas the strange child becomes estranged from ordinary children by its release from time and its immortality in children’s literature, the respective characters in adult literature are snatched from their friends by an early death. An archetypal pattern was manifested in the girl Mignon from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; but this aspect is also reflected in Charles Lamb’s essays »Dream Children; a Reverie« (1823) and »The Child Angel: A Dream« (1833), which unite the insatiable longing for childhood as lost paradise with the personal loss of much-loved children. The children, stylized as angelic characters, are deprived of the natural process of development by their early death and thus become symbols of eternal childhood: »We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence and a name« (Lamb, 299). The motif of the »strange child« is repeatedly taken up and varied in Romantic children’s literature. A criticism of the idea of »eternal childhood« is already indicated in Wilhelm Hauff ’s fairy tale »Die Geschichte von dem kleinen Muck« (The Little Muck, 1825), published in the fairy tale almanac Die Carawane (The Caravan, 1825), likewise in the fairy tale »Der Zwerg Nase« (Dwarf Long-Nose, 1827), published in Der Scheikh von Alessandria und seine Sclaven (The Sheik of Alexandria and his Slaves, 1827). The main characters in both fairy tales are shunned by society because of their deformed appearance. Their outsider position is also stressed by their seeming agelessness, their tiny figures and their special abilities, which come close to magic for the bystanders. A friendly relationship with other people, be they children or adults, is only possible when the main characters either regain their original figure (»Zwerg Nase«) or accept their special life situation (»Der kleine Muck«). Further variations of the »strange child« are obvious in John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River (1851) and George Sand’s Histoire du véritable Gribouille (Story of the True Gribouille [=Ninny], 1850). These fairy tales are classified as important contributions to English and French children’s literature because they combine fantasy and reality. As in Hoffmann’s fairy tales, the preference for grotesque figures and changes, especially the metamorphosis of insects into human beings and vice versa, attracts the reader’s attention. The borders between real and fantastic events gradually become blurred. Many incidents take place on two levels, either in anticipatory dreams or in a surreal world tied to the world of reality. This development has consequences for the main characters Gluck and Gribouille, whose origin, age, name and magical abilities contribute to an increasingly puzzling situation. The connection to the reign of elves and insects, the ability to communicate with animals and mythical figures, their innocence, kind-heartedness and naivety indicate that Ruskin and Sand not only took up the motif of the »strange child« intertextually, but also integrated pre-Romantic ideas of the »divine child«. Additionally, in Sand’s fairy tale a connection to the Romantic cult of childhood arises from Gribouille’s self-sacrifice and revival in the reign of elves, showing analogies to Christ’s death and resurrection.

Images of childhood in Romantic children’s literature 6.

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Conclusion

Despite these instances of innovative discourse, two tendencies have opposed each other since the Romantic movement: a pedagogical movement which dissociates children’s literature from adult literature on the one hand and a literary-aesthetical movement emphasizing the common aspects of children’s and adult literature on the other hand. The exemption from immediate purposes of education was only achieved for part of children’s literature. The idea of the autonomy of childhood stressed the intrinsic value of childhood as a more authentic and original way of life. As a consequence, the functionalization of this stage of life as preparation for adulthood was rejected. This development demonstrates that children’s books written by the Romantics only took effect in assimilated form, that is, as adaptations to the demands of literary educators. However, as children’s literature achieved liberation from pedagogical control by means of the development of the book market and of light literature, the influence of the Romantic movement was less important. In spite of the change of the image of childhood, children’s literature was further tied to the task of preparing children for future social tasks. In the first decades of the nineteenth century the demand to be pedagogical and useful was opposed by the aesthetic idea of childhood, which reduced its function of anticipating pedagogy and approved of highly literary modes of storytelling. But this development did not lead directly to a literary children’s literature. The demand to be pedagogically useful was, rather, moderated to the demand to be pedagogically appropriate. Nonetheless, the images of childhood expressed in Romantic children’s literature influenced international children’s and adult literature until the end of the twentieth century. Reminiscences of Romantic concepts of childhood are obviously not only found in the work of the German-language authors Hermann Hesse, Marie-Luise Kaschnitz, Gottfried Keller, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, or Adalbert Stifter, but also in English (Henry James, Virginia Woolf), French (Henri Bosco, Victor Hugo), American (Nathaniel Hawthorne, J.D. Salinger), Russian (Fedor Dostoevskii, Lev Tolstoi) and Scandinavian (August Strindberg, Sigrid Undset) adult literature. The legacy of the Romantic image of childhood can be seen more clearly in European and American children’s literature, starting with the nonsense books of Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865) and William Thackeray (The Rose and the Ring, 1855), the children’s novels of Edith Nesbit (The Story of the Treasure Seekers, 1898; Five Children and It, 1902) and Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Långstrump — Pippi Longstocking, 1945; Mio min Mio — Mio, my Mio, 1954), the fantastic novels by Michael Ende (Die unendliche Geschichte — The Neverending Story, 1979), Tove Jansson (Muminböckerna — Moominbooks, 1945–93), and Antoine de SaintExupéry (Le petit prince — The Little Prince, 1943), up to the picture-books of Elsa Beskow (Puttes äventyr i blåbärsskogen — Little Hans in the Blueberry Wood, 1901) and Maurice Sendak (Outside Over There, 1981). The fascination of Romantic images of childhood has not decreased down to the present, as is evident in contemporary children’s literature. Proof of this influence is, among other things, the successful children’s novels of David Almond (Skellig, 1998), Jostein Gaarder (Sofies verden — Sofie’s World, 1991), Peter Pohl (Janne min vän — Johnny, My Friend, 1985), Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials trilogy, 1995–2000), and Michel Tournier (Vendredi ou la vie sauvage — Friday and Robinson, Life on Speranza Island, 1971; literally, Friday or Savage Life). Each text demonstrates the extent to which the project of writing for children is influenced by Romantic thought.

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Grundtvig, Svend. 1839–83. Danske Folkeeventyr. Kopenhagen: Munksgaard. Hagemann, Sonja. 1965. Barnelitteratur i Norge inntil 1850. Oslo: Aschehoug. Hansen, Maurits. 1882. Noveller: i udvalg ved Henrik Jaeger. Kristiania: Aschehoug. Hauff, Wilhelm. 1999. Märchen: Nach den Ausgaben der Märchen-Almanache 1826–1828, textkritisch revidiert. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftl. Buchgesellschaft. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1883. Iduna, oder der Apfel der Verjüngung. Sämmtliche Werke. Ed. by Bernhard Suphan. Vol. 18. Berlin: Weidmann. Higonnet, Anne. 1998. Pictures of Innocence: History and Crisis of the Ideal of Childhood. New York: Thames and Hudson. Hoffmann, E.T.A. 1987. »Nußknacker und Mausekönig«, »Das fremde Kind«. Kinder-Mährchen. Ed. by HansHeino Ewers. Stuttgart: Reclam. 66–144, 147–202. ———. 1999. Die Serapionsbrüder. Ed. by Wulf Segebrecht. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Holt MacGavran Jr., James (ed.). 1998. Romanticism and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. Athens: Georgia UP. Hunt, Peter (ed.). 1995. Children’s Literature: An Illustrated History. Oxford: Oxford UP. Iwaya, Sazanami. 1971. Nihon Mukashibanashi. Tokio: Hokuseido. Jackson, Mary V. 1989. Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from its Beginning to 1839. Lincoln: Nebraska UP. Jacobs, Joseph. 1984. English Fairy Tales. London: Bodley Head. Jansson, Tove. 1945–1970. Mumin-Böckerna. Helsinki: Schildts. Jean Paul. 1937. »Levana oder Erziehlehre«. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. by the Prussian Academy of the Sciences. Vol. 12. Weimar: Böhlau. 69–410. Kästner, Erich. 1931. Der 35. Mai oder Konrad reitet in die Südsee. Berlin: Williams. Khudiakov, Ivan. 1860–62. Velikorusskie skazki. Moscow: Vl. Tin. Klingberg, Göte. 1991. Till gang och nöje: svensk barnbok 400 år. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren. ———. 1998. Den tidiga barnboken i Sverige: Litterära strömningar, marknad, bildproduktion. Stockholm: Natur och kultur. Knoepflmacher, U.C. 1977. »Mutations of the Wordsworthian Child of Nature«. Nature and the Victorian Imagination. Ed. by U.C. Knoepflmacher and G.B. Tennyson. Berkeley: California UP. 391–425. Kreis, Rudolf. 1980. Die verborgene Geschichte des Kindes in der deutschen Literatur. Stuttgart: Metzler. Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhold. 1967. Eesti rahva ennemuistsed jutud. Tallinn: Kirjastus. Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina. 1995. »Comparing Children’s Literature«. Current Trends in Comparative Children’s Literature Research. Compar(a)ison [special issue of the journal, ed. by Bettina KümmerlingMeibauer]. 2.: 5–18. ———. 1996. »Identität, Neutralität, Transgression: Drei Typen der Geschlechterperspektivierung in der Kinderliteratur«. Inszenierungen von Weiblichkeit: Weibliche Kindheit und Adoleszenz in der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Ed. by Gertrud Lehnert. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. 29–46. ———. 1999. Klassiker der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur: Ein internationales Lexikon. 2 vols. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. ———. 1999. »Kommunikative und ästhetische Funktionen historischer Kinder- und Jugendbücher«. Medienwissenschaft: Ein Handbuch zur Entwicklung der Medien und Kommunikationsformen. Ed. by JoachimFelix Leonhard et al. Vol. 1. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. 560–568. ———. 2003. Kinderliteratur, Kanonbildung und literarische Wertung. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. Kuhn, Reinhard. 1982. Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature. Hanover, London: Brown UP. Lamb, Charles. 1935. The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb. Ed. by Saxe Commins. New York: Modern Library. Lindgren, Astrid. 1945. Pippi Långstrump. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren. ———. 1954. Mio min Mio. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren. Locke, John. 1968. The Educational Writings of John Locke: A Critical Edition with Introduction and Notes. Ed. by James L. Axtell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

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MacLeod, Anne Scott. 1992. »From Rational to Romantic: The Children of Children’s Literature in the Nineteenth-Century«. Poetics Today. 13: 141–154. Mellor, Anne K. 1993. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge. Michaelis, Tatjana. 1986. Der romantische Kindheitsmythos: Kindheitsdarstellungen der französischen Literatur von Rousseau bis zum Ende der Romantik. Frankfurt/M.: Lang. Michelet, Jules. 1971. Mémorial. Œuvres complètes. Ed. by Paul Viallaneix. Vol. 1. Paris: Flammarion. ———. 1883. Ma Jeunesse. Paris: Flammarion. Moe, Jørgen. 1972. I brønnen og i tjerne. Oslo: Aschehoug. Molesworth, Mary Louisa. 1980. The Cuckoo Clock. London: Macmillan. Moritz, Karl Philipp. 1999. Werke in zwei Bänden. Ed. by H. Hollmer and A. Meier. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Müller, Adam H. 1807. Vorlesungen über die deutsche Wissenschaft und Literatur. 2nd ed. Dresden: Arnold. Muir, Percy H. 1954. English Children’s Books 1600–1900. London: Patsford. Nesbit, Edith. 1958. The Story of the Treasure Seekers. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1996. Five Children and It. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Novalis. 1983. Schriften. Vol. 3: Das philosophische Werk. Ed. by Richard Samuel. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Ottevaere-van Praag, Ganna. 1987. La littérature pour la jeunesse en Europe occidentale 1750–1925. Bern: Lang. Patterson, Sylvia W. 1971. Rousseau’s »Emile« and Early Children’s Literature. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press. Pattison, Robert. 1978. The Child Figure in English Literature. Athens: Georgia UP. Pickering, Samuel F. 1981. John Locke and Children’s Books in Eighteenth-Century England. Knoxville: Tennessee UP. Plotz, Judith. 2001. Romanticism and the Vocation of the Child. London: Palgrave. Pogorel’ski, Antonii. 1992. Chernaia kuritsa, ili podzemnye zhiteli. Moscow: Russkaia kniga. Pohl, Peter. 1985. Janne min vän. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren. Pullman, Philip. 1995–2000. His Dark Materials. 3 vols. London: Scholastic. Pushkin, Aleksandr. 1869. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 2. Petersburg: Isakov. Reisinger, Roman. 2000. Die Autobiographie der Kindheit in der französischen Literatur: ����������������������� A la recherche de l’enfance perdue im Lichte einer Poetik der Erinnerung. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Richardson, Alan. 1992. »Childhood and Romanticism«. Teaching Children’s Literature. Ed. by Glenn E. Sadler. New York: MLA. 121–130. Richter, Dieter. 1987. Das fremde Kind: Zur Entstehung der Kindheitsbilder des bürgerlichen Zeitalters. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. Romero, Silvio. 1954. Cuentos populares do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Agir Ed. Roscoe, William. 1973. The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast. London: Cape. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1962. Émile ou de l’éducation. Œuvres complètes. Ed. by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Vol. 4. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1979. Emile: or, On Education. Transl. by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic. ———. 1989. Les Confessions. Œuvres complètes. Ed. by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard. Ruskin, John. 1974. The King of the Golden River. New York: Dover. Rydberg, Victor. 1980. Lille Viggs äventyr på julafton. Stockholm: Bonniers. Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. 1988. Le petit prince. Paris: Gallimard. Sand, George. 1990. Histoire du véritable Gribouille. Paris: Gallimard. Schiller, Friedrich von. 1966. Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime: Two Essays. Transl. by Julius A. Elias. New York: Ungar. ———. 1975 »Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung«. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. by Gerhard Fricke and Herbert G. Göpfert. Vol. 5. München: Hanser. 694–780. Schindler, Stephan K. 1994. Das Subjekt als Kind: Die Erfindung der Kindheit im Roman des 18. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Schmidt. Ségur, Sophie Comtesse de. 1857. Nouveaux contes de fées. Paris: Hachette.

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Sendak, Maurice. 1981. Outside Over There. New York: Harper & Row. Simonis, Annette. 1993. Kindheit in Romanen um 1800. Bielefeld: Aisthesis. Sønsthagen, Kari (ed.) 1992. Danske børne litteraturhistorie. Kopenhagen: Gyldendal. Soriano, Marc. 1975. Guide de littérature pour la jeunesse. Paris: Flammarion. Steedman, Carolyn. 1995. Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930. London: Virago Press. Steinlein, Rüdiger. 1987. Die domestizierte Phantasie: Studien zur Kinderliteratur, Kinderlektüre und Literaturpädagogik des 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhunderts. Heidelberg: Winter. ———. 1999. »Kindheit als Diskurs des Fremden: Die Entdeckung der kindlichen Innenwelt bei Goethe, Moritz und E.T.A. Hoffmann«. »Die andere Stimme«: Das Fremde in der Kultur der Moderne; Festschrift für Klaus R. Scherpe zum 60. Geburtstag. Ed. by Alexander Honold and Manuel Köppen. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau. 277–297. Stephens, George, Hyltén-Cavallius, and Gunnar Olof. 1942. Svenska folksagor och äventyr. Stockholm: Thule. Summerfield, Geoffrey. 1984. Fantasy and Reason: Children’s Literature in the Eighteenth Century. Athens: Georgia UP. Svensen, Åsfrid. 1988. »Når egenviljen halshogges: Jørgen Moes Beate og Viggo Viking«. Edda. 88: 203–212. Thackeray, William Makepeace. 1964. The Rose and the Ring. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Thalmann, Marianne. 1952. »E.T.A. Hoffmanns Wirklichkeitsmärchen«. Journal of English and German Philology. 51: 473–491. Thwaite, Mary F. 1972. From Primer to Pleasure in Reading: An Introduction to the History of Children’s Books in England from the Invention of Printing to 1914. London: Library Association. Tieck, Ludwig. 1991. »Die Elfen«. Schriften in 12 Bänden. Vol. 1. Ed. by Achim Hölter. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Tournier, Michel. 1987. Vendredi ou la vie sauvage. Paris: Gallimard. Wetzel, Michael. 1999. Mignon: Die Kindsbraut als Phantasma der Goethezeit. München: Fink. Wild, Reiner (ed.). 2002. Geschichte der deutschen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler 2nd edition. Winkler, Angela. 2000. Das romantische Kind: Ein poetischer Typus von Goethe bis Thomas Mann. Frankfurt/M., Berlin: Lang. Wordsworth, William. 1977a. Poems. 2 vols. Ed. by John D. Hayden. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1977b. The Prelude: 1798–1799. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Zweigbergk, Eva von. 1965. Barnboken i Sverige 1750–1950. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren.

Artificial life and Romantic brides Michael Andermatt Artificial humans, or androids (from the Greek »anér«, gen. »andrós«, meaning person, man), have been part of European literature since the classical age (cf. Völker 1971; Drux 1988). In Homer’s Iliad (18, 417–21) Hephaestus, the god of fire and metallurgy, surrounds himself with artificially created golden virgins to serve him; in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (10, 243–97) the love of the Cypriot artist Pygmalion for the statue of a woman he himself has created brings her to life; and Prometheus animates men and women whom he has shaped out of clay and water (Metamorphoses 1, 82–88). The literature of late antiquity and the medieval period is littered with animated statues, mechanical attendants or warriors, and talking heads. In Jewish legend we find the tradition of the Golem, a servant made of clay who is brought to life. From the Renaissance we are familiar with humans produced pseudo-scientifically from alembic vessels, the so-called homunculi (even Goethe dreams up a homunculus in Faust II, 1832), as well as biological hybrids like the mandrake root, which is part plant, part human. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, technological advances lead to the appearance of automata or mechanical creatures, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) gives rise to the monster produced by medical science. Finally, the twentieth century, especially in science fiction novels, is awash with robots, mutants, clones and cyborgs. It seems as though the creation of artificial beings lies at the very heart of human fantasy. Traditionally, manufactured humans are either women or servants (cf. Gendolla 1984, 265; Drux 1988, xi). There are thus two primary variations on the main theme: the artificial woman, or, more accurately, the artificial bride, and the artificial menials. In both cases, however, the creators of those androids as a rule are men, particularly artists, magicians or scientists, who, as figures of mastery, are experienced and adept in cultural practices. In the creation of artificial beings, especially the artificial woman, the male master attempts to possess the zone of »nature« or the »other« of rationality. The body, fantasy, desire and emotions are thus brought under the influence and supervision of culture and civilization (cf. Böhme/Böhme 1985). In nearly all of the texts in which this theme appears, however, the creator sooner or later loses control over his creation, and the artificial being turns against its creator, bringing destruction (cf. Drux 1988, xiii–xv). How do those themes feature in Romantic prose fiction? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein alone would justify the argument that this motif plays an important role in Romanticism. In quantitative terms, however, it shows up much less frequently than one might think. It appears above all, and almost exclusively, in German Romanticism, from which its influence spreads first to France and then to world literature in general. The following overview begins with the development of the motif in German Romanticism and then discusses its formulation in other Romantic literatures. For reasons of focus, I will limit myself largely to the thematic strand of the artificial bride, leaving aside the artificial servants and companions, which in Romanticism since Jean Paul have largely served as vehicles to criticize philistinism (cf. Sprengel 1977). For the same reasons, I must also leave aside the theme of the painted beloved and her animation (cf. von Matt 1971, 38–75), which is closely related to the motif of the artificial bride.

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The animated statues, robots and monsters in German Romantic narratives, as I will argue throughout, tell us something about the Romantic conception of the mutually embedded relationship between art and life. In the works of the German Romantics, the theme of artificial humans thus has an essentially auto-poetic, or self-reflexive, function (cf. Schmitz-Emans 1993, 168 f.). It corresponds in exemplary fashion to Friedrich Schlegel’s idea of transcendental poetry, which should always be »poetry and simultaneously the poetry of poetry«.1 In the theme of artificial life as well as in transcendental poetry, the observation of the world is integrally bound up with the observation of art and the self (cf. Kremer 1996, 8–12). 1.

Pygmalion and Brentano

The grounding paradigm for the creation of the artificial bride appears in the myth of Pyg­ ma­lion, the oldest and best known version of which stems from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (10, 243–97). The sculptor Pygmalion, burning with passion for the statue he himself has created, entreats the goddess of love Venus to bring the statue to life. What is decisive is that Pygmalion creates the ivory statue because he has been deeply disappointed by an actual, human woman. Out of this disappointment with everyday existence, Pygmalion turns to art, which alone can fulfil his demands on life and love (cf. Ovid 1988, 10, 243–49). The artificial woman thus replaces the real woman, surpassing her in external and internal beauty. Even though Pygmalion requires the help of Venus to animate the statue, it is nonetheless the »male« spirit and art itself that compensate for the deficiency of »female« nature and thereby gratify the desire of the man. The process of creating humans by means of art therefore involves an auto-erotic and narcissistic aspect. The degree of culture achieved in this moment is a celebration of its own magnificence, conceived in terms of a self-love based on differentiation from its rival, nature. It comes as no surprise that the German Romantics, with their messianic ideas of art that border on the religious, should zealously seize on and reformulate this notion of the primacy of art over life. In addition to Pygmalion there is a second thematic tradition, the Venus ring, which plays a major role in narratives about the bride of stone (cf. Mühlher 1957). The theme of the Venus ring involves a fiancé who, in a reckless moment, places his engagement ring on a statue of Venus; the statue is thereby brought to life, then to appear on the wedding night as a ghostly presence who supplants the real bride at her husband’s side. The German Romantics apparently knew of this motif from Kornmann’s Mons Veneris (1614), but it is in fact older, belonging to the legends of late antiquity, from which it passed on to medieval chronicles like that of William of Malmesbury (1125, cf. Weschta 1916, 4–13; Brunel 1969, 12 f.). As in the Pygmalion myth, the Venus ring involves the replacement or displacement of the real woman by the artificial woman figured as a statue. In this cycle, however, the artificial woman Venus is imagined to be dangerous and depraved. The medieval Christian sources even place the pagan Venus statue in the same league as the devil, for Venus symbolizes the all-consuming carnal passions of heathen, barbaric antiquity. Her reanimation consequently represents the dangerous return of an older culture that has been conquered, or, as Sigmund Freud puts it, the uncanny return of the 1.

»zugleich Poesie und Poesie der Poesie« (Schlegel 1985, 50).

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repressed (cf. Freud 1970). Whereas Pygmalion’s animated statue embodies a male fantasy of desire, the pagan Venus, reanimated out of marble, represents a fantasy of fear and horror. Clemens Brentano’s novel Godwi oder Das steinerne Bild der Mutter (Godwi, or the Stone Image of the Mother, 1800/02) is one of the earliest texts of German Romanticism to develop the theme of bringing a statue to life, and it does so in doubled form. In this text, the animation of the statue thematizes the sublimation of pleasure and sorrow in the apotheosis of art. One of the two marble statues in the novel, as the title suggests, is the statue of Godwi’s mother; the other is the allegorical grave monument of a prostitute. The two statues represent the cornerstones, or the »two beautiful poles«,2 of Godwi’s life. Moreover, they figure the development of the protagonist and of the novel Godwi itself. Brentano’s use of the statue takes femininity as an allegory for the development of the Romantic hero. The marble statues in Godwi thus show the way, programmatically, that the male Romantic biography should take. The maternal statue in Godwi reflects the pain and impossibility of carnal love, strengthened by the incest taboo. As a child, Godwi enters the garden at night and attempts to awaken the mysterious statue (which he does not know to be of his mother) from her paralysis into life: And it seemed that that deeply grieved / Woman of marble, / Which I had always violently loved, / By the lake in the moonlight, / Began painfully to extend herself, / To long for life. / […] It dragged me from the spot, as though I were drawn by phantoms / To the pool, and my eyes stared / At the white statue, which seemed to await me, / that I might throw my heated arms around it, / And press life into the cold breast.3

Though this passage suggests that the statue is about to come to life, this does not in fact occur, for Godwi fails in his attempt. He loses his way in the dark, falls into the pool, loses consciousness and nearly drowns. Godwi thus does not succeed in alleviating the suffering of the statue, freeing her from her paralysis, and winning her as a beloved. As a rigid, pallid statue, the figure of the mother embodies Godwi’s inadequacy and failure in love. Subsequently, the desired woman becomes ever more unattainable, since iconographically she moves away from the figure of the beloved to the figure of the Christian mother of pain, Mary, the »sacred image« of the »mother of God«.4 In Brentano’s Godwi, the myth of Pygmalion undergoes a typically Romantic shift in meaning. The ardour of love does not bring the statue to life, but rather resituates it as an unattainable ideal. In the end, in an ironic negation of the thematic tradition, life and death are in fact reversed; the new Pygmalion Godwi, impelled by his early experience with the maternal statue, finds himself leaving his various lovers only to transfigure the most carnal of them, beyond death, into works of art as statues. 2.

»zwei schönen Pole« (Brentano 1973, 373).

3.

»Und es schien das tiefbetrübte / Frauenbild von Marmorstein, / Das ich immer heftig liebte, / An dem See im Mondenschein, / Sich mit Schmerzen auszudehnen, / Nach dem Leben sich zu sehnen. // […] // Es riß mich fort, als zögen mich Gespenster / Zum Teiche hin, und meine Augen starrten / Aufs weiße Bild, es schien mich zu erwarten, / Daß ich mit heißem Arme es umschlinge, / Und Leben durch den kalten Busen dringe« (ibid., 145).

4.

»heiliges Bildnis«, »Mutter Gottes« (ibid., 147 and 330).

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This is where the second of the novel’s marble statues comes in, the grave monument to the prostitute Violette. The replacement of non-life with life, which Brentano’s Godwi takes from the Pygmalion myth, is figured in Violette’s grave monument as the Romantic apotheosis of art, that is, as the intensification of life through poetry. At the feet of this statue, the narrator Maria experiences the only animation possible in Godwi: animation through the medium of art. Brentano thus overlays the erotic desire of Maria with the process of artistic recognition; by means of this intensified Romantic love the statue is animated paradoxically as the work of the poet: As it [the statue] stood before me, as though arisen from the darkness, radiant, fully-formed and unconstrained, it reached out to me and demanded of me what it was; it violently desired me to recognize it, and joy filled my breast that I did recognize it, and that in the darkness it and I was its desire, and that attainment came with the light, in me and in it.5

In a visionary love dialogue with the »recognized« statue, Violette’s life is revealed to Maria as a transformation through art. Maria addresses the desired monument in tones of both love and poetry, first in allegorical prose, then ascending to sonnets and a canzona (cf. Brentano 1973, 295–301). The dead Violette is thus doubly animated through art: first as sculpture and then in Maria’s vision as poetry. Mortal life moves paradoxically beyond death, transformed into the higher life of art. The focus of this process lies in the image of the gaping »wound«,6 which comes to stand in for the devalued genitals of the beloved, raising the dead body of the woman, through her own mystique of blood and suffering, to the newly animated body in art. Brentano’s animation of the statue gains its transcendental poetic heightening from the fact that in the end Maria presents his verses as a work of art to Godwi. The versification of Violette draws the characters of the novel into a discussion about the essence of poetic transformation. Through this Godwi succeeds in recognizing that life has also turned him to stone, out of which the poet Maria can create a work of art, namely the novel Godwi itself, which the reader holds in his/her hands: »You could, if you were to keep company with me for a long time, develop my history from me, from the monument of my life« (emphasis mine).7 In a move typical of the Romantics, Brentano’s new Pygmalion no longer transforms his beloved from art into life; rather, in reverse, he accedes to art together with the beloved. 2.

Tieck and Romantic perplexity

In the same period as Brentano, Ludwig Tieck addresses the theme of the animated statue in Der Runenberg (Rune Mountain, 1802). In Tieck’s work, too, the Romantic world view comes to the fore, bringing the intensification of the everyday through the medium of art. 5.

»Als es [i.e. das Bildnis] so vor mir stand, wie aus der Finsternis erstiegen, wie erblühet, gestaltet und frei, drang es heftig auf mich ein, und forderte von mir, was es war; es begehrte mit Gewalt, daß ich es erkenne, und ich fühlte mit Freude in meiner Brust, daß ich es erkannte, und daß es und ich in der Dunkelheit sein Begehren war, und daß sein Erlangen mit dem Lichte kam, in mir und in ihm« (ibid., 295).

6.

»Wunde« (ibid., 296).

7. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Sie könnten, wenn Sie lange mit mir umgingen, aus mir, dem Denksteine meines Lebens, meine Geschichte entwickeln« (ibid., 303).

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The young hunter Christian, the protagonist of Tieck’s Der Runenberg, is driven by an indeterminate longing for wide, unbounded spaces. This longing takes him away from his home to the mountains, where he comes near to the fulfilment of his dreams in a nocturnal vision on Rune Mountain. Before Christian’s enraptured gaze, a pagan goddess arises in »otherworldly beauty«8 out of the »wreckage«9 of the past. The stones and ruins of the everyday world are thereby intensified, raised to a higher power, through the beauty of the animated woman of stone: Naked, she at length began to walk up and down the hall, her heavy, flowing locks forming a dark, billowing sea around her, from which gleaming forms of the pure body shone at intervals like marble.10

In Tieck, as well, eroticism and love play a decisive role in the process of animation, for the marble woman becomes Christian’s beloved. Once again, however, it is not a question of an actual, carnal union of the couple. In the place of gratified carnal love, we find anew the transformation of desire into art. On Rune Mountain, Christian makes a pact with the mysterious goddess which serves in the text to rival bourgeois marriage. The symbol of this pact is a tablet of runes, with cryptic writing marked in the stone. Woman and writing thus gain a »close metonymic connection«,11 since the tablet serves as a substitute for the woman (cf. Appelt 1989, Kittler 1985). By examining the rubies, diamonds and jewels, Christian succeeds in deciphering the »marvellously incomprehensible figure«12 and thus in achieving a romantically intensified experience of reality. Through this reading, he accedes to the Romanticized, poeticized world: Within him a chasm of figures and dulcet tones had opened, of longing and lust; flocks of winged notes and melancholic and joyful melodies moved through his soul, which was agitated to its very base: he saw a world of pain and hope arise within himself, mighty, marvellous boulders of trust and defiant faith, great streams of water, flowing as though full of melancholy.13

This passage clearly articulates what has been missing in Christian’s everyday life: that experience of art he has long sought in vain and has finally found in the meeting with the goddess of runes. Compared to this experience, the bourgeois marriage with a real woman can only be short-lived. Christian leaves Rune Mountain temporarily, but soon gives up the community of the valley and leaves his wife and child, spurred on by the memory of the woman on the mountain. Christian’s decision in favour of Rune Mountain, the tablet, and the woman from the rocks 8.

»überirdischer Schönheit« (Tieck 1985, 192).

9.

»Trümmern« (ibid.).

10.

»nackt schritt sie endlich im Saale auf und nieder, und ihre schweren, schwebenden Locken bildeten um sie her ein dunkel wogendes Meer, aus dem wie Marmor die glänzenden Formen des reinen Leibes abwechselnd hervor strahlten« (ibid.).

11.

»enge metonymische Verknüpfung« (Kremer 1996, 59).

12.

»wunderlich unverständliche Figur« (Tieck 1985, 192).

13.

»In seinem Innern hatte sich ein Abgrund von Gestalten und Wohllaut, von Sehnsucht und Wollust aufgetan, Scharen von beflügelten Tönen und wehmütigen und freudigen Melodien zogen durch sein Gemüt, das bis auf den Grund bewegt war: er sah eine Welt von Schmerz und Hoffnung in sich aufgehen, mächtige Wunderfelsen von Vertrauen und trotzender Zuversicht, große Wasserströme, wie voll Wehmut fließend« (ibid.).

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is to be read as a rejection of the everyday world in favour of the counter-world of Romantic poetry and art. This is not, however, unproblematic. For his wife and the people of the valley, Christian’s decision causes unhappiness and pain (cf. Tieck 1985, 206 f.); from the bourgeois perspective, Christian is lost to »madness«14 and death. In this threatened loss of self at the end of the text, as well as in the suffering of the family community, Tieck signals that the Romantic appropriation of the other through art remains irreconcilable with social reality. The apotheosis of art is thus counterbalanced by scepticism. 3.

Arnim’s critique of Romantic desire

The dangerous and corrupting aspect of the artificial woman comes repeatedly to the fore in the works of Achim von Arnim, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Joseph von Eichendorff (cf. Fink 1983, 104–117). In the work of these authors, all of whom belong to a later generation of German Romantics, the figure of the artificial bride increasingly slides into a sceptical and self-critical commentary on Romantic conceptions of art. The body to be animated is no longer a marble statue; in its place we now find dolls, automata and the Golem. The Romantic beloved is usually a sublime figure of womanhood, her carnal aspect transformed into an artistic ideal. Even in Brentano and Tieck, the artificial bride figures along with the sublime and the divine. But in the Venus statues, dolls and automata of Arnim, Hoffmann and Eichendorff, the divine tips over into the monstrous, the spiritual becomes sexual, and life once intensified by art becomes an enervated mechanism of death. Arnim goes so far as to make this feature of his androids central to his work. For him, the artificial creature represents not the sublime but rather the earthly being shorn of spirituality. In Achim von Arnim’s story Isabella von Ägypten (Isabella of Egypt, 1812), the artificial bride appears as the figure of the Golem. The replacement of the statue by the Golem, a figure of clay, is itself important, since with the shift from classical mythology to Jewish legend (cf. Scholem 1992, Mayer 1987), Arnim calls up a negative version of the Pygmalion theme. By activating anti-Jewish stereotypes (cf. Härtl 1987, Oesterle 1992), Arnim makes the artistic creation fundamentally recognizable as a deficient being. Unlike the marble or ivory statue of the Pygmalion tradition, the animated Golem-woman of clay is not an improvement on her rival, but rather a worse form of her. Serving as the double (Doppelgänger) and copy of the gypsy queen Isabella, the Golem Bella is, in contrast to her angelic model, an unspiritual, purely instinctual being who incorporates merely the »crude embodiments« of human attributes in the form of »pride, lust and meanness«.15 In this substitution of the mortal for the divine, Arnim seeks to undermine the Romantic intensification of life represented by the artificial bride in Brentano and Tieck. Thus, the creation of Arnim’s Golem is linked less to the Romantic inspiration that transcends borders than to its opposite: envy, jealousy, vengeance and betrayal. Arnim’s protagonist, Archduke Karl, asks a Jewish sage to create the Golem as a means of deceiving his presumed rival in love, the Alraun. The Golem copy is then slipped unnoticed before the rival in place of the genuine Isabella. Karl 14.

»Wahnsinn« (ibid., 206).

15.

»plumpe Verkörperungen«, »Hochmut, Wollust und Geiz« (Arnim 1990, 689).

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enjoys his triumph by callously seducing the desirable Isabella (cf. Arnim 1990, 691), but this union has little to do with Romantic love except per negationem. In the figure of Isabella, Karl profanes the Romantic beloved, turning her into a sexualized, earthly bedfellow. Consistent with this logic, he soon confuses Isabella with the Golem copy and spends his nights with the Golem of clay (cf. ibid., 704–706, 711 f.). As Isabella’s double, Golem Bella thus reveals the destructive potential of carnal, earthly beings by fully displacing Isabella, who embodies the values of Romantic love. Importantly, Arnim does not choose an arbitrary figure for the part of the male protagonist, but rather Charles V (1500–1558), the last, great late-medieval German emperor. Arnim thus makes a historical and philosophical connection between the decline of Romantic love and the demise of the medieval empire. When Karl V exchanges the gypsy queen Isabella for the Golem, he gambles away not only love, but also the glorious future of an extensive empire which would have joined the Occident with the Orient through the marital union of these royal offspring (cf. Andermatt 1996, 281–284). In imagining Charles V’s failure to bring about this future, Arnim suggests the end of the Romantic dream of a unified European empire, though other German Romantics, such as Friedrich Schlegel writing in support of Metternich’s restoration (cf. Schwering 1994, 549 and 554), would hold on to this dream for some time yet. Arnim returns to the theme of the artificial bride in Raphael und seine Nachbarinnen (Raphael and His Female Neighbours, 1823). This story sketches the biography of the artist Raffael Sanzio (1483–1520) in terms of a process of sublimation from carnal life to the spiritual principle. The statue animation here appears both at the beginning and the end of Raphael’s development, providing — much as in Brentano’s Godwi — a commentary on the ideal course of the artist’s biography. Surprisingly, the animated statue in Raphael und seine Nachbarinnen once again stands for the sublime, that purely spiritual and even divine element of being. This statue bears the features of the virtuous Benedetta, one of Raphael’s two neighbours, with whom the young Raphael has fallen in love. The marble image is thus figured as the spiritual muse or divine mother. When Raphael attempts to paint the enchanting statue, she turns into the Madonna; in fact, all his future Madonnas, who establish Raphael’s fame as a painter, will bear the features of the marble statue (cf. Arnim 1992, 275). As the sublime embodiment of Benedetta, the statue is a sublimation of the carnal body in the form of a painted Madonna. The earthly beloved is thus transfigured into the icon of Romantic art. In a replay of the theme of the Venus ring, Arnim has Raphael place his engagement ring on the statue, seemingly for a lack of choice. Of his two neighbours, Benedetta, whom he has courted, is too easily shamed, while Ghita, a voluptuous baker’s daughter, who offers herself repeatedly as a rival to Benedetta, is too unashamed. Thus the ring lands — even if quite coincidentally — on the finger of the statue, who, in a clear reference to the process of sublimation, wears Benedetta’s clothing (cf. Arnim 1992, 277). Arnim thereby claims that the artist must become engaged not to a mortal woman, but rather to the sublimated form of love, to art itself. Arnim’s story offers a three-stage developmental model for the artist’s biography. The first stage consists of the engagement to the statue, combining the renunciation of marriage with the sublimation of love into art. In the second stage, the artist cultivates a non-binding, open exchange with love, which places the power of carnal love in the service of his art. In the last chapter, »Zu Raphaels Verklärung« (On Raphael’s Transfiguration, Arnim 1992, 291), Raphael

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completes the transition to the third stage of artistry when, in a chapel, he once again comes across the marble statue of his youth. Wearing Benedetta’s blue robe, she stands on the main altar as »the queen of Heaven«16 and »the holy mother without child«.17 With a raised finger she reminds Raphael that he must not »any longer suspend his great work of transfiguration«.18 The childlessness of the statue points again to the renunciation of marriage and earthly love. In the place of flesh-and-blood children we find the work of art, the sublimated Benedetta occupying the role of the mother or muse. Arnim’s representation of love, art and artistry clearly owes a great deal to the concepts of early German Romanticism. Such Romantic ideas of art subtend the criticism in Raphael und seine Nachbarinnen, as becomes clear when one reads the other artists in the text as providing a contrasting commentary to the protagonist. This is particularly the case with the artist Bäbe, a deformed figure who serves as a grotesque double for Raphael. In a moment of dubious good fortune, Bäbe exploits his life for the sake of art, losing his humanity in the process. Bäbe, Ghita’s renounced and scorned husband, nurtures an animalistic being in obscurity, painting in nightly episodes »indecent images from the history of the gods« as Raphael’s alter ego. The »poor, baked Bäbe«, who figures tellingly as Ghita’s »ape«,19 reflects the negative image of the artist Raphael, an existence degenerated to the animal or the automaton. In a classical image of fate, Bäbe’s life hangs from a thread of the spindle which his wife Ghita has abandoned in order to enjoy herself elsewhere with suitors (cf. Arnim 1992, 306). The abandoned spindle, like the mightily rising dough and the flour-covered painter, add up to a grotesque, sexually symbolic inversion of the sublimation process in art. The »so-called ape in the corner«,20 Bäbe, is Arnim’s self-ironicizing response to the early Romantic conceptions of art, which he instances in »Raphaels Verklärung.« 4.

Hoffmann’s ironic insights

E.T.A. Hoffmann first takes up the theme of the artificial bride in his story Die Automate (The Automaton, 1814). Here two friends, Ludwig and Ferdinand, are in deep discussion about the android musicians of Professor X and conclude unanimously that the »dead, rigid aspect of mechanical music« has something »appalling« about it. True art can only be »animated through the inner power of the soul […] which, of course, can never be the case with a machine«.21 The clear verdict against the professor’s experiments with automata fully corresponds with the Romantic conception of art, which rejects the rationalistic world view of the enlightenment; the 16.

»Himmelskönigin« (Arnim 1992, 297).

17.

»[heilige] Mutter ohne Kind«( ibid., 296).

18.

»großes Werk, die Verklärung nicht länger auszusetzen« (ibid., 297).

19.

»unschickliche […] Bilder aus der Göttergeschichte«, »armen verbackenen Bäbe«, »Affe« (ibid., 304, 307, 306).

20. »sogenannter Affe im Winkel« (ibid., 364). 21.

»das Tote, Starre der Maschinenmusik«, »Entsetzliches«, »die innere Kraft des Gemüts belebt [werden,] welches natürlicherweise bei der Maschine nie der Fall sein kann« (Hoffmann 1967, 372, 370, 371).

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friends thus see in the mechanical construction of the androids »a declaration of war against spirituality«,22 which upholds philistine attitudes. The irony of Hoffmann’s story, however, lies in the fact that at a decisive point the text throws this judgment into radical doubt by revealing that even Ferdinand’s long-standing, secret love, an unknown singer, may well be one of Professor X’s automata, much to the horror of the two friends. The theme of the artificial bride reappears in a similar form in Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf (The Golden Pot, 1814), and in particular, of course, in Der Sandmann (The Sandman, 1817). While in Der goldne Topf it is the snake Serpentina who is transformed into a bride before the enraptured gaze of the artist, in Der Sandmann it is the mechanical doll Olimpia. The transformation of the snake Serpentina into the Romantic beloved touches on the android motif only tangentially, but Serpentina plays precisely the same role as the doll Olimpia in Der Sandmann; both are rivals to the actual human beloved. As versions of the artificial bride, Hoffmann’s synthetic creations displace the bourgeois woman from the side of the Romantic hero. In one instance, this works out well, and in the other, not so well. While his love for Serpentina allows Anselmus to be initiated into the correct relationship to writing and hence into his calling as a Romantic artist, Nathanael’s love for Olimpia leads to self-destruction. The purification of Anselmus through art succeeds in setting him free from his bourgeois bride, a necessary liberation because Veronika would have tied Anselmus to the philistine world of office and marriage. His decision in favour of Serpentina is thus a decision for a life lived through art. Nathanael’s love for Olimpia results in the same alienation from his bourgeois bride Clara, but it does not lead him away from the bourgeois world to the Atlantis of poetry. Rather — and Tieck has already warned us of this — it leads to madness and death. The name Olimpia (the Italian spelling of »Olympia«, meaning she who comes from Olympus), chosen by Hoffmann for his doll in Sandmann, clearly plays on the theme of the Venus statue, though here the »beauty of the ancient statue« is exchanged for an »automatonlike femininity«.23 Before the desiring gaze of Nathanael, Olimpia comes to life like the marble statue imagined by other Romantics, but, as in Arnim, this secularized, mechanical Venus proves to be dangerous. Hoffmann’s texts, much more than the texts of Brentano, Tieck and Arnim, highlight the role of looking and the medium of sight as being important in the process of statue animation. Through the accumulation of images of eyes — including the robbing of sight as well as the substitution or simulation of eyes by glasses, mirrors, spectacles and telescopes (cf. von Matt 1971, 76–116) — such moments ironically and self-reflexively thematize the intensification of the Romantic aesthetic, thus exposing it to continuous reflection and criticism. In the instance of statue animation in Sandmann, Nathanael is figured as both Narcissus and a voyeur, for he peeks through a telescope into Spalanzani’s apartment in order to gaze at the beautiful Olimpia (cf. Hoffmann 1985, 36). It is precisely the intensification of his own gaze, this erotically sharpened, sedulous seeing, that awakens the dead doll to life. Hoffmann indicates this romanticizing act to be »an act of narcissistic transference of the eyes« in which »Nathanael [kindles] the fire of love in the lifeless automaton, in order subsequently to be able 22.

»erklärte Krieg gegen das geistige Prinzip« (ibid., 371).

23.

»Schönheit der antiken Statue [in eine] automatenhafte Weiblichkeit« (Drux 1994, 23).

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to ignite his own fire in the mirror all the more forcefully«.24 The critical distance from early Romantic theories cannot be overlooked, for Hoffmann parodies them with his »autistic boundary or counterweight to magical idealism«.25 The process is repeated and extended at Spalanzani’s ball, where Olimpia is first presented to the public. In contrast to most of the ball-goers, who tend to sneer at the beautiful daughter of Spalanzani who sings and dances with »the soulless beat of a […] machine«, Nathanael is carried away by rapture and passion. The recognition that Nathanael finds in Olimpia only his own love and »soul« does not seep into his consciousness, although he verges on such a recognition when he sees »his entire self reflected«, or, ex negativo, when he remonstrates with the critics of his love that Olimpia’s mechanical nature is simply the effect of soulless observation and hence the result of »one’s own dullness«.26 Nathanael fully realizes that Olimpia appears desirable only to the person who has »a poetic soul«, in comparison to which »cold, prosaic people« remain »rigid and soulless«.27 But it remains concealed from him that he in fact loves a doll, an automaton, until he is finally and shockingly confronted with the materiality of the machine in the process of its grotesque disintegration: Coppola now threw the figure over his shoulder and with a terrible, shrill laugh dashed down the stairs, dragging the feet of the figure, which hung loose in a hideous manner, clattering and echoing woodenly on every step. Nathanael stood paralyzed. He had seen only too clearly that Olimpia’s deathly pale, waxen countenance had no eyes, just dark holes — she was a lifeless doll.28

In its broken state, the machine is recognizable as a dead artefact, uninhabited by life. It is the life of her admirer Nathanael, the life of the artist, whose narcissistic self-consumption finally turns into a self-destructive mechanism of death. This process is symbolically underlined through the robbing of eyes, which ends in the loss of eyes, the loss of the Romantic gaze, and thus the loss of Romantic spirituality. After the destruction of the doll, Professor Spalanzani throws a pair of bloody eyes at Nathanael’s chest, which then lie on the floor and stare at him; the gesture is accompanied by the words, »the eyes that have been stolen from you […] — there you have the eyes!« This brutal denunciation of Romantic intensification as a form of self-deceit

24. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Akt einer narzißtischen Augenübertragung, [bei der] Nathanael zunächst das Liebesfeuer im toten Automaten [entzündet], um sich anschließend um so nachdrücklicher in seinem Spiegel entflammen zu können« (Kremer 1998, 82). 25.

»autistische[n] Grenz- oder Gegenform des magischen Idealismus« (von Matt 1971, 105; cf. also 161).

26. »geistlosen Takt der […] Maschine« (Hoffmann 1985, 42), »Gemüt« (ibid., 40), »ganzes Sein [ge]spiegelt« (ibid.), »eigenen Stumpfsinns« (ibid., 42, 40, 41). 27.

»poetisches Gemüt«, »kalten prosaischen Menschen«, »starr und seelenlos« (ibid., 42, 41).

28. »Nun warf Coppola die Figur über die Schulter und rannte mit fürchterlich gellendem Gelächter rasch fort die Treppe herab, so daß die häßlich herunterhängenden Füße der Figur auf den Stufen hölzern klapperten und dröhnten. — Erstarrt stand Nathanael — nur zu deutlich hatte er gesehen, Olimpia’s toderbleichtes Wachsgesicht hatte keine Augen, statt ihrer schwarze Höhlen; sie war eine leblose Puppe« (ibid., 44 f.).

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is too much for Nathanael, and he goes hopelessly mad: »Thus in this condition of insane fury he was taken raving to the madhouse«.29 5.

The conflict of pre-Christian and Christian values in Eichendorff

In Joseph von Eichendorff ’s novella Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue, 1818), the artificial bride, as in Tieck, originates as a »pagan goddess« arising from ancient »ruins«, which are even designated as »former temple of Venus«.30 The protagonist Florio, transformed by his new love for the young Bianka, ends up on a moonlit night outside the city of Lucca, unbeknownst to him in the enchanted circle of Venus. A »marble statue of Venus« stands on the edge of a fishpond »as though the goddess had just risen from the waves«.31 Florio is completely enchanted by the statue, and his enraptured gaze sets the process of animation unexpectedly in motion. The marble Venus appears to open her »soulful eyes«32 and the beautiful limbs seem to take on a warmth of their own. On closer inspection, however, the marble statue proves to be »appallingly white and motionless« and looks »fearfully with stony eye sockets out of a boundless silence«.33 The dangerous dialectic of Romantic intensification takes an exemplary form in Eichendorff. In his work, »melancholy and delight« turn into one another with no mediation, in a »horror never felt before«;34 life changes place with death. As with Hoffmann’s Nathanael, what is manifested here is the dangerously narcissistic dimension of artistic animation. Caught up by the Venus statue, Florio’s love has receded from the human counterpart, the girl Bianka, and turned into a fantastically heightened but lonely self-love. In Eichendorff, too, this leads to madness, death and depravity. After the nocturnal meeting with Florio, the stone Venus awakes and begins to lead her own life, uncontrolled by social mores. It is the dark knight Donati who finally arranges a romantic encounter between Florio and »the beautiful mistress«. Venus leads Florio »into the interior of her castle«, dominated by the pagan art world and sultry eroticism. In Venus’s love chamber he finds a »row of marble statues« and walls covered in »exquisite tapestries worked in silk with life-sized histories of exceptional vividness«.35 The love encounter itself is preceded by a discussion about art. In the pictures of Venus’s chamber, Florio sees the embodiment of the image world of his youth, all »his youthful dreams«, what he had dreamed before seems now 29. »die Augen dir gestohlen […] — da hast du die Augen! —«, »So in gräßlicher Raserei tobend wurde er nach dem Tollhause gebracht. — « (ibid., 45). 30. »Heidengöttin«, »Ruine«, »ehemaliger Tempel der Venus« (Eichendorff 1998, 79, 76, 79). 31.

»marmornes Venusbild«, »als wäre die Göttin so eben erst aus den Wellen aufgetaucht« (ibid., 45).

32.

»seelenvollen Augen« (ibid.).

33.

»fürchterlich weiß und regungslos«, »schreckhaft mit den steinernen Augenhöhlen aus der gränzenlosen Stille« (ibid., 46).

34.

»Wehmuth und Entzücken«, »nie gefühltes Grausen« (ibid., 46).

35.

»schöne Herrin«, »in das Innere ihres Schlosses«, »Reihe marmorner Bildsäulen«, »köstliche Tapeten mit in Seide gewirkten lebensgroßen Historien von ausnehmender Frische« (ibid., 53, 69, 70).

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suddenly able to »come to life«. The nocturnal scene, however, soon turns uncanny. Thunder approaches, and in a flash of lightning the beloved changes again into a marble woman, the cold stone looking at Florio partly »smiling« and partly with »a dreadful face«. In a nightmarish vision all the figures of the room come to life — the marble statues and tapestry images, even down to the flowers and candelabra. In this ghostly metamorphosis, the art world of Venus begins to press itself onto Florio, who is caught in the grip of a »deathly terror«:36 The two arms, which held the candles, twisted and stretched out longer and longer, as though a monstrous man were working his way out of the wall; the room filled up more and more, the flashes of lightning threw horrifying shadows amongst the figures. Through the throng Florio saw the statues throw themselves toward him with such violence that it made his hair stand on end.37

Florio runs away, back to life, and thus saves himself from a Romantic art world become excessively powerful. He barely escapes madness and death, but falls temporarily into a deep depression. Nothing remains of Venus’s world but ruins and wreckage. At the end Donati’s counterpart, Fortunato, informs Florio of the persistent danger, explaining that »the spirit of the beautiful pagan goddess« arises every spring from the ruins, out of »the dreadful stillness of the grave«, to corrupt »young, carefree souls with satanic delusions«;38 these young men »lose life and soul, roam aimlessly, and waste away in horrible self-deception«.39 Eichendorff ’s text can be read as a commentary on the Romantic treatment of art as though it were a religion. The pagan Venus represents the dismissal of a conception of art which in Eichendorff can only lead to the destruction of the artist, his social isolation and his spiritual confusion. In Fortunato’s closing song, Eichendorff turns to a counter-image, »another image of woman«;40 in the place of Venus, we find the Virgin Mary: For over land and sea / There appears, so quiet and mild / High above the rainbow, / Another image of woman. / A child in her arms, / The miraculous unfolds, / And the compassion of heaven / Pervades the whole world.41

36.

»seine Jugendträume […] lebendig werden«, »lächelnd […] schreckliche Gesicht«, »tödliches Grausen« (ibid., 71, 72, 73).

»die beiden Arme, welche die Kerzen hielten, rangen und reckten sich immer länger, als wolle ein unge37. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ heurer Mann aus der Wand sich hervorarbeiten, der Saal füllte sich mehr und mehr, die Flammen des Blitzes warfen gräßliche Scheine zwischen die Gestalten, durch deren Gewimmel Florio die steinernen Bilder mit solcher Gewalt auf sich losdringen sah, daß ihm die Haare zu Berge standen« (ibid.). 38.

»der erschrecklichen Stille des Grabes […] durch teuflisches Blendwerk […] junge, sorg-lose Gemüther« (ibid., 79).

39.

»an Leib und Seele verloren, umherirren, und in der entsetzlichsten Täuschung sich selber verzehren« (ibid.).

40. »andres Frauenbild« (ibid., 78). 41.

»Denn über Land und Wogen / Erscheint, so still und mild, / Hoch auf dem Regenbogen / Ein andres Frauenbild. // Ein Kindlein in den Armen / Die Wunderbare hält, / Und himmlisches Erbarmen / Durchdringt die ganze Welt« (ibid., 78 f.).

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The Catholic mother of God captures the pagan Venus and dispels her, and with her the world of Romantic art. With her help, Florio finds his way back to life. The text ends by allowing Florio to rediscover the worth of his real bride Bianka, who has only been temporarily displaced by Venus. The story triumphantly celebrates the happiness of the young couple. With this moment, the religion of art preached by German Romanticism comes to an end, pushed once again to the margins of convention. 6.

Survival of Venus’s Power in Mérimée

Outside the German-speaking world, the Romantic animated statue appears only infrequently. In fact, Prosper Mérimée’s story La Vénus d’Ille (The Venus of Ille, 1837) is the only text which is clearly in line with the German thematic tradition. As part of the French reception of E.T.A. Hoffmann, the fantastic found its way to the centre of Mérimée’s stories. Accordingly, Todorov calls La Vénus d’Ille a consummate example of the ambiguity of the fantastic (cf. Todorov 1970, 49). In this ambiguity, the natural and the supernatural come into conflict as two irreconcilable orders. Mérimée’s story relies on the fact that the reader never knows, up to the end and beyond, whether the animated statue of the text should be taken as real or as a phantasm. This conflict of interpretation on the one hand places the rational, scientific world into question while, on the other hand, it proves to be an artistic »game with the fictional consciousness of the modern reader«.42 Mérimée’s literary game with the enlightenment reader is in large part the French variation and extension of German transcendental poetry. In Mérimée, too, the animation of the Venus statue, which is fully self-reflexive, poses the question of the appropriate relation between life and art. In the place of the Romantic artist, who must choose between the real and the ideal bride, we find in Mérimée the scientist, and with him the question of the validity of his rational judgment. The narrator of the tale is a Parisian archaeologist and bachelor. With the superior self-confidence of the city dweller on a journey to the provinces, he meets a colleague dabbling in art, M. de Peyrehorade, who with great pride shows him an ancient statue of Venus which he has discovered. In the ensuing quarrel between the two scholars about the correct classification and interpretation of the bronze statue, Mérimée opens to debate not only the scientific world but also, more self-reflexively, the reception of his own text. For the quarrel over Venus is a quarrel about the correct interpretation of writing, revolving around the meaning of a Latin inscription on the statue itself. Just as the narrator and M. de Peyrehorade cannot agree on how to read the inscription and hence how to understand the Venus statue, so the reader, faced with the ambivalence of the fantastic in Mérimée’s tale, cannot decide on a single course of reading. M. de Peyrehorade, the captious and pedantic rationalist who claims the right to interpret for himself alone, ends up cruelly punished. In terms of poetic self-reflexivity, this serves as a warning to the reader not to be found in a similar situation. In Mérimée it is no longer love that drives the meeting between the scientist and Venus, but rather — though hidden behind the rules of civilized politesse — the polarizing passions 42.

»Spiel mit dem fiktionalen Bewußtsein des modernen Lesers« (Penning 1980, 43).

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of competition, battle, will to power, wealth and career. Mérimée’s text suggests in drastic fashion that Venus has no patience with such passions, since this Venus takes vengeance on and finally kills everyone who slights either her or love. The victim of Mérimée’s Venus, however, is only indirectly the scientist. In a structural displacement, the revenge of Venus lands on M. Alphonse, the son of M. de Peyrehorade. M. Alphonse repeats in a different sense the same message already provided by the father. He is on the cusp of marrying an enchanting young woman, but he is only doing so for the money. On the day of the wedding his passion is entirely involved in a competitive game, a »tennis match«,43 which he plays with ambition and drive, and, true to form, wins. Into this context Mérimée introduces the motif of the Venus ring. In order to be able to devote himself without hindrance to the game, Alphonse slips off his expensive engagement ring and sticks it for the time being on the finger of the Venus statute. The text leaves us in no doubt that in this act love has been sacrificed for the sake of battle: And his bride? […] Truly, I believe he would have postponed the wedding had it been necessary. I watched him hurriedly pull on a pair of sandals, roll up his sleeves, and with a confident air place himself at the head of the vanquished party, like Caesar rallying his troops at Dyrrachium.44

In a subversion of the process of civilization, the competitiveness of the scientist is displaced onto the competition between the tennis players, and then onto the scenario of an ancient battle. In the process, wedding, bride and love are forgotten. At this point Venus vengefully intervenes. She balls up her hand, refuses to release the ring, and climbs that night into the conjugal bed, next to the newly wedded wife, where she proceeds cruelly to strangle the bridegroom who has forgotten love. As the horrified bride reports the next morning: She heard a choked cry. The figure by her side in the bed raised itself up and seemed to stretch its arms out. She turned her head at that point […] and saw, she says, her husband on his knees by the bed, his head level with the pillow and violently clamped between the arms of a greenish giant. She says — over and over twenty times, the poor woman! — that she recognized the figure […] Can you guess? It was the bronze Venus, M. de Peyrehorade’s statue.45

The terrible end to the ambitious bridegroom, as competitive in sport as in money matters, remains unexpiated. Venus stands triumphant in the garden in her original place: Every time that I passed by the statue, I [i.e. the narrator] stopped for a moment to look at it. This time, I confess, I could not look at the expression of spiteful mockery without horror. With

43.

»jeu de paume« (Mérimée 1969, 42).

44.

»Et sa fiancée? […] Ma foi, si cela eût été nécessaire, il aurait, je crois, fait ajourner le mariage. Je le vis chausser à la hâte une paire de sandales, retrousser ses manches, et, d’un air assuré, se mettre à la tête du parti vaincu, comme César ralliant ses soldats à Dyrrachium« (ibid., 43).

45.

»Elle entendit un cri étouffé. La personne qui était dans le lit, à côté d’elle, se leva sur son séant et parut étendre les bras en avant. Elle tourna la tête alors… et vit, dit-elle, son mari à genoux auprès du lit, la tête à la hauteur de l’oreiller, entre les bras d’une espèce de géant verdâtre qui l’étreignait avec force. Elle dit, et m’a répété vingt fois, pauvre femme! […] elle dit qu’elle a reconnu… devinez-vous ? La Vénus de bronze, la statue de monsieur de Peyrehorade« (ibid., 53).

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my head full of the terrible scenes to which I had been witness, it seemed to me that I saw an unholy demon gloating over the misfortune that had struck this house.46

The narrator remains puzzled by the situation, even as he leaves the site of the event. His perplexity is transferred to the reader, who is thus left in the dark about what has really happened. Nonetheless, the rational explanation offered for the murder, although convincing at first, is vigorously refuted. The probable murderer, a competitor whom Alphonse humiliated in the tennis match, is provided with a hard and fast alibi. When M. de Peyrehorade dies not long after and the pagan statute is melted down into a church bell, Venus still continues to wreak havoc; the ringing bell causes the grapevines in the area to freeze. The reader, of course, knows that Alphonse drank a great deal; in fact, on his wedding night, he had gone to bed drunk… 7.

Shelley’s insights into Romantic hubris

In addition to Prosper Mérimée’s version of the artificial bride, there are two other non-German texts that are of pre-eminent importance in this context, even though — or precisely because — they subvert the thematic tradition. These texts are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus and a later novel, belonging to the fin de siècle, L’Ève future (Tomorrow’s Eve, 1886), by Jean-Marie Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. At first glance, Mary Shelley’s monster seems to have nothing to do with an animated bride, and certainly nothing to do with a seductive Venus. As the title indicates, Shelley’s text turns not on the paradigm of Pygmalion, but on the other classical myth of human creation, the myth of Prometheus. Since Goethe’s similarly titled hymn to genius, Prometheus has figured as a provocative symbol of bourgeois emancipation, »the exponent of a humanity which strives for social, political and spiritual self-determination«.47 In the history of the mind, Prometheus testifies to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The stealing of the gods’ fire from which man is shaped and animated by human hands exemplifies the autonomous consciousness of the enlightenment subject, who is self-illuminating and independent of divine powers-that-be. As the modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein stands for the crisis of the enlightenment subject. The novel launches a radical critique, from a Romantic perspective, of the human will to self-determination. Shelley’s protagonist Victor Frankenstein, the inventor of the monster, is »the prototype of any number of mad professors who populate science-fiction literature«.48 His primary

46.

»Passant et repassant devant la statue, je m’arrêtai un instant pour la considérer. Cette fois, je l’avouerai, je ne pus contempler sans effroi son expression de méchanceté ironique; et, la tête toute pleine des scènes horribles dont je venais d’être le témoin, il me sembla voir une divinité infernale applaudissant au malheur qui frappait cette maison.« (ibid., 52).

47.

»Exponent einer Menschheit, die sozial, politisch und geistig nach Selbstbestimmung strebt« (Schmidt 1988, 264).

48.

»Prototyp so vieler verrückter Professoren, die die Science-Fiction-Literatur bevölkern« (Grawe 1986, 313).

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characteristic is cold passion, a feverish approach to work that excludes love. In this, Frankenstein dreams less of wealth than of »glory« (Shelley 1993, 59): So much has been done, […] — more, far more, will I achieve: treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation. (ibid., 73)

To achieve his goal, Frankenstein grasps, like Faust, at every kind of knowledge available to humanity. He studies not only the natural sciences, but has fully researched alchemy and natural philosophy. In the end he commits himself to the contemporary science with the greatest future, chemistry, and links the knowledge he acquires there with the study of anatomy: My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. (ibid., 78)

Frankenstein wants to »examine the causes of life« (ibid., 78) although, to do so, he turns coldbloodedly to death and destruction. Unlike the Romantic artists represented in the works of Brentano, Tieck, Arnim, Hoffmann and Eichendorff, Frankenstein’s gaze does not radiate animating flames of love but rather observes in cold emotion the passage from life to death: »I paused, examining and analyzing all the minutiae of causation« (ibid.). In consequence, he actually acquires the ability to »bestow […] animation upon lifeless matter« (ibid.), but only to the extent that he engages unflinchingly with death. He thus seeks out body parts in anatomy classrooms and cemeteries, all the while coming ever closer to death in his own self-image: My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement. […] Sometimes I grew alarmed at the wreck I perceived that I had become; the energy of my purpose alone sustained me. (ibid., 80 f., 83)

As though mirroring the gradual development of his creation, Frankenstein’s appearance takes on the morbid hideousness of the monster before it even appears. Shelley’s text thus clearly draws on the narcissistic dimension of android creation. The result of Frankenstein’s efforts, however, is absolute hideousness, the sheer opposite of the superhuman beauty which emanates from the animated Venus statue. Frankenstein describes the creature that his cold passion has finally succeeded in animating as follows: How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! — Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips. (ibid., 85)

That the »watery eyes« are at the centre of this hideous being is telling, for the »watery« eye of the monster corresponds to the cold eye of the scientist, in contrast to the »fiery« eye of love possessed by the Romantic artist and the bride-statue he has brought to life. What Frankenstein is missing is love; his creation is therefore not a wonderful bride with radiant, loving eyes, but a

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hideous monster with a milky gaze. If one adds to this the narcissistic dimension of the process of creation, then the monster comes to stand for unconcealed self-loathing. Mary Shelley illustrates the opposition between cold rationality and rapturous love in a way similar to that of Mérimée’s later Venus, for Victor Frankenstein constantly postpones marriage to his fiancée Elizabeth on the grounds of his scientific passion. Rather than marry her and surrender himself to love, Frankenstein pursues the creation of his monster in place of going to the bride who waits for him in a distant university town: The summer months passed while I was thus engaged, heart and soul, in one pursuit […]. And the same feelings which made me neglect the scenes around me caused me also to forget those friends who were so many miles absent, and whom I had not seen for so long a time. I knew my silence disquieted them […]. I wished as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed. (ibid., 81 f.)

The monster is as much a rival of the bride as is the animated Venus statue of the German Romantics. It is thus only logical that Mary Shelley’s monster should enter Frankenstein’s conjugal bed on his wedding night and kill the bride. And, like Mérimée’s Venus, vengeance here also triumphs: The shutters had been thrown back; and, with a sensation of horror not to be described, I [Frankenstein] saw at the open window a figure the most hideous and abhorred. A grin was on the face of the monster; he seemed to jeer, as with his fiendish finger he pointed towards the corpse of my wife. (ibid., 262)

To the extent that Mary Shelley replaces Pygmalion by Prometheus, she succeeds in radically subverting the thematic tradition. In her work, »the transformation of the Pygmalion myth into a destructive version«,49 intimated in the works of all the Romantics, finds its most complete form. The figure of the enraptured lover is replaced by the ambitious careerist, the artificial bride by the murderous monster, and narcissistic love by self-loathing. 8.

Pygmalion and Prometheus at the fin-de-siècle

Jean-Marie Villiers de l’Isle-Adams’s L’Ève future adapts the artificial bride of the Romantics in virtuoso fashion to the fin de siècle. At the end of the nineteenth century, the novel returns to the Romantic discussion about art and life by shifting the counter-world of the ideal from the realm of art to that of science and technology. In a neo-romantic gesture, the natural world is self-consciously declared to be obsolete. It is no longer the artist and art, however, but the scientist and technological advance which will allow humanity to move out of the old world and into the ideal. Villiers takes up both the Pygmalion and the Prometheus myths together. His protagonist, Lord Ewald, is the lover who, like Pygmalion, has been disappointed by a real woman and finds himself enraptured by the merits of the artificial woman. In the role of the modern Prometheus, 49.

»Umwandlung des Pygmalion-Mythos ins Zerstörerische« (Stephens 1997, 532).

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we find the figure of the inventor Thomas Alva Edison, who has brought Promethean fire to the people in the form of electricity. Lord Ewald, however, is no artistic type; he is rather a wealthy decadent who is weary of life and wants to kill himself because of his disappointment with women. Because of Edison he survives his disappointment, for Edison puts his immense knowledge and latest technological discoveries to work in the creation of the ideal woman whom Ewald has been seeking in vain in the real world. Edison’s synthetic Miss Hadaly originates in a way similar to Arnim’s Golem Bella, for both are copies of a living model. Unlike Arnim’s Isabella, however, the original in L’Ève future, Alicia Clary, represents the frailty of the female sex. She comes across as a fully insipid »bourgeoise« (Villiers 1986, 808), whose single attractive attribute is an impeccably beautiful body. Alicia, as the »bourgeois goddess«50 and the cause of Lord Ewald’s disappointment, thus continues the series of bourgeois women reviled by the Romantics. Her surname Clary is an obvious pun on Hoffmann’s Clara in Der Sandmann, who represents the species at large. Edison’s creation Hadaly, whose name means »the IDEAL«,51 is intended to incorporate the bodily beauty of the model while making up for the deficiencies of the actual woman. As Edison explains to his friend Lord Ewald, »I will make a perfect reproduction of this woman [i.e. Alicia], a double of her, with the sublime aid of Light! […] In this vision, I will make the Ideal manifest, for the first time, before your senses, PALPABLE, AUDIBLE AND MATERIALIZED.«52

In order to achieve the goal of materializing the Ideal, like the task of squaring the circle, Edison draws on the achievements of the most up-to-date technology. Over the course of several pages, Villiers’s text describes in minute detail the components which make up the »magneto-metallic organism«53 of this new fantasy woman. The model once again is nature, though Edison compensates for and improves on organic life with the help of inorganic wires, metal, glass and technology. Electricity, »this spark bequeathed by Prometheus«,54 provides the life force. Here the text focuses attention in particular on breathing and language: This spark, bequeathed by Prometheus, which you see here captured and running along this magical wand, produces breathing by affecting the magnet which is situated vertically between the two breasts and which attracts the nickel blade attached to this steel sponge; at each moment the sponge falls back into place because of the regular intervention of this isolator […]. Here are the two gold phonographs, inclined at an angle toward the centre of the chest, which form the two lobes of Hadaly’s lungs. They pass one to the other the metallic leaves of their harmonious — I would even say heavenly — conversations, somewhat like printing presses draw pages from one side to the other. A single tin band can contain seven hours of such

50. »Déesse bourgeoise« (Villiers 1986, 804). 51.

»l’IDÉAL« (ibid., 852).

52.

»Je reproduirai strictement, je dédoublerai cette femme [i.e. Alicia], à l’aide sublime de la Lumière! […] Je forcerai, dans cette vision, l’Idéal lui-même à se manifester, pour la première fois, à vos sens, PALPABLE, AUDIBLE ET MATÉRIALISÉ.« (ibid., 836).

53.

»l’organisme magnéto-métallique« (ibid., 856).

54.

»cette étincelle, léguée par Prométhée« (ibid., 910).

222

Michael Andermatt speech. These words come from the minds of the greatest poets, the most subtle metaphysical thinkers, and the most profound novelists of this century, all geniuses to whom I have turned — and who have surrendered to me, at great cost, these marvels which have never before been printed. This is why I say that Hadaly is not an intelligence, but the Intelligence.55

Electricity and technology are the heirs of literature and philosophy, so that in the end it is not art but the technological world that guarantees survival for the disappointed lover Ewald. Edison himself stands for this dawning of art within science, since his face reminds one in »a striking manner« of Gustave Doré, so that one finds in Edison »the face of the artist translated into the face of the scholar«.56 As a new Eve created by Edison’s compassion, the robot woman Hadaly is a fully synthetic art creation, an android that gratifies male fantasies in every sense. Nonetheless, it takes more than Edison’s knowledge to bring life to the artificial creature; it also requires the enraptured love of Lord Ewald because Hadaly, like Hoffmann’s Olimpia, is essentially a narcissistic mirror, who simply sends back to the man what he needs from her. In response to Ewald’s question about how the automaton will be able to find the right words to converse with him, Edison answers: The word you expect — and for this the beauty will depend on your own suggestion — will be the word with which she responds! Her »consciousness« will no longer be the negation of your own, but will become the semblance of the soul which best fits your melancholy. You will be able to evoke in her the radiance of your own love, without fearing, this time, that she will refute your dreams! […] It will not even be necessary for you to speak the words! Her words will respond to your thoughts as well as to your silences.57

The animated Hadaly explains the same point to Ewald, who is still sceptical: You see, in response to your despair, I hurried to clothe myself in the radiant lines of your desire […] What am I? […] A creature from a dream who glimmers in your thoughts — and whose beneficent shadow you can dissipate with one of those nicely-turned arguments, which 55.

»Cette étincelle, léguée par Prométhée, qui court, domptée, autour de cette baguette vraiment magique, produit la respiration en impressionnant cet aimant situé verticalement entre les deux seins et qui attire à lui cette lame de nickel, annexée à cette éponge d’acier, — laquelle, à chaque instant, revient à sa place, à cause de l’interposition régulière de cet isolateur. […] Voici les deux phonographes d’or, inclinés en angle vers le centre de la poitrine, et qui sont les deux poumons de Hadaly. Ils se passent l’un à l’autre les feuilles métalliques de ses causeries harmonieuses — et je devrais dire célestes, — un peu comme les presses d’imprimerie se passent les feuilles à tirer. Un seul ruban d’étain peut contenir sept heures de ses paroles. Celles-ci sont imaginées par les plus grand poètes, les plus subtiles métaphysiciens et les romanciers les plus profonds de ce siècle, génies auxquels je me suis adressé, — et qui m’ont livré, au poids du diamant, ces merveilles à jamais inédites. / C’est pourquoi je dis que Hadaly remplace une intelligence par l’Intelligence« (ibid.).

56. »d’une manière frappante«, »le visage de l’artiste traduit en un visage de savant« (ibid., 767). 57.

»Ce sera bien la parole attendue — et dont la beauté dépendra de votre suggestion même, — qu’elle répondra! Sa ›conscience‹ ne sera plus la négation de la vôtre, mais deviendra la semblance d’âme que préférera votre mélancolie. Vous pourrez évoquer en elle la présence radieuse de votre seul amour, sans redouter, cette fois, qu’elle démente votre songe! […] Il vous sera même inutile d’articuler, vous-même, des paroles! Les siennes répondront à vos pensées, à vos silences« (ibid., 913).

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will only leave you, in place of having me, with emptiness and weary tedium, the fruits of a pretence of truth. […] My being, here below, at least for you, depends on your free choice. Affirm my being, tell me that I am! Strengthen my being through your own! And suddenly I will be fully alive before your eyes, real to the degree that your creative will has penetrated through me. Like a woman, I will be for you only that which you believe me to be.58

In addition to the cold technology of the Promethean Edison, it requires the warm love of the Pygmalion Ewald to succeed in creating the ideal woman. Mary Shelley had shown in drastic measure what happens when the latter is lacking. Nonetheless, Villiers’s novel also ends in catastrophe. At first, indeed, Lord Ewald steers a course with his artificial ideal woman towards an avowed happiness for both, unthreatened by any danger, and fully in opposition to the Romantic thematic tradition. Hadaly is then put into a sleep-like state by Edison in order to travel with Ewald in a »coffin« or »sarcophagus«59 by ship from New York to England, where they plan to live in perfect happiness on Ewald’s estate. The morbid scenario is thus foreshadowed, for in fact things turn out differently than planned. The ship sinks, taking Hadaly with it, and Ewald, who survives the catastrophe, remains in a stupor of grief over the loss of his ideal. This abrupt and unmotivated ending has been read to mean that Villiers, as artist and author of novels, could not allow the grand victory of technology, even in relation to the imagination, over art (cf. Gendolla 1984, 270). From the perspective of literary history, however, Hadaly’s sad ending follows clearly in the tradition of Romantic selfreflection and self-criticism. Conceiving of the imaginary realm in terms of the hero’s crossing into the counter-world of art has always been bound up with death and danger, from Brentano to Eichendorff. This holds no less true for Villier’s Lord Ewald, for whom the transition into the world of the ideal can end only in grief and disappointment. From the perspective of culture studies, the sinking of the ship at the end of Villier’s novel can be read as a sceptical commentary on the Faustian pursuit of science and technology. According to Villier’s text, these are not to be relied upon, since nature, embodied in the storm-tossed ocean and the conflagration on board the ship, is always stronger in the end. Romanticism has throughout used the figure of the artificial woman to draw our attention to the fact that the move into the counter-world of the ideal, bound up as it is with the rejection of nature, too readily means giving oneself up to death. This obviously holds true even when technology replaces art. (Trans. by Misha Kavka)

58.

»Tu le vois: au cri de ton désespoir, j’ai accepté de me vêtir à la hâte des lignes radieuses de ton désir, pour t’apparaître. […] Qui suis-je? […] Un être de rêve, qui s’éveille à demi en tes pensées — et dont tu peux dissiper l’ombre salutaire avec un de ces beaux raisonnements qui ne te laisseront, à ma place, que le vide et l’ennui douloureux, fruits de leur prétendue vérité. […] Mon être, ici-bas, pour toi du moins, ne dépend que de ta libre volonté. Attribue-moi l’ être, affirme-toi que je suis! renforce-moi de toi-même. Et soudain, je serai tout animée, à tes yeux, du degré de réalité dont m’aura pénétrée ton Bon-Vouloir créateur. Comme une femme, je serai pour toi que ce que tu me croiras« (ibid., 990 f.).

59.

»cercueil […] sarcophage« (ibid., 1001).

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Romantic gender and sexuality Thomas Klinkert / Weertje Willms

1.

Introduction

The second half of the eighteenth century is a period of transition between two fundamentally different orders of society in Europe. The French Revolution is the most visible sign of the changes which took place in almost every area of social organisation at that time. According to Niklas Luhmann, the hierarchical structure of a society based on stratification, in which the social status of the individual is solely dependent on the fortuity of birth, was gradually being replaced by a social structure based on functional differences. This new type of society is composed of social systems which specialise in fulfilling one function (economy, law, politics, art, religion, science, etc.) and which operate independently of one another. For the individual, this means that he or she has to find a place outside all social systems, since everyone can occasionally participate in the existing systems, but no one essentially belongs to them. Whereas, formerly, the individual was positively defined by inclusion in a social entity (family, class), he or she is now negatively defined by exclusion from all social systems (Luhmann 1989/1993, 158). Henceforth, the individual is that social element which cannot be defined by the place it has or the function it fulfils. The individual has become the »indefinable remnant« within society. This is the principal reason why authors started to reflect upon the status of the individual, trying to develop models of personal identity and interpersonal relationships, some of which were supposed to compensate for the loss of social stability and fixed identity which were characteristic of stratified society, while others simply analysed the new state of affairs without having any solutions to propose. Inevitably, these models are concerned with the irreducible features shared by all people — gender and sexuality — which are social and cultural categories. They are derived from, and superimposed on, biological differences in a historically variable manner. All societies ascribe status to individuals, and they try to regulate their sexual behaviour by taking into account their sex. The individual cannot act independently of the fact that he or she belongs to one or the other sex. But the undeniable biological reality of sex is transformed into the social and cultural reality of gender. In a stratified society, gender is a less important feature than class. This type of society regulates interpersonal relationships mainly by asking if the individuals belong to the same class or not. Accordingly the difference between men and women is perceived to be a gradual and quantitative one. Women, not unlike children, are seen to be incomplete versions of men. Equality between men and women is not the usual state of affairs, but it is by no means impossible. A woman, for example, can achieve the status of a man by showing male heroism. This way of dealing with sexual difference is characteristic of the »one-sex model« (Laqueur 1990, 114–148, Schabert 1997, 25). In a society based on functional difference, however, class does not disappear, but it loses the status of a dominant factor regulating social behaviour. This loss is partly compensated for by the re-evaluation of gender. Male and female are defined as dichotomic and complementary genders. The »one-sex model« is replaced by the »two-sex

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model« (Laqueur 1990, 149–243, Schabert 1997, 40), which assumes that the difference between men and women is an essential, irreducible one. This dichotomic conception of gender entails new regulations and prescriptions concerning sexual behaviour and marriage. A case in point is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As the author of the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité (Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality, 1755) and Du contrat social (On Social Contract, 1762), he was the principal agent of an intellectual revolution which was one of the factors leading to the political Revolution of 1789. But he was equally influential in the literary field and can be considered as one of the »inventors« of Romanticism. This is largely due to his re-evaluation of sentiment and to his redefinition of gender on the basis of biological difference. He was one of the principal representatives of the »two-sex model« in the late eighteenth century. Many aspects of the problems of Romantic gender and sexuality can be clearly shown by an analysis of Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or The New Heloise, 1761) and of his fictionalised treatise on education, Émile (1762). The main protagonist of La nouvelle Héloïse, Saint-Preux, is in love with his pupil Julie, but he cannot marry her because he does not share her noble rank. Although he does not respect her father’s authority, he is submissive to Julie’s will. Julie, however, despite her love for Saint-Preux and despite the fact that, by having sexual intercourse with him, she has transgressed the law of chastity before marriage, does not want to disobey her father, and she finally marries her father’s friend Wolmar, whom she does not love. Thus, the novel’s plot is based on the conflict between two conceptions of intimate relationships: one being connected with love, passion and mutual consent to sexuality, the other being imposed by parental authority; one defining marriage as a contract between individuals, the other conceiving of it as a mechanism of stratified society aiming at the reproduction of social classes. In Michel Foucault’s words (Foucault 1976, 140), the novel stages a clash between the »dispositif of sexuality« (Julie/Saint-Preux) and the »dispositif of alliance« (Julie/Wolmar). While the dispositif of alliance aims to control the transfer of names and fortunes, regulating sexual behaviour by reducing it to its reproductive function independently of individual feelings and wishes, the dispositif of sexuality, which has been gradually superimposed on the dispositif of alliance since the eighteenth century, is a mechanism of control directed towards the individual body. The body is sexualised and it becomes the focus of attention of different discourses (medical, economic, literary, etc.). Feelings, affections, love, and even incestuous relationships penetrate into the family, which thereby loses its former, strictly reproductive function. The ideological counterpart to the dispositif of sexuality is the ideal of marriage for love, so-called Romantic love (Luhmann 1982/1995), which in many literary texts is at the core of the action. The dispositif of sexuality is an attempt to solve problems that arise from changed economic, social and political factors. But by sexualising the family, it surely creates new problems, for example, incest. The conflict between love and marriage as such is certainly a traditional element of the novel as a genre. Rousseau’s treatment of this traditional conflict, however, is original in that love and marriage are considered as equally necessary and their union is symbolically achieved in a utopian and impossible ménage à trois, for Saint-Preux is finally integrated into Julie’s family as the teacher of her children, but the former lovers’ passion is contained by chastity. (Traditional solutions would have been adultery or the definite separation of the lovers.) Passion,

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friendship and love neutralise each other in a paradoxical manner, and at the same time this keeps alive the love between Julie and Saint-Preux. The importance of love for the modern individual, who finds himself subject to a completely new social context, is explicitly stated when, at one point in the novel, Saint-Preux writes to Julie: »But, Julie, alas!, as for me, erring, without a family, and almost without a fatherland, I have only you on earth, and love alone replaces everything else for me«.1 SaintPreux is the prototype of the Romantic individual, homeless, without roots, socially mobile, for whom the intimate relationship with a beloved person is supposed to substitute everything he is lacking. Of course, such a conception of love is doomed to failure, the burden being too heavy to bear, and Rousseau is conscious of this. Thus, the love between Julie and Saint-Preux can only be realised at the beginning; later it is transformed into remembrance and illusion. The structure of the novel mirrors the impossibility of reconciling passion and duty: while the idyllic elements of the central episodes suggest a harmonious solution, the final episodes culminate in the dying Julie’s confession that she has never stopped desiring Saint-Preux but that to her own damage she has been trying to deny her love. Passion and desire prove to be dangerous and destructive in the end (for a more detailed reading of Rousseau’s novel in the present context, see Klinkert 2002). In a different, although comparable way, the misconception of love as being a medicine or magic potion is laid bare in Émile. The text tells the story of an ideal education given to the hero by the narrator in a kind of mental experiment. The aim of this education is to help develop the natural intelligence of the boy who grows up far from society and its artificial constraints. As an adolescent, he inevitably starts being interested in the opposite sex. The narrator makes him meet Sophie, a virtuous young lady. Émile and Sophie are destined to fall in love and eventually to get married, thus realising the ideal union of love and marriage dear to Romanticism. But, as Rousseau shows in Émile et Sophie (1780), the fictional continuation of his treatise, the union of love and marriage cannot last. In the long run, Émile’s boredom with his companion makes him look for distraction and amusement. Sophie, deeply disappointed, resorts to adultery. Rousseau was one of the favourite authors of many Romantic writers. He was one of the first to shape the image of the modern individual, trying to define man not on the basis of class and inequality, but on the basis of »humanity« and »nature«. But in doing so, he showed the internal conflict within the modern individual, who is trying to define his status by starting from himself, rather than from given social structures. Such a conflict also characterises the gender dichotomy. The seemingly unambiguous evaluation of the dichotomy, which in Rousseau’s theory is formulated in terms which would seem reactionary today — men are bound up with culture, whereas women belong to nature, which excludes them from cultural achievements — is not corroborated by his texts, where the female characters turn out to be stronger than the male characters, and, as has been shown by feminist readings, the position of the implied author is female rather than male (Garbe 1992). The Romantics continue to explore this field marked by contradictions and paradoxes. We shall consider some of the aspects of this exploration, taking into account their relevance for the status of gender and sexuality in European Romanticism. 1.

»Mais moi, Julie, hélas! errant, sans famille, et presque sans patrie, je n’ai que vous sur la terre, et l’amour seul me tient lieu de tout« (Rousseau 1964, 73).

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Our main concern will be with German, French and Russian texts, but we will also take into account some English, Italian and Czech authors. 2.

Dispositif of alliance vs. Romantic love

Romantic gender roles are related to the new conception of marriage. Since the Romantic ideal is the union of love and marriage, which implies the rejection of conventional marriage based on family alliances, Romantic narratives tend to focus on the period preceding marriage. The protagonists are usually young people trying to find their place in society and the ideal partner. Of course, marriage is far from being seen as unproblematic. In many texts, the leading figures act out variations of the conflict between the dispositif of alliance and the dispositif of sexuality, which is dominant in Rousseau, as has been shown above. Individual desire and social duty, as represented by parental law, are staged as conflicting values. Gender roles have to be studied in the context of this framework. In general, it cannot be said that Romantic texts idealise marriage, even if it is usually seen as the normative model for intimate relationships. Thus, while some texts depict marriage as the happy ending of a love story consisting of removing the obstacles which threaten the lovers’ union — Kleist, Austen, Pushkin, Němcová, Hoffmann, Manzoni, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1825/26) —, or as the eventual legitimisation of a (problematic) sexual relationship existing before marriage — Kleist, Die Marquise von O… (The Marchioness of O…, 1808) —, many texts have a sceptical, sometimes even resentful attitude towards marriage — Jean Paul, Siebenkäs (1796), Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (The Elective Affinities, 1809), Hoffmann, Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov. Negative images of marriage can be explained by different reasons. Sometimes a marriage is not the result of a free decision and consequently does not make the partners happy (Foscolo, Jacopo Ortis [1802], Karamzin, Austen, Pushkin). Sometimes marriage is perceived, mainly by male protagonists, as the loss of freedom and as the end of love. Examples of this can be found in Hoffmann, whose male artists have to choose between art and love, and in Gogol, whose male protagonists experience marriage as a serious danger. Perhaps the most radical example is the so-called lishnii chelovek (»superfluous man«), the Russian version of the Don Juan figure — Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin (1825–33), Lermontov’s Geroi nashego vremeni (A Hero of Our Time, 1840). After Tatiana confesses her love to Onegin, he replies: »Marriage would be a pain for us. However much I loved you — getting accustomed to you would make me stop loving you«.2 The conflict between the dispositif of alliance and the Romantic marriage for love is a conflict between different values: property, money and social status on the one hand, and love, passion and free choice on the other. It is, above all, a conflict between parents and children. The young protagonists want to marry a partner of their choice — someone they love, regardless of social and economic conditions. The protagonists’ parents — who are often represented by the father, the mother having died or being absent — want their children to marry a partner of 2.

»Supruzhestvo nam budet mukoi, / Ia, skol’ko ni liubil by vas, / Privyknuv, razliubliu totchas« (Pushkin 1964, 81).

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socially adequate status. In many cases this is motivated by selfish interests, the parents trying to solve their own (economic, social, or even political) problems by means of their children making a good match. Quite often, in this type of quarrel between parents and their children, the fathers’ behaviour is cruel towards their children, and destructive of their individuality (Gogol, Pushkin). It is striking that — despite the premises of Romantic love and individualism — in many texts the dispositif of alliance, which presupposes submission to parental authority, thereby denying personal autonomy, is shown as quite firmly rooted in society — Karamzin, Bednaia Liza (Poor Liza, 1792), Foscolo, Jacopo Ortis (1802), Mme de Staël, Corinne (1807), Pavlova, Dvoinaia zhizn’ (A Double Life, 1848). This does not necessarily imply a positive judgement — the texts do not recommend the dispositif of alliance as a model of conduct, but by contrasting the desires of Romantic individuals with the mental reservations of the older generations, they expose the discrepancy between social realities and the way of thinking, as well as the difficulties that arise from this discrepancy. But even some of those texts that clearly place their protagonists outside the dispositif of alliance do not create the illusion that the Romantic ideal can be achieved. For example, the protagonist of Constant’s Adolphe (1816) chooses to live in an extramarital relationship with a woman who is the mother of two illegitimate children. Adolphe’s father does not prevent the union. But Adolphe soon realises that his love for Ellénore is merely disguised vanity. He does not really love her, but he just cannot accept rejection by her; that is the reason why he has felt obliged to make her love him in the first place. But once she has fulfilled his desires, he starts turning away from her. Love is only an illusion. Another example of the failure of romantic love is Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Catherine Earnshaw, the daughter of a landowner, loves Heathcliff, whose parents are unknown. But instead of realising her love by obtaining a legal union with Heathcliff, she marries Edgar Linton, whose father is a landowner even richer than hers. She justifies her choice by pointing out the social difference between Edgar and Heathcliff: I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire (Brontë 1976, 100).

Paradoxically, at the very moment in which Catherine evokes her metaphysical love for Heath­ cliff, she decides not to marry him, but someone else. She is not forced but bases her free decision on the social values of her class. Heathcliff, humiliated by Catherine’s statement, which he accidentally overheard, takes revenge by destroying both Catherine’s and her husband’s families. Having achieved this, his only remaining desire is to be reunited with Catherine in her grave after his death. So, the posthumous triumph of romantic love in this particular case is based on lifelong hatred, death and destruction. More so than their male counterparts, female authors seem to have a tendency to believe in the invulnerability of the dispositif of alliance, although they criticise it. This disillusioned

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belief can be transmitted by mothers whose main concern is making a good match for their daughters without considering sentimental preferences (Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813). This attitude comes out clearly in the works of Karolina Pavlova. Her novel Dvoinaia zhizn’, which by its subtitle Ocherk (Draft) refers to the current of socially critical literature characteristic of its era, does not, however, focus on underprivileged characters and the social question, but on upper class women. In this social context, a mother’s central preoccupation is finding a husband for her daughters. The only conceivable destiny for a woman being marriage, it must be the aim of a mother to educate her daughter so as to make her appear a good match, which comes down to blunting her feelings and making her behave like an automaton in society. Thus, having achieved her goal, the heroine’s mother says about her daughter: »Yes, I can say that my efforts have not failed. Cécile is exactly what I wanted to make of her«.3 Furthermore, a man has to be found who possesses money and a good reputation, so as to be a match for the daughter. Not only are the daughter’s personal feelings and desires not taken into account in this commerce, but what is worse, due to her education, the daughter does not even probe into her own feelings. Thus, Dvoinaia zhizn’ tells the story of two friends, Cécile and Olga, who are old enough to be married. Both mothers would like their daughters to marry prince Victor. Yet, after the encounter with Victor’s friend Dmitrii, Cécile believes she has fallen in love with him, without being quite sure. Olga’s mother takes advantage of Cécile’s sentimental confusion by fixing the marriage between Cécile and Dmitrii, thus eliminating her as a rival for her daughter. Dmitrii, however, turns out to be a superficial and unfaithful man even before the wedding. He does not marry Cécile because he loves her, but because he wants her dowry. Using prose and poetry alternately, Pavlova constructs two separate worlds: one being the superficial, inimical, cold life of society which is characterised by lies, intrigues and conventions, and which takes place by day, making us see Cécile’s outer appearance, the other being the realm of dreams which make themselves heard at night, presenting us with the young woman’s internal reality. In her dreams, Cécile, imagining an ideal lover, realises the shortcomings of her daytime life, but, due to her education, she is incapable of changing her life according to her desires. This double life being too exhausting for her, she finally chooses to accept the reality of her daytime life. Before her wedding her ideal dream lover tells her that she is going to be unhappy; after this prophesy he vanishes forever. Having missed the opportunity of liberating herself, Cécile destroys her life by marrying Dmitrii. This type of conflict is indicative of the role of gender, since the female protagonist is often more willing to comply with the rules of the dispositif of alliance than her lover is. In Pushkin, there are several examples of young women who, despite loving the central male figure, prefer to obey their parents by marrying someone they do not love. In Kapitanskaia dochka (The Captain’s Daughter, 1836), the protagonist Grinev is ready to marry Masha against his father’s will, his mother and Masha’s parents being on his side. He plans to marry her secretly, hoping that his father will pardon them after the wedding. Although there are no reasonable obstacles to this plan, since Masha’s parents are in favour of the union and Grinev’s father does not have any serious objections other than his conviction of its childishness, it is out of the question for 3. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Da, ia mogu priznat’sia, chto moi staraniia ne propali: Cécile sovershenno to, chto ia khotela iz nee sdelat’« (Pavlova 1964, 240).

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Masha to act against Grinev’s father’s will: »God’s will be done! He knows better than us what is necessary for us. We cannot help it, Petr Andreich; you are to be happy… […] I will not marry you without your parents’ blessing. Without their blessing, you cannot be happy«.4 The situation is even worse in Evgenii Onegin (1825–33) and in Dubrovskii (1841), which lack the happy ending of Kapitanskaia dochka. In these texts the female figures cling to marriage despite the fact that they do not love their husbands. In Dubrovskii, Masha is to be married to the old landowner, prince Vereiskii, whom she does not love. She tries to escape her destiny by planning to leave with Dubrovskii, her lover. But her father intercepts the letters which the lovers write to each other and keeps his daughter locked up until the wedding can take place under irregular circumstances: the bride is only semi-conscious, and her assent is given by the priest. Yet, when Dubrovskii, who arrives shortly after the wedding ceremony, tries to free Masha by using violence, she says: »It is too late, I am married, I am prince Vereiskii’s wife. […] I have given an oath. […] The prince is my husband, give the order to let him free, and leave us. […] I waited for you until the last minute. But now, I am telling you, it is too late«.5 In these texts, the gender role appropriate to a young woman is stated explicitly: when unmarried, she has to obey her parents, when married, she is supposed to submit to her husband’s will. This is independent of the question whether she has married him voluntarily or not. In other texts, women cling to the dispositif of alliance by letting down their lovers in favour of a good match — Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Odoevskii, Nasmeshka mertvetsa (The Dead Man’s Sneer, 1844). Like Pavlova and other authors, Odoevskii contrasts the paralysing life of social conventions with the »real« life which is the poets’ realm. By marrying a rich man of good reputation, the female protagonist chooses the paralysing life. When the poet, her former lover, dies, she is reminded of the opportunity she has let pass by, but does not regret her choice. While most texts adopt a critical attitude towards the dispositif of alliance, a few of them allow the protagonists to go beyond it by overtly opposing their parents’ will — Kleist, Das Erdbeben in Chili (The Earthquake in Chile, 1807), Die Marquise von O… (The Marchioness of O…, 1808), Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (The Engagement in St. Domingo, 1811), Pushkin, »Metel’« (The Blizzard, 1831), Stantsionnyi smotritel’ (The Stationmaster, 1831) — but when this happens, the love-match is by no means a perfect solution. Pushkin, for example, undermines it by taking an ironic attitude. In »Metel’« the lovers, Masha and Vladimir, plan to get married without their parents’ assent. Since their plan cannot be realised, Masha falls ill, and her parents finally change their minds. They decide to permit the marriage, consoling themselves by saying that »poverty is not a vice; that one does not live with riches, but with people, and things like that«.6 Surprisingly however, Vladimir rejects the parents’ offer, enrols in the army and is killed in action. The reason for his refusal is the failure of the lovers’ former attempt to get married 4.

»Budi vo vsem volia gospodnia! Bog luchshe nashego znaet, chto nam nadobno. Delat’ nechego, Petr Andreich; bud’te khot’ vy schastlivy… […] ia ne vyidu za tebia bez blagosloveniia tvoikh roditelei. Bez ikh blagosloveniia ne budet tebe schastiia« (Pushkin 1995, 311).

5. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Pozdno — ia obvenchana, ia zhena kniazia Vereiskogo. […] ia dala kliatvu […] kniaz’ moi muzh, prikazhite osvobodit’ ego, i ostav’te menia s nim. […] Ia zhdala vas do poslednei minuty… No teper’, govoriu vam, teper’ pozdno« (ibid., 221). 6.

»chto bednost’ ne porok, chto zhit’ ne s bogatstvom, a s chelovekom, i tomu podobnoe« (ibid., 82).

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secretly. On the night of the planned wedding, Vladimir had got lost in a blizzard; meanwhile Masha, having fainted, had been married to a stranger. The irony of this narrative is that, years later, Masha meets this stranger again, falls in love with him and when she wants to marry him, they find out that they are already married. So the love-match is one that cannot take place because it has already happened. In other words, it seems to be just as improbable as the series of coincidences leading up to the final encounter between Masha and her husband. Moreover, the lovers belong to the same class, so that against the woman’s intention, the rules of the dispositif of alliance, which Masha and her first lover wanted to break, are finally fulfilled. In Russian literature, it seems to be easier for men than for women to break the rules of the dispositif of alliance. Nevertheless, as has been shown above, while on the one hand young women respect its constraints, and mothers prepare their daughters to make a good match, on the other hand mothers break the rules for their children’s benefit, preferring their children’s happiness to their own material or social advancement — Pushkin, Arap Petra Velikogo (The Moor of Peter the Great, 1837). The conflict, therefore, is not in all cases one between the older and the younger generation, since sometimes a member of the older generation is in favour of the dispositif of sexuality, whereas in other cases, the daughters accept the premises of the dispositif of alliance. In general, the female role is characterised by weakness. In Western literature, women are depicted as more independent. This can be seen, for example, in Kleist’s novellas mentioned above, which tell stories of lovers whose union is not approved of by their parents. In two cases, the love stories’ end is fatal, since the lovers die. Significantly, in Das Erdbeben in Chili, the male protagonist’s father causes the lovers’ death by identifying his son and handing him over to the furious crowd. In Die Marquise von O…, however, the woman and her mother overcome the father’s resistance to a union between the female protagonist and the anonymous man who has raped her while she was unconscious. The irony of the story is that the rapist turns out to be the Russian officer who has saved Julietta from being raped by a group of Russian soldiers. He has taken advantage of the situation by making love to the unconscious woman. But he really loves her and wants to marry her even before she knows that she has become pregnant. The novella has a happy ending: The father pardons his daughter, accepts her marriage with the Russian officer, and finally Julietta pardons the man who has appeared to her both as an angel, when saving her, and as a devil, when raping her. Since the partners are equal in rank and since they love each other, the union can be considered as a combination of the two dispositifs. 3.

Types of women and men and their relationships

We hope we have made it clear by now that strong, independent women are by no means a usual appearance in Romantic texts. Generally speaking, the dominant perspective is a male one. This does not only hold true for literature, but for the Romantic movement in general (Mellor 1993, Schabert 1997, Becker-Cantarino 2000). It was extremely difficult for women writers to get official recognition from male critics and writers. Accordingly, in the texts, the role of female figures is usually defined in relation to men. Nevertheless, the pattern of male and female types and their relationships is a complicated one (see Hoffmann 1983, Willms 2005).

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The female protagonists are usually quite young and rather attractive (Kleist, Hoffmann, Austen, Pushkin, Gogol, Odoevskii, Lermontov, Pavlova). Their outward appearance and, to a certain extent, their characters are described stereotypically; these women do not seem to have individual features (most strikingly so in Gogol). The insistence on female beauty is in accordance with the dominantly male perspective of Romantic texts. Women are looked upon as potential lovers, not as independent persons. This male point of view, however, is quite often subverted. Thus, in a number of texts, the female characters are far more fascinating than their male counterparts. In general, the heroines fall into two categories: On the one hand there are passive women who are mainly dependent on men. A typical example of this group is the woman being kidnapped — Karamzin, Bednaia Liza, Kleist, Die Verlobung in St. Domingo, Austen, Sense and Sensibility, Pushkin, Stantsionnyi smotritel’, Lermontov, Geroi nashego vremeni. The archetype of this woman is Richardson’s Clarissa, the innocent young lady pursued by a rake. Apart from a few exceptions, this type of woman falls in love with the man who has kidnapped and seduced her, but who usually lets her down afterwards, acting recklessly. The relationships end in disaster either for the woman or for both partners. The Clarissa type figure is one of the stock characters of the Gothic novel (Praz 1966, 83–169). A variant of the passive female type is the muse (Hoffmann, Gogol, Nevskii prospekt, 1835). Especially in Hoffmann, there is a strong desire for women whose only function is the inspiration of male artists; they do not have the right to have an independent position — Der goldne Topf (The Golden Pot, 1814), Der Sandmann (The Sandman, 1816), Der Artushof (King Arthur’s Court, 1816/17). Foscolo’s angel-like Teresa, who is derived from the Petrarchist tradition, is a variant of the passive woman (Jacopo Ortis, 1802). She is unhappy, having been engaged against her will to a man who cannot understand her. When she meets Jacopo they fall in love, but are unable to have a positive relationship. Jacopo projects his own fantasies onto Teresa, recreating her as the ideal woman. On the other hand we find some female protagonists who have a strong character and who strive to gain a position of independence in relation to men, not always successfully — Brentano, Godwi (1801), Mme de Staël, Corinne (1807), Kleist, Die Marquise von O…. In some cases, even those women who seem to be feeble can turn out to be in a position of power. For example, in Gogol, women are represented in a clichéd manner, but their power derives from the fact that, as women, they can arouse sexual desire in men. This makes them uncanny and dangerous. In Constant’s Adolphe (1816), Ellénore, instead of being a simple victim of Adolphe’s seduction, acquires power by taking the decision to leave her former lover and live with Adolphe. She suffers because she realises that Adolphe does not love her, but she makes him suffer by forcing him not to leave her. She is both passive and active. In an even more complex manner, Molly Hodefield in Brentano’s Godwi (1801), who like Ellénore is a seduced woman, manages to cope with her situation, thus gaining a position of independence. She is a sensual character and lives as a kept mistress, disregarding conventional morals. At the same time she is a caring mother and a charitable person. A less common female character type is the eponymous figure of Mme de Staël’s Corinne (1807). The daughter of a Scottish nobleman and an Italian woman, Corinne has grown up in Italy. Her mother has given her a sense of freedom, encouraging her talents as an artist. After her mother’s death, her father takes her to Britain, but she cannot grow accustomed to a social

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environment in which there is no place for independent women. Italy and Britain are opposed to one another as the reigns of freedom and of slavery for women. Corinne chooses freedom, waiving her heritage and her father’s name, and goes back to Italy, where she lives as an artist and poetess. In so doing, she does not simply violate the rules of the dispositif of alliance, but clearly situates herself outside its sphere. Yet when she meets Oswald, a Scottish nobleman, she falls in love with him and realises that despite her success as an artist, she has been missing something essential in her life. There is a problem in that, contrary to Corinne, Oswald does not believe in the superiority of the Italian way of life nor accept female independence. He is under the influence of his late father and can only conceive of living with a woman like Corinne on the condition that they marry and that she give up her artistic career. Corinne, despite her desire for freedom and independence, is ready for this sacrifice, but when the two protagonists tell each other the history of their lives, they find out that Corinne’s and Oswald’s fathers were friends and that they wanted their children to marry each other. This plan, however, had not been realised because Oswald’s father, having met Corinne when she was living in Britain, found her too independent and considered that she was not an adequate partner for his son. This leads to a paradoxical reversal of the situation: Corinne, after giving up her life as an artist and being prepared to sacrifice her independence to Oswald, is rejected by her lover, who cannot free himself from his father’s law. He turns away from Corinne to marry her sister Lucile. The rules of the dispositif of alliance have destroyed Corinne’s and Oswald’s love, but her independence is not destroyed. She succeeds in transforming her suffering into writing before she dies. As a female artist, Corinne is an exception in Romantic literature, but there are some other extremely strong female characters, above all in Stendhal. Unlike in Mme de Staël’s novel, however, Stendhal’s strong women are not confronted with weak characters such as Oswald. On the contrary, Le rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black, 1830), tells the story of a passionate young man, Julien Sorel, who admires and emulates Napoleon. As the son of a craftsman, he belongs to the underprivileged classes of society, but he is extremely ambitious and, thanks to his brilliant intellectual capacities, succeeds in gaining social advancement. In his hometown Verrières he works as the private tutor of the mayor’s children; later he goes to Besançon to become a priest, and finally to Paris, where he is employed as the private secretary of a highly influential nobleman. He encounters and falls in love with two women: Mme de Rênal, the mayor’s wife, and Mathilde de la Mole, his Parisian employer’s daughter, a character endowed with outstanding power. She is admired by all the young noblemen surrounding her, but she feels bored by their presence, having ideas of grandeur which are based on an idealised image of past centuries, and on her admiration of her ancestor Boniface de la Mole, »beloved lover of the most spiritual queen of her century [Marguerite de Navarre], who died for having tried to gain freedom for his friends«.7 She recognises Julien as a kindred spirit, but it is a great effort for him to conquer her heart. What takes place is the meeting of two outstanding characters whose ambitions are greater than those aspired to by the average upper-class citizen in the early nineteenth century. Consequently, their love cannot last. Julien, having been denounced by Mme de Rênal, who is herself under the influence of her father confessor, tries to kill his former 7.

»amant aimé de la reine la plus spirituelle de son siècle, et qui mourut pour avoir voulu rendre la liberté à ses amis« (Stendhal 1989, 288).

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lover and is sentenced to death. Finally, imitating Marguerite de Navarre, Mathilde kisses her decapitated lover’s head. Between these two opposites (active vs. passive women), there are a number of female protagonists who tend towards the active end of the scale. In many texts, young women are strongly influenced by authors such as Rousseau, Richardson, and Ann Radcliffe. Their novels have fashioned the young women’s ideas about love — Austen, Sense and Sensibility, Pushkin, Evgenii Onegin, »Metel’«, Dubrovskii, Lermontov, Geroi nashego vremeni, Pavlova, Dvoinaia zhizn’ — and the texts present this fact ironically. As in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856/57), the failure to distinguish between literature and reality is criticised: the reading of books gives young ladies wrong ideas about life, since hopes and desires aroused by novels cannot be satisfied in reality. What the texts criticise is not literature as such, but a wrong attitude towards books. By clearly emphasising the difference between life and literature, Romantic texts affirm the autonomy of literature; but this is not the only function of the phenomenon. As far as the conflict between the dispositif of alliance and the dispositif of sexuality is concerned, reading novels seems to influence the attitudes of young women in such a way that they cannot accept the restrictions of their social class any more. This is a step towards individual autonomy. Thus literature, despite its claim to autonomy, can have the function of making readers conceive of a world which is different from the one they know. Other female characters have gone farther in this direction, having gained a position of independence — Kleist, Die Marquise von O…, Pushkin, »Metel’«, Kapitanskaia dochka. The difference between the two levels of independence is clearly indicated in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, through the characters of Marianne and Elinor Dashwood. While Marianne who, influenced by literary texts, tries to realise her ideal of Romantic love and is deceived by her lover, Elinor takes a rational stance, finding a compromise between feeling and reason. She is not prepared to marry a man whom she does not love, but her choice of a partner is not independent of social and economic considerations. Eventually, Marianne adopts her sister’s attitude by marrying a wealthy and kind-hearted man, whom she does not love passionately but for whom she feels more than simple friendship. What has been said about young women does not apply to wives and mothers. Far from being weak and submissive, they can be strikingly strong, in either a positive or a negative sense. Positive mothers appear in Kleist’s Die Marquise von O…, or in Pushkin’s »Metel’«, where they take sides against their husbands in order to make their daughters happy, whereas in Gogol, Lermontov or Pushkin, wives are negatively depicted as monsters scolding and beating their husbands. This seems to imply that women are allowed to be strong and powerful once they have been firmly integrated into the dispositif of alliance by having been married by arrangement and after having fulfilled the task of biological reproduction. They are permitted to have power, but only within the bounds of the dispositif of alliance. Male characters are defined in relation to female characters, and vice versa, and their gender roles are defined by such relationships. Men are contrasted with women according to the dichotomic structure of the »two-sex model«, which stipulates that men have to be active, passionate and strong, whereas women are supposed to be passive, receptive and weak. Male and female are complementary characters and feel incomplete without one another, which makes them search for their counterpart. Ideally, a union between a man and a woman founded on love leads to the abolition of all gender differences. Some highly reflective Romantic novels,

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such as Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde (1799), while employing the gender dichotomy, which surely is of basic importance for Schlegel’s conception of romantic love (Elkholy 1999), are nevertheless conscious of its fictitious nature, showing that it can be considered as a role-play. Thus, Julius says to Lucinde: when we swap roles, engaging ourselves with childish joy in a competition about who can imitate the other more perfectly, trying to find out if you are more successful in emulating the considerate vehemence of men, or me in miming the attractive devotion of women. But do you know that this sweet game has other charms for me than those concerning itself? […] To me it is a miraculous, wittily meaningful allegory of the perfection of the male and the female principle into full humanity.8

One of the basic oppositions concerning male gender roles is the contrast between the Romantic protagonist and non-Romantic characters. The latter term of the opposition can be realised either by conformist characters, such as Odoardo in Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis, who represent reason, measure and boredom, or by the ultra-Romantic or nihilist hero who goes beyond Romanticism. In some texts, this opposition is realised by couples, for example in Jean Paul’s Titan (1800–1803, Albano vs. Roquairol), in Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin (Lenskii vs. Onegin) and in Lermontov’s Geroi nashego vremeni (Gruzhnitski vs. Pechorin). In other texts, for example in Lucinde, the protagonist himself represents both aspects of the Romantic character. In general, this type of male figure does not have parents, or at least his parents do not feature in the text. The type of father mentioned above, who tries to protect the dispositif of alliance or to enforce its rules, usually has daughters. Likewise, husbands who live with dominant wives are defined in relation to female characters. Male protagonists, both of the Romantic and of the nihilist type, on the other hand, are free and without any social roots. This is mirrored in their characters and their actions. Above all, the Romantic and the nihilist protagonists differ in their attitudes towards women. Among Romantic protagonists, there are men who try to compensate for their lack of roots by loving someone or by looking for someone to love. Love is depicted as a kind of metaphysical ideal towards which humans strive and which gives their life a telos. This high evaluation of love can partly be explained by the social situation of the protagonists, which is one of homelessness. Love is supposed to give them what they lack. For example, in Dorothea Schlegel’s Florentin (1801), the hero is an adopted child who does not know his parents. His adoptive mother wants him to become a monk and gives him a severe religious education. When he leaves her at the age of fourteen, she tells him that she is not his biological mother. After this, he has an adventurous life as an artist travelling through Italy and other European countries. Finally, he decides to go to America in order to fight for political freedom. But before he can realise this plan, he meets a family of German aristocrats and is talked into staying with them, although he feels like a stranger: »He was melancholic and regretted that he alone was a stranger in this place, where 8. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »wenn wir die Rollen vertauschen und mit kindischer Lust wetteifern, wer den andern täuschender nachäffen kann, ob dir die schonende Heftigkeit des Mannes besser gelingt, oder mir die anziehende Hingebung des Weibes. Aber weißt du wohl, daß dieses süße Spiel für mich noch ganz andre Reize hat als seine eignen? […] Ich sehe hier eine wunderbare sinnreich bedeutende Allegorie auf die Vollendung des Männlichen und Weiblichen zur vollen ganzen Menschheit« (F. Schlegel 1962, 12 f.).

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there seemed to be a law that people belonged to each other, he regretted that he was on his own, that all over the world he had no relatives, that no person’s existence was tied up with his own«.9 He makes friends with Juliane and Eduard, who are engaged to be married. On one occasion, Juliane wants to know whom Florentin loves. His answer is that he has had many lovers, but that he has not yet encountered a woman whom he might truly love: I do have love in my bosom, Juliane, but a woman to whom it might belong and who might share it with me…I have not yet found her! […] But an object for my love, which so far has existed unrewarded but deep down in my heart — where would I possibly find it? It exists somewhere, I’m sure, this merry presentiment makes me cling to life: but where does it exist? where can I find it?10

It is exceptional for love affairs to be happy or for the union of love and marriage to be achieved. Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde (1799) is one of the rare examples of a happy relationship between lovers. Julius, who has had many love affairs, living a life of amusement and distraction, meets Lucinde who is a kindred spirit. However, he takes some time to realise that he has encountered the ideal of love: He had been looking for love and happiness wherever they could not be found, and now that he possessed the utmost, he had not even been able to call it by its name, or he dared not. Now he did realise that, for a man, love, which for a woman’s soul is an indivisible, indeed a simple feeling, can only be an alternation and a mixture of passion, friendship and sensuality; and with merry amazement he saw that the love he received was just as infinite as the love he gave.11

This quotation shows a significant nexus between love and gender. In loving Lucinde, Julius experiences the difference between man and woman. Despite this difference, happiness presupposes the equality of feeling, the abolition of differences, the fusion of opposites. If, according to Balzac, it is true that the depiction of happiness is boring in narrative texts (cf. Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes [The Splendour and Misery of the Courtesans, 1838–47], 1st part, chap. 15), this may be the reason why happy relationships are so rare even in Romantic literature. Therefore, it is logical that in Lucinde, the relationship itself is not narrated. Instead, the protagonists reflect upon it (in letters, allegories, fragmentary texts and the like), or Julius tells the history of his life, contrasting former love experiences with his love for Lucinde. 9.

»Er war schwermütig, es war ihm traurig, daß er allein hier ein Fremdling sei, wo es ein Gesetz schien, einander anzugehören, daß er allein stehe, daß in der weiten Welt kein Wesen mit ihm verwandt, keines Menschen Existenz an die seinige geknüpft sei« (D. Schlegel 1993, 25).

10.

»Wohl trage ich Liebe in meiner Brust, Juliane, aber ein Weib, dem sie eigen gehörte, die sie mit mir teilte… die fand ich noch nie! […] Einen Gegenstand der Liebe aber, die bis jetzt mir nur unbelohnt, aber tief im Herzen lebt, wo würde ich den wohl finden? Er existiert irgendwo, das weiß ich, von dieser frohen Ahndung werde ich im Leben festgehalten: aber wo er existiert? wo ich ihn finde?« (ibid., 46).

»Er hatte die Liebe und das Glück überall gesucht, wo sie nicht zu finden waren, und nun da er das Höch11. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ste besaß, hatte er nicht einmal gewußt oder gewagt, ihm den rechten Namen zu geben. Er erkannte nun wohl, daß die Liebe, die für die weibliche Seele ein unteilbares durchaus einfaches Gefühl ist, für den Mann nur ein Wechsel und eine Mischung von Leidenschaft, von Freundschaft und von Sinnlichkeit sein kann; und er sah mit frohem Erstaunen, daß er eben so unendlich geliebt werde wie er liebe« (F. Schlegel 1962, 56).

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Other heroes do not have a predisposition for marriage, above all the young artist seeing himself as a genius and often marked by symptoms of madness — Hoffmann, Der goldne Topf, Der Sandmann, Der Artushof, Gogol, »Portret« (The Portrait, 1835/42), Nevskii prospect (1835), Odoevskii, Nasmeshka mertvetsa, Sil’fida (The Sylphid, 1837). Usually the relationships between artists and women are doomed to fail, since artists have to transform their sexual desire into artistic creativity. An early example of the artist’s dilemma can be found in Jean Paul’s novel Siebenkäs. The protagonist, who is an advocate for poor people, marries Lenette, whom he loves. He is not rich but has inherited a small fortune which could guarantee a living. But the money is in the hands of his guardian, and Siebenkäs, who has artistic ambitions, has not paid any attention to it before his wedding. In any case, he does not want a marriage to be based on material interests, clearly rejecting the dispositif of alliance. Once married to Lenette, however, he needs the money because he does not earn enough as an advocate. The problem is that he has swapped names with his friend Leibgeber, who is his double, or Doppelgänger. Having lost his identity, he cannot claim the money anymore, so he tries to make money as a writer. This leads to a conflict with his wife, who will not let him study and write in tranquillity, because she does not understand why he has lost his fortune, nor why he wants to be an artist. The dispositif of sexuality does not work, since it interferes with artistic creativity. Gradually poverty and mutual misunderstanding destroy the love between Siebenkäs and Lenette. Moreover, they do not have children. Since both are unhappy, Siebenkäs decides to simulate his own death in order to escape from the situation. Meanwhile he has met and fallen in love with Natalie, who is a reader of his books and who understands him. After his simulated death, he is free to start a new life, and at the end of the novel meets Natalie again. A happy ending is intimated. Thus, the Romantic artist can only live in an artificial world which he has created himself. He cannot have children, and he experiences love through books. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) can be interpreted as a more radical version of the conflict between artistic creation and marriage/procreation — an allegory of artistic creativity. The protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, is a scientist who creates an artificial man. The being he has called into life by using appendages taken from dead bodies turns out to be a hideous monster. This monster has human impulses and intellect and wants to live a normal life, but since he is rejected by humans because of his ugliness, he takes revenge by killing his creator’s friends and relatives. Finally, on the night of Frankenstein’s wedding, the monster kills Victor’s bride Elizabeth. While the literal reading of the novel is that the »modern Prometheus« Victor Frankenstein is severely punished for his ruthless curiosity, a possible allegorical reading is that artificial creation is sterile and excludes love, procreation and happiness. Other Romantic heroes can only live in solitude, for example the protagonists in Chateaubriand’s René (1802) and Senancour’s Obermann (1804). The Frenchman René, living among native Americans in the Mississippi area, marries a woman according to the customs of the tribe, but refuses to live with her. When his comrades inquire after the causes of his melancholy attitude, he tells them the story of his life. He has spent his early years restlessly travelling through Europe. After his return to France, he settles down in the solitude of the countryside. His character is ambivalent. He cannot live in society, but he feels lonely in the countryside, longing for a woman he might love.

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Thomas Klinkert / Weertje Willms I was full of religion, and my reasoning was impious; my heart loved God, and my spirit misunderstood Him; my conduct, my speech, my sentiments, my thoughts were nothing but contradiction, darkness, lies. But does a man always perfectly know what he wants, is he always sure of what he is thinking?12

The situation changes when René discovers that his sister Amélie loves him secretly, and that, repentant of what she considers a sin, she has decided to become a nun. Finally, René has found a cause for his suffering, and this makes him almost happy. Instead of committing suicide, as he planned to do when his suffering was imaginary, now that he suffers from real causes, he goes to North America, leaving European civilisation behind. For a character like René, the archetypal solitary Romantic hero, love and marriage only exist negatively, as that which the hero longs for but can never find in reality. The decadent version of the artist is the Romantic hero for whom simulated Romanticism is a kind of life style. Quite often this figure is depicted in an ironic manner. This type is incarnated by Pushkin’s Lenskii (Evgenii Onegin) and by Lermontov’s Gruzhnitski in Geroi nashego vremeni. Both see themselves as Romantic artists and live their lives as if they were on a stage. Thus, Lermontov’s narrator says about Gruzhnitski: He belongs to those people who have splendid ready-made phrases for any occasion, […] pompously draping themselves with uncommon feelings, sublime passions, and exceptional sufferings. […] Romantic provincial ladies love them furiously. […] His aim is to be the hero of a novel. So often has he been at pains to convince the others that he has not been created for this world, […] that now he almost believes it himself. […] Likewise, his stay in the Caucasus is the consequence of his Romantic fanaticism.13

Both Lenskii and Gruzhnitski, in Romantic exaggeration, fight duels with their opponents, and both are killed. Symbolically, this marks the end of Romanticism. The ridiculous Romantic’s opponent is the Romantic who is conscious of his own motives, the Don Juan type, the nihilist, the cynic, or the lishnii chelovek (»superfluous man«, for example Erast in Karamzin’s Bednaia Liza, Roquairol in Jean Paul’s Titan, Willoughby in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Pechorin in Lermontov’s Geroi nashego vremeni, Pushkin’s Onegin). This character acts immorally, playing with the feelings of the people around him, especially those of young women. He is a reckless seducer, who is bored by everything, including the fact that he can anticipate the young ladies’ reactions. However beautiful and uncommon a woman may be, as soon as she falls in love with him, she stops being interesting and charming for him. 12.

»J’étais plein de religion, et je raisonnais en impie; mon cœur aimait Dieu, et mon esprit le méconnaissait; ma conduite, mes discours, mes sentiments, mes pensées, n’étaient que contradiction, ténèbres, mensonges. Mais l’homme sait-il bien toujours ce qu’il veut, est-il toujours sûr de ce qu’il pense?« (Chateaubriand 1969, 131).

»on iz tekh liudei, kotorye na vse sluchai zhizni imeiut gotovye pyshnye frazy, […] kotorye vazhno drapi13. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ruiutsia v neobyknovennye chuvstva, vozvyshennye strasti i iskliuchitel’nye stradaniia. […] oni nraviatsia romanticheskim provintsialkam do bezumiia. […] Ego tsel’ — sdelat’sia geroem romana. On tak chasto staralsia uverit’ drugikh v tom, chto on sushchestvo, ne sozdannoe dlia mira […], chto on sam pochti v ėtom uverilsia. […] Priezd ego na Kavkaz — takzhe sledstvie ego romanticheskogo fanatizma« (Lermontov 1976, 63 f.).

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Inevitably, he will let her down. If he causes suffering in those who love him, he suffers himself because he is unable to have interpersonal relationships and to live in harmony with his own desires. When Constant’s Adolphe, who has seduced Ellénore to satisfy his vanity, realises that he does not love her, he tries to leave her. Lucidly analysing his contradictory feelings and far from being reckless, he is unable to act, because he does not want Ellénore to suffer. But although he avoids confronting her with the truth, he cannot help showing symptoms of his indifference, which makes her suffer even more than an overt confession would have done. After Ellénore’s death, which is a consequence of her suffering, Adolphe reads a letter which she wrote to him and in which she expresses her feelings: »You are good, your actions are noble and full of devotion: but which actions could make your words unspoken? Those piercing words thunder around me: I hear them at night; they follow me, they devour me, they mar everything you do«.14 Adolphe is not a seducer of the Don Juan type, but he suffers and causes suffering because of an initial fault committed out of vanity. Lermontov’s Pechorin is perhaps the most radical and cynical incarnation of this type. He suffers from the sentimental void which he discovers in himself and from being incapable of having positive interpersonal relationships. All activities in which he has tried to engage in order to distract himself have sooner or later turned out to be boring. His last resort is travelling, which finally leads to his death. 4.

Sexuality

Despite the general importance of sexuality for Romantic individuals who, as has been shown, are exponents of the dispositif of sexuality, sexual encounters are usually not represented in Romantic texts. This does not mean that sexual desire does not exist. On the contrary, it is quite often one of the principal triggers of love. Passionate gestures (kisses, embraces) can be represented. Sexual intercourse, however, is largely avoided. It can happen, but when it does it is not focused on by the texts, and quite often it is even punished. The ambivalent status of sexuality can be clearly seen in a text whose hero was to become one of the archetypal romantic lovers: Goethe’s epistolary novel Werther, 1774 (cf. the chapter by B. Dieterle in this volume). The hero falls in love with Lotte, who is engaged to marry Albert. According to Werther, Lotte cannot be duly appreciated by Albert, who incarnates reason; she was made to be loved by a passionate character like Werther. Finally, when he realises that there is no way of gaining Lotte’s love and finding it impossible to live without her, he commits suicide. Throughout the novel, Werther speaks of his furious desire for Lotte which he himself considers as illegitimate. For example, in the letter written on 14th December, he declares himself shocked by a dream in which he has held her in his arms, kissing her passionately. Such a behaviour does not correspond to his ideal of pure love. According to Kittler (1980), Werther’s renunciation of sexuality is paradigmatic of Romantic love, in that it coincides with a strong impulse to write: sexuality is not acted out, but it is substituted by writing. 14.

»Vous êtes bon; vos actions sont nobles et dévouées: mais quelles actions effaceraient vos paroles? Ces paroles acérées retentissent autour de moi: je les entends la nuit; elles me suivent, elles me dévorent, elles flétrissent tout ce que vous faites« (Constant 1955, 144 f.).

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The representation of sexuality is usually indirect, sometimes being narrated in metaphorical terms. For example, narrators will give information from which it can be inferred that a sexual encounter has occurred between two lovers (Karamzin, Bednaia Liza, Austen, Sense and Sensibility, Pushkin). In other texts the sexual encounter is marked by a gap, for example the famous dash in Kleist’s Die Marquise von O…, or the following comment in Die Verlobung in St. Domingo: »It is not necessary for us to report what happened then, because everyone having read up to now will substitute it automatically«.15 In Lermontov’s Geroi nashego vremeni, the sexual act is hinted at by two lines of dots, the narrator telling us: »About two hours past midnight I opened the window and […] got down from the upper balcony«.16 In some texts the omission of sexuality is commented on ironically when characters react with amazement to the existence of pregnant women or babies — Gogol, Pushkin, Dubrovskii. Discreetly allusive and metaphorical representations of sexual encounters can be found in Goethe — Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years, 1795/96), Die Wahlverwandtschaften (The Elective Affinities, 1809) — or in Brentano (Godwi, 1801). When Brentano’s hero tells the narrator about his father’s encounter with Molly Hodefield, he depicts her as sitting in front of a mirror and regarding her naked breasts which she metaphorically calls »those two lives«. Godwi goes on to say: I will not […] continue to tell you the way in which my father seduced this woman. — Soon he was lying by those two lives, but without having regained his enthusiasm; he was playing with them like he did with all lives, took everything which the flowering blossoms offered him, swore that he had enjoyed more than he had expected, and left her bed; she grasped him with her tender arms and didn’t understand him.17

By his way of narrating the sexual encounter, Godwi makes clear that in itself it is not very important. What matters is that it has occurred and which consequences it has, namely that Molly gets pregnant and will be the mother of Karl Römer, whom she will meet again years later without immediately recognising him as her son. Thus, in the long run, the sexual encounter with Godwi’s father leads to an incestuous situation. This is a typical example of the problems caused by the dispositif of sexuality according to literary texts. It has been shown by Titzmann (1991) that incest occurs in a highly significant number of texts between 1770 and 1830. He has analysed 487 German narrative texts and found that about 10% of them feature incestuous situations and, furthermore, that all major authors have written such texts. Whereas in the juridical reality of that time, incest, as well as »sodomy« (i.e. all kinds of »unnatural« sexuality), was no longer considered as a capital crime, in literary 15.

»Was weiter erfolgte, brauchen wir nicht zu melden, weil es jeder, der an diese Stelle kommt, von selbst liest« (Kleist 1990, 238).

16.

»Okolo dvukh chasov popolunochi ia otvoril okno i […] spustilsia s verkhnego balkona« (Lermontov 1976, 111).

17.

»Ich will Ihnen […] nicht weiter erzählen, wie mein Vater dies Weib verführte. — Bald lag er an diesen beiden Leben, aber er war nicht wieder zum Enthusiasten erwarmt, er spielte mit ihnen, wie mit allen Leben, nahm alles, was die volle Blüthe ihm entgegen drängte, schwor ihr, er habe mehr genossen, als er vermuthet habe, und verließ ihr Bett; sie faßte ihn mit ihren zarten Armen und verstand ihn nicht« (Brentano 1978, 471).

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texts any incestuous sexual encounter is inevitably punished, usually by death or an equivalent of death (such as madness or monastery). If, in the juridical field, the prohibition of incest cannot be founded on rational arguments, which leads to a relatively tolerant attitude towards it, the severe punishment of incest in literary texts seems to suggest that what is at stake is not a juridical question, but the relationship between the individual and the family. The inclusion of sexuality in the sphere of the family, which is the principal feature of the dispositif of sexuality, seems to jeopardise the autonomy of the individual. The sexualised family has an ambivalent status; the individual must leave the family in order to realise his or her potential by obtaining Bildung (Titzmann 1991, 275). At the same time, the frequency of incestuous situations can be interpreted in terms of the fact that sexuality is produced within the conjugal family (Kittler 1978 and 1991). The ancient rule of exogamy is replaced by the rule that the members of the conjugal family have to desire and love each other, which is realised by intimacy and education within the family. The father, who used to be outside the family, is integrated into it as the loving counterpart of the mother, but his dominant role is taken over by her. Children have to be educated by their mothers. Whereas the »two-sex model« reduces women to silence in the public sphere, in the private sphere of the family they gain power as mothers. But the pervasive presence of sexuality within the family is considered as dangerous and uncanny. The fact that love scenes are rarely represented in Romantic literature correlates with a generally negative evaluation of sexuality. In some texts sexual desire is severely punished (Hoffmann, Die Bergwerke zu Falun [The Mines of Falun, 1819], Gogol). This is one of the most striking features in Gogol, in whose narratives women are usually depicted as dangerous and fatal. Thus in Vii (The Vii, 1835), the Madonna-like beautiful young lady turns out to be a witch who finally causes the protagonist’s death. The protagonist’s reactions to her beauty are clearly voluptuous, but he finds this disconcerting. In Hoffmann and Gogol, positive relationships between men and women presuppose the exclusion of sexuality (Der goldne Topf, Starosvetskie pomeshchiki [Old-fashioned Landowners, 1835]). In the Gothic novel — Ann Radcliffe, Lewis, The Monk (1796), Hoffmann, Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs, 1815/16) — sexuality holds an exceptional position within Romanticism. These texts explore the unconscious, their characters being on the brink of madness, possessed by demons and devils, or driven by a dangerous curiosity, and sexuality is realised in a transgressive way (rape, incest, murder, sadomasochism). In the female Gothic — Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) —, the exploration of the uncanny by the curious female protagonist, who penetrates into the dark sphere of rejected and monstrous sexuality and femininity, is embedded in a moralising narrative frame which restores the conventional order of desire. By contrast, the male Gothic (Lewis, The Monk) abandons this order of desire by demonising the feminine and by establishing a new and negative knowledge of the unconscious (Schabert 1997, 397–419). In several texts the idea of a pure, platonic love is contrasted with sexuality, which is associated with »dirty« voluptuousness — Karamzin, Bednaia Liza, Jean Paul, Titan, Foscolo, Jacopo Ortis, Lermontov, Vadim (1833/34), Gogol, Nevskii prospekt. This can partly be explained by the fact that for attractive and intelligent men, especially noblemen, seducing women is not a challenge, so that having sexual intercourse with different partners will soon prove a boring occupation. Pure, innocent, platonic love, however, appears as a goal which is difficult to reach.

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The renunciation of sexuality can therefore be considered as a means of Romantic self-styling. The Romantic hero, who wants to be different, disdains common, everyday values. This is true also of the seducer, who will turn away from women who have fulfilled his desires because sexuality is fascinating only as long as the desire is not satisfied. In order to be interesting, a woman has to be out of reach. If she falls in love with the seducer, she loses her attractiveness for him — Karamzin, Bednaia Liza, Austen, Sense and Sensibility, Constant, Adolphe, Pushkin, Evgenii Onegin, Lermontov, Geroi nashego vremeni. Usually it is the woman who falls in love with her seducer but in some cases women act as seducers themselves, for example Euphemie in Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels. Sexuality is also depreciated because it is linked with the banal and utilitarian reproductive function and thus with bourgeois society. This is opposed to the nobler function of artistic sublimation — Jean Paul, Siebenkäs, Hölderlin, Hyperion (1797/99), Mme de Staël, Corinne, Hoffmann, Der goldne Topf, Gogol, »Portret«, Odoevskii, Sil’fida, Pushkin, Evgenii Onegin. In this context the positive evaluation of sexuality and its reproductive consequences in authors such as Kleist, Friedrich Schlegel or Nĕmcová is exceptional. Kleist states explicitly that sexuality is the basis of marriage and the family. Love and sexuality belong together and can even make protagonists violate the limits of social conventions. In Das Erdbeben in Chile, the union of love and sexual reproduction is interpreted in a metaphysical sense, in that it helps realise the utopia of a return to paradise. There is hardly any other Romantic text in which a baby as the product of an illegitimate sexual relationship fulfils a function of similar importance. Here, the baby is, if only temporarily, the basis of a utopian community. The omission and the depreciation of sexuality cannot be explained by moral reasons. As can be seen most clearly in the Don Juan type character or the lishnii chelovek (»superfluous man«), morality is not usually a factor which governs Romantic characters’ behaviour. Even a character such as Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis, who does not take the chance to gain his beloved Teresa, does not reject sexuality for moral reasons, although Teresa is unhappy and although her father has destroyed his own family by enforcing his daughter’s marriage with Odoardo. Jacopo needs to suffer in order to be the exceptional Romantic hero he considers himself to be. Even when it is not used as a means of Romantic self-styling, the renunciation of sexuality is necessary because the Romantic artist has to or wants to transform his sexual desires into artistic creativity. This artistic sublimation and the conflicts associated with it are the subject of many Romantic texts — Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs, Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Mme de Staël’s Corinne, Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf and Der Artushof, Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl (1814), Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, Gogol’s »Portret«. Hoffmann, who has influenced authors such as Odoevskii and Gogol, has based almost his entire work on the opposition between the bourgeois world and the artist’s realm. Der Artushof can be considered as paradigmatic in this respect. Traugott, a young man without roots, is attracted by two women who symbolically represent two ways of life — the life as a bourgeois and the life as an artist. These different ways of life are associated with two forms of love — sexual and spiritual love. At first, Traugott does not realise that his vocation is being an artist; he wants to be a bourgeois merchant. His fiancée, Christina, like almost all her literary sisters in Hoffmann, is characterised by a sense of economic pragmatism and good housekeeping. Even her conception of love is tainted by her utilitarian pragmatism. Her choice of a husband is guided

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by economic considerations, and the aim of marriage is biological reproduction. Traugott, the artist, however, is guided in another direction. On seeing a portrait of Felizitas he falls in love with her and goes to Italy in search of her. This voyage is a rite of passage, at the end of which Traugott has passed into the realm of art. He realises that the woman he loves is his Muse, who must necessarily remain out of reach: »Marvellously, he could not imagine possessing as his wife the beloved woman who had disappeared. Felizitas appeared to him as a spiritual image which he could never lose nor gain. Everlasting spiritual presence of the beloved woman — no physical possession«.18 He definitely realises this when he learns that Felizitas does not live in Italy, where he has been looking for her, but in his hometown Danzig, and that she is married and has several children. Despite this, Traugott says: »No, no, Felizitas, I have never lost you, you will always be mine, since you yourself are the artistic principle at work in me«.19 Artistic creation can only be realised by a loving person, but his love must not be absorbed by marriage, sexuality and procreation, because this would end the artist’s quest. The artist’s libidinal energy must nourish his work. A variant of the artist figure is the person who sacrifices love to science, for example Schlemihl (Chamisso) or Frankenstein (Mary Shelley). The principle of sublimation reaches its peak in Pushkin and Lermontov. Their protagonists Onegin and Pechorin suffer from an incurable existential boredom. Having understood the mentality of women, they are tired of them. The repetitive game of seduction causes them nothing but ennui. Finally the attempt to replace love with art or science in order to fill the internal void fails as well: Yawning and taking a pen, he tried to write — but permanent work disgusted him: Nothing was produced by his pen […]. And again condemned to idleness, tormented by the void of his soul, he sat down with the commendable intention to acquire other persons’ knowledge […]. As he had done with women, he left books.20

5.

Conclusion

The nihilist character in Romantic literature is of paradigmatic importance because he demonstrates in a most radical way the consequences of a social evolution which leads to the exclusion of the individual from all social systems (Luhmann 1989/1993). At the same time this character reflects the status of literature and art in modern society. Just as the individual is set free, losing his or her identity as a member of a specific social entity, thus being exposed to risks and opportunities of an unknown kind, so literature is liberated from its former functions which can 18.

»Auf wunderbare Weise konnte er sich den Besitz der entschwundenen Geliebten als Frau nicht wohl denken. Felizitas stellte sich ihm dar als ein geistig Bild, das er nie verlieren, nie gewinnen könne. Ewiges geistiges Inwohnen der Geliebten — niemals physisches Haben und Besitzen« (Hoffmann 2001, 202).

19.

»Nein, nein, Felizitas, nie habe ich dich verloren, du bleibst mein immerdar, denn du selbst bist ja die schaffende Kunst, die in mir lebt« (ibid., 206).

20. »Zevaia, za pero vzialsia, / Khotel pisat’ — no trud upornyi / Emu byl toshen; nichego / Ne vyshlo iz pera ego, […] / I snova, predannyi bezdel’iu, / Tomias’ dushevnoi pustotoi, / Uselsia on — s pokhval’noi tsel’iu / Sebe prisvoit’ um chuzhoi; / […] Kak zhenshchin, on ostavil knigi« (Pushkin 1964, 27 f.).

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best be described succinctly by quoting Horace: prodesse (»being useful«) and delectare (»being amusing«). As is well known, ever since Romanticism, literature has been defined as autonomous: it is no longer subject to external determining factors, it does not need to be useful or amusing any more. (Of course it can continue to be so, but this is no longer an essential category of literary self-description.) Now, an analogous kind of autonomy is represented by characters such as Onegin or Pechorin. Compared with the libertin of the eighteenth-century novel, for example Valmont in Laclos’s Les liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons, 1782), who in some respects resembles the Romantic nihilists, the latter lack any kind of external determining factors. While Valmont is bent on defending a certain ideological position, namely that people who pretend to be sexually virtuous are hypocrites, Onegin and Pechorin do not even have an ideological position to defend. Their ennui is not the symptom of a crisis of social values but is indicative of the crisis of the rootless individual. We have considered some aspects of this latter crisis, starting with Rousseau, who was one of the most important precursors of the Romantics. The conflict between the ancient dispositif of alliance and the modern dispositif of sexuality (Foucault), which recodes the roles of gender and sexuality, is the subject of La nouvelle Héloïse, and many variations of this conflict are to be found in Romantic novels and narratives. The ways in which this conflict is treated seem to indicate the conviction that — despite Romantic theories of love which postulate the happy union of love and marriage — the dispositif of alliance is still quite firmly rooted in contemporary society. Some male protagonists shrink from marriage because they feel threatened by a permanent relationship, while some female characters willingly accept the constraints of the dispositif of alliance. This clarifies the different possibilities of action accorded to men and women within the sphere of the »two-sex model« (Laqueur). While women are often depicted as passive and submissive, especially the young lady being kidnapped by a rake and falling in love with him, very few female characters appear strong and independent (Molly Hodefield, Corinne, Mathilde de la Mole). Men, on the contrary, are not only more independent, but quite often lack social roots. This makes them seek for love as a compensation for their homelessness. The Romantic protagonist usually desires the company of a loving woman, unless he is an artist who can only accept the presence of a Muse inspiring his creativity, a solitary character such as René or Obermann, or a seducer. In general, many authors seem to have a sceptical attitude towards the ideal of Romantic love and of marriage. Happy relationships between men and women are few and far between, which is due to a number of reasons (external obstacles prevent the lovers’ union; the lovers’ inner turmoil renders them incapable of having a permanent relationship; love alone cannot abolish the differences between the lovers). Sexuality, which is the basis of the new type of union between men and women, is rarely represented in Romantic texts, or only indirectly (except in the Gothic novel). The attitude towards sexuality is generally marked by uneasiness and ambivalence. Quite often characters that have sex are punished. There are various reasons for this negative standpoint. Sexuality is considered as a common, banal or even beast-like activity, which the Romantic protagonist renounces. One of the central conflicts concerning sexuality is its ambivalent relationship to artistic creativity; artists have to decide whether they want to create or procreate. Finally, incest is an indicator of the problematic status of the modern conjugal family, which, by integrating sexuality, threatens the autonomy of (male) individuals.

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The (incomplete) panorama of Romantic gender roles and sexuality which we have outlined shows clearly that it is impossible to speak of a consistent position concerning these aspects in Romantic literary texts. It would be more correct to say that Romantic prose fiction is an experimental laboratory in which different models of gender roles and sexuality are developed. Literary texts do not usually concord with or confirm official doctrines, such as the gender models and marriage conceptions in the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt or Fichte. Rousseau himself, who was a writer of both fiction and philosophy, did not confirm his own theories in his literary texts. It is certainly one of the principal charms of literature that by keeping a critical distance from official doctrines such as the gender dichotomy, authors expose the blind spots within the dominant discourse. Bibliography Balzac, Honoré de. 1968. Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. Ed. by Pierre Citron. Paris: Flammarion. Becker-Cantarino, Barbara. 2000. Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik: Epoche — Werk — Wirkung. München: Beck. Brentano, Clemens. 1978. Godwi oder Das steinerne Bild der Mutter: Ein verwilderter Roman von Maria. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Ed. by Jürgen Behrens, Wolfgang Frühwald and Detlev Lüders. Vol. 16. Ed. by Werner Bellmann. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Brontë, Emily. 1976. Wuthering Heights. Ed. by Hilda Marsden and Ian Jack. Oxford: Oxford UP. Chateaubriand, François-René de. 1969. René. Œuvres romanesques et voyages. Vol. 1. Ed. by Maurice Regard. Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade). Constant, Benjamin. 1955. Adolphe: Anecdote trouvée dans les papiers d’un inconnu. Ed. by Jacques-Henri Bornecque. Paris: Garnier. Elkholy, Sharin N. 1999. »What’s Gender Got to do With it?: A Phenomenology of Romantic Love«. Athenäum: Jahrbuch für Romantik. 9: 121–159. Foucault, Michel. 1976. Histoire de la sexualité 1: La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard. Garbe, Christine. 1992. Die »weibliche« List im »männlichen« Text: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in der feministischen Kritik. Stuttgart: Metzler. Hausen, Karin. 1976. »Die Polarisierung der ›Geschlechtscharaktere‹ — Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben«. Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas. Ed. by Werner Conze. Stuttgart: Klett. 363–393. Hinderer, Walter (ed.). 1997. Codierungen von Liebe in der Kunstperiode. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. 2001. Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden. Ed. by Hartmut Steinecke and Wulf Segebrecht. Vol. 4: Die Serapionsbrüder. Ed. by Wulf Segebrecht and Ursula Segebrecht. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Hoffmann, Volker. 1983. »Elisa und Robert oder das Weib und der Mann, wie sie sein sollten: Anmerkungen zur Geschlechtercharakteristik der Goethezeit«. Klassik und Moderne: Die Weimarer Klassik als historisches Ereignis und Herausforderung im kulturgeschichtlichen Prozeß. Ed. by Karl Richter and Jörg Schönert. Stuttgart: Metzler. 80–97. Jehlen, Myra. 1990. »Gender«. Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago, London: Chicago UP. 263–273. Kittler, Friedrich A. 1978. »Der Dichter, die Mutter, das Kind: Zur romantischen Erfindung der Sexualität«. Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, Sonderband 1978: Romantik in Deutschland. Ed. by Richard Brinkmann. 102–114. ———. 1980. »Autorschaft und Liebe«. Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften: Programme des Poststrukturalismus. Ed. by Friedrich A. Kittler. Paderborn: Schöningh. 142–173. ———. 1991. Dichter — Mutter — Kind. München: Fink.

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Kleist, Heinrich von. 1990. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe in vier Bänden. Ed. by Ilse-Marie Barth et al. Vol. 3: Erzählungen, Anekdoten, Gedichte, Schriften. Ed. by Klaus Müller-Salget. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Klinkert, Thomas. 2002. Literarische Selbstreflexion im Medium der Liebe: Untersuchungen zur Liebessemantik bei Rousseau und in der europäischen Romantik (Hölderlin, Foscolo, Madame de Staël und Leopardi). Freiburg: Rombach. Laqueur, Thomas. 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge/Mass., London: Harvard UP. Lermontov, Mikhail Iur’evich. 1976. Geroi nashego vremeni. Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh. Vol. 4: Proza. Pis’ma. Ed. by V. Volina and Ch. Zalilova. Moskva: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Luhmann, Niklas. 1982/1995. Liebe als Passion: Zur Codierung von Intimität. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1989/1993. »Individuum, Individualität, Individualismus«. Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft. Vol. 3. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. 149–258. ———. 1995. Die Kunst der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1997. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. 2 vols. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Mellor, Anne K. 1993. Romanticism & Gender. New York, London: Routledge. Pavlova, Karolina Karlovna. 1964. Dvoinaia zhizn’. Ocherk: Polnoe Sobranie Stikhotvorenii. Ed. by N. M. Gaidenkov. Moskva-Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’. Praz, Mario. 1966. La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura Romantica. 4th edition. Firenze: Sansoni. Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich. 1964. Evgenii Onegin. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh. Vol. 5: Evgenii Onegin, Dramaticheskie proizvedeniia. 3rd edition. Ed. by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Moskva: Nauka. ———. 1995. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. V 17 tomakh. Vol. 8: Romany i povesti. Puteshestviia. Ed. by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Moskva: Voskresen’e. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1964. Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse. Œuvres complètes. Vol. 2. Ed. by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade). ———. 1969. Émile ou de l’Éducation. Œuvres complètes. Vol. 4. Ed. by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade). Schabert, Ina. 1997. Englische Literaturgeschichte: Eine neue Darstellung aus der Sicht der Geschlechterforschung. Stuttgart: Kröner. Schlegel, Dorothea. 1993. Florentin. Ed. by Wolfgang Nehring. Stuttgart: Reclam. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1962. Lucinde. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Ed. by Ernst Behler. Vol. 5: Dichtungen. Ed. by Hans Eichner. München, Paderborn, Wien, Zürich: Thomas Schöningh. Stendhal [i.e. Henri Beyle]. 1989. Le Rouge et le noir: Chronique du XIXe siècle. Ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex. Paris: Bordas (Classiques Garnier). Titzmann, Michael. 1991. »Literarische Strukturen und kulturelles Wissen: Das Beispiel inzestuöser Situationen in der Erzählliteratur der Goethezeit und ihrer Funktionen im Denksystem der Epoche«. Erzählte Kriminalität: Zur Typologie und Funktion von narrativen Darstellungen in Strafrechtspflege, Publizistik und Literatur. Ed. by Jörg Schönert. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 229–281. Willms, Weertje. 2005. Männlichkeits- und Weiblichkeitskonstrukte und Geschlechterbeziehungen in der deutschen und russischen Romantik (E.T.A. Hoffmann — Caroline Auguste Fischer, Therese Huber — Nikolaj Gogol’, Vladimir Odoevskij — Marija Žukova, Elena Gan, Karolina Pavlova), Habilitationsschrift TU Berlin, unpublished.

Part Two: Paradigms of Romantic fiction A. Generic types and representative texts

The Gothic novel as a Romantic narrative genre Hendrik van Gorp 1.

Literary dynamics: Emergence of a new construct

The Romantic horror or terror novel, commonly called »Gothic novel«, is a narrative genre that in its time, i.e. the transition of the 18th to the 19th century, had an enormous success − not only in England, but also in the neighbouring countries and in North America. The genre has been considered, from its beginning, as a popular and trivial one, so that most scholars approached it from a purely sociological point of view. This has changed in recent times: criticism is focusing more and more on the literary and cultural context in which the Gothic novel emerged and which it represented. In this essay I want to explain the emergence of the genre against the background of new literary and aesthetic ideas (diachronic approach) and to situate it in a broader literary context of other texts and meta-texts of the time (synchronic approach). This historical-intertextual study will show that the Gothic novel had an irreplaceable function in the emergence and evolution of Romantic fiction. A description, positioning and interpretation of the genre first require some terminological comments. In the OED the word »gothic« covers a multitude of meanings, varying from social behaviour (barbarous) to literary style (medieval opposed to classic), to architecture (cf. a Gothic castle or cathedral). In general, we can say that three interrelated main clusters of meaning were manifest during the 18th century: barbarous, medieval and mysterious/supernatural. In the field of the arts and of literature the feature »gothic« characterised an irregular style, opposed to the uniformity, simplicity and proportionality of the classical norm. Before the 18th century this style had been considered »barbarous«, but in the middle of the century some authoritative critics, such as Bishop Richard Hurd, made a plea to evaluate Gothic art and literature on their own merits and not from a classical point of view. Thus the pejorative connotation of »barbarous« began to disappear. As Varma put it in his monograph The Gothic Flame: »The word ›Gothic‹ […] ceased to be a synonym for ›barbarous‹ and ›violent‹ and became associated with the poetry and chivalry of the Middle Ages: thus ›Gothic‹ assumed a second meaning, ›the medieval‹« (Varma 1996, 12). Via further associations of the Middle Ages with spectres, spirits and all sorts of supernatural forces the name »gothic« assumed a broader meaning and became a synonym for specific art forms, especially romances, in which mysterious and

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terrifying things occurred. Therefore in most West-European literatures the name of the genre was linked with »terror«: tale of terror, roman terrifiant, Schauerroman or Schreckensroman, etc. This shift of meaning in the terminology will be important in our approach to the Gothic novel as a specific narrative genre. Literary genres do not emerge from a vacuum but are − in their form and/or their content − mostly an implicit or even explicit answer to questions or problems of their time. Thus, a precise definition of the historical situation, i.e. a description of the socio-cultural and literary context, is necessarily the first step when approaching the genre of the Gothic novel. As far as the cultural context is concerned, many scholars have stressed its relation with »Pre-Romanticism«. The context for the emergence of the Gothic novel would have been the same as the fascination of contemporary poets like Gray, Young, and Percy with churchyards, ruins of abbeys and castles, old legends, etc. The Gothic »romance« has been conceived of, in that sense, as an initiator of Romanticism, i.e. of an attitude of escape or remembering: of a flight to the past, to regions far away, to nature, to forces deep in one’s self. Indeed, numerous Gothic novels are set in the (late) Middle Ages and/or in the South of Europe or the mysterious East, since they contain a sort of »exoticism«. In The Romantic Agony (1933) Mario Praz has demonstrated persuasively that most of the Romantic motives are already present in the Gothic novel. Another critic wrote that, »historically, the Gothic novels have their genesis in some of the same problems and discontents that were producing what is commonly described as ›Romantic‹ poetry« (Hume 1969, 288). With these Pre-Romantic preferences a new aesthetics came into being, in which the horrible and the awful were integrated. Of course, horror and terror had, from ancient times, been connected with aesthetic experience. This notion was already present in Aristotle’s theory of the catharsis in his Peri Poiètikès (On Poetics). Later on, elements of terror and magic also played an important role in Seneca, the Hellenistic novel, popular folktales of the Middle Ages, and, last but not least, in Elizabethan drama (Marlowe, Shakespeare). But it had remained a peripheral phenomenon because of the dominance of classical aesthetics. During the 18th century this changed gradually. Already in Joseph Addison’s The Pleasures of Imagination we read »that the taste of most of our English poets, as well as readers, is extremely Gothic«, i.e. that simplicity is replaced by »all the Extravagancies of an irregular Fancy« (Spectator, Nr. 62, 1711). The most influential text for this new aesthetics was, however, Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Whereas the emotion of the beautiful is caused by the instinct of social sympathy, that of the sublime emerges, according to Burke, on the basis of our instinct of self-preservation. It is activated when something transcends or threatens us, such as a sky full of stars, a tempest, a desert, etc. The aesthetic experience and the fascination with it are based on the fact that this threat is, at the same time, kept at a distance, since it occurs »only« on an imaginary level. These Burkean ideas have influenced many authors in the second half of the century, amongst them Immanuel Kant in his Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Observations on the Sentiment of the Beautiful and the Sublime, 1764); John and Anna Laetitia Aikin (»On the Pleasure derived from Objects of Terror«, 1773); and William Gilpin (»On Picturesque Beauty«, 1792). Mario Praz describes this shift in aesthetics at the end of the century as follows:

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The discovery of Horror as a source of delight and beauty ended by reacting on men’s actual conception of Beauty itself: the Horrid, from being a category of the Beautiful, became eventually one of its essential elements, and the »beautifully horrid« passed by insensible degrees into the »horribly beautiful« (Praz 1968, 10).

The Gothic novel has tried to evoke these new feelings in its (female) readers, as Anna Aikin illustrated in her above mentioned essay with a fragment called »Sir Bertrand« (1773). Historians and critics have not only pointed to Pre-Romanticism and to a new aesthetics but also to a third socio-cultural factor that might have promoted, if not caused, the emergence of the genre »Gothic novel«: the revolutionary climate at the end of the 18th century. The success of horror literature is considered a typical phenomenon for periods of great social conflicts and threatening war violence. In dark ages — such as the Middle Ages — people seem to be more aware of trouble. The Marquis de Sade thus explained in his Idée sur les romans (Idea about Novels, 1799) the success of »le roman noir« as »the indispensable fruits of the revolutionary events which the whole of Europe met with. Novelists«, he continued, »had to call for hell’s help to compose titles that would be at least as interesting as reality« (quoted in Praz 1968, 14).1 And he refers in this respect to the idyllic sentimental novels which had become extremely boring in a period of »terreur«. A genre such as the Romantic novel of terror would have met better the expectations of romance readership. This leads us to the more specific literary context in which the Gothic novel emerged. The fiction of the second half of the century was dominated by imitators of Richardson and Fielding, i.e. the sentimental and the realist-adventure novel. In general, one can say that the Romantic Gothic novel tried to find its own position against these and against the medieval romances that had remained very successful. The Gothic romance exploits, so to speak, human sentiments in pointing at their horrible aspects and in discovering their exotic and mysterious character. This is the literary situation which Horace Walpole, generally considered the initiator of the genre, experimented with in his The Castle of Otranto (1764). In the »Preface« to the second edition, he explicitly referred to this filiation: It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be […] copied. […] the author of the following pages thought it possible to reconcile the two kinds. Desirous of leaving the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention, and thence of creating more interesting situations, he wished to conduct the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability; in short, to make them think, speak and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do in extraordinary positions (Walpole 1968, 43).

The preface to The Castle of Otranto is a very important »meta-text«, as far as the emergence of the Gothic novel is concerned. Here Walpole also hints at another source: the Shakespearean 1.

The original passage reads: »le fruit indispensable des secousses révolutionnaires, dont l’Europe entière se ressentait. Pour qui connaissait tous les malheurs dont les méchants peuvent accabler les hommes, le roman devenait assez difficile à faire, que monotone à lire; […] Il fallait donc appeler l’enfer à son secours, pour composer des titres à l’intérêt, et trouver dans le pays des chimères, ce qu’on savait couramment, en ne fouillant que l’histoire de l’homme dans cet âge de fer« (Sade 1971, 40).

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drama. It will become clear, later on, that there are diverse parallels between the two genres. Anyhow, if the Gothic novel emerged in the above mentioned socio-cultural and literary contexts, it is clear that this relation had to manifest itself in textual signals of the time, i.e. on the part of production (authors, publishers…) in declarations of intent, prefaces, subtitles, parodies, etc., and on that of reception (readers, critics…) in reviews and polemics (in periodicals, magazines, and correspondences). Based on such criteria, the corpus of Gothic novels has been situated by literary historians in the period of 1764–1820 (between Walpole’s Castle and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, 1820), especially in England, but with clear epiphenomena in Continental Western Europe (esp. Germany, France and the Netherlands) and in the United States. It has become a cliché to say that the genre started with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. A lot of meta-texts seem to support this opinion, last but not least Walpole’s own statements in the above mentioned preface, where he explicitly refers to »the novelty of the attempt« and »the new route« on which he had struck out by blending elements of the ancient romance and the modern novel. This statement is confirmed by Clara Reeve who, in a preface to her novel The Old English Baron (1777), refers to the example of Walpole, calling her book (which she explicitly subtitles »a Gothic story«) »the literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto, written upon the same plan, with a design to unite the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient Romance and the modern Novel«. And she continues: »To attain this end, there is required a sufficient degree of the marvellous, to excite attention; enough of the manners of real life, to give an air of probability to the work; and enough of the pathetic to engage the heart on its behalf« (Reeve 1967, 3 f.). Other meta-texts, such as some pieces of literary criticism in the periodicals of the time — maybe influenced by the above mentioned statements — point at Walpole as the father of a new literary genre, too. The paternity, thus, is not discussed. The real representatives and propagators of the genre, however, have to be situated in the 1790s: Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797), Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783), Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline; or: The Orphan of the Castle (1788), and numerous other novels (many of them written by female writers) sparked a trend in England and on the Continent. As a literary fact and phenomenon the Gothic novel thus actually started around the year 1785 and gradually disappeared in the years 1825–30. Many novels à la Radcliffe (so-called »Radcliffiades«), and translations, dramatisations, parodies and even recipes of Gothic novel-writing at that time point to the enormous success and popularity of the genre. Besides, they have contributed to the fact that other novels, showing only some of the characteristic features, were equally received as Gothic ones, since an intense genreawareness had arisen on the part of the readers as well as of the critics, the authors and the publishers/booksellers. The Gothic novel can rightly be considered − at least in its beginning − as a typically English literary genre. As Maurice Lévy puts it in the conclusion of an article bearing the significant title »Le roman Gothique, genre anglais«, the essential of what constitutes the Gothic finds its source in a history, a culture, a tradition that are in the first instance those of the English people in the second half of the 18th century.

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In the mixed waters streaming under the Gothic arch it is those of the Thames, passing so near by Strawberry Hill, which are the origin.2

This is the reason why in France literary critics preferred to use the term »������������������ roman anglais����� « instead of »roman gothique« or »roman noir«. 2.

Literary synchronics: Recognition of generic features

What are the most typical features of this popular genre? Wellek and Warren, in chap. 17 of their Theory of Literature, describe them in the following terms: The Gothic Novel […] is a genre by all the criteria one can invoke for a prose narrative genre: there is not only a limited and continuous subject matter or thematics, but there is a stock of devices (descriptive-accessory and narrative, e.g. ruined castles, Roman Catholic horrors, mysterious portraits, secret passageways reached through sliding panels; abductions, immurements, pursuits through lonely forests); there is, still further, a Kunstwollen, an aesthetic intent, an intent to give the reader a special sort of pleasurable horror and thrill (»pity and terror« some of the Gothicists may have murmured) (Wellek/Warren 1956, 222 f.).

This somewhat satirical but nevertheless accurate description of the genre addresses themes as well as procedures and intention. They are interrelated and converge in a new aesthetic experience of anxiety. As Mario Praz puts it, »an anxiety with no possibility of escape is the main theme of the gothic tales« (Praz 1968, 20). This extreme feeling is evoked by a specific story, by typical characters, by a remarkable setting in time and space, and, finally, by an appropriate narrative perspective. As for the motives of the story, the Gothic novel is based, just as the fairy tale and the ancient romance, on the righting of something that has gone wrong. But in opposition to the mentioned forms of narrative, this correction requires much greater efforts, since the initial wrong situation is defended by a villain with all means, violence and terror included. In general, we can distinguish four groups of typical motives, related to social, sexual, religious and psychological matters (cf. Dorner-Bachmann 1989). On the social level, the Gothic novel often uses the so-called usurpation motive: a villain or one of his ancestors has unjustly occupied a castle or another property and tries to defend it against the real owner. Sexual desire is incarnated in the opposition villain/persecuted maiden and contains many intensified romance motives such as forbidden love, and all kinds of excesses and taboo elements, from forced marriage to rape, incest and patricide, even to necrophilia. In a number of Gothic novels the hero and/or heroine are the victims of clerical pressure and religious fanaticism: forced noviciate, accusation by the Roman Catholic Inquisition, inhuman application of ecclesiastical laws, etc. This last motive group is characterised, with regard to an English-Protestant reading public, by detailed descriptions of the horrors occurring behind the closed walls of papist cloisters; that is why so many 2.

»l’essentiel de ce qui fut le gothique a sa source dans une histoire, une culture, une tradition qui sont d’abord celles du peuple anglais dans la seconde moitié du 18ème siècle. Dans les eaux mêlées qui coulent sous l’arche gothique, ce sont celles de la Tamise, passant si près de Strawberry Hill, qui sont l’origine« (Lévy 1984, 13).

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Gothic villains are monks or other church authorities. Finally, there is an exaggerated desire for knowledge, a form of spiritual avarice to know all the secrets on earth and to possess a power similar to that of God. These motives recall the classical hubris and the Prometheus myth and manifest themselves especially in some related genres such as the Oriental tale (e.g. Vathek, 1787, by William Beckford) and the persecution novel (e.g. Caleb Williams, 1794, by Godwin), as well as in the later, more psychological stage of the genre evolution (Frankenstein [1818], Melmoth the Wanderer, and the after-effects in high Romanticism: Poe, Hoffmann, etc.). In contrast to the usurpation and sexual motives, they relate especially to the relation of the ego to the self and to transcendence (cf. Todorov’s »les thèmes du je«). In many Gothic novels, especially in a later stage of the evolution of the genre, diverse excesses can be found in this regard: exaggerated curiosity about mysterious situations or concerning the protagonist’s own descent/identity, madness, schizophrenia, melancholia, existential dissatisfaction with one’s self (motives of the Wandering Jew and the Byronic hero), pacts with the devil, etc. The syntagmatic ordering of all these motives differs, of course, from novel to novel, but the fabula of the action, i.e. the logical and chronological chain of events, is always intentionally transformed in a sujet full of suspense, because of the unequal measurement of information quantity distributed over the reader and the characters. The characters, especially the protagonists, of the Gothic novel are similarly generic. The action of most Gothic novels is centred, as in many forms of popular fiction, around the opposition between a villain and a hero or heroine. Other characters function as helpers or opponents, but they often change their roles in order to enhance the intended suspense. With regard to the ethical motivation and the main theme of the story one can distinguish two groups of characters: negative and positive ones, i.e. those who pose a threat and cause anxiety, and those who suffer them. This contrast finds its aesthetic expression in the villain being attracted by the unspoiled purity of the maiden, whereas the heroine (»lady in distress«) herself is fascinated, even mesmerized by evil (chiaroscuro technique; cf. the opposition between the sublime and the beautiful). Already by its outward appearance, the villain evokes anxiety by his tall figure and piercing look (»evil eye« in opposition to the obligatory »blue« eyes of the heroine). A last typical feature of the Gothic novel is the occurrence of supernatural forces (spectres, the devil, etc) that determine in many cases the course of the action. In the first Gothic novels these forces made their appearance on the stage in a kind of grand finale (deus ex machina technique), after having fought their struggle above the heads of the protagonists. Later on in the evolution of the genre, the supernatural is explained (Radcliffe) and becomes more and more internalised in the characters themselves. Most characteristic of the genre, next to the opposition between villain and persecuted maiden, is, without any doubt, the specific setting. The geographical location itself is already typical, i.e. the South of Europe (Italy, Spain, the South of France and Germany) or the mysterious East. This creates the necessary distance to make acceptable the »strange« events. On the other hand, the reader receives a lot of »real« geographical indications (sometimes with an effect of couleur locale), so that the story obtains a suggestion of reality. The success of the Gothic novel depended for a large part on this foreign, not to say exotic, setting. For the common reader this exoticism of the genre was an attractive characteristic, in

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England as well as in France and Germany. Novels of foreign origin were more sellable than local products; hence the commercial labels »traduit de l’anglais« in France and »translated from the German« in England. For the reviewers of the leading periodicals, however, this exotic, irregular character of the English Gothic Novel was mostly subject to negative criticism. As a French critic of the Nouvelle Bibliothèque des Romans (New Library of Novels), reviewing a French imitation à la Radcliffe, put it in 1802, Nearly all modern novels resemble bad English gardens; one knows in advance that one will find in a confused hotchpotch […] ruins, tombs, gothic chapels, subterranean vaults, caverns, castles, et cetera.3

Such a lack of »good taste« is also a frequent reproach aimed at German writers. Hence the similarly negative connotation, within French and English literary criticism, of the popular and successful German variant of the Gothic romance, the so-called »Räuber- und Schauerromane« (e.g. Christian August Vulpius’s Rinaldo Rinaldini, 1799). One should, for that matter, notice that of the seven »horrid tales« mentioned in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), one of the most famous parodies of the genre, two are translations from the German, three are described as a »German story« or »German tale« and a sixth is entitled The Orphan of the Rhine, whereas the action of the seventh seems to take place in Salzburg. »German«, thus, stood for »romantic«, »extravagant«, and in particular for »mediaeval« and »barbarous«, in one word: »Gothic«. For the English reader it must have had a special exotic attraction, so that an anonymous commentator in The Critical Review of 1807 could state: So great is the rage for German tales, and German novels, that a cargo is no sooner imported than the bookseller’s shops are filled with a multitude of translators, who seize with avidity and without discrimination, whatever they can lay their hands upon (cited in Summers 1968, 147).

Even Sir Walter Scott would refer to this German rage by telling his readers, in the introductory chapter of his Waverley (1814), that he had been thinking of subtitling it »A Romance, from the German« to attract more readers. Beyond the exotic localisation, the Gothic novel is especially characterised by its psychological setting, e.g. by typical Romantic and sublime loci terribiles (often contrasted with idyllic loci amoeni) such as wuthering heights, old castles, ruins of abbeys, labyrinths, caverns, isolated places etc., which are intended to evoke in the mind of the (mostly female) readers a deep feeling of terror. The special effects of this setting emerge from the action of the characters. The protagonists of Gothic novels frequently travel and wander. Generally they (have to) leave a familiar and safe place (home, idyllic atmosphere) to end up in a foreign world in which at any moment nasty or uncanny things can happen. The hero and/or heroine try to escape from it; hence the many attempted escapes, countered by the villain. This gives the author a lot of possibilities to describe the sublime landscape with its rough mountain chains and dark forests, as well as the 3.

»Presque tous les romans modernes ressemblent aux mauvais jardins à l’Anglaise; on sait d’avance, qu’on y trouvera rassemblés confusément […] des ruines, des tombeaux, des chapelles gothiques, des souterrains, des grottes, des châteaux, etc« (cited in Gorp 1999, 597).

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prisons (castles, cloisters, isolated manor houses…) where the protagonists are locked up again. The feelings are intensified by the fact that these escape movements often happen during the night through unknown ways (e.g. subterranean vaults), which creates a labyrinthine effect: »an anxiety with no possibility to escape«, as Mario Praz put it (Praz 1968, 20). It is not only movement, of course, but also visual observation which creates a sense of space. In the Gothic novel, light, in its many nuances, will determine this sensory space by its veiling and unveiling potentialities. The unveiling function is evident; secrets, mysterious objects, as well as forgotten crimes come »to light«. But revelation contains also delimitation. Light shows contours behind which darkness appears. It is especially a transitory stage between light and darkness which characterises the genre: mist, flickering candles, etc. For weak sources of light lead to the blurring of boundaries; one loses one’s grip on things, and everything becomes uncanny. The same effect is created by aural impressions: voices, echoes, noises, whispers and groans, cracking stairs, etc., or sometimes no sound at all, which results in a complete loss of orientation and one’s being left alone with one’s fears (horror vacui). In brief, the Gothic novel has a preference for closed, isolated places where one can dig deeply in one’s own mind. Finally, the Gothic novel, certainly in its first stage, prefers an authorial narrative perspective, since this technique gives the narrator the possibility to manipulate the reader. We have mentioned already the fact that the reader receives more information than the characters. This effect is achieved by procedures such as retardation, flash-backs, cliff-hangers, »blanks« in old manuscripts (cf. the definition of Gothic as »narrative of the gap«; Mishra 1994, 38), etc. The choice for such editorial omniscience, however, is determined especially by the ambivalent ethical overtone of most novels. By the moral comments of his narrator, the author was able to criticise, at least superficially, the immoral course of the action, so that he might escape censorship. The case of Matthew Gregory Lewis proves that this risk was a very real one. In the later, more psychological stage of the genre, this authorial point of view is gradually replaced by first person narratives, in which the subject is thematised (reflection, schizophrenia, motive of the double, etc.; cf. Todorov’s »thèmes du je«). 3.

Literary systems: The relevance of reception

It is necessary to state explicitly two important ideas concerning this general and static »portrait« of the Gothic novel as a Romantic narrative genre. The first one concerns the evolution of the genre. Indeed, as we mentioned already casually, the Gothic novel changed considerably in the fifty years of its existence (1765–1820). It started with the so-called »historical Gothic« of Walpole and Clara Reeve (1765–1785), moved on to a sentimental kind of Gothic in the works by Sophia Lee, Charlotte Smith and especially Ann Radcliffe (1785–1810), and culminated in a more psychological Gothic with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. These two authors, together with the earlier American novelist Charles Brockden Brown (Wieland or the Transformation, 1798) mark, so to speak, the transition to a more »internalized« Gothic/fantastic fiction (E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ludwig Tieck, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne), with Byronic heroes, wanderers and doubles, and, later on, a preference

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for a »homely Gothic« with ghosts, mirrors, inner landscapes and a first person perspective (cf. Botting 1995, 91–123). It is evident that the mentioned features of the genre evolved and developed other characteristics according to this evolution. My second comment concerns the fact that the presence of the above-mentioned formal, structural and thematic features alone does not determine the Gothic character of a novel. Genre awareness is, indeed, not exclusively based on so-called »essential« characteristics; when these occur − in a corpus of novels, as well as in critical and polemic meta-texts − we are on safer grounds. That is why a genre description of the Gothic novel as Romantic fiction has to cover also, as kind of proof or correction, a synchronic view at diverse sorts of texts surrounding it. This comprises the full amount of intertextual utterances (such as literary criticism, translations, parodies, recipes, etc.) that may serve as valuable documents for a history of perception and interpretation. These texts are, together with the creative ones (the novels themselves), interesting parameters of what is going on in the literary life of the period. What is more, not only texts, but also intermediary instances can play an important role in this respect: specific practises of writing/producing and reading/consuming, influenced by institutions like publishing houses, editors in chief of periodicals and magazines, libraries, translators, etc. It goes without saying that this is especially important in matters of popular fiction. I would like to illustrate this synchronic and more »institutional« approach with some of the most striking »meta-texts« referring to the Gothic novel genre. Let us first have a look at literary criticism. In the periodicals and magazines of the time (1785–1820) we find a large amount of critical notes and comments on the new genre, especially on its commercial, superficial and »immoral« character. An interesting example is the critical reception of The Monk by Lewis. Its publication sparked a heated debate, in which even Samuel Coleridge engaged. Although he appreciated Lewis’s work as »the offspring of no common genius«, he protested passionately against its immorality: Not without reluctance then, but in full conviction that we are performing a duty, we declare it to be our opinion, that the Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale […] [It is] a poison for youth, and a provocative for the debauchee (Coleridge 1797, 197).

Lewis’s comparison of the Bible to »the annals of a brothel« would, for example, cause a general outcry of indignation. In the fourth part of his The Pursuits of Literature (1797), one of the leading critics of the time, T.J. Mathias, stigmatized Lewis as the public enemy number one by putting him on the same level as Cleland and accusing him of »blasphemy against the Scriptures« (cited in Norton 2000, 294). Similar reactions can be found in German periodicals, albeit that here the many translations/adaptations of The Monk are the object of criticism. In the Neue Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek (The New General German Library), we read the following »coloured« evaluation by an anonymous reviewer: The devotee of a mixture of matricide and sororicide, of incest, spectres, pacts with the devil, exorcists, and similar devilry and witchcraft, mixed with love stories, abductions, inquisition, wandering Jews, amorous nuns, whoring monks, who for their sexual fulfilment murder the

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mothers in order to rape the daughters and sink down deeper than beasts, the devotee of such horror here finds anything to suit his taste.4

Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), as well as The Mysteries of Udolpho received rather positive reactions in England because of the morally more neutral character of the action and the beautiful and sublime landscape descriptions. The German adaptations, however, evoked a comparable negative response (cf. Gorp 1993). In the Netherlands Radcliffe’s Italian is called a terrifying product (»een vervaarlyk product«), although the anonymous reviewer deems it less dangerous than The Monk (Anonymus 1798, 116 f.). Most of these negative reviews are characteristic of the way the genre was rejected on commercial, ethical and religious grounds, at least by official criticism. That the common reader did not share this opinion appears from the amount of receptive forms of textualization such as abridgements, drama versions, adaptations, etc., all of them witnessing the enormous demand for this kind of fiction at that time. Is it any wonder, then, that the success of the Gothic novel was an appropriate foundation for recipes, parodies and burlesque reactions? Recipes for Gothic novel writing, which were repeatedly used and even exported (via translations) as a means of disparagement of that kind of fiction, appeared since the success stories of Radcliffe and Lewis in nearly every periodical or magazine. One of the most widespread examples bears the striking title »Terrorist Novel Writing«. It runs as follows: Take — an old castle, half of it ruinous. A long gallery, with a great many doors, Some secret ones. Three murdered bodies, quite fresh. As many skeletons, in chest and presses. An old woman hanging by the neck, with her throat cut. Assassins and desperados, quant. suff. Noises, whispers and groans, threescore at least. Mix them together, in the form of three volumes, To be taken at any of the watering places before going to bed.5

In the St. James’s Chronicle a year later a critic comments on the book production of 1798 as follows: Terror is the order of the day; swords, axes, poniards, daggers, knives, sabres, all the instruments of offensive cuttlery, the poisoned bowl, and the ignominious halter, are scattered with a profusion at which even Borgia would shudder. Blood and mangled limbs, whole skeletons,

4.

»Wer an einem Gemengsel von Mutter- und Schwestermord, von Blutschande, von Geistererscheinungen, Bündnissen mit dem Teufel, Exorcisten und dergleichen Teufelsspuck und Zaubereyen, vermischt mit Liebesgeschichten, Entführungen, Inquisition, ewigen Juden, verliebten Nonnen, hurerischen Mönchen, die zur Befriedigung ihrer Lüste die Mutter morden, um die Töchter zu nothzüchtigen — ja bis zum Vieh und auch wohl noch tiefer herabsinken — wer an dergleichen Greuel Geschmack und Behagen findet, der sieht hier […] einen vollen Tisch gedeckt« (Anonymus 1799, 377).

5.

Clery and Miles 1995, 184.

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assist the plot, and lead to the catastrophe, which is either murder, or an execution, and a wedding (cited in Gorp 1997, 124).

The case of the parodies is even more interesting. The genre had, for that matter, started as a mystification by Horace Walpole himself. The positive response of the public at The Castle of Otranto, which had first been presented as a translation from an Italian manuscript, was partly due to its allusions to ancient romances. The well-known example of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is even clearer in that respect. It is a brilliant, but still ambiguous parody of Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and many others »of the same kind«, whose titles refer to genuine Gothic romances (the so-called Northanger novels). Such burlesque imitations are also found in France and Germany. The most significant specimen is La Nuit Anglaise (The English Night, 1799), by R.P. Spectroruini [sic!], pseudonym of the French author Bellin de la Liborlière. It was translated into German in 1801 and adapted into English in 1817 under the title The Hero, Adventures of a Night, as a counterpart to Eaton Barret’s successful parody The Heroine (1813). La Liborlière’s novel is a detailed comment on ten Gothic novels, amongst them those of Lewis and Radcliffe. The circumstantial subtitle, for that matter, points ironically at the remarkable translation business at that time: The Adventures, formerly a bit extraordinary, but at this moment wholly usual and very common, of Mr. Dabaud, Merchant at Saint Honoré in Paris. A novel of which there are too many, translated from Arab into Iroquoian, from Iroquoian into Samoyed, from Samoyed into Hottentot, from Hottentot into Lapp, and from Lapp into French. By the Rev. Father Spectroruini, Italian monk.6

And the novel can be bought at all places »where there are spectres, monks, ruins, brigands, subterranean vaults, and a West tower«.7 The story itself is a parody in the strict sense of the word, in that it runs parallel with stereotyped episodes of the novels imitated. An episode in which the protagonist Monsieur Dabaud, obsessed with Gothic reading, meets a suspicious Italian monk (cf. Radcliffe) is worth mentioning. Dabaud asks him: »Who are you, Father?« The answer is revealing to the Radcliffe reader: »I am Italian, as you may have supposed. […] My name is not Montoni, neither Schedoni nor Rasoni, but I am called Falconi«. And Dabaud instantly replies: »Father, […] I cannot but tell you that, when one is an Italian, and a monk, and one bears a name ending on -oni, one, inevitably, must be a villain«.8 These and other parodies are clear indications of the success of the Gothic novel genre, since they only could be appreciated by people who knew the parodied texts. At the same time they reveal − when written by creative authors such as Jane Austen, Eaton Barrett, W.H. Ireland, 6. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Les Aventures jadis un peu extraordinaires, mais aujourd’hui toutes simples et très communes de M. Dabaud, Marchand de la rue Saint-Honoré, à Paris. Roman comme il y en a trop, traduit de l’arabe en iroqois, de l’iroqois en samoyède, du samoyède en hottentot, du hottentot en lapon, et du lapon en français. Par le R.P. Spectroruini, moine Italien«. 7. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Se trouve […] dans tous les endroits où il y a des revenans, des moines, des ruines, des bandits, des souterrains et une tour de l’Ouest« (la Liborlière 1799, [subtitle]). 8.

»Qui êtes-vous, mon père?« — »Je suis Italien, comme vous avez dû vous en douter […] Mon nom n’est point Montoni, ni Schedoni, ni Rasoni, mais je m’appelle Falconi.« — »Mon Père […] je suis fâché d’être obligé de vous le dire, mais quand on est Italien, qu’on est moine et qu’on a un nom en -oni, on est inévitablement un coquin« (ibid., 144 f.).

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Bellin de la Liborlière, and Madame de Genlis − a certain ambiguity showing a kind of lovehate relation to the genre. It is noteworthy that great Romantic poets such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats (whose The Eve of St. Agnes [1820] was clearly written under the influence of Radcliffe’s Mysteries) were passionate Gothic novel readers in their youth and found much of their inspiration in the genre. Well known in literary history is the genesis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written during a holiday stay in Switzerland, in a kind of mock competition with Byron and Polidori. Shelley had to write a story that could rival, so she confesses, »those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror« (Preface to the 1831 edition; Shelley, 171). This does not mean, however, that Frankenstein, which nowadays has become a prototype of the horror genre (together with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1897), was, at that time, regarded as belonging to the Gothic genre; at least, there are no contemporary meta-texts supporting this. Parodies, moreover, often indicate a crisis and uncertainty in literary conventions and opinions. The period of the »Gothic flame« (1790–1820) can, thus, be considered as a transition period as far as novel writing is concerned. Whereas the initial combination of romance and novel (cf. supra Walpole’s and Reeve’s prefaces) had developed gradually in the work of most Gothicists into the direction of »imagination«, even in the form of a kind of »mock supernatural« (Radcliffe), a reverse evolution seems to manifest itself in the first decennia of the 19th century, anticipating, so to speak, the emergence and success of Walter Scott’s historical novel. The mysterious element, on the other hand, found its way into a new, more psychologically based and internalized form of fantastic tale (E.A. Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Charles Nodier), becoming the »Gothic« of high Romanticism. To conclude: we have tried to stress that the rise and success of a literary genre, i.e. the Gothic novel at the end of the 18th century, cannot truly be understood unless one examines not only the genuine texts, but also what is occurring around them in the so-called »literary life« of production, distribution, critical reception and post-processing activities in all possible forms of intertextuality (imitations, adaptations, parodies, translations). These »meta-texts« reveal the real function and position of the genre in the cultural and ideological context of (Pre-)Romanticism and, thus, correct an exclusively aesthetic evaluation, not to say depreciation, from a present-day point of view. Bibliography Anonymous. 1798. [Review of] »Anne Radcliffe: The Italian«. Algemeene Konst — en Letterbode. 224: 116 f. Anonymous. 1799. [Review of] »Mathilde von Villanegas oder der weibliche Faust [i.e. Matthew G. Lewis: The Monk]«. Neue Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek. 50.2: 377. Barrett, Eaton. 1813. The Heroine. London: Colburn. Botting, Fred. 1995. Gothic. London: Routledge. Clery, E.J. 1995. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ———, and Miles, Robert. 2000. Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1700–1820. Manchester: Manchester UP. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1797. [Review of] »Matthew G. Lewis: The Monk«. The Critical Review. 2.19: 194–200. Dorner-Bachmann, Hannelotte. 1989. Erzählstruktur und Texttheorie: Zu den Grundlagen einer Erzähltheorie unter besonderer analytischer Berücksichtigung des Märchens und der Gothic Novel. Hildesheim: Olms.

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Frank, Frederick S. 1988. Gothic Fiction: A Master List of Twentieth-Century Criticism and Research. London: Meckler. Gamer, Michael. 2000. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Gorp, Hendrik van. 1996. »Traductions, versions et extraits dans la Nouvelle bibliothèque des romans et la Bibliothèque britannique (1796–1802)«. La Traduction en France à l’âge classique. Ed. by Michel Ballard et Lieven d’Hulst. Lille: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 291–304. ———. 1997. »Intertextuality, Parody and Plagiarism in the Gothic Novel (1790–1820)«. Parodia, Pastiche, Mimetismo. Ed. by Paola Mildonian. Roma: Bulzoni. 119–129. ———. 1998. De romantische Griezelroman (Gothic Novel): Een merkwaardig randverschijnsel in de literatuur. Leuven-Apeldoorn: Garant. ———. 1999. »Cultural Diversities in the Reception of the Gothic Novel (1790–1820)«. Comparative Literature Now: Theory and Practice. Ed. by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek & Milan V. Dimic. Paris: Champion. 595–604. Graham, Kenneth W. (ed.). 1989. Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression. New York: AMS Press. Hall, Daniel. 2005. French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century. Bern: Peter Lang. Hogle, Jerrold E. (ed.). 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hume, Robert D. 1969. »Gothic versus Romantic: A Re-evaluation of the Gothic Novel«. PMLA. 84: 282–290. Kiely, Robert. 1972. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. Kilgour, Maggie. 1995. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London, New York: Routledge. Killen, Alice M. 1923. Le roman terrifiant ou le roman noir de Walpole à Ann Radcliffe, et son influence sur la littérature française jusqu’en 1840. Paris: Champion. La Liborlière, Bellin de [aka R.P. Spectroruini]. 1799. La nuit anglaise, ou les aventures, jadis un peu extraordinaires, mais aujourd’hui toutes simples et très-communes de M. Dabaud. Paris: Pougens. ———. 1817. The Hero, or Adventures of a Night: a Romance: Translated from the Arabic into Iroquese; from the Iroquese into Hottentot; from the Hottentot into French; and from the French into English. Philadelphia: M. Carey. Le Tellier, Robertus I. 1982. Kindred Spirits: Interrelations and Affinities Between the Romantic Novels of England and Germany (1790–1820). Salzburg: Inst. f. Anglistik und Amerikanistik. Lévy, Maurice. 1984. »Le roman Gothique, genre anglais«. Le Roman Gothique [special issue of: Europe]. 5–13. ———. 1995 (1968). Le roman ›gothique‹ anglais (1764–1824). Paris: Albin Michel. Mathias, Thomas James. 1797. The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Dialogue. London: Becket. Miles, R. 1993. Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy. London: Routledge. Mishra, Vijay. 1994. The Gothic Sublime. New York: New York State UP. Mulvey-Roberts, Marie (ed.). 1998. The Handbook to Gothic Literature. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Norton, Rictor (ed.). 2000. Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764–1840. London, New York: Leicester UP. Praz, Mario. 1968. »Introductory Essay«. Three Gothic Novels. Harmondsworth: Penguin (English Library). 7–34. ———. 1970 [1934]. The Romantic Agony. Oxford: Oxford UP. Prungnaud, Joelle. 1997. Gothique et décadence: Recherches sur la continuité d’un mythe et d’un genre au XIXe siècle en Grande-Bretagne et en France. Paris: Champion. Punter, David. 1996. The Literature of Terror. 2 vols. London: Longman. ———. (ed.). 2000. A Companion to the Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell. Railo, Eino. 1927. The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. London: Routledge. Reeve, Clara. 1967. The Old English Baron. London: Oxford UP. Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de. 1971. »Idée sur les romans«. Les crimes de l’amour. Ed. by Gilbert Lely. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions. 23–51. Shelley, Mary. 1996. Frankenstein. Ed. by J. Paul Hunter. New York, London: Norton. Summers, Montague. 1968. The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. London: Fortune P. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1971. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris: Seuil.

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Tracy, Ann B. 1981. The Gothic Novel 1790–1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs. Lexington: Kentucky UP. Varma, Devendra. P. 1996 [1957]. The Gothic Flame. New York: Russell. Walpole, Horace. 1968. The Castle of Otranto. Three Gothic Novels. Ed. by Mario Praz. Harmondsworth: Penguin (English Library). 36–148. Watt, James. 1999. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict 1764–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Wellek, René/Warren, Austin. 1956 [1948]. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace. Zelle, Carsten. 1987. Angenehmes Grauen. Hamburg: Meiner.

Variants of the Romantic »Bildungsroman« (with a short note on the »artist novel«) Manfred Engel 1.

The »Bildungsroman« (novel of formation): Towards a definition

Although the term »Bildungsroman« belongs to the tried and tested tools of literary criticism there seems to be astonishingly little consensus on its exact meaning. There are probably two reasons for this confusion: the anachronistic origin of the term and its successful globalisation. The anachronistic origin of the term is, so to speak, its congenital defect. Most scholars will agree that the Bildungsroman originated in the German literature of the late 18th century, with Christoph Martin Wieland’s Geschichte des Agathon (The History of Agathon, 1766/67) as its first example, Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser (1785–90) as the first negative Bildungsroman, and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years, 1795/96) as the seminal model of the genre. Yet the term »Bildungsroman« was invented almost a century after the publication of these novels by the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. (In fact, he re-invented it, for the word had originally been coined by a rather obscure professor of rhetoric named Karl von Morgenstern (1770–1852) in 1810 [for details cf. Martini, 1991], whose lectures and essays on the genre were, however, little read and soon completely forgotten.) Dilthey used and defined the term for the first time in his biography Das Leben Schleiermachers (The Life of Schleiermacher, 1870), but a broader reception did not start until the appearance of his much more popular collection of essays entitled Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Poetry and Experience) in 1905. Here we read the well-known sentences: Hyperion belongs to the Bildungsromane which, under the influence of Rousseau, originated in Germany from the tendency of our [i.e. the German] spirit towards a culture of inwardness. Among these, the novels by Goethe and Jean Paul, Tieck’s Sternbald, Novalis’s Ofterdingen, and Hölderlin’s Hyperion have proved to be of lasting importance. Starting with Wilhelm Meister and Hesperus, they all present the youth of their times as he steps into life in blissful ignorance, searching for related souls, experiencing friendship and love, as he then struggles with the hard realities of the world, and thus, in manifold encounters with life, matures, finds himself, and comes to know his mission in the world. […] The dissonances and conflicts of life appear as necessary transitional stages of the individual on his way to maturity and harmony.1

1.

»Der Hyperion gehört zu den Bildungsromanen, die unter dem Einfluß Rousseaus in Deutschland aus der Richtung unseres Geistes auf innere Kultur hervorgegangen sind. Unter ihnen haben nach Goethe und Jean Paul der Sternbald Tiecks, der Ofterdingen von Novalis und Hölderlins Hyperion eine dauernde Geltung behauptet. Von dem Wilhelm Meister und dem Hesperus ab stellen sie alle den Jüngling jener Tage dar; wie er in glücklicher Dämmerung in das Leben eintritt, nach verwandten Seelen sucht, der Freundschaft begegnet und der Liebe, wie er nun aber mit den harten Realitäten der Welt in Kampf gerät und so unter mannigfachen Lebenserfahrungen heranreift, sich selbst findet und seiner Aufgabe in der Welt gewiß wird. […] Die Dissonanzen und Konflikte des Lebens erscheinen als die notwendigen Durchgangspunkte des Individuums auf seiner Bahn zur Reife und zur Harmonie« (Dilthey 1970, 272 f.).

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Dilthey, Georg Lukács in his Theorie des Romans (The Theory of the Novel, 1916; Lukács uses the term »Erziehungsroman«, i.e. novel of education), and Melitta Gerhard in Der deutsche Entwicklungsroman bis zu Goethes »Wilhelm Meister« (The German Novel of Development until Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, 1926) not only established the concept of the genre but did much to inaugurate its popularity in the German literature of the first half of the 20th century. Only in this fourth phase of the history of the genre — after its beginning in the late Enlightenment, its Romantic and its Realist version —, however, could the authors be aware that what they wrote was a Bildungsroman. In Romanticism and Realism there was no such concept; but there was a clear awareness of an intertextual connection: All 19th-century German novels which we today call Bildungsromane refer back to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years as their common pre-text. This intertextual relationship led to a broad variety of correspondences concerning themes, character-constellations, motifs, and literary devices. The most important common denominator, however, was the concept of »Bildung« as a process of organic or quasi-organic development. The exact definitions of this process differed considerably in the late Enlightenment (where it was conceptually influenced by Enlightenment anthropology), in Romanticism (conceptually influenced by the philosophy of German Idealism), in Realism (with its decidedly anti-Romantic anthropology), and in the early 20th Century (where it was influenced by the »Lebensphilosophie« [philosophy of life] of Dilthey, Nietzsche, and Bergson). These differences are crucial for the understanding of the history of the concept of »Bildung« and of the history of the genre »Bildungsroman« alike. Scholars using the term — from Dilthey’s days to the present — have, however, tended to ignore these differences almost completely. Instead, they read Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister in the light of the Realist versions of the genre (e.g. by Stifter, Keller, Freytag) and base their definition of the genre on a ideal type of the Bildungs­roman which never existed. The resulting difficulties lead to a growing discontent with the genre among Germanists and, ultimately, to a widespread doubt about its usefulness as a descriptive technical term. Just when the value of the Bildungsroman had reached an all-time low in German studies, however, its stocks started to soar on the Anglo-American market. This strange renaissance of the term was to a large extent due to its increasing popularity among feminist literary critics (cf. esp. Abel/Hirsch/Langland, 1983). The successful export of the term from the area of German studies did, however, much to increase its vagueness. As long as the term »Bildungsroman« had been used for German texts only its scope had been defined by a set of novels which were considered as the most important representatives of the genre; almost all of them were intertextually related to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. When scholars tried to apply the term to nonGerman novels (most of which had, of course, in no way been influenced by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and his »relatives«) the number of potential Bildungsromane, male or female, quickly multiplied — and all historic and systematic criteria which had been suggested by Germanists were soon forgotten. The fateful all-inclusiveness in which the successful »globalisation« of the Bildungsroman has resulted is well illustrated by the following definitions given in two of the current standard dictionaries:

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a kind of novel that follows the development of the hero or heroine from childhood or adolescence into adulthood, through a troubled quest for identity (Chris Baldick, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: University Press 1991). This is a term more or less synonymous with Erziehungsroman — literally an ›upbringing‹ or ›education‹ novel […]. Widely used by German critics, it refers to a novel which is an account of the youthful development of a hero or heroine (usually the former). It describes the process by which maturity is achieved through the various ups and downs of life (J.A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin 1992).

Small wonder that here all sorts of novels are quoted as examples: Goethe’s Werther as well as Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) — and why not even Joyce’s Ulysses (1918–22) and Proust’s Recherche (1913–27). Of course, one could use the term »Bildungsroman« in such an inflated way. It is, however, highly doubtful whether such a genre-concept could claim any descriptive value whatsoever. Moreover, I cannot see any reason why it should be baptised with such a difficult and tradition-laden name as that of the Bildungsroman. Why not simply call it »novel of adolescence«, »novel of maturation«, or, for that matter, »novel of development«? Literary terms, too, have a tradition and a history of their own, on which their heuristic value is largely based. So all scholars who want to use the term Bildungsroman should remember the systematic and historic distinctions on which its descriptive value depends: the Bildungs­roman is (a) a subgenre of the Entwicklungsroman (novel of development) — just as the Er­ziehungs­roman (novel of education, e.g. Rousseau’s Émile, 1762); (b) it originated in the late 18th and flourished in the 19th century; (c) all later versions must be related, however vaguely, to this important part of the genre-history. In the remaining part of this chapter I will try to suggest a definition which is based on three assumptions: (1) The »Bildungsroman« is a novel of character, i.e. as a rule it has one, and only one, central figure. This distinguishes the genre from the novel of place (»Raumroman«, focused on the portrayal of a geographic space), the novel of time (»Zeitroman«, focused on a certain epoch, like the historical novel), the social novel (»Gesellschaftsroman«, focused on the portrayal of social structures), the novel of ideas (»Ideenroman«, focused on the discussion of philosophical questions), and the novel of action and adventures (»Geschehnisroman«, »Handlungsroman«, »Abenteuerroman«). (2) The »Bildungsroman« is a novel of development. Its main person is a full character with psychological depth that changes (»develops«) continuously and gradually in steps or stages. This process may — or may not — start in childhood; its focus, however, is always the crucial period of adolescence. This second characteristic implies a definitive terminus post quem. Novels of development in this strictly defined sense do not exist before the last third of the 18th century. The hero of a picaresque novel cannot be said to »develop« — he may change at the beginning (picaresque initiation) and at the end of his career (resulting in »desengaño«, or integration into society), but these changes are abrupt and have no psychological motivation. The character change in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) is of similar abruptness: The hero never »learns« anything; at the end of the novel he changes from the state of an adolescent (with all its minor faults which are well balanced by a fundamentally »good« character disposition) to that of a grown-up — a pattern of character change which reminds us of that of the comedy which, of course, had deeply influenced Fielding’s concept of the novel as a »comic epic poem in prose«.

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The discovery of the »history« of the individual (paralleled by the discovery of history as such) is one of the most important innovations of the 18th century. It is based on a widespread interest in psychology, in the »inner« history of characters (cf. Karl Friedrich von Blanckenburg’s Versuch über den Roman [Essay on the Novel, 1774] and the rise of the epistolary novel), and an interest in the interaction between (so to speak) genetic disposition and social-cultural influences, and between body and soul. All these developments are, quite obviously, side-effects of the European-wide triumph of empiricism and the resulting transition from rational to empirical psychology. In Germany this even led to the rise of the new discipline (or proto-discipline) of ›anthropology‹, a new »study of man«, based on the work of »philosophical doctors« (»philosophische Ärzte«). Ernst Platner, whose Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise (Anthropology for Doctors and Philosophers, 1772) firmly established the new discipline, defined anthropology as the consideration of »body and soul in their mutual conditions, limitations, and relations«.2 This led to the ideal of the »whole man« as a unity of body and soul but it also tended to confirm the darker findings of empiricism and materialism: As a product of nature, man is entirely subjected to its laws, determined by inherited tendencies and outer circumstances, and motivated by an egoistic striving for self-preservation and pleasure; so in the late Enlightenment the freedom of the will, the universal validity of ethical rules, and the immortality of the soul were more and more considered as rather dubious ideas. This negative concept of universal determination gave rise to a new counter-concept: the idea of »Bildung«. (3) In the »Bildungsroman« the development of the hero is not a process of social or biological determination but a process of formation (»Bildung«). This, obviously, is the most difficult as well as the most crucial aspect of a definition of the genre. Only a concept of »Bildung«������������ can distinguish the Bildungsroman from the novel of development. However, as I have already pointed out, the idea of formation, of its pre-conditions, its modes, even of its possibility, underwent considerable changes between the late 18th and our early 21th century. Any attempt to define the term will have to steer a middle course between too narrow a definition (based on the discussions around 1800) and one that is too wide (suspending the distinction between »formation« and »development«). To define the process of »Bildung« in the Bildungsroman I suggest the following three criteria: (a) »Bildung« is ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� not simply education and still less training, schooling, the mere acquisition of knowledge and technical skills; »Bildung« is the formation of a character, an individual personality. The Bildungsroman is inseparably linked to the idea of modern individuality and to the awareness that the structures of modern society tend to threaten or even thwart the development of a harmonious personality. This anti-modernist impulse is the very origin and raison d’être of the genre. (b) Formation can but does not have to be modelled on the idea of organic growth. It does imply, however, an interaction, a dialectic interplay between character and environment, individualisation and socialisation; and therefore some sort of compromise or even synthesis between mere self-realization, subjectivity, and a mere adaptation to reality, objectivity. Ideally, the Bildungsroman will end with the hero’s integration into society. A positive ending is, however, not 2.

»Körper und Seele in ihren gegenseitigen Verhältnissen, Einschränkungen und Beziehungen« (Platner 1772, xvii).

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a necessary ingredient of the genre; there are also numerous examples of a Bildungsroman ex negativo in which the process of formation fails, either because of the hero’s own fault, or because of deficits in the society of the time. What definitely is needed, however, is the concept of an ideal, desirable and possible process of character-formation. (c) Therefore »Bildung« is not merely an element of the plot but also the central subject of the Bildungsroman. These novels not only narrate the character formation of their hero but also discuss their concept of »Bildung« in an implicit or explicit way. So much for my attempt of a systematic definition. In the main part of this chapter I will try to describe the specific characteristics of the Romantic Bildungsroman. I will base my description on two assumptions: (1) Whatever Romanticism may be, it certainly is not Realism. After all, Realists define themselves in the 1840’s/1850’s all over Europe by declaring themselves decidedly as anti- or non-Romantics. So there must be a significant difference between the Romantic and the Realist Bildungsroman. (Quite generally speaking, the best way to define literary epochs is always to describe their differences vis-à-vis their predecessors and their successors.) (2) As far as Romanticism is concerned, there is, however, an important watershed roughly in the midst of the epoch. Following — not in every detail, but in the general line of argument — Virgil Nemoianu’s seminal study The Taming of Romanticism, I will draw a line between the »strong« variant of the Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode and the »weaker« versions. I will use the term »High Romantic« or »High Romantic mode« however rather in a systematic or typological than in a historical sense. As a rule, one will find texts written in the High Romantic mode more often in German and English Romanticism than in that of the literatures of the Romance languages, and one will find them more often in texts written before 1815 than in those of a later origin. But this is a rule only, with many exceptions, many of which were quite obviously caused by the reception of High Romantic texts. For the comparatists, a historical use of the terms »Early«, »High«, and »Late« Romanticism is extremely difficult, as the definition of these subunits will vary considerably from country to country. To give just two examples: In Germany Early Romanticism (combining, from a comparatist’s point of view, the Germanist’s »Klassik« and »Frühromantik«) will start in the early 1790s and last to about 1805; High Romanticism (combining, from a comparatists point of view, the Germanist’s »Hochromantik« and »Spätromantik«) will start at around 1805 and last to 1815 or 1820; Late Romanticism (equalling in parts the Germanist’s »Restaurationsliteratur« or »Biedermeierzeit«) will start at around 1815 and last till 1848. In France one could distinguish between an »early« phase (1800–15), the time of the formation of the Romantic movement (1815–30), and the main phase of Romanticism (1830–50). In spite of these national differences, 1815 and 1848 seem to be fairly global watersheds in mental, intellectual and political history, at least as far as Europe is concerned.

Manfred Engel

268 2.

The Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode

2.1 Beginnings: Goethe’s »Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre« (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years, 1795/96) Goethe started to work on his Wilhelm Meister project on February 16, 1776, about two years after he had finished his immensely successful first novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther, 1774; 1787); progress was slow, however, and it was not until November 1785 that he managed to complete Book VI. A copy of the lost manuscript of this first (partial) version of the novel was rediscovered in 1910 and first published in 1911 under the title Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung (Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Calling). The second workphase began in March 1793, i.e. after Goethe’s journey to Italy (1786–88) and in the author’s »classical« period. First, Goethe copied and considerably revised the six books of the Theatralische Sendung, turning them into books I–IV of the Lehrjahre; then, between February 1795 and June 1796, he wrote the remaining four books. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre appeared in three instalments in 1795/96. A detailed knowledge of the long and complicated genesis of the Lehrjahre is important because its two versions represent two different types of the Bildungsroman: The Theatralische Sendung belongs to the anthropological type of Bildungsroman of the Late Enlightenment, whereas the Lehrjahre launched the new type of the Romantic Bildungsroman. When Goethe started to write the Theatralische Sendung he had conceived the text as something like an Anti-Werther, as an attempt to overcome his own Storm and Stress period. Werther had been a typical enthusiast (»Schwärmer«), a prototypical representative of the young intellectuals of Storm and Stress and the Late Enlightenment alike, who deeply suffered from the gap between their ardent feelings and their idealist creed on the one hand and the prosaic reality and the rationalistic and materialistic attitude of the society of their time at the other. As the enthusiast is gifted with a very strong imaginative power he can, in his best moments, imaginatively and emotionally transform the reality around him into a meaningful and sympathetic universe. This Herculean effort of the imagination will, however, not last for very long, and the resulting confrontation with reality throws the enthusiast into the abyss of a deep melancholy. The enthusiast is thus caught in the vicious circle of a manic-depressive pattern of behaviour — which may well result in his final ruin (as, for instance, in Werther’s suicide). Curing the enthusiast without turning him into a disillusioned and materialistic bourgeois was the aim of the anthropological Bildungsroman. Its prototype is Wieland’s Geschichte des Agathon (History of Agathon; first version in 1766/67), its negative versions — negative, because here the enthusiast remains uncured — are Karl Philip Moritz’s Anton Reiser: Ein psychologischer Roman (Anton Reiser. A Psychological Novel, 1785–90) and Ludwig Tieck’s Geschichte des Herrn William Lovell (History of Mr William Lovell, 1795/96). Goethe’s Theatralische Sendung was quite obviously planned as a positive version of this anthropological type of the Bildungsroman. As a typical enthusiast, Wilhelm is gifted with a strong imagination and with high ideals and confronted with a prosaic reality: his commercialist surroundings (his father is a merchant who, of course, wants his son to become his successor), and the distress of his parents‹ unhappy marriage (his mother has a lover, and his father

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knows about it). The Christmas present of a puppet theatre gives Wilhelm’s vague longing for a different life a decisive direction: He wants to become a dramatist, actor, director, even the founder of a German national theatre. This practical use of his talents and the »objective« medium of the drama would, at the (yet unwritten) end of the novel, probably have enabled Wilhelm to (more or less) overcome his enthusiastic subjectivity and to perceive his surroundings and his fellow characters without imaginative projections. This successful cure of an enthusiast would have been the exact antithesis to Werther’s doom — just as the form of the Theatralische Sendung had been conceived as an exact antithesis and »correction« of that of Werther: This had been an extremely subjective, almost lyrical and highly emotional version of a mono-perspectival epistolary novel. The Theatralische Sendung, in comparison, is dominated by an auctorial narrator continually commenting — sometimes ironically, sometimes in good humour — on Wilhelm’s faults and mistakes. The reader will thus also assume a distanced attitude towards the hero. The Lehrjahre are a product of Goethe’s classical period. In many ways, they reflect the new anti-mimetic and autonomous turn which Goethe’s aesthetics had taken in the years of his Italian journey and in his collaboration with Schiller. But, of course, Goethe could — and perhaps would — not change the text completely. From the point of view of genre-history the Lehrjahre therefore remain a transitional work: They retain traces of the anthropological version of the Bildungsroman — and they already show important characteristics of the new, »transcendental« and symbolic version of the Bildungsroman of the High Romantic mode. The paradigm shift between these two genre types is marked by three important differences between the Theatralische Sendung and the Lehrjahre: (1) Goethe reduced the anthropological motivation of Wilhelm’s development by pruning away all particular determinations. For instance, there is no longer a particular family conflict caused by the infidelity of Wilhelm’s mother but just the general conflict between the narrow economical and utilitarian worldview of Wilhelm’s merchant father and that of his early friend Werner on the one hand and Wilhelm’s desire for a more »universal« development of his character on the other. The detailed realism of the first version is thus transformed into a more generic approach. (2) Goethe considerably and progressively reduced the voice of auctorial comment — in the last two books it has become almost non-existent. So the text, with its contrasting biographies and its rivalling concepts of character-formation — mutually reflecting and commenting (as Goethe says: »mirroring«) each other — and its complex symbols, is made to speak for itself: The narrative mode of »telling« is substituted by that of »showing« (for details cf. Engel 1993, 266–275). (3) Goethe adds two new layers to the text which supplement its pragmatic nexus (i.e. the causal — socially, genetically, and psychologically motivated — chain of events which forms the plot). A new conceptual nexus is established by the introduction of the mysterious »Turmgesellschaft« (Society of the Tower), a new poetic nexus by several chains of symbolic images. Despite all these changes, the plot-line of the Theatralische Sendung remains basically intact: Young Wilhelm is still an enthusiast who is deeply dissatisfied with the narrowness of his family surroundings and the dire outlook of becoming a merchant like his father. And still the present of a puppet theatre fixes his hopes and interest on the theatre. As a young man he has an affair with the actress Mariane, falsely believes himself cheated by her, and leaves her

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without knowing that she is pregnant (later she will give birth to his son Felix, and die a few days afterwards). The main part of the novel is a long journey which starts for Wilhelm as a business trip but soon turns into a tour d’horizon of different forms of theatrical practice in the Germany of the 18th century. By a series of coincidences Wilhelm becomes the leader of an actors‹ company, takes care of a strange girl called Mignon, who insists on dressing as a boy, and of a melancholy old street musician called Harfner (i.e. harp player) — only at the end of the novel will he find out that the Harfner is Mignon’s father who had had an incestuous relationship with his sister —, has several love affairs, is assaulted and wounded by robbers and saved by a mysterious »amazon« (who later turns out to be Natalie, his future fiancée), and finally joins the renowned actors‹ company of Serlo and his sister Aurelie. There he first meets his son Felix (whom he wrongly believes to be Aurelie’s son), and performs as actor playing the title-role in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1602) — the climax and end of his theatrical career. In the last two books of the novel Wilhelm enters the world of the Society of the Tower, which had already tried to influence and direct his life several times. He learns that Felix is his son, and accepts the role of a father. He gives up all plans of a theatrical career, is betrothed to his beloved Natalie, and becomes a member of the Society and its projects of social reform and of an active, practical way of life. Mignon and the Harfner, however, cannot be integrated in this new existence: Mignon dies of grief when she learns about Wilhelm’s marriage plans and the Harfner commits suicide. Of course, this is nothing but a barren and in many ways incomplete sketch of a complicated and multi-layered plot, which I cannot discuss in detail. The all-important question for an interpretation of the Lehrjahre as a Bildungsroman is naturally that of the mode and the result of the hero’s development. Even my sketchy summary will have shown that Wilhelm’s long journey — a typical plot-device of the Bildungsroman — has brought him into contact with many individuals, many ideas, and many different spheres of society. He has also come to understand that he is neither a born actor nor a born writer: He has always remained a »dilettante« (in Goethe’s and Schiller’s definition of the term), using literature and the theatre as a means to express himself and being unable to view them as autonomous art. As Jarno, one of the members of the Society of the Tower, tells Wilhelm: a man »who can only play himself is no actor«.3 So does the Lehrjahre tell the story of the successful cure of an enthusiast who has, in the end, learned to come to terms with reality? This, at least, is the happy ending that we would expect in a Bildungsroman proper. Yet the ending of the novel remains strangely inconclusive. Of course, there have been changes in Wilhelm’s character and behaviour which definitely are improvements: His new role as a father forces him to take a new and more objective interest in his surroundings: »the child’s [i.e. Felix’s] curiosity, his thirst for knowledge, first made him realize what little interest he himself had taken in external things, how small his actual knowledge was. […] being called upon to teach he felt the necessity of learning«.4 He has renounced his theatrical ambition and, still more, »along with the feeling of a father, he had acquired all 3.

»wer sich nur selbst spielen kann, [ist] kein Schauspieler« (Goethe 1988, 552).

4.

»die Neugierde, die Wißbegierde des Kindes ließen ihn erst fühlen, welch ein schwaches Interesse er an den Dingen außer sich genommen hatte, wie wenig er kannte und wußte. […] er fühlte die Notwendigkeit, sich zu belehren, indem er zu lehren aufgefordert ward« (Goethe 1988, 500).

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the virtues of a citizen«.5 His early friend Werner finds him »taller, stronger, straighter«, more clearly defined in his character, and more amiable in his behaviour«.6 All this may certainly be true — yet what about the gravest fault in Wilhelm’s character: his enthusiastic disposition with its manic-depressive ups-and-downs? When, in the very last chapter of the novel, Wilhelm has to believe that Natalie will remain unreachable for him he, once again, immediately falls prey to the darkest melancholy, crying out: Again and again have my eyes been opened to my conduct; but it was always too late, and always in vain! […] We are wretched, and appointed for wretchedness; and what does it matter whether our faults, higher influence or chance, virtue or vice, wisdom or folly plunge us into ruin?7

If this is the result of a long process of character formation in the archetype of all Bildungsromane we have every reason to be disappointed. Moreover, Wilhelm’s »character formation« is, as my plot-summary may have shown, largely the result of a chain of happy coincidences and of a series of more or less fatal mistakes. In the end, it is Natalie’s brother Friedrich, another member of the Society of the Tower (and not a particularly respectable one, for that matter), who brings about the happy ending. And he adequately comments on its coincidental nature with a biblical comparison: »to my mind, you [i.e. Wilhelm] resemble Saul, the son of Kish, who went out to seek his father’s asses, and found a kingdom«;8 Goethe himself used another metaphor for this paradoxical combination of chance and finality, namely that of the »Umweg« (detour) which, in the end, however leads the hero right to his goal. So, quite obviously, the pragmatic nexus of the novel can hardly be described as that of a continuous and successful process of character formation. The same is true as far as the interventions of the Society of the Tower are concerned; they, too, remain curiously ineffective (for details cf. Engel 1993, 277–279). By introducing this Society — which somewhat resembles the »machinery« of gods in old epic poems — into the final version of the novel, Goethe provided himself with an opportunity to explicitly discuss problems of character formation. But none of all the rival concepts which diverse members of the Society expound within the text can claim more than a merely relative validity, none of them is the »master-concept« on which the novel is modelled. So the novel’s claim to be a Bildungsroman can neither rest — at least: not solely rest — on the pragmatic nexus of the plot nor on the conceptual nexus of the »Bildung«-discussions. In fact, it mainly rests on the poetic nexus of several chains of symbols running through the novel. Here I can discuss only the most important of these symbolic links (for more details cf. Schings 5.

»mit dem Gefühl des Vaters hatte er auch alle Tugenden eines Bürgers erworben« (Goethe 1988, 504).

6.

»größer, stärker, gerader, in seinem Wesen gebildeter und in seinem Benehmen angenehmer geworden« (Goethe 1988, 500).

7.

»Aber und abermal gehen mir die Augen über mich selbst auf, immer zu spät und immer umsonst. […] Wir sind elend und zum Elend bestimmt, und ist es nicht völlig einerlei, ob eigene Schuld, höherer Einfluß oder Zufall, Tugend oder Laster, Weisheit oder Wahnsinn uns ins Verderben stürzen?» (Goethe 1988, 607).

8.

»du kommst mir vor wie Saul, der Sohn Kis, der ausging, seines Vaters Eselinnen zu suchen, und ein Königreich fand« (Goethe 1988, 610).

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1984; Engel 1993, 275–299): the painting of »The Ailing Prince«. This picture was part of the collection of Wilhelm’s grandfather, was bought by the Society in Wilhelm’s youth, and finally came into the possession of Natalie. It is one of Wilhelm’s earliest memories, and it plays an important part in the happy ending of the novel — so, in a way, it acts as a frame for Wilhelm’s life-story (and is mentioned again and again throughout the novel). The painting depicts a scene from Old Syrian history: The ailing Prince is Antiochos, son of King Seleukos I. His illness is actually a psychological one: The Prince is lovesick because he longs for his stepmother Stratonike. He is cured by a wise doctor, who finds out the emotional cause of the illness and informs King Seleukos who generously gives wife and kingdom to his son. A story with a happy ending — but this is not what young Wilhelm used to see in the painting: How much did I pity and how much do I still pity a youth that must shut up within himself the sweet impulses, the fairest inheritance which nature has given to us, and conceal in his own bosom the fire which should warm and animate himself and others, so that his innermost self is consumed by unutterable pains! How much do I pity the ill-fated woman who has to devote herself to another man when her heart has already found the worthy object of a true and pure affection.9

This is, of course, a flagrant misinterpretation — and shows that melancholic mistrust in the ways of the world which is the typical reaction of a disappointed enthusiast. At the very end of the novel, in his answer to Friedrich’s biblical comparison (quoted above), Wilhelm explicitly corrects his earlier view of the world: »I know not the value of a kingdom […] but I know that I have attained a happiness which I have not deserved, and which I would not exchange for anything in the world«.10 Both meaning and form of this symbolic nexus are typical of the Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode. Character formation is always based on a dialectical interplay, on some sort of compromise between subject and objects, the inner impulses, urges, longings of the hero and the necessities of nature and the rights of his fellow creatures. To achieve this compromise or synthesis, the hero has to somewhat reduce his subjectivist view of the world. But this alone could never guarantee a successful process of character formation if reality itself was nothing but an ensemble of dead objects and given social structures without anything like an inner connection and an all-encompassing inner purpose. This negative picture of a disenchanted universe had been the result of the Enlightenment’s successful critique of all forms of metaphysics. The Romantics sought to compensate this loss without recurring to traditional metaphysics. The success of character formation depends — this was their basic creed — on the belief in a pre-established harmony between subject and object, between the individual and »nature« as a whole. 9.

»Wie jammerte mich, wie jammert mich noch ein Jüngling, der die süßen Triebe, das schönste Erbteil, das die Natur uns gab, in sich verschließen, und das Feuer, das ihn und andere erwärmen und beleben sollte, in seinem Busen verbergen muß, so daß sein Innerstes unter ungeheuren Schmerzen verzehrt wird. Wie bedaure ich die Unglückliche, die sich einem anderen widmen soll, wenn ihr Herz schon den würdigen Gegenstand eines wahren und reinen Verlangens gefunden hat« (Goethe 1988, 69).

10.

»Ich kenne den Wert eines Königreiches nicht […], aber ich weiß, daß ich ein Glück erlangt habe, das ich nicht verdiene, und das ich mit nichts in der Welt vertauschen möchte« (Goethe 1988, 610).

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For Goethe, Hölderlin and most of the German Romantics, the existence of such a harmony could never be grasped — according to Kantian terminology — by »theoretical reason«: it could be conclusively proven neither by philosophical reasoning nor by scientific research. Yet the presupposition of its existence was a necessary postulate of »practical reason«, i.e. a transcendental necessity. Only if we believe that we can find in nature the »antwortende Gegenbilder«�������� (corresponding — literally: »answering« — counter-images) — a metaphor which Goethe coined in his biographical study Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert (Winckelmann and his Century, 1805) — to our inner longings will we be able to act confidently and feel at home in the world, only then will we be able to overcome the deep melancholy and the attitude of mistrust and antagonism which we would feel in a mechanical, »disenchanted« (»entzaubert«, Max Weber) universe. This is exactly what the painting of the »Ailing Prince« suggests: In the end, the deepest longings of the individual will not be thwarted, in the end happiness will be possible. And, in fact, this is what the Lehrjahre as a whole suggest. And they do this in a way which is possible and plausible only in a work of literature. In an age in which the old metaphysical systems had been shaken and in which philosophy — at least as long as it respected the boundaries drawn by Kant — could formulate metaphysical speculations only as postulates of practical reason, literature and art became the legitimate heirs of religion. This is what Nietzsche would later call »Kunstmetaphysik« (metaphysics of art). The Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode turns the transcendental postulate of a pre-established harmony between the ego and the world into (fictional) reality, i.e. it provides symbolic images and a symbolical form for a re-enchanted universe. Therefore I have suggested the use of the genre-term »transcendental novel« (»Transzendentalroman«) for this type of the Bildungsroman. 2.2 Novalis’s »Heinrich von Ofterdingen« (1802): A radical version of the »Bildungsroman« in the High Romantic mode The Bildungsroman of the High Romantic mode or »transcendental novel« flourished in the German literature of Early Romanticism and it dominated the novels and narrations of High Romanticism. Even Goethe’s Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeymanship, 1829) — in many aspects a clearly Post-Romantic novel — still echoes the genre in its complex form and in the newly invented episode from Wilhelm’s youth, which clearly corresponds with the ending of the text. As it is not possible to discuss all of the many variants of the genre type in the novels of Hölderlin, Dorothea and Friedrich Schlegel, Jean Paul, Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Joseph von Eichendorff and others, I will restrict myself to one example only: to Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Henry of Ofterdingen, 1802) which presents us with one of the most avantgardistic versions of the transcendental novel. Because of Novalis’s early death the Ofterdingen remained a fragment. The first part, entitled »Die Erwartung« (Expectation) had been finished, the second and last one, entitled »Die Erfüllung« (Fulfilment), just barely begun. The novel was published posthumously in 1802 by the author’s friends Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck. The story of the book is easily told: it is set in the Middle Ages — but this is of little importance. The idealization of the Middle Ages is typical of High, not of Early German Romanticism;

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Novalis’s Middle Ages are characterised by the same problems as his own time, the only difference being that the contradictions are somewhat less extreme, so that their mediation is more easily possible than in the present. Heinrich’s situation at the beginning of the novel is similar to that of the Lehrjahre: Just as young Wilhelm, young Heinrich is not really at home in the bourgeois world of his family in Eisenach. And just as Wilhelm’s dissatisfaction was simultaneously increased and newly directed by his grandfather’s painting and the present of a puppet theatre, so Heinrich’s discontent is amplified and newly focalised by the tales of a visiting stranger (»ein Fremder«): He tells the family about a mysterious »blue flower«, of which Heinrich dreams in the following night and which he cannot forget. To cure their son’s increasing melancholy, the parents decide to send him on a journey: Heinrich’s mother has long planned to visit her father Schwaning��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� , a rich merchant, — and so she, her son, and some merchant friends of his grandfather’s depart for Augsburg. It is a journey without adventures — but with many encounters and conversations: Heinrich discusses poetry and the role of the poet with the accompanying merchants; at a castle he meets Zulima, a girl from the Orient, and learns about the crusades; in a village, he meets a miner, and in a nearby cave an aristocratic hermit, and listens to their opinions on natural history and on the history of mankind. In the cave, Heinrich finds an illustrated book written in an unknown language, which seems to tell his own life-story. All of these encounters and conversations are in some way related to the Golden Age of the past, to poetry and the poet, and all of them include the telling of legends and/or the singing of songs as epic and lyric interludes. What they offer to young Heinrich is not an encyclopaedia of scientific or empirical knowledge but an initiation into a new world-view in which natural philosophy and poetry are deeply interlinked, in which the world becomes re-enchanted — »poetisiert« (poeticised) as Novalis calls it —, and subject and object prove to be interlinked in multiple ways. Arrived at Augsburg, Heinrich meets the poet Klingsohr (he had seen his picture already in the strange book) and immediately falls in love with his daughter Mathilde (who reminds him of the blue flower of his dream). Soon they are engaged and a marriage is arranged. In the preceding weeks there are, once again, long conversations on nature and poetry, this time between Heinrich and Klingsohr. The latter also tells a long, highly symbolic fairy tale, which ends the first part of the novel. At the beginning of the second part, Heinrich has once again started off on a long journey. In the time gap between the two parts, Mathilde has given birth to a child, but both have died (these events are not directly narrated, but had only been foreshadowed in another of Heinrich’s dreams). We have to rely on the recollections of Ludwig Tieck for information on the main part of this second section of the novel (Novalis 1977–88, I: 359–369): Whereas the first section had been devoted to Heinrich’s private life, he was now to be portrayed as a public figure: He would become a general, a friend of the son of the Emperor Friedrich II, travel to Greece and Jerusalem, meet the Emperor himself, find the blue flower deep in a mountain (who will turn out to be Mathilde). The end of the novel would have converged with the end of Klingsohr’s fairy-tale: the end of history and of time and the beginning of a new Golden Age. This information on the second part of the novel is much too scarce to base an interpretation on it. Yet, even my summary of the first part tells us almost nothing about the text — apart from the obvious fact that there is hardly any action in it. Whereas Goethe in the Lehrjahre had merely complemented the pragmatic nexus of the plot by a conceptual and a poetic one, Novalis

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comes close to completely suspending it. The chapters of the novel tend to turn into isolated units which are connected more by a complex system of horizontal and vertical thematic and symbolic links than by the plot. The horizontal system of poetic links resembles that of the Bible (at least in its traditional theological interpretation): the plot-units of the Ofterdingen are »figurally« or »typologically« interrelated like the episodes and persons of the Old Testament with those of the New Testament (e.g. the tree in Paradise with Christ’s cross). Thus, for instance, the »blue flower« is explicitly linked with all the women whom Heinrich meets (Zulima is prefiguring Mathilde, just as Zyane is postfiguring her — and all are pre- and postfigured by the blue flower which at the end of the Heinrich’s dream had assumed the face of a woman). The system of vertical links is even more complex: The construction of the novel is based on the principle of self-similarity or self-reflexivity. Each chapter is not only — like a Russian doll — a mise en abîme of the novel as a whole but contains in itself at least one (sometimes two or three) further and, so to speak, more condensed mises en abîme. This, of course, is what the Romantics called the device of »Potenzierung« (potentiation). Again, I have to restrict myself to the discussion of one example only: Heinrich’s dream of the »blue flower« (Novalis 1977–88, I: 196 f.). It consists of three parts: The first one is a sequence of all sorts of adventures mirroring (or prefiguring) the extensive totality of Heinrich’s life, whereas the second and third part are symbolic condensations and generalisations. First Heinrich climbs up a mountain, finds an opening, enters it, and thus reaches a large cave deep inside the mountain. The metaphor of the mine and other poetic signals mark this part of the dream-journey as a regression in time, back to the arch-scene of creation itself: In the cave, Heinrich sees a mysterious fountain whose »mighty jet« (»mächtiger Strahl«) is atomised into »countless sparks« (»unzählige Funken«) — an obvious image for the primeval act of creation in which the »Absolutes« (Absolute) divides itself into the sensual manifold. Heinrich swims in the large basin of the fountain and experiences in its »bluish« (»bläulich«) water a fluid, quasi »oceanic« state of being in which the borderline between subject and object has not yet been fixed: a heavenly sensation flowed through his inner self; in heartfelt lust countless thoughts strove to mingle within him; new, never seen images arose which also interfused and became visible beings around him, and every wave of the lovely element clung to him like a tender bosom. The flood seemed to be a dissolution of charming maidens who at once embodied themselves as they touched the youth.11

This regression to a state of primeval creation, in which subject and object, body and soul, mental and sexual arousal have not yet been separated, is followed by a rapid progress in time in the third part of the dream: After a short sleep Heinrich awakes (of course, as part of his dream) and finds himself lying on a meadow near a fountain. All of the scenery is coloured in different 11.

»eine himmlische Empfindung überströmte sein Inneres; mit inniger Wollust strebten unzählige Gedanken in ihm sich zu vermischen; neue, niegesehene Bilder entstanden, die auch in einander flossen und zu sichtbaren Wesen um ihn wurden, und jede Welle des lieblichen Elements schmiegte sich wie ein zarter Busen an ihn. Die Flut schien eine Auflösung reizender Mädchen zu sein, die an dem Jüngling sich augenblicklich verkörperten« (Novalis 1977–88, I: 196 f.).

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shades of blue. Near the fountain, he sees a blue flower that strangely attracts him. Suddenly it starts to change into a girl. Right at this moment, his mother calls and Heinrich awakes. For any reader who is well versed in the natural philosophy of German idealism the meaning of the dream is of almost allegorical transparency: As a flower, the strange plant is part of the organic world without consciousness; in its blue colour, it unites the »watery«, fluid all-unity of the beginning with the »spiritual« colour of the sky and thus with the final spiritualisation of all objects. In its metamorphosis into a girl, it prefigures the metamorphosis of the alienated world of objects from a mere »Nicht-Ich« (non-ego) into a loving and beloved »Du« (Thou). Whereas the second part of the dream symbolised a regression to an absolute beginning, the third part thus prefigures the first steps to an absolute ending, the final state of harmony and unity which — following the triadic system of the Idealist philosophy of history — will be a potentiated version of the harmony and unity of the beginning. Heinrich’s dream is thus not only an abimization of the hero’s life-story — his various regressions to the experience of a foregone »Golden Age« and his final progress to a »poeticized«, re-enchanted universe —, but also of the triadic pattern of history. Heinrich’s walk into the cave and out again is a metonymy of the dialectics of Heinrich’s (and all human) formation. Once we realize that the seemingly antagonistic »urges« of the ego — its »centripetal« and »centrifugal« longing (Fichte), the »inward« and the »outward« way, or, as Novalis calls it, the »Weg der innern Betrachtung« and the »Weg der Erfahrung« (way of inner contemplation — way of experience; Novalis 1977–88, I: 208), action and contemplation, the life of the »poet« and that of the »hero« (p. 280 f.) — ultimately lead to the same end, the polarities of subject and object, self and nature, soul and body lose their antagonistic appearance. In the meaning of its symbols and in its symbolic, self-referential structure the Ofterdingen is thus what Novalis calls a »symbolische Construction der transscendentalen Welt« (symbolic construction of the transcendental universe; Novalis 1977–88, II: 536), a symbolic model of the transcendental laws of the universe. 2.3 The genre-type and its variants The type of the transcendental novel dominated the narrative literature of German Romanticism. (Differences between Classicism and Early Romanticism on the one hand and High and Late Romanticism on the other will be sketched in Section 3.2.). Basically, all of these texts share the following characteristics: (1) The Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode (»transcendental novel«) is anti-mimetic. Its authors are not primarily interested in the representation of a detailed life-story with highly individual psychological motivations and sociological determinations. This level of the text — which I call the »plot-layer« or »pragmatic nexus« — loses much of its structuring force by the reduction of causal and psychological motivations, by ruptures of narrative continuity, and by the introduction of supernatural and fantastic elements. (2) The traditional modes of narrative integration are further reduced by the open form of the texts and the integration of epic, essayistic, lyric, sometimes even dramatic insertions and interludes.

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(3) To substitute the pragmatic nexus and to achieve epic integration the authors use (a) a conceptual nexus in which the process of formation, its transcendental preconditions, and the artistic means of adequately portraying it are explicitly discussed (self-reflexivity); (b) a poetic nexus, formed by symbols, myths, pre- and post-figurations, potentiation and abimisation. (4) In their narration, their symbols, and their symbolical form, these novels present a symbolic picture of the universe, which is the exact antithesis to a mechanical and »disenchanted« view of the world. With poetic means only — i.e. without recurring to traditional metaphysics —, these novels try to re-build the symbolic view of the world which the Enlightenment and natural science had destroyed: a world, in which subject and object, man and nature, soul and body, natural and human history, are »related« in an emphatic sense of the world and in which their relationship does not rest on strife and the domination of one part by the other but on consubstantiality and mutual affinity. Character formation is thus but a metonymy of all forms of natural formation and of natural and human history as a whole. Quite often, it is modelled on the triadic scheme of paradise / fall / redemption, or — in the terminology of German idealist natural philosophy — of unity / division / unity regained at a higher level. In Anglo-American terminology, the development of longer prose fiction in the course of the 18th century has been described as the way from »romance« to »novel« (or »history«). The Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode in its attempt to re-enchant the world tries to overcome the »novel« — not by simply returning to the old »romance« but by creating a new symbolic type of romanesque narration: the transcendental novel. Why did this particular type of the Bildungsroman flourish in Germany — and in Germany only? There are, I think, basically three answers to this question: (1) German Idealism — a project on which authors like Schiller, Hölderlin, Novalis, and the Schlegel brothers actively collaborated — had formulated the strongest and most avantgardistic version of Romantic natural philosophy and of Romantic aesthetics (cf. Engel, Lehmann 2004). (2) Only in Germany the novel was considered as the Romantic genre per se; in all other countries — especially in those where the tradition of Classicism was still strong — it was assessed as a »low«, popular, or even subliterary form. The high estimate of the novel in Germany was based on the poetic innovations of Goethe’s Lehrjahre which in its poetic form (not in its content) had been universally acclaimed by the Early Romantics. It was the Lehrjahre which motivated Friedrich Schlegel to consider the novel as the most adequate genre for the Early Romantic project of »progressive Universalpoesie« (progressive universal poetry): because of its comparatively loose and unregulated form the novel could and should integrate all other forms of poetic and non-poetic writing. (3) Germany was one of the few European countries in which Romanticism in a fully developed form had begun already in the 18th century. So an important part of German Romantic writing belongs to the first period of Romanticism, which preceded the historical and psychological watershed of 1815. Many of its texts still shared the historical optimism that flourished in the wake of the French Revolution and was definitely broken in the European-wide process of restoration following the Vienna Congress. In an epoch dominated by »Weltschmerz«, »Byronism«, »ennui«, and »mal du siècle«, the transcendental novel could never have been invented.

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Does this mean that the Bildungsroman in the High Romanic mode was restricted to German literature only? The answer must be: yes and no — yes, for fully fledged examples of the genre; no, for at least partial realizations or similar projects. These latter cases were either independent parallel projects, or resulted from a reception of German literature and of the philosophy of Idealism and its aesthetics. In the remaining part of the chapter I will present a few examples for these variants. British Romanticism started at about the same time as the German one — first as a parallel project in a parallel reaction against the deficiencies of the Late Enlightenment, then, with Wordsworth’s and especially Coleridge’s contacts with German culture, at least partially as a reception of key ideas of Idealist philosophy and of German literary texts. Contrary to Germany, however, in Britain the reputation of the novel as a literary form was rather low. So the Romantics who had the highest possible vision of literature wrote few novels — and so the British novel of the period was largely based on the continuation of Enlightenment traditions of narration (as, for instance, in the novels of Jane Austen, which cannot be called »Romantic« even in the vaguest sense of the word). Small wonder, then, that we have to turn to another genre when we are in search of British equivalents to the German Bildungsroman of the High Romantic mode. If we compare the literary systems of Romanticism in both countries, the closest equivalent to the German »high« form of the novel in its newly romanesque form is the verse epic (verse romance, long verse narration, long narrative poem). So the best equivalent we can find for the German transcendental novel are texts like Wordsworth’s The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1799, 1805, 1850), Keats’s Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818) and Hyperion: A Fragment (1820), or Shelley’s Alastor (1815). In an admittedly looser sense, we might also add Coleridge’s »Rime of the Ancient Mariner« (1798), or some of Blake’s verse narrations (e.g. Milton, 1809). A simplified, but suggestive formula for the comparison of these texts with the German transcendental novel could be the equation: »verse romance = transcendental novel — novel«. In most of these British verse romances the layer of symbols, myths, inserted poems and fairy tales, which in the transcendental novel was added to the pragmatic nexus of the plot layer, has become the text itself. And most of these verse narrations create — just as Novalis tried to do — a new myth for the triadic pattern of unity, fall, unity regained. (An even more radical, albeit non-fictional, version is Edgar Alan Poe’s Eureka: A Prose Poem of 1848, which might be called a »Bildungsroman of the universe«.) Among these texts, it is Wordsworth’s Prelude which best fulfils the genre criteria of the Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode. The first to notice this affinity was M.H. Abrams, who called the poem »a fully developed poetic equivalent of two portentous innovations in prose fiction, of which the earliest examples had appeared in Germany only a decade or so before Wordsworth began writing the poem: the Bildungsroman […] and the Künstlerroman« (Abrams 1971, 74). The Prelude was the poetic work of Wordsworth’s lifetime as a poet. Begun in 1798 — and originally intended as an introduction for the (never written) philosophical work The Recluse (thence the title) —, it was continually revised and remodelled, and not published until after the poet’s death. Today, we usually distinguish between three versions of the text: the two-part

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Prelude of 1799 (first published in 1974), the thirteen-book Prelude of 1805 (first published in 1926), and the fourteen-book Prelude of 1839 (published posthumously in 1850 by the poet’s wife Mary). The following discussion will be based on the 1805 Prelude. Although the subtitle of the poem Growth of a Poet’s Mind was chosen (just as the main title) by Mary Wordsworth, it adequately describes one of the two layers of the text: The Prelude combines a biography of the author (of course, in a highly stylised version) with what could be called a Bildungsroman of the poet’s mind, or, more generally speaking, a Bildungsroman of the »mind of man« (Wordsworth 1979, 46, i: 340 — henceforth the Prelude 1805 will be quoted with book-number and verse only). For the poet represents nothing but the highest level that the mind of man can reach in the development and active use of the imagination (which, for Wordsworth, serves as the key agent in all human cognition). This is the characteristic two layer-model of the Bildungsroman of the High Romantic mode. Typically, too, the more abstract pattern of the history of the mind in the interaction of subject and object, man and nature — expressed in the visionary »spots of time experiences«, or even in dreams — dominates the layer of the story proper: biographical events are selected and re-ordered according to the controlling pattern of the text (for a detailed interpretation cf. Abrams 1979, 71–140). This pattern is, basically, a variant of the triadic scheme: In his childhood, the poet lived in harmony with nature. He lost it by his contact with the modern world: his life in cities, his disappointed belief in the French revolution and in the materialistic philosophy of William Godwin. At this stage, he had    sacrificed The exactness of a comprehensive mind To scrupulous and microscopic views That furnished out materials for work Of false imagination, placed beyond The limits of experience and truth. […] till, demanding proof, And seeking it in every thing, I lost All feeling of conviction, and, in fine, Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, Yielded up moral questions in despair. And for my future studies, as the sole Employment of the inquiring faculty, Turned towards mathematics, and their clear And solid evidence. (x: 843–848, 896–904)

Even at this nadir of despair, however, the narrative voice — the »narrating I« who always knows better than the »narrated I« — predicts the regaining of the lost unity: »lastly Nature’s self […] conducted me to open day« (x: 921–923). The »narrated I« will reach this stage only at the end of the poem, in the famous Mount Snowdon-episode (which in Wordsworth »real« life took place in 1791, that is, in actual history, before the depressing and disillusioning stay in France). Here the poet finally regains his belief in the active power of the mind and in its conformity with the force of Nature itself: »Hence sovereignty within and peace at will,/ […];/

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Hence chearfulness in every act of life;/ Hence truth in moral judgements; and delight/ That fails not, in the external universe« (xiii: 114–119). In the 18th century, that might well have been called »theodicy achieved«; as Wordsworth’s belief in nature needs no personal god, Abrams has, quite aptly, suggested the term »biodicy« instead. In The Prelude, Wordsworth »translates Providence into an immanent teleology« of nature (Abrams 1971, 96). So, like a true Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode, the poem is a new secular Bible, proclaiming the Romantic religion of the belief in the unity of being, in the existence of a meaningful universe, in which subject and object are in pre-established harmony. A second example of a non-German Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode is Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (literally translated: The Taylor Re-Taylored). The book was written in 1830/31, and first published anonymously in sequels in Fraser’s Magazine (1833/34). 58 remaining copies of these instalments were sewn together for a private book issue in 1834. The first public book-edition of Sartor was sponsored and prefaced (anonymously) by Ralph Waldo Emerson; it appeared in Boston in 1836 — and soon became the Bible of the American Transcendentalists. The British edition of 1838 was the first to bear a subtitle: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh (literally translated: Mr. Devil’s Dirt). In the case of Carlyle, the parallels to the German transcendental novel were, of course, the result of an intense reception of German literature and philosophy. Carlyle had, to give just a few examples, translated Goethe’s Lehrjahre (1824) and Wanderjahre (1827), written a Life of Schiller (1825), and published the first English study on Jean Paul (1827). Sartor Resartus is a highly artistic novel, influenced less by Goethe than by Jean Paul, perhaps also by Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde, and certainly by Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67). The book consists of three parts: In the first and third the »editor« gives an account of, comments on, and tries to understand a strange book written by the German scholar Teufelsdröckh; its bibliographical data are given as: »Die Kleider ihr Werden und Wirken [Clothes, their Origin and Influence]: von Diog. Teufelsdröckh, J.U.D. etc. Stillschweigen und Cognie: Weissnichtwo, 1833« (Carlyle 1987, 6). The middle part contains a biography of the author, based on the rather dubious authority of »six considerable PAPER-BAGS« of autobiographical notes, »written in Professor Teufeldröckh’s scarcely-legible cursiv-schrift« (60). The tripartite form obviously echoes the all-inclusive novel theory of »progressive Universalpoesie«, and, quite generally, the theory-laden and highly self-reflective tradition of the transcendental novel. The middle part, once again, gives a fairly abstract biography — a mental biography, we might call it — of Professor Teufelsdröckh based on the triadic scheme of »unity — fall — unity regained at a higher level«. And once again, the crisis is brought about by an infection of the hero with materialist Enlightenment thought at a »Rational University […] hostile to Mysticism« (87) — but also by the loss of his beloved Blumine (Teufelsdröckh’s personal, rather unworthy version of the »blue flower«). This nadir of despair is called »the Everlasting No« (123), and described in this way: To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on in its dead indifference, to grind me from limb to limb. O the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the Living

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banished thither companionless, conscious? Why if there is no devil; nay unless the Devil is your God? (127)

Abruptly, however, and without psychological motivation — modelled on the sudden elevation to the »sublime« (»Erhabenes«) in Kant and Schiller —, the hero is saved and reaches the new unity of the »Everlasting Yea« (140). The »Editor« comments: Thus have we […] followed Teufelsdröckh through the various successive stages and stages of Growth, Entanglement, and almost Reprobation, into a certain clearer state of what he himself seems to consider as Conversion. […] He has discovered that the Ideal Workshop he so panted for, is even this same Actual ill-furnished Workshop he has so long been stumbling in (150).

The religious vocabulary is no coincidence. Carlyle, too, aims as something like a new Bible. He and his hero know that »the Mythus of the Christian Religion« has lost much of its convincing power in the 19th century, and that it would be necessary to »embody the divine Spirit of that Religion in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live« (147). Basically, Teufeldröckh’s strange philosophy of clothes is a part of this new myth: a symbol or metaphor for the necessity of »looking through the Shows and Vestures« of the mere world of appearances. The third and last example of a non-German Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode which I will discuss here, is Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia, ou le Rêve de la Vie (Aurélia, or The Dream of Life, 1855); as it is a short text narrating only a comparatively small part of a life-span (autobiographically speaking: less than fifteen years), we might perhaps call it a Bildungs-novella. Just as Carlyle, Nerval may well be called a connoisseur of German culture. He had translated poetry by Klopstock, Bürger, Goethe, Schiller (Poesies allemandes, 1830), Heine, and, above all, both parts of Goethe’s Faust (1826/27, 1840), and he had travelled widely in Germany and Austria. Last not least, he was an omnivorous reader who knew the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann as well as Georg Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker (Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancients, 1812). Aurélia is a deeply autobiographical text, dealing with a severe crisis in the author’s life and attempting to solve it by fictional means. And though it failed on a biographical level — soon after he had finished the book Nerval committed suicide — it is a fascinating and highly avantgardistic work of Romantic literature. It was first published in two sequels in the Revue de Paris (January/February 1855); a posthumous book-edition appeared in the same year. The book is famous for its first sentence: »La Rêve est une seconde vie« (»The Dream is a second life«, Nerval 1961, 6): What from a rationalist point of view might well be called a journey into madness — and what from a biographical point of view certainly was the author’s struggle against several attacks of schizophrenia — is portrayed as a voyage into a visionary world and, once again, modelled on the pattern of fall and redemption. The way down starts with an experience of loss and guilt: The nameless first-person narrator loses his beloved Aurélia. This loss is closely connected with a feeling of guilt, yet the narrator’s offence is never specified. Quite obviously, however, it must be a personal variant of the general »original sin« in Romanticism: The fall of the ego into the sensual world in which it forgets its spiritual, immortal side and its links with the whole of the universe — and thus becomes guilty of pride and

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egoism. A series of visionary dreams (which clothe well-known topoi of Romantic thought into the symbols and images of Nerval’s eclectic private mythology) soon confirms the existence of a spiritual universe and the immortality of the soul, the continuous presence of a Golden Age of pre-Adamite innocence, the structural identity between the history of the universe and that of the individual, the subterranean links between the myths and religions of all ages. Yet all this knowledge cannot save the ego as long as it is tormented by feelings of guilt — not, at least, in an age in which belief has become so difficult: for us born in the days of revolutions and thunderstorms, when all beliefs have been shattered, raised at best in that vague faith that is content with a few external observances, the indifferent adhesion to which is possibly worse than impiety and heresy — it is very difficult for us, as soon as we feel the need, to reconstruct the mystic edifice whose ideal figure the innocent and the simple admit into their hearts. »The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life!« Yet can we ban from our minds all the good and evil that so many intelligent generations poured into them? Ignorance cannot be learned.12

Thus, salvation does not begin with knowledge but with an act of compassion and of caring for others: During his third and last incarceration in a mental asylum, the narrator is introduced to a fellow patient who is in an even worse state. The narrator takes care of him, helps him — and in this social act loses his feeling of guilt. The second and final step to salvation is the narrator’s decision to become the conscious subject of his dreams: »Why,« I said to myself, »not […] dominate my sensations instead of being subject to them? Is it not possible to tame this fascinating and frightening chimera, to impose an order on these spirits of the night which play with our reason? Sleep occupies a third of our life. […] After a dazed state of a few minutes a new life begins, freed from the conditions of time and place and doubtlessly similar to that state which awaits us after death. Who knows if a link does not exist between these two existences and if it is not possible for the soul to unite them already now.«13

With this return from a »descent into hell« (»descente aux enfers«, Nerval 1961, 160) the triadic scheme of the text is completed. Just as in the other transcendental novels described in this chapter, the pragmatic nexus of the text is of secondary importance only. The outer stages of the hero’s development — including his repeated stays in mental asylums — are but vaguely 12.

»pour nous, nés dans des jours de révolutions et d’orages, où toutes les croyances sont brisées, — élevés tout au plus dans cette foi vague qui se contente de quelques pratiques extérieures et dont l’adhésion indifférente est plus coupable peut-être que l’impiété et l’hérésie, — il est bien difficile, dès que nous en sentons le besoin, de reconstruire l’édifice mystique dont les innocents et les simples admettent dans leurs cœurs la figure toute tracée. ›L’arbre de science n’est pas l’arbre de vie!‹ Cependant, pouvons-nous rejeter de notre esprit ce que tant de générations intelligentes y ont versé de bon ou de funeste? L’ignorance ne s’apprend pas« (Nerval 1961, 82).

13.

» ›Pourquoi, me dis-je, ne point […] dominer mes sensations au lieu de les subir? N’est-il pas possible de dompter cette chimère attrayante et redoutable, d’imposer une règle à ces esprits des nuits qui se jouent de notre raison? Le sommeil occupe le tiers de notre vie. […] Après un engourdissement de quelques minutes une vie nouvelle commence, affranchie des conditions du temps et de l’espace, et pareille sans doute à celle qui nous attend après la mort. Qui sait s’il n’existe pas un lien entre ces deux existences et s’il n’est pas possible à l’âme de les nouer dès à présent’ » (Nerval 1961, 156).

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sketched. The text is focused on the »romanesque« mythological and symbolical nexus of the series of visionary dreams and on the pattern of fall and redemption. 3.

From the Bildungsroman to the novel of disillusion

3.1 »Weak« variants of the Romantic Bildungsroman: »Romance« vs. »novel« Even if fully fledged versions of the transcendental novel are rare outside of German literature, some of its key characteristics can be found in almost any Romantic novel of development (or, more generally speaking, in all of the life-stories which are told in Romantic novels or autobiographies): Many of them have a strong symbolic nexus, and in most of them the pragmatic nexus of psychological and sociological causes — and with it that of a purely rationalist explanation of the universe — is at least partially suspended or supplemented. There are two basic modes for this reduction: (1) The hero’s life is determined by one or more events which form a transrational chain of causes: some fateful sort of predetermination, »election«, which singles out the hero from the very beginning (extreme examples of such an »election« are, for instance, the protagonists of Balzac’s Louis Lambert [1832] and Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor [written 1886–91]), and shapes his life into a pattern of transindividual meaning and/or of a supernatural linkage between events, a »fateful« unity of being in which everything is connecting in the framework of a higher order. These mysterious »links« cannot be grasped by reason, and they are not simply identical with the concepts of traditional metaphysics (i.e. Christian religion), though they can be clothed in traditional metaphysical terminology. Therefore they have to be expressed by poetic means: by symbols and myths, by supernatural and/or fantastic elements, quite often by premonitions and dreams. This, of course, is, once again, the »romance«-element in Romantic narration, which in narrations of the High Romantic mode tends to dominate or even substitute the »novel«-, or (in the terminology of the 18th century) »history«-element of the text. In all of the Romantic narrations in the »low« Romantic mode we find different variants of narrative compromises between »romance« and »novel«. Accentuations may vary, but in the historical development of global Romanticism, the »romance«-element is increasingly backgrounded without being completely lost (its complete loss would be one of the »markers« which indicate that the period change from Romanticism to Realism has been completed). (2) The hero’s innermost longing is directed at some ideal, some absolute goal which — though it can, of course, assume the concrete form of a person (usually the beloved) or an object (usually a highly symbolic one) — is more than an earthly one; certainly it is not material success or anything like the hedonist version of a »good life«. Even in the texts of the High Romantic mode this goal is hardly ever reached (Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen would have been an exception, had the novel been finished). But, at least, the protagonist succeeds in overcoming his personal crisis and feels at one with himself and the world. Once again, we can observe a pattern of change in the historical development of global Romanticism: The less the hero is able to achieve a successful formation of his character, the more often the ideal is externalized into an outer unreachable goal. At the same time, the quest for this »absolute« becomes more and

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more ambiguous in its value: It remains the only way of transcending the narrow, rationalist and philistine world-view — but striving for it is dangerous and destructive for the protagonist. The best-know example for such a disastrous quest for the absolute is, of course, Captain Ahab’s hunt of the White Whale in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: or, The Whale (1851). These two characteristics (which can but do not have to be combined) serve as minimal markers for a Romantic story of character formation; if both of them are missing, even in the most rudimentary form, it is highly doubtful whether the text should be classified as »Romantic«. Examples and variations for this integration of »romance«-elements into a novel-frame are countless; so any attempt to even approach something like an extensive overview would be futile. Instead, I will try in this sub-chapter to illustrate the »romance«-element in Romantic narrations by two comparisons between (more or less related) texts which either accentuate the »novel«- or the »romance«-aspect. In the remaining part of the subchapter, I will discuss at least one example of a protagonist’s fateful striving for the »absolute«. The most obvious example for a comparison of romance- and novel-elements within one text would, of course, have been one of the most important transcendental novels of the second phase of German Romanticism: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern (Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, along with a Fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister [conductor] Johannes Kreisler in Stray Printer’s Sheets, 1820/21). Here, it is the life-story of the philistine tomcat which is organized as a novel: with a clear pragmatic plot-nexus, a chronological order of events, and an observation of the psychological rules of vraisemblance — with, of course, the obvious exception of (satirically) choosing a tomcat as the (only all-too-human) protagonist. By associating the narrative mode of »novel«-telling thus with a philistine and trivial hero and his world view, it is quite obviously poetically »stigmatised«. The life-story of Kapellmeister Kreisler, on the other hand, is told in the »romance«-mode: fragmentary, split into erratically dispersed narrative-units, replete with aesthetical and philosophical reflections, symbols and myths. Quite obviously, Hoffmann considers this romanesque mode as the only form of the novel which can claim poetic dignity: It is the truly »Romantic« form of narrating the life of a truly Romantic hero (for details of the organisation of the text cf. the articles by Albert and Spiridon in this volume). As this chapter is, however, devoted to »weak« variants of the Romantic Bildungsroman I will use two other pairs of texts. My first comparison will be one between two versions of Romantic autobiography. Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater ­(first published anonymously in the London Magazine in 1821) certainly had a Romantic subject — after all, the »fascinating powers of opium« (Preface, De Quincey 1956, 348) were an obvious means to enrich the imagination, the Romantic faculty per se. But the autobiographical style of the Confessions showed but few traces of a Romantic Weltanschauung. In the German terminological tradition, the book might well have been called an »anthropological novel«, a case-study, which not only describes in great detail the effects of opium but narrates in even greater detail the prehistory of De Quincey’s first use of the drug. To cut this very long story short, the chain of events might be summed up in the causal sequence: poverty — hunger — pain (»a most painful affection of the stomach«, 350) — opium.

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Twenty-four years later, in 1845, De Quincey published Suspiria de Profundis: Being a Sequel to the »Confessions of an English Opium-Eater« (a first version appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine). The subtitle is misleading — for rather than being a mere »sequel« the Suspiria presents a new, and this time truly Romantic version of De Quincey’s life-story. Not only does the book contain a considerable number of poetic inserts, in which De Quincey builds up a mythology of his own, but it also presents two completely new reasons for the author’s use of opium. The first is a critique of the non-poetic or rather anti-poetic character of modern life, which has severely diminished man’s »power of dreaming«: social and technological revolutions have »dissipated and squandered« »the action of thought and feeling«, »tumult« and »eternal hurry« have led to a »decay of solitude« (De Quincey 1961, 448). The second reason is a personal one, yet not the mere psychological result of a chain of events in an individual life-story. Early experiences of »intolerable grief« »drove a shaft […] into the worlds of death and darkness which never again closed« (452 f.) — and turned De Quincey into an archetypical Romantic, a »stranger« on earth. The »primal scene« of this early character-formation is impressively recounted: De Quincey was two and a half when his sister Jane died. Yet as death meant little to a child of this age, his grief was easily overcome: »Summer and winter came again […] why not little Jane?« (461). In the »unity« of childhood, De Quincey did not and could not yet distinguish between the »natural« and the »spiritual« side of human existence. When, however, his second sister Elizabeth died, too, about four years later, things were very different. All on his own, young De Quincey went to the chamber where the dead corpse lay to take his last farewell. There he suddenly had a vision: A vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up forever. I, in spirit, rose as if on billows that also ran up forever; and the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran before us and fled away continually (468).

This was but the first of many similar visions — yet it was enough to make the child aware of »the sublime attractions of the grave« (484), alienating him forever from the joys of earthly life. My second example is a sketchy comparison between two novels of the Brontë sisters: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (first published in 1847 under the pseudonym of Currer Bell, allegedly the mere »editor« of the text; in later editions the subtitle was deleted), and Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (first published in 1857 under the pseudonym of Acton Bell as the third volume of a three-volume set, including Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights). There are obvious plot- and genre-affinities between these two novels: Both tell the story of a young girl/woman with a sharp intellect and a strong personality, who sets out into the world with the social handicap of poverty, works as a teacher and a governess, has to suffer all sorts of hostility, degradation, and insults from representatives of the upper classes, and in the end finds a modest form of happiness with a beloved husband, without having to give up her spiritual independence. Both novels might well be called Bildungsromane, as both tell the life-stories of their heroines in the important period of character-formation, aim at an ideal state of compromise between the claims of individualisation and socialisation, and explicitly discuss — both

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heroines are educators — the principles and circumstances of character formation. Yet with all these similarities, one difference is more than obvious: Only Jane Eyre can be considered as a Romantic novel. Why is this so? Agnes Grey combines traits of the Bildungsroman with those of the social novel: it tells — quite often in a highly satirical vein — an exemplary story of the class and gender conflicts of the time. Agnes is a person of sound character, raised and educated by loving and sensible parents; there is a lot she has to learn about the conceited, heartless and immoral manners of the upper classes, and about the limits which these will impose upon the work of even the best educator; there are some weaknesses she has to overcome — as for instance that of a »mauvaise honte« (A. Brontë 2003, 54) — but in the end she will prevail, and find the values confirmed upon which her character and her life are based. So, from the point of view of literary history, Agnes Grey is a striking proof for the continuity of the »novel«-tradition­, leading from the 18th century right into Victorian Realism. The most important intermediary link — consisting of texts of an even higher literary rank — is, of course, the narrative work of Jane Austen. Jane Eyre is different in at least two respects — and exactly these characteristics turn the book into a Romantic text. Of course, it has all the »novel«-elements which can be found in Agnes Grey; yet they are combined with others which lie beyond the scope of a »realist« social novel. (1) On a conceptual level, the development of the heroine is described not only in terms of psychology and sociology but also on a more general scale: From the very beginning (starting with the rightly famous »primal scene« in Chapter 1, when the orphaned ten-year-old girl for the first time violently and passionately rebels against the abuses of her fourteen-year-old cousin John and, as punishment for this transgression, is bound and locked away), Jane is confronted with the need to find a compromise between »passion« and »imagination« on one hand, and »reason« on the other. »Passion«, the depth and strength of one’s emotions, and the power of the »imagination« naturally belong to the key values of Romanticism. Of course, the very search for such a compromise is typical of Late Romanticism (that version of European Late Romanticism which Virgil Nemoianu has tried to describe as »Biedermeier«). Undoubtedly, Charlotte Brontë vividly depicts the »night sides« of an uncontrolled reign of passion and the imagination — Bertha Rochester, her future husband’s mad first wife, who is locked away in the attic, is nothing but an emblem of these dangers, and Mr Rochester himself, a rather Byronic character, is severely punished for a similar, if somewhat less severe, lack of reasonable selfcontrol. Yet, dangerous as passion and imagination may prove to be in their unchecked reign, they are nevertheless also the qualities on which the strong character and the independent spirit of the heroine and her husband rest. So they must not be given up completely — mere self-abnegation and mere self-denial are, for Charlotte Brontë, not the ideal goal of character formation (as is demonstrated by Jane’s school-mate Helen Burns and by the fervent evangelist St. John Rivers who woos Jane and asks her to join him as missionary in India). Thus, Charlotte Brontë modifies Romantic key values by moralising them — but does not simply discard them. (2) The second Romantic characteristic of Jane Eyre is its elaborate poetic nexus: the dense network of metaphors and symbols (e.g. »fire«, »moon«), of premonitory compositional links, premonitions by dreams (e.g. C. Brontë 2001, 187 f., 198, 272), and »supernatural« occurrences and coincidences. The most obvious example is, of course, the way in which the (after all) »happy ending« is brought about. When Jane is just about to give in to St. John’s wooing, she

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asks »Heaven« to »show [her] the path« (C. Brontë 2001, 357). All of a sudden, she hears the voice of Edward Rochester, crying out for her. She follows the call, travels back to Thornfield Hall and learns that the house had been burnt down by Bertha (who committed suicide by jumping from the burning roof) and that Rochester had been blinded and disabled by the fire. Most important, however, she finds out that in the very same night, when she was miles away, Rochester had indeed called out for her in desperation — and had heard her reply: »I am coming; wait for me« (381). The overtones in which this obviously supernatural romance-element is discussed are Christian in appearance — but in appearance only. Jane, who no longer can be fooled by mere imagination, comments on the mystic experience with the words: »Down superstition! […] This is not thy deception, nor thy witchcraft: it is the work of nature« (358), and Rochester speaks of »the beneficent God of this earth« (380; my italics). In a thin Christian disguise, Charlotte Brontë thus ultimately reaffirms the Romantic belief in the natural/supernatural unity of being. The last text in this sub-chapter is Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (part of the book was first published in two sequels in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1837, the complete text in book-form in 1838). The plot-line of the novel can be divided into three parts and an epilogue: (1) The first part gives a brief history of the hero’s youth, centred around a first sea-faring adventure: one stormy night, sixteen-year old Pym and his (very drunk) friend Augustus, the son of a Captain Barnard, take Pym’s sailboat, set to sea, are shipwrecked and just barely saved by a passing ship. (2) Eighteen month later, Pym puts to sea again: smuggled on board and hidden as a stowaway by Augustus on his father’s whaling-brig Crampus. From the very beginning, the trip is full of the most dreadful horrors: mutiny, murder, distress at sea, hunger, thirst, cannibalism, to name but a few. (3) Pym and the sailor Peters, as the only survivors of the Crampus, are finally saved by the schooner Jane Guy. Rather abruptly, the voyage changes into a discovery-trip: The ship crosses the Antarctic ice barrier and approaches the South Pole, which turns out to be a strange continent, peopled by hostile »jetblack« natives who loathe the colour white (when the novel was written no man had yet reached the South Pole, and Poe’s description of a continent beyond an ice barrier and even his hint at a maelstrom-like water connection between the Poles were based on current speculations about the area). The natives lure the crew into an ambush and kill most them. After some rather puzzling adventures — most important, a series of strange hieroglyphics found in a strangely shaped chasm (Poe 1986, 223–225) — only Pym and Peters, once again the sole survivors, escape in a boat and head further south. It is a voyage into an ever-increasing, allencompassing whiteness. The last impression Pym has, before the boat is drawn into a cataract, is that of a gigantic »shrouded human figure« whose skin »was of the perfect whiteness of snow« (239). (4) The remaining two or three chapters of the »report« have been lost — so the »editor« tells us in a »note« which closes the book as a sort of epilogue. Somehow (we may gather: via a subterranean water-link) Pym was saved. He returned to the United States, wrote down his report — and died soon afterwards. From the point of view of genre-typology, the text is something like a hybrid between the novel of adventures and the Romantic Bildungsroman. The elements of the novel of adventure are obviously the dominant ones; the Narrative’s claim to be also a Bildungsroman rests

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primarily on its first episode. As part of the plot it could be considered as rather superfluous — the voyage of the main part might have been motivated by merely mentioning young Pym’s persistent lusting for sea-faring adventures. In Poe’s design, however, the episode has an important function: It serves as one of the »primal scenes«, which single out the protagonist and, so to speak, »brand« him as a »Romantic hero«. The key passage — in fact, a key to the understanding of the whole novel — lies in the conclusions which the hero draws from his first adventure at sea: My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrows and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown. Such visions or desires — for they amounted to desires — are common, I have since been assured, to the whole numerous race of the melancholy among men — at the time of which I speak I regarded them only as prophetic glimpses of a destiny which I felt myself in a measure bound to fulfill (Poe 1986, 57).

Of course, these »desires« will be fulfilled in every detail. They turn Pym into the ideal hero for Poe and his personal version of an aesthetics of the sublime: The horrors for which he asks and which he will experience condition and intensify a longing for the supernatural, a quest for the absolute. And it is exactly the fulfilment of this disposition which turns the text into a transcendental novel, even though the hero never realizes what he is looking for. In the symbolical realm of the South Pole, the polarities of human nature seem to disintegrate into its »dark« (animal) and its »white« (spiritual) half — this is at least what the strange hieroglyphics tell us which the »note« explains as Ethiopian and Arabic signs for the verbal roots »to be shady« and »to be white«. (Had Poe known about the unfathomable pitfalls of postcolonial criticism, he might have been more explicit about the metaphysical meaning of his colour symbolism.). Of course, the experience of ultimate »whiteness« can neither be told (therefore the missing last chapters) nor survived in the continuation of an ordinary life (hence Pym’s »sudden and distressing death« [240]). The search for the »absolute«, for the ultimate sublime, is a deadly undertaking. 3.2 Towards the »novel of disillusion« After 1815 (to give a very rough date), Bildungsromane that tell of a successful character formation tend to become rare. (They will reappear in the latest phase of Romanticism in a more moderate variant: Here, as for instance in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the Romantic strife for absolute synthesis will be toned down to a much more practical ethos). As most of the resulting life-stories can no longer be called Bildungsromane, I will merely sketch three of the most important types. (1) The »duplicity of being« (»Duplizität des Seins« [Hoffmann 1978, 4: 65]): This handy formula was coined by E.T.A. Hoffmann in his famous tale of the hermit Serapion at the beginning his cycle of novellas called the Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brotherhood, 1819–21). The protagonists of narrations of this category are hopelessly and helplessly torn between their desire for sensual and for spiritual fulfilment. In the »strong«, transcendental versions of this type, the heroes are doomed to perpetual suffering, madness, or death, yet the narrative text itself reaches — by the humour and irony of its narrative organisation — something like a tolerable

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balance between the extremes. Most of Hoffmann’s texts belong to this type — just think of the fate of Kreisler in the (already mentioned) Kater Murr (Tomcat Murr), or of Nathanael in the Sandman (The Sandman, 1817). In the »weak« variants of the type even this aesthetic balance is missing — the texts merely expose an aporetic conflict. A good example is Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie. Souvenirs du Valois (Sylvie. Remembrances from the Valois, 1853), which was later included in the collection Les filles du feu (Daughters of the Fire, 1854). Here the narrator’s love for the actress Aurélie reminds him of a love-affair of his youth; so he travels back to his hometown in the Valois. This geographical journey soon turns into a journey back into time and memory, with a complicated mixture of various time-levels. In fact, however, nothing has changed and nothing will ever change: In his youth the narrator could not decide between his love for two women: Sylvie (lovely and very real) and Adrienne (sublime and ideal), because they were like the two halves of one love. Only their combination would have satisfied his double longing, so he lost both of them — just as he will lose Aurélie in the present. (2) Stories of unfulfilled love: Again we can distinguish between two subtypes: The stories of an amour passion, which remains unfulfilled because the beloved proves to be unreachable — these texts follow the pattern of the »Wertherism«-complex (for details cf. the article by B. Dieterle in this volume). The even worse (and later) version is the Byronic one (modelled on the melancholy hero of Byron’s Childe Harold, 1812–18): Here the love-affair never really gets started as the lovers-to-be (and especially the male ones) have no trust in their feelings. Examples for this second type are Aleksandr Pushkin’s verse narration Evgenii Onegin (Eugene Onegin, 1833), in which, to grossly simplify a psychologically complex story, Evgenii and Tatiana twice miss the chance to realise their love because Evgenii has read too much Byron, and Tatiana too many sentimental novels; and Alfred de Musset’s La confession d’un enfant du siècle (Confessions of a Child of His Time, 1836), in which the hero Octave, the »child« of his disillusioned postNapoleonic age, after a series of futile love-affairs, wilfully destroys the true love of his life. (3) Towards the »novel of disillusion«: In the novels of the »duplicity of being« and of unfulfilled love the Bildung of the protagonist never even begins, because he persists, from the very beginning, in an aporetic and hopelessly melancholic state; so both types must be considered as suspensions rather than as modifications of the genre model. The novels of the third group are Bildungsromane, yet most of them belong to its negative type. Here the protagonist either clings to his version of the Romantic ideal and is destroyed by a society which leaves no room for a Romantic existence, or he gives up his ideals. The best known example for the first version is certainly Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir: Chronique du XIXe siècle (The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the XIXth Century, 1830). Admittedly its protagonist Julien Sorel is, at first glance, a rather improbable Romantic hero: an overly ambitious social upstart from the province, who will commit any crime, from mere hypocrisy to attempted murder, to raise himself in society. Yet, Julien is a Romantic, after all: It is not money or the boring, timid, and petty life of bourgeois success which he is aiming at, but a (Napoleonic) vision of heroic grandeur. Admittedly, his Romantic ideals are strongly compromised because he aims at realizing them within the framework of a corrupt society, but his passion, his sensibility, his rich imagination, and the sheer energy of his will still single him out among his average fellowmen, earn him the passionate love of two remarkable women, and

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enable him, at the end of the novel, when he is imprisoned and has lost his outer freedom, to reach a new, inner liberty with new and authentic feelings. Thus, although Julien is executed in the end, his Romantic ideals ultimately triumph. The same is basically true of Balzac’s Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, 1837–44), yet with an important difference: Just like Julien, the young poet Lucien Chardon (or de Rubempré, as he later calls himself, assuming the title of his mother) leaves the province and moves to Paris, full of hopes and ambition. But other than Julien, he readily gives up his Romantic ideals and turns into a journalist as this seems to be the more promising career. Yet even this betrayal of his original values earns him but short-lived success; in the end — in the sequel novel Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (Splendour and Misery of the Courtesans, 1838–44) he will even commit suicide. So Julien’s ideals are »illusions« merely in the sense that they do not conform with the structures and values of a fundamentally commercialised society and cannot be successfully realised within its scope. Nevertheless, they remain intact as values, as a normative point of view from which the French society of the late restoration can be criticised. With Balzac’s Illusions perdues, the Romantic Bildungsroman has been transformed into the novel of disillusion, but the borderline to Realism has not yet been definitively crossed. This will happen in Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education, 1845; ����������������������������������� 1869); here the Romantic ideals have become illusions in the full sense of the word: the Romantic attitude is shown as both deceptive and harmful. 4.

Conclusion: The Bildungsroman in the genre-system of Romantic fiction (with a short note on the »artist novel«)

In a way, the Romantic Bildungsroman was a highly precarious, almost paradoxical undertaking. The genre of the Bildungsroman originated in the late 18th century, and it flourished in the Age of Realism. In both epochs it was closely aligned with the »novel« or »history« type of the long prose narration — many misunderstandings about the Bildungsroman in the Age of Romanticism rest not only on one-sided interpretations of Goethe’s Lehrjahre but also on the assumption that the genre had simply remained within the boundaries of the novel-type. This, however, would neither have conformed to the world view nor to the poetics of Romanticism, as the novel with its strongly developed plot, its causal motivations, and its chronological order, was closely linked with a rationalist view of the world. So, the Romantic Bildungsroman in its radical version — the transcendental novel or the Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode, as I have called it — is a result of the attempt to »romanticise« the novel-form by turning it as completely as possible into a romance. The Bildungsroman in its »weak« Romantic form, on the other hand, might be described as the much more modest attempt to merely infuse select thematic and/or formal romanesque elements into the novel-form. In Late Romanticism, when Romanticism started to integrate more and more elements of a Realism avant la lettre, the Romantic Bildungsroman gradually returned to its roots, i.e. to the novel-tradition — either in reformulating the Romantic ideals of Bildung, or in directly thematising the conflict between these ideals and a commercialised and corrupt society. This conflict had, of course, been the very reason for the formation of the genre. The

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Early Romantics, however, had still had hopes of actively changing, of »poeticising« the realm of modernity, which the Late Romantics no longer cherished; this growing scepticism is also reflected in the partial convergence of the Bildungsroman and the social novel. In the Romantic novel of disillusion Romantic values are still affirmed by the text — but no longer by the hero. The borderline between Romanticism and Realism is definitely crossed when either (a) the novel of disillusion actively attacks Romantic ideals (e.g. in Flaubert’s Éducation sentimentale) or (b) when an new Realistic version of the Bildungsroman has been established in which the successful character formation of the hero depends on his avoidance of Romantic values and habits (e.g. in Stifter’s Nachsommer [Indian Summer, 1857], Keller’s Grüner Heinrich [Green Henry, first version 1854/55, second version 1879/80], Dickens’s David Copperfield [1849/50] and Great Expectations [1860/61], or Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn [1884]). To better understand the precarious position of the Bildungsroman in the Romantic Age it will be helpful to consider its position in the genre-system of (longer) Romantic fiction. Basically, this system is formed by the Bildungsroman and three other types (which, of course, can be mixed in many ways): (1) The fantastic novel and the Gothic novel (the latter being a subgenre of the first, in which a historical setting and the stock-elements of the genre considerably facilitated the task of creating a fantastic, romanesque world; for details cf. the chapters by Van Gorp and Steigerwald); (2) the love-story (for details cf. the chapter by B. Dieterle); (3) the historical novel (for details cf. the chapters by V. Nemoianu and M. Bernauer). Type 1, quite obviously, aims at a direct renaissance of the »romance«-tradition. In comparison, type 3 provides but a minimal »romantisation« of the »novel«-form: here, the »poetic« or »Romantic«, or, quite simply, »anti-modernist« element is basically the choice of a setting from a »poetic« past. Because of its strong affinity to the »novel«-tradition, the genre could be easily continued, with only slight modifications, into the Age of Realism. Type 2 is formally but loosely defined. Once again, the Romantic element is primarily a thematic one: the subject of »absolute« love, mostly following the pattern, if not always the style, of Goethe’s Werther; the more the elements of psychological analysis and of the expressions of sentiment are accentuated, the more the »novel«-element will be reduced. This short survey of the three genres clearly implies that the first one will, in all probability, provide the most spectacular poetic innovations in Romantic narration. This will occur not in the Gothic novel — which, from its beginnings, is a restricted and highly stereotyped genre, a simple return to the romance tradition — but in fantastic fiction, where the form of romance is re-invented. Here we will find devices like a blending of genres, use of metaphors, symbols, dreams, and myths, etc. It is here that the Romantics try hardest to find a new poetic language for their new anti-rationalist world-view: their new view of a subject, deeply integrated into nature, and of a natural world, which has, once again, become a disenchanted universe. The function of the Bildungsroman, as the fourth type in the Romantic genre-system of prose narration, is predetermined by the genre-specific attempt to find a compromise between individualisation and socialisation. In the Romantic context, this marks the genre as the zone of conflict between the Romantic aims and values of the hero and those of a »philistine« and

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»prosaic« society. The Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode aims at nothing less than the Romantic transformation of society and the substitution of its rationalist and materialist world view — which, poetically speaking, means a transformation of the »novel«-form into a »romance«. In their poetic innovations these texts will, quite often, even surpass those of the fantastic type, as they do not simply escape from the world of modernity but have to actively transform it. »Weak« variants of the Bildungsroman, on the other hand, will be content with introducing elements of the »romance«-tradition in the novel form, which they leave fundamentally intact. Texts from the late phase of the Romantic Bildungsroman tend to return to the novel-tradition, sometimes even tend to converge with the social novel. So the Romantic Bildungsroman is the genre where the conflict between the narrative traditions of novel and romance is acted out most clearly — and most productively, as far as poetic innovations are concerned. Of all the Romantic genres of narrations, the Bildungsroman is therefore the one which is most deeply related to the narrative revolutions of Modernism. And what about the genre hardly mentioned in this article: the »artist novel«? What is its relation to the Bildungsroman? The genre definition of the »artist novel« (»Künstlerroman«) is but a loose and merely thematic one: any novel in which the hero is an artist (and in which, consequently, art is a central subject) may be called an »artist novel«. This is a fairly broad definition — which is practically useless for the Romantic Bildungsroman. To somewhat overstate my point: it is of hardly any importance whether the hero of a Romantic Bildungsroman is explicitly called an artist (as many are, indeed) or not. In High Romanticism (and not only there) the artist is considered as the ideal representative of mankind. The key faculty on whose active use the dignity of a human being ultimately depends in Romanticism is the imagination — and art is nothing but the most active and creative use of this faculty. The Romantic anti-type, the »philistine« bourgeois (»Philister«), does not even know that he has an imagination. So in one way or the other all of the protagonists of the Bildungsroman in the high Romantic mode are »artists« — and in most of these texts literature and/or art are explicitly discussed as essential elements in the process of character formation. The question to ask is therefore not whether the protagonist is an artist but what sort of artist he is. A painter? — which may be dangerous, as this medium is closely connected with the sensual world. A musician? — which may be even more fateful, as music is the most spiritual art. Or a poet? — this might be the best choice, as the poet not only assumes a middle position between the painter and the musician but also has poetic devices like irony and humour at his disposal, which enable him to assume a distanced stance towards the antagonisms of life. (For details cf. the chapters by G. Maertz, M. Szegedy-Maszák, and C. Albert.) It is only in Late Romanticism that the »artist novel« proper comes into existence: When Romantic values can no longer be realized within a hopelessly materialistic and commercialised society the artist, who lives at the margins of the social realm, becomes the only remaining representative of a Romantic existence in the modern world.

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Historical novel and historical romance Markus Bernauer 1.

Scott’s pivotal contribution to the discourse on history in literature

When E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories were published in a French translation by Loève-Veimars (with the title Contes Fantastiques) in 1830, the collection was prefaced by an article by Walter Scott that denounced the fantasies of Hoffmann’s stories in favour of a more reality-based narration. The article, published for the first time in the Revue de Paris in 1829, was an abridged translation of Scott’s essay »On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition: and particularly on the Works of Ernest Theodore William Hoffmann«, which was published in Foreign Quarterley Review in 1828. It is a collective review of the Serapionsbrüder (1819–21) as well as the Nachtstücke (Night Pieces, 1816/17) and is based on the posthumous biography by Hoffman’s friend Julius Eduard Hitzig, Aus Hoffmann’s Leben und Nachlass (From Hoffmann’s Life and Legacy, 1823). Scott merged Hoffmann’s characters with the person of the author, following in the footsteps of Hoffmann’s friend, the physician Johann Ferdinand Koreff, nicknamed »Médicin Hoffmannique« (Doctor Hoffmannesque). Scott admits that Hoffmann has great talent as a storyteller but in general he perceives his stories as creations of a sick poet’s fancy. This may be called the Fantastic mode of writing, — in which the most wild and unbounded license is given to an irregular fancy, and all species of combination, however ludicrous, or however shocking, are attempted and executed without scruple. In the other modes of treating the supernatural, even that mystic region is subjected to some laws, however slight; and fancy, in wandering through it, is regulated by some probabilities in the wildest flight. Not so in the fantastic style of composition, which has no restraint save that which it may ultimately find in the exhausted imagination of the author. This style bears the same proportion to the more regular romance, whether ludicrous or serious, which Farce, or rather Pantomime, maintains to Tragedy and Comedy (Scott 1828, 72).

The modern fantastic genre is the result of an »irregular fancy«; its topics are therefore »ludicrous and shocking«. A literary scene is ludicrous in Scott’s view if it is incoherent and therefore implausible; it is shocking if it assaults the feelings of the reader and is indecent. Both demands — that for decency as well as that for plausibility and probability — belong to the rationalistic poetics of the 18th century and the classic French poetic theory of the Golden Age. Scott criticises Hoffmann’s Romantic mode of writing with seemingly obsolete criteria. However, when he refers at the beginning of his essays to Samuel Johnson we can see that his poetological repertoire is not so much outdated but rather the result of an intentional reference to the past. It is the »regular fancy« of Scott as well as of Johnson that sees the dead as dead and exiles the supernatural out of literature. Moreover, like Johnson, Scott admits that the »irregular fancy« is historically justified. It has its place in the literature of a pre-enlightened society where the supernatural and the improbable can seem plausible. This period of society, however, must have long past before the Romancer began to select and arrange with care, the nature of the materials out of which he constructed his story. It was not

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when society, however differing in degree and station, was levelled and confounded by one dark cloud of ignorance, involving the noble as well as the mean, that it need to be scrupulously considered to what class of persons the author addressed himself, or with what species of decoration he ornamented his story (ibid., 61).

The implausible in literature becomes plausible only when the public believes in the influences of the supernatural. The historicisation of norms that makes spiritual and evil powers in the romances of the Middle Ages (but not in modern novels) appear to be plausible corresponds to the social differentiation of the poetological criteria: Because in the modern age society is divided into an educated elite that favours rational thinking and an uneducated class whose thinking is still determined by fairytales and beliefs in ghosts, God and the devil still have their place in popular literature. As a primary witness for this thesis, Scott refers to Johann Karl August Musäus with his Volksmärchen der Deutschen (Folktales of the Germans, 1782–86) and opens a backdoor for the creation of the fantastic in modern literature. Musäus was not just a collector of popular fairytales; instead, he favoured narrative mimicry that, besides licensing pleasure in the weird, satire and parody, made him create fantastic stories in an ironic mode. The modern mimicry of the popular poet, especially mimicry of the poet of the Middle Ages, could create a possibility for the modern author, so Scott argues, for adequate creation of the fantastic — a possibility that Horace Walpole, as creator of the modern Gothic novel, made use of. Scott was well aware of the achievements of Walpole and his successors above and beyond the genre of the Gothic novel; their more or less transparent masquerades contributed immensely to the dawning of historical consciousness and to the importance of history in general. Scott, however, as well as Hoffmann, was in his own practice a stranger to this kind of mimicry. When Scott emphasises criteria like probability, plausibility or decency, he argues from the poetics of the bourgeois novel of the Enlightenment. In fact, Scott’s novels should be placed between the realistic narratives of the 18th century and the realism of the 19th century. They transfer descriptions of cultural customs (as in Daniel Defoe) and the idea of the comic epic (as in Henry Fielding) into the historical genre. Under Scott’s criteria, historical conditions are displayed not in heroic epics but in bourgeois customs. Even though Scott’s interest in history might be inspired by a Romantic attitude, his narrative method is part of the tradition of realism. In France, where enthusiasm for the genre in the 1820’s opened the door for French realism, the Waverley novels have been read as realistic novels. This is probably the reason why Loève Veimar prefaced Hoffmann’s fantastic stories with Scott’s essay, in order to counter the fantastic Romanticism of Hoffmann’s, whose success was in sight, with Scott’s already established realistic position. Seventy years ago, George Lukács already analysed the historical novel as a realistic genre. Lukács wrote his groundbreaking work, The Historical Novel, in 1936/37, at a time when the historical novel was used as a field for ideological debates. He started out with something close to a definition of the genre: The historical novel arose at the beginning of the nineteenth century, approximately at the time of the fall of Napoleon. […] Of course, there are novels with historical themes already in the seventeenth and eighteenth century […]. The so-called historical novels of the seventeenth century (Scudéry, Calprenède, et al.) are historical only in their purely external theme, only in their dress. Not only the psychology of their figures, but also the portrayal of manners are entirely those of the writers’ own present. And the most famous »historical novel« of

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For Lukács, the historical novel presents an image of the uniqueness of the age, from which it derives »the particular way in which persons act«. This expression already mirrors Lukács’s preference for Marx’s philosophy of history, which not only deals with the condition of the human subject but also relates the uniqueness of an epoch to the economic situation. It is this commitment to a philosophy of history that allows him to focus, from the viewpoint of the present, on historicity; a focus that becomes in Lukács’s aesthetics the sole claim for a realism as it had been developed in the 19th century novel. This explains why he can only perceive the aspect of curiosity about the world in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) and why he does not think it is worthwhile to deal in a more detailed way with historical novels before the great realist Scott. Even though I do not agree with the Marxist basis of Lukács’s book on the historical novel, it seems to me that its basic characterisation of the genre is still valid. It is a given, at least for Scott and his immediate successors, to present an image of the historical uniqueness of a time as well as to develop characters as representatives of this uniqueness. However, what can »historical uniqueness of a time« mean? Aside from Lukács’s philosophy of history, this expression implies the concept of the epoch, or as the German historiography of the 19th century would phrase it, a historical period in time that has to be seen as a distinct totality. Apart from the methodological problems, I believe this definition is wrong for the historical novel in two ways. On the one hand, it is especially the situations of crisis between epochs that the novelists pay attention to. And there are situations of crisis in national history in these novels; that is, historical worlds come into view that not only are part of a synchronic cohesiveness but also are phases of a diachronic relation beyond national history. Nevertheless, the »actual« historical novel is based on an idea of history that is seen not as a predictable series of repeated constellations but as a consequence of unique connections of events. What was once does not return. This idea of historicity had to make the uniqueness of a past time more or less alien to the reader of the present. In addition, the author also had to face the methodological problem, how a strange world can be comprehended and described adequately for a modern reader. Scott and his successors reflected in detail on this problem. 1.

»Der historische Roman ist am Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts ungefähr zur Zeit des Sturzes von Napoleon entstanden […]. Selbstverständlich gibt es Romane geschichtlicher Thematik schon im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert […]. Die sogenannten historischen Romane des 17. Jahrhunderts (Scudéry, Calprenède usw.) sind nur nach ihrer rein äußerlichen Thematik, nur ihrem Kostüm nach historisch. Nicht nur die Psychologie der Gestalten, sondern auch die geschilderten Sitten sind vollständig die der Gegenwart der Schriftsteller. Und der berühmteste ›historische Roman‹ des 18. Jahrhunderts, Walpoles Castle of Otranto, behandelt die Geschichte ebenfalls nur als Kostüm, es kommt hier allein auf die Kuriosität und Exzentrizität des geschilderten Milieus an, nicht auf die künstlerisch getreue Abbildung eines konkreten historischen Zeitalters. Es fehlt dem historischen Roman vor Walter Scott gerade das spezifisch Historische: die Ableitung der Besonderheit der handelnden Menschen aus der historischen Eigenart ihrer Zeit« (Lukács 1965, 23).

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Scott used methods of the 18th-century realistic novel to give the modern reader an idea of the historical uniqueness of a past time, an idea of the singular totality of human consciousnesses and ways of living. This is, for example, true for Scott’s heroes, whose ordinariness seems to copy Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). George Lukács conceptualised this type of protagonist as »middle heroes«; they are as typical for the historical novel as Achilles and Ulysses are for the Homeric epics. These heroes from antiquity were for Hegel, to whom Lukács refers, »total individuals, who splendidly comprehend in themselves that which otherwise is disparately scattered in the national character«.2 In the same way, Scott’s heroes are also »summarised« characters: »The main figures, too, of Walter Scott’s novels are nationally typical characters, however, not in the sense of being comprehensive highpoints, but of being serviceably average«.3 The theme of the story is mirrored in the type of the average hero, as Lukács explains: »Thus the main point in the historical novel is not the retelling of the great historical events, but the poetic reawakening of those human beings who have figured in these events. It is a matter of enabling us to re-experience the social and human motivations out of which people have thought, felt and acted, as this was the case in the historical reality«.4 It is one of the characteristics of historical novels in the tradition of Scott that they focus on central moments of crisis of the specific national history. They are, to express it in a modern way, narrated transformations of intellectual and social history. In addition to the discovery of reality in the bourgeois novels of the 18th century, it was the discovery of the intellectual and social history in the context of the historiography of the 18th century that added texture to Scott’s historical novel. These sources were historical works that described social change — like Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la décadence de l’Empire Romain (Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1734), Voltaire’s Le Siècle de Louis XIV (The Century of Louis XIV, 1751), or Edward Gibbons monumental work History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). These moments of radical change within bourgeois society, in national history, could only be told through »middle heroes«. 2.

Art history and the aestheticising of history

Analogous to the intellectual and social historiography of the Enlightenment is the emerging historiography of art in the 18th century. Its first protagonist, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, showed in his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of Ancient Art, 1764) how 2. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� totale Individuen, welche glänzend das in sich zusammenfassen, was sonst im Nationalcharakter zerstreut auseinanderliegt« (Hegel 1970, 361). 3.

»Auch die Hauptfiguren der Walter Scottschen Romane sind national typische Charaktere, aber nicht im Sinne des zusammenfassenden Höhepunktes, sondern in dem der tüchtigen Durchschnittlichkeit« (Lukács 1965, 43).

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»Es kommt also im historischen Roman nicht auf das Nacherzählen der großen historischen Ereignisse an, sondern auf das dichterische Erwecken jener Menschen, die in diesen Ereignissen figuriert haben. Es kommt darauf an, nacherlebbar zu machen, aus welchen gesellschaftlichen und menschlichen Beweggründen die Menschen gerade so gedacht, gefühlt und gehandelt haben, wie dies in der historischen Wirklichkeit der Fall war« (ibid., 51).

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a history of the development of genres — instead of a history of artists — can be conceived. Winckelmann conceptualised the development as a rising and falling movement and associated with this linear model of development a linear value system. This construction, however, does not readily apply to the historical novel since Scott and many of its authors did not share the Enlightenment belief in progress. When Walter Scott describes the world of the Scottish clans sympathetically and James Fenimore Cooper presents the world of the »Indians«, the indigenous peoples of North America, in a positive light, when, in their novels, modern society can only emerge at the price of the destruction of a more humane civilisation, more is at stake than the idealising of the simple life and simple manners of other cultures, a habit which was spread through Europe by Johann Gottfried Herder’s early works. Specifically the genre of travelogues in the late 18th century shows this change in the perception of foreign cultures in a geographic or historical sense. The most impressive evidence of this change is Georg Forster’s Voyage Round the World of 1777. Originally written in English and later translated into German, Forster’s report of James Cook’s second voyage around the world in 1772/3 was an attempt to base a travelogue on empirical perceptions as opposed to preconceived interpretations and legends. It was none other than Alexander von Humboldt who proclaimed later that with Forster’s travelogue a new era of »scientific« travel had begun that focussed on a comparison of nations and countries. (»Scientific« in this context means a non-theoretical work, based not on models but on empirical observation as the positivistic theory of signs in 19th-century Germany prescribed.) It was an achievement of Romantic historiography and even more, of Romantic aesthetics in Germany, to describe a foreign civilisation in the context of its own premises, to give each epoch its unique right and to make historical ages into quasi-subjects. The first manifestation of Romantic aesthetics involved the rediscovery of the Middle Ages. It is true that Bodmer and Breitinger focused early on in Zurich on a new edition of epics of the Middle Ages but they did this under the specific perspective of rehabilitating the fantastic against the rationalist poetics of Johann Christoph Gottsched. It was first the German Romantics, especially Ludwig Tieck and Wilhelm Wackenroder, who discovered the literature and art of the Middle Ages as aesthetic epochs. Even as a high school student, Wackenroder, supervised by his teacher Erduin Julius Koch, had begun working on the literature of the Middle Ages and helped Koch create a collection of documents for his history of literature of the Middle Ages. While the canon of classicism appears to be straightforward in the Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar, 1796) and in Phantasien über die Kunst (Fantasies on Art, 1799), created together with his friend, Ludwig Tieck, the approach toward art is innovative. Both authors see artistic work as the product of an individual and personal vision, not as a creation of an ideal. This subjective aesthetic criterion is transferred to history, which is no longer perceived in its relation to antiquity; instead, its different phases are to be understood within their own context. Each art should be measured in itself and then in the context of its aesthetic contemporaries. This historicisation of art and literature mirrors the idea of an ahistorical subjectivity, the conviction that feelings or, as the German collective singular expresses, the »Gemüt« (sensibility) of man is developed in the same way throughout the ages. In the preface to his collection Minnelieder aus dem Schwäbischen Zeitalter (Lovesongs from the Swabian Epoch, 1803), Tieck talked on the one hand about a unified poetry of humanity but on the other hand

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demanded »to understand and to grasp every spirit in terms of its own peculiar kind«.5 Tieck’s claim proved to be valid for the historical understanding of the 19th century: On the one hand, history has to be understood as the unity of the history of mankind, mirrored in the development of each national history (man is at the same time always part of a specific nation), on the other hand, each epoch has to be understood in terms of its own premises. 3.

Inventing ways to capture historical processes: The Gothic and Classicistic strains

The historical novel in the tradition of Scott is based on this approach toward history that was formulated by the Romantics. However, its incubation period was in the 18th century when authors in dealing with historical topics based their work on an emerging awareness that each epoch (and the literature of each epoch) enjoys its own right. According to his own poetics of the genre, Lukács denies the existence of the historical novel before Scott on the grounds that novels with historical subjects published before Waverley (1814) generally do not deal with radical changes in national history nor do they use the »middle hero« as an average protagonist of the bourgeois nation. There was no concept of a realistic historical novel in this sense; in fact, the opposite was the case: When Horace Walpole published his novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764, the literary scene of England was dominated by the realistic novel of Henry Fielding. Walpole’s Gothic tale departs from this tradition, already in regard to the setting. It takes place in Apulia in the Middle Ages, a time and place largely unknown to the modern English reader who was acquainted with it neither from travel writing nor from historiography. Also the historical moment is vague: The preface dates the story between 1095 and 1243; 150 years that not only cover the time of the Crusades but also the years of the Norman and Hohenstaufen reign in lower Italy. However, neither the fictitious place (which, by the way, is modelled on Walpole’s own house, Strawberry Hill) nor the fictitious historical time, constitutes the theme of the story. Rather, it is an eccentric tale about guilt and divine justice, basically an ancient drama plot on which Walpole’s book is based. To tell the story he uses a (transparent) fiction: A modern editor pretends to have just translated a monk’s manuscript dating from the Middle Ages. The creation of this manuscript during the Middle Ages serves as an explanation for all that is fantastic, improbable and abstruse in the book: Miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other prenatural events, are exploded now even from romances. That was not the case, when our author wrote; much less when the story itself is supposed to have happened. Belief in every kind of prodigy was so established in those dark ages, that an author would not be faithful to the manners of those times who should omit all mention of them. He is not bound to believe them himself, but he must represent his actors as believing them (Walpole 1998, 4).

Walpole subtly reverses the poetic rule of verisimilitude: It is improbable that the supernatural was excluded from the literature of the Middle Ages because people then believed in it. Scott’s explanation for the fantastic in his review of Hoffmann is here preformulated. However,

5.

»jeden Geist auf seine ihm eigene Art zu verstehen und zu fassen« (Tieck 1975, 39).

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Walpole draws a clear line as we can see from the second preface (1765) when the author takes off his mask. It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life. But if in the latter species Nature has cramped imagination, she did but take her revenge, having been totally excluded from old romances. The actions, sentiments, conversations, of the heroes and heroines of ancient days were as unnatural as the machine employed to put them in motion (ibid., 7).

Plausibility of modern psychology was not to be destroyed by Gothic costumes and fantasy of the Middle Ages. The 18th-century reader should not be alienated from the world of a modern romance as he would be from the actual romance of Middle Ages. Even when Walpole talks about the unnaturalness of the reactions of the characters in old romances, he does not condemn moments of improbability and unnaturalness with an arrogant Enlightenment attitude but justifies them historically. However, he adds the demand that a modern romance has to prepare the historical topic for the contemporary reader. Walpole comes close to Scott’s poetics in both aspects. A fact that Scott recognised: In an address, first published in 1811, celebrating the author of the Castle of Otranto, he writes: As, in his model of a Gothic modern mansion, our author had studiously endeavoured to fit to the purposes of modern convenience, or luxury, the rich, varied, and complicated tracery and carving of the ancient cathedral, so, in The Castle of Otranto, it was his object to unite the marvellous turn of incident, and imposing tone of chivalry, exhibited in the ancient romance, with that accurate display of human character, and contrast of feelings and passions, which is, or ought to be delineated in the modern novel (Scott 1848, 306 f.).

The analogy between Strawberry Hill and the castle of Otranto makes clear that Scott saw Walpole’s rehabilitation of the Gothic as an eccentric endeavour, a rejection of the classic taste in architecture and the realistic novel, but not as an endeavour to serve the renewal of British culture. The influence of Walpole’s Gothic tale was (like the influence of his house) nevertheless considerable, possibly because he served a newly awakened interest in the suppressed Middle Ages. Of course, he was not the only author who dealt with historical topics in the 1760s. The most important among his imitators (who were mainly women) was Clara Reeve. Nowadays, Reeve is not held in high esteem as an author. Her writing is seen as dry and overly concerned with scholarly correctness. Even if this assessment is correct, her role in the history of the English novel is not unimportant. Her most famous book is the romance The Champion of the Virtue. A Gothic Story. By the Editor of the Phoenix; A Translation of Barclay’s Argenis published in 1777, known since the second edition under the title The Old English Baron. In 1785, she published a history of romance in dialogue form (The Progress of Romance Through Times, Countries and Manners), in which she also discusses fundamental problems in the relationship between novel and romance. The Romance is a heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and things. — The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written. The Romance in lofty and elevated language describes what never happened nor is likely to happen. — The Novel

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gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural a manner, and to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses, of the persons in the story, as if they were our own (Reeve 1785, vol. I: 111).

The realistic novel is opposed to the romance that integrates fantastic elements; of course, Reeve does not only focus on the epics of the Middle Ages but was also concerned with the epic of antiquity when she speaks of »heroic fable« — a tradition that resulted in the modern romances of the kind written by John Barclay and Philip Sidney. However, something else is rather remarkable: while the novel focuses on contemporary reality, the romance deals with »fabulous persons and things«. The romance is concerned as a genre with historical scenes because this genre grew from the depth of history and because the modern enlightened world has no appreciation for mythical fantastic literature. This was already the case with Walpole: the fantastic longs for historical scenery because it achieves thereby the appearance of probability. It is astonishing how Reeve deals with her romance. The first edition of The Old English Baron was published anonymously and used the same masquerade as Walpole’s Gothic tale: it was claimed that it was in fact a book from the Middle Ages, though in the process Reeve disclosed this masquerade on the title page. In the preface to the second edition of 1778, in which she divulged her pseudonym, she introduced the reader to the poetics on which her romance is based. She uses Walpole as a starting point. He attempted, from her point of view, to merge the old romance with the modern novel: »To attain this end, there is required a sufficient degree of marvellous to excite the attention; enough of the Manners of real life to give an air of probability to the work; and enough of the pathetic, to engage the heart in its behalf«. Walpole’s texts only fulfilled the last two requirements and the appearances of ghosts in his stories were only bothersome and awkward: For instance; we can conceive, and allow of, the appearance of a ghost; we can even dispense with an enchanted sword and helmet; but then they must keep within certain limits of credibility: A sword so large as to require an hundred men to lift it; a helmet that by its own weight forces a passage through a court-yard into an arched vault, big enough for a man to go through; a picture that walks out of its frame; a skeleton ghost in a hermit’s cowl: — When your expectation is wound up to the highest pitch, these circumstances take it down with a witness, destroy the work of imagination, and, instead of attention, excite laughter (Reeve 1977, 4 f.).

Also the presentation of the »improbable«, that is, the fantastic, has to be based on the postulate of »probability«. In The Old English Baron, scenes with ghosts are moved into dreams or quasibehind-the-stage where they can only be heard — the dead lord appears only once in his armour on the scenery. However, there are other, more important rhetorical means that serve the function of »credibility«: For example, the author conscientiously leaves gaps in the so-called manuscript. She is even more scrupulous about staying as close as possible to the historical sources when it comes to the description of the customs and rituals of the Middle Ages. And in the case of a duel, she uses as many illusionist means as the fiction of following an old manuscript allows. The term »Gothic story« is used literally to mean a story about Gothic life; in contrast to Walpole, the action takes place in an exactly determined historical context, namely

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in the years between 1422 and 1437, when the Hundred Years War between France and England was drawn to a conclusion through Joan of Arc. However, this interest in real history serves only to make the story — that, like The Castle of Otranto, is about crime and divine justice — and its spooky elements more plausible for the modern reader. The old romance is rehabilitated with the means of the modern novel. Because superstition is part of the manners of the Middle Ages, the appearances of ghosts paradoxically also belong to the reality of the times. However, it would be a mistake to believe Reeve was aiming for a historical novel in the tradition of Scott, even though The Old English Baron prefigured elements of the Waverley novels. Unlike Scott, she was not concerned with real history but with literary history and she was not interested in a narration of history but in the revival of an old genre with its aspect of historical colouring. That was not unusual, as most of the writers of Reeve’s time became acquainted with the Middle Ages through that era’s architecture and literature. Important in this context is the effect of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, written under the mask of a mythical-andhistorical poet comparable to Homer, which triggered enthusiasm for the world of Celtic and Nordic myth all over Europe. The Celtic world of Ossian and the Middle Ages of the Gothic novel merged in Ann Radcliffe’s first novel The Castle of Athlin and Dunbayn: A Highland Story (1789) centring on a knight with historical colouring borrowed from Macbeth, which she valued highly. Later she moved her epics of chivalry into the south without ever developing comparable historical interest in her topics. During the last two decades of the eighteenth century, tales of chivalry abounded in Germany. Das Petermännchen (Little Peterkin, 1793) �������������������������������������������� by the German Christian ������������������������������ Heinrich Spieß, sub���� titled Geistergeschichte aus dem 13. Jahrhundert (A Ghoststory from the Thirteenth Century), used Gothic buildings and ghosts only as background props. Other novels of this commercially very successful genre did not employ supernatural personnel, even when they referred to gruesome and scary events, as in Friedrich E. Rambach’s »Ossianic« novel Die eiserne Maske: Eine schottische Geschichte (The Iron Mask: A Scottish Story), published in 1792 under the pseudonym Ottokar Sturm (the last chapter of which was written by the young Ludwig Tieck). These novels were, however, not limited to the trivial romance of chivalry. In 1787, Wilhelm Heinse published Ardinghello oder die glückseligen Inseln (Ardinghello, or the Blissful Isles), which became a scandal not only because of its freewheeling eroticism but also because of its tales of murder and death that reflected Italian Renaissance fiction. The plot takes place in Italy in the late 16th century and centres on the painter Ardinghello. As a »historical novel of an artist«, it has often been imitated in German Romanticism — for example, in Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (Franz Sternbald’s Travels), published in 1798 by Ludwig Tieck. Heinse’s interest is focussed on painting in the Italian Renaissance and his insertions borrowed from the history of Genoa or the Medici stay intentionally on an anecdotal level. Even though Heinse did extensive research in Italy, he conceived the Renaissance only as an epoch of painting and concluded the story with the creation of an autonomous community in the Aegean Sea — an aesthetic world, a new Greece born from the spirit of the Italian Renaissance culture. Ardinghello is thus simultaneously part of the Greek revival that started all over Europe after 1750. In contrast to the Gothic revival, however, it triggered no large supply of historical topics for novels — the literature of antiquity was closely associated with the rationalistic poetics of the 17th and 18th centuries and its favourite genre was the realistic novel based on modern life.

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It was only long after Scott, after the novel started to cover historical topics that authors started to deal seriously with themes from Greek and Roman history. Christoph Martin Wieland’s »Greek« novels used antiquity only as a mirror for modern problems and were written without the drive of historical consciousness to enter into a vanished world. A strange but very successful exception is Le Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (Travel of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece), published in 1789 by Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélémy. For the fictitious travels of the Scythian Anacharsis through Greece, the author researched all available historians and geographers of antiquity and reproduced their texts in a translation, explicitly mentioning the sources in the footnotes. An included magnificent atlas was supposed to transfer his travels from the realm of fiction to that of geographical reality for the reader. Barthélémy was not a novelist but an antiquarian, and the protagonist and the plot become secondary to scholarly details in his compilation of ancient sources. Until the 20th century, generations of students (and not just in France) grew up with Barthélémy’s fictitious journey and perhaps simultaneously gained their knowledge of the Middle Ages from Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820) and its imitations. 4.

Historicising the romance of the Old and New Worlds

The above-mentioned 18th-century narratives approach historical topics in a new way and are conceptualised by the authors as parts of a past history. They are not yet historical novels in the stricter sense because they are not narratives of historical change. This situation changed with the publication of Walter Scott’s text Waverley or ’Tis Sixty Years Since in 1814. The new type of historical novel triggered a revival of realistic narration that at first existed side by side with Romanticism and later pushed the Romantic approach aside in the contemporary literary scene. Romanticism and realism can no longer be understood as successive epochs of the history of literature as still proclaimed in the textbooks. Rather, they are poetic approaches toward reality that return in phases in the 19th century. For example, the movement known as neo-Romanticism will develop a new interest in a ›dreamt‹ history, and its authors, in dealing with topics from history, will move away from the historical novel as a genre. Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Franz Blei, both from Vienna, are part of the Neo-Romantic movement as well as the Russian Mikhail A. Kuzmin. But back to Scott: no other novel in his time was as influential as Waverley, which started a whole new genre, »the Waverley novels«. Novels whose plots were backdated approximately two generations were called Waverley novels. Scott’s A Postscript which should have been a Preface includes a Waverley programme, inserted at a later stage. Even though at the beginning Scott talks about the end of the journey, he points to a topic that will be further expanded and invite retrospection: It was my accidental lot, though not born a Highlander, (which may be an apology for much bad Gaelic) to reside, during my childhood and youth, among persons of the above description; and now, for the purpose of preserving some idea of the ancient manners of which I have witnessed the almost total extinction, I have embodied in imaginary scenes, and ascribed to fictitious characters, a part of the incidents which I then received from those who were actors in them. Indeed, the most Romantic parts of the narrative are precisely those which have a foundation in fact (Scott 1998, 340).

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Similar to the authors of the 18th century, Scott pretends to discover a vanished world, the world of the Scottish highlands. He claims that he wants not only to talk about customs, rituals and a segment of recent history, but also to help ensure their survival, at least in memory. The decisive thrust, however, is not Scott’s role as a curator of monuments, because unlike the Walpoles and Reeves, Scott is not concerned with reconstruction of an exotic world that should be presented in its exotic totality; rather, it is the presentation of a life still vivid in his and his contemporaries’ memories. The novelist refers to reality as the source of his fiction, not to fantasy and not to literature. He thematises literature in a partially defensive and partially selfpositioning way. Books like Elizabeth Hamilton’s The Cottagers of Glenburni (1808) and Anne Grant of Laggan’s Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland (1811) could not have served as models for his own writing because one of them dealt only with a section of society, i.e. country-life, and because the other was not a novel. In the new edition from 1829, Scott published a new introduction and pointed out his sources in the footnotes. We are not concerned so much with the sources but with the method, namely the attempt at a quasi-academic basis for the narrative. These footnotes refer to many verbal sources whose immediacy further secures Scott’s realism. The distance of only 60 years protects the novelist from his own fantasy and it protects the narrative from aspects of the bizarre and the eccentric that were typical of the romances of Walpole and Reeve. The »60 years« category determined not only the topic of the narrative but also the method of realistic narration. The journey does not lead to the exotic of a completely alien world that can only be understood through a medium but to the immediate neighbourhood. This has consequences that can still be felt in the present. The poet can become a curator of monuments because their fragments are still tangible and can still be experienced. This aspect of experience that was already the basis of Forster’s travel writings becomes the constitutive feature of the realistic novel. We can definitely use the term novel in its newer sense, and this is the second decisive point: Historiography, the description of custom and manners as Scott expresses it, is now embedded in fictional material. As both of the works mentioned by Scott show, invention is useful to make a tableau out of single pieces, to present a whole, and this possibility, in contrast to academic work, plays an important role in Scott’s influence on writers who come after him (for example, authors of the German »professorial« novel). Scott’s ingenious trick is the creation of a protagonist in the middle between parties, between classes, and between representative figures from a specific time. This kind of protagonist is close to the reader and offers him greater attractiveness for identification than representative figures in history or from the lower classes. Waverley can legitimately be pitied, as he finds himself between both enemy parties during the revolt in Scotland in 1745 and 1746. A captain in the English army, he is at the same time bound by his heart to side with the Scottish enterprise. It is only through the generosity of the king and his family’s connections that he survives at the end. This simple basic construction makes it possible to portray the historical circumstances as a panorama; this panoramic approach allows for a less biased perspective on the part of the author who neither takes the standpoint of the Scottish revolt (even though he is sympathetic), nor of the British crown. In order to understand this phenomenon fully, it is important to envision Scott’s historical situation. Waverley was published at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when the question of the legitimacy of the Stuarts was obsolete and the French crown, which had supported them, had

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disappeared. It was a time when Britain’s fight against France had dissolved all the former factions. The novel narrates not a contemporary but a recently passed situation that allows for a somewhat unbiased portrayal. The information in the preface points to the story above and beyond the characters: There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century, or little more, has undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland. The effects of the insurrection of 1745, — the destruction of the patriarchal power of the Highland chiefs, — the abolition of the heritable jurisdictions of the Lowland nobility and barons, — the total eradication of the Jacobite party, which, averse to intermingle with the English, or adopt their customs, long continued to pride themselves upon maintaining ancient Scottish manners and customs, commenced this innovation. The gradual influx of wealth, and extension of commerce, have since united to render the present people of Scotland a class of beings as different from their grandfathers, as the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth’s time. The political and economical effects of these changes have been traced by Lord Selkirk with great precision and accuracy. But the change, though steadily and rapidly progressive, has, nevertheless, been gradual; and, like those who drift down the stream of a deep and smooth river, we are not aware of the progress we have made until we fix our eye on the now-distant point from which we set out. Such of the present generation as can recollect the last twenty or twenty-five years of the eighteenth century, will be fully sensible of the truth of this statement; especially if their acquaintance and connexions lay among those, who, in my younger time, were facetiously called ’folks of the old leaven,’ who still cherished a lingering, though hopeless attachment, to the house of Stuart. This race has now almost entirely vanished from the land, and with it, doubtless, much absurd political prejudice; but, also, many living examples of singular and disinterested attachment to the principles of loyalty which they received from their fathers, and of old Scottish faith, hospitality, worth, and honour (Scott 1998, 340).

Firstly, the novelist acts as a historiographer but not as a historiographer of events but of manners, or, in modern terms, as a historiographer of social history. Secondly, he acts as a historiographer who tells the story of a specific historical crisis resulting in the disappearance of a society and its structure. It is a transitory moment in British and Scottish national history that is the topic of the novel. From Scott’s perspective, this transitory situation is the beginning of Scottish history as an enlightened history of progress, at least in regard to the economic development. From that perspective, the revolt of 1745–46 turns into the beginning of the modernisation of Scotland that ended her traditional society and culture. By narrating the disappearance, the vanished tradition is brought back to life, not as an exotic phenomenon but as an experienced, Romantic element told through the means of realism. This Romantic impulse is also an important part of the novel itself. Waverley mirrors the overcoming of the Scottish tradition and of a Romantic attitude toward reality and history. This latter feature also includes elements of a poetics of the novel. Let us return to the starting point of the novel, which shows the protagonist taking the side of the Scots. Waverley’s education consists largely of literary works. The young Edward spends his time reading novels; besides classical English and Italian literature (Shakespeare, Milton, Boccaccio, probably also Tasso and Ariosto), he is interested in Jean Froissart’s »heart-stirring and eye-dazzling descriptions of war and of tournaments« and in Spanish novels: »The Spanish had contributed to his stock of chivalrous and romantic lore« (ibid., 14). The boy becomes

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a young dreamer trapped in the world of romances. This entrapment is further strengthened by his aunt’s and uncle’s stories of their family’s heroic deeds. Two are unmistakable: First and foremost it is the elimination of the Romantic world of Scotland that is told in the novel — a world that survived up until the 18th century and that was revived previously in the mirror of Macpherson’s Ossian. The manners that the historiographer Scott describes are part of a preEnlightenment reality that has survived only in novels outside of Scotland. Secondly, the book shows in its main character Waverley the transformation of a society from the Middle Ages to Modernity. The novel retraces the end of the Middle Ages, the end of a world whose reality can only be mirrored in romances; here the protagonist is more than only a middle hero, a representative of the nation. The historical process is reflected in his personal development: in the same way that the young Edward is educated for real life (similar to the hero of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister), the Scottish nation is transformed into a modern, economically oriented society that is rewarded with increasing wealth for the loss of its old tradition. Scott’s presentation of this process is ambivalent. Without a doubt, his sympathy belongs to the old Scottish world, but it seems as if his insight into historical necessity, the awareness of the achievements of the Enlightenment, wins out in the end. The novel itself, as a means for reinventing an old tradition, appears to be a compensation for a historical loss. Thirdly, the book itself mirrors the change that it describes. It takes leave not only from the social world of the romances but also from that literary form and introduces the characteristics of the novel as part of its historical topic. We already mentioned that Scott uses the trick of describing the disappearance of a »romanesque« reality, the consequences and witnesses of which are still known to the author and the audience. Developments pertaining to the pre-story in Waverley Scott appear in one of his next novels which shifts our attention onto the Middle Ages: Ivanhoe is a Romantic subject but it is presented through the means of a modern historiographer; and, with its historical additions and tone, is specifically not framed as a romance of the late 18th century. Ivanhoe does not depend on references to the superstition of the time and the historical perspective of the protagonist. While Walpole presented an eccentric story and Reeve portrayed an exotic world, Scott displays a tableau of historically tangible characters. The importance of the plot also changes. Reeve was interested in the customs and the awareness of the society of the Middle Ages because they provided the context for an adventurous romance; historical details were only part of this context. These historical facts move into the foreground in Ivanhoe and the supposed manners from the world of the old romances disappear and are replaced by a description understandable to an enlightened society that renounces the magical world and is focussed on historically supported, not Romantic, facts. With this distinction, Scott contributed to the creation of the modern science of history that had excluded poetry from its repertory of sources for a long time. In his novel Ivanhoe, Scott used the pseudonym Laurence Templeton and prefaced it with a somewhat light-hearted dedication to the Reverend Doctor Dryasdust. Here, he develops his basic poetic approach and talks about the material of Scottish history. It could be brought to life as well by an author as by a Northern Warlock because the »historical« aspect in Scottish history has only recently receded into the past and hence it is easy to lend »verisimilitude to the narrative«. This contrasts with England, where »civilization has been so long complete, that our ideas of our ancestors are only to be gleaned from musty records and chronicles«: »The English Author […] with our supposing him less of

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a conjurer than the Northern Warlock, can, you observed, only have the liberty of selecting his subject amidst the dust of antiquity. Where nothing was to be found but dry, sapless, mouldering, and disjointing bones« (Scott 1986, 523 f.). At first, Scott discusses his notion that probability must be integral to the narrative. In French classicism, this postulate means the integration of plot and speech in a kind of behaviour that shows the characters in their social class and »costume« (as it is still called in 18th-century Germany), that is, in their historically determined customs and manners. For Scott, probability is bound to the »��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� vie privée����������������������������������������������������������������������� «, that is, not only to social, national and historically plausible behaviour but also to the psychological filling-out that alone can create believable characters. The congruity of outer and psychological traits of a figure is already a requirement of realistic narration in the 18th century. This kind of plausibility, the basis for every »novel«, can only be gained through dry sources, in chronicles and other documents. For Scott, this objection seems to be inadequate in regard to the poetics of the novel. As he explains later, there is sufficient historical material that one can arrange in order to provide the knowledge of a »vie privée« necessary for the liveliness of the story and this can substitute for direct observation (Scott 1986, 525). England is different from Scotland in the sense that its civilisation is already »fulfilled«, the process of modernisation is completed. This factor of the relative degree of maturation toward being modern effectively determines the field of the historical novel: a prime choice is the time of the emerging of a modern nation, maybe also its immediate prehistory, where the emphasis is not only on nation but on the nature of being modern. This determination makes the choice of the topic in Waverley appear in a different light; it is not only given through the »60 years« category, that is, through a memory of a comprehensible novelistic world, but also through the historical moment of 1745. Therefore, the term »60 years« in the subtitle has two meanings, pointing also to the short time that has passed since the fall of old Scotland. The choice of this historical moment is associated with the drive for narrative plausibility according to modern criteria. Scott points to Antoine Galland’s translation of Contes arabes: Les mille et une nuit (Arabian Tales: The Thousand and One Nights, 1704–12). This in Scott’s view amounts not simply to a translation but to an integration of these oriental fairytales into European literature, with all of the necessary cuts and editing. The oriental world appears in a European form and that is the decisive point for Scott: his world of the Middle Ages should also be brought into the form of the modern novel, and that means to be dressed up in a modern novel. The plot and the psychology of the characters (a question that Scott makes clear in regard to their language) are determined by what the modern enlightened reader seems to see as probable, not that what historical characters think is plausible. Here Scott distances himself implicitly from the romance as Reeve conceives it that historicises plausibility in an opposite way. He distances himself even more from Ossian’s world; its epic form and its (supposedly) old kind of language runs counter to his poetics of the novel because it is an imitation of an old form of poetry with its own rules which was addressed to a different audience from the modern one. (That this cannot be completely true is shown by Macpherson’s success!) Scott chooses an English topic for his first novel of the Middle Ages and calls his writing explicitly »work with the sources«. By this method, he distances himself radically from the method Macpherson and his imitators employ. For Scott, the author is not a poet of romances but a historian, who bases his work on observation and study of the sources.

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Though both characteristics of the historical »novel« — namely that it presents a historical topic in the form of modern (realistic) narration and that this topic is chosen from the early history of the modern nation — Scott’s work leaves its imprint on the historical narrative of the 19th century. In retrospect, as we will see, he achieved even more with his Ivanhoe: the Middle Ages, in Pre-Romanticism still an exotic topic of eccentric literature, is integrated into history as a topic of the novel and thereby loses its novelistic and Romantic character. 5.

The dialectic of reality and myth in German and American fiction

In the »Advertisement« for his novel The Antiquary (1816), Scott fine-tuned his scheme of the 60 years so that different novels would represent different moments of the immediate past. »The present Work completes a series of fictitious narratives, intended to illustrate the manners of Scotland at three different periods. Waverley embraced the age of our fathers, Guy Mannering that of our own youth, and The Antiquary refers to the last ten years of the eighteenth century« (Scott 1816, vol. 1, V). This structure of historical development that Scott afterwards forced on his early Waverley novels inspired his greatest imitator, James Fenimore Cooper, twice to write a series of novels that related different phases of the first 50 years of American history. Starting with The Pioneers (1823), the first set grew gradually over two decades into the world-famous Leatherstocking series. The books in the second series, the Littlepage trilogy, were published together in 1845/46. Both series are unique in the sense that they tell a story of radical changes in American history in several sequences. The Leatherstocking books span the time from the Founding Fathers until the first decade of the 19th century; the Littlepage Papers reach until the present (the third volume takes place in 1845). The protagonist in this larger sequence is Natty Bumppo who ages with each novel. As one of the most important of the »last« heroes, he reflects the progress of American civilisation — progress should be understood in Cooper, as in Scott, as if in quotation marks. The development of the United States appears in an even more sceptical light in the family saga of Littlepage. Its third volume, The Redskins, tells the story of the Helderburgh revolt, presented critically as a result of modern mass civilisation in which the rights of the individual were stomped on. Early on, in his second novel, The Spy (1821), Cooper follows the Waverley novels. Already the subtitle, A Tale of the Neutral Ground, shows his ambition to follow his role model Scott, who described in Waverley the split of Scottish, and in Ivanhoe of English, society. Distancing himself from both parties, Cooper tells a story of dissension in the young American nation during the war against England in 1812. With the first Leatherstocking story, the attitude of the narrator changes. With the introduction of Natty Bumppo, he gives up his neutral position and uses the trapper and several Indian tribes to introduce new scenery into his historical novels — the American landscape that becomes from now on a central part of his storytelling. Nature is not only the protagonist of the plot in the five novels of the Leatherstocking series but also in the Littlepage trilogy (for example, the great drive through the ice in Satanstoe) as in the sea novels. By imitating Cooper, German authors learned how to describe a landscape: Charles Sealsfield (i.e. Karl Anton Postl) and Friedrich Gerstäcker with stories about America but most of all Adalbert Stifter in Witiko (1865/67), a historical novel taking place in Bohemia. Cooper’s

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landscapes correspond to the people who live within them (the heroes of the Leatherstocking novels) or against them, that is, people who treat nature only as something to be exploited. The development of the novels shows how step-by-step the landscape with its wild inhabitants (this includes also the white trappers) vanishes. Cooper sees the inhabitants only as loners, as heroes, and this is true also for his great Indian characters. Cooper’s view of human being shows how much he is indebted to Rousseau: The American author’s novels are governed not only by the dream of the noble savage but especially by the conviction of the late Rousseau that only the loner, the introverted person, can be one with nature. The character of Hetty in The Deerslayer (1841), the last of the five Leatherstocking novels, is as symptomatic of this approach as is the figure of Natty Bumppo, who does not want to marry Hetty’s sister Judith because he prefers the lonely existence in nature to life in society. Hetty implicitly understands Natty’s preferred lifestyle. Her psychological development came to a standstill in the state of childhood (which describes her mental state better than insanity); in her existence she merges a pure state of nature with natural moral sense. As a childlike woman, she is the counterpart of the noble savage Chingachgook, with whom she is connected through an immediate understanding and a shy love. Both figures are examples of a natural existence. Hetty, however, dies symbolically upon the fall of the Hurons, and Natty’s nature becomes more and more limited through the modernisation of the United States (as one gathers from the early novels). In the introduction to The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish (1829), Cooper defined the function of the »historical novel«: At a distant period, when Indian traditions are listened to with the interest that we lend to the events of a dark age, it is not easy to convey a vivid image of the dangers and privations that our ancestors encountered, in preparing the land we enjoy for its present state of security and abundance. It is the humble object of the tale that will be found in the succeeding pages, to perpetuate the recollection of some of the practices and events peculiar to the early days of our history (Cooper 1870, V).

The historical novel becomes the vessel for mankind’s memory. If one takes the last volume in the Leatherstocking series, The Deerslayer, seriously as an interpretation of the five novels, then we can see how they preserve the memory of a state of nature in American history (in which loners like Natty Bumppo also participated) that was lost through progress — and, in recent time, the memory of nature’s decline. From this perspective, the poetological self-criticism in Cooper’s preface to the complete edition of the series makes sense. His laments over the realism of his early novels and his demands for more poetic quality are related to his idea that the counter image to modern civilisation can only be created in a poetically transfigured, beautiful form. At the beginning, Cooper followed Scott’s realism but at the same time he questioned not only the realistic approach but also the purpose of the historical novel. It should not be the task of the historical novel to tell the story of change, and especially not to tell the story of change from a neutral perspective, but to retain the memory of a pre-modern state with sympathy. In the Littlepage trilogy, Cooper describes later, in a very harsh form, a modern mass-civilisation that does not provide space for either nature or the individual. Cooper’s relation to the genre, therefore, remains ambivalent until the end.

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The historical novel in the German lands

The history of the historical novel in Germany starts with a Scott parody: Walladmor, published in 1824, is allegedly a translation from the English, written by the author of the Waverley novels. A year later the novel is translated into English by Thomas de Quincey and the parody is parodied. The 26-year-old Georg Wilhelm Heinrich Häring was the author of Walladmor. Under the pseudonym Willibald Alexis, he had translated Scott and was also successful with his own historical novels. Of course, Walladmor was not the first German novel of the 19th century that dealt with historical material. For example, there are Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Der Zauberring (The Magic Ring, 1813) and Achim von Arnim’s Die Kronenwächter (Guardians of the Crown; vol. I, 1817, unfinished). Both, however, are not historical novels in the sense of the Waverley novels. Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s extremely successful novel attempted to revive the world of the epic of the Middle Ages. It is also not a historical novel sensu stricto because it does not deal with history but instead with epical matters and in addition resurrects the complete repertoire of the Gothic Romantic. Veit Weber’s Sagen der Vorzeit (Songs of Olden Times, 1787–98), was its most important source, which shows that Fouqué was mainly interested in narrating a mythical, prehistoric world in an archaic language and without the means of the psychological narration found in Romanticism. Fouqué created colourful details with a sense for the adequate historical moments to make his Romantic world more interesting. The novel was successful because Fouqué described the mythical world with the intensity of a historical reality. Stories about knights began to be popular again at the beginning of the 19th century. Fouqué’s novel was quite different compared to the contemporary chivalric novels (Ritterromane) that appeared in a historical costume. Take for example Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802): Although the medieval poet Heinrich von Ofterdingen is at the centre of the novel, history provides only a meagre structure and Novalis is not afraid of anachronisms. History is not important for this fragment, except as a history of poetry. The young Romantics saw the songs of the poets of the Middle Ages as the dawn of Romantic poetry. Conceived as an antiWilhelm Meister novel, Ofterdingen rejects the integration of the hero into reality, which is so important for Goethe. Instead the hero is led into the area of poetry. In this story, presented as if from the Middle Ages, Novalis develops a modern Romantic myth, as the journal Athenäum has suggested. This distinguishes Novalis from Fouqué, who is content to create a fictional mythical world without integrating a poetological and political programme into the novel. Achim von Arnim’s unfinished novel Die Kronenwächter presents a more complicated case. The novel is set around 1500, just before the Reformation. Close to the town Waiblingen, the protagonist Berthold discovers the ruins of Barbarossa’s castle. Through this discovery, Berthold comes into contact with the Kronenwächter, a secret society that dreams of the restoration of the power of the Hohenstaufen line. Berthold, however, is a modern pragmatist and builds a garment factory on the site of the ruins which makes him rich and finally propels him to the position of mayor. The reader learns through the Kronenwächter of a mysterious castle at Lake Constance, a palace made out of glass with a fantastic interior, in which the crown of the emperor is kept. The facts, however, undermine this mythical image. The last Hohenstaufen, an insane duke, lives with his caretaker in the run-down castle Hohenstock. From the perspective of the difference between the mythical image and the depraved life of the present, the

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secret society is nothing but a powerless group of delusionary, self-obsessed romantics. Moreover, Berthold is an anti-hero, who comes to his death by attempting to integrate Waiblingen in the Schwäbischen Bund (Swabian League) while venturing as a knight with Condottiere Georg von Frunsberg. This summary of the plot is highly abbreviated and also problematic because Arnim left his novel unfinished. A long time after his death, a second part was published by his widow Bettina, who exploited the remaining outlines more or less according to her own judgment. However, even as a fragment, Die Kronenwächter is the most important German contribution to the historical novel, even if it is more than just a historical novel. The book did not have its deserved success because it was left unfinished and even today, the novel may be mentioned in Germany but seldom discussed in detail. The novel, which Arnim began writing in 1810, was conceptualised independently of Scott. Presumably it was based on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years, 1795/96) and Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, German novels which were twinned in opposition. As many details show, it was Arnim’s intention to present with great accuracy a panoramic picture of the years around 1500 — a time that was perceived by the Romantics as one of radical change. Moreover, the novel was not conceived as a historical novel in the sense that it was supposed to show the historical break toward modernity with a clearly defined event. Rather, as its plot spans 40 years, it is a novel of an era, attempting to comprehend an age not in representative characters but as it were in itself. In »Dichtung und Geschichte« (Poetry and History), a kind of preface, Arnim attempted to express this sentiment: In every era there existed a mysteriousness of the world worth more in height and depth of wisdom and joy than what has been bruited in history. It is too close to humanity’s uniqueness to become obvious to contemporaries, but history in its highest truth gives posterity premonitory images, and as the imprints of fingers on hard rock cliffs awaken the presentiment of a wonderful antiquity in the people, so out of those signs in history the forgotten activity of spirits who once belonged on earth as human beings steps before our inner intuitive vision in singular luminous contemplations, never in complete overview of the entire horizon. We call this insight, should it be communicated to us, poetry; it is born out of past into present, out of spirit and truth.6

Arnim proposes here a definition of historicity that is relevant for poetry. History is to be divided into outer and inner history, or as Arnim explains elsewhere, into a history of the world and of the spirit. The history of the spirit is not a reflection of the world spirit in the Hegelian sense but a history of great minds in the Romantic sense in which only the embodied thinking 6.

»Es gab zu allen Zeiten eine Heimlichkeit der Welt, die mehr wert in Höhe und Tiefe der Weisheit und Lust, als alles, was in der Geschichte laut geworden. Sie liegt der Eigenheit des Menschen zu nahe, als sie den Zeitgenossen deutlich würde, aber die Geschichte in ihrer höchsten Wahrheit gibt den Nachkommen ahndungsreiche Bilder und wie die Eindrücke der Finger an harten Felsen im Volke die Ahndung einer seltsamen Urzeit erwecken, so tritt uns aus jenen Zeichen in der Geschichte das vergessene Wirken der Geister, die der Erde einst menschlich angehörten, in einzelnen, erleuchteten Betrachtungen, nie in der vollständigen Übersicht eines ganzen Horizonts vor unsre innere Anschauung. Wir nennen diese Einsicht, wenn sie sich mitteilen läßt, Dichtung, sie ist aus Vergangenheit in Gegenwart, aus Geist und Wahrheit geboren« (Arnim 1989, 13).

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subject is the carrier of the godlike and human spirit. The intentionally ambiguous expression of the last sentence makes poetry not only a document of several different human minds as well as a document of history, it also raises poetry to a means of insight into the inner world. The history of the spirit can therefore only be known poetically, through the Romantic concept of »Ahndung« (premonition). As Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis already pointed out in the Athenäum, »Ahndung« becomes concrete in »hieroglyphs«, in a language with a secret meaning that cannot be understood conceptually but only in terms of the psyche. This language occurs as images that in the act of representation simultaneously contain a piece of the reality which they reflect. The consequences of these constructions for Arnim’s poetics are twofold. First, he is not bound to the outer presentation of history. He is not afraid to display anachronisms in Die Kronenwächter and he introduces both realistic and mythic elements simultaneously in the form of an image: Crown Castle, the Kronenburg. Most of all, however, the novel, as hieroglyphics, blends the presentation with its presented objects — the poet merges with the story he invents (the inner or intuitive representation). With this approach, Arnim can fulfil his main goal of turning the historical novel into a contemporary novel. For, of course, Die Kronenwächter also portrays the present situation. It is a novel about Romanticism and the Romantics. In the beginning, the anti-hero Berthold embodies the image of the modern prosaic man, who is contrasted with the Kronenwächter, dreamers of an apparent restitution of a mythical state. Their programme can readily be associated with specific Romantic movements in the same way as the run-down castle Hohenstock can be viewed as a post-revolutionary mirror of the decayed poetic world of chivalry. Faced with this play of doubleness — with the mythical world of the Romantics as well as its real correlation — Berthold becomes more than a modern prosaic person. His attempt to dig a well, that is, to enter the interior of the earth, reflects a Romantic dream in himself. Novalis was a mining engineer, who perceived the inside of the earth as an inorganic world, as a hieroglyph of an artificial spirituality, disengaged from the mode of perception of the outer world. Berthold’s attempt to reach water inside the Earth acts as a satirical mirror for Romantic thought. The castle Hohenstock, on the one hand, and the well on the other hand could be read as the two sides of the Romantic dream of unlocking the mind, independent of reality. This myth, to some extent congealed, shows in particular how much Die Kronenwächter is not just a book about Romanticism but also a novel about historicity — and thus an implicit reflection on the historical novel. History appears either as a dream state that hardens into a fatal poetry or it appears as a collection of facts, lacking any dream or any spirit. Arnim attempts to develop his own vision of history and historical poetry against this background. Poetic works are not truth such as we demand from history and our intercourse with contemporaries; they would not be that which we seek, which seeks us, if they could belong entirely in reality to earth, for they would all conduct the earthly alienated world back to eternal communion. If we call the holy poets seers too, and if poetic creation should be called seeing of a higher kind, then history permits itself to be assembled in the eye through a crystal ball which does not see itself but is necessary for the eye to gather and unify the effect of light; its essence is clarity, purity, and colourlessness. He who injures this in history also spoils poetry which ought to flow forth from it; he who purifies history into truth also creates for poetry a sound intercourse with the world. Our own unimportant life events only become a welcome

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incitement to poetry because we have regarded them with more truth than generally is granted us in greater world happenings.7

For Arnim, intuitive contemplation is a means for the truth of poetry (something similar had been claimed by Scott as well). However, for the German Romantics poetry is not supposed to be dissolved into contemplation and when spent become historical realism. Rather, it has the task of presenting the fictional world as a hieroglyph of a different state of the world; this idea is also applicable to the historical novel if it is supposed to be poetry and not just history. The poetics of Arnim’s complex novel are a result of critical reflection on early Romantic poetics. In comparison with Die Kronenwächter, Wilhelm Hauff ’s Lichtenstein (1826) is a less complex book. In the preface, Hauff admits that he followed Scott and his novel is conceived according to the examples of Waverley and Ivanhoe. The protagonist Georg von Sturmfeder finds himself in 1519 in the midst of the war between the Swabian coalition and Duke Ulrich von Württemberg. At first, he takes part in the Swabian coalition’s occupation of Ulm. Later, however, he follows his lover Marie to the castle Lichtenstein, where he meets the duke and follows him. After his defeat in Stuttgart, Georg von Frundsberg saves him from death. Several aspects of the novel point to Hauff ’s attempt to introduce Scott’s literary techniques into German literature: a central moment in the history of Württemberg, the detailed research of the sources with scholarly notes, realistic details like the Swabian dialect that Hauff uses for the speech of the peasants and innkeepers. Of course, there are also aspects that are unique to Hauff ’s novel: each chapter is introduced with a motto, usually from verses of Swabian poets (Ludwig Uhland, Gustav Schwab, etc.), and we find a poetic rhythm in the language of his descriptions of landscapes as well as the castle Lichtenstein — transfigured moments that counter the apparent realism. The subtitle of the novel frames the story as a Romantic myth and thereby emphasises the poetic characteristics more strongly than the historical aspect. The lovingly painted details serve to make a shadowy world more concrete while the poetic transfiguration is Hauff ’s real goal. This aspect is even more pronounced in the most successful historical novel in Germany, Victor Scheffel’s Ekkehard (1855). In its preface, Scheffel emphasises the friendship between historiography and poetry and argues polemically in the name of the reader against overbearing historiography; instead of scholarly work, he prefers a kind of poetry that focuses on the drawing of human feelings (thus, not surprisingly, the plot centres around a romance). Scheffel is very interested in the audience of the nation. His call to present history in the form of a novel for a broad readership — instead of in the form of scholarly works intended for a limited 7. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Dichtungen sind nicht Wahrheit, wie wir sie von der Geschichte und dem Verkehr mit Zeitgenossen fordern, sie wären nicht das, was wir suchen, was uns sucht, wenn sie der Erde in Wirklichkeit ganz gehören könnten, denn sie alle führen die irdisch entfremdete Welt zu ewiger Gemeinschaft zurück. Nennen wir die heiligen Dichter auch Seher und ist das Dichten ein Sehen höherer Art zu nennen, so läßt sich die Geschichte mit der Kristallkugel im Auge zusammenstellen, die nicht selbst sieht, aber dem Auge notwendig ist, um die Lichtwirkung zu sammeln und zu vereinen; ihr Wesen ist Klarheit, Reinheit und Farbenlosigkeit. Wer diese in der Geschichte verletzt, der verdirbt auch Dichtung, die aus ihr hervorgehen soll, wer die Geschichte zur Wahrheit läutert, schafft auch der Dichtung einen sichern Verkehr mit der Welt. Nur darum werden die eignen unbedeutenden Lebensereignisse gern ein Anlaß der Dichtung, weil wir sie mit mehr Wahrheit angeschaut haben, als uns an den größern Weltbegebenheiten gemeinhin vergönnt ist« (ibid., 14).

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audience — was heard in Germany. The novels by the historian Felix Dahn and the historical series by Gustav Freytag fulfilled two tasks: on the one hand, they tried to introduce history to a bourgeois audience; on the other hand, in the context of the creation of the German empire in 1870/71, they performed the function of creating and popularising national myths. However, this post-Romantic phenomenon falls outside our time period. Willibald Alexis was neither a Romantic dreamer nor a prophet of the German nation, but an author with realistic ambitions. Because of German history after 1945, but also because of his sometimes plodding prose, Alexis has disappeared from the horizon of the German reader. To be sure: a series of his novels about the history of Brandenburg was published in the former German Democratic Republic with the aim of assimilating them then to the »realist« heritage, but these new editions had little effect in regard to his reception. His most famous novel was published in 1846 and was called Die Hosen des Herrn von Bredow (Lord von Bredow’s Britches). The book centres in fact on a pair of trousers, which gives the novel a humorous aspect. Alexis uses this object and its owner to develop a history of Brandenburg at the time of the conflict between the Elector Joachim the First with Brandenburg’s knights. Alexis conceives this and the other Brandenburg stories as patriotic novels of Prussia. However, it is the vast quantity of carefully researched and vivid details that makes the novel appealing. The protagonist is an aristocrat from the Havel region, who somewhat fulfils the function of the middle hero. In Alexis’s other novels, the emphasis is different: bourgeois citizens from Berlin, peasants and the gentry from Brandenburg no longer appear as mediators of great history but as its carrier. Therefore, Alexis’s novels can be described as bourgeois historical novels in analogy to the realistic bourgeois novel of society in the 19th century that appeared in Germany only at the end of the century. 7.

History and romance in France and Spain

After Scott admitted to being the author of the Waverley novels, Wilhelm Hauff wrote a series of �������������������������� Paper for the Edcontributions to Cotta’s magazine Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände (Morning ucated Classes) in a satirical vein about their effect in 1827: »Certainly, one can reckon that sixty thousand copies have been distributed in Germany alone, and he is becoming more famous daily. In Scheerau they have now opened an exclusive translation factory where fifteen quarto sheets a day are translated and printed«.8 And Hauff also reflects on the issue of imitation: »My decision stands firm: You must write a historical novel à la Walter Scott, I said to myself, for according to everything one currently hears about the public’s taste, only this and no other form can bring happiness«.9 What kind of novel did he have in mind? »And the title is going to read: 8.

»Gewiß, man kann rechnen, daß allein in Deutschland sechzigtausend Exemplare verbreitet sind und er wird täglich noch berühmter. In Scheerau hat man jetzt eine eigene Übersetzungsfabrik angelegt, wo täglich fünfzehn Bogen übersetzt und sogleich gedruckt werden« (Hauff 1970, vol. 3: 62).

9.

»Mein Entschluß stand fest; einen historischen Roman à la Walter Scott mußt du schreiben, sagte ich zu mir, denn nach allem, was man gegenwärtig vom Geschmack des Publikums hört, kann nur diese und keine andere Form Glück machen« (ibid., 63).

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The History of Germany from Hermann the Cherusker to 1830, in a Hundred Historical Novels«.10 Hauff ’s satire was justified in regard to the reception of Scott’s novels from the Atlantic to the Urals and the many European Waverley imitations. Around 1819, Scott’s novels began to become popular in France; by 1824, approximately 200,000 copies of the Waverley novels were sold. In the following years, Alfred de Vigny, Prosper Mérimée and Honoré de Balzac developed their own poetics of the historical novel against Scott. Alfred de Vigny’s preface »Réflexions sur la vérité dans l’art« (Reflections on Truth in Art, 1826) in the novel Cinq-Mars, is programmatic for this context. Here the author rejected the criticism that he took too much liberty with the historical material on Richelieu and the Fronde, and specifically with his characters. »What one desires of works that make phantoms of humans move […] is the philosophic spectacle of a man thoroughly racked by the passions of his character and his times; it is to be sure the truth of this person and this time, but both raised to a superior and ideal power which concentrates all their forces«.11 The subject matter of the novel was not the factual historical truths, the historical realities (»le vrai«, for which Vigny did some serious research), but the »inner« truths of men, their »passions«, in a specific historical situation. Vigny develops the »ideal type« of a modern enlightened aristocrat, whose ideas and heroic idealism foreshadows a positive streak in France’s later history, with the help of his two protagonists: the tragic hero Cinq-Mars, who is willing to contract an alliance with Spain in order to fight Richelieu and is later killed for treason, and the unscrupulous ruler of France, his tyrannical opponent. The characters are exaggerated in order to lift them above their historical condition and in order to make a specific historical moment of the »condition humaine« in history transparent, most of all, of course, a moment in French history. The most popular imitator of Scott, Alexandre Dumas père, built on this idea to turn history into a mirror of the human soul while he used history for the apolitical genre of the adventure novel. In his most enduringly successful novel Les Trois Mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers, 1844), that takes place, like Cinq-Mars, in the troubled times of Louis XIII and Richelieu, the protagonist D’Artagnan’s noble character becomes apparent in his art of swordsmanship as well as in his loyalty to the queen — and not in a modern enlightened consciousness. And his direct opponent is not Richelieu himself but the unscrupulous seductress Anne de Bueil, Lady Winter. Dumas’s source was the Mémoires de Monsieur d’Artagnan (Memoirs of Monsieur D’Artagnan, 1700/01), by Gatien de Courtils de Sandras, a partly fictitious, scandalous adventure story. In Dumas’s innovative recreation, history remains as a colouring for the merry heroes that neither mirrors the historical truth nor the human »vérité« in Vigny’s sense. In Spain, the reception of Scott started around 1830 under the influence of the historical novels from France. Even though the novel in Spain was not highly valued in the first decades of the 19th century, a series of historical novels were created whose influence, however, was 10.

»Und der Titel soll heißen: Die Geschichte Deutschlands von Herrmann dem Cherusker bis 1830, in hundert historischen Romanen« (ibid., 68 f.).

»Ce que l’on veut des œuvres qui font mouvoir des fantômes d’hommes, c’est […] le spectacle philoso11. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� phique de l’homme profondément travaillé par les passions de son caractère et de son temps; c’est donc la vérité de cet homme et de ce temps, mais tous deux élevés à une puissance supérieure et idéale qui en concentre toutes les forces« (Vigny 1965, 144).

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limited to the land of its origin. The most famous novel is El doncel de don Enrique el Doliente: Historia caballeresca del siglo XV (Don Enrique the Sorrowful’s Page: A Chivalric Story of the Fifteenth Century, 1834) by the journalist Mariano José de Larra. The novel about the troubadour Marcías (the material had already inspired Lope de Vega) deals not with a relevant moment in Spanish history but with an artist’s life and a tragic love affair (Marcías is in love with a married woman). One is reminded of Vigny but the genre here is only a costume in which Larra clothes his identity as an artist and his own Romantic problems. (He shot himself in 1839 because of an unhappy romance with an unmarried woman.) This defamiliarisation of modern or even personal relationships by transferring them into a historical setting is an aspect of the genre that can be found in many historical novels. 8.

Romanticism and national consciousness in Eastern Europe

In the literatures of Eastern Central Europe, the focus on historical material started with the beginning of the development of a »national identity«. A historical drama stands at the beginning of a new Hungarian literature that emphasised national self-esteem: Joszef Katona’s Bánk Bán (Governor Bánk, 1826), a tragedy that broaches the issue — in the context of the Middle Ages — of a conflict between crown and gentry, between Germans and Hungarians. Later, around the time of the revolution of 1848, Jószef Eötvös and Mór Jókai created historical romances that covered national themes: Eötvös’s novel Magyarország 1514-ben (Hungary in 1514), written in 1847, centres around the peasant uprising in Hungary in 1514, which mirrors the unstable political situation of 1848 in Hungary. The novel can be read as a warning to avoid an uprising against the Habsburgs. Eötvös belonged later to the party that favoured negotiations with the Habsburgs. An opposite intention is revealed in Jókai’s novel Erdély Aranykora (Siebenbürgen’s Golden Age), published after the failed revolution in 1851. The first historical novel by Jókai, who soon became successful throughout Europe, depicts the decline of Hungary’s independence in internecine struggles, projected onto the autonomous Siebenbürgen of the 17th century. Jókai, too, belonged to the group that wanted to come to terms with the Habsburgs and in a later Romantic novel dealing with a historical subject, this political conflict becomes his topic: A cigánybáró (1885), famous as Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron) in the operetta version by Johann Strauss Jr. In Poland, it is a poetic epic, a modern »national epic«, that uses a historical subject: Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, czyli Ostatni zajazd na Litwie (Pan Tadeusz or the Last Aristocratic Feud in Lithuania, 1834). Unique in this epic are the »reproduced old PolishLithuanian rural world, seen as if for the first time, its people and animals, its household implements and foods, its fields, hills, woods and plants bathed forever in sunny light«.12 That is, here we find a detailed realism that is part of the tradition of the novel but alien to the poetic epic of many other European literatures. (For Mickiewicz, the only important exception is Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea). Historical novels in the tradition of the Waverley novels, however, are 12.

»erzeugte, wie zum erstenmal gesehene altpolnische-litauische ländliche Welt, ihre Menschen und Tiere, ihre Hausgerätschaften und Speisen, ihre immer in sonniges Licht getauchten Felder, Hügel, Wälder und Pflanzen« (Fieguth, 454 f.).

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rare. That changes only after 1848 in a different historical and literary context, with the success of French realism. The reason for this change is not so hard to find. While Scott, in his new type of novel, focussed on the time of radical change in a nation from tradition to modernity, most nations of Eastern Europe were just entering the stage of such dramatic change. Or to phrase it differently, the awareness of national identity, one of the main premises of the historical novel, was just about to be developed. Russia presents an interesting case. Aleksandr Pushkin’s Kapitanskaia dochka (The Captain’s Daughter, 1836) was one of the best historical novels written in the 19th century. While modelled on Scott, it is at the same time utterly unlike Scott’s work. It tells the story of the peasant uprising under the leadership of Pugachev (in 1773/74), a subject that Pushkin dealt with while writing his Istoriia Pugacheva (History of Pugachev, 1834). This uprising, which triggered a serious crisis in Russia, is analysed by Pushkin from a critical distance. The sympathy for his leader is undermined in a sentence expressed by the narrator in a chapter that was cut from the final version: »May God protect us from a Russian insurrection, senseless and without pity. People who fantasise impossible convulsions for us are either too young or do not know our people or are persons with already hardened hearts, to whom someone else’s head is not worth a farthing and whose own neck is not worth a copper penny«.13 Like Scott, Pushkin chooses a subject from recent Russian history (he almost follows the rule of 60 years exactly), and also like Scott he tells the story of the decline of a society. But while Scott, the Russian poet’s role model, focuses with a curator’s zeal on the history of old Scotland, albeit from a quasi-enlightened modern position, or uses the character of Robin Hood to transform him from a leader of bandits to a popular rebel, Pushkin’s view of recent history is more sober and harsh. Neither Pugachev nor his enemies are chivalrous and the scene of the execution of the leader of the peasants, in which he bows his head to the narrator, seems like an illustration of the point about hardhearted men that was later cut from the final version. To clarify Pushkin’s poetics of the novel it is customary to cite his popular statement according to which a novel involves »a historical epoch developed from fictionalised action«.14 The general definition of the historical novel that is part of the European mainstream can be found at the beginning of Pushkin’s review of the novel Jurii Miroslavskii (1829) by Mikhail N. Zagoskin (published in the Literaturnaia gazeta No. 5 on January 21, 1830.) In this review, Pushkin makes fun of anachronisms, inconsistencies and poppycock as well as the absence of liveliness in historical novels and demands directness of narration, probability, and concreteness. Pushkin does not want a distancing dignity but closeness to the narrated world that should be experienced by the reader as contemporary (as he expresses it in another unfinished article from the same year). Up to a certain point, this demand is opposed to Scott’s requirement to tell a historical event in a modern way. However, what Pushkin really means only becomes clear in the novel. Like Scott in Waverley, Pushkin creates a middle hero, Sergeant Grinev, and like 13.

»Ne privedi Bog videt’ russkii bunt — bes<s>myslennyi i besposhchadnyi. Te, kotorye zamyshliaiut u nas nevozmozhnye perevoroty, ili molody i ne znaiut nashego naroda, ili uzh liudi zhestokoserdye, koim chuzhaia golovushka polushka, da i svoia sheika kopeika« (Pushkin 1948, 383 f.).

14.

»V nashe vremia pod slovom roman razumeiut istoricheskuiu epokhu razvituiu v vymyshlennom deistvii« (Pushkin 1949, 363).

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Scott in his footnotes, Pushkin strives for a maximum of historical detail. He even looked for a historical model for the main character. However, in contrast to Scott, the middle hero narrates from an »I« position, which changes the structure decisively. While Scott approaches his characters from the outside to create a historical field, the characters in Pushkin are the decisive focal points of this field. Not the uprising, but its leader Pugachev, framed as a psychological character, is the centre of the novel The Captain’s Daughter: the hardhearted man who does not act hardheartedly in certain moments — to some extent a systemic breach of a historical figure. It is this interest in the narrated soul of a historical character (complementarily the psychology of the first-person narrator suits this purpose) which is not only Pushkin’s own achievement in this genre, but it makes The Captain’s Daughter stand apart from other historical novels. 9.

Manzoni’s juxtaposition of historiography and fiction

Like Aleksandr Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, Alessandro Manzoni’s novel I Promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1825/26) is a unique case, but it did not have the same influence on the genre as Pushkin’s book. The novel, whose subtitle creates a fiction (Storia milanese del secolo XVII, scoperta e rifatta da Alessandro Manzoni [A Milanese Story of the Sixteenth Century Discovered and Recast by Alessandro Manzoni]), was printed in 1825/26 but only distributed in 1827 (therefore called Ventisettiana) and became a European success (praised by Goethe!). A stylistically revised version was published in 1840/42. While the first edition used the Lombard dialect, the second one instead used standard Tuscan Italian. At the beginning of the introduction, a fictional context is created in a unique way: The narrator »quotes« in an archaic tone from a manuscript, then he interrupts the manuscript and integrates his own text and develops his doubts about the possibility of revising the story. The »quote« from the »manuscript« stops at a significant place: »And since, it being an evident matter and denied by nobody, that the names be nothing if not pure accidents…«.15 The manuscript does not describe significant historical events but the story of »Everyman«, a farmhand and a farmgirl, in a historical context. The middle heroes are the real protagonists, and George Lukács explains this by stating that not a specific national crisis but the tragedy of the Italian people in general was to be told. This is part of the problem of the genre. Manzoni reflected on this issue not only in his Introduzione, but also in his own essay »Del romanzo storico« (On the Historical Novel, 1850), which was triggered by the reviews of I Promessi sposi. Manzoni wrote here about the relationship between history and fiction and came — after reflecting on the history of the epic — to a surprising conclusion. The epic at first was created as historiography (the Iliad and the Odyssey) and not as a novel in the modern sense; the audience listened to the singers in order to hear news about the world. For Manzoni, however, the epic unity of truth and fiction cannot be transferred easily to the modern novel. In the first part of his essay, Manzoni argued for the separation of the truth from the probable (the fictional part of the historical novel). In his novel, he cut out the description of the pestilence in Milan from the plot, which the reviewers harshly criticised. Instead, he condensed it into its own story 15. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ »Imperciocchè, essendo cosa evidente, e da nessun negata non essere i nomi se non puri purissimi accidenti« (Manzoni 1963, 4).

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in which a central historical character, the cardinal Frederico Borromeo, also appears. In the parts about the pestilence, Manzoni gives up the fiction of an old manuscript. The narrator appears as a historian (and not as an eyewitness), whose story is based on research. The historical sources integrated into the novel come from periods reaching up to Manzoni’s present. In the historical novel, in Manzoni’s view, the historical facts should not immediately be mixed with poetic invention. This separation is already addressed in a letter to Claude Fauriel from 1821 in which he reflected about the possibility of the historical novel’s form: »to gather the characteristic traits of an epoch of society, and develop them in an action, to profit from history without slipping into competition with it, and without pretending to do what history does better«.16 A few months later, he defined the task of poetry in the novel more precisely in a letter to Fauriel: »To give you a brief idea of my principal idea on historical novels […] I shall say that I conceive of them as a representation of a given state of society by means of facts and characters so resembling reality that one can believe them a true history which one had happened to discover«.17 The novel is supposed to invent history in a way that is not only probable but also true — at least as true as a work of historical fiction. In the Promessi sposi, the introductory manuscript fulfils this function; Manzoni, however, cut the »quote« off with the remark that the book is written for the modern reader and therefore has to be adjusted to his needs. In his novel, he also distinguished the fictionalised history from the historical report (the chapters about pestilence) by tone and manner of narration, and summarised what he still rejected as unpoetic in his letter to Fauriel: a historical narration that goes to the extreme of mimicry and a distancing report of past events by a modern historian. If we take Manzoni’s later essay about the historical novel seriously as a self-interpretation, then Manzoni aimed with his Promessi sposi for a goal that he seems explicitly to reject: to write a modern epic. However, unlike the old epics, this modern epic does not present fictionalised and described history as a unity but keeps them side by side because poetry and science are no longer a unity in modernity. Nonetheless, against all criticism, both strains in the Promessi sposi depend on each other: without the story of the affianced couple, it would not be a novel and without the chapters on pestilence, it would not be an epic but only an unspecific romance. The themes of the novel are well suited for the epic approach in the narration. As in the Iliad — and different from Scott’s historical novels — the national crisis is only marginally important. Rather, the novel outlines a theological perspective on the world and shows the effect of God’s justice and mercy in virtually the only possible poetic form — in the modern epic. Manzoni’s Catholicism already exposed him to much criticism in the 19th century. However, it is easily overlooked that the novel creates in Frederico Borromeo an ideal character as a leader of the church. There is more of a projection of an ideal Catholicism than a ruling Catholic ideology (as diagnosed, for example, by Alberto Moravia) in Manzoni’s Catholic epic. 16.

»rassembler les traits caractéristiques d’une époque de la société, et les développer dans une action, profiter de l’histoire sans se mettre en concurrence avec elle, sans prétendre faire ce qu’elle fait mieux« (Manzoni 1970, 227).

17.

»Pour vous indiquer brièvement mon idée principale sur les romans historiques […], je vous dirai que je les conçois comme une représentation d’un état donné de la société par le moyen de faits et de caractères si semblables à la réalité, qu’on puisse les croire une histoire véritable qu’on viendrait de découvrir« (ibid., 244 f.).

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322 10. Hugo’s Romantic vision of history

Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831) also centres on a Catholic world, but that is the only feature this novel has in common with Manzoni’s Promessi sposi. In contrast to the theological perspective of Manzoni, who conceives of the world, even with all of its suffering, as a balanced cosmos, Hugo’s novel implies the pessimistic world view that a mean-spirited destiny rules history: »ΑΝÁΓΚH« (that is, destiny, fate) is the motto of his novel: »It is upon this word that we have made this book«.18 This pessimism is countered by other things, and destiny, which seems to rule world history like a law, is not quite as disastrous as the fate of Esmeralda and Quasimodo indicate. In the fifth book, Hugo develops a vision of world history that could be conceptualised as a philosophically based »destiny« of world history. In this book, he sets a theocratic against a democratic architecture: The architecture of Hindus, Egyptians and Romans is read as theocratic, while Phoenician, Greek and Gothic architecture is viewed as democratic. Using the example of Roman and Gothic, Hugo describes a history of how peoples and individuals symbolise their freedom in signs of stone: »Architecture is the great book of humanity«.19 (Readers should consult chapter three of the present volume for further treatment of Hugo’s artistic use of allusions to architecture.) His history stops at the invention of the printing press, that is, at the time around 1500. Hugo’s novel is set in the year 1482. In 1483, Louis XI died, who had executed Esmeralda as a witch; in the same year Luther was born. We are at the eve of a radical change, a time that not only signifies the break from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance but also the implementation of the printed word as a factor in world history: »The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother revolution. […] Through the form of printing, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, ungraspable, indestructible«.20 And the chapter ends with a hymn, stating that journals and books, the new tower of Babel, are a »promised refuge for intelligence against a new deluge, against submergence in barbarians«.21 Notre-Dame de Paris is not supposed to tell the story of one of the changes in a national history but about the radical change in world history. Hugo’s Romantic hubris becomes even more pronounced when one considers that this radical change supposedly transforms authors into creators and curators of the human spirit and human freedom. The dark fate of Esmeralda’s and Quasimodo’s lives is the fate of the long-vanished Middle Ages and Hugo emphasises again and again the historical distance between his own time and the late 15th century. To cross this historical distance, Hugo did some research, but the novel still shows a strange disinterest in regard to real history (a lack for which Hugo was again and again criticised in France). However, it is not a concrete historical moment that is the central topic of the book but a historicalphilosophical change. The date 1482 has to be seen as a symbolic element, not as a literal one. 18.

»C’est sur ce mot, qu’on a fait ce livre« (Hugo 1963, 241).

19.

»l’architecture est le grand livre de l’humanité« (ibid., 300).

20. »L’invention de l’imprimerie est le plus grand événement de l’histoire. C’est la révolution mère. […] Sous la forme imprimerie, la pensée est plus impérissable que jamais; elle est volatile, insaisissable, indestructible« (ibid., 303). 21.

»refuge promis à l’intelligence contre un nouveau déluge, contre une submersion de barbares« (ibid., 305).

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Esmeralda, Claude Frollo and Quasimodo are not middle heroes who would make it possible to tell a story about a historical event from an intimate perspective. The same applies to Alfred de Vigny’s Cinq-Mars, but Vigny’s novel is conceived as an excessive vision of a poetic counterimage to the protagonists of history. This is not true for Hugo’s novel; in fact, the characters are, as opposed to the Waverleys and Ivanhoes, not figures that have been created out of a historical interest. It has been often remarked that Quasimodo’s nature follows the programme of Romantic literature that Hugo outlined in the preface to Cromwell: the merging of the sublime and the grotesque. In opposition to Scott’s realism, Hugo approaches the creation of the grotesque, specifically the Gothic architecture, through the medium of the historical subject. Closely associated with this approach was the enthusiasm for Hoffmann in France that was so alien to Scott. From Scott’s perspective, Hugo’s novel was the result of an »irregular fancy« whose topics threatened to become »ludicrous« and »shocking«. It was Scott’s achievement to introduce historical topics into realistic narration and thereby create the historical novel. The Romantics in France, the generation of 1830, discovered in historical topics the possibility to protest against the dominance of France’s classical literature with the invention of grotesque realities from history. Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris is the most famous example. However, in Théophile Gautier’s late novel Le Capitaine Fracasse (Captain Fracasse, 1863) we still find an artificial French world of the time of the »comic« novelist Paul Scarron, in which commedia dell’arte stock situations and swordplay determined the scenes — at a time when realistic narration following Scott’s approach was gaining acceptance in all European literatures. Bibliography Apel-Muller, Michel (ed.). 1977/79. Recherches sur le roman historique en Europe. XVIIIe-XIXe siècles. 2 vols. Paris: Les belles lettres. Arnim, Achim von. 1989. Die Kronenwächter. Ed. by Paul Michael Lützeler. Frankfurt/M: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag (Werke, vol. 2). Aust, Hugo. 1994. Der historische Roman. Stuttgart: Metzler. Buendia, Felicidad (ed.). 1963. Antología de la Novela Historica española (1830–1844). Madrid: Aguilar. Cooper, James Fenimore. 1870. The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish: A Tale. New York: Hurd and Houghton. ———. 1987. The Deerslayer, or The First War-Path. Ed. by James Franklin Beard. Albany: State of New York UP. Felten, Hans and Lope, Hans-Joachim. 1985. »Historisierende Erzählkunst in Frankreich: Die Walter-ScottRezeption«. Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft. vol. 16: Europäische Romantik III. Ed. by Norbert Altenhofer and Alfred Estermann. Wiesbaden: Athenaion. 275–287. Fieguth, Rolf. 1985. »Die polnische Literatur«. Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft. Vol. 16: Europäische Romantik III. Ed. by Norbert Altenhofer and Alfred Estermann. Wiesbaden: Athenaion. 439–460. Fleishman Avrom, 1971. The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf. Baltimore, London: John Hopkins UP. Hauff, Wilhelm. 1970a. Lichtenstein. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. by Sibylle von Steinsdorff. Vol. 1. München: Winkler. ———. 1970b. »Phantasien und Skizzen«. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. by Sibylle von Steinsdorff. Vol. 3. München: Winkler. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1970. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III. Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Vol. 15. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Hughes, Helen. 1993. The Historical Romance. London, New York: Routledge.

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Hugo, Victor. 1963. Notre-Dame de Paris. Romans. Vol. 1. Ed. by Henri Guillemin. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Iser, Wolfgang and Schalk, Fritz (eds.). 1970. Dargestellte Geschichte in der europäischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt/M.: Klostermann. Krogoll, Johannes. 1982. »Geschichte im Drama und im Roman der Romantik«. Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft. Vol. 14: Europäische Romantik I. Ed. by Karl Robert Mandelkow. Wiesbaden: Athenaion. 319–354. Leisy, Ernest Erwin. 1950. The American Historical Novel. Norman: Oklahoma UP. Lukács, Georg. 1965. Der historische Roman. Werke. Vol. 6: Probleme des Realismus III. Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand. MacQueen, John. 1989. The Enlightenment and Scottish Literature. Vol. 2: The Rise of the Historical Novel. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Manzoni, Alessandro. 1963. I promessi sposi. Tutte le opere di Alesandro Manzoni. Vol. 2.1. Ed. by Alberto Chiari and Fausto Ghisalberti. Milano: Mondadori. ———. 1970. Lettere. vol. 1. Tutte le opere di Alesandro Manzoni. Vol. 7.1. Ed. by Cesare Arieti. Milano: Mondadori. ———. 1991. »Del romanzo storico«. Tutte le opere di Alesandro Manzoni. Vol. 5.3. Ed. by Carla Riccardi and Biancamaria Travi. Milano: Mondadori. Moravia, Alberto. 1976. »Manzoni e l’ipotesi du un realismo cattolico«. Manzoni pro e contro. Ed. by Giancarlo Vigorelli. Vol. 3. Milano: Istituto Propaganda Libreria. 32–38. Orel, Harold. 1995. The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini: Changing Attitudes toward a Literary Genre, 1814– 1920. New York: St. Martin’s. Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich. 1948. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. V 17 tomakh: Vol. VIII: Romany i povesti. Puteshestviia. Ed. by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk SSSR. ———. 1949. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. V 17 tomakh. Vol. XI: Kritika i publitsistika 1819–1834. ���������������� Ed. by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk SSSR. Reeve, Clara. 1785. The Progress of Romance Through Times, Countries and Manners. 2 vols. Colchester: W. Keymer. ———. 1977. The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story. Ed. by James Trainer. Oxford: Oxford UP. Scheffel, Joseph Victor von. 1926. Ekkehard: Eine Geschichte aus dem zehnten Jahrhundert. Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 5. Leipzig: Hesse & Becker. Scott, Walter. 1816. The Antiquary, by the Author of »Wavereley« and »Guy Mannering«. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co. ———. 1828. »On the Supernatural in Fictions Composition: and particularly on the Works of Ernest Theodore William Hoffman«. Foreign Quarterley Review. 1: 60–98. ———. 1848. »Horace Walpole«. The Miscellaneous Prose Works. Vol. III. Edinburgh: Robert Cadell. ———. 1986. Ivanhoe. Ed. by A.N. Wilson. London: Penguin Books. ———. 1998. Waverely, or ’Tis Sixty Years Since. Ed. by Claire Lamont. Oxford: Oxford UP. Shaw, Harry E. 1983. The Form of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors. Ithaca, London: Cornell UP. Tieck, Ludwig. 1975. »Die altdeutschen Minnelieder«. Ausgewählte kritische Schriften. Ed. ������������������������ by Ernst Ribbat. ��� Tübingen: Niemeyer. Vigny, Alfred de. 1965. Œuvres complètes. Ed. by Paul Viallaneix. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Villari, Enrica (ed.). 1985. Storie su storie: Indagini sui romanzi storici (1814–1840). Vicenza: Neri Pozza (Collana di varia critica XXXII). Walpole, Horace. 1998 The Castle of Otranto and Hieroglyphic Tales. Ed. by Robert L. Mack. London, Vermont: Everyman. Zimmerman, Everett. 1996. The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth Century British Novel. Ithaca, London: Cornell UP. Žmegač, Viktor. 1983. »Der Aufstieg des Historismus in Geschichtsphilosophie, Ästhetik und Literatur«. Propyläen Geschichte der Literatur. Vol. 4: Aufklärung und Romantik, 1700–1830. Berlin: Propyläen. 290–314.

The fairy-tale, the fantastic tale Jörn Steigerwald Looking at and speaking about literary genres always implies an awareness of questions concerning their traditional background and their relationship towards their classical forms. Or, in other words, analyzing genres always means answering questions of continuity and discontinuity of forms and subject matters. Romantic literary genres commonly exhibit these problems because of a double claim, set by their authors and contemporary literary historians. According to the latter, Romanticism often marks the beginning of modernity and the discharge of a traditional or even obsolete canon. Critics might refer to the end of the classical concept of mimesis meaning the relation of imitation and emulation, and to the beginning of a new model called intertextuality. They also apply themselves to new literary forms like the Bildungsroman or the new rise of the novella in Germany and France. Fairy-tales and fantastic tales can be seen as an expression of this challenge. Is the Romantic fairy-tale just a continuation of the fairy-tale of the Enlightenment or are there ruptures between them which make it impossible to speak about a homogenous genre? Has the fantastic tale itself to be considered as a new model of the fairy-tale under the conditions of modernity (i.e. Romanticism) or is it necessary to speak about a well-defined genre with clearly distinguished borderlines separating it from the fairy-tale? Finally, is the fantastic tale a new, originally Romantic genre, or does it have a history and a tradition of its own, originating from the Middle Ages or Oriental regions? Questions like these have to be considered while talking about the fairy-tale and the fantastic tale in Romanticism, but they are not the only issues which have to be taken into account. National and historical differences are as important as different forms of reception, effects, and further developments. The hypothesis of this chapter is that two different historical situations, each with its own literary and epistemological background, have to be regarded to understand the evolution of each genre. While transformations and modifications of the fairy-tale took place at the end of the eighteenth century, the situation again changed completely around 1815. Not just the origin of the fantastic tale dates from those days, but also the fairy-tale came to be considered from a new perspective. From this time on, the fairy-tale was divided into two separate entities; an artistic product, the Kunstmärchen, and authentic original tales. The latter, according to their propagandists (e.g. the Grimm brothers), had been liberated from art of any kind. The fantastic tale itself does not constitute an evolution of the fairy-tale, or a transformation, or an adaptation to modern times, but exhibits an intentional transgression of the limitations of the fairy-tale to establish a new literary genre. The moment of »hesitation« between two possible explanations — one allegorical and one psychological — is the key feature distinguishing the fantastic and its determining marker in opposition to the fairy-tale. Consequently both genres follow their own model of »naturalization« (Jonathan Culler) within their limits. What is special about the fairy-tale and the fantastic tale is an intricate conjunction between them, which does not allow any real connection, but establishes differences. So the thoughtful transgression of the limitations of the fairy-tale does not simply cause a violation of their ancient literary rules, but also enables the establishment of a new genre. The fantastic tale has its own limitations and forms

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of naturalization, which cannot be transgressed without its becoming in turn part of another genre, either the fairy-tale or the psychological tale. I will, first, give a brief summary of the critical discussion about the marvelous and the forms of the fairy-tale in the late Enlightenment. On this basis I will introduce the innovations of Romantic authors concerning the fairy-tale after 1800, which could be called the marvelous discovery of the subject, and the development of psychological fairy-tales. Then, I will illustrate the transgression of the fairy-tale and the origin of the fantastic tale after 1815. The introduction of a new literary distinction, the »hesitation«, marks the difference from the fairy-tale and opens up new possibilities to create contingent literary expressions of subjectivity. Finally, I want to give an overview of the development of this genre, its adaptations, and continuations in the different countries up to 1850. 1.

The fairy-tale and the marvelous in late Enlightenment and pre-Romanticism

For the majority of readers the fairy-tale and the marvelous are nowadays just two sides of the same coin. The fairy-tale is the genre which is defined or determined by the marvelous, whereas the marvelous is the essential literary category of the fairy-tale. This relationship is not false at all, but disregards historical facts. Therefore two main points have to be noted. Firstly, the fairy-tale existed long before any discussion or classification of the marvelous came up. In the imported Arabian Nights, a classical fairy-tale, there is no reference to the marvelous but a reference to the instruction and the amusement of the reader. At the beginning there is no need to define the fairy-tale as a literary representation of the marvelous. The marvelous was regarded as a sign of the will and the power of God. Therefore there was no need for a poetological explanation. The second point is that the rise of the marvelous was not related to the fairy-tale. The main discussion on the marvelous in the early Enlightenment took place between Johann Christoph Gottsched and the two Swiss critics Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger and revolved around John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). The central question was: Does Milton in his epic poem violate the limits of literary expression, as Gottsched asserted, or does he have to use new forms and contents of literary presentation according to his subject, as the Swiss critics claimed? The category of the marvelous was widely connected to the fairy-tale right after this discussion. Nevertheless, through this discussion the concept of the marvelous became a license for new models of fanciful writing concerning either imaginary objects or fabulous actions. It is useful to recall how the limits of the marvelous were defined in Enlightenment discourse. It was an integral part of rationalist poetics and not at all external to it. Its power was restricted by laws enacted by the same critics who denied the extraordinary and the — in their opinion — tasteless use of fancy in Baroque literature. The marvelous was only allowed when it was clearly indicated to the reader so that no confusion regarding reality could occur in the act of reading. Finally, the concept of the marvelous was to some extent limited to debates among German critics and poets while no such discussions came up in England or France in the eighteenth century. But even in France there existed a huge and a highly effective production of fairy-tales, starting with Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l’oye (Tales of Mother Goose, 1697), and ending with the famous collections of the Bibliothèque bleu (Blue

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Library) or the Cabinet des fées (Cabinet of Fairies, 1785–89), where tales of authors like Mme d’Aulnoy or Mme de Leprince de Beaumont were assembled. In the late Enlightenment, or — depending on the point of view — in Pre-Romanticism, the situation of the fairy-tale can be described in the following way. In the years after 1770 there existed one model of the fairy-tale consisting of at least three different types. Each of them had a special national background, but was also influential in other countries. The first type could be called the French type, the Contes de fées. In these tales human beings meet good and bad fairies who influence the destiny of man by their natural power. The most celebrated tales came from Mme d’Aulnoy, who published her stories under the title Contes de fées in four volumes from 1696 to 1699. This title was later used as a synonym for this type of fairy-tale. Also very influential was the translation of The Arabian Nights by Antoine Galland of 1704. The final act and apotheosis was the collection called Cabinet des fées, published in a total of 41 volumes from 1785–89, which were very influential in Germany, too. They are mostly related to the name of Christoph Martin Wieland, the mediator of the French tradition into the German literary culture. His best-known and most successful adaptations were Das Märchen vom Prinzen Biribinker (The Fairy-tale of Prince Biribinker, 1764) from his novel Don Sylvio von Rosalva (Don Sylvio of Rosalva, 1764), and his epic poem Oberon (1780). Even if Oberon was praised by his critics and welcomed by the public more than the fairy-tale of Biribinker, this earlier work indicates more clearly the transformations of the fairy-tale between the late Enlightenment and the beginning of Romanticism. The tale is an integral part of the novel where it serves as a touchstone for the probability of the marvelous. The novel starts with Don Sylvio’s fabulous wanderings and his search for the model for a beloved female portrait he found somewhere in the country he was in before. This odyssey of the Quixotic figure is a result of Sylvio’s having been educated by his aunt, who gave him only fairy-tales and courtly tales to read as an approach to real contemporary conditions. On the journey from his own to his neighbor’s castle, the protagonist experiences difficult and strange adventures, and next he meets a society of well-educated and gallant people who take care of him. One member of the society uses the Märchen vom Prinzen Biribinker to demonstrate to Don Sylvio the extravagances and incredibility of the marvelous, with the intention of persuading the hero to abandon his faith in the marvelous. But the tale does not change the world for Don Sylvio; on the contrary, he sees in it a proof of his belief and a sign of the possibilities of the marvelous. He does not deny the power of the marvelous at all, but emphasizes its necessity and effectiveness instead. It is perhaps the first time that the marvelous is not seen as an integral part of rationalist discourse anymore, but as something resistant and opaque. In addition, Wieland is an important predecessor of the Romantics because of his collection of fairytales called Dschinnistan (1786–89), his most important tribute to the fairy-tale because of its representation of the pure marvelous. Dschinnistan was a literary topic for the Romantics — as texts by Novalis and E.T.A. Hoffmann show — and a real reference for them. While Wieland is normally regarded as the Enlightened opposite of the Romantics, his Dschinnistan makes clear how closely connected they were in reality. The second type could be called the Italian type, and is mainly associated with Carlo Gozzi. His fairy-tales are not tales in the concrete sense, but as their genre term Fiabe teatrali (Fables for the Theatre, 1761–65) indicates, they are dramatic fairy-tales. These plays were an effort

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to renew the ancient tradition of the commedia dell’arte under contemporary conditions in opposition to Carlo Goldoni’s established form of realistic or bourgeois theatre. Gozzi tried to purify the drama from obscene and drastic eroticism. At the same time he wanted to uphold the marvelous as the origin of dramatic representation. In his Fiabe he introduced a more philosophical background to maintain the relevance of fancy as well as the marvelous as an anthropologicon. So he argued against Goldoni’s exclusion of the marvelous from his theatre and restored traditional Italian theatre. Gozzi’s Fiabe attained special importance for the German critical discussion and in the literary practice of Romanticism where they became famous for their presentation of the marvelous on the stage in pure form. But even in Germany the reception of Gozzi was twofold. Schiller for example translated and modified a version of Gozzi’s Turandot (1762) by purifying the play to accord with classical aesthetics. For the young Ludwig Tieck, Gozzi’s Fiabe demonstrated the abuse of the marvelous; while Shakespeare exemplified the correct way of fairy-tale writing, Gozzi stood for an overwhelming use of it. In contrast, E.T.A. Hoffmann and others regarded Gozzi as a model predecessor, who had worked on the project to romanticize the world. His plays stood for the attempt to bring back into life the forgotten and lost marvelous. The third type is the folk-tale, such as the Volksmährchen der Deutschen (Fairy-tales of the Germans), compiled by Johann Karl August Musäus and published in five volumes from 1782 to 1786. It can be considered the German contribution to the fairy-tale of the Enlightenment. Musäus’s collection is unimaginable without the aesthetic framework of Johann Gottfried Herder, the intellectual head of the Sturm und Drang movement. Especially his Volkslieder (Folksongs, 1778 and 1779) and his treatise Über die Würkung der Dichtkunst auf die Sitten der Völker in Alten und Neuen Zeiten (On the Effect of Poetry on the Customs of the Peoples in Ancient and Modern Times, 1778) assert the value and the importance of folk literature for the manners and the culture of a nation. Musäus followed this argumentation and worked in the field of the folk-tale without naming Herder. In the preface to his collection he set off his work against current forms of the fairy-tale and popular literature such as sentimental novels. He also claimed not to have changed his models from the oral tradition to make them modern and fashionable. According to Musäus, the only modification he had made was to give the tales a localization, because for him it was not possible to publish them in their original version. Finally, he distinguished his folk-tales from folk novels and fairy-tales for children. The folk-tales do not represent real facts and actions, but illustrate and exemplify the national character of their place of origin. They are not tales for a specific public but should reach everyone. That is the reason why Musäus tried to find a stylistic level to speak to old and young alike. There are two important points to be considered when comparing Musäus’s folk-tales with Romantic folk-tales. Firstly, his folk-tales are not folk-tales in the strict sense of the Grimm brothers, but an extensive collection containing anecdotes, legends, chronicles, and fairy-tales. He did not strive for philological correctness or authenticity which Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm demanded for their later collection. Secondly, Musäus bases the literary legitimization of his folk-tales on their reference to fancy and the marvelous as necessary and important elements alongside reason. Even if Musäus’s main point is typical of the argumentation of authors of the late Enlightenment, it also shows the difference between him and the Romantics. His folk-tales focus on a pragmatic message. In this sense they are didactically orientated, with a clear and strict

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common-sense grasp of valuable and moral actions. Each protagonist has to follow the rules of society before earning his or her reward. In Romantic fairy-tales such as Ludwig Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert (The Blonde Eckbert, 1797) or E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf (The Golden Pot, 1814), no established rules have to be followed by the main figure, nor do we detect any pragmatism for the daily life of the reader in them. The pragmatism of the marvelous in Musäus’s folk-tales and the disturbing and confusing marvelous of the Romantics contrast strikingly. The first step towards the fantastic tale is exemplified by Jacques Cazottes’s Le Diable amoureux (The Devil in Love, 1772/76). According to most critics, the rise of the fantastic starts with this French tale. But there are no real criteria that allow us to legitimate this claim. The fact of considerable change of emphasis in the different editions of Le Diable amoureux complicates things. There is a small but important difference between the first edition (1772) and the second (1776). In the first edition, the young noble officer Don Alvare de Maravilla conjures up the devil in a situation of high spirits and curiosity in the ruins of Portici. Thus he meets a creature, which is at first a dog, then a servant, and finally a beautiful young woman called Biondetta. After this he travels around with her and experiences many extravagant and adventurous incidents. After a certain time, he falls in love with her, and the young woman explains to him that she is a sylph, who has just taken human shape because of her love for him. Thus accompanied by her he travels back to Spain, where he wants to introduce Biondetta to his mother before their marriage. The final station of this journey is a night of passion with her after which Biondetta leaves him. It might be possible that he swears to Biondetta in this night that he worships the devil, but there is no clear evidence of it. He returns to his mother and recognizes that his whole adventure was full of contingent incidents and illusions. According to his confidantes and figures of authority, his mother and the doctor of theology, Quebracuernos, he could avert the disaster only by becoming obedient and contrite again. In the first version, Alvare is completely under the spell of the devil, against whom he defends himself maladroitly. But in the second edition, Alvare ends his story in an ambiguous moment when he no longer knows whether his adventures were real or merely dreams. Thus, only the second edition technically might be regarded as the beginning of the fantastic tale. But even then, there is still the problem of an allegorical reading. Such a reading, which, as we learn in an epilogue, is intended by the narrator, makes the tale a warning against the dangers of illusion and attraction of the diabolic. If one excludes allegorical readings from the fantastic tale, Le Diable amoureux cannot be regarded as belonging to this category. Nonetheless this tale opens up the way to the fantastic tale by dramatizing the hesitation between real and imaginary as the central focus of a tale without responding to it. Finally, Le Diable amoureux was a main reference for the identification of an indigenous tradition of the fantastic in opposition to Hoffmann, particularly in France. Charles Nodier, to state an example, showed this view clearly in his prefaces to his tale Trilby (1822): The subject of this tale is taken from a preface or a note of one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, I do not know which one. Like all popular traditions this one has made a tour around the world and can be found everywhere. It is the diable amoureux of all mythologies.1 1.

»Le sujet de cette nouvelle est tiré d’une préface ou d’une note des romans de Sir Walter Scott, je ne sais pas lequel. Comme toutes les traditions populaires, celle-ci a fait le tour du monde et se trouve partout. C’est le diable amoureux de toute les mythologies« (Nodier 1982, 345).

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330 2.

The fairy-tale in Romanticism

As shown above, the fairy-tale of the Enlightenment is not a simple predecessor of the Romantic fairy-tale, but they are linked together in an intricate and complex way. Sometimes both can be regarded as parts of a longer tradition like the literature of Satanism. Tales like Alain-René Lesage’s Le Diable boiteux (The Limping Devil, 1707), Cazotte’s Le Diable amoureux, up to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs, 1815/16), and those by French authors like Nodier and Nerval are examples of this tradition. Some could be called Pre-Romantic in a certain way, such as those by Cazotte, Gozzi, or Wieland. Sometimes the Enlightened fairytale and its authors — such as Musäus or Wieland — have to be seen as an opposition to the intentions and objects of Romantic authors. It is often necessary to differentiate between mere polemics against an opposite which is too close for comfort and real theoretical or practical distinctions in the actual manner of fairy-tale writing. The question remains: Is the Enlightened marvelous the same as the Romantic marvelous, or does it just seem to be the same concept, but with a different significance? This would imply a discontinuity between the Enlightened fairy-tale and the Romantic fairy-tale. Critics who argue this way often appeal to the works of Michel Foucault, in particular to his work Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things, 1966), in which he installs a model of discontinuous epistemes against the traditional model of historical continuity. Following this theory, critics argue that the Enlightened fairy-tale is part of the episteme of »representation« while the Romantic fairytale is part of the episteme of »man«. So all relations and correspondences supposedly are only superficial in comparison with their deeper structure. But an argumentation focused on Foucault’s theory of epistemic discontinuity is not very helpful given the fact that Foucault does not claim a certain date or year for the discontinuity. He sets the end of the classical episteme and the beginning of the modern episteme vaguely between 1770 and 1830. It was exactly during this time that the production of fairy-tales, whether Enlightened or Romantic, reached its highest point. So what is the difference between the fairy-tale of the Enlightenment and that of Romanticism? According to Foucault, »man« makes the difference. Or, in other words, the rise of modern subjectivity, based on an anthropological and psychological approach to man, defines the difference between the classical and the modern episteme. While in the classical episteme man as subject was an objective being in relation to a transparent system of representation of ideas through signs, there is no such transparency in the modern episteme anymore. Man has become a human being with an individual psyche and an opaque knowledge of himself and his environment. Self-knowledge and self-evidence have become important attributes of man in the modern episteme. These are not only scientific or medical assumptions, but general metaphysical ones, which are also reflected, integrated, and transformed in aesthetics itself. This occurs not in a simple stimulus-response pattern, but in an alternating and oscillating system, which in Foucault’s sense we could term poetic counter-discoursivity. If there is some merit to the distinction Foucault draws, what does this mean for the Romantic fairy-tale, and later on for the fantastic tale? Three points ought to be considered: first, the enlargement of the fairy-tale to include a psychological dimension; second, the end of a pragmatic and didactic orientation of the marvelous and introduction of a mysterious or opaque conclusion; third, the impossibility of an allegorical reading. Two examples, a theoretical text

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and a literary one, might explain the relevance of these statements. In his Vorschule der Ästhetik (Preschool of Aesthetics, 1804), Jean Paul reflects on the possibilities and limits of the marvelous. In § 5 of the First Program, entitled »Gebrauch des Wunderbaren« (Use of the Marvelous), he starts with the assertion that »all of the truly marvelous is poetic in itself«.2 Then he refers to two different ways in which the marvelous is misused. The first way is to materialize the marvelous, which means to explain and to resolve the marvelous in a rational system. The second way is to invent miracles without giving an explanation of the miracle. For Jean Paul a continuing miracle is not a miracle at all, but a mistaken mixture of the material and the ideal marvelous. The solution to this two-fold problem is the search for the marvelous — by way of the self. The self is the real foreign ghost for man. Jean Paul prefers the inner wonders in opposition to external wonders, which can be explained, but not resolved. For him, the figures of Mignon and of the Harper in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795/96) are good examples of this. For Jean Paul, the superstition of man is the background to the real marvelous. But he refuses to use ghost appearances in fairy-tales in order to elevate the subjective belief in ghosts as the origin of the marvelous. In the fairy-tale Der blonde Eckbert (Blond Eckbert, 1797), Ludwig Tieck focuses on the psychology of the figures too. It is not necessary to follow Walter Benjamin in his claim that Der blonde Eckbert erects a third theory of memory prior to Freud’s and Bergson’s. But it is obvious that subjective memory plays an important role in this tale. The tale starts with a meeting of Eckbert, his wife Bertha and his friend Philipp Walter. In an evening conversation, Eckbert asks his wife to tell their friend about her life. Bertha’s narration of her childhood is an incomplete remembrance. She describes the conditions under which she had lived before she left her parents and the events she experienced afterwards. She met an old woman in the forest who took care of her in a marvelous idyll. But she cannot remember one specific detail of this period which concerned another member of their household: the name of the dog. At the end of her story, Walter suddenly mentions the name of the dog: »Strohmian«. Bertha is completely confused and tells Eckbert about the mystery of Walter’s knowledge. It is a catastrophe for her that someone else has information about this dog and hence about her former life. In the end she collapses and dies. In an act of revenge Eckbert murders Walter. But even then the history of Eckbert’s and Bertha’s childhood is not complete. Only at the end, when Eckbert is dying after having met the old woman Bertha lived with, does this mysterious figure tell him that Bertha was his sister, and their relationship illegal. She also explains to him that to be able to observe them she used the appearances of Walter and another friend of Eckbert’s. Eckbert meets his end finally realizing what disturbed him all the time when he lived with Bertha. So the psychological dimension of the fairy-tale includes both individual memory and unconscious fear. There is no pragmatic lesson for either the reader or the figures in this tale. The figures die in complete confusion. No allegorical reading allows us to resolve the situation. The marvelous is only seemingly explained by the old woman. For example, there is no answer given to the question why Eckbert always had the idea in his mind that Bertha could be his sister. The tale does not end with a complete solution of the mysteries, but with more questions and mysteries than before. 2.

»Alles wahre Wunderbare ist für sich poetisch« (Jean Paul 1963, 44).

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Two conclusions can be drawn from these examples. Firstly, the Romantic marvelous and the Romantic fairy-tale are different from the Enlightened ones. The distinctions are primarily made by the new psychological dimension of the figures and the tales. The argumentation that man himself is the real marvelous is not only consistent and evident, but also an expression of a new understanding. Secondly, the changes in the system can still be summarized under the concepts of the marvelous and the fairy-tale. Even a tale like Der blonde Eckbert is subtitled »fairy-tale« by Tieck. This enlargement and transformation of the system can be explained by the model of »naturalization«, proposed by Jonathan Culler. According to Culler, a literary system or genre always has to treat and process new, unknown, and foreign moments, which have to be integrated and positioned in the new context. In the process of naturalization the former unknown is assimilated, evaluated, and finally integrated or expelled. The last point is the most important for the difference between the Romantic fairy-tale and the fantastic tale. While for the Romantic authors the new models of the marvelous are still marvelous, the fantastic has to be something different that cannot be integrated in the existent system anymore. The new focus on the psyche of man as the marvelous or the end of the pragmatic fairy-tale does not abolish the system of the marvelous. Another example of this naturalization of the fairy-tale might be Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s »Märchen« (Fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily) at the end of his collection Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Refugees, 1795). Here we have an extraordinary kind of over-allegorization of the fairy-tale. This leads to the situation in which, on the one hand, no pragmatism of action exists for the figures anymore and, on the other hand, the reader has significant difficulties with recognizing who or what the figures symbolize. Or, to say it with the words of the old man in the »Märchen«: Everyone should remember all and nothing at the same time. Thus, neither can a moral be found in the tale, nor is a reasonable allegorical reading possible. Goethe himself doubled this complexity after publication when he was asked for the solution or was given others’ interpretations. Goethe did not answer at all, but circulated the interpretations given to him. Nevertheless Goethe’s »Märchen« figures as the ideal of the fairy-tale for Romantics like Novalis, Hoffmann, and others. Another important change in the fairy-tale is the introduction of a new literary space into the fairy-tale. As we have seen already, the fairy-tale had strict limits in the Enlightenment poetics. The marvelous could only occur in a well defined space, which was clearly and commonly regarded as the space of the fairy-tale. For example, the Orient, with its wonders and miracles, was such a space. Deep forests and wilderness were also typical settings. That excluded places of daily life such as towns or well-known regions. In contrast, in Romanticism, the integration of formerly excluded spaces took place. In the Romantic fairy-tale, towns were no longer forbidden places, but naturalized in the system of the marvelous. Simultaneously, this naturalization opened up new opportunities. Tieck’s Liebeszauber (The Love-Charm, 1812) deals with a love story between a young man and a woman in a small town which is permeated by hermetic magic and phantasmagoric events. But the best known example for this is probably E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale Der goldne Topf (The Golden Pot, 1814), in which the young student Anselmus meets the archivist Lindhorst and falls in love with his daughter Serpentina. In this »fairy-tale of the new time« — as Hoffmann subtitled the tale — most of the confusions and misreadings of the protagonist result from Anselmus’s inability to differentiate between reality

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and the imaginary. For him they are not divided anymore, but mixed together. The imaginary life becomes more real to him than his normal life. The restoration of the marvelous in daily life, especially in towns, opens up new opportunities, but also sets new limits for the marvelous. Two examples might help to explain this thesis. At the beginning of Hoffmann’s tale »Das öde Haus« (The Deserted House, 1816), three friends sit together in conversation about the marvelous. They all agree that nowadays real life is more marvelous than the marvelous itself. As a reaction, one of them starts to narrate a story to illustrate the statement. The story is about strange events which happened to him in the middle of Berlin. So the conditions of modern civilization in huge cities are the basis of a new marvelous, where the marvelous is seen in man himself. But the marvelous also has limits. In the tale »Die Brautwahl« (Bride Selection, 1818), the officer Tusman meets a ghost in Berlin in the middle of the night. Afterwards, he reports to one of his friends what has happened to him. His friend reacts in a disbelieving and disapproving way. He fundamentally denies such a possibility; in the Enlightened Berlin nothing like this could happen. In Vorschule der Ästhetik, Jean Paul points out on a theoretical level that he prefers individual superstition to an apparition. In his Brautwahl, E.T.A. Hoffmann illustrates in a fairy-tale what happens when such an appearance emerges in an Enlightened space. He demonstrates that apparitions are regarded as tasteless and incredible in such surroundings. To summarize, it can be said that if man himself is the origin of the marvelous, events which happen to him cannot be described as »wunderbar« (marvelous) anymore but have to be named »wunderlich« (strange). The figures of Hoffmann’s »Das öde Haus« think the same way. You ought to know from Eberhard’s concept of synonyms that all expressions of knowledge and desire which cannot be justified by any sensible reason are called strange, but that marvelous means that which one considers to be impossible or incomprehensible, and which seems to exceed the known forces of nature, or as I add, which seems to be against its normal course.3

But what happens when marvelous events occur to a man in daily life? The answer might be: There must be something beyond the marvelous, perhaps something fantastic. To understand the Romantic fairy-tale it is useful to look at the revival of folk-tales in Romanticism. As shown in the section about the fairy-tale in Pre-Romanticism, the most important collection of folk-tales in the Enlightenment is Musäus’s Volkmährchen der Deutschen. In this collection, anecdotes, fairy-tales, legends and the like are united to form and to give evidence of the national character. But things definitely changed after Musäus. When Tieck published his collection Volksmährchen (Folk-tales, 1797) under the name of Peter Lebrecht, the relation to Musäus seemed to be close but was only superficial. In this collection one can find fairy-tales like Der blonde Eckbert as well as dramas like Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss in Boots). Both are forms of Romantic transgression of the Enlightened marvelous. So folk-tales became just a name for fairy-tales or literature in general, in accordance with the tradition of Johann 3.

»Aus Eberhards Synonymik musst du wissen, dass wunderlich alle Äußerungen der Erkenntnis und des Begehrens genannt werden, die sich durch keinen vernünftigen Grund rechtfertigen lassen, wunderbar aber dasjenige heißt, was man für unmöglich, unbegreiflich hält, was die bekannten Kräfte der Natur zu übersteigen, oder wie ich hinzufüge, ihrem gewöhnlichen Gange entgegen zu sein scheint« (Hoffmann 1996, 460).

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Gottfried Herder’s ideas of national literature and character. Also, Clemens Brentano’s Italienische Märchen (Italian Fairy-tales, 1805–11) and Rheinmärchen (Rhine Fairy-tales, 1846), can be regarded as part of this movement. Characteristics of this kind of folk-tale are a free use of old traditions and subjects without paying attention to philological correctness. Against this practice, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm started their project of a collection of authentic folk-tales to attack the misuse of the folk-tale. They regarded the collections of fairy-tales by Tieck and Brentano and even more the anthology of poems Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn, 1805/8) by Arnim and Brentano as artificial works, which disregard the folk-tales and modernize them in order to restore and preserve them. The Grimms’s collection of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) was first published in 1812 (86 folk-tales) and then published again in 1815 (72 folk-tales). The Grimm brothers maintained that the real tradition in an authentic version could be found in this collection. It was their attempt to collect and transfer the original versions for the first time from the oral tradition into a written form without any major changes. But that was more a resolution than a real practice. Some of the fairy-tales that appeared in the first version were excluded in the second one because of their explicit sexual content. The Grimm brothers also modified and transformed tales according to their own ideas. The first time this was recognized was in the twentieth century, when critics had a closer look at the Grimms’s methods and procedures. Up until then everybody appreciated their effort to uphold the authentic tradition of folk-tales. When looking at the Romantic fairy-tale one might assume them to be a purely German problem and tradition. One might also argue that there is a certain blindness in an author ignoring or disregarding the real situation around 1800 and later on. But it is a matter of fact that the fairy-tale has a higher rate of production and is of greater influence in Germany than in other countries. For example, William Beckford’s novel Vathek (1786) illustrates the different situation with respect to the fantastic in other European countries very well. Written originally in French but first published in English, it is a work sui generis. The gigantic and diabolic Orient of the phantasmagoric story stands outside of traditional fairy-tales and produces a pandemonic scenery beyond all boundaries. Also Vathek is not a tale anymore but a novel. The reasons for this divergence cannot be discussed or even summarized here. But two other interesting facts should be mentioned. On the one hand the fairy-tale plays an important role in German literature, not only at the time of Romanticism. In its wake, fairy-tales were still common and successful in Germany, like the tales by Theodor Storm and others. But on the other hand, the fantastic tale is a literary genre that exists in all other European countries and in North America, but not in Germany, even if the origin of the fantastic tale can be seen in some of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tales. 3.

The fantastic tale in Romanticism

What is the fantastic? How can it be defined? What are its limits? Where does it come from? Does it have an origin of its own? When does it end in literary history? Critics have been trying to answer questions like these for a long time. But instead of a common theory with slight modifications, there are many different theories which try to answer these questions in their

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own way. There are also national differences in the critical literature on the fantastic. So we have — among others — a French, a German, an American, and also a Polish discussion on the fantastic without any real exchange between them. It is outside the scope of this chapter to summarize the different theories and their arguments. Moreover, one has to take care in this discussion to avoid repeating the arguments of the Romantic authors while losing sight of the historical background. To avoid these problems and to focus on my main theme, I propose another approach to the fantastic. First of all I want to follow Tzvetan Todorov’s central definition of the fantastic because this is the most accepted and influential definition, even for his critics. I then want to take a closer look at the historical origin of the fantastic. The doubts of many critics notwithstanding, one can find the plausible origin of the fantastic tale in the French literary discussion of the 1820s. Looking at this discussion makes it easier to define the potential of transgression which passes the limits of naturalization of the fairy-tale. After this the different evolutions of the fantastic in the national contexts will be presented in an overview. In his Introduction à la litterature fantastique, Tzvetan Todorov gives a summary of older theories of the fantastic from a structuralist perspective. His intention is not to invent a completely new theory, but to emulate older ones and to focus on the main point of the fantastic. For Todorov, the essential feature of the fantastic is »hesitation«. That means a situation or moment in which the protagonist is confronted with an extraordinary event he cannot explain and resolve. The fantastic, then, is an act of perception of a strange event. Such an event might be the casual encounter of the protagonist with a ghost or the devil in the middle of the day in a city crowd. But only the central figure perceives the being in front of him. Two explanations might be logically possible, but are not really suitable for resolving the problem. Firstly, the being he meets exists in reality, but that would mean that our knowledge is incomplete, and that our comprehension of nature is defective, because normally we deny the existence of such beings. Or secondly, the being does not exist; but what has he seen? He knows that he has met something, but this being cannot be real. Again, two solutions are possible, but both resolve the hesitation and so simultaneously lift the fantastic. The first is an allegorical reading. In a tale marvelous events might happen; they are symbols for the will and power of God or the fancy of the author. The second is a psychological reading. The protagonist has been influenced by hallucinogens or has dreamed and was not fully conscious. The fantastic only exists when the protagonist is sure that he has been completely aware of what has happened and when he does not believe in marvelous events or beings. Then he is in a situation of hesitation, which defines the fantastic. This hesitation might only appear once in the literary text, or it might end or structure the whole text. As we have seen above, the necessary psychological dimension of a literary figure is an invention, or in Foucauldian terms, an epistemological datum of the episteme of man. The fantastic event rises from the psychological explanation of the marvelous as a sign or production of superstitious belief, or as a strange event caused by psychological dysfunctions and individual temporary unconsciousness. One example might explain this assumption. In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s capriccio Prinzessin Brambilla (Princess Brambilla, 1820), strange things happen to the actor Giglio Fava. He meets himself in a different mask in the middle of the carnival in Rome. He falls in love with Princess Brambilla and is attacked for this by his rival and opposite, Prince Chiapperi. People believe that Fava is someone else, that Chiapperi is Fava, and so on. Everything is confusing for the

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figures as well as for the readers. At the end of the story, when everything is over, nothing is clear to Fava and his wife. They do not understand what really happened and the allegorical explanation of Celionati, their friend and master, does not resolve anything at all. Also the indication of the editor given to the reader in the capriccio’s preface that it is a play in the sense of Carlo Gozzi does not help at all. So what really happened? Or rather, what is the story about? Heinrich Heine might help us here with his statement about the capriccio in his Briefe aus Berlin (Letters from Berlin, 1822). Often quoted, but rarely explained, Heine says that the capriccio makes the real reader dizzy: »But Princess Brambilla is a delightful beauty, and he whose head she, because of her strangeness, does not make dizzy, has no head at all«.4 What does this mean? Vertigo as an anthropological fact or medical disease has been known for a long time. But not until the end of the eighteenth century did a great interest in the functions of vertigo emerge. In this context, vertigo was regarded as a dysfunction of the human psyche, and antidotes were sought against it. Thus, vertigo has negative connotations of incomplete awareness. But Heine, and Baudelaire after him, see vertigo as a positive category in an aesthetic context. Hoffmann also maintains the positive value of vertigo as an aesthetic category both in his preface of the capriccio and in the main text, which leads the protagonists into situations of hesitation. In Hoffmann’s text, the fantastic rises under the name of vertigo before becoming a valuable category of modern aesthetics. Heine is, like Baudelaire, not a critic of the fantastic, but nevertheless they both indicate a change in consciousness and in the definition of aesthetics. Vertigo, as well as madness and dreams, are sometimes linked to the fantastic, but they are not essential to it. This shows us that contemporaries had already realized that something new had arisen which could not be summarized anymore under the term of the marvelous. Two main points have to be distinguished to avoid confusion. First, the term fantastic is not used explicitly by E.T.A. Hoffmann, but some of Hoffmann’s works are regarded as the origin of the fantastic. The fantastic can be understood as a literary project of Hoffmann’s to transgress the traditional boundaries of the marvelous and the fairy-tale. His assertion that he will not write another Goldner Topf5 is realized in his tales, starting with Klein Zaches (Little Zaches, 1819), the capriccio, and ending with tales like Meister Floh (Master Flea, 1822). It is easy to follow his intentions by reading his prefaces and reflections on the tales. There he underlines that the term »fairy-tale«, which he uses as a generic term for his tales, does not fit very well and does not explain his real ambition. Moreover, Hoffmann requests that readers might be so friendly as not to be confused upon finding something other than what they might be looking for. But he does not say anything about the fantastic. The fantastic itself is a French term and invention. Its relation to Hoffmann is close because the term appears in an important false translation from Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner) into Contes fantastique à la manière de Callot (Fantastic Tales in Callot’s Manner). This title suddenly became a distinctive term to characterize the new literary model originated by Hoffmann and to maintain the thrust of the original French 4.

»Aber Prinzessin Brambilla ist eine gar köstliche Schöne, und wem diese durch ihre Wunderlichkeit nicht den Kopf schwindelig macht, der hat gar keinen Kopf« (Heine 1981, 66).

5. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Ich schreibe keinen goldenen Topf mehr!«; E.T.A. Hoffmann in a letter to Hippel, August 30, 1816 (Hoffmann 1967–69, vol. 2, 100).

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context. Hence Hoffmann became a French author but in turn had — as Nodier pointed out — a French predecessor, Cazotte, so that the fantastic tale is typically French, and an original way of writing that can stand alongside the model of historical novels by Walter Scott. When looking at the categories which were used to define the fantastic, one sees extensive confusion. Yet it is clear that with the so-called »contes fantastiques« something new and different had begun. In this earlier debate, we very often come across arguments still found in the critics of the fantastic to this day. Thus, fantastic has to be understood in two ways. It is a transgression of the marvelous, which first happened in the process of shifting to the episteme of man. The fantastic tale is like the fairy-tale, a genre with its own system of naturalization. On the one hand, the marvelous creates a border and involves an allegorical interpretation of the fantastic which marks the end of the fantastic. On the other hand, the fantastic is a transgression of the marvelous, which replaces an apparition of ghosts by superstition. As a genre with a system of naturalization, the fantastic is transferred into different national contexts, with the result that artists invent new literary forms and spaces. The fantastic was used in the feuilleton section of French journals of the 1820s and 1830s as a counterweight to the hegemonic form of the historical novel. But for authors like Nodier it was necessary to define French writers’ own literary production in opposition to Hoffmann’s model. Thus, the fantastic was transferred from one country with its particular cultural context into another. The reference to Hoffmann was used as a legitimization and a sign of difference to add character to one’s own production. This combination of transfer and naturalization does not apply exclusively to the reception of Hoffmann in France, but can be regarded as the dominant model of transformation and modification of the fantastic in the nineteenth century throughout Europe and America. A short overview shall illustrate this. In France, the most famous names of fantastic literature are, in chronological order, Charles Nodier, Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, Prosper Mérimée, Guy de Maupassant, and Auguste Villiers de l’Isle Adam. The last two authors cannot be comfortably included under Romanticism. Yet there are some characteristics that all of them have in common: the search for and the consciousness of indescribable and unexplainable facts and events which lead their protagonists and narrators. Charles Nodier’s preface to Trilby and his essay »���������������������� Du fantastique en littérature« (About the Fantastic in Literature, 1830) are reflections on the problems of myths and mythology in a secularized world. In modern times there is no belief in them anymore, even though they are the origin of all literature. Hence, one has to go to remote regions like Scotland or Norway to find people who still believe in the old myths and places where marvelous tales could take place. Another opportunity is the re-discovery of classical places and regions, like ancient or oriental ones where Europeans experience strange things. In Théophile Gautier’s tale Arria Marcella (1852), a group of three friends visit the ruins of Pompeii where one of them has a fantastic rendezvous in the middle of »daily night«. In the morning the friends arrive at the railway station of Pompeii. The combination of a modern railway station and the ancient location of Pompeii sounds strange to their ears. Afterwards they take a guided tour through the ruins of the ancient town. During the night one of them cannot sleep and takes a walk to the ruins again. To his surprise the old Pompeii is resurrected, and the further action takes place just a few hours before the eruption of the Vesuvius. He meets a young Roman who is amused by the strong accent of his Latin, his strange clothes, and so on. The sun is shining in the middle of the night

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when Octavien — that is the name of the young Frenchman — recognizes a beautiful woman called Arria Marcella. In another tale of Gautier’s, La Morte amoureuse (Amorous Death, 1836), a pious vicar lives a double life. He is a young gallant and voluptuous man in Venice and a young vicar in a small village in France at the same time. The reference to ancient, rural, and mysterious or interesting places is sometimes more sublimated by or substituted through symbols and objects. For example, Prosper Merimée’s La Venus d’Ille (The Venus from Ille, 1837) starts with the archaeological find of an antique statue of Venus. It goes on with the search for the name and the power of the statue by regarding her incomplete inscriptions. Each of the two archaeologists advocates his own thesis. But the one who finds out the real dimension of the power by accident is the son of the archaeologist of Ille. Absentmindedly he gives the statue his wedding ring. The statue takes this action seriously and comes to her husband in the middle of the wedding night. He dies in her arms while his real wife lies paralyzed beside them. The next morning the statue leaves her dead husband and goes back to her place. Another example is Balzac’s La peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin, 1831). The protagonist, Raphaël de Valentin, finds an amulet in an antique shop, which gives him immense power. But as the amulet becomes smaller with each wish it grants, the owner is also disappearing slowly. It is not only a certain common reference which unites these fantastic tales, but also the structure of contrafactions. As some critics have shown, French fantastic tales are often modernized contrafactions of miracle-tales or legends. The plots of the stories often have these mythologies — as Nodier called them — as a background. The difference from these older tales is that in modern times the ghost is often replaced by superstition or dreams. But this replacement is not complete, and at this moment the hesitation of the protagonist arises. For example, in Gautier’s La Morte amoureuse the priest tells another clergyman the story of his love. You ask me, brother, if I have loved; yes. This is a singular and terrible story and although I am sixty-six years old, I hardly dare touch the ashes of this memory. I do not want to refuse you anything but I would not impart a story like this to a less tried mind. These are such strange events that I still cannot believe they happened to me. I have been for more than three years the toy of singular and diabolic illusion. I, a poor country parson, lead the life of a condemned soul, the life of a man of the world and of Sardanapal in my dreams every night (God grant that they be dreams!).6

The rhetoric of the priest is self-evident. At the beginning of his confession he uses a captatio benevolentiae for the extraordinary and incredible history he is about to narrate. And it is still truly incredible for him. Thus, he names the events singular, terrible, and strange. He describes the situation as a singular and diabolic illusion and regards his adventures as dreams. The priest also expresses his hope that they have only been dreams and not reality. Even after a long time 6. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Vous me demandez, frère, si j’ai aimé; oui. C’est une histoire singulière et terrible, et, quoique j’aie soixante-six ans, j’ose à peine remuer la cendre de ce souvenir. Je ne veux rien vous refuser, mais je ne ferias pas à une âme moins éprouvée un pareil récit. Ce sont des événements si étranges, que je ne puis croire qu’ils me soient arrivés. J’ai été pendant plus de trois ans le jouet d’une illusion singulière et diabolique. Moi, pauvre prêtre de campagne, j’ai mené en rêve toutes les nuits (Dieu veuille que se soit un rêve!) une vie de damné, une vie de mondain et de Sardanapale« (Gautier 1981, 117).

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he hesitates to define the status of the events. Another interesting point is the end of the seductive dead woman. The mentor of the young priest, the Abbé Serapion, explains to him that this woman is a vampire and he demands that the young priest should destroy her. For this he undertakes an exorcism. This is only one example, but it can be seen as a paradigm for the structure of the French fantastic tale. Another paradigm of the fantastic tale is the dream. For the young priest in Gautier’s tale, the dream conveys a sense of hope and an explanation of what has happened. But nevertheless it is just wishful thinking. Other authors like Nodier, Nerval, and finally Maupassant use the dream and its hallucinatory potential to establish an imaginary scenery for their protagonists. Nodier’s Smarra (1821) and Nerval’s Aurélia (1855) are examples of such imaginary projections of the protagonists. Their dreams make it impossible to distinguish clearly between dream and reality because no such difference exists for them anymore. In their subjective recitations, the borders of perception are totally transgressed and it is impossible to differentiate between dream, imagination and memory. The dream is for the authors the inner poet of man, and his stories open up new spaces of literature and interest. But the dreams also might be dangerous for the protagonists. Nodier’s dreamer in Smarra wakes up after his dream because of concern for his fiancée. All’s well that ends well. But for the dreamer in Nerval’s Aurélia there is no real end. It is not clear at all if his permanent dream is a sign of madness or not. Maupassant also uses the relationship between dream and madness and their potentials for his hallucinatory tales. The last point is the proximity of the fantastic tale to science fiction and utopian tales at the end of the nineteenth century. Villiers de l’Isle Adam would be an example for this. His L’Eve future (Tomorrow’s Eve, 1886) illustrates the relationship between modern technology, superstition, and imaginary projects very well. Discussing these issues would lead us too far astray, however. (Readers should consult the chapter »Artificial life and Romantic brides« in this volume). As well as in France, the fantastic tale was also very influential in Russia and the United States. For Russia it is Nikolai Gogol, for the United States Edgar Allan Poe who should be mentioned. In England it is difficult to find an author of truly fantastic tales in Romanticism. There are some authors who are influenced by the fantastic tale or simply stimulated by it. For example, Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is not a fantastic tale in a narrower sense because there is no hesitation, but it certainly qualifies as a strange and perhaps Gothic tale. In Romanticism, »pure« forms of the fantastic can thus only be found in Gogol’s tales, and later in Poe’s. Two major tales by Gogol are important for the fantastic: »Nos« (The Nose, 1835/36), and »Shinel’« (The Overcoat, 1842). Both of them are so called St. Petersburg tales, named after their place of action. The tale »Nos« more evidently belongs to the fantastic genre than »Shinel’«. One morning the barber Ivan Iakovlevich finds a nose in his breakfast bread. Astonished, he remembers that this nose must belong to one of his clients, the assessor Kovalev. After his first surprise he tries to get rid of the nose, but is arrested by the police just at the moment he lets it disappear. The same morning the young assessor Kovalev looks in the mirror to see if he is still attractive and recognizes that he has lost his nose. Terrified by this he starts searching for his nose. From this moment, a confusing and chaotic quest for the nose begins. Kovalev meets his nose first in a shop and later in a church, where he tries to persuade the nose to accept him as its owner. But the nose is more sophisticated than he expected and insists on its higher rank at the level of a major. It denies any knowledge

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of Kovalev and refuses any further contact. So Kovalev reflects on how to regain his nose. He thinks of a notice in a newspaper, or a report with the police, but to no avail. He is totally desperate until a policeman brings back his nose. The solution is simple. It is the same policeman who arrested the barber in the beginning and remembered the nose well. Luckily the policeman is able to hold back the nose at the very moment the nose is on its way out of St. Petersburg by coach. After this arrest the nose at first still refuses to take its position on the face, but goes back in the end. Especially the sensational fact of a nose which acts independently brings the whole story close to the fantastic tale. But there is merely surprise about this fact, and no real hesitation to decide between different possible explanations. On the contrary, the finding of the nose by Ivan Iakovlevich is surprising, but not fantastic to him and his wife. He has drunk too much and so has injured the assessor. Also for Kovalev there is no need for an explanation of the fact. Even if he is terrified about it, he is not confused. The only problem that occurs to him is his lost chances for a good marriage without a nose. The question how all this could happen is simply not addressed. Finally, there is no indication that the reader should see a situation of hesitation in all this because everything is regarded as normal in this tale. It is comic, but not fantastic. In the tale »The Overcoat« the fantastic might also be considered as a background for the tale, but not central to it. Only at the end of the tale, when the ghost of the protagonist returns to threaten the »important person« who did not help him to regain his coat, a moment of the fantastic could appear. But it does not happen. The »important person« is anxious and terrified, but not confused. Because he believes in ghosts the rendezvous is a sign of warning for him, rather than confusing. So the fantastic in a narrower sense cannot be used to describe these tales. They are marvelous or fantastic in a wider sense. The case of Edgar Allan Poe is similar to Gogol’s. His collections of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) and Tales (1845), are related to fantastic tales, but are not mere fantastic tales. For example, a story like »The Masque of the Red Death« (1842) has no moment of hesitation, but is purely allegorical of the threat of death. Tales like The Gold Bug (1843) seem to be closer to the fantastic. At the beginning of the story, madness might be around William Legrand, but after a while everything is cleared up. Instead of madness, cold logic leads the action, and explains all misunderstandings. Perhaps Poe’s most famous story, »The Fall of the House of Usher« (1839), is closest to the fantastic. But in the detailed descriptions of the traveler one cannot find any signs of hesitation, but only of terror and anxiety. Hence the end is logical: He flees from the house and leaves everything there without any need for explanation. One could say that in Poe’s tales a moment of surprise and astonishment is produced as in the fantastic tale, but he leaves these moments in different ways. One is the explicative way, which opens up the detective story (cf. the chapter »The Detective Story and Novel« in this volume). Here every mysterious fact is resolved by an analytical brain which has the capacity to see more deeply than others and to connect facts in the right order to resolve logical problems. Poe’s famous figure M.C. Auguste Dupin, arguably the first detective in literary history, is the personification of such a strategy. The second way is the grotesque. Here Poe follows the Gothic tradition and combines sublime terror with psychological knowledge. The only possible explication available is an allegorical reading of the tales. For the fear experienced by Poe’s figures mostly ends in a movement of escape, if not in death.

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Finally, what constitutes the end of the Romantic fantastic tale? Is the fantastic tale just a specifically French contribution to Romanticism, as the Romantic fairy-tale seems to be a specifically German product? Questions like these demand answers that amount to canonization, double canonization even. The inclusion of tales in a literary genre establishes or underlines the aesthetic value of tales officially. The acceptance of a genre itself often depends upon its importance for the particular national literature. For example, the term »fantastic« is often used in German discussions about the marvelous as a synonym. Since there are apparently no truly fantastic tales in German literature, there is no real need for a clearly defined use of the term. Discussions in Anglo-Saxon countries about the fantastic might bring the same results in the end. The fantastic as a French literary invention, a special way of writing, could be an answer, but disregards too many historical facts and levels out the differences. Perhaps the authors of fantastic literature might help us toward a better definition. In a story called Die Reisebegegnung (The Travel Meeting, 1973) by Anna Seghers, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Nikolai Gogol meet a young poet — Franz Kafka — in a Café in Prague. They start a discussion on literature in general and their own work in particular. Gogol and Kafka are full of admiration for Hoffmann’s tales because he has opened up new dimensions of literature to them. Themes like madness, incomprehensible facts, and dreams have their legitimization because of his works. Gogol and Kafka are also aware of the potential in his literary productions which transgress the given limits disliked by them. Hoffmann tries to explain his writings and why he transgressed the marvelous but he cannot persuade them. They still regard his productions as full of oversized fantasy and heatedly argue for a fanciful, but not unlimited use of imagination. Perhaps this discussion illustrates the problems of the fantastic. First of all, a certain acceptance of fanciful imagination is necessary even if it takes the figures to a point of no logical return. The question why the fantastic tale was so influential and characterized by such immense output especially in France is hard to answer. Maybe there are no answers if one wants to avoid a simplistic assembling of stereotypes. Second, the fantastic is by no means a meaningless way of writing. Too much of imagination is not literature — as Jean Paul already pointed out — but chaotic writing. Furthermore, the claimed end of the fantastic around or after 1900 has nothing to do with Romanticism but with the peculiar epistemological constellations of modernism. But this would be another chapter. Bibliography Apel, Friedmar. 1981. »Von der Nachahmung zur Imagination — Wandlungen der Poetik und der Literaturkritik«. Propyläen Geschichte der Literatur. Vol. 4: Aufklärung und Romantik 1700–1830. Ed. by Erika Wischer. 74–100. Bargues-Rollins, Yvonne. 1985. »Une ›danse macabre‹, du fantastique au grotesque dans La peau de chagrin«. Romantisme. 48: 33–46. Bauer, Roger. 1988. »›The Fairy Way of Writing‹: Von Shakespeare zu Wieland und Tieck«. Das Shakespeare-Bild in Europa zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik. Ed. by Roger Bauer. Bern: Lang. 143–161. Berger, Willy R. 1978. »Drei phantastische Erzählungen: Chamissos Peter Schlemihl, E.T.A. Hoffmanns Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht und Gogols Die Nase«. Arcadia. 53: 106–138.

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Bergström, Stefan. 2000. Between Real and Unreal: A Thematic Study of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s »Die Serapionsbrüder«. New York: Lang. Bock, Ivo. 1982. Die Analyse der Handlungsstrukturen von Erzählungen am Beispiel von Nikolaj V. Gogol. München: Sagner. Campe, Rüdiger. 1990. Affekt und Ausdruck: Zur Umwandlung der literarischen Rede im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Castex, Pierre-Georges. 1962. Le Conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant. Paris: Corti. Cazotte, Jacques. 1981. Le diable amoureux. Preface, notices, and notes by Georges Décote. Paris: Gallimard. Chase, Cynthia. 1986. Decomposing Figures. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge. De Man, Paul. 1984. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP. Ėjchenbaum, Boris M. 1969. »Wie Gogols Mantel gemacht ist«. Texte der russischen Formalisten. Ed. by Jurij Striedter. München: Fink. Vol. 1: 122–159. Emery, Ted. 1997. »The Reactionary Imagination: Ideology and the Form of the Fairy-tale in Gozzi’s Il re cervo«. The Origins of the Literary Fairy-tale in Italy and France. Ed. by Nancy L. Canepa. Detroit: Wayne State UP. 247–277. Erhart, Walter. 1991. Entzweiung und Selbstaufklärung: Christoph Martin Wielands »Agathon«-Projekt. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Espagne, Michel, and Werner, Michael. 1988. »Deutsch-französischer Kulturtransfer als Forschungsgegenstand: Eine Problemskizze«. Transferts: Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIIIe et XIXe siècle). Ed. by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner. Paris: Edition Recherche sur les Civilisations. 11–34. Finné, Jacques. 1980. La Littérature fantastique. Bruxelles: Université de Bruxelles. Gautier, Théophile. 1981. Récits fantastiques. Ed. by Marc Eigeldinger. Paris: Flammarion. Hagner, Michael. 2000. Psychophysiologie und Selbsterfahrung: Metamorphosen des Schwindels und der Aufmerksamkeit im 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Heine, Heinrich. 1981. »Briefe aus Berlin«. Sämtliche Schriften. Ed. by Klaus Briegleb. Vol. 3: Schriften 1822–31. Ed. by Günter Häntzschel. Frankfurt/M.: Ullstein. Heinemann, Elke. 2000. Babylonische Spiele: William Beckford und das Erwachen der modernen Imagination. München: Fink. Hillmann, Heinz. 1969. »Wunderbares in der Dichtung der Aufklärung: Untersuchungen zum französischen und deutschen Feenmärchen«. Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte. 43: 76–113. Hoffmann, E.T.A. 1967–69. Briefwechsel. 2 vols. Coll. and annot. by Friedrich Schnapp. München: Winckler. ———. 1996. »Das öde Haus«. Fantasie- und Nachtstücke. With an epilogue by Gerhard Neumann. Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler. Horch, Hans Otto, and Schulz, Georg Michael (eds.). 1988. Das Wunderbare in der Poetik der Frühaufklärung: Gottsched und die Schweizer. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Kaiser, Gerhard R. 1984. »›Ce fameux ministre Cinabre dont la vivante copie est à côté de nous‹: E.T.A. Hoffmann — histoire et discours fantastique«. Récit et Histoire. Ed. by Jean Bessière. Paris: PUF. 229–242. Kittler, Friedrich A. 1985. Aufschreibesysteme 1800–1900. München: Fink. Klotz, Volker. 1985. Das europäische Kunstmärchen. Stuttgart: Metzler. Kubiska, Malgorzata. 1996. Märchen und Meta-Märchen: Zur Poetik der »Volksmärchen der Deutschen« von Johann Karl August Musäus. Fernwald: Litblockin. Liebrand, Claudia. 1996. Aporien des Kunstmythos: Die Texte E.T.A. Hoffmanns. Freiburg.: Rombach. Lim, Jeong-Taeg. 1988. Don Sylvio und Anselmus: Untersuchungen zur Gestaltung des Wunderbaren bei C.M. Wieland und E.T.A. Hoffmann. Frankfurt: Lang. Matzat, Wolfgang. 1989. Diskursgeschichte der Leidenschaft: Zur Affektmodulierung im französischen Roman von Rousseau bis Balzac. Tübingen: Narr.

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Mayer, Andreas. 2001. From Introspective Hypnotism to Freud’s Self-Analysis. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Miller, Norbert. 1980. »Ansichten vom Wunderbaren: Über deutsche und europäische Romantik«. Kleist-Jahrbuch. 107–148. Milner, Max. 1960. Le Diable dans la littérature française, de Cazotte à Baudelaire (1772–1861). Paris: Corti. Musäus, Johann Karl August. 1977. Volksmährchen der Deutschen. With an epilogue by Norbert Miller. München: dtv. Neumann, Gerhard. 1985. »Die Anfänge deutscher Novellistik: Schillers Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre — Goethes Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten«. »Unser Commercium«: Goethes und Schillers Literaturpolitik. Ed. by Wilfried Barner et al. Stuttgart: Cotta. 433–460. Nodier, Charles. 1982. La Fée aux Miettes; Smarra; Trilby. Preface by Petrick Berthier. Paris: Gallimard. Nolting-Hauff, Ilse. 1991. »Die fantastische Erzählung als Transformation religiöser Erzählgattungen (am Beispiel von Théophile Gautier, La morte amoureuse)«. Romantik: Aufbruch zur Moderne. Ed. by Karl Maurer and Winfried Wehle. München: Fink. 73–100. Oesterle, Günter. 1991. »Arabeske, Schrift und Poesie in E.T.A. Hoffmanns Kunstmärchen Der goldne Topf«. Athenäum: Jahrbuch für Romantik. 1: 69–107. ———. 1994. »Der Streit um das Wunderbare und Phantastische in der Romantik«. Phantastische Welten: Märchen, Mythen, Fantasy. Ed. by Thomas Le Blanc and Wilhelm Solms. Regensburg: Röth. 115–130. Paul, Jean. 1963. Vorschule der Ästhetik. Sämtliche Werke, I.5. Ed. by Norbert Miller. München: Hanser. Perroud, Robert. 1983. »La Défense et l’utilisation des ›masques‹ de la commedia dell’arte dans l’œuvre de Carlo Gozzi«. Das Ende des Stegreifspiels — Die Geburt des Nationaltheaters: Ein Wendepunkt in der Geschichte des europäischen Dramas. Ed. by Roger Bauer and Jürgen Wertheimer. München: Fink. 9–16. Pikulik, Lothar. 1969. »Anselmus in der Flasche: Kontrast und Illusion in E.T.A. Hoffmanns Der goldne Topf«. Euphorion. 63: 341–370. ———. 1975. »Das Wunderliche bei E.T.A. Hoffmann«. Euphorion. 69: 294–319. Preisendanz, Wolfgang. 1964. »Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nachahmungsprinzip in Deutschland und die besondere Rolle der Romane Wielands«. Nachahmung und Illusion. Ed. by Hans Robert Jauss. München: Fink. 72–95. ———. 1985. »Dialog zwischen Naïveté und Esprit du monde: Zu den Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé von Charles Perrault«. Französische Klassik: Theorie, Literatur, Malerei. Ed. by Fritz Nies and Karlheinz Stierle. München: Fink. 395–414. Rieger, Dietmar. 1969. Jacques Cazotte: Ein Beitrag zur erzählenden Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts. Heidelberg: Winter. Robert, Raymonde. 1982. Le Conte de fées littéraire en France de la fin du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Nancy: Presse Université de Nancy. Röllecke, Heinz. 1975. »������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ Die ›stockhessischen‹ Märchen der ›Alten Marie‹: Das Ende eines Mythos um die frühesten Aufzeichnungen der Brüder Grimm«. Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift. N.F. 25: 74–86. ———. 1985. »Wo das Wünschen noch geholfen hat«: Gesammelte Aufsätze zu den »Kinder- und Hausmärchen« der Brüder Grimm. Bonn: Bouvier. Ruddick, Nicholas. 1985. »The Hoax of the Red Death: Poe as Allegorist«. The Sphinx. 16.4: 268–276. Rusack, Hedwig H. 1966. Gozzi in Germany: A Survey of the Rise and Decline of the Gozzi Vogue in Germany and Austria, With Special Reference to the German Romanticists. New York: Ams Press. Seghers, Anna. 1973. »Die Reisebegegnung«. Sonderbare Begegnungen: Erzählungen. Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau. 113–152. Shaffer, Simon. 1992. »Self Evidence«. Critical Inquiry. 18.2: 327–362. Shell, Marc. 1982. »The Gold Bug«. Genre. 13: 11–30. Stahl, Karl-Heinz. 1975. Das Wunderbare als Problem und Gegenstand der deutschen Poetik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt/M.: Athenaion. Starobinski, Jean. 1966. »Ironie et mélancolie: (I) Le Théâtre de Carlo Gozzi, (II) La Princesse Brambilla de E.T.A. Hoffmann«. Critique. 22.227: 291–308, 228: 438–457.

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The detective story and novel Gerald Gillespie Criminals were nothing new in literature. The picaresque genre had remained popular fare in Europe ever since the first rogues and roguesses appeared on the scene in Spanish tales of delinquency in the Renaissance such as the title figures of La Celestina (1499), La Lozana andaluza (1528), and Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). But a new genre, in which crime fighters and crime solvers were central, began to contest for a comparable place as popular reading during the early nineteenth century. Keen interest in the Mémoires of François-Eugène Vidocq, which appeared in 1828–29 and were immediately translated into English, is one of many indications that the broader public was fascinated by criminality as a widespread problem requiring countermeasures in a rapidly urbanizing western Europe. The colorful French author (with the assistance of ghost writers) personally bridged the older picaresque and the emergent detective orientations. Many early episodes of the Mémoires, especially Vidocq’s youthful scams connected with the military, read much like the adventures of rogues such as John Makepeace Thackeray’s antihero in The Luck of Barry Lyndon: a Romance of the Last Century (1844). But in addition Vidocq, himself a former master criminal, who became head of France’s new »Sureté« or national investigative service in 1811, divulged secrets of how the underworld operated and how the authorities fought back. The British Police Act of 1829 led to the formation of a regular London metropolitan police and a specialist detective force was created in 1842; yet, until 1884, police investigators were hired on a retainer by the magistrates office and were allowed to accept rewards from private parties and served their own clients as well as the state, alongside a number of wholly freelance detectives. The appearance of Richmond; or, Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Officer (1827) helped promote a very popular new type of story purporting to be (and in some instances actually drawing on) accounts of the exploits of police officers. In his essay »Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts« (1827), Thomas De Quincey links the rising appeal of crime stories in the nineteenth century with the artistic principle of Romantic irony, by wittily construing the criminal impulse as a key to newer urban psychology. The detective story, an invention mainly of high and late Romanticism, not only helped popularize modern exploration of the psyche but also often probed the nature of making and reading fictions. The Romantic detective provided yet another means to link literary sensibility, newer aspects of the natural and social sciences, and the realities of the modern city. Although Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831) deals with the time of Louis XI, Richard Maxwell regards it, too, as contributing to the vogue of the urban mystery in the nineteenth century (Maxwell 1992, 25–57). Clearly, independent Romantic hermeneuts like Poe’s Dupin were among the first explicit readers of the city rather than of nature at large. It was a typically Romantic maneuver to combine the functions of forensic interpretation, probing into the secrets of urban life, and exploring the nature of »reading« in general and to interweave recognizable popular and serious materials so as to engage the reader’s interest in such breaching of older norms. As in the development of the picaresque tradition, the detective genre rather soon incorporated stories which reflected awareness of the readership’s captivation by the new construct, a fad that was to last for good reasons.

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Today, with all the perspicacity of hindsight, we can simplify the generic and discursive transformations of detective fiction during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into six large, cumulatively overlapping waves: the Romantic, the Realist-Positivistic, the Symbolist-Absurdist, the Classical, the Metaphysical, and the Postmodern varieties. In dealing with problems of »reading« and »writing« under the guise of detection, the Romantic detective story of more literary bent was participating in the general search for a surer basis of knowledge in post-Revolutionary society and of ways to reconfirm community in a fragmenting subjective world. The predominance of the latter drive in the pseudo-scientific phase of the discourse of detection at mid-century overlapped with domestication and trivialization of the genre. It is useful to note not only primary examples of the detective story but other symptomatic works containing prominent motifs of detection as secondary features. From the start, the Romantic detective story borrowed freely from other generic streams, most notably from Gothic fiction; and further waves of compounding, transformation, and repristination of traits were to occur. The Romantic detective story, only slightly refurbished to suit the Realist program, was eventually adopted by Positivism and rewritten as a presumptively »antiRomantic« genre, even though hermeneutics patently remained its central subject-matter and Romantic characters had become accepted as actual fixtures in a modern social typology. Thus older and newer kinds of detective stories coexisted in the second half of the nineteenth century while novel-length works were increasingly appearing which were chiefly organized by »detection« as a binding narrative thread; and eventually, among these forms the Symbolist-Absurdist detective story and novel would be counted, the direct ancestors of what commentators like Holquist (»Whodunit«) and Spanos (»The Detective and the Boundary«) label the Metaphysical and Postmodern varieties. 1.

Early Romantic shaping of a literature of detection

In broad outline, the Romantic detective story thematizes the drive and capacity to interpret. This drive exists in an ambiguous, often perplexing symbiosis with what is concealed, the »secret« that simultaneously begs and resists discovery. In the Baroque era, the poet regarded the world as the »world book« whose »signatures« he »read«; the emblemata of art and language permitted him and the reader to interpret the confusing phenomenal realm. The Baroque writer penetrated the mask of signs to grasp meaning; and, as a second maker, his work rivaled the creation, God’s mirror; however, this was possible only because nature was in some degree transcribable. The challenge to read well intensifies when the world takes on puzzling aspects of being a script in progress (to the religious, it is being written by Providence, and to freethinkers by fate and human folly or heroism). Human beings, as transient participants, must act while spectating. By secularizing the idea of the education of humanity in terms of the doctrine of perfectibility, Enlightenment rationalism redefined the inherent directedness of the world process; however, without eliminating actual crime. The histrionic potential latent in the Baroque actor-spectator dichotomy thus could resurge in the situation of the newer Romantic subject in the encounter with crime and evil. The Romantic »self« may be motivated to discover a magical key to decipher the world book; but the occasional attempt to transcend the natural

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creation can readily precipitate a violent split from, rather than promote unity with, nature, and threatens to rupture the social compact. The bipolar relation of detective and criminal constitutes just one expression of this recurrent tension in the age. By 1800 we can observe the headwaters of the detective story branching off from the course of Gothic horror. From its inception, the new mode combines characteristic Romantic motifs and innovative story forms. Most notable are various phenomena of »doubling«. This occurs both in narrational bipolarity or involution and in the dramatic opposition of detective and criminal as characters. An intense interest in psychological discovery often binds the Romantic thematics of criminal detection and of textual interpretation. At the heart of many a Romantic tale of detection as in Gothic fiction is a rankling secret, an oppressive mystery, a crime that must be brought to light or solved. The predilection for such materials occurs in the same decades as the surging interest in the Oedipus tradition (Gillespie 1981), and both trends seem to draw nourishment from the same cultural soil. The suggestion by critics such as Grossvogel (1979) that the ancient Oedipus myth is the nuclear form of the later detective tale is a formalistic exaggeration and suffers from the absence of any due consideration of the extraordinary vogue of Oedipus in Romanticism and the enormous indebtedness of modern to Romantic psychology. The function of the detective — increasingly explicit toward the middle of the nineteenth century — is earlier sometimes subsumed in the narrative process itself in Gothic tales, insofar as acts of detection lead to tragic revelation or amount to psychological or metaphysical analysis of transgression. An early example of a Romantic proto-detective story is Ludwig Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert (Blond Eckbert, 1796) with its horrific fairytale atmosphere. This brilliant novella is about a medieval knight who — so we learn on the final page — has unwittingly married his own sister. In recalling her strange girlhood experiences in an internal account in the first half of the story, Bertha premonitiously brings to the surface a series of clues that accelerate her own pining to death and lead her husband to desperation and murder, when a key bit of long repressed knowledge, the name of her childhood dog Strohmian, at last is uttered. The siblings’ resisted conscience or superego has actually always been present in the guise of Eckbert’s successive intimate friends Walter and Hugo whom he kills out of inchoate, unexplained paranoiac dread. They fuse with the witchlike old woman of the woods, who in Bertha’s narrative of childhood had adopted and sought to instruct her as a runaway girl. These figures become a single accusing internal witness during Eckbert’s final plunge into madness when he cannot permanently kill the principle they manifest. In effect, the omniscient narration seems to »read itself«; and qualitatively it embodies the detective function when this mysterious absolute authority fully unveils itself and destroys the obdurate guilty knight, while confirming our suspicions. The situating of the dream-like experiences in a fictitiously »actual« Middle Ages, without direct authorial commentary, heightens our sense of penetrating into realms obscured by our everyday habits, into the human labyrinth concealing its secrets. The reader, at the latest from the mention of the dog’s name, if not earlier through symbolic moments in Bertha’s inner tale, is drawn into the process of deciphering resisted clues. While Eckbert sinks into madness, the reader becomes a collaborative pursuing analyst of Eckbert’s condition and experiences release from the shared oppression of not clearly knowing or admitting the truth. The narrative unmistakably resembles a therapeutic investigation that begs for the presence of a detectivehermeneut to solve the mystery.

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The needed detective figure, who first emerges in England, is not yet convinced of his own mission. In 1794, Mary Shelley’s father, the radical philosopher William Godwin, elaborates the reciprocal relationship of the pursuer and the pursued in his tragic novel of the »spy«, that is, of the detective who is the perplexed title hero of Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams. Godwin’s primary intention was to write a powerful attack on the oppressive and perfidious behavior of the privileged classes, but he ended up writing a proto-detective novel, too. Albeit operating in a quite different formal vein as a novel, Caleb Williams resembles Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, written two decades earlier, under the influence of Laurence Sterne), insofar as we can see in it how the treatment of late eighteenth-century topics drifts into an increasingly Romantic mode. The work is ostensibly a first-person account, but a haunting bipolar structure emerges out of the original conflict that obsesses the narrator-character Caleb. In the first part of the book he tells of the misdeeds of the tyrannical squire Tyrrel who ruins Hawkins, one of his tenants, and drives his own cousin Emily Melville into despair and death for opposing him. Falkland, who is Tyrrel’s benevolent, high-minded neighbor, has acted in the role of a protector toward both Hawkins and Miss Melville. After a violent confrontation with Falkland, Tyrrel is found murdered. Falkland is suspected but is acquitted in trial, while attention is diverted to Hawkins and his son, and they are eventually executed for the crime. Falkland is a person of high culture and great dignity, yet is gloomy and secretive — »Byronic« avant la lettre. Overly curious Caleb, a bookish country youth of humble origins who has been appointed Falkland’s secretary, is irresistibly drawn into investigating his fascinating and socially prominent master. Caleb destroys this ideal image by efforts of detection that uncover Falkland’s sordid past and his murder of Tyrrel; his meddling induces Falkland to reveal his criminal behavior under »every seal of silence« (Godwin 1992, 123). A large part of the novel is devoted to developing an ironic reversal and doubling of the theme of pursuit. Falkland, in anticipation of possible betrayal, plants false evidence which brings social disgrace and psychological torment to Caleb. Falkland’s agents are instruments of the resourceful mind stalking Caleb. Their success in hounding him stirs a whole host of questions regarding justice and privilege. Caleb’s gaze penetrates »the whole machinery of society« and eventually he plumbs the lower depths of life in Britain in his struggle for personal liberty. Caleb suffers by keeping the secret, until the sheer pain forces him to level a formal accusation and the knowledge and determination he has acquired through his experiences enable him to do so effectively. Though innocent in a strictly legal sense, Caleb’s protestations suggest his own inner flaw and perhaps unreliability or inadequacy as an objective narrator. A victim of »a kind of fatal impulse that seemed destined to hurry me to my destruction« (ibid., 110), Caleb discovers the seeds of evil in himself and the coexistence of good and evil in Falkland. As the investigation proceeds, a »magnetical sympathy« (ibid., 100) develops between them; their destinies become interdependent, their separate identities twinned. In the end, Caleb laments his own success, and reciprocally Falkland extols Caleb’s perseverance: »Williams, […] I see too late the greatness and elevation of your mind. […] I stand now completely detected« (ibid., 275). Aware of the tragic waste of Falkland’s talents in which their society is complicitous, remorseful Caleb concludes: »I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my own character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate« (ibid., 277).

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Godwin’s novel ends by highlighting the anguish of its protagonist over the mysterious pairing that will so often be encountered in later detective fictions, although the most famous detective figures eventually will feel justified or even take pride in gaining the upper hand. It is important that such relationships of theme and narrative structure are echoed in contemporaneous works that never explicitly present a detective. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) raised the pattern of pursuit and detection to a new degree, while, as it were, withholding the active intervention of a detective such as the readership might understandably crave. By the time of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, her work could be grasped more clearly as perhaps the most influential early science-fiction novel of its century. We can regard her novel here, for our purposes, more immediately as an encoding of a specifically Romantic form of self-referential ironic discourse, because it exhibits as twinned terms the tension between Faustian prideful sin and Prosperian renunciation — principles rooted in a distinguished international literary heritage. From this vantage point, Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s more abstract perversion of creating life without recourse to sex and the bodily murder of his fiancée Elizabeth by his creature evince a deeper correspondence to dubious aspects both of poetry and of science. The relationship can be interpreted as Mary Shelley’s commentary on a primarily masculine mode of being: science and art as a bypass to power, and as an assault on the feminine basis of life. Behind both stages of Frankenstein’s (creative and scientific) self-realization is the rape of nature perpetrated by the presumptuous human mind. When the ambivalent »modern Prometheus« pursues his own equally ambivalent demon into the symbolic icy wastes, Mary Shelley situates his story in the larger post-Kantian, subjectivist framework of the early nineteenth century. As a re-inscription of the Renaissance-Baroque problematics of »magic«, Shelley’s Frankenstein is but one of innumerable Romantic texts that are concerned also about the »magic« of signification. She examines the Faustian transgression and the nature of »reading« and »writing« conjointly in order to test the validity of acts of assertive objectification by selfglorifying minds in a subjective world. Mary Shelley carefully contains the discovery of Victor Frankenstein’s criminality inside a first-person frame-tale consisting of letters to a Margaret, a married sister in England, written by a Robert Walton, who is supposed to be an intrepid explorer in the desolate Arctic. Having entered these symbolic spaces, depicted for example by the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s Wrack im Eismeer (Wreck in the Polar Sea, 1798), Walton encounters an alter ego. It is Frankenstein who, himself in pursuit of his own shadow, the fled monster, compulsively relates his life to Walton. In his youth, like Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus, Frankenstein was inspired above all by the teachings of the magus Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim. Frankenstein’s seduction by science, his transgression in prizing his own creativity above God’s, is unmasked as a broader story of criminality at the core of contemporary society. This society is inclined to misread the implicating evidence, not to see who their respected fellow citizen really is, just as, reciprocally, the arch-criminal is driven to conceal his guilt and power. The murder of Victor’s younger brother William by the monster sets the pattern of hidden complicity. The authorities (who resemble the bungling police in the fully developed detective genre) mistakenly suspect a family dependent Justine, and Victor’s silence adds the murder of this innocent woman to fratricide. Justine’s trial at midpoint in the novel is a model of failed interpretation; society cannot see its own imposed falsification and will heed neither the instinctive confidence of Elizabeth

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in the accused nor its feigned equivalence spoken by Frankenstein, in effect his indirect confession. By following Frankenstein onto the icy heights of the Alps in search of his monster and hearing the monster’s view in Chapters 10–16, we penetrate as privileged interlopers into the strange secret of their reciprocal utter loneliness. The reader becomes surrogate for the missing detective-psychoanalyst. In essence, the crucial defense speech by the monster, impossible in a failed modern court of inquiry, only becomes feasible when secreted in the interior of the narrative through a mise en abyme of mirrored and containing stories. When, very late in Victor Frankenstein’s tale and life, this »creator« figure more adamantly attempts to confess by accusing the monster and enlisting official help against him, it is to no avail; though momentarily disturbed, the complacent Genevan magistrate will not acknowledge the evil. Internally, until the novel’s close, the best »reader« remains the guilty criminal who reads himself but remains enthralled by crime. The eventually yet more adequate »reading« of Frankenstein’s story by the explorer Walton includes Walton’s direct witness of the monster, who comes out of the ice to lament his expired creatorpursuer, but Walton survives the threat of narrational convergence in the mutual self-destruction of the perverse creator and his created monster that occurs in the moment of recognition. Walton’s by then already formed decision to save his crew by abandoning his own mad pursuit and returning directly to England provokes the terrifying apparition and allows the redemptive exorcizing of the monster which the Romantic mind bodies forth. Walton’s voice carries back from the sterile ice the voice of Frankenstein, his Romantic shadow, and the voice of the shadow’s shadow, somewhat as the voice of the failed European hero Kurtz and the horror it knew resonate in the voice of Conrad’s Marlow who returns from the heart of darkness in the novella of that name published in 1902. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s famous tale Der Sandmann (The Sandman, 1816) illustrates just how complicated the Romantic play with narrative structure and with the truth status of subjective experience could become. If the public authorities are unreliable readers in Godwin’s and Shelley’s works, they do tardily pay some attention in Hoffmann’s story to suspect new kinds of artifice and textuality brought to light. Just before the catastrophe, a »criminal investigation«1 is launched to get to the bottom of the finally incontrovertible evidence that criminals have deceived human society with automata. Hoffmann’s irony operates on more than one level. In a Tieckian vein, the puppet affair has caused the spread of mistrust toward normal human figures, and the town council is not at all satisfied by the opinion of a foppish pundit, the local Professor of Poetry and Eloquence, that »The whole thing is an allegory — an extended metaphor«.2 We external readers are torn by our own doubts as to the reality of what is being narrated. On another and weird plane, the official inquiry is already too late; for the confidence-men and artificers Spalanzini and Coppola have vanished, Nathanael will die shortly in a crazed plunge from the city tower they may or may not actually trigger, and we are denied any final clarification of the sinister connection between them and Nathanael’s long dead father, whom we suspect to have been a necromancer, in part on the basis of the son’s sudden nightmarish recollections of childhood at the tale’s opening and the contradictory views expressed then and now, much later, 1.

»Kriminaluntersuchung« (Hoffmann 1985, 3: 47).

2.

»Das Ganze ist eine Allegorie — eine fortgeführte Metapher« (ibid., 46).

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in the correspondence of his best friend Lothar and his fiancée Clara, Lothar’s sister. Despite the frightful memories and ominous undercurrents, the three letters exchanged at the start still replicate the order of a sentimental community that tries to cope and to interpret rationally. However, Nathanael reacts irritably to Clara’s encouragement to conquer »that uncanny power […] the dark psychic power« in us, »the phantom of our own identity«3 — terms that sound distinctly Romantic; and an abrupt generic shift confirms the failure of Enlightenment discourse paralleling the eruption in Nathanael’s psyche. A rather aggressive authorial persona interrupts to argue with the reader about the validity of narrating Nathanael’s inner fantasy life; and after some sarcastic sketching of alternative modes, this »I« continues the story of the three friends as a third-person omniscient account. Though interpenetrated by this ironic authorial consciousness, the boundaries between the real and imaginary are slowly erased in this generic shift. Nathanael’s own internally recounted poetic works, ever more hallucinatory, seem to triumph as he loses permanently any ability to distinguish between artificial and organic creatures. The amazing power of the imagination to write an alternative script bids to supersede the duty and confidence of the rational mind to »read« nature as the authoritative script. The experience of collapse into madness threatens the older Enlightenment trust that we are capable of meaningful intersubjective communication. Only the ironizing outer narrator hovers over the story’s mournful afterlude as an ambiguous witnessing consciousness. The new potential for involving the reader imaginatively in the tasks of detection and interpretation emerged with a more distinct generic profile in Hoffmann’s novella Das Fräulein von Scuderi (Mademoiselle de Scudéry, 1819), published a year later than Frankenstein. It presented a competent detective to a world in need of such (cf. Gillespie 1990a). Subtitled a »Tale from the Age of Louis XIV«, its events are set in a Paris teeming with dangers and secrets. Speaking in a voice of historical authority, an unidentified narrator relates the dramatic appearance of a youth who seeks entry by night into the house of the aged poetess Mlle de Scudéry to deliver a box, then flees; and in an excursus the narrator explains the good reasons for the apprehension of her servants. The city lives in terror of crime. Two successive conspiratorial rings of poisoners for gain have reached victims up to the highest social levels, and now some gang is stealing jewels and murdering the robbery victims with impunity. The extraordinary measures taken under the king’s authority by Desgrais, the chief of police, and La Regnie, the president of the special court, the »Chambre Ardente«, have already created an atmosphere of repression and hysteria. One night, in pursuing a suspect from the scene of an attack, Desgrais has rubbed his eyes in disbelief as the figure disappears into shadow and through a solid stone wall. Modern readers will notice in this baffling phenomenon a distinct feature of the detective story as practiced a generation later by Poe in »Murders in the Rue Morgue«, likewise set in Paris. Desgrais’s experience, soon circulated in the city as a leaflet with a woodcut of a devil figure, reflects the collective interpretive tendency of the popular mind, troubled by talk of alchemy and witchcraft and retrogressing to partly submerged older codes in search of an explanation. Fans of the detective story will notice also the antagonism toward the lower, inadequate, essentially reactionary mentality of the police, in contrast to the aristocratic superiority of the 3. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »jene unheimliche Macht […] die dunkle physische Macht« [»physische« in 1st ed., »psychische« in original ms]; »das Fantom unseres eigenen Ichs« (ibid., 22 f.).

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amateur sleuth, who soon rises to the challenge in this story — an opposition that also becomes a standard Romantic trait in Poe. Hoffmann’s narrator underscores the difference by relating that the police inquisitors have tried to sway the increasingly reluctant king to expand their powers through their use of an anonymous petition poem which has appealed to his gallantry in the name of the threatened lovers who are attacked going to nocturnal trysts. Whereas the now aged Louis could elicit only a guarded response from his mistress Maintenon to this propaganda piece, Mlle de Scudéry has instantly convinced him of the correct, noble course with two lines of her own poetry on the dignity of courage. Past this excursus, the sober light of day finds the seventy-year-old poetess Scudéry again forced into the role of interpreter as she dares to open the box, »the sealed secret«.4 It proves to contain a priceless necklace and bracelet, accompanied by a flattering letter of thanks which starts with her same verses the king has heard and is signed by the »Invisible«.5 That is — as we eventually realize — she holds two reciprocal texts: one a written document in the ambiguously formal first and second-person plural, the other a concretized Petrarchistic emblem. By the time of Hoffmann, because of its use in works by Novalis, Tieck, and other Romantics, jewelry symbolizes sexuality and dangerous treasures in the unconscious. Worldly wise Maintenon recognizes the sublime touch of the eccentric master jeweler Cardillac on the stones. Cardillac, a tormented artist so familiar in Hoffmannian works, when summoned before the ladies, explains that these pieces, made for himself out of pure joy, had mysteriously disappeared. He passionately begs Scudéry to keep them as a fated tribute of his respect and devotion — much to the amusement of Maintenon, who correctly sees this bestowal of the emblem as a rite of courtship, whereas the encounter with Cardillac inspires uncanny premonitions in his fellow artist Scudéry. There follows in a few months the strange reappearance of the young man who passes a message into Scudéry’s coach on the Pont Neuf, warning her for her life to return the jewels to Cardillac under any pretext. Soon after, Scudéry takes Cardillac’s daughter under her protection out of pity when Olivier Brusson, his apprentice, is arrested for murdering him. At the zenith of her renown, the elderly maiden lady Scudéry faces the hardest challenge of her life by becoming what the nineteenth century will learn to call a detective. She sets about verifying Olivier’s good character and meticulously gathers bits of evidence, because Cardillac’s daughter Madelon convinces her that Olivier had returned bearing the mortally wounded father, whom unknown assailants attacked. La Regnie actually provides Scudéry with some key details in the process of trying futilely to recruit her help to wrap up the case according to his preconceptions. Everything depends on properly evaluating the clues — for example, the supposedly cinching argument that since Olivier’s arrest the jewel thefts have ceased. Scudéry suffers a profound crisis upon recognizing Olivier in prison as the young man from the episode on the Pont Neuf. Her humane instinct momentarily falters, until the agonized cries of Madelon rekindle her confidence. Scudéry’s interpretive gift and courage depend on her literary sensibility and sound instincts. But from a twentieth-century perspective, we can say that the poetess proceeds detail by detail according to a variety of Peircean »retroduction«, or reasoning backward, and 4.

»das verschlossene Geheimnis« (Hoffmann 1985, 4: 795).

5.

»Die Unsichtbaren« (ibid., 797).

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»hypothetic abduction«, which in their Victorian »scientific« phase characterize the kind of detection practiced by Sherlock Holmes (Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok). The unraveling constitutes half the tale. Olivier’s story — he turns out to be the son of Scudéry’s long dead, beloved surrogate daughter, Anne Guiot — is a typically Romantic complicating device of an interpolated tale within the novella, but it serves as a version of happenings that enables an authentic reconstruction of the crimes, containing as it does, in turn, the interpolated story of Cardillac as told by him to Olivier. Cardillac has been the sole murderer, a tragically obsessed artist in love with his own work who stole back his own creations with demonic cunning. The connection between the jewels and his death-oriented sexuality, we learn, was rooted in the bizarre seduction of Cardillac’s mother. Now the problem becomes how to save Olivier without betraying the secret he guards for Madelon’s sake — that is, we have explicitly, but in a benign form, the motif of an inner complicity between the criminal and the detective. The poetess is tireless in her confidential maneuvers. Finally, a Count Miossens, learning of her efforts, offers invaluable evidence by revealing how he began to suspect and stalk Cardillac and was the officer who fled leaving his dagger, rather than get involved with the feared police authorities. Scudéry now instinctively gambles all on a private audience with the king in which she dresses in black like a widow and wears Cardillac’s jewels — a gesture confirming her symbolic marriage and adoptive motherhood. Guided by Scudéry, the king is moved to play the role of the nation’s supreme detective until the case is discreetly closed and the young couple is redeemed. Whereas Cardillac embodies the fallen creator-father, Louis is the surrogate father restored and restoring. This novella has rightly been celebrated as the artist and lawyer Hoffmann’s most positive statement about commitment to a humane order, as exemplified in the elderly maiden, an intellectual and moral heroine who takes up detection out of interest in and loving kindness toward her fellow beings. Scudéry is the elegant ancestress of our latter-days Miss Marples. In contrast, like Shelley’s Frankenstein, Cardillac represents the artist as criminal, incarnating the tragic disease and terror of the subjectivist age, when the creative individual worships the products of his own imagination and disregards natural beauty and moral obligation. As a countervailing principle to the perverse isolation of individual minds, Hoffmann seems to posit a dedicated »reading« activity capable of repairing the torn social web. There is nothing anomalous in the fact that Frankenstein both is a prototype for science fiction and exemplifies the critique of Romantic subjectivity or that Das Fräulein von Scuderi embodies simultaneously the start of detective fiction proper and the persistence of concern over the threat of subjective willfulness. Many important Romantic works are junctions of several literary strands. One example must suffice here to illustrate how a fellow Romantic might exploit a particular cluster of features in preference over others. In an unsigned story explicitly referring to Hoffmann’s character, entitled »Le bibliomane ou le nouveau Cardillac« (The Bibliomaniac or the New Cardillac, 1836), — possibly also echoing the title of Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus — Charles Nodier »translates« the obsessive jeweler, who is an artist, into a book collector who will kill in order to get possession of a rare edition. The miscreant, Fra Vicents, a Catalonian monk, has fled his burning monastery, which he perhaps set on fire, with choice books stolen from its library. Totally forgetting the purpose of books as means of communication and instruments in the search for truth, a way for humanity to transcend

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time spiritually, the ruthless bibliomane worships them as aesthetic objects divorced from the human community. Nodier, a master portrayer of dream states and the night side of existence, shifts our attention onto aestheticism of criminal dimension, but is not interested in creating a champion who can hold the dangers of the night realm in check, whereas Hoffmann gives us the detective as such a champion. Inevitably, stories of detection occurring in contemporary society, as in Godwin’s novel, were to outnumber those set in a remote or exotic past. By using a present-day milieu, a writer could favor exploration of the pragmatic details and theory of professional crime-solving that so fascinated bourgeois readers. Adolph Müllner’s novella Der Kaliber (The Caliber, 1828) illustrates the natural turn toward a ratiocinative detective figure. The first-person narrator Herr von I… (whose name indicates membership at least in the lower nobility) prides himself as a responsible public official, and clearly is very interested in psychology. His account is saturated with literary references, and he freely admits at the start of his narrative to resting from his deductive and legal labors preferably by feeding his imagination on Gothic mysteries, fate tragedies, and tales of adventure and brigands. He can gaze from his jurisdiction within a typically Hoffmannian pocket principality directly at the part of a dangerous forest stretching just across the state border. The novella relates how one day a slighted injured young businessman Ferdinand Albus seeks his aid because Albus’s brother Heinrich has just died of a bullet wound in his arms, the apparent victim of bandits lurking in wait for them in the forest. With great consideration toward the distraught survivor of the attack, the narrator as chief magistrate and investigator meticulously questions him and undertakes forensic probes on site in the forest. Several facts are developed casting suspicion on Ferdinand as possibly having killed his brother out of rivalry for the hand of Mariane. That is, once again, one of the favorite themes in the literature of the Revolutionary age, fratricidal struggle, emerges as a possibly »real« force in society for the narrator who dotes on such fictional fare. However, the narrator’s continuous analysis of Ferdinand’s behavior and statements and of Mariane’s faithful character (all of which mental work the reader is privy to step by step) predispose him not to accept at face value a confession which Ferdinand himself arrives at — so we ultimately discover — out of the young man’s misinterpretation of the confusing traumatic events. The detective understands how the survivor’s tormented conscience has misled him and he eventually amasses sufficient forensic clues to solve the murder and exonerate him. The careful measuring of the caliber of retrieved bullets provides decisive scientific evidence implicating a local bandit. One of the interesting features of this novella is that, despite the apparently tiny microcosm of the immediate police jurisdiction, it opens up to the bigger world in later chapters, — much as Arthur Conan Doyle’s first tales, »A Study in Scarlet« (1886) and »The Sign of Four« (1890), do. Der Kaliber also flirts with a broadening of the political horizon. The magistrate, who as yet has no Watson, draws on his sister’s aid and opinion. And so guided, he becomes a virtual foster father, nurturing the high-minded couple, visiting Mariane’s home where the badly shaken Ferdinand is recuperating, and promoting their marriage. Mariane Brand, we learn, is the daughter of a respectable converted Jewish family who retains a sense of her heritage. She teases her beloved Ferdinand by using his nickname the »republican«, based on the liberal tendencies in his serious conversations. She has kept in contact with a potential business partner for Ferdinand, his uncle in Philadelphia, and that is ultimately the destination to which the young couple

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depart, with Mr. Brand’s blessing, to restart their lives. The narrator, himself a skilled »doctor of the psyche« (as the title of Chapter 21 reads), pronounces with great satisfaction, according to fashionable theory: »You [Mariane] have such a decided power over his entire nervous system that I almost want to believe in a magnetic rapport between you two«6 (Tannert 1999, 48). The account closed by our healer-hermeneut is in fact intended as a gift honoring this remarkable young woman, now twice a mother in the New World by the time the author has finished writing up the case. Like Mlle de Scudéry, the detective Herr von I… is clearly a beneficent person, as well as professional public servant, whose special gifts restore the damaged community. 2.

Late Romantic consolidation of detective fiction

The evidence shows that the foundations of the Romantic detective genre were laid in the three decades from Godwin to Müllner. As colorful a figure as the former pícaro Vidocq was, it is clear that his Mémoires appeared on the scene at just the perfect moment to intensify interest in detectives but did not furnish the specifically Romantic literary model of this figure. Resolute and resourceful to an amazing degree, Vidocq did leave an indelible impression by inspiring Honoré de Balzac’s invention of the master criminal Vautrin (»wild boar dog«, a nickname from Vidocq’s youth), who first appears in the novel Le Père Goriot (Father Goriot, 1834/35), and Victor Hugo’s powerful Jean Valjean, the reformed criminal who seeks to serve his fellows in Les misérables (The Wretched, 1862). And Vidocq is doubtlessly one of the main sources of numerous devices and tricks used by later sleuths — notable among these being his unusual skill, later credited by Arthur Conan Doyle to Sherlock Holmes, in creating foolproof disguises that permitted the detective to circulate anywhere, including dangerous underworld precincts. Edgar Allan Poe probably knew Vidocq from the Philadelphia edition of 1834 or the first English translation of 1828–29; it is likely he based the name of his own mathematician sleuth on a Baron Dupin, a specialist in geometry and mechanics mentioned by Vidocq (Lits 1999, 27). However, aside from some shared technical matters, important differences separate the chiefly theatrical and intelligence-gathering methods of the hyperactive thief-catcher Vidocq from the cerebral methods of Poe’s self-sufficient aristocratic flâneur Dupin. Poe is likely also to have read contemporary legal experts on the theory of evidence (Böker 1981, 51). It is the spirit of Poe’s narration and not just the eccentric character of the independent hermeneut which finally imparts the Romantic stamp. Even more directly than Hoffmann’s use of the name of the writer Scudéry, the title of Poe’s »The Purloined Letter« (1844) hints at a general equation between detection of a crime and the accurate situating of a specific text in the semiotic complexity that obtains. It is nothing less than a document containing a delicate secret that has been brazenly taken from the queen’s boudoir and is being held by the unscrupulous Minister D. to extort political influence. All the ruses and skills of the Parisian police have been to no avail. Like Hoffmann, Poe contrasts the interpretative adequacy of his sensuously alert sleuth, Chevalier Dupin, and the coarse-minded rationalism of Monsieur G., the Prefect 6.

»Der psychische Arzt«; »so haben Sie eine so entschiedene Macht über sein ganzes Nervensystem, daß ich fast an eine magnetische Beziehung zwischen Ihnen beiden glauben möchte« (Müllner 1913, 211 f.).

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of Police, who finally must swallow his pride and buy Dupin’s help in order himself to collect the royal reward. Dupin solves the case by his superior imaginative capacity to project into the ingenious mind of Minister D., who is, significantly, a better mathematician than poet and also Dupin’s longtime archenemy. The mirroring initial D. unmistakably marks the doppelgänger. Instead of the symbiotic metaphor of Scudéry’s marriage with her dark artist counterpart, here the metaphor is a game resembling a duel, masculine mimetic rivalry between the detective and his perverse alter ego. And in what curiously resembles an inversion of Scudéry’s theatrical ostentation of the tell-tale jewelry to awaken the king, Dupin boldly wears a pair of very Hoffmannian »green spectacles« to dull his opponent’s powers of observation. He diverts attention from the fact he is indeed minutely reading the entire physiognomy of the Minister’s study under his very nose, just as he reads the flux of signs in the quotidian world at large as semiotic puzzles. All this we learn from Dupin’s pre-Watson straight-man and companion, and, like the later Watson, our narrator, an American bachelor sojourning in Paris, is the voice through whom Poe establishes the tone of neutral authority in a distinctly contemporary present. In Paris, the detective Dupin acts to protect the queen and nation because (as later Holmes will do) he opposes the malevolent manipulation of societal codes and defends the humane, tacitly agreed-upon double-standard behind the outermost surface coding, which is transparent to all sensible citizens. Dupin’s revenge on D. is to substitute as a double-blind a useless facsimile of the doctored document he has found daringly on display in the chimney of the Minister’s study. The Minister, a deceived deceiver, will now inevitably precipitate his own ruin in the belief he wields power through the captured text. Paradoxically, by reclassifying the signifiers so as to foil the wicked intellectual who seeks to abuse society’s multilayered codes, Dupin liberates the intimate text and revalidates the conventional rules that govern public as against secret communication. The detective, as counterpart to the criminal, restores a sanctioned order of doubleness. Doubleness also inheres in the narrational symbiosis of the detective with his fascinated observer represented within the fiction, the Watson figure or internal narrator. The fictive detector of detectors is ideally suited to instruct the real-life reader. But he often performs his job as an obtuse observer in our eyes by contrastively bungling the job of reading the signs while in the company of his eccentric friend, as in »The Murders in the Rue Morgue« (1841). The narrator in Poe’s »The Gold-Bug« (1843) is slowly and reluctantly drawn as a confidant into the work of detection, while we are drawn by his act of narration into the surprising mystery which develops around a most unlikely eccentric, William Legrand. This parodic Robinson Crusoe, an impoverished aristocratic naturalist who lives with his manumitted servant Jupiter in a cabin on Sullivan’s Island off the coast near Charleston, begins to act in quite strange ways after the discovery of an unusual beetle with a pattern like a skull on its back. It turns out that the narrator once unknowingly held in his own hand the key text, an old piece of parchment, from which Legrand, however, proceeded to »read« the secrets in the coastal topography and history of the Carolinas and to raise the buried pirate treasure of Captain Kidd. Almost the whole second half of the tale consists of the detective Legrand’s explanation of his method — an explanation anticipating those with which Holmes will amaze his interlocutors. As if in a story by Heinrich von Kleist, a mysterious double of the skull image of the beetle drawn by Legrand first appeared, then disappeared, on the reverse side of the parchment. In

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successive treatments of the document, suspecting it to be written in invisible ink, he gradually brought out the symbols of the death’s-head (the pirate emblem) and a goat (an idiosyncratic heraldic sign for Kidd), between which stood enigmatic characters, evidently a cypher. Hypothesizing on historical grounds — Peirce would say: abducting — that the disguised language is English, Legrand analyzed orthographical frequencies to derive lexical clusters, then set about discerning syntactical units. The next main problem was to interpret the words of the decoded cipher in philologicalpositivistic terms for their current applicability. One of hardest and crucial steps was understanding that the eighteenth-century name »Bishop’s Hostel« — now the nineteenth-century »Bessop’s Castle« — had been transferred anthropocentrically to a rock formation. In »The Gold-Bug« we have a fascinating juncture where the older belief in a World-Book with its emblematic signatures has given way to a scientific view of the relative readability even of phenomena subject to metamorphosis. Poe’s detective is in essence an archaeologist and anthropologist who sees the world as the human estate that has constantly been subjected to and marked by language. Although language is recognized to be mutable over time, the structuring principles of language have sufficed to elaborate networks of signs that can be projected onto nature, and thus we still have a degree of access through traces, through weathered signs, to the past human moment of their employment. Or from another perspective, ages after the heritage of language has become the permanent generic property of mankind, we can decode the perceived patterns of nature as if they are a current language. In this sense, there is no absolute secret of nature or humanity, but only relative concealment. And so the investigation, by leading us in this case to a concentration of wealth, or money as an alternate language of society, leads to crime, human monstrosity: the skeletons of many victims are discovered with the loot. Decoding, in this case, means that the secrets of money and crime will out. In what is also avowal of Romantic irony, the drole Legrand confesses to having practiced some »sober mystification« to »punish« the narrator for an obtuseness that extended to doubting his sanity (Poe 1966, 96). Poe drives home the lesson it is »poetic consistency« which really solves the hardest semiotic puzzles and most hidden crimes, or rather the union of »poetic consistency« and »common sense« (Poe 1966, 96), not »common-sense« alone, the comic variety of the latter in the story being Jupiter’s unstoppable low-brow practicality. One of the oddest, yet most brilliant late Romantic works playing with the thematics of detection is The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) by Herman Melville who was born in the year of the publication of Das Fräulein von Scuderi. His satirical novel, published just a few years before the baleful American Civil War, gives a strange intensifying twist to the legacy of Romantic irony, to the presumption of the interpretative superiority of the detective, and to the bipolarism of writing versus reading texts as well as perpetrating crime versus exposing it. We start out on April first, the universal festival of fertility and disorder, at a crossroads of all time and peoples, the midpoint of the American continent and American expansion from East to West, as the Mississippi steamer Fidèle, explicitly a »ship of fools« (Melville 1984, 855), descends from the free North to the slave South, and out of day into darkness. On board are smaller and larger crooks, dodgers, hypocrites, whose fingers are »enveloped in some myth« (Melville 1984, 841). This medley of American types, while scheming and defrauding gullible passengers, all presume to play detective vis-à-vis other prospective cheats and grifters.

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Melville challenges us imaginatively to follow the series of disguises of a confidence-man who engages his fellow passengers in a continuous »masquerade« that acquires ever more ominous undertones. This protean figure valiantly champions faith in one’s fellow beings versus pessimism and misanthropy and, in Chapter 24, proclaims he »never could abide irony; something Satanic about irony« (Melville 1984, 986). This link between the critical principle, laughter, and its anti-patron the devil, clearly reinstates a major Romantic theme (cf. Gillespie 1990b) that made its first major — and lastingly influential — appearance in the novelist Jean Paul Richter’s treatise Die Vorschule der Ästhetik (Introductory Course in Aesthetics, 1804). In the process of our hearing various schemers assert goodness, everything is called into question in the novel: Certificates of value become suspect, because we learn that bogus stock and counterfeit money are being put in circulation, and the markets rigged. Likewise, American philosophy and letters are unmasked insofar as Melville lets us hear the (to his ear) hollowness of such thinly veiled luminaries as Emerson, »a kind of cross between a Yankee peddler and a Tartar priest« (Melville 1984, 1043), whose mystic hieroglyphics remain inscrutable blanks in Chapter 36. Religious mandates and charitable undertakings are slandered as just clever games. The whole rationale for America as a nation is impugned; the New World is a collective expression of greed, mendacity, and folly. The taint touches even the revered Holy Scriptures, because these, too, in this novel, ultimately mask a divine deception. In a million lifetimes no detective could possibly uncover more criminality than this book brings to light — as if the endless serial labors and withering social insights of a Vidocq could hardly cope with what the ship of fools carries on board. Melville exercises a negative Romantic irony of unremitting deconstruction of his own society. His gallows humor compels us gradually to recognize a frightening presence not adequately »read« by the crowd of fools: the various roles of the confidence-man may be avatars of the principle of cosmic undoing. As Bruce Franklin has suggested, on the basis of Melville’s lifelong avid anthropological investigations, the god Shiva of Hindu mythology may emerge more demonstrably in the second half of the novel as the »Cosmopolitan«. He has appeared in Chapter 1 like the positive hope of Vishnu, a Krishna or Christ or Manco Capac, the figure of a potential savior from the East. But our increasingly more adequate reading — in analogy to the intensifying negative revelation posited by Melville’s writing — empties all seemingly rock-hard textual systems of their pretended meaning. The psychological truth of the avatar’s salvational teachings leads to ruin, while the historical truth of the succession of avatars makes the god’s own ruin a joke, and in this sense the god »deceives« men into perdition. One of the funniest and scariest sequences of chapters recounts the unequal contest between the champion, but merely mortal, bunko artist who goes by the confidence-inspiring name Charles Noble, and the »Cosmopolitan«, perhaps the incarnation of the trickster god himself under the apt label Frank Goodman. Noble’s »poetical eulogy of the press« in Chapter 30 restates the Rabelaisian equation of the triumph of Humanism (printing press) and of the Christian-Dionysian civilizatory principle (wine press); but the evidence shows both are now distinctly superseded by »the spirit of Wall Street« (money press). The authorial commentary on European civilization as a long-range process of inflation and counterfeiting that must collapse becomes pointed. This novel furnishes an example of the radical extreme to which a culturally self-consuming Romantic irony could go. As co-detectives under Melville’s tutelage, we are encouraged

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to respond to the mythological clues under the surface of American discourse, as in the final eerie chapter when »The Cosmopolitan Increases in Seriousness« (ch. 45). He rebukes mention of the Apocalypse as distasteful, and his very last act is to extinguish the lamp, leaving us with its stench in the darkness. Melville may be patterning the »strange boy« who sells foolproof money belts with a »Counterfeit Detector« (Melville 1984, 1106) in this chapter directly after Hindu depictions of a child who appears announcing the destructive phase of Shiva. The old man who broods over the apocryphal books in the Bible is deflected from using the Detector by the cosmopolitan, who, like a Dupin, reads his thoughts: »you hoped you did not distrust the creature [i.e., mankind]; for that would imply distrust of the Creator« (ibid., 1107). Our question, since we hold the either cynical or anguished book The Confidence-Man in our hands, naturally is whether this perversely doubt-filled text is a detector from the application of which the beguiling textuality of our world distracts us. The time arrives in our pondering of the »Bible«, the book generically, when we notice the oddity of apocryphal writings — those texts that seem to undercut the authenticity of the authoritative scriptures by the very fact they are pushed aside as being of dubious authenticity. The rising positivistic fields of anthropology and comparative religion loom as the mysterious intrusion of alternate revelations and myths that function as disturbing apocrypha. Except for the excursus in Chapter 44 on truly original characters of world-historical significance like Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Milton’s Satan, only the Shiva principle remains awesome in this essay-novel in contrast to the parade of deconstructed all-too-human fabrications. In this respect, Melville resurrects some of the deepest anxieties of the Romantic mind, while anticipating the obsession with intertextuality in the twentieth century. 3.

The afterlife of the Romantic detective

As the success of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock stories will prove, the detective can play a positive role in the Victorian popular imagination. By possessing both artistic talent and reasoning power, the gentleman or lady sleuth, as invented by Hoffman and Poe among others, occupies a special position in society. One of the last of this distinct breed (although he was to be resuscitated in the twentieth-century Classical mode in a modernized guise in the nobles Wimsey and Campion) is Robert Audley in Mary Braddon’s third-person novel Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Audley combines meticulous scientific research and induction with independence from superficial rules. He is an aristocrat who finally cannot evade the terrible responsibility of investigating his beautiful, but criminal aunt, and who saves his uncle and others by taking the law into his own hands after determining her guilt. Audley’s penetration by a secret passage into his aunt’s boudoir and his viewing of her portrait there as a pre-Raphaelite beauty, a belle dame sans merci, has a lush voyeuristic quality. In addition to the erotic suggestion of such a scene, Braddon also provides us through the detective nephew with telling glimpses into the social problems of the poor. Having intervened to restore decency and order, the otherwise phlegmatic and scholarly lawyer Audley finally settles down to an idyllic Victorian life of self-cultivation in a congenial marriage. We hear very similar Victorian sentiments about how unpleasant it is to acknowledge duty and necessity in the present condition of society from the distaff side through the

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character Mrs. Gladden who speaks under this professional pseudonym in Andrew Forrester’s first-person novel The Female Detective (1864). Her fictive service as a detective predates by fifty years the actual appointment of policewomen in Britain. But what does the nineteenth century otherwise make of the Romantic detective’s hermeneutic superiority and the story-form of crime-solving? The answer is complicated, first of all, by the fact that, while strains of Romanticism survived all opposition, the struggle to overcome Romanticism or tame it (Nemoianu 1984) became an important part of the Realist program. Accordingly the bias was increasingly toward exhibiting the detective’s scientific endowment and ratiocination, as in Henry Cauvain’s and Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories of the eccentric sleuths Maximilien Heller (a user of opium) and Sherlock Holmes (a user of cocaine) from the late 1880s onward. The late Romantic strain puts in its appearance in Spain in a work by the popular short story and novel writer Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. His »El Clavo: Causa célebre« (The Nail: A Cause Celebre, 1854) has the hallmarks of a Hoffmannesque tale, steeped in Romantic irony, and replete with doubling. Our field of attention is divided between the sophisticated principal narrator who is constantly referencing older and contemporary European literature, and his friend, a meticulous judge, who is fated to play the role of detective when a skull is unearthed riven by a nail. Through swift flow of internal narratives and shifts between present and past as well as place, we follow steps in the discovery that both men have met and known the tragic anti-heroine, the judge’s lost love and mother of his child. She appears under several names over the course of events in this rapidly paced story, because her predicament necessitates disguises and causes deep existential changes. She proves to be the murderess of her oppressive husband, the case which the detective-magistrate zealously solves and pursues to the end, even though the verdict will mean her execution and his own grief. Well the most extreme expression of the Positivist recasting of the detective story is Benito Pérez Galdós’s novella La sombra (The Shadow, 1870), in which a first-person narrator becomes interested in a cranky recluse who represents the pathological heritage of Romanticism and, so the narrator will opine, earlier cultural backwardness. As psychoanalytic interlocutor, the unnamed detective narrator conducts his resistant subject through a therapeutic cure by getting him to talk out and reconstruct his story until he arrives at the recognition that he killed his own wife out of insane jealousy. The mentally disturbed recluse Anselmo (obviously named after the character in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, 1805/15) finally exorcizes the doppelgänger figure Paris, really his own repressed nature (but also modeled on a false friend Alejandro), who one day stepped down from a picture on a wall in his house to torment him. Like Gothic fiction before it, the detective story proliferated once its popular appeal was recognized. It often was employed internally as a core plot in novels with several plot strands, as in Wilkie Collin’s celebrated The Moonstone (1868), in which Inspector Cuff upholds the honor of the law. Charles Dickens anticipated the possibilities of interpolating a detective subplot in his even more complicated novel Bleak House (1852–53), in which the detective Sergeant Bucket solves the murder of the despicable Tulkinghorn. The trivialization and domestication of detective fiction suited the Biedermeier and Victorian age. Many writers of mysteries or thrillers such as Eugène Sue, in the action-filled Les mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris, 1842), never really grasped what Poe had simultaneously created as a Romantic ironist. But occasionally

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someone added a new wrinkle to the narrative game, as when Emile Gaboriau introduced the device of the red-herring in his story »Le petit vieux des Batignolles« (The little old man of Batignolles, probably written in the 1860s). As T. J. Hale has noted (Hale 1984, 19–20), it is interesting that Holmes — in contrast to his creator Doyle — is dismissive of his key predecessors, both Poe’s Dupin and Gaboriau’s Lecoq (from Monsieur Lecoq, 1869), whereas Poe’s Dupin was dismissive earlier of Vidocq. Through this familiar form of playful intertextual reference a rapidly developing genre incorporates self-reflection. A comparable moment occurred for the picaresque when in the opening of Francisco de Úbeda’s La pícara Justina (The Picara Justina, 1606) the roguess Justina is poised with black pen in hand and vows to outstrip Celestina, Lazarillo, Guzmán de Alfarache, and all her predecessors male and female alike. Because such self-reflectivity was thoroughly imbedded at the fin-de-siècle, it is hardly surprising that Absurdist-Symbolist forms of detection appeared on the scene. Knut Hamsun’s novel Mysterier (Mysteries, 1892) and Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg’s novella La bolsa de huesos (The Bag of Bones, 1896) serve to illustrate this generic shift that reinstantiated Romantic irony and most immediately prepared for the Metaphysical variety of detective story. In the Norwegian author Hamsun’s third-person novel we follow a flamboyant detective figure with big-city manners and wide-ranging knowledge, Johann Nilsen Nagel, who arrives out of nowhere in garish fauvist clothes to engage in a mysterious struggle with a deformed antagonist, a dwarf, in a small Norwegian town and who tries to solve the recent probable murder of a schoolteacher. Nagel is contemptuous of conventional virtues, bourgeois optimism, and routine problem-solving; his odd behavior and obsession with unexplained details augment the plethora of clues in the book which yield no discernible pattern, so that we readers begin to follow the detective, too, with suspicion. The novel Mysterier thwarts generic expectations when Nagel punishes himself as a desperate failure by drowning in the harbor, where he first arrived, and we never learn the answers to the many haunting questions his investigations have raised. The Argentinean author Holmberg’s grandfather frequented Romantic circles around Tieck, and Holmberg prolonged the Romantic fantastic tale in Spanish with a flair reminiscent especially of Hoffmann and Poe. For instance, his short story »El ruiseñor y el artista« (The Nightingale and the Artist, 1876) presents a painter’s Pygmalion-like encounter with spiritual luminosity that assumes female form, but we can never be certain whether the protagonist has dreamt or hallucinated his privileged moment. Romantic irony reigns supreme in the tale Horacio Kalibang o los autómatas (Horacio Kalibang or the Automatons, 1879), set in Germany and involving the confusion between who is a real human being and who a clever automaton; the Hoffmannian cast includes the witty narrator, his smug bourgeois uncle, and a scientistartificer who claims to realize the tenets of materialism. Holmberg was a scientist with diverse research interests and a professor of forensic medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. The first-person protagonist of his novella La bolsa de huesos (The Bag of Bones), too, is a respected professor of forensic medicine, who meticulously solves a crime in cooperation initially with the authorities, after a bag of bones — hence the title — has been dropped at his door. In digressions couched in terms of how a detective story could be constructed, the professor explains everything to us readers step by step as he progresses. Sometimes these statements occur in the form of conversations in veiled language with a Watson-like companion who may be a figment of his imagination or a ruse to foil the authorities. Then on reaching the solution, the professor

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conceals the criminal’s identity. He protects the murderer out of genuine compassion, which like other Romantic gentlemen sleuths he believes transcends any legality. In answer to police complaints over his highhanded behavior, he invokes the pretext that his written account is just a fiction and he incorporates this twist in his manuscript for press before our eyes. The police are stymied, while the reader is left hovering in a strange metafictional limbo at the close. Holmberg, who openly celebrates his literary ties in the tale La pipa de Hoffmann (Hoffmann’s Pipe, 1876), would readily have appreciated Jorge Luis Borges’s later Metaphysical detective narratives and recognized his own role as a literary mediator. Bibliography Alarcón, Pedro Anonio de. 1982. »El clavo« y otros relatos de misterio y crimen. Ed. by Joan Estruch. Barcelona: Editorial Fontamara. Anon. 1976. Richmond; or, Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Officer. New York: Dover; London: Constable. Balzac, Honoré de. 1989. Le Père Goriot. Ed. Gérard Gengembre. Paris: Pocket. Böker, Uwe. 1981. »Englische Juristen entdecken Poes Detektivgeschichten«. Arcadia. 16: 49–55. Braddon, Mary. 1985. Lady Audley’s Secret. London: Virago. Cauvain, Henry. 1997. Maximilien Heller. Toulouse: Editions Ombres. Collins, Wilkie. 1999. The Moonstone. Ed. by John Sutherland. Oxford: Oxford UP. Conrad, Joseph. 1953. Heart of Darkness. Tales of Land and Sea. Garden City, NY: Hanover House. De Quincey, Thomas. 2000. »On Murder as One of the Fine Arts«. Works. 7 vols. Ed. by Grevel Lindop. London: Pickering and Chatto. 6: 110–33. Dickens, Charles. 1996. Bleak House. Ed. by Stephen Gil. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP. Diderot, Denis. 1971. Jacques le fataliste et son maître. Œuvres complètes, édition chronologique. 14 vols. Ed. by Roger Lewinter. 12: 17–325. Doyle, Arthur Conan. 1975. »A Study in Scarlet« and »The Sign of Four«. New York: Berkley Books. Forrester, Jr., Andrew. 1978. The Female Detective. Three Victorian Detective Novels. New York: Dover Publications. Part 1. Franklin, H. Bruce. 1963. The Wake of the Gods. Stanford: Stanford UP. Gaboriau, Emile. 2001. Le petit vieux des Batignolles. Paris: Grand caractère. Gillespie, Gerald. 1981. »Romantic Oedipus«. Goethezeit: Studien zur Erkenntnis Goethes und seiner Zeitgenossen: Festschrift für Stuart Atkins. Ed. by Gerhart Hoffmeister. Bern, München: Francke. 331–45. ———. 1990a. »The Romantic Discourse of Detection in Nineteenth-Century Fiction«. Fiction, narratologie, texte, genre: Actes du Symposium de l’Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée, XIème Congrès international (Paris, août 1985). Ed. by Jean Bessière. New York, Paris: Lang. 77–95. ———. 1990b. »The Devil’s Art«. European Romanticism: Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models. Ed. by Gerhart Hoffmeister. Detroit: Wayne State UP. 77–95. Godwin, William. 1992. Collected Novels and Memoirs. 4 vols. Vol. 3: Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams. Ed. by Pamela Clemit. London: Pickering and Chatto. Grossvogel, David I. 1979. Mystery and Its Fictions: From Oedipus to Agatha Christie. Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins UP. Hale, T. J. (ed.). 1983. Great French Detective Stories. New York: Vanguard Press. Hamsun, Knut. 1992. Mysterier. Gyldendal: Norsk Forlag. ———. 1984. Mysteries. Trans. by Gerry Bothmer. New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers. Hoffmann, E.T.A. 1985. Sämtliche Werke. 6 vols. Ed. by Wulf Segebrecht, Hartmut Steinecke, et al. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Der Sandmann, 3: 11–49. Das Fräulein von Scuderi, 4: 780–853. Holmberg, Eduardo Ladislao. 1957. Cuentos fantásticos. Ed. by Antonio Pagés Larraya. Buenos Aires: Hachette.

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Holquist, Michael. 1972–73. »Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction«. New Literary History. 3: 135–156. Hugo, Victor. 1989. Les misérables. 3 vols. Ed. by René Journet. Paris: Flamarion. Jean Paul. 1975. Werke. 12 vols. Ed. by Norbert Müller. Vol. 9: Die Vorschule der Ästhetik. Lits, Marc. 1999. Le roman policier: Introduction à la théorie et à l’histoire d’un genre littéraire. Liège: Editions du CEFAL. López de Úbeda, Francisco. 1984. Libro de entretenimiento de la pícara Justina. Ed. by Bruno Mario Damiani. Madrid: J.P. Turanzas. Maxwell, Richard. 1992. The Mysteries of Paris and London. Charlottesville: Virginia UP. Melville, Herman. 1984. Pierre, or the Ambiguities; Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile; The Piazza Tales; The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade; Uncollected Prose; Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Ed. by Harrison Hayford. New York: Library of America. Müllner, Amandus Gottfried Adolph. 1913. »Der Kaliber: Aus den Papieren eines Kriminalbeamten«. Bibliothek wertvoller Novellen und Erzählungen. Ed. by Otto Hellinghaus. Freiburg: Herdersche Verlagsbuchhandlung. 14: 141–223. Nemoianu, Virgil. 1984. The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Nodier, Charles. 1836. »Le bibliomane ou le nouveau Cardillac«. La Gazette des Tribunaux. 23 October. Pérez Galdós, Benito. 1966. La sombra. Ed. by Rodolfo Cardona. New York: Norton. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1966. Complete Stories and Poems. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Sebeok, Thomas A., and Jean Umiker-Sebeok. 1983. »›You Know My Method‹: A Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes«. The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Ed. by Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Shelley, Mary. 1999. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. Ed. by D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Spanos, William V. 1972. »The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on Postmodern Literary Imagination«. Boundary 2. 1.1: 147–168. Sue, Eugène. 1977. Les mystères de Paris. 4 vols. Paris: Hallier. Tannert, Mary W., and Kratz, Henry (trans., ed.). 1999. Early German and Austrian Detective Fiction: An Anthology. Jefferson, NC, London: McFarland. Thackeray, William Makepeace. 1975. The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. [The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a Romance of the Last Century, by Fitznoodle.] Ed. by J.P. Donleavy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tieck, Ludwig. 1963. »Der blonde Eckbert«. Werke. 4 vols. Ed. by Marianne Thalmann. 2: 7–26. Vidocq, Eugène-François. 1976. Memoirs of Vidocq, Principal Agent of the French Police until 1827; and Now Proprietor of the Paper Manufactory at St Mandé. 4 vols. London: Hunt and Clarke (vols. 1–2); Whittaker, Treacher, and Arnot (vols. 3–4), 1828–29. Repr. New York: Arno Press. ———. 1998. Mémoires de Vidocq, chef de la police de sûreté jusqu’en 1827, aujourd’hui propriétaire et fabricant de papiers à Saint-Mandé. 1828–29. Repr. Mémoires; Les Voleurs. Ed. by Francis Lacassin. Paris: Robert Laffont.

Récit, story, tale, novella Santiago Rodriguez Guerrero-Strachan The Romantic period witnesses the first steps in the formation of modern short fiction. Subtle and continuous changes gave birth to what has been called the modern short story, indicating both its pertinence to the nineteenth century and its capacity to reflect the experiences of contemporary society. This does not mean that the short story is a Romantic product, since the larger shift comprises the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth; but the foundations laid in Romantic literature, particularly in America and Russia, would influence its development decisively. The short story should not be considered a new form coming to light in the nineteenth century. To start with: it is part of a worldwide literary tradition originally oral in nature. The different national folktales would play a relevant part in its creation: Folktales, ballads, fables, legends and the like ushered in this new form. The important role of the oral tradition in the development of the short story, both traditional and contemporary, has to be indicated and accounted for. The fictions of Washington Irving or Fernán Caballero have their roots in the folktale, partly because of the importance played by the folklore revival during Romanticism. As a consequence, in its early stages national folk traditions determined the direction of the short narrative as well as its denomination. Also, folk traditions coexisted with a current of literary short fiction over many centuries. The influence of the moral tale in the manner of Daniel Defoe’s »A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal« (1706), the Spectator-type narratives, the eighteenth- century Gothic narratives, the French oriental tale and the philosophical tale in the manner of Voltaire marked a rising interest in psychological analysis as well as in verisimilitude that would gradually pervade Romantic short fiction. The overlapping of short fiction with other narrative forms was common during the nineteenth century, and eventually resulted in a rich cross-fertilisation of the narrative form. What characterises Romantic short fiction to a certain extent is an unstable balance between an impulse towards Realism — in the sense of verisimilitude — and an interest in the unknown, as expressed in fantastic, Gothic or fairy tales among other narrative modes, this being a consequence of the romance tradition it comes from. There can be little doubt that the emphasis on minute details in the stories signals that interest in Realism. However it cannot be denied that the abundance of visions, nightmares or other types of psychological manifestations such as present in Edgar Allan Poe or E.T.A. Hoffmann, the allegorical mode as in Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the use of non-realistic literary strategies as in Ludwig Tieck — all imply that the realistic detail is aimed at creating verisimilitude and is not concerned with the aesthetics of Realism, although a move towards the latter can be subtly perceived as the period progresses. Periodicals have to be taken into account in the development of short fiction. The nineteenth century sees the growth of periodicals as the most appropriate publishing medium for short fiction. The material and social growth of magazines as continuing vehicles for their work allowed the writers a wider space for publishing narratives than a single issue publication. The interest of the readers moved from the essay, or the moral tale, to a more fictional kind of writing. Thus, a large number of magazines and collections appeared. In Britain these appeared mainly during the Christmas season and works of different writers were normally grouped

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under the same generic topic. Such annuals probably influenced the authors little, if at all, but fed the predilection of readers for short fiction and made editors aware of the opportunities that were presented to them. The rise of the short story in America is due both to the demand for written material by newspapers and magazines, and to the influence exerted on American culture by English and German Romanticism. Magazines were becoming a popular means of publishing in America from 1714 on, and helped shape the modern American short story. Writers had to adapt to the demands of the reading public if they wanted their stories to be published, although authors did not always respond to the tastes of the readership. Magazines encouraged short pieces of prose, usually not serialised, to feed the intellectual needs of their readers, and authors were willing to fulfil such needs, even if that meant resorting to sentimental, morbid or populist narratives. In France, as well as in other countries, the first decades of the nineteenth century also marked the rise of the press and, as a consequence, a growth in the number of professional writers. The readers’ appetite for short narrative pieces gave rise to an increase in such publications in weekly and daily journals and newspapers. Subsequent critical reviews were not always enthusiastic about the possibilities that the new form was opening up to writers. Despite the early negative reactions, the press helped to spread the new form. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ludwig Tieck and E.T.A. Hoffmann published their stories individually in magazines like Die Horen (Horae). The most important French magazines were La Revue de Paris (The Review of Paris) and La Revue de Deux Mondes (The Review of Two Worlds), both modelled on established British literary reviews such as The Edinburgh Magazine and The Polar Star. It is not surprising that they also published British material, together with German authors like Hoffmann, whose stories were published extensively in the French periodical press. This resulted in a growing vogue for the fantastic tale. Spanish and Latin American authors published their works in El Museo Universal (The Universal Museum), El Contemporáneo (The Contemporary) and La América (America), among many other periodical publications. The growth in the number of journals was also a trend in Russia. Though many did not last long, they were important for the circulation of Russian short fiction, as for example Biblioteka dlia chteniia (The Reading Library, 1834–64), or Sovremennik (The Contemporary, 1836–66). 1.

Short fiction in the German-speaking countries

»Erzählung« (tale) is the generic term in German Romanticism that describes a short piece of fictional writing. Its wider field of reference includes »Märchen« (fairy tales), »Sagen« (folktales) and »Novellen« (novellas). During the first part of the century, the fairy tale and the novella were predominant, although this was partly due to the interest of authors like the brothers Grimm. Older kinds of folk stories were also present to a certain extent. The boundary line between the fairy tale and the novella was not always apparent since in many cases, as for example in Tieck’s works, the production of short fiction resulted in the blending of both forms. Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Refugees, 1795) marks the beginning of the German novella. The work is a framed narrative in which a group of people tell stories for several days while they are living in a mansion cut off from the historical process of the French Revolution. Practice and theory keep the same pace in this work.

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The stories deal with the issues of verisimilitude and Realism in literature. The narrators state that the fantastic, represented by the fairy tale, does not belong to the realm of the novella. The model for Goethe is, of course, Boccaccio’s Decameron, but it is also of great importance that the narrative constitutes a single interwoven unit and is not considered a collection of independent tales. From that moment onwards, Goethe’s cycle of stories was to be taken as a model for the Early Romantic authors, mainly because of the »Ferdinand«-novella, situated in the middle of the cycle. The German term »Novelle« was not to appear until a later period, and these narratives were initially labelled as moralische Erzählungen (moral stories). It is not simply that Goethe has not yet thought of the appropriate term for the form. The earlier name bears on it the stamp of its link to the folktale. The idea of the story as containing a moral is an ambiguous feature in the Decameron that can also be found in the folk story tradition. Despite this early beginning, Goethe’s other novellas belong to a later period in his literary career, when he published his work with the generically eponymous title Novelle (Novella, 1828). In 1827 a conversation takes place with Eckermann in which Goethe defines the novella: »What is a novella but an unheard-of event that has occurred?«1 Following Wieland, Goethe claims that the novella remains outside the realm of fantasy. At first it should deal simply with the actual world of contemporary society. But the adjective »unerhört« adds a nuance of great importance to the genre. It must contain something strange which causes surprise, or is unexpected. The classic novella, then, is a short linear narrative which reaches its climax in an unheard of and original episode. This last path would be taken by the Early Romantics, who constructed their narratives around a turning point, as in the writings of Tieck and Heinrich von Kleist. It was an approach which allowed narrative strategies to blend the realistic bias of the novella with the non-realistic aspects of short narratives, such as fairy tales, folktales, Gothic or oriental tales. The action in Goethe’s late novellas is related to the ethical aspect of the narratives and brings into confrontation two opposing principles. Such an opposition is reflected structurally in the motifs. The ethical content is stressed in his last works, and causes what I consider a move away from Boccaccio’s work. Even more important is the fact that the stress has shifted away from the external action itself to the symbolic significance of the events. This fact brings about important changes in technique. Goethe’s last works are based not on clearly significant events, but rather on a subtly technical composition in which the underlying current of events, symbols and meanings determines the whole novella. This crucial generic term is first mentioned in Friedrich Schlegel’s »Nachricht von den poetischen Werken des Johannes Boccaccio« (Notice about Boccaccio’s Poetic Works 1801). He defines the novella as an anecdote, an unknown story, which should arouse interest by itself, without reference to the ordinary course of human culture and history. He points out that retelling a story already known is possible, provided that an element of novelty is introduced. The author’s point of view becomes another relevant trait, even superior to the content of the narrative, and allows the author to express his own subjectivity through the objectivity of the storytelling. He thus creates a literary work, since the anecdote exposes an idea of the world. Although the novella may have its origins in the allegory or the parable, it is the realistic mode that is emphasised in the nineteenth century. No less important is the role played by wit in the 1.

»Was ist eine Novelle anders als eine sich ereignete, unerhörte Begebenheit?« (Eckermann 1982, 194 f.).

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structure of the tale. This device allowed the writer to structure the narrative on two separate levels, and came to determine the subsequent development of the novella, as can be seen in Goethe’s, Tieck’s or Kleist’s stories. Finally, Schlegel claims that the novella exhibits something characteristic of a cultivated audience, which in turn further encourages the author. Here Schlegel also points to the origin of the »Rahmenerzählung« (framed narrative), the paramount example of which is, at least for him, Boccaccio’s Decameron. Ludwig Tieck defines the novella more broadly than his predecessors. In fact, it can be any prose narrative, provided that it has a turning point in its development: it (the story) will »always have a strange, striking turning point«.2 The conclusion should be unexpected and logically convincing. Tieck departs from the early Goethean realistic mode and pursues the path of fantastic literature, producing other forms of short fiction in that style such as the »Kunstmärchen« (artistic fairy tale), »dämonisches Märchen« (demonic or Gothic tale) or »tragisches Märchen« (tragic tale). The prologue to the eleventh volume of his collected works displays his literary tradition. There he claims he is more interested in Cervantes’ novellas than in Boccaccio’s. This statement is important because it indicates how the emphasis is now placed on ideas, presented in the form of a discussion, rather than on events, and points to a shift from the past to contemporary events and ideas. Moreover, Cervantes is named as one of the most outstanding practitioners of an ironical literature, a distinction that would be taken into account by Tieck. It is literary irony that informs his fictional writings and allows the move from a realistic to an unrealistic mode. He also introduces the »Reflexionsnovelle« (novella of ideas), in which the discussion of an abstract idea sustains the literary work. The external form fades away largely because of the subject matter. Examples are Die Gemälde (The Paintings, 1821) and Der Mondsüchtige (The Sleepwalker, 1831). However, between 1812 and 1816, in the early phase of his career, Tieck had published a collection of short stories under the title of Phantasus. The work resembles a framed narrative, but in fact the framework was written in 1811, after the stories were already extant, with the sole aim of grouping a miscellany of writings under the same heading. The collection contains Der Runenberg (Rune Mountain, 1802) and Der Blonde Eckbert (Eckbert the Fair, 1796). The latter is a piece of short fiction in which a set of elements contribute to the depiction of a marvellous world in the fashion of a »Kunstmärchen«, yet the narrative keeps oscillating between a fairy story and a tale of terror. Kleist’s names for short fiction still show a certain fluctuation, using terms from an earlier phase in the development of the short stories such as legend, chronicle, or anecdote. It is, however, most remarkable that he followed Goethe’s path in calling his novellas moral tales when he published them in 1810. Nevertheless, he departs from Goethe in other relevant aspects. His stories show no framework and the narrator is not the usual objective teller of the stories. A lack of the social element fundamental in Boccaccio’s novellas and in those of other early authors is notable in Kleist’s works. His is the work of an author who stands midway between the Classic and the Romantic German novella. He created what has been called the metaphysical novella. In Kleist’s works, the irrational element becomes more relevant than in previous authors. It is the product of a universe whose main characteristic is antithesis. As a consequence, his novellas deal not with the natural course of events, but with the exceptional, with what is strange, unusual or 2.

»nur wird sie immer jenen sonderbaren auffallenden Wendepunkt haben« (Tieck 1829, lxxxviii).

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extraordinary. The themes of his work are related to the strangeness of his poetics, which allow both the historical and the exotic to constitute his main subject matter. Regarding the external form, Kleist’s works rely on the central idea and on the turning point which marks a shift in the course of events while the inclusion of the unexpected widens the scope of his novellas. Subsequent Romantic authors were to mark another stage in the introduction of the element of strangeness along with Tieck in his late writings. For him, as for E.T.A. Hoffmann, short fiction was to be the battleground of the uncanny. Particularly in Hoffmann’s stories, the uncanny would be present as the defining factor both in content and in form. His works share elements of the novella and the fairy tale, although he preferred to label them as the latter. »Die Automate« (The Automata, 1820) or »Der Sandmann« (The Sandman, 1817) were conceived as fantastic short stories. They are not a continuation of traditional fairy tales. In Hoffmann, as in Poe, the supernatural is primarily engendered in the mind of the narrator or main character. It does not come from outside as was customary in traditional oral tales. The uncanny is the outcome of a particular way of representing the world. Both the inner and the outer reality are represented from a multiplicity of different points of view that are contradictory. It signals man’s struggle against nature symbolically, the irrationality of the latter, the senselessness of this world and the nature of man. In »Der Sandmann«, the protagonist’s obsessive attempt to rationalise his fear of Coppelius and his behaviour towards Olympia may be part of his mania. It cannot be absolutely asserted that Nathanael’s problems are wholly psychological or that they are due to an external supernatural agency. The effect, then, is one of multileveled ambiguity. Hoffmann’s short stories are compiled in three collections: Phantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner, 1814–15); Nachtstücke (Night Pieces, 1817); and Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brotherhood, 1819–21). The latter is a framed narrative, with a framework written a posteriori to gather together the material that had already come out. Hoffmann anticipates the artist novel, since a great number of his stories have an artist, most of them a musician, as the main character. More relevant, however, is his use of the grotesque. Again, as in the case of Poe, the fantastic element creates a distorted vision of reality that comes to be expressed in literary terms as the grotesque and arabesque. Walter Scott discusses Hoffmann’s fantastic stories in his article »On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition«, published in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1827. Scott classifies Hoffmann’s stories as fantastic, and within this general framework, he terms them bizarre and grotesque. To him, Hoffmann’s tales are the product of a disturbed mind. Imagination teeters on the brink of the odd and the bizarre, because reason has no place at all in the narration. As a consequence, the creatures arising are not modelled on normal patterns of everyday experience. It is to be noted that in Hoffmann’s writings, both terms emphasized by Scott — bizarre and grotesque — are connected to the use of an abundance of realistic elements along with an ironic point of view in the narrative. The impression of Realism in fantastic short fiction should be considered, first of all, as a move from the eighteenth-century conception of the fantastic to that of the nineteenth century. Rejecting both a mere account of events and the supernatural world of fairies, the author can provide a more detailed account of the events, settings and reactions of the characters with the sole aim of provoking an uncanny reaction in the reader. By making the narrative more realistic, the author raises doubts in the readers’ minds about the reality of the events narrated, thus creating the modern fantastic narrative. Such an impression is reinforced by the often unreliable narrator,

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whose use of ironic devices undermines the global meaning of the story. By destabilising the secure everyday world, the narrator opens the door to the exploration of other worlds, made real by the use of language. 2.

Forms of prose fiction in Britain

The term »tale« is a generic name used in Great Britain after 1800 to refer to narratives which have a realistic basis and are modest in their scope and subject matter. They differ from the novel in their lack of greater artistic pretensions. The more common terms used to designate short fictions were »anecdote« and »sketch«. Consequently, the reader will find that both short stories and novels come under the heading of tale, as is the case with Sir Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth. The many collections of tales in the period include both long and short fiction. Tales of the heart, tales for youth, village anecdotes, national tales, moral tales, tales of fashionable life, tales of real life or tales of wonder are among the different modes of British Romantic short fiction. Such divisions usually refer to the topic of the narrative and share, as we have already seen, a common portrayal of everyday events without recourse to exoticism, heroism or fictionalisation of characters as in modern novels. A good example is Maria Edgeworth’s first work, Castle Rackrent, an Hibernian Tale Taken from Fact, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires before the Year 1782 (1800), which stands midway between a long novella and a short novel, the subtitle highlighting the main features of Realism and setting. Closer to the genre of short fiction are her stories for children, The Parent’s Assistant; or, Stories for Children (1796) and the two sets of Tales of Fashionable Life (1802 and 1819), including such important pieces as »Irish Tales«, »The Absentee« and »Ennui«. These literary forms, which we would nowadays consider proper tales, were thought of as minor genres in their time because of the subject matter and the lack of a moral lesson for the edification of society. Edgeworth is also worth mentioning because she acted as a model for Walter Scott, the major figure of the period. Her Irish Tales remain the pattern for Scott’s Scotch Novels. Terminological confusion is frequently present in Scott’s works. The series entitled Tales of My Landlord comprises four sets of works that should more properly be labelled as novels or romances: The Black Dwarf and Old Mortality (1816; 1st series), The Heart of Midlothian (1818; 2nd series), The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose (1819; 3rd series), Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous (1832; 4th series). There is, however, a remarkable fact that makes these series resemble a collection of short stories. Scott experiments with a variety of narrators, in the role of editors in some cases, that allow him to group the whole set of works in the overarching scheme of framed narratives. One of his most famous short stories is »Wandering Willie’s Tale«, a story inset in Redgauntlet (1824). Combining different modes of narration, Scott attempts a reflection on the relation of culture, language and identity, as he does in most of his writings, but this time much more searchingly and consciously. However, Scott’s two finest short stories, »The Highland Widow« and »The Two Drovers«, are to be found in the first series of Chronicles of the Canongate (1827). Mary Shelley wrote over a dozen tales and a novella, the majority of which were published in the magazine The Keepsake and collected posthumously in 1891. Her short stories are closer to the eighteenth-century tale than to modern short fiction, her interest lying in the description

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of characters rather than in a single action. The role of the third-person narrator becomes fundamental in the development of the story. Characters are presented statically, avoiding a more direct and personal introduction through action and dialogue. There is no doubt that the construction of periodicals obliged her to alter her storytelling approach because it required more space than the editors of the magazines permitted. As a consequence, in some of the stories she summarises several years in a few paragraphs. Essays as written at the end of the seventeenth century in the manner of Addison and Steele also shaped her conception of the short story, although the strong moralising tendency of the former is absent in Mary Shelley’s works of fiction. A good example is »Roger Dodsworth« (1826). It is told by a third-person narrator who controls the story and begins with the summary of Dodsworth’s life before his death. The narrator communicates all the traits that make up the character, except for a brief dialogue between Mr. Dodsworth and Dr. Hotham. This is the only action that falls outside the authorial responsibility of the narrator. The story continues in the style of an essay dealing with Mr. Dodsworth’s response to the new society he has found after his return to life. The narrator’s omnipresence allows him to address the reader directly with some remarks about the character. The end is once again controlled by the narrator in his comments about Roger Dodsworth’s death and its causes. 3.

Development of fiction in the United States

The development of short fiction in the United States shows the unstable path its authors were treading. By the end of the nineteenth century, the modern American short story had come into being thanks mainly to the writing and criticism of authors like Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville. A closer look at the literary careers of the first two shows a fluctuation between the modern and the old forms. Sketches, tales and short stories appear mingled in their published collections. In Irving’s case they are a miscellany of prose pieces bound together by a narrator, Geoffrey Crayon, who records the impressions of his voyages while transcribing some narratives he finds among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker. They are, consequently, a variation on the framed narrative; the presence of the narrator is too obvious in the first collection, The Sketch Book (1819). Only three narratives can be considered proper short stories: »Rip van Winkle«, »The Legend of Sleepy Hollow« and »The Spectre Bridegroom«. Curiously enough, the first two pieces represent Irving’s highest achievements in the field of short fiction. The rest of the prose pieces are sketches, a series of literary digressions centred on the personality of the narrator. As he explains in »The Author’s Account of Himself« in The Sketch Book, he collects a series of picturesque scenes in the style of other travellers for the entertainment of his friends. This assertion implies that the short narrative can hold to a non-narrative scheme, and that it can be closer to the local colour piece of prose. However, the most fertile and influential stories are the three cited above. The Sketch Book marks a turning point in American short fiction. Irving’s subsequent collections, Bracebridge Hall (1822), Tales of a Traveller (1824) and Tales of the Alhambra (1832) are mere attempts to repeat the success — in public acceptance and in literary accomplishment — of the former.

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Both »The Legend of Sleepy Hollow« and »Rip van Winkle« are emblematic in Irving’s short fiction. They deal with the making of a nation. From a formalist point of view they share certain characteristics that would lead to modern short fiction. To begin with, there is a clear distinction between the figures of the narrator and the author. Both stories are simply transcribed by the implicit author, who has found them in manuscripts, and gives them to the press. So, the narrative authority does not come from the author but from the narrator, a character who tells the story to an audience, as can be seen in the coda of »Sleepy Hollow«. The implicit author begins the story by stating the genre and the source. These remarks function as a means of separating the source of validation of the story from the author. The reader is reminded of pieces of short fiction from past centuries. By placing the source of the story beyond the author, real or implicit, Irving emphasises the fact that he is using the pattern of the European legend for his stories. The distance between the source and the reader allows the author to create a form that does not entirely bear the mark of modern narratives. At the same time, the presentation of a narrator, old Brouwer, who does not believe in tales of ghosts, indicates that Irving is parodying the mode and prefiguring the sceptical narrator who seeks a rational explanation to the facts. Providing the story with a postscript introduces a new turn. It signals the distance between author and narrator and between the protagonist and the imagined reader. Diedrich Knickerbocker acts as the transcriber of a story that he heard in a meeting. The narrator is an old gentleman, much in the style of Irving’s other narrators. He is a man close to the figure of the Romantic artist, estranged from society and living in an outdated realm of fantasies. »Rip van Winkle«, on the contrary, is presented as a real story, as Knickerbocker asserts in the note at the end. The authorial voice is authenticated by the narrator. The story does not come from a legendary source but from the real world. Irving moves away from the legendary mode by bringing the implied author’s time close to that of the implied reader. By stating that the character is a real person and not a fictitious entity, and by placing him in contemporary society, Irving creates the sensation of Realism that is peculiar to modern fiction. In general it can be said that Irving created the pattern of American modern short fiction. There are still artistic vacillations in his stories. The use of German legends and of the word »tale« to label his stories indicate that he is not aware he is setting the pattern for a new literary genre. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s literary career can be considered as paradigmatic for American Romanticism. For a long period he published short fiction anonymously in magazines. His first two collections, Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), sold poorly. Only after the success of The Scarlet Letter (1850), his major romance, did he gain literary reputation. He would then publish new editions of both volumes and only one new collection of short stories, The Snow Image, and Other Twice Told-Tales (1852). A long time before, he had designed three early collections of short fiction, Seven Tales of My Native Land, Provincial Tales and The Story Teller. These would be composed of stories previously published in magazines and, although they were never published, they left their imprint on Hawthorne’s subsequent narratives. They would also have the pattern of a framed narrative and would contain tales and modern short fiction. The characteristics observed in Irving’s or in the German authors’ short fiction can be applied to Hawthorne’s writing. He wrote in a period during which modern short fiction was being defined, theoretically and practically. His continual shifting from the sketch to modern short fiction cannot be explained except as the different steps the author was taking

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towards a definition of the pattern. It is worth noticing that he does not use the term »short story« in his prefaces. Hawthorne makes a distinction between »tale« and »sketch«, the former being a narrative of an uncertain length and the latter a short piece of prose fiction. Tales closer to the eighteenth-century manner such as »Sights from a Steeple« (1831), »The Procession of Life« (1843) or »Feathertop« (1852) are contemporary with »The Gentle Boy« (1832), »The Birthmark« (1843) or »Ethan Brand« (1850). The fluctuation between both forms — sketches and proper tale — cannot be ascribed to the imitation of Irving’s models or to a poetics estranged from his time. Hawthorne is a fully conscious writer, sometimes even more modern than Poe, and a more evidently »modern« author in the eyes of critics. There are two reasons for his oscillation. The spirit of the times sees modern short fiction as the modern literary genre proper to the age, but there is also an interest in tales resembling the folk tradition. Hawthorne’s main concern is the creation of the possibility of fiction, of what he called a neutral ground. He observes contemporary America and perceives the cultural conditions not being appropriate. His attempt is directed towards a literary use of Puritan history, whereas Irving and Poe turn towards Europe. By setting their narratives in Europe, or by making use of European folklore, they are signalling the lack of an American literary tradition. Their shift to American settings indicates that both Irving and Poe felt that the necessary conditions for American fiction had been fulfilled up to a certain extent. This is the main reason why they use Germany as the setting for some of their narratives, or why Irving makes use of German legends. Hawthorne, by contrast, attempts from the very beginning of his career to create American literary conditions, and his early stories must be read in such a way. An interest in Elizabethan literature together with European Romantic literature explains Hawthorne’s ambivalence concerning generic direction. The allegorical mode of his day coexists with a narrative more centred on the actual details of the outside world. The two types that can readily be distinguished are the sketch and the historical tale. The former is a more experimental literary form in which central features of modern short fiction such as the psychological profile of the characters, the plot, or the depiction of reality are absent. The second mode is much more in accordance with such characteristics and is inspired, according to the author, by historical events. In Rappaccini’s Daughter (1844), Hawthorne uses elements of allegory: Good and Evil characters, a symbolic garden and poison. He transforms Rappaccini’s Daughter into a modern story by providing a detailed account of facts and features both in the setting and in the characters. What is more, the narrative structure is simplified despite its initial external appearance, and no attempt is made to impose an external validation of the story as in legends or eighteenth-century stories. Edgar Allan Poe has a strong claim to be regarded as the founder of the modern short story. But such an assertion is subject to serious qualifications. Poe’s writings must be seen in the context of the achievements in short fiction attained by German authors and measured against those of his accomplished compatriot, Hawthorne. Because Poe first formulated an American poetics of short fiction, his contribution has, unsurprisingly, become the most influential in the history of the genre. It is totally consistent with his general poetics. In »The Philosophy of Composition« he claims that brevity, intensity and unity of impression are the central points to be considered in a work of art. In the review of Hawthorne’s stories, published in Graham’s

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Magazine in May 1842, under the title »Twice-Told Tales«, Poe expounds the main body of his theory. He stresses the idea of brevity: »not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour« (Poe 1984, 571). Then he insists that the genre of short fiction permits »a vast variety of modes or inflections of thought and expression (the ratiocinative, for example, the sarcastic or the humorous)« (ibid., 573). Most of his narratives first appeared in magazines. His first collection of short fiction, Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque, was published in 1839. In 1845 he brought out another collection, entitled Tales, which had been selected by the editor Everett Duyckink. He is remembered as the chief creator of the American stream of Gothic fiction: »Ligeia« (1838), »The Fall of the House of Usher« (1839); terror stories »The Black Cat«, (1843); detective stories »The Murders of the Rue Morgue«, (1841), »The Purloined Letter«, (1844); and science fiction »The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall«, (1835). All these forms, however, spring from the literary principle of rationality. Poe’s stories can be analysed as the exemplification of the use of the power of reason in literature. The distinguishing feature of his narrative is probably that of an obsessive character who tells his story. The narrative voice resulting from the union of protagonist and narrator provides the character with a tight narrative structure, in which the difference between reality and imagination is not clear-cut. Poe’s own stories exemplify his theory of the short story. The beginning of »The Black Cat« points directly towards its conclusion. The narrator subtly reveals the mode of the story in the first sentence by alluding to the uncanny via the opposition of the words »wild« and »homely«. It is a reference to the appearance of the cat in the tomb as well as an indication to the reader about the type of story he is going to read. The reference to the act of writing points both to the importance of literature and to the fact that storytelling is a kind of confession. Finally, his reference to belief deals with the ontological status of literature in relation to the world, but also with the literary mode of the fantastic. By creating a structure so tightly oriented to the conclusion, Poe had to adapt the role of the narrator to his literary aims. This role is attached in this instance to the main character, a person of obsessive behaviour, who sees the world through the distorting glass of his mania. Reality is focused through a twisted mental perception. This implies a very high degree of subjectivity on his part, and leads to focusing on a single subject, a device which brings about a unity of effect besides increasing the impression of verisimilitude in the narratives. Characters in Poe’s fiction often represent a type of mania. They are not abstract representations of concepts. The details that the narrator offers together with the rational explanations of the characters’ behaviour, as well as the relationship between the characters and the location, contribute to providing them with psychological features that make them appear real. As a model of the above we can point to Roderick Usher. The final outcome of the story is anticipated in the narrator’s early description of the house and his comments on its material decay as well as in the close identification of the house with Roderick himself. As in most of Poe’s stories, the beginning acts as a theoretical introduction to the narrative and presents the reader with the generic elements that will be found later in the story. »The Fall of the House of Usher« can be classified as a fantastic or as a symbolic story, even as a realistic narrative depending on the interpretation of the narrator’s first comments. In Poe’s stories, such ambiguity is achieved via the uncertainty caused by narrative strategies, particularly those referring to the fantastic and

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the ratiocinative. Masterfully, Poe achieves a combination of the conventions of the realistic and romance forms which marked the path that the short story was to follow from his Romantic poetics to nineteenth century Realism. 4.

Fiction in France

In France, as elsewhere, there is a confusion in the terms used to designate narratives of short length during Romanticism. »Conte« (tale) and »nouvelle« (novella) were used almost indiscriminately. There is a preference for tale before 1835, whereas afterwards novella is used more frequently. »Anecdote« (anecdote) was sometimes used to designate very short pieces, not to mention the terms »veillée« (evening gathering) or »légende« (legend). By 1830, writers such as Honoré de Balzac and Prosper Mérimée had begun to experiment with short narratives in which certain formal traits can be distinguished. The »conte« focuses on the telling of the story; it has an ancient origin in the folk tale, contains elements of fantasy, and does not claim to be real or authentic in its topic or in its setting. The »nouvelle«, a genre with its origins in a literary tradition going back to the seventeenth century, was centred around Realism and verisimilitude. The insistence on unrealistic narrative elements is apparent in the marvellous or fairy tale aspects of the »conte« and in the modern fantasy of the »nouvelle«. The main narrative modes of short fiction published during those years are the »tableaux des moeurs« (local colour sketches), represented by Prosper Mérimée’s Mateo Falcone (1829), among others, the historical story, such as Stendhal’s Vanina Vanini (1829), and the fantastic story, for example, Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia (1855) or Charles Nodier’s stories. A type of narrative depicting remote parts of the world, above all the Orient, also appeared at this time. The central feature of the stories of the Romantic period is the desire to create a sense of realism and of authenticity. This concern is clearly derived from an interest in Hoffmann and is apparent in the German writer’s stories as well as in Poe’s. In a certain sense, this preoccupation with the fantastic is linked to the grotesque, but also to romantic irony. It is then understandable that the »récit excentrique« (the ironic tale) should appear in French Romantic literature, and that Lawrence Sterne should influence writers like Théophile Gautier or Nodier. The grotesque takes two paths, that of the purely fantastic and that of the ironic piece of narration, both playing an important role in French literature. In 1854, Gérard de Nerval published Les filles du feu (Girls of Fire), a collection of short stories comprising different narrative modes. The stories had already been published in periodicals, and some of them were somewhat revised to adapt them to the collection. The epistolary story, the poetic prose piece, the novella, the humorous piece of narrative or the essay are among the modes contained in the volume. Nerval had previously published other collections such as Contes et facéties (Short Stories and Sketches) in 1852 or Les faux saulniers (The Salt Smugglers) two years before. But Les filles du feu marked the highest peak in his literary career. When compiling them, he had in mind the pattern of framed narratives. The prologue, a letter to A. Dumas, served as the general frame and linked the different stories. Aurélia, his last literary work and to a certain extent his spiritual testament, is a piece of fiction made up of fragments and is a sort of autobiography. Some technical innovations made their appearance, for example, the scientific

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discourse intended as a means to mark a distance between the narrator and the character subject to the visions, or the use of the first person narrator, implying that the narrator recovers his sanity from time to time. As in Poe’s stories, there is a skilful combination of techniques that convey verisimilitude in fiction. A comparative analysis of Hoffmann’s, Poe’s and Nerval’s fantastic stories makes clear the direction that the fantastic story was to follow during the second half of the nineteenth century in its shift from the Romantic to the Realist period. Charles Nodier came to analyse with deep insight the possibilities that the short story offers to the modern writer. It is true that his comments seem to be directed solely at the fantastic narrative, but, on a deeper level, he is referring more broadly to the new literary genre in general. He divides the short story into three groups: the folktale (»false fantastic«), the sketch (»vague fantastic«) and the short story (»true fantastic«) proper.3 The first is a narrative characterised by the credulity of the audience, i.e. the ingenuous nature of the people as well as the naivety of the fiction. By mentioning Charles Perrault, Nodier is implicitly stating that such folktales, even though they may have undergone a process of literary elaboration, remain on the lowest level. The second group, that of the sketch, is described as a »vague fantastic story that leaves the soul suspended in a dreamy and melancholy doubt«.4 This mode evokes the sketch in the sense that characters and patterns are not so clearly delineated and that the main interest lies in the atmosphere as well as in the digressions of the narrator, who has no definite point to focus on. Finally, the third type is characterised by the impossibility of explaining rationally what has happened. The story is paramount here with the narrator playing a secondary role and simply doing his best to make the story sound convincing. The emphasis on the plot rather than on the narrator marks the main feature of modern short fiction. The narrative voice loses importance while the plot achieves a more central role as the means to show the character’s features and express the moral of the tale. Nodier’s claim that the plot has been taken from a previous historical account is not really as important as the comment on its length, which means that the successive arrangement of details is fundamental. Histoire d’Hélène Gillet (Story of Hélène Gillet, 1832) or Smarra (1821) are examples of the importance of the psychological details. Smarra stands as one of the most interesting models of grotesque short fiction in France, since the events are close to a nightmarish perception of reality that is being recorded gradually and morbidly. The dreams, the bizarre situations and the creation of a narrative from the viewpoint of others identify it as another ironical tale. Prosper Mérimée’s literary career is divided almost equally between the fantastic and the realistic modes. A translator of Russian authors like Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol or Ivan Turgenev, Mérimée identifies the term with the novella. The influence of the Russian and German authors can be traced in his works through his use of literary modes. Mérimée sets himself the task of creating a fantastic narrative out of elements common to both narrative modes. As in the cases of Hoffmann and Poe, the fantastic is created from a realistic setting in order to produce in the reader an epistemological ambiguity towards what he has read. It is within this fantastic mode that the bizarre, the grotesque, and the ironical work. Because of his interest in 3.

»Histoire fantastique fausse, histoire fantastique vague and histoire fantastique vraie« (Nodier 1961, 330).

4.

»histoire fantastique vague qui laisse l’âme suspendue dans un doute rêveur et mélancolique« (ibid., 330 f.).

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both the realistic and the bizarre, Mérimée produced two groups of works that at first may seem to conflict but in the end share the same aesthetic basis. The first group would become the récit excentrique, but of a nature different from that of Nodier’s work. It comprises fantastic pieces such as Lokis (1869), La Vénus d’Ille (The Venus of Ille, 1837), Djoûmane (1873) and Les âmes du Purgatoire (The Souls of Purgatory, 1834). The second would be that of the realistic narrative and contains the novellas Colomba (1840) and Carmen (1845). There is also a taste for the folktale in Mérimée’s writings as he admits in his translation of Pushkin’s stories, but once again, his interest is oriented towards the narrative devices of fantastic fiction: »A bit of obscurity is always necessary in a story of dreamers«.5 Two remarkable facts link Merimée’s short fiction to authors like Poe and Hoffmann. Realistic detail and a sceptical narrator act as narrative means that lead to the typology of modern short fiction. The narrators are normally witnesses of uncanny events, yet do not believe in a fantastic realm. Thus, a struggle for verisimilitude underlies the whole narration, but is subtly contradicted by the narratorial comments only a few pages later. The narrator is the link between the events and the reader, while at the same time he creates a disassociation between the narratorial purpose and the narrative facts. Objectivity on the part of the narrator is the central feature of the stories. The narrator in Lokis will not give credence to the rumours about the main character’s birth. Similarly, Vision de Charles XI (Vision of Charles XI, 1829) begins with the narrator’s assertion of the historicity of the story. Having incorporated the legend, he comments on the abuse of wine that may have provoked the visions. 5.

Fiction in Spain

The situation in Spain is somewhat peculiar. On the one hand, periodicals are the main form of publication, and collections of stories tend only later to be published in book form. The number of magazines is astonishing, particularly if we take into consideration the size of the readership in those years. On the other hand, the term »cuento« (tale) had not yet been established. It was quite common for authors to use different terms to refer to this particular genre, some of the words being related to the folktale. Tales normally appeared with the title and a subtitle indicating the narrative form: »consejas« (fairy tales), »leyendas« (legends), »tradiciones« (traditions), »baladas« (ballads), »episodios« (episodes or sketches), »relaciones« (narratives or novellas) and even »novelas« (novellas). The first five terms make reference to the tale or to the sketch; the last two are the Spanish equivalents to the novella. Regarding the terms »consejas«, »leyendas« and »tradiciones«, the question of orality is implicit. These terms make apparent the idea that in its origins a short story was primarily a piece of oral fiction. »Relaciones« was a term that Fernán Caballero adopted since she did not find a more appropriate one. Romantic authors still thought that a »novela« was a term that designated a short piece of prose in the manner of Cervantes’s novellas. Another term which became quite common is that of »cuadro de costumbres« (local colour sketch).

5.

»En effet un peu d’obscurité est toujours nécessaire dan une histoire de revenants« (Aubrit 1997, 62).

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Spanish modern short fiction had its roots in the European tradition as it is reflected in Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s writings, though in an early period the native tradition of sketches and folktales was much more relevant. This is due in part to two writers, Mesonero Romanos and Estébanez Calderón, journalists who published a great number of local colour sketches. The reason for the fluctuation of terms during Romanticism is due to the tendencies present in Spanish culture during the Romantic period. The folktale, particularly in the brothers Grimm’s collection, exercised a decisive influence on Spanish authors. The stress on the people and traditions characteristic of a certain conservative Romanticism was especially strong in Spain. Fernán Caballero (pseudonym of Cecilia Böhl de Faber), Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, and José Zorrilla followed this current of thought and creation. Finally, the introduction of European trends into Spanish literature would affect literary production. Because of her German background, Fernán Caballero was thoroughly acquainted with German culture and helped introduce German literature into Spain. Similarly, the time that some Spanish authors spent in England contributed to the diffusion of English and American literature in Spain. French literature was also familiar, as Fernán Caballero’s letters make clear. Despite these facts, an interpretation and appreciation of the indigenous tradition would remain the most fertile path for many authors. A few authors wrote a small number of tales in verse. This is, however, a minor trend that does not hold any significance for the period, and even less afterwards. Fernán Caballero should be considered the originator of Romantic short fiction in Spain. She was interested in the oral tale, which she considered the appropriate form for short fiction. Tales were collected from traditional folk culture and slightly re-elaborated. In such a manner she published Cuentos y poesías populares andaluzas (Tales and Poems from Andalusia, 1859). These are small sketches and anecdotes, close to modern short fiction but traditional in their appeal and aesthetic ideology. The fact that she assigned the label »cuento« to the oral folktale meant that she had to use a different term for the short story. »Relación« is, for her, the Spanish equivalent to the French novella: »The writings that the French and German authors call Nouvelle, and that we, because of the lack of an appropriate term, call Relaciones«.6 Nonetheless, she designated as »relaciones« not only novellas but short stories as well. This indicates that the term refers to stories that are not novels, i.e. novellas, folktales, and other forms of short fiction previous to the Romantic period. They are characterised by the moral, inherent to them and absent in the others. Her novellas are, in a certain sense, similar to Goethe’s. Her claim that they should cause an effect is related to Goethe’s conception of the novella as the narration of an amazing event. Her primary impulse is to ground the stories in reality. She tries to avoid fantastic or marvellous narrative elements, while at the same time including whatever digression she may consider curious, picturesque or traditional with the aim of providing an effect of realism. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer must be considered the main figure of the period. As well as bringing about the end of the tradition of the legendary tale, he started the movement towards modern short fiction in Spanish. Among his most remarkable works are El caudillo de la manos 6.

»Las composiciones que los franceses y alemanes llaman Nouvelles, y que nosotros, por falta de otra voz más adecuada, llamamos Relaciones« (Fernán Caballero 1961, 303).

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rojas (The Leader with Red Hands, 1859), El rayo de luna (The Moonbeam, 1862), La corza blanca (The White Roe, 1863), Los ojos verdes (Green Eyes, 1861), El monte de las ánimas (The Mountain of the Souls, 1861) and El Miserere (The Miserere, 1862). As was usual at that time, he published them in magazines to earn his living but did not live long enough to bring them together in one volume. Much more interesting than the sociological aspect is the shift in the Spanish tradition of the tale which he instigated. Bécquer is commonly considered a Romantic writer little acquainted with foreign literature with the exception of Heinrich Heine’s poetic ideas. The reality is that he had a thorough knowledge of English and American fiction, and was equally familiar with French and German literature, via articles in periodicals, translations, or even through friends. His stories cannot be fully explained with reference to the Spanish tradition alone. As a matter of fact they are much closer to European Romantic short fiction than to the Spanish tale. The introduction to El monte de las ánimas presents a first person-narrator who thereafter controls the whole story. By using this narrative device, the love story of Beatriz and Alonso is placed in the realm of the legendary and fantastic. The narrator’s comments that he has been told the legend make the story »verosimile«, despite the type of narrative itself with its origins in traditional lore. Most of Bécquer’s Leyendas (Legends, 1871) are ghost tales in a broad sense. The authorial dominion of the form through the introductory narrator allows him to enter into the realm of the fantastic while at the same time maintaining a realistic mode. By claiming that the imagination plays a central role in the story, he is situating his tales within the range of modern stories, since undoubtedly they are to be considered as real. At the same time, aspects of previous centuries can still be found in his, sometimes only superficial, allegiance to traditional stories. The narrator’s introduction to El monte de las ánimas also points to the importance of orality, another characteristic of folktales. The story itself concerns the love between Beatriz and Alonso. It takes place in the Middle Ages and presents the thematic elements of Gothic fiction: the castle, the gloomy night, the storm and the legendary story of medieval religious knights. All of them are to be taken as the necessary narrative components proper to such a literary mode. Their only function is that of creating the appropriate atmosphere for the tale to be credible. The different settings in which the tale is heard can bring about different responses in the reader. In the last section, the narrator resumes control of the story by providing a coda in which he reaffirms plausibility by saying that a rider witnessed a series of events coinciding with those told in the legend. The appeal to objectivity and narratorial distance embodied in that other narrator is countered by the first narrator’s »filtering« of his tale and by the tone of a fantastic legend that he lends to the coda. 6.

Latin American fiction

Latin American short fiction in Spanish depends heavily on the Spanish tradition. The different modes and forms that have been described previously can be applied here too. The »artículo de costumbres« (local colour sketch) was widely used to portray the social reality of the continent. Sometimes it comes close to the newspaper article; at others it is more literary and fictive. Esteban Echevarría’s El matadero (The Slaughterhouse, 1871) accurately reflects Latin American culture and is one of the first Latin American pieces of modern short fiction. Echevarría makes

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use of different literary forms in the tale. Features of the sketch, the fable, the legend and the historical documentary can be traced in it. Due to the peculiar characteristics of Latin American Romanticism, it is, however, a tale closer to the realistic than to the Romantic mode. A first person narrator is always present in the story, not as a character but as the authorial voice that controls the narrative. It begins by emphasising the polysemy of the term »historia«, meaning both history and story, with the aim of stressing that it is a literary narrative, grounded in historical events. Thus, it becomes a parable tinted with the characteristics of the legend in an attempt to universalise the moral of the story. The presence of the narrator throughout the story emphasises the realistic mode in its pretended objectivity. The use of irony, however, destroys this effect of realism and stresses the basic fallacy of the story, that of saying one thing while meaning the opposite. Its critical purpose becomes a fundamental characteristic of the narrative, and this approach would have a central role in the following period. Echevarría uses the sketch, as well as the historical and the legendary modes supplied with a realistic narrative form with the sole purpose of criticising the politics of Rosas in Argentina. In doing so Echevarría goes beyond the Romantic tale and anticipates subsequent developments of the short story, though ironically El matadero would remain largely unknown to Latin American writers until the twentieth century. However, in fact the most important form, the short story, was widely considered a secondary genre in the nineteenth century. Romantic Latin American stories are not so closely centred on plot; what really matters is the inward analysis of the characters, which brings the story close to the poetic form. One of the most distinctive exponents of this tendency is José Victorino Lastarria. His El mendigo (The Beggar, 1843) is one of the first distinctly Romantic stories. All the literary conventions of the period are present. It reminds the reader of Hoffmann’s Phantasiestücke (Fantasy Pieces, 1814), Scott’s »The Two Drovers« (1827) and Merimée’s Mateo Falcone (1829). Apart from these authors, the most renowned short story writer throughout the Western Hemisphere was Poe. The wide influence of his poetics and stories determined the path Latin American fiction was to take. The extraordinary flourishing of short fiction in the Southern continent in the last two centuries cannot be explained but as a consequence of the strong impact of the North American writers, Poe, Hawthorne and Melville, primarily. José María Roa Bárcena anticipated most of the trends that would come afterwards. He is also important since he wrote short fiction all his life on a regular basis. A man of his time, he also re-elaborated popular tales and stories already published in European periodicals and translated authors such as Hoffmann. His Lanchitas (1878) offers the ambivalence of a narrative midway between the legendary and modern Gothic fiction. It is an example of what has been termed the pure fantastic in the manner of Hoffmann and Poe. There is no rational explanation for the events that are narrated but its religious and moral features link it to a pre-modern worldview. The narrating voice is always present in the third-person narration. This creates a distance that may affect its verisimilitude. The cause that underlies the ambiguous fantastic basis of the story is not clear. The author alludes to the role of the perturbed imagination of madmen, and yet a reference to spiritualism raises the possibility of a preternatural cause. The choice of a clergyman as the main character and the existence of a moral to the tale suggest the latter option. Other intertextual allusions such as the relevance of knowledge and the discovery

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of a walled-in corpse link Lanchitas to the works of Poe. The detailed descriptions reveal that Roa Bárcena also learnt from the North American author the importance of the setting in creating the adequate Gothic atmosphere. 7.

Russia

In Russia, a set of three terms covered the semantic field of the short story in the early nineteenth century. »Povest’« (tale) was the dominant designation for stories. This was an elastic term that denoted a narration of intermediate length, although it acquired a specific literary meaning late in the nineteenth century. »Skazka« (folktale) referred to folktales in verse form; and finally »rasskaz« (short story) described a manner of narration, though it displaced »skazka« as the word for a brief piece of short fiction containing some allegorical or fantastic fairy tale element. Aleksandr Pushkin’s Povesti pokoinogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina (Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin), published in 1830, are generally considered to be the starting point of Russian short fiction. There had been short stories previously, dating back to around 1770, but they were hardly considered to be of any interest, much less a genre, until the early 1800s with the appearance of Nikolai Karamzin’s sentimental short fiction. Pushkin’s tales were deemed experimental works that acknowledged the tradition of earlier short narratives and foreshadowed the short fiction to come. The most significant aspect of Tales of Belkin is probably the fact that they helped define the future, but no less important was the fact that they were written in prose and considered a cycle. They paved the way for Mikhail Lermontov’s Geroi nashego vremeni (A Hero of Our Time, 1840) as well as for collections of framed narratives. The »ocherk« (sketch) was already present in the collection, and gave way to the psychological sketch. Anecdotes were also widely written. Gothic and Scott-type narratives, along with Hoffmann’s works, influenced the development of the Russian short story. Other subgenres are the folktale, the Oriental tale of adventure, the physiological sketch and the society tale. There is little doubt that the great story writer of the period is Nikolai Gogol. He began his career with a collection of stories, Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan’ki (Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, 1831), followed by a second volume in the following year. These are stories that are loosely gathered together within a frame, written specifically for publication. Gogol follows the Romantic strategy, present in Irving’s and Scott’s works, of introducing an ingenuous narrator. These first narratives are largely local colour sketches and folktales. His second collection, Mirgorod (1835), contains an early version of Taras Bulba, later revised and published as a novel in 1842. »Starosvetskie pomeshchiki« (Old-World Landowners) and »Povest’ o tom, kak possorilsia Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem« (Story of the Quarrel between Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich) are masterpieces. In 1835 he published a collection of prose fiction and nonfiction, Arabeski (Arabesques), in which »Portret« (The Portrait), »Nevskii prospekt« (Nevsky Prospect) and »Zapiski sumasshedshego« (The Diary of a Madman) are included. Other important tales are »Nos« (Nose, 1842) and »Shinel’« (The Overcoat, 1842), a story about a clerk whose obsessive concern with copying drives him into estrangement from society.

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Conclusion

Romanticism stands as the period in which much of our generic terminology referring to short fiction was established. Previous fluctuations of words to designate a narrative of short length gave way to a more established set of terms. There remained, however, a basic differentiation between stories with roots in the folk tradition and those of a more urban and literary origin. The set of pairs »Erzählung/Novelle«, »conte/nouvelle«, »tale/novella«, »cuento/novela« and »skazka/rasskaz« indicate that with short stories the division in provenance was still present. Other forms such as the sketch still exerted some influence on authors although, because of their lack of plot, they lost their pre-eminence and, at the end of the nineteenth century, came to be considered as an outdated form. An interest in plot and characters, along with a concern for verisimilitude, arose during Romanticism. This is less in evidence during the early years, partly due to the dominance of folk forms, but as the century progressed authors felt more and more obliged to present believable characters. This resulted in an increase in the amount of details present in the stories and in the creation of characters that were no longer just types, but represented real individuals. As a consequence, narratives representing life as it is came to prominence at the expense of those with a folk background, or of the allegory, both of which were gradually relegated to a secondary position. This turn would account for the direction that previous modes or forms such as the Gothic tale or the sketch came to take from that moment onwards. Bibliography Aubrit, Jean-Pierre. 1997. Le conte et la nouvelle. Paris: Armand Colin. Aust, Hugo. 1995. Novelle. Stuttgart: Metzler. Baquero Goyanes, Mariano. 1992. El cuento español: Del Romanticismo al Realismo. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. ———. 1988. ¿Qué es la novela? ¿Qué es el cuento? Murcia: Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia. Bennet, E.K. 1965. A History of the German Novella. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Bryant, David. 1995. Short Fiction and the Press in France, 1829–1841. Lewinston, Queenston, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press. Castex, Pierre. 1974. Le conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant. Paris: José Corti. Current-García, Eugene. 1985. The American Short Story before 1850. Boston: Twayne Publishers. Doderer, Klaus. 1973. Die Kurzgeschichte in Deutschland. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Eckermann, Johann Peter. 1982. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Ed. by Regine Otto. Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau. Fernán Caballero. 1961. Obras. Vol 2. Madrid: Ediciones Atlas. Gillespie, Gerald. 1995. »¿Novella, nouvelle, novela [corta], short novel: una revisión de términos«. Del cuento y sus alrededores. Trans. by Carlos Pacheco and Peter Soehlke, ed. by Carlos Pacheco and Luis Barrera Linares. Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana. 131–145. Jolles, André. 1972. Formes simples. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Kelly, Gary. 1989. English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830. London: Longman. May, Charles. 1995. The Short Story. The Artifice of Reality. New York: Twayne.

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Montague, Bonington J. 1995. »El cuento romántico en Hispanoamérica«. El cuento americano. Ed. by Enrique Pupo-Walker. Madrid: Castalia. 111–132. Moser, Charles A. 1986. »Introduction: Pushkin and the Short Story«. The Russian Short Story: A Critical History. Ed. by Charles A. Moser. Boston: Twayne. xi–xxiv. Nodier, Charles. 1961. Contes. Ed. by Pierre Castex. Paris: Garnier. Poe, Edgar Allen. 1984. Essays and Reviews. New York: Library of America. Pupo-Walker, Enrique. 1995. »El relato costumbrista«. El cuento americano. ������������������������������� Ed. by Enrique Pupo-Walker. Ma��� drid: Castalia. 79–110. Polheim, Karl Konrad. 1965. Novellentheorie und Novellenforschung. Stuttgart: Metzler. Rath, Wolfgang. 2000. Die Novelle. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Sangsue, Daniel. 1987. Le récit excentrique: Gautier, De Maistre, Nerval, Nodier. Paris: José Corti. Terras, Victor. 1986. »The Russian Short Story, 1840–1850«. The Russian Short Story: A Critical Theory. Ed. by Charles A. Moser. Boston: Twayne. 1–49. Tieck, Ludwig. 1829. »Vorbericht«. Schriften. Vol 11. Berlin: G. Reimer. vii–xc.

The literary idyll in Germany, England and Scandinavia 1770–1848 Sven Halse 1.

The concept of idyll

The history of idyll within the period to be considered in this essay is, to a large extent, also that of its opposite, of counter-idyll. It seems to be one of the most powerful qualities of the idyll that it has been — and still is — able to provoke its own contradiction among critics and writers, who find the idyllic universe unworldly and oversimplified. W.J. Keith conceptualises this dialectic tension in his distinction between the »pastoral« and »rural writing« as two different literary approaches. He suggests the term »pastoral« to characterise the idealising and allegorical tradition of idyll, dominated by the viewpoint of urban man. The term »rural writing« on the other hand Keith suggests for the non-fictional description of rural forms of life. As will be shown, these two opposite literary approaches describe a field of tension where the idyll is realised in various ways during the period in question. But even though one side of the tradition evolves as a polemic rejection of the »naive« description of its subject, this polemic side also holds on to — and refines — some of the traditional motifs and themes of the genre. While the counter-idyll rejects the stylised descriptions of persons, landscapes and situations known from the »naive« idyll, it also repeats the traditional themes of art and love, and the preference for detailed descriptions, for rich metaphors and intense atmosphere. The polemical counter-idyll as well as the naive idyll conveys the ever-fascinating ideal of a harmonious and happy life in a beautiful setting. Although the traditional Arcadian setting of the idyll from the very beginning of the Pre-Romantic era is replaced by more realistic rural and in some cases urban milieus, the »idyllic life« as an ideal lives on throughout the history of idyll. Thus, the development of the idyllic genre has been borne by two main strategies: on the one hand, a modifying, on the other, a polemical one. The modifying approach seeks an adaptation of contemporary milieus, thoughts and problems to fit the framework of the traditional literary idyll in accordance with the poetological standards of the Enlightenment: Literature should seek credibility through mimesis, »Nachahmung der Natur« (Imitation of Nature). Although characters and story do not appear »realistic« in our modern sense of the term, they are being transferred from an Arcadian »Nowhereland« to a recognisable countryside, village or small-town environment. The polemical approach, on the other hand, is based on the direct rejection and negation of the simplifying, secluded idyll. The polemic attitude can be the leading principle of a counteridyll as a whole, as can be seen in George Crabbe’s The Village (1783), or it can be included in an otherwise idyllic context as in Friedrich Maler Müller’s Die Schaafschur (The Sheep-Shearing, 1775) — two texts we will subsequently return to. This essay in its approach will focus on the dialectical relation between the »unbroken« naive literary idyll and its modifying and polemical sisters. Examples from German, English and Scandinavian texts will be considered in the attempt to show some lines of development within the main forms of literary idyll of the period.

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Idyll, in Greek eidyllion, means »a small picture«, this term revealing some vital aspects of the nature of the genre. The literary idyll is first and foremost a descriptive, secondly — if at all — a storytelling genre. The picture represents static description, a frozen moment, and the diminutive form of the Greek word tells us that in this genre the limitation, the frame, is an important part of the picture, determining what should be included and what should be left out of the picture. In both the common and the literary-theoretical use of the word, the term »idyll« expresses a state of unproblematic quietude, balance and harmony, a relaxed existence beyond tensions and stress. The idyll does not intend to show reality as it is. On the contrary, it seeks out our visions of happiness and couches them in a literary form, in this way commenting on reality. »This Idyll achieves its reference to reality not as a representation but as an ideal«,1 Gerhard Kaiser points out in regard to the Swiss Salomon Geßner’s idylls. But this statement applies to the idyll in general. The idyll wishes to create an ideal textual expression of an elementary human need of harmony, order and satisfaction. Thus the idyll to a great extent deals with unattainable matters, but in spite of — or rather because of — the unattainability and the never-satisfied urge for harmony, the idyll remains a fascinating ideal. In choosing a state of things that is ideal as its theme, the idyll is closely related to the Utopia as a literary form or »model«. The Utopian model is usually understood as a more elaborate and complex suggestion of a social construction than is normally included in the idyll. The Utopia deals with the ideal form of society, whereas the idyll deals more with atmospheres, basic forms of existence and unsophisticated human relations. The idyllic »model« is not characterised by a particular outer form. In its original antique tradition the genre is a verse narrative in hexameters, continuing as such in the neo-classical tradition in Germany and Sweden until the 1840s. The English metric idyll uses blank verse as its preferred form. Salomon Geßner introduces the prose-idyll as an innovation and alternative in German (Swiss) literature in the middle of the eighteenth century with his Idyllen (Idylls, 1756), and Neue Idyllen (New Idylls, 1772). According to the title of the present volume, the main focus in the following will be on the idyll in its prose forms. As a consequence of the strong traditional links to metric forms, however, we will not try to repress the very productive side of literary idyllic tradition represented by the forms of hexameter, blank verse and alexandrine. However, it is, as mentioned, not primarily the outer form but the repertoire of structure, themes and motifs that characterises the idyll. Renate Böschenstein-Schäfer lists the typical themes of love and art, and motifs such as the harmonious landscape, the shadowy spot at the brook — the locus amoenus — the shepherd and the shepherdess. This circle of motifs in the period to be considered widens into more »realistic« rural and urban spheres of life, their surroundings and domestic utensils. The typical basic atmosphere of the genre is one of harmony and quietude; the idyllic space is physically or mentally isolated from the world outside, remote from threats and aggression. The idyll is in general characterised by the absence or the eventual disarmament of power; the idyllic space is one of equality, where human understanding and not societal hierarchy rules or comes to rule. When two lovers are able to unite, this is typically made possible by the ruler’s 1.

»Nicht als Abbild, sondern als Ideal erhält diese Idylle ihren Wirklichkeitsbezug« (Kaiser 1977, 19).

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— often the father’s — renouncing of power out of human considerations. Idyll thus offers a space where the ego in its strongly individualistic form renounces its demands. This aspect is important for our understanding of the lack of literary idyll in the age of High Romanticism. A brief glance at the ancient history of idyll must consider the Hellene Theocritus (c. 310–250) and the Roman Virgil (70–19), often mentioned as fathers of the genre. The idylls by Theocritus are known for their rural, pastoral surroundings, highly reminiscent of the poet’s home Sicily, for which he longed so much in his urban »exile« in Alexandria. The atmosphere in Theocritus’s idylls is playful, sometimes mischievous, and sometimes philosophic, but under all circumstances harmonious. Virgil’s idylls are transferred into a mythological, ideal landscape, an Arcadia where gods, legendary figures and »real« human beings come together. With Theocritus and Virgil the most important themes and topoi of the idyllic model are laid down. Friends gather under the shady tree for a discussion of love or art, or for a rendezvous. Typically, nothing more happens; the atmosphere is everything. Minimal action without consequences for the characters characterises the genre in general. This »lack« of action is counterbalanced by a thorough description of landscapes, artefacts, objects, feelings. Often songs and recitations are inserted to create variation of style and atmosphere. From Theocritus’s and Virgil’s idylls derive certain other names for the genre that are partly used synonymously with the idyll: Virgil called his idylls carmina bucolica (Greek: bukolos, shepherd), and the term bucolica has been used in general for poetry dealing with the simple rural life in a idyllic manner. Pastoral is the equivalent Latin term (Latin: pastor, shepherd), which is used, with some specific exceptions, as a synonym for »idyll«, in the English tradition. In the German tradition, the terms »bucolica« and »idyll« were used synonymously until the last third of the eighteenth century, where the thematisation of non-rural milieus in the idyll allowed the two concepts of idyll and pastoral to drift apart. As Renate Böschenstein-Schäfer stresses, pastoral poetry is not always idyll, and vice versa (Böschenstein-Schäfer 1967, 4). Theocritus’s and Virgil’s hexameter idylls were re-discovered in the Renaissance, and from here the tradition is continued through Baroque literature into the eighteenth century. It lies beyond the intentions of this essay to describe the history of the genre from the Renaissance to Romanticism, a description that would have to mention names like Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Milton, Montemayor, d’Urfé, Tasso, Opitz, Thomson, Ewald v. Kleist, and many others. It has been normal practice in literary criticism for the last half a century to distinguish between the idyll as a genre and the idyllic as a phenomenon — Gerhard Kaiser, speaks of the »phenomenology of the idyllic«2 —, a distinction which derives from the fact that the idyll as a mode of existence as well as the themes and motifs of the idyllic tradition also appear as parts of texts that seen as a whole cannot be categorised as idylls. The idyllic repertoire or »model« is a potential and a possibility in all literary genres. In such contexts the nature of the idyllic model as a corrective or contrast to disharmonious and alienated reality appears even more explicit and effectual. In High Romanticism such idyllic intermezzi often form a window onto the transcendental, more or less unachievable states of sublime understanding for which the Romantic so much longed: The happy country of childhood, the medieval Golden Age, the universal kingdom of poetry. 2.

»Phänomenologie des Idyllischen« (Kaiser 1977).

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Undoubtedly the most dynamic and promising approach to the idyll is made using the broader concept of the phenomenon. But in order to achieve a more coherent picture of the idyll of the Romantic era we will, in this essay, attempt to restrict our point of view to the kind of examples in which the idyllic characteristics are constitutive of the text as a whole. In some cases, however, we will also mention examples in which parts of the idyllic, thematic and structural repertoire appear only as a more or less isolated element in a generally non-idyllic text. 2.

The concept of Romanticism

In the title of this essay we have deliberately avoided the construction »Romantic Idyll«, as this is a contradiction in terms and would very poorly describe the actual occurrences of idyllic texts. The fundamental world view of Romanticism is one of expansion, transcendence or what derives from that in terms of instability, disharmony and ultimately frustration, depression and Weltschmerz. This for instance is the account given by Virgil Nemoianu in his seminal study The Taming of Romanticism: »The common denominator of all these changes is expansion« (Nemoianu 1984, 25). In Romanticism the sovereign ego is a central ideal, the genius with its unique gifts, with which he as the vanguard of humanity is to lead the way to the poetic kingdom. In the course of this process, ordinary bourgeois rules and restrictions must be abandoned. The idyllic mode of thought is, as mentioned, to a large extent the exact opposite: the maintenance of equilibrium of mind, a return to a point of rest and harmony. As an illustration of the opposition between the sovereign ego and the idyll, Gerhard Kaiser says concerning Goethe’s Werther: »His [Werther’s] experience of nature is determined by an enthusiastic going beyond the boundaries of the self, thereby exceeding the limitations and clear outlines of the world of idyll from the beginning«.3 The idyll does not intend to cross borders; it seeks rather to show us the borders that must be drawn to secure the continuity of the idyll. A condition of this idyllic state, however, is the renunciation of the ego, its giving up the unrestrained realisation of itself, and giving up its claims to hierarchic power as well. The idyllic space is characterised by the balance that derives from the absence of external power and from the presence of human ethics, as it finds expression in spontaneous human contact, respect and equality. If the true idyllic harmony is momentarily disturbed by the demands of the ego and power, the idyllic values only gain in validity after such disturbance. High Romanticism fundamentally represents a state of disturbed balance, Zerrissenheit and individual striving towards uncertain goals, and in that climate idyll can only find isolated places to linger, can only be of momentary existence. Literary criticism states that High Romanticism is a vacuum concerning the production of idyllic texts. »Romantic poetry has produced few examples of the genre,« we read in Renate BöschensteinSchäfer.4 The few examples are idylls more in name than in fact. The themes and motifs of rural life and of an Arcadian Golden Age in High Romanticism are emancipated from the idyll as 3. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Sein Naturerlebnis ist auf enthusiastische Selbstentgrenzung angelegt und überflutet damit die Begrenztheit und Konturiertheit der Idyllenwelt von vornherein« (ibid., 43). 4.

»Die romantische Poesie hat wenig Zeugnisse der Gattung hervorgebracht« (Böschenstein-Schäfer 1967, 84).

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a genre and are incorporated into other, more storytelling genres. The idyll as a special genre for counter-metaphors to real life loses its function in a literary climate where transcendental counter-metaphors are the leading idea in almost all literature. Not until in the following decades, when a more popular and less transcendental Romanticism finds its way into a growing literary mass market, does the idyll again become possible as a genuine genre. There is, however, in German as well as in English and Scandinavian literary criticism, a tradition of regarding Romanticism as a much broader movement than what is normally described as High Romanticism in the relatively short period of 1795–1815. A broader concept of Romanticism also includes the period from 1770 to 1795 (Pre-Romanticism), and from 1815 up to the revolutionary year of 1848, the latter often summarised by the term »Biedermeier«. This continuation of Romanticism in the Biedermeier period was in earlier literary history more or less ignored in the effort to stress the more petit-bourgeois, philistine elements of Biedermeier tradition, elements from which Romantics dissociated themselves. Thus the Biedermeier appeared as an antiromantic tendency in literature. Biedermeier-culture is, however, to a large extent a composition of echoes from earlier literary currents, primarily from Romanticism and Neo-Classicism. Not until the era of Biedermeier do Romantic thoughts become common property; but, of course, this can only happen via a simultaneous dismantling of the elitist and absolute hopes and ambitions of High Romanticism. Friedrich Sengle, whose opus magnum (Sengle 1971–80) has been the platform of all further research on this period since the 1970s, describes the era of Biedermeier partly as a fundamental mood of Weltschmerz, partly as a polyphonic echo of Romanticism and Neo-Classicism. He therefore introduces the term »Biedermeier-Romantik« for the specific kind of Romanticism that dominated great parts of the literature in the period from 1815 to 1848. In German and to a much lesser extent in Scandinavian literature we see a Pre-Romantic current which in the German tradition is named Sturm und Drang. In Anglo-Saxon literaryhistorical tradition this anti-feudal current is usually seen as a part of the general concept of Romanticism. This is what lies behind the statement of Virgil Nemoianu »German romanticism started in the 1770’s and 1780’s« (Nemoianu 1984, 42). German literary-historical tradition itself is much less happy about viewing Sturm und Drang as part of Romanticism, which is to some extent due to the fact that Goethe, one of the main figures of the Sturm und Drang as a young man, explicitly dissociated himself from Romantic thinking and writing. This, however, cannot prevent us from recognising the fact that the movement of Sturm und Drang is characterised by some thoughts and attitudes very central to High Romanticism as well. This especially concerns their worshipping of the poet’s genius and its access to a higher realisation beyond the boundaries of bourgeois norms and standards. This wider concept of Romanticism provides the temporal frame for the following view of the idyll and allows us to include some of the most important manifestations of the genre from the early 1770s up to 1848. 3.

Idyll and counter-idyll in the pre-Romantic era

In the first half of the eighteenth century, all of European literature is able to boast a rich variety of pastoral writing, a veritable fashion trend in courtly culture. The rural-pastoral in literature,

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dress and landscape gardening were a sort of game, a mask, that were to add an element of naturalness to the artificial culture of the court. With the thoughts of the Swiss philosopher Rousseau from the middle of the century, the rural, however, strengthened its position in bourgeois thinking as the natural, the culturally unspoiled. While the nature poetry of the early Enlightenment was of a religiously contemplative and scientifically descriptive nature, as seen for instance in Alexander Pope’s Pastorals (1709) and Albrecht von Haller’s »Die Alpen« (The Alps, 1702), Rousseau’s fellow countryman Salomon Geßner began to use the genre of the idyll as a medium for a new, enlightened-sentimental picture of man. His Idyllen and Neue Idyllen are directly linked in the conception of the repertoire of their motifs to the classical tradition after Theocritus and, in particular, Virgil. But Geßner — who writes his idylls in a rhythmic, lyrically tinged prose — adds a new moral dimension to the genre: the exemplary presentation of the bourgeois virtues of the Enlightenment, including the capacity for sentimentalism, the virtue which has given its name to an entire movement in German literature in the period from 1750 to 1770. »Empfindsamkeit« (The Age of Sentimentalism) in Germany and Switzerland was inspired by related movements in France and England, not least via translations of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), and Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766). Geßner thus uses the classical setting in order to idealise this virtue as an enlightened path to human perfection. Something parallel can, according to Nemoianu, be observed in England: After 1750 it [the societal idyll] provided a convenient literary landscape in which writers could exercise sentimentalism with moderation, confront the individual with society […], in other words, the idyllic model was a reserve of sensible humanism for William Cowper and Tobias Smollett (Nemoianu 1984, 39).

If Geßner is, then, at the forefront of the trend of the age with his moral idylls, he represents on the other hand, with his classically derived staging and gallery of characters, a soon-to-be superseded phase in idyllic writing in the eighteenth century. Just as Gottsched within drama argued in favour of classical Aristotelian drama to convey the moral values of the Enlightenment, Geßner seeks, within the genre of the idyll, classical forms for his moral statements. And just as Gottsched is not long in being swept aside by Lessing’s genuine »Bürgerliches Trauerspiel«, the idyll is also invaded by its contemporary social context. This takes place to a great extent in the ten idylls of Johann Heinrich Voß, written mostly in the period between 1774 and 1784. Unlike Geßner, Voß reverts to the use of the hexameter, a metrical form he had familiarised himself with via his translation of Homer’s Odyssey in 1781 and The Iliad in 1793, thereby creating an almost ironical interaction between the archaic form and a feature that is new, realistic and contemporary — the village environment. The farm workers in »Die Leibeigenen« (The Villeins, 1775) and »Die Freigelassenen« (The Freedmen, 1776), the school teacher in »Der siebzigste Geburtstag« (The Seventieth Birthday, 1780), and the notables of the village, the vicar and his family in Luise (1784; 1795), not without inspiration from Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield — all gain a voice in these idylls. Typically, »��������� Der siebzigste Geburtstag« (which was to prove of great importance for the hexameter idyll in Sweden via Franzén’s translation, see below), has the harmonious petit bourgeois family as its setting. But »Die Leibeigenen« also takes up a topical political issue as its theme, i.e. the relationship between the squire and his serfs. In »Die Leibeigenen« and »Die Freigelassenen«, we see depicted

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the actual situation of the serfs and the release by the squire of his serfs out of enlightened humanistic considerations. Serfdom was not abolished in Prussia until 30 years later, as a result of the so-called Stein-Hardenberg reforms in the first decade of the nineteenth century. But in the early 1770s, the abolition of villeinage was an eagerly debated issue in the circles of the enlightened North-German aristocracy. Fourteen years after these two polemical idylls (the very first that Voß wrote), he felt it imperative to write a third, »Die Erleichterten« (The Unburdened, 1801), which mediates between the rigidly opposed views expressed in the first two by praising the enlightened landowners of the new age. England also saw the emergence of a polemicising counter-movement to the existing tradition of the idyll. Already four years prior to Voß’s »Die Leibeigenen«, Oliver Goldsmith supplied one of the age’s most important contributions to a revolt against the pastoral’s idyllic view of life in the country, the verse narrative »The Deserted Village« (1770). Like all the English metrical idylls referred to here, it was written in blank verse. Here, Goldsmith depicts his »sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain« (Goldsmith 1975, 181) as caught in the destructive tendency of the modern age — the migration to the major cities. The text is structured around then-now. Where the poem is descriptive, it is so only in order to provide a contrast to present-day decay of values like innocence and joyful labour. As with Voß, criticism is exclusively vented on the absolute power of the landowners and their misuse of it, on the age’s one-sided accumulation of values, approved by the servants of the state. Goldsmith goes much further in his criticism of the social order than Voß. Positive figures of authority in the poem are in particular the village vicar and the school teacher, representatives of the Enlightenment and humanism, regular features of the idyllic genre — the one described as »humble«, »hospitable to the poor« (ibid., 181) as known from Goldsmith’s own novel The Vicar of Wakefield and from J.H. Voß’s Luise, the other as »severe but kind, impressive and learned«, as also found in an older version in J.H. Voß’s »Der siebzigste Geburtstag«. The Village, an idyll by George Crabbe, must be seen in close conjunction with Goldsmith’s »Deserted Village«. Not only does the title link it to its predecessor; the entire treatment by the text of its rural material makes much use of the earlier work. Crabbe, however, takes yet another step away from the idealism of the idyllic tradition. Whereas Goldsmith was still able to postulate an earlier rural harmony, Crabbe completely denies the justification of any such conception. He explains the idyllic treatment as resulting from a lack of knowledge of the realities, then as now. As an antidote to false idealisation, Crabbe calls for radical mimesis: By such examples taught, I paint the cot, As truth will paint it, and as bards will not (Crabbe 1988 I, 158).

The current topoi must be dismantled. Over-idealising poetry is seen as an affront to those who are suffering. The poem ridicules a range of abuses in the country: alcoholism, lack of breeding, economic exploitation and — as a result — the flight from the country, disintegration of marriage, misery of the poorhouse, incompetent doctors, indifference and greed of the clergy (here with a direct, jeering reference to Goldsmith’s noble vicar in »The Deserted Village«). Gossip and slander, infidelity, theft and brawling — all classes in society, high or low, are united in Crabbe’s picture of life in the country, in a shared amorality.

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At the same time as Goldsmith and Voß, the private tutor Hans Bull in Norway was writing (in alexandrines) an epic poem called »Om Landmandens Lyksalighed ved Friheds og Eiendoms Nydelse« (Concerning the Happiness of the Peasant on Enjoying Freedom and Property, 1771). Bull criticises the miserable conditions of the Danish peasant (Denmark and Norway were a dual kingdom until 1814), presenting the happy situation of the Norwegian peasant proprietor as a feasible alternative. The poem is a petition to the Danish Government on the occasion of its considering a change to conditions in the country. In line with Voß, Goldsmith and Crabbe, Bull changes the function of the pastoral epic to that of a political tract, not via polemicising against the genre of the idyll but via a stylised description of peasant conditions in the two countries. Another form of polemical discussion using the formal and thematic tradition of the idyll is found in the same period in the writings of the German poet Friedrich »Maler« (i.e. »painter«) Müller. Three of his total of seven idylls — in line with his admired master Geßner — borrow their material from the world of antique mythology: »Der Faun« (The Faun, 1775), »Der Satyr Mopsus« (Mopsus the Satyr, 1775), and »Bacchidon und Milon« (1775). Two idylls, »Die Schaafschur« and »Das Nußkernen« (The Nut-Cracking, 1776), are placed in a local German setting and have the subtitle »Pfälzische Idyllen« (Palatian Idylls), while »Ulrich von Coßheim« (fragment, printed 1811) takes place in a German medieval context, with the subtitle »����������������������������� Eine deutsche Idylle��������� « (A German Idyll). Finally, »Adams erstes Erwachen und erste seelige Nächte« (Adam’s First Awakening and the First Blessed Nights, 1778), takes its material, as its title suggests, from the Bible. Despite their closeness to Geßner, as the titles »Der Faun«, »Der Satyr Mopsus« and »Bacchidon und Milon« as well as the prose form taken over from Geßner might both suggest, Friedrich Müller’s idyllic project seeks to go beyond the Geßner idyll at a number of levels. The stylised, standardised gallery of characters in Geßner is replaced by individual characters with genuinely depicted emotionality. When the faun Milon weeps at the death of his beloved woman, this is done both in deep-felt despair and practical concern: »From now on I will enjoy no life […] What should I do with my little ones? How am I to feed the small worms when they open their mouths […] Oh, dear God! — Oh!«.5 In Maler Müller’s text there are no reminiscences of the playful, stylised emotionality that typifies the characters in Geßner’s Arcadian landscapes. Müller breaks through to the absolute depiction of emotions typical of the Sturm und Drang movement. The idyll »Bacchidon und Milon« heralds a revolt against the bucolic tradition at the stylistic level: the characters in this »classical landscape« are clad in Palatinate peasant costume as well as speaking an everyday language coloured by dialect forms that causes the entire idyll to take on a slight tinge of parody. In the publisher’s preface (by Maler Müller himself), excuses are offered for this »breach of style« that have a function within the idyll, preparing the reader for the unexpected, whilst also emphasising the fact that this humoresque idyll exceeds the boundaries of the genre. »Adams erstes Erwachen und erste seelige Nächte« only shares the outer setting with the Geßner idyll: the shadowy locus amoenus here assumes the form of a locus familialis: Adam, Eve, Abel and the daughters Melboe and Tirza are sitting under the shade of a nut-tree listening 5.

»Will von nun an keines Lebens mehr genießen […] Was soll ich mit meinen Kleinen anfangen? Wie die Würmger ernähren, wenn sie ihre Mäulger aufsperren […] Oh du lieber Gott! — Oh!« (Müller 1977, 9).

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to Adam’s story of his first experiencing of the world — a theme that takes him deep inside his own mind and memory in an attempt to describe the indescribable, the primeval experience of life, body and nature. He says to his wife, who has asked him to narrate, »No, I cannot tell you that, my dear, beloved Eve. The dread of the first awakening remains inexpressible! forever a secret to me«.6 Nevertheless, Adam spends the next 60 pages talking of his first experiences in an emotional poetic language that is full of imagery, plainly drawing on Klopstock’s stylistically influential epic works Messias (The Messiah, 1748–73) and »Die Frühlingsfeier« (The Festival of Spring, 1759). Just as in »Der Faun«, it is elementary human emotions that are thematised, while in »Adams erstes Erwachen« this new mythological material breaks the confines of the genre by introducing a far more radical, primevally human emotional world than thematised in the idyll up to that point. The two »pfälzische Idyllen« seem to be more »realistic«, their settings being the villagers and their daily routines. In »Die Schaafschur« the seasonal sheep-shearing provides the outer framework. In the circle made up of »Hausvater« Walter, the daughter Gustel and her sweetheart Veitel as well as the schoolmaster and the cousin Schultz, nothing less than a poetological discussion takes place, in which two poetic ideals are opposed to each other: popular, simple poetry, which is praised by Walter, and refined anacreontic pastoral poetry, of which the schoolmaster is a great admirer. The ridiculing of the pedantic schoolmaster and the boldness of the temperament and »Kraftsprache« (forceful language) of the »unspoiled« peasant, who could have been the model for the Müller character in Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, 1784), add considerable entertainment value to the entire scene. With his ridiculing of the unrealistic depiction in anacreontic poetry of shepherds and pastoral life Walter strikes at the heart of the dichotomy between »pastoral« and »rural« writing mentioned in our introduction. Where, I say, can one find shepherds such as these […] They are curious people, indeed, in my opinion […] they do not, like us other people, feel the heat or the cold, do not hunger or thirst, live entirely off rose dew and flowers.7

The ridiculing of the anacreontic style culminates in cousin Schultz’s recitation of a poem which he has learned by heart from a noblewoman but of which he himself — as he admits — does not understand a word. It contains all the well-known anacreontic topoi, whose constant repetition produces the intended satirical effect. The rural singer’s contest is ended by Walter, who tells »ein Mährgen«, a legend from the Middle Ages in a strange mixture of folk tale and Sturm und Drang prose, so emotionally powerful that the love relationship between Lotte and Veitel blazes up. The discussion topic of »genuineness« in poetry thus breaks through to the level of reality. True to the requirement of the idyll tradition concerning the synthesis of opposites, Müller allows his text to conclude with a kind of reconciliation between the schoolmaster and Walter, since they agree that the final scene was probably worthy of an idyll — and one surmises that the schoolmaster will immediately go home and write it down. With this ending, where the 6. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Nein, das sagen kann ich dir nicht, theure geliebte Eva. Des ersten Erwachens Schauder bleibt unaussprechlich! mir ewig geheim« (ibid., 167). 7.

»Ey freilich sagt ich wo giebts dann Schäfer wie diese […]. Das sind mir curiose Leute […] fühlen nicht wie wir andre Menschen Hitze und Kälte; hungern oder dursten nicht, leben nur von Rosenthau und Blumen« (ibid., 70 f).

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text points in almost postmodernist fashion at itself as text, Müller transcends once more the boundaries of the idyll as a genre. »An idyllic figure that recognises itself as such and expresses it, ceases to be such a figure«, Georg Kaiser remarks (Kaiser 1977, 31). Even more complex is Maler Müller’s idyll »Das Nuß-Kernen«, the most comprehensive of his texts. Like »Die Schaafschur«, it consists exclusively of dialogue, thereby having the character of a small one-act play that takes place in the living room of the farm worker Schulz. As the title indicates, a small group of friends and neighbours have gathered here to engage in the common activity of cracking nuts. This idyllic basic situation — the pleasant company of people who, despite all their teasing, get on well with each other — forms the setting for a number of highly different themes that take place in the dialogue. To the socially critical Sturm und Drang repertoire belongs partly fierce criticism of the treatment of the country’s subjects by the authorities and partly the demand for the improvement and humanisation of the country’s princes. Two tales which the schoolmaster narrates (we are already familiar with him from »Die Schaafschur«) also deal with two of the favourite topics of the time: concubinage and infanticide — both the result of the denial by despotic parents and prejudiced fellow human beings of the right of young people to choose their own spouses. In stark contrast to this are the merry pranks carried out by one of the guests, Fröhling, since he poses as an adventurer and swashbuckler; the same joker ingratiates himself in the course of the idyll with one of the young girls and gains her word of consent, while the girl’s elder sister gives birth to a son in the neighbouring house. Other amusing incidents include the difficult riddles in verse which Fröhling asks the 85-year-old grandmother — and which she is exceptionally proficient at solving. Like »Die Schaafschur«, also »Das Nuß-Kernen« contains a fulsome literary parody of one of the age’s fashionable genres, a »tragi-komische Serenate« (a tragi-comic serenade). In this idyll Maler Müller shows his Sturm und Drang-like desire to push far beyond the traditional boundaries of the genre, to link comic — almost grotesque — characteristics with serious political and moral criticism as well as with a love-story, all of this held together by a village community which is fundamentally realistic, but which, in its good, straightforward way of talking presents a contrast to the obtuseness and narrow social control which, in the tale of the schoolmaster, drives a young girl to infanticide and madness. Walter, the good-hearted if hot-tempered peasant who was the main character in »Die Schaafschur«, makes the following comment on the story: Oh, humans, humans! You are worse than animals! If the entire village had not watched over the poor girl with such spiteful eyes before, prepared all disgrace and shame […] That is what perverts nature entirely, transforms gentleness and love into rage and bloodthirstiness and hardens the gentle motherly heart to iron.8

The avantgardist anti-morality of the Sturm und Drang movement is expressed here by the simple peasant, thereby gaining a quality of natural morality and common sense. This takes place in the movement’s characteristic revolt against the older generation’s classically schooled, artificial 8.

»O Menschen, Menschen! Ihr seyd ärger, als Thiere! Hätte das ganze Dorf nicht mit boshaften Augen das arme Mädchen zuvor so bewacht, allen Schimpf und Schand’ vorbereitet […]. Das ist’s, was die Natur ganz verdreht, Sanftmuth und Liebe in Raserei und Blutdurst verwandelt und das sanfte mütterliche Herz eisenfest härtet« (ibid., 124).

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style and superficial sentimentality. In place of this, the insistence was on natural language that could directly communicate strong emotions. The models for this were found partly in Ossian and the bardic tradition (Klopstock) and partly in the simple, direct mode of expression of popular poetry. Müller’s idyll project, to change the function of the genre in accordance with this literary programme, is presented in concentrated form in »Die Schaafschur« and »Das NußKernen«, but it is a common denominator for all his idylls, no matter whether they deal with unspoiled enthusiasm for life itself (»Adams erstes Erwachen«), deep-felt sorrow and despair (»Der Faun«), the insistence on genuineness and immediacy in art (»Die Schaafschur« and »Das Nuss-Kernen«) or the critique of narrow-minded morality and its consequences (»Das Nuß-Kernen«). Maler Müller does not — as do Voß, Goldsmith, Crabbe and Bull — come with direct contributions to a discussion about the abolition of villeinage; nevertheless, he pleads, in »Das Nuß-Kernen«, for humane enlightenment of the ruling class, and — just as Geßner did, although in a radicalised form — for the modern ideal of man and poetry that unites emotionality with naturalness, and self-awareness with spontaneity and vision. With Goldsmith’s »The Deserted Village«, Crabbe’s The Village, Voß’s »Die Leibeigenen«, Hans Bull’s »Om Landmandens Lyksalighed« and Maler Müller’s prose idylls we have followed a branch of tradition that, in various ways, represented a polemic against the traditional form and content of the genre, whilst at the same time — and, once more, individually — maintained and further developed other traditional elements of the genre. Alongside this innovative, polemic branch, the non-polemic part of the idyll tradition before 1800 is represented by few, although weighty, names — by the later idylls of Voß, those after »Die Leibeigenen« and »Die Freigelassenen«, and by Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea (Hermann and Dorothea, 1797). After the age of Crabbe, England seems unable to provide any corresponding examples; and Scandinavian idyll does not seem to emerge until around 1810. In his later idylls, Johann Heinrich Voß concentrates on the quiet, harmonious and emotionally rich life of the village. The great idyll Luise, which appeared in three parts (1783, 1784 and 1795), is a magnificent example of this. It centres on the old vicar and his family, the figure which Goethe in his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth, 1811–33) describes as the ideal idyllic figure, since it combines the educated and Christian-humanistic with the simple life in the immediate proximity of peasants and servants. The basic plot of Luise takes place in the space of the two days of Luise’s wedding. Surrounding it are a number of elements which, to a greater extent than the action itself, constitute the idyllic nature of the text. This applies first and foremost to the old vicar, who is utterly devoted to his family, especially his only daughter. His thoughts prior to the wedding concerning his imminent farewell to his little girl belong to the emotional highlights of the idyll. His character also includes a healthy interest in the delights of the simple meal — an interest that is reflected in the text in a detailed list of ingredients that is typical for the idyll genre. The richness of detail is not only linked to the gastronomical. The description of nature in Voß frequently includes long lists of names of flowers and birds, just as the description of the domestic also abounds in such details: how the dwelling is fitted and furnished, the porcelain and cutlery used, the pipe and the tobacco (a recurrent motif in the idylls). Typical of the social setting of Luise is the patriarchal organisation of the family and the village: strong personal bonds link together not only the members of the nuclear family but also

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those employed and the inhabitants of the village in a fellowship which we also can see represented in the idylls of Maler Müller. Only at times, though therefore all the more conspicuous for that, the »great outside world« makes its appearance in this intimate universe, through references to the American Revolution and Constitutional Rights, the ideals of which — we have not yet reached the French Revolution — can still easily be defended by a well-adjusted village vicar and family father. Voß’s idylls have no really Romantic characteristics — rather elements from the sentimental tradition of the pre-Romantics. His well-turned hexameters lend the depicted universe a certain transfigured, almost distant elegance which does not invite a Romantic, innovative emotionality and ethos. Something similar can be said about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s idyllic hexameter epos Hermann und Dorothea, which takes place in a town, not in a village, as with Voß. Also as regards the inclusion of the historical context, Goethe goes a step further than Voß, whom he greatly admired. Where the latter had introduced occasional references to contemporary events, Goethe makes the great events of his time — here the French Revolution — the very backdrop that unleashes the plot and constitutes the magnetic field within which the characters of the tale achieve their personal development. Goethe does not establish an idyll by creating an isolated space, but by allowing the values of the idyll and the close family ties to pass the test. In Goethe, the world is not some set piece but a vital factor. For that reason, the final re-harmonising state appears, also in Goethe’s case, to be a sort of combative act of will. Harmony and happiness are something man has to fight for and to retain a hold of. This is how Goethe relativises the idyllic concept, as he changes the traditional, enclosed idyllic space (in Voß) to the open space of reality and action. In the same way, he qualifies and amplifies the genre by means of a varied, deeper character portrayal. Through this greater depth of characterisation, Goethe is able to make the love relationship between the two young main characters far more gripping and convincing than Voß with his sentimentally idealised though also stylised pair Luise and Walter and the somewhat postulated emotionalism of Maler Müller’s village youth. Other works by Goethe have also been labelled idyllic. In his earlier works this has been applied to certain passages in Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther, 1774; 1787), a story of passion that is, as is well recognised, far from being idyllic, taken as a whole. Here, the idyll represents the breathing-holes of the emotionally highly-strung hero, his attempt to get away from city life and calm his mind via a »genuinely« natural life in rustic surroundings. In the first letters of the book the well-known dichotomy between town and country is thematised. In the description of the experiences in the village of Wahlheim a series of idyllic elements is included, partly in the description of nature and partly in the relations between the main character and the local inhabitants. In the famous letter of 10 May, Werther presents himself at the classical locus amoenus in the grass beside the stream. As a Romantic, he is aware that the paradisiacal nature of his experience is to a great extent a projection of his own fantasies and nature worship (the letter of 12 May). In the village, the well and the square in front of it, fringed with tall trees, is the idyllic space where children and mothers live a harmonious family life, and where simple but noble peasant lads confide to him their genuinely felt yearnings for love. Precisely this closeness to the people, the sense of meaningful community, is recognised here

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as being a central idyllic element. Werther sees village life as being permeated by a patriarchal concept which he praises in the letter dated 21 June: Thus even the most restless traveller finally yearns for his native soil, and finds in his own cottage, in the arms of his wife, in the company of his children, and in the labour necessary for their support, that happiness which he had sought in vain in the wide world.9

Signs can be seen in this village idyll of various contemporary sources of inspiration — first and foremost Geßner’s idyllic etchings and Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, which cannot in its entirety be justly considered as an idyll, but whose portrait of the humanist, benevolently patriarchal vicar has proved a source of inspiration for a number of corresponding characters in the idyllic tradition. 4.

The idyll around and after 1800: High and late Romanticism

As mentioned in the introduction, the idyll in the prose of High Romanticism mainly features as interpolated »windows« out towards alternative states, thereby reflecting the duality of reality and irreality that dominated the Romantic cast of thought. In one of the early German Romantic masters, Ludwig Tieck, we see such worlds of transcendental idyll in glimpses, as in the tale »Die Elfen« (The Elves; 1812 in Phantasus), where the perspective is the young girl Marie, and where the idyll thus has the nature of a childlike Elysium, where the immediate and sensual is in the foreground: sweet fruit and berries, sparkling and bright colours, gold and precious stones, beautiful music and bird song fill the senses. The idyllic fellowship in this childlike version has the nature of exciting but always safe and secure playing and of loving fellowship between children, adults and animals, where embraces, kisses and gentle gifts recur as important elements. All of this takes place in an unreal space, where the normal laws of time, space and nature are suspended. Typical for the Romantic, transcendental idyll is, however, its frailty and transitoriness: It is a land that mankind loses, as it does childhood, before even realising it. When Marie returns from what she experiences as a single day’s visit to the world of the elves, seven years have passed in the outside world. In another tale by Tieck, Der Blonde Eckbert (Eckbert the Fair, 1797), the main female character recalls a childhood that she spent in an isolated enchanted world, in harmony with her magical surroundings until she herself breaks the idyll by violating its law and flees back to the real world. In Clemens Brentano’s early, wild and fragmentarily conceived novel Godwi (1801), we have glimpses of a similar childlike idyll in Otilie’s memories of the quiet spot in the forest where she made friends with Jodmo: I sat beside her and, with childish oaths, We joined together our young hearts.10 9.

»So sehnt sich der unruhigste Vagabund zuletzt wieder nach seinem Vaterlande und findet in seiner Hütte, an der Brust seiner Gattin, in dem Kreise seiner Kinder, in den Geschäften zu ihrer Erhaltung die Wonne, die er in der weiten Welt vergebens suchte« (Goethe 1998, vol. 6, 29).

10.

»Ich setzte mich zu ihr, und wir verbanden/ Mit kindschen Schwüren unsre kleinen Herzen« (ibid., 156).

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In Godwi, it is the women who convey the idyllic images. Walpurgis’s vision of death in the second part of the novel has idyllic elements that remind us of what we encounter in Novalis in Heinrich von Ofterdingen (see below) and later in E.T.A. Hoffmann, i.e. the concept of the emancipation of thought from the will of the individual and its fusion with the cosmos: »and it [the thought] rests in the arms of all«.11 This state is described by the dying Walpurgis as a symbiosis of male and female, of light and sound, a crescendo of »Wollust« (lust) with an orgiastic quality that is broken off by the darkness of death. Both in the retrospective childhood idyll and the prospective vision of death, the longing for the other state is the central force — a longing that makes the idyll dynamic, as opposed to the more static idylls of other periods. In certain passages in Godwi, the idyllic theme is ironically broken, since the idyllic is revealed as being a hollow idealised conception. Thus Godwi, on the one hand, praises a life where soulful friendship, love, joy, wine and beautiful nature are the bearing elements. These elements, however, are immediately deconstructed: Friendship must give way to the profane duties of every day, the girl must stop her kiss (she has to cough), the wine-glass must be put down (he has got drunk), art falls silent (the female singer is unable to reach the high notes), and beautiful nature is laid waste by winter. What remains is sleep plagued by a hangover (ibid., 47). Thus two highRomantic elements characterise Godwi’s treatment of the idyllic: the Romantic irony and the transcendental vision. Only Otilie’s recollections of childhood already mentioned, which fill a few lines in a novel of some 600 pages, exhibit the genuine, naive nature of the idyll. Novalis’s novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Henry von Ofterdingen, 1802), in which the blue flower is introduced as the Romantic symbol of poetry, offers a series of glimpses into a magic world that has some of the same characteristics as that of Tieck, but which is related to a greater extent with that of Brentano. In Novalis we are dealing with visions that do not have the static and harmonious characteristics of the idyll but which, by virtue of their infinitude, have a dynamic quality that runs counter to the idyllic model. However, the second part of the novel, »Die Erfüllung« (Fulfilment), offers — in the final, not easily accessible dialogue between Heinrich and the hermit Sylvester — a philosophical reflection on the highest state of the soul which approaches that of the idyll, a state which is characterised by the absence of evil. This highest form of harmony is explained as the result of the supremacy of conscience over man and nature. Conscience is understood as the result of personal development to the point of mastery — and thus the highest degree of artistic freedom. In this highest phase of artistic creativeness, each word and deed of the master is identical with the word and will of God. In this Elysian state, then, religion, ethics and aesthetics fuse into a combined artistic expression that is the realisation of God’s original intention with the world and man. Here, as in Tieck’s »Die Elfen« and in Hoffmann’s »Nußknacker«, childhood plays a pivotal role. It is the open door onto nature, and the Elysian state is also understood as a heavenly reflection of true childhood, as »the apparition of a second, higher childhood — of paradise regained«.12

11.

»und er [der Gedanke] ruht in aller Armen« (ibid., 417).

12.

»die Erscheinung der zweyten, höhern Kindheit, des wiedergefundenen Paradieses« (Novalis 1977, vol. I, 67).

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As early as the years 1793–97, the classically oriented Romantic Friedrich Hölderlin wrote his visionary epistolary novel Hyperion, which, like Brentano’s Godwi, is a disconnected and fragmentary project. The letters between the main character, Hyperion, the beloved Diotima and the friend Bellarmin contain, among other things, a series of reflections on the great issues of love, friendship, the lost paradise, history and art. Once more, it is childhood that is praised as the Elysium that has been lost for ever, where idyllic qualities reigned: tranquillity, innocence, freedom, endless possibilities and, not least, the holistic identity of the I, which had not yet been exposed to the Zerrissenheit (disunion, inner strife) that is the fate of every Romantic. In other passages it is the Arcadian landscape of the idyll that is described, with the well-known antique motifs: the olive grove, the goats and their herdsmen, the cool shade of the trees, the murmuring of the spring — everything experienced in a temporal vacuum, as a pulsating, motionless moment or an eternity, analogous to the recollection of childhood as a motionless space of recollection. As is the case with the other Romantics mentioned, the idyllic, Arcadian spaces are depicted in an elegiac tone that expresses the loss of, and the longing for, these states — a loss which Hölderlin understands as a consequence of the very nature of man: »For the savage breast of man no native-land is possible«.13 Love is another space where idyllic qualities become visible, not in the form of love that is actually realised but in the vision of a pre-Elysian age where the loving souls had already found and were playing with each other in a state of divine childhood, and in a corresponding vision of a paradisiacal future where they stroll together from spring to spring in eternal sunlight. The theme of the idyll acquires a dimension particularly inspired by classicism in Hyperion in the section on Athens as an image of harmoniously developing culture, undisturbed by violent warfare, in a life free of extreme states such as poverty or abundance, without uncontrollable, absolute monarchs, and in a temperate climate. Precisely this golden mean of everything, a harmonious world without extremes, »left to its own devices like the emerging diamond«14 is something we know not only as a recurring idea in the idyll but also as an essential concept in the classicistic current in the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet it is not the classical »edle Einfalt und stille Größe« (noble simplicity and quiet greatness) in Winckelmann’s famous formula that constantly characterises Hölderlin’s idyllic ideas; rather, the elegiac, the longing and the transcendental vision. In the late-Romantic E.T.A. Hoffmann, too, it is the transcendental vision which bears the ideas that come closest to the idyll. In Der goldne Topf (The Golden Pot, 1814), the main character experiences definitive transcendence into a world of bliss which is called Atlantis. The state he experiences in the union with his beloved can be viewed as an idyll, insofar as this state is an expression of the highest bliss (»höchste Seligkeit«). The total affinity between the two lovers is extended here to one with nature and the world. Love opens the mind to the very being of nature, and, in a universe of light, precious stones and flowers, all sensual impressions fuse with love and thereby provide images for the Romantic idea of the inner cohesion of all things which, at its best, poetry is able to show the way to. The tranquil, harmonious stasis in Der goldne Topf — as in Brentano’s Godwi — is replaced by a dynamic fusion of subject and 13.

»Für des Menschen wilde Brust ist keine Heimat möglich« (Hölderlin 1965, 17).

14.

»sich selber überlassen, wie der werdende Diamant« (ibid., 73).

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cosmos in a final, ecstatic crescendo. Typical for Hoffmann, however, is the ironic dissonance that arises out of the narrator’s frustration at never being able himself to attain such a state of absolute happiness. Via this Romantic irony, Late Romanticism generally thematised its recognition of the impossible nature of the high-Romantic project. In Jean Paul, the ironic dissonance becomes the dominant narrative mode. Even though, in a number of his tales — e.g. Quintus Fixlein (1796) and Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterlein Maria Wuz in Auenthal (Life of the Contented Schoolmaster Wuz, 1793) — he makes frequent use of known idyllic motifs, the treatment of these motifs in his work is dominated by the Romantic critique of the Philistine. The commenting, strongly subjective and at times critical narrative voice leaves no room for the quiet and breadth of description which is a prerequisite in order for a truly idyllic space and a corresponding mood to develop. When the story of Schulmeisterlein Wuz has Eine Art Idylle (A Kind of Idyll) as its subtitle, it is thus more the words »eine Art« than the word »Idylle« that should be emphasised. The schoolmaster — a character we have met in the idyll as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century — in Jean Paul loses his status as a representative of popular, humanistic educative ideals, becoming rather a self-sufficient, ridiculous figure. Far less querying is the late-Romantic tale Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Good-For-Nothing, 1826) by Joseph von Eichendorff, in which the frustrations of High Romanticism are replaced by a more cheerful, direct tone that probably has contributed to the propagation and popularity of this work. In actual fact, the work contains more of the »Biedermeier« de-demonisation of Romanticism than of originally Romantic thought. The traveller as a Romantic topos is central to the tale. But in Eichendorff ’s version he acquires a devil-maycare, almost superficial nature that distances him from the contemplative, seeking Romantic traveller. Something similar applies to the idyllic aspects of the novel, which are limited to just a few scenes where life in the village is depicted as quiet, pleasant conviviality, focused on the inn, playing cards and tobacco, while the children play and the young men and women dance and fall in love. The main character sees all of this in a single glance, as a tableau that unfolds in front of his eyes as he enters the village (a situation not unlike Werther’s description of the square with the well in the letter of 12 May in Goethe’s famous novel). Another depiction of a festive get-together, tinged by idyll, in the last warm rays of the evening sun is also the description of just a moment, not an idyllic state. We find a lightly ironic dissonance, but with a much warmer gleam in the eye than was found in the authors of High Romanticism, in the way the main character presents himself as a Philistine, with dressing gown, pipe, nightcap and account book — a character we associate with Voß’s friendly village vicar, with links back to the 1780s. And even though a dream of an Arcadian landscape is described at one point, this vision — which was vividly and fully described in Hölderlin and Novalis — is reduced in Eichendorff to a collection of topoi that are almost clichéd in character: »I dreamed of heavenly-blue flowers, of beautiful, dark-green lonely dales where springs murmured and streams rustled and brightly coloured birds sang wondrously, until I finally fell fast asleep«.15 15.

»Mir träumte von himmelblauen Blumen, von schönen, dunkelgrünen, einsamen Gründen, wo Quellen rauschten und Bächlein gingen und bunte Vögel wunderbar sangen, bis ich endlich fest einschlief« (Eichendorff 1966, 1079).

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While the idyll before High Romanticism was, as has been shown, dominated to a great extent by the polemical, boundary-exceeding idyll, it is in the post-1800 period — which actually means the period in which Romanticism proper has been replaced by the Biedermeier culture — that »pure« idyll is the dominant form. The element of revolt which characterised the view of the world and art in Pre-Romanticism and Sturm und Drang has, after a brief but intense High Romantic period — exhausted its energy, with a more adjusted and resigned art more geared towards its audience emerging in its stead. 5.

The Biedermeier age in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain

It is, nevertheless, interesting to note how the classicist variant introduced by Voß and Goethe continued to influence Scandinavia and to find a new content. Frans Michael Franzén, the first to draw on classicism and later to experiment with Romanticism, marks this continuity in Sweden with his translation of Voß’s idyll »Der siebzigste Geburtstag« in 1794. Under the influence of Voß’s idylls Franzén writes »Emili, eller en afton i Lappland« (Emili, or an Evening in Lappland, 1810). Franzén adds certain traits to the genre: he chooses the alexandrine as metrical form, and he adopts a somewhat weightier, more external, moral-didactic tone. Closer to Voß is Sweden’s »national bard« Esaias Tegnér (a title which Tegnér has mainly acquired by virtue of the national-heroic cycle of poems known as Frithiofs Saga, 1825). Tegnér introduces the idyll into Swedish Biedermeier culture with his work Nattvardsbarnen (The Children of the Lord’s Supper, 1820), which takes up the hexameter once more. As was characteristic of the genre (in Voß: »Der siebzigste Geburtstag«), the action in Nattvardsbarnen also concentrates on a single event in a person’s life, i.e. confirmation. The setting is rural, with once more the old vicar at the centre. In Tegnér’s case, it is the vicar’s sermon to the confirmands that is the core of the story, thus adding — as in Franzén — a strongly edifying element to the text, and a typical Biedermeier characteristic. Nattvardsbarnen was a great sales success, whereas a later attempt within the same genre, Kronbruden (The Crown Bride, 1841), did less well, being characterised by the more complex composition and political reflection that was typical of the 1840s but alien to the idyll — and its audience. Already a few years previously, the Finnish-Swedish writer Johan Ludvig Runeberg had published his Elgskyttarne (The Elk Hunters, 1832). Here, as in Tegnér, the hexameter has been chosen, with a narrative style that is broadly descriptive, while the intrigue centred round the nubile Hedda and her suitors has a secondary role. Important in Runeberg is a new, more »realistic« depiction of a rural community. With an ethnographical and topographical attention to detail, Runeberg takes the descriptive qualities of the genre far further than previously seen within the tradition of the idyll in hexameters. The narrative conveys a detailed picture of the hierarchy of village society. However, central to this universe — and in agreement with the patriarchal tradition of the idyll as well as the humanistically conservative concept of order of the Biedermeier period — is the common morality that binds people together across social boundaries. Elgskyttarne was followed by Hannah in 1836, a love-story in which the idyllic portrayal of nature with evocative images gains a new breadth and functions as a backdrop to the main characters’ closeness to nature. In his third idyll Julqvällen (Christmas Eve, 1841) Runeberg chooses

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a theme that is especially typical of the Biedermeier period, Christmas Eve, as the quintessence of family intimacy and unity as well as of unaffected childlike joy. The setting is a manor-house environment, which contrasts with the army camp, where a different, tougher although more resistant and heroic mentality is prevalent. On the last pages of the idyll, the heroic — without any organic link to the rest of the idyll — comes to the fore via nationalist escapades. The work of the Swabian writer Eduard Mörike, especially his idylls in verse, must also be seen in the light of the break between the classicist, the Romantic and the Biedermeier tradition. The parallel between Runeberg and Mörike consists, not least, in the fact that the latter was the originator of the final important contribution to the hexameter idyll tradition within his language area and the period here under discussion. This occurred in his Idylle vom Bodensee (The Idyll of Lake Constance) from 1842, inspired by Goethe’s Herrmann und Dorothea (Herrmann and Dorothea, 1797), but also with strong roots in the popular tale discovered by the Romantics. The idyll comprises two Till Eulenspiegel-like picaresque stories. We are dealing with country jinks, although they are not quite as innocent as one would expect to find in an idyll. With a sharp psychological eye, Mörike reveals in his main character an element of realistic malice. The rough practical jokes are counterbalanced towards the end of the idyll by the inserted love story with its happy conclusion. The somewhat sudden happy love is staged as a bucolic idyll in which the shepherdess, surrounded by sheep and dog, and the young fisherman profess their love. In Mörike, the pastoral environment — as well as that of the fishermen — is an integral part of a form of rural realism which radically separates this latecomer of an idyll from the Geßner pastorals and shows literary affinity with Goethe’s and Runeberg’s realistic portrayals of village and town environment. Although Mörike makes use of the hallmark of the genre, detailed description, it is clear that the narrative element in this idyll is more to the fore than was the case in his predecessors, showing his close ties with the popular, humorous and moralising prose tale, of which the Biedermeier period was so inordinately fond. Idylle vom Bodensee exposes and ridicules material greed and of common capriciousness. The tension that exists in the text between the realistic and partly demonic nature of the presentation on the one hand and the artificial language, influenced stylistically by classicism, on the other makes it plain that we are in a phase where the potential of the hexameter idyll as a narrative genre would seem to have reached its limit. After this, the tradition of realistic literature takes over to an extent that would seem to prevent the continued existence of this genre. In Norway, the special history of the country seems to a certain degree to have obstructed the production of idylls during the Biedermeier period. Since Romanticism came somewhat late to Norway after its independence from Denmark in 1814, the literary scene was characterised by the struggle between those who were fervent anti-Danish nationalists and those who argued for continued close contact with Danish cultural life. This struggle also included the discussion concerning the language of creative writing: should bokmål (book, i.e. literary, idiom), influenced by Danish, or the original Norwegian language, marked by dialect, be the medium of the new literature? In this at times extremely heated polemics a decidedly national Romanticism developed in Norway in the 1820–40 period that afforded only little room for pastoral echoes and idyllic native-soil depictions. As early as 1775, the writer and critic Claus Fasting had noted in his review of the first publication by The Norwegian Literary Society (Det

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Norske Litteraturselskab): »We have odes and satires, but we lack poetic tales and idylls« (quot. Holm-Olsen 1974, vol. 1, 591). It was not until Maurits Christian Hansen’s cycle of idylls, Norsk Idyllekrands (Norwegian Idyllic Garland, 1831), (see below) that the Norwegian idyll vacuum began to a certain degree to be filled. In England, the violently polemical criticism by Goldsmith and Crabbe of the false idealisation of the pastoral idyll seems to have led to a marked caesura in the further development of the genre. It is not until Mary Russell Mitford’s collection of tales in five volumes, Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery (1824–32), that England acquires, for the first time since the age of innocent pastorals in the middle of the eighteenth century, an unspoiled presentation of the countryside and the village. In a series of relatively short scenes and tales, the female firstperson narrator provides a detailed picture of her village, its inhabitants and parts of its history. With her beloved greyhound Mayflower, and often accompanied by the young girl Lizzy from next door, the narrator explores the village and the surrounding countryside on her regular walks. With the dog and the child — both spontaneous yet both well-behaved — the narrator establishes an intimate, emotional space that allows the adult reader to be a child and regain a pristine experience of the wonders of nature, whether seen through the eyes of the dog, the child, or the authentically experiencing adult. All three points of view are represented in turn by a first-person narrator. It is only rarely that any real course of actions is part of the individual episodes. As Shelagh Hunter points out, we are dealing here with tales which, in terms of narrative, are governed by »extreme simplicity«. »She was first a poet, secondly a poetic dramatist, lastly a prose-writer and never a good story-teller« (Hunter 1984, 59). The tale normally consists of a description of flowers, landscapes and the objects of human culture in a course of events that is structured and varied according to the changes of the seasons and the weather and the moods which these provoke in the narrator — moods that as a rule keep to the lighter end of the spectrum. Mitford’s narrative style is characterised by the listing that is well-known in the idyll tradition though now considerably expanded, so that it reflects the author’s wish to attain a high degree of exactness in her descriptions, as, for example, in »The First Primrose« (1819): A large, heavy, white house, in the simplest style, surrounded by fine oaks and elms, and tall massy plantations shaded down into a beautiful lawn by wild overgrown shrubs, bowery acacias, ragged sweet-briars, promontories of dogwood, and Portugal laurel, and bays, overhung by laburnum and bird-cherry (Mitford 1922, 53).

The correct names of the plants in this descriptive listing play just as important a role as the descriptive adjectives linked to them. The empirical approach to the world of early realism, not least to the individual natural phenomenon, begins to make itself felt. The use of the term »realism« in connection with Mitford’s idylls must of course be rather tentative, since we are far removed here from realism of the starker kind represented for instance by a contemporary French writer like Balzac and which a number of early Victorian writers were soon to introduce. Mitford’s realism is of the same kind as that with which contemporary painters depicted the humble life of people in the countryside — painters to whom references are also made in the text: Teniers, Wilkie, Millais, as also mentioned by P.D. Edwards (Edwards 1988, 10 f.). These artists represent a style of painting where veracity and detail in the representation of the humble cottages, domestic animals and people do not combine to create a picture of misery but rather

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one of a sun-drenched rural harmony and homeliness. The painting as a model for Mitford’s descriptions is often evident in one of her series of scenes and tableaux: The father, mother and children, returning from the wheat-field, the little ones loaded with bristling close-tied bunches and wheat-ears, their own gleanings, or a bottle or a basket which had contained their frugal dinner, whilst the mother would carry her babe hushing and lulling it, and the father and an elder child trudged after with the cradle, all seemingly weary and all happy (Mitford 1922, 199).

The relatively objective descriptive layers of the text are enriched emotionally by apostrophic and exclamatory elements. The majority of the chapters, for example, are introduced by a mention of the weather: »A lovely autumnal day; the air soft, balmy, genial« (210) or »A bright sunshiny afternoon. What a comfort it is to get out again« (179). Mitford presents a light, positive picture of rural life that seems completely unthreatened by industrial development or other dangers. The greatest danger for the narrator would seem to be unforeseen rain and a dog that does not obey her commands. Poverty as a menace is peripherally represented by the poorhouse, the existence of which the narrator seems eager to suppress: »I always hurry past that place as if it were a prison« (63), and by a few tales of families who have gone into a decline (»The Old House at Aberleigh«, i.e. Our Village, part 10). Even though these references to poverty and decay are part of the idylls and thus betray a social involvement that was characteristic of large sections of the European bourgeoisie in the time leading up to the 1848 revolution, these are things in Mitford’s universe that one can always »hurry past« and that do not seriously blight the harmonious, happy picture Mitford presents — a harmony which, interestingly enough, is not justified by a divine order whereas this is often the case in both German and Swedish writers of idyll in the Biedermeier period (Mörike, Franzén) — but which would rather seem to be a secular and humanistically justified alternative to a world order no longer based on religion. As an idyll, Our Village has a number of the genre’s constituent characteristics: the time cycles, the changing and repetition of the seasons determined by nature as the structural principle of the text, the doing away with narrative and a dramatic course of action in the traditional sense, the freezing of the description in static images — tableaux — that display an affinity with painting, the comprehensive, listing descriptions, the determined screening off of threats coming from without and below, and finally the contrast already present in the idyll of antiquity between town and country. In contrast to her »delightful little village far in the country« (Mitford 1922, 3), London is described as a place of discomfort and disease. At the beginning of »Violeting« (Our Village, part 5) the narrator has newly arrived from the heat, the glare, the noise, and the fever of London, to plunge into the remotest labyrinths of the country, and regain the pose of mind, the calmness of heart, which has been lost in that great Babel (59).

It is natural to see the link between these thematic elements in Mitford’s idylls and the writings twenty years later of the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, who admittedly did not write real idylls but who makes intensive use in his stories of idyllic structures and themes. Precisely the emotionally based village fellowship provides the setting for the action in his best-known tale »Bergkristall« (Rock Crystal, 1853), which tells of two children’s miraculous rescue from a

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snowstorm in the mountains. Country fellowship is also is a central theme in the tales »Brigitta« (1847), and »Zwei Schwestern« (Two Sisters, 1850), as well as in his great Bildungsroman Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer, 1857). These tales all have a description of a rural community where the structures of the patriarchal family form the setting of a community for production and personal development. In the long-winded, repetitive descriptions and the penchant for almost empirically scientific precision in the indicating of names of flowers, birds, insects, landscapes and locations, it is also possible to see a relationship between Mitford and Stifter. It is, generally speaking, a question of an intensified ethnographical and topographical approach to the description, a wish to gather and protect which the conservatively-minded Biedermeier person was a representative of. As already mentioned, the same attitude can be observed in the contemporary Finnish writer Runeberg, who at the time of writing his epic Elgskyttarne was also working on a scientific topographical description of the same region. In Denmark, too, this topographical wave would seem to have been quite strong. The humorous philosophical Danish writer Poul Martin Møller felt inspired to write a topographical parody Statistiske Skildringer af Lægdsgaarden i Ølseby Magle (Statistical Description of the Recruiting House in Ølseby-Magle, 1819), a tiny village on the Danish island of Zealand. In Norway, which after its severance from Denmark in 1814 was busy building up its self-awareness as a nation, Jens Edvard Kraft published a very comprehensive Topografisk-statistisk beskrivelse over Norge (Topographical Statistical Description of Norway, 1820–35). With Adalbert Stifter, however, we have crossed the threshold into the realistic period, which means a comprehensive problematisation of the idyllic model and its restriction to publications of a »lighter« nature, e.g. the highly popular periodical Die Gartenlaube (The Garden Bower). A superb example of Realism’s deconstruction of previous idyllic environments is to be found in the Die Leute von Seldwyla (The People of Seldwyla, 1856–74), a cycle of novels by Gott­fried Keller. Here the village harmony is replaced by material greed and mutual distrust (Die drei gerechten Kammacher; The Three Righteous Combmakers, 1856). With biting irony Keller contrasts his often misanthropic character portrayals with descriptions of idyllic landscapes and love relationships, as in the deeply tragic tale »Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe« (A Village Romeo and Juliet, 1856). A more genuine idyllic setting is to be found in the tale »Das Fähnlein der sieben Aufrechten« (The Banner of the Upright Seven, 1861, later part of the Züricher Novellen, 1878). Here too, however, the patriarchal family idyll is broken by Keller’s lovingly ironical depiction of the historically antiquated, self-important patriotic craftsmen’s guild. The love relationship between the two young main characters, with its happy ending (which also borrows features from the fairy-tale) does, however, allow us to use the idyll concept when characterising this tale. The contemporary famous novella by Eduard Mörike, Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag (Mozart on his Journey to Prague, 1856) is, to a greater extent than the tales of the Swiss Gottfried Keller, in accordance with the idyllic model. Within the setting of an aristocratic environment — which in Mörike’s description is hardly distinguishable from a Biedermeier-like upper middle class environment — an interaction takes place between people previously unknown to one another who, by virtue of a common love of music, attain the effortless intimacy which we have described earlier as being the nature of the idyll. No violent or fateful events are described

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here. The depicted encounter is practically without further consequences, an intermezzo the significance of which consists solely in the humanist message of meaningful and life-affirming time spent in each other’s company, made possible by guest friendship, cultivated openness and dedicated humanity. Regarding the Victorian or English Biedermeier period, mention must be made not only of Mary Mitford but also of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Unlike Mitford, Tennyson retained epic verse as his preferred literary form. He wrote a number of narrative poems in blank verse in the period between 1833 and 1839, which were published under the title English Idyls in 1842. Tennyson’s idylls are relatively short texts of between 50 and 270 lines. He continues a number of thematic and structural elements from the tradition of classical idyll. The basic situation is often the cosy, intimate atmosphere that exists among friends, as a setting for conversations about important subjects, such as love (»Edwin Morris«) or art (»The Epic«). The prologue of the verse narrative »The Princess« should also be mentioned. It is not part of English Idylls, but is has the same basic characteristics and is more detailed in its discussion of aesthetics in art than any of the included texts. »Audley Court« tells of an excursion by two friends to a tranquil spot where they consume the delicacies they have taken with them and chat about things of interest to them. Here it is not the themes of the conversations but the actual situation which becomes the content. The retrospective angle often predominates in Tennyson’s idyllic texts, lending them a melancholy and nostalgic atmosphere. The loss of happiness and the one true love recurs as a theme in a number of the idylls, not least in »The Gardener’s Daughter«: My first, last love; the idol of my youth, The darling of my manhood, and, alas! Now the most blessèd memory of mine age. (Tennyson 1969, 521).

The same elegiac tone is found in »Edwin Morris«. Love as a theme does not, then, appear in the traditionally positively transfigured light of the idyll. The idyllic aspect lies more in the actual setting in which the theme of love is brought up: the relaxed company of good friends, with whom it is possible to talk intimately and directly, whether it is on an excursion as in »Audley Court« and »Edwin Morris«, in a cosy home setting as in »The Epic« (»round the wassailbowl«) or at some festive occasion (as in the »Prologue« to »The Princess«). The atmospheric, detailed description of nature plays an important role in these texts, with the tableau so typical of the genre also often constituting an important focal point, where love arises or is declared to the loved one (»The Gardener’s Daughter«, »Edwin Morris«). In »Dora«, the theme of love is treated with greater narrative acceleration than is normal for the idyll. The action in this novellistic text stretches over many years. The theme is the confrontation between the despotic family father and love’s insistence on freedom. It is only the last, sudden twist of the plot, where the father renounces his power and thereby creates room for a harmonious conclusion, that can justify this work being categorised as an idyll. Tennyson’s idylls add a highly concentrated, poetic language to the idyll as well as a form of description which, with a few quick strokes, outlines the situation. He creates a verse narrative that, in its often sketchy, brief form, is more Romantic by nature than anything found in any of the other writers dealt with here.

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The Biedermeier period is the phase in European literature in which prose really makes its breakthrough and achieves a high level of acceptance as a literary form with the wide reading public that develops in the first half of the century. This shift will also play an important role for the idyll, which, in conquering the prose form, creates a new platform for itself for the description of the rural conditions which Goldsmith and Crabbe had made it difficult to approach. To return, though, to the prose idyll proper, which is found in various forms in Scandinavia: In Sweden, the otherwise Romantically turbulent and mysterious Carl Jonas Love Almqvist wrote what could be called the prototype of a Swedish, idyllic settler story, Grimstahamns Nybygge (The Settlement of Grimstahamn, 1839). It tells the elementary story of a young man who wishes to be freed of his contract of service so that he can re-establish a derelict farm, without having much at his disposal apart from his own two hands. The core of the tale is a love-story: the main character, Johan, proposes to his childhood sweetheart to get her out to the new place. With great realism in the description of the hard work, yet also with the fairly easy overcoming of difficulties that is typical of the idyll, the ten years that are depicted form a gently progressing success story, determined by the love and solidarity of the married couple, and by their knowledge of and respect for the demands made by the harsh natural conditions of Sweden. The threats that stand in the way of the project from time to time prove to be of a superficial nature. The sickness and death of the grandmother is not presented as a tragic event but as a natural though moving part of the eternal cycle of time and life. Almqvist’s idyll does not, like Mitford’s, include the social fellowship of the village. In realistic accordance with the history of the country, the idyll is established in a small family that is isolated in the huge forest. The harsh outer conditions are counterbalanced by the harmonious nature of the people’s minds, with love of one’s neighbour and helpfulness being the qualities that meet the settlers on all sides. The derelict farm is transferred to Johan by the friendly local landlord on extremely favourable conditions, and he is given all the farm implements he needs by old friends. Almqvist’s narrative style is direct and uncomplicated, displaying a preference for tableaux that is typical of the genre — tableaux that can visualise the surroundings and conjure up moods of happiness and harmony, such as, for example, in the depiction of the first evening after the removal, where the evening sun and the interior of the house, with the woman reading aloud and the man listening, are elevated to the sacred and emotionally loaded mood of divine service: As the light in the room was very low and the fire had gone out in the stove, she went out and sat down in the door with a view towards the lake: Half of the sun was still seen over the rim of the woods on the other bank. Its rays fell on her book, so that she could see to read. She read aloud and not fast, but in the purest voice. Johan sat on the bench outside, and after she had read the first lines, he started to fold his hands. Who knows if he heard or saw the most. But he sat there as astounded and blissful as a child at the Gate of Heaven. As the sun set and the rays changed from yellow into red, Katrina’s voice sounded still more heartfelt and was finally so gently exquisite that a tear fell from Johann’s eyes upon her hymn book (Almqvist 1958, 217).

This is how Almqvist in this tale unites traditional, idyllic elements with a more realistic, modern tale of the emancipation of the peasantry and of material success through exceptional individual effort — a Swedish parallel to the many American tales of the conquering of the West.

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The Englishman William Cobbett, in his Rural Rides (book-edition 1830, first written for Cobbett’s newspaper The Political Register in the 1820s), also chooses the new age of the peasantry as his theme. But in his depiction, the reforms in the country have not led to emancipation from the squire but to poverty and moral corruption. Welfare is concentrated in a few hands, with the rest of the population forced to eke out a miserable existence as day labourers, or to leave for the towns and try and find work there. We find here a particularly realistic depiction of the result of the liberalist agricultural reforms that were introduced in many European countries in the first half of the nineteenth century. Rural Rides also contains a number of charming descriptions of the countryside of Southern England, and at that level Cobbett is akin to Mary Mitford, whose pastoral descriptions abound far more, however, in their use of descriptive and embellishing adjectives. In Cobbett’s writings, enthusiasm is tempered by objectivity: »We arrived at Odiham about half after eleven, at the end of a beautiful ride of about seventeen miles in a very fine and pleasant day« (Cobbett 1967, 42). In its raw, revealing portrayals and yearning back to a postulated happier past, Cobbett’s Rural Rides is a continuation of Goldsmith’s »The Deserted Village« and Crabbe’s The Village. William Cobbett’s approach to his material is that of the reformer, the politician. In the years after 1809, he was a radical critic of contemporary conditions, a champion of the right to vote and the self-determination of the rural population. Just how radical and socialist his political position was is disputed. Margaret Stonyk calls him »the first of his Century’s Romantic socialists« (Stonyk 1983, 71), while George Woodcock states that »he never reached or even approached Socialism« (Cobbett 1967, 22). It is, at any rate, radical political reflection that pervades Cobbett’s Rural Rides, just as it does his other publications. His »rides« aim to gather material and instances for his political convictions and programmes — even though the description of the landscape and the region can be without a political agenda for short passages. In Rural Rides Cobbett borders on the edge of what can be called counter-idyll. The linear structure of his descriptions, the long excursions into the countryside, lack the spatial centre that is characteristic of the idyll. Mary Mitford’s idylls are also often structured as excursions, but they take place on foot and within a far more limited geographical space; the village and the community, expressed in the title Our Village, is the permanent centre for the universe beyond historical change. Goldsmith’s and Crabbe’s counter-idylls also keep the described village, the »sweet Auburn« (Goldsmith), as the centre of their description. But in Cobbett it is replaced by the easy-to-grasp universe of a constantly changing landscape. The constant change of whereabouts thus also means the loss of constant human contacts — in the village, the family and the love relationship — which are constituents of the idyll. Cobbett’s Rural Rides thus point in important points not towards the idyll as a genre but rather ahead towards the journalistic-political travel descriptions of the new age which we see emerging in Germany in the 1820s and 1830s with Heinrich Heine’s Reisebilder (Travel Pictures, 1826–31), and Ludwig Börne’s Briefe aus Paris (Letters from Paris, 1832–34). The impact of prose as a literary form in the first decades of the nineteenth century can also be observed in Scandinavia. For the idyll, this generally means that the static and descriptive elements of this genre become part of larger narrative concepts, in which the intrigue and the advancing action become the determining factors. At the same time, there is a strengthened approach to »realistic« description, as regards landscape, environment and character portrayal.

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The originally naive and sentimental, idealised universe of the idyll changes its function in this phase into a depiction of environments and social conventions, of customs and habits — a depiction that forms the social framework for the quite often emotionally gripping plot. When I hesitate to include, for example, En Hverdagshistorie (An Everyday Story, 1827), by the Danish writer Thomasine Gyllembourg, or Teckningar ur Hvardagslifvet (Sketches of Everyday Life, 1828) by the Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer within the idyll genre, it is because they are based on a narrative dynamics that is alien to the genre. At the same time, however, they contain such sun-drenched descriptions of the bourgeois environment that one is reminded of the idyll. With the term »genre picture« one has attempted to define more precisely this literary blend of dynamic narration and environmental description. But precisely the necessity of introducing another concept in relation to these texts shows that we are dealing with something else than an idyll. And the difference is primarily that the idyllic component of the »genre picture« often competes with the dynamic narration and does not therefore constitute a bearing principle for the text as a whole. Here, too, it is of course possible to grade one’s categorising, and in the following I intend to draw attention to a couple of Scandinavian texts in which the narrative dynamic is very much in the background, thereby leaving centre stage free for idyllic elements. The very title of Hans Christian Andersen’s Billedbog uden billeder (Picture Book Without Pictures, 1839), points to one of the characteristics of the idyll — the picture — as we have already noted in a number of the texts already mentioned. In Billedbog uden Billeder (the title is of course a reference to Felix Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte [Songs Without Words, 1829]) it is, in true Andersen fairy-tale style, the moon that supplies the point of view. In 33 pictures it considers the earth in small sections lasting 1–3 pages. Because the texts are so short and only seek to give a subjective glimpse of the state of a moment, the descriptions rarely have sufficient depth in their portrayal of humans and environments to be able to develop into that which we have so far associated with the genre of the idyll, in which precisely the excessive description was so salient a feature. Hans Christian Andersen also displays in these texts his naively Romantic temperament, insofar as he seeks intensive expressions of emotion, quite often the melancholy depiction of death, which the Biedermeier period and, not least, Hans Christian Andersen’s work is so full of (Böschenstein 1986). The striking emotionality is so predominant in many of these short texts that the tranquillity which is established in the idyll through longish descriptive and narrative passages is hardly achieved. The individual, sensitive heart and the sentimentally observing moon, seem to get in the way of the tranquillity of the idyll. In some of the other pictures, the irony and the allegorical thrust (one gets the feeling it has to do with Hans Christian Andersen himself) are so marked that the rest and clarity of the idyll cannot be established. He gets closest to the nature of the idyll in pictures where the child is in the foreground. On the 14th evening, the moon shows us the picture of a small roadside farmhouse in a forest, with a low door and crooked windows — a motif Hans Christian Andersen has used in a number of contexts. On that evening, two children are awaiting the birth of a little sister or brother and are discussing whether it really can be true that the stork brings babies. The boy thinks not — it is God who comes with children, and since God is invisible, he comes with children without anyone seeing it. A murmuring in the branches of the trees announces the arrival of the new child, and when the woman from next door comes out and says »Come and see what the stork

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has brought!«,16 the children can only nod to each other in secret understanding. They know better. Via the depiction of the children’s immediate understanding of the true being of God and Nature, this vignette establishes a mood that is similar to that of a small idyll. The little girl in the 33rd picture also displays a higher childlike wisdom when the moon looks in on an evening scene with a family that has many children. The evening ritual, getting undressed, the somewhat wild games before bedtime, and then the little girl who says her evening prayers in bed: »Give us this day our daily bread — and with lots of butter on it«.17 The child’s concrete understanding of the metaphor of the prayer »our daily bread« is a detail which, in a moving way, opens our eyes to the mind and universe of the child. The innocence of the children and the power inherent in it is also the theme of the last of the three pictures to be specifically mentioned here. On the 31st evening, the story is told of the leader of the bears, who has broken free and is joining in the children’s game. In joining in with the children, the bear loses its dangerousness; the children take it to be a large dog and play around with it. A harmonious, childlike situation is established, until the adults — first the mother, then the bear leader — turn up and re-establish the opposition between man and beast, thereby ruining the paradisiac idyll where the lion plays with the lamb — and the bear plays with the children. The same theme is used by the Norwegian Maurits Christopher Hansen in his idyllic tale of »Lille Alvilde« (Little Alvilde, 1829). Here, too, it is the child’s obvious trust that causes the bear to forget its nature. The idyll is the only piece of prose in Maurits Hansen’s Norsk Idyllekrands (Norwegian Idyllic Garland) from 1831. 6.

Conclusion

This outline of the English, German and Scandinavian idyll in the Romantic period makes no claims to being exhaustive. At best, it has managed to show the contours of the tip of the iceberg — of which, as everyone knows, only one tenth is visible. Delving slightly more deeply into popular literature — which was beginning at precisely this period, especially after 1814, to capture the entire European market as a result of new, inexpensive techniques of book and paper production — would undoubtedly unearth material for a far more consistent, though not necessarily more differentiated, picture of the idyll at that time. On the present evidence, when, as above, the point of departure is in the names and works of the canonised literature, it can firstly be stated that the period — perhaps unexpectedly — found it difficult to maintain the idyll as an independent genre. The requirement of the Enlightenment regarding naturalness and truth in the literary picture of reality has worked against the idealising and typifying tendencies of the genre. The narrow and elitist classicist tradition has, admittedly, been able to a certain extent to keep the genre in its versified form, at intervals right up until the 1840s, but the prose idyll as a genuine genre is very poorly represented. In England, Mary Mitford has occupied a central position within this genre, while her contemporary literary sisters Elizabeth Gaskell and Fanny Trollope, as well as their model Jane Austen, concentrated on the larger epic prose genres, 16.

»Kom nu ind,« sagde hun, »see, hvad Storken har bragt« (Andersen 1856, 48).

17.

»Giv os i Dag vort daglige Brød […] — og dygtig Smør paa!« (ibid., 104).

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though basing themselves on a picture of life in the country that had idyllic and pastoral traits. In Scandinavian literature, too, genuine prose idylls are thin on the ground throughout the period, while, as shown, there has existed a quite consistent tradition — especially in Sweden — for the verse-epic idyll. In Norway, independence from Denmark, the national struggle for self-determination and the somewhat idyllic Norwegian nature have hindered the development of a more comprehensive idyll tradition. Nature and the village are often depicted in Norwegian poetry, as, for example, in Jens Zetlitz, but normally in a heroic and nationally enthusiastic tone that is alien to the idyll. A broader treatment of the concept of the idyll than I have found appropriate to this chapter would, of course, have been able to make large sections of contemporary prose works relevant for presentation. Dealing in more detail with the idyllic elements in the work of, for example, Thomasine Gyllembourg and Fredrika Bremer would be perfectly reasonable. Within drama — which is not dealt with here at all — it would be natural in a Scandinavian context to emphasise the extremely popular vaudevilles of the Danes Johan Ludvig Heiberg and Henrik Hertz, which, based on the French model, were produced in great numbers and performed at The Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. A broader concept of the idyll would, in terms of German prose in the Biedermeier period, of necessity mean including such names as the Austrian Adalbert Stifter, with his at times demonically tinged depictions of the Austrian landscape and village life, the German (Swabian) writer Wilhelm Hauff, with his narratives inspired by fairy-tales, and the Swiss Jeremias Gotthelf, with his moral peasant dialect tales. It would also be interesting to shed light on the Viennese Volkskomödie tradition around Raimund and Nestroy in this connection. Although the number of genuine idylls in the period can be grasped fairly easily, the idyllic as a structure and stylistic figure would seem to have had tremendous importance for, not least, popular prose, drama and poetry — not only in the mid-century decades of the Biedermeier period but also in later Victorian bourgeois culture and the German Gründerzeit (Wilhelminian Era) after 1848, the era of mass magazines of popular literature. Bibliography Almqvist, Carl Jonas Love. 1958. Jaktslottet. Stockholm: Grimstahamns Nybygge. Andersen, Hans Christian. 1856. Billedbog uden billeder. 4th edition. København: C.A. Reitzel. Börne, Ludwig. 1862. Briefe aus Paris. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 8–12. Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe. Böschenstein, Renate. 1986. »Idyllischer Todesraum und agrarische Utopie: Zwei Gestaltungsformen des Idyllischen in der erzählenden Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts«. Idylle und Modernisierung in der europäischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts. Ed. by H.U. Seeber and P.G. Klussmann. Bonn: Bouvier. Böschenstein-Schäfer, Renate. 1967. Idylle. Stuttgart: Metzler. Bremer, Frederika. 1869. Teckningar ur Hvardagslifvet. Samlade Skrifter i Urval. Vol I. Örebro: Abr. Bohlin. Brentano, Clemens. 1978. Godwi oder das steinerne Bild der Mutter: Ein verwilderter Roman von Maria. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Vol. 16. Ed. by Werner Bellmann. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Bull, Hans. 1937. Om Landmandens Lyksalighed ved Friheds og Eiendoms Nydelse. Samlede Skrifter. Oslo: Norske Selskab. Cobbett, William. 1967. Rural Rides. Ed. and intro. by George Woodcock, Baltimore: Penguin. Crabbe, George. 1988. The Village. The Complete Poetical Works. 3 vols. Ed. by Norma Dalrymple-Champneys and Arthur Pollard. Oxford: Clarendon. Vol. I: 155–174.

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Edwards, Peter David. 1988. Idyllic Realism from Mary Russell Mitford to Hardy. Houndmills: Macmillan Press. Eichendorff, Joseph von. 1966. Werke. Ed. by Wolfdietrich Rasch. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Franzén, Frans Michael. 1867–69. Frans Michael Franzéns samlade dikter. Vol. 1–7. Örebro: Bohlin. Geßner, Salomon 1974. Idyllen; Neue Idyllen. Sämtliche Schriften. Ed. by Martin Bircher. Vol. II, III. Zürich: Orell Füssli. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1998. Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden. Ed. by Erich Trunz. München: dtv. Goldsmith, Oliver. 1974. The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale, Supposed to be Written by Himself. London: Oxford UP. ———. 1975. Poems and Plays. Ed. by Tom Davis. London: Dent. Gotthelf, Jeremias. 1916–28. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. by Rudolf Hunziker and Hans Bloesch. Zürich: Rentsch. Gyllemborug-Ehrensvärd, Thomasine. 1900. Fortællinger. Kjøbenhavn: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag. Haller, Albrecht von. 1965. Die Alpen und andere Gedichte. Ed. by Adalbert Elschenbroich. Stuttgart: Reclam. Hansen, Maurits Christian. 1831. Norsk Idylkrands. Christiania: Lehmann. Hauff, Wilhelm. 1969. Das Wirtshaus im Spessart. Werke. Ed. by Bernhard Zeller, vol. II. Frankfurt/M.: Insel. Heine, Heinrich. 1975. Sämtliche Werke. (Vol 6–7: Reisebilder) Ed. by Manfred Windfuhr. Düsseldorf: Hoffmann & Campe. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. 1969. Der goldne Topf: Ein Märchen aus der neuen Zeit. Ed. by Konrad Nussbächer. Stuttgart: Reclam. Hölderlin, Friedrich. 1965. Hyperion. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. by Friedrich Beissner. Vol. III, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Holm-Olsen, Ludvig et al. 1974. Norges litteraturhistorie. Vol. 1. Oslo: Cappelen. Hunter, Shelagh. 1984. Victorian Idyllic Fiction: Pastoral Strategies. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Kaiser, Gerhard. 1977. Wanderer und Idylle. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Jean Paul. 1977. Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterlein Maria Wuz in Auenthal. Werke in zwei Bänden. Ed. by Wolfgang Hecht. Vol. 1. Berlin: Aufbau. ———. 1977. Leben des Quintus Fixlein, aus fünfzehn Zettelkästen gezogen. Werke in zwei Bänden. Ed. by Wolfgang Hecht. Vol. 1. Berlin: Aufbau. Keith, William John. 1975. The Rural Tradition: William Cobbett, Gilbert White, and Other Non-Fiction Prose Writers of the English Countryside. Toronto: Toronto UP. Keller, Gottfried. 1958. Die Leute von Seldwyla. Sämtliche Werke und ausgewählte Briefe. 3 vols. Ed. by Clemens Heselhaus. Vol. II. München: Hanser. Mitford, Mary Russell. 1922. Our Village. London: Macmillan and Co. Mörike, Eduard. 1981. Idylle vom Bodensee. Sämtliche Werke in vier Bänden. Ed. by Herbert G. Göpfert. München: Hanser. Müller, Friedrich Maler. 1977. Idyllen. Ed. by Peter-Erich Neuser. Stuttgart: Reclam. Nemoianu, Virgil. 1984. The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg]. 1977. Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Schriften. Ed. by Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel. Vol I: Das dichterische Werk. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Pope, Alexander. 1930. The Poetical Works. Ed. by Adolphus William Ward. London: Macmillan. Runeberg, Johan Ludvig. 1882. Elgskyttarne. Stockholm: F. & G. Beijers Förlag. ———. 1933. Samlade skrifter. Vol. 1: Dikter I–III. Ed. by Sven Rinman. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag. Sengle, Friedrich. 1971–80. Biedermeierzeit: Deutsche Literatur im Spannungsfeld zwischen Restauration und Revolution, 1815–1848. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Metzler. Sterne, Laurence. 1967. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick. Ed. by G.D. Stout. Berkeley: California UP. Stifter, Adalbert. 1959. »Zwei Schwestern«. Werke. 3 vols. Ed. by Hannsludwig Geiger. Wiesbaden: ������������������������ Vollmer (Tempel-Klassiker). Vol I.

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———. 1959. »Bergkristall«; Der Nachsommer. Werke. 3 vols. Ed. by Hannsludwig Geiger. Wiesbaden: Vollmer (Tempel-Klassiker). Vol II. Stonyk, Margaret. 1983. Nineteenth-Century English Literature. London: Macmillan Press. Tegnér, Esaias. 1881. Nattvardsbarnen. Stockholm: Norstedt. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. 1969. The Poems. Ed. by Christopher Ricks. London: Longmans. Tieck, Ludwig. 1975. Der blonde Eckbert; Der Runenberg; Die Elfen. Ed. by Konrad Nussbächer. Stuttgart: Reclam. Voß, Johann Heinrich. 1976. Werke in einem Band. Ed. by Hedwig Voegt. Berlin: Aufbau. Zetlitz, Jens. 1825. Samlede Digte, vol 1–2. Ed. by C.N. Schwach, Kristiania: Gröndahl.

B. Modes of discourse and narrative structures

Address, relation, community Boundaries and boundary crossing in Romantic narration Frederick Garber 1.

Margins and territories

Horace Walpole begins The Castle of Otranto (1764) (and thereby begins the mainstream history of Gothic fiction) with a shattering of boundaries. That fracture takes place at a ceremonial moment: Manfred, the current master of the castle, is about to marry off Conrad, his homely, sickly son, only fifteen years old and »of no promising disposition«, to Isabella, the daughter of the marquis of Vicenza (Walpole 1964, 16). Walpole’s language suggests the handing-over of a captive or a slave: »she had already been delivered by her guardians into the hands of Manfred« (16). The phrasing is proprietorial, as is, curiously, the wording of an »ancient prophecy« that some of the locals recall: »That the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it« (16 f.). Property and disproportion: these issues hover about the scene as the assembled company wait for the wedding to get underway, for the ritual of the »divine office« to begin (17). In fact it will be a double ritual, two rituals at once, for »young Conrad’s birthday was fixed for his espousals« (17). Ritual should be added to the issues taken up at the beginning of Walpole’s text. But the sacrament of marriage never gets performed and the ceremony of the birthday never gets celebrated because Conrad dies on his birthday, squashed by the disproportionate. A servant sent to find him can only return and repeat »Oh, the helmet! The helmet!« (16), awed as much by the size of the giant headpiece as by what it has done to Conrad. Rushing into the court Manfred at first makes out what seems »a mountain of sable plumes« (16), and even when he gets there the plumes continue to stand out in all their symmetry. The grim proportionateness of the helmet and the feathers contrasts sardonically to the helmet’s disproportion to anything we could wear: He beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers (17).

It is not only Conrad’s undignified dying (one thinks of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa), mashed in some dark tourney they did not know was being played, that makes the scene sardonic; »proportionable quantity« speaks of a dismal symmetry, something from an aesthetics of horror that brought its ironies with it as it entered the scenes of their lives. Yet the helmet and its symmetries did not merely enter these scenes. The forces that murdered Conrad did not slip in surreptitiously in a kind of guerilla warfare but broke through

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violently into that which was bound to resist. However silent the helmet’s invasion (no one seems to have heard what ought to have been the sounds of a massive clanging and crashing) the helmet irrupts into the scene. Brazenly incursive, it breaks into territories Manfred claims as his own, breaking off a piece of Manfred’s family, the heir to all he claims, bringing in thereby the question of property, turf, already broached in earlier passages. (I take »turf« to signify ownership where »scene« and »territory« do not). The density of Walpole’s text, whatever the woodenness of his persons and the flatness of his prose, reveals a rich relation among the topics that have been emerging. In particular it reveals certain geographies, turfs (Manfred’s, for one example) that display all manner of complex interconnections. Thus, we need to add the matter of geography (the mapping of places/spaces in their relation to each other) to the package of issues broached by this progenitor of the Gothic. Still, there is more to geography than spaces, even spaces-as-turfs. Where there are spaces there are margins, borders or boundaries between the various places; and when the spaces are turfs the matter of margins becomes crucial (»good fences make good neighbors«) and may well grow deadly. That, clearly, is what happened in Conrad’s case: however silent the helmet’s plunge, it breaks through the margins of Manfred’s turf with a thrust that suggests the violence of an especially tense desire. No wonder Conrad was »dashed to pieces« (17). This brutal visitation of the sins of the father draws on fierce compulsions for its punishing thrust. Where, then, is the massive helmet’s turf? Where does the helmet depart from to get to the place that Manfred claims? A young peasant, drawn by the din, »observed that the miraculous helmet was exactly like that on the figure in black marble of Alfonso the Good, one of their former princes, in the church of St. Nicholas« (18). That sets some »vulgar spectators« to check out the church, where they find, to their horror, that the statue’s helmet is missing; but that absent casque is clearly not the helmet that killed Conrad: not only is the immense weapon made out of steel, not marble, but there is an »enormous […] disproportion« of size between the statue’s helmet and the casque that killed the son; i.e. the question of proportion takes in lack of it as well. The weapon could not have come from the church but had to come from somewhere else, another kind of turf more akin to the casque. We can guess the qualities of that place by observing the qualities of the helmet: the casque is gigantic in size but small in the sounds it makes, a chilling combination suggesting degrees of the strange out of all proportion to us, incompatible with us. The place the helmet comes from is surely a mirror of the helmet, proportionate to the casque, but that place is, to us, a distorting funhouse mirror. Other to our place, it is the place of the Other, our overgrown look-alike. Still, that does not answer the specific question we posed: where is the Other’s turf? Where does the helmet depart from? Assuming the mirroring relation of place and occupant, a knowledge of the whence should help to explain the what. Knowing the helmet’s home place is knowing something about the helmet, surely something crucial; and that, perhaps, could tell us what the helmet has to do with us. One thing seems certain: the place the casque arrives from is not part of Manfred’s world, at least not those aspects — physical, social, existential — that Manfred occupies. It seems outside of those aspects, beyond the margins or borders that delineate Manfred’s place, that enclose the mode of being of which he partakes. That the helmet partakes in, occupies, a different mode of being comes clear from its size and the (even creepier) manner in which it bursts soundlessly through the limits of Manfred’s space. Whether the spaces

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the helmet comes from are immediately proximate, hunched at Manfred’s borders, or arrive at those borders from a more distant place, they are outside the margins of Manfred’s accustomed turf, occupy a limen (L. threshold). Modern anthropology does fascinating things with the limen, based largely on the work of Victor Turner who, drawing on the study of rites of passage in Arnold van Geep, elaborated a theory of interstitial space (Van Geep 1960). In Turner’s work the rite of passage has a special temporality peculiar to itself, different in mode from that of conventional society (Turner speaks of the latter as a structured, role-oriented world, structured in that it has a location for each element within the social hierarchy). Turner most often describes the liminal as part of a process (it is processual). One goes through it at a certain stage to reach a particular goal, a higher maturity within the structured world. Liminality is a time and condition of betweenness; as Turner has put it, it is »betwixt and between«, working within its own kind of temporal/interstitial space, social and existential, between the thresholds of the initial condition and those of the condition to which one arrives after working through liminality’s peculiarly transitional modes (Turner 1974, 232). One occupies a place in what Turner calls communitas, a community of equals, democratic in mode. No one is special in the community of a rite of passage; no one in such a community owns a private place in a rigid hierarchy. Such differentiations lie on either side of the liminal, in the structure from which one comes and to which one (post-liminally) returns. Liminality, then, like the social entities that flank it, has to do with communality, group living and thinking and being. We do not leave society as such in entering the liminal. As we pass from initial community through communitas and then, crossing the final threshold, to post-liminal community, we deal with social order at every point in the process. Though Turner works mainly with extraordinary conditions such as the rite of passage, and though these experiences are, generally, passing stages or phases (questions of history and narrative are fundamental to the liminal), he also recognizes that, in certain related conditions, some have sought to extend the interstitial or even turn it permanent, at least for themselves. They praise and desire the liminal because of its fundamental difference from the structured world, its distinction in terms of values, norms and conditions of being, especially the radical democracy basic to communitas. Turner studies hippies closely but he also suggests that some religious orders follow similar practices, for example in matters of personal possession, what I called earlier the »proprietorial«. Such interstitial states offer no place for personal ownership, which, for some collectives, includes monogamy. Turner sees these states of being as related to the liminal but different because of their intended permanence, and he offers a list of such types that takes in a considerable range: As well as the betwixt-and-between state of liminality there is the state of outsiderhood, referring to the condition of being either permanently and by ascription set outside the structural arrangements of a given social system, or being situationally or temporarily set apart, or voluntarily setting oneself apart from the behavior of status-occupying, role-playing members of that system. Such outsiders would include, in various cultures, shamans, diviners, mediums, priests, those in monastic seclusion, hippies, hoboes, and gypsies (Turner 1974, 232 f.).

The outsiders he describes create a condition that is in many ways analogous to the liminal, especially in terms of the values espoused; call it quasi-liminal. But where true liminality is seen

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as a stage, a passing condition, a phase of a process, the condition of outsiderhood is more or less permanent (at least that is what its participants want it to be). Liminality is best described as a narrative, Turner’s processus moving through time to accomplish initiation. Outsiderhood has a narrative though only in its background, the story of how it got to be where and what it is, but we do not often emphasize the birth of such a condition because we are mainly interested in outsiderhood’s system of values. We further that interest, analyze those values, by juxtaposing outsiderhood and the conditions to which outsiderhood is a dogged contrary, bourgeois society for example. We need to take outsiderhood at its word: the effect of juxtaposition is to show outsiderhood as outside the condition it rejects, to see it, therefore, in terms of geography, the mapping of places in their spatial relations. Liminality, on the other hand, is concerned with the stages of a process, looks at those stages, therefore, in their temporal relations. Outsiderhood spatializes what Turner’s liminality treats as a temporal process. Liminality temporalizes what outsiderhood treats as a question of the geographic. Outsiderhood is synchronic; liminality is diachronic. So far so neat, a pairing set up in a dialectical package; but consider that the term »interstitial«, one of Turner’s favorites to describe the liminal, signifies an intervening space. We routinely turn to such metaphors to describe temporal spaces (that too is a metaphor); but in a context where the temporal and spatial are packaged as dialectically as in the previous paragraph any sort of »contamination« of one by the other has to be taken as questioning the neatly diametrical, suggesting, instead, a fusion. In fact we shall see more of such fusion in the patterns of Romantic fiction we are beginning to uncover. Whatever such qualifications our key terms remain »narrative« and »geography«. The question of relation is particularly important. To work out where the enormous helmet fits into all this, to gauge its place among such differing conditions, we need, first, to work out its role, a business not nearly as patent as the novel’s beginning seems to make it. The prophecy quoted in the text’s initial paragraph (the true owner will grow too large to inhabit the castle, which will then »pass from the present family«) bluntly, unmysteriously, explains the helmet’s presence and, for Manfred if no other, the vengeful murder of his son. Elements of armor and of a gigantic body appear later in the text and then, at the end, the figure emerges in its gigantic entirety: »the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude, appeared in the center of the ruins. Behold in Theodore, the true heir of Alfonso! said the vision« (108). The vision’s Otherness, figured in the revelation of its stunning disproportion, is thoroughly confirmed in a destructive termination Poe would learn to echo. The massive, crashing epiphany through which the vision enters the community of Otranto also confirms two points now shown to be inseparable: first, that which brings down the walls cannot be mistaken for one of us (precisely the opposite of the explained supernatural Ann Radcliffe would later command); second, the Other guards the rights of primogeniture and punishes their infringement. Together these points suggest the Other’s being and duties. That which is Other to us watches over the possessions that hold structured society together. Since the Other takes charge of something so fundamental it can hardly be a transient phenomenon, the sort of passing condition we associate with the liminal. Rather, it is more like some of those quasi-liminal entities Turner describes in the quotation above, those beings that share in the liminal’s outsiderness but look for a longer-lasting version of such being. Yet the Other as we see it in The Castle of Otranto cannot be neatly categorized,

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involved with only the elements on a single side of the margin. Whatever its connection to the liminal aspect of things it must also be connected to stratified society since it is profoundly and aggressively linked to the matter of property, the basis of such a community. Such paradoxes appear throughout much of the Gothic fiction Walpole helped to get going. Indeed they seem endemic to the bourgeois romance in which Ann Radcliffe framed her anachronistic fictions, steeped in the values of the eighteenth century British Protestant middle class. With significant variations such paradoxes appear in Scott’s equally bourgeois historical romances: because of their popularity and Scott’s powerful insights into the meaning and texture of the liminal and quasi-liminal for his time and place, they extend the pungent thematics and built-in ironies Walpole laid out. With other variations and local ironies those issues appear in Cooper too. In fact the linking of the liminal and quasi-liminal and the socio-economic turns up, often ironically, as a primary issue in the fiction we call Romantic and in some of its derivations: there is, for example, an unbroken line from Theodore, the poor young peasant in The Castle of Otranto, to Julien Sorel. What, then, of the where in regard to the Other’s turf? In Otranto the Other hides out in liminal territory yet it reveals itself to and in structured society when the Other gets too big for its unknowing surroundings. Its turf is located within Manfred’s turf and grows there like a cancer. Indeed its situation reads like an allegory of the pervasive Romantic claim for an independent, efficient, sometimes destructive inner life, variations of which would turn up in Poe and Baudelaire and, half a century after them, in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). To this what and where we can add, for Otranto, a when. The Other emerges to finish its business at a time of ritual, a point Walpole was so eager to pursue that he turns this novel’s example into a time of two rituals. Turner makes much of the connection of ritual and the liminal. So indeed does Walpole, as though ritual time so weakens the walls between the diurnal and the extraordinary that the Other, always seeking penetration, finds a place to come through, irrupt. Coleridge would make the same point, make it classically for Romanticism with his Ancient Mariner (1798), where the outsider emerges into structured society at the ritual moment of the wedding: He holds him with his glittering eye — The Wedding-Guest stood still, And listens like a three years’ child: The Mariner hath his will (Coleridge 1969, 187).

Moments of special quality that stand out from other moments because of what happens in them or had happened in them once upon a time: by their nature such moments cannot be understood through their temporal aspect alone but have to be understood in terms of a multi-leveled meeting of the temporal and the spatial, occasion and geography. The wedding guest meets the mariner not only at the time of the wedding but at the church where it will occur. The mariner has departed from the home place of the Other to get to this place, cutting through a complex and dangerous geography to get to the local scene at the most needful time. A script of the encounter would describe a performance (Turner’s processus seen from the perspective of act) in which the mariner works his way toward that edge-border-boundary-limen where the emissary delivers a report from the world of the Other to the world of the institutional, personifying that

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world in the person of the wedding-guest. A script of the encounter performed in The Castle of Otranto would have some different characteristics, a different Lebensraum, but the main points would be the same: in Walpole’s tale the Other need not travel far because it abides in a world of its own within the world of Otranto and reveals that geography at the most appropriate moment. In both of these examples encounter involves the meeting of contrary modes of being in a powerful, indissoluble linkage of time and place. Much the same happens with many of the activities performed by the outsider groups Turner describes, the shamans, the hippies, the members of religious orders, groups that seek to create a quasi-liminal condition, a permanent state akin to the condition we saw in Walpole’s model. For all such groups the encounter between their quasi-liminal state, with its egalitarian communitas, and the institutional communities with their roles and hierarchies, is basic to the understanding of what communitas is and what its members do. Every approach to the limen is, for them, an act of self-definition, and the richer the time and the moment the richer their self-understanding as well as the better understanding of their thoughts and activities such an encounter brings to the world. If we turn the liminal element into a communitas of one we have a fundamental pattern of much Romantic fiction, in forms as different as the fairy tale and the Bildungsroman, in figures as different as Fouqué’s Undine, Hugo’s Quasimodo and Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. When Catherine Linton’s father brings home the »gypsy« creature who, unlike the rest of us, will have only a single name, that moment is charged with incipient self-definition, and the place called Wuthering Heights will never be the same, absorbing a darkness of tint that grows more saturated the more Heathcliff inhabits the place. 2.

The powers of myth and morality

Yet sometimes what seems like a community-of-one, especially to its inhabitant, may turn out to be more multiple than its inhabitant recognizes. Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther, 1774; 1787) extends the question of the liminal into larger issues of community and the way we utter them. Early in Goethe’s text, in the letter of 27 May, Werther describes his wanderings around Wahlheim, telling of the children he meets, of the charming innocence of their passions and desires (Goethe 1963, 17). He speaks in the discourse of eighteenth-century sociocultural myth, children, primitives and peasants embodying radical innocence, a complex so familiar by the seventeen-seventies that it comes fully into play with even a passing allusion. That it is more than slightly theatrical appears in Werther’s projection of himself as audience, establishing space and difference, class and a careful placing of another as performing Other; all this accomplished in a fleeting reference to himself as a gentleman. Of course his addressee will pick up these nuances. Werther is, in effect, in dialogue with his correspondent, who will know how to respond to the language Werther speaks. He speaks it once more in the next letter, that of 30 May, where he tells of meeting a young peasant who has fallen in love with the widow for whom he works. References to class and socio-cultural discourse (»that sort of people«)1 clarify the relation Werther establishes with the peasant. He wants the 1.

»dieser Art Leuten« (Goethe 1963, 18).

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nature of that connection — the sympathy, the difference — to be perfectly understood, and therefore carefully phrases the detail of the connection. It is through this framing of disparity and parallel that Werther, the sentimental traveler, reports on the peasant’s claims for the purest sort of love, even as the young man describes the widow in terms of the glories of her body. This innocence, of course, picks up and continues the innocence of the peasant children in the previous letter, rephrasing the elemental purity of the class in terms of adult sexuality, a point Werther will have reasons to reiterate. The language of socio-cultural myth offers Werther a means of addressing issues of class and relation of the sort that the intended reader of this letter (i.e. its addressee) will understand, will see as addressed to himself. (Note that one addresses a letter in which issues are addressed). Of course he could also address the peasants on the matter of class and relation but that would have to be done through a very different discourse. The discourse through which addressing of the issues is phrased is therefore a way of clarifying the connection of people like him to people like the young peasant. It is also a way of describing (and therefore defining) the nature of the community he shares with the young proletarian. Address has very much to do with community. Werther describes his second meeting with the smitten peasant in the letter of 4 September (76–79). The young man had been let go. Overwhelmed by his passion for the woman, he had sought to force himself upon her. Further, after some prodding, he admits that the woman had to a certain extent encouraged him. So much for the now discredited claim for purity of intention, innocence of response on the part of such people (the hint that this widow knew precisely what she was doing injects the phrasings of a different, more Rabelaisian discourse into this intricate sub-narrative). So much, too, for the difference-within-community Werther had previously stressed: now he too suffers a bitter, fruitless love. Deep in the throes of unenviable passion he sympathizes with the peasant; more precisely empathizes, for now there is a fundamental identification, thus an undoing of the difference he had claimed in the earlier stages of his connection with the youth. Relations within their community of two have shifted, and so has the discourse in which he describes those relations to his correspondent: his addressee knows well what draws him toward every unfortunate person.2 Now he speaks the current language of sensibility, speaks it within the terms of the case he is living through. Yet even as he utters he struggles: toward the end of the scene he reverts to the language of socio-cultural myth, speaking, despite all the evidence, of the extraordinary purity of the passion felt by the class others have spoken of as rude. What that does, of course, is give him room to express his humiliation at what he feels within himself: here are these others, inferior in class, superior in purity, and that makes even more intricate the dimensions of his shame. By now Werther is so wrought with ambivalence and ambiguity that he cannot address — speak to, speak toward — his correspondent through a consistent, coherent discourse, cannot address — take up, describe — the context of his feelings; that is, he is uncertain where to place himself. Address, it seems, has very much to do with our placement within our communities. Grammar and syntax help him out somewhat, which is not to say they save him. By their third and final meeting the peasant has murdered his successor and quickly been caught. When Werther asks him what he has done (a »what« that is also a »why«) the cool and articulate 2.

»so weißt du nur zu wohl, was mich zu allen Unglücklichen […] hinzieht« (ibid., 78).

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peasant replies that he has, in effect, made a pariah of the woman, an outcast from their community. That the peasant has also made a pariah of himself means that he and the widow are now permanently paired in a special community of their own: if he cannot link with her one way then he will do so in another. Werther’s simmering empathy guarantees what will happen next: rebuked by the judge for suggesting clemency for the criminal (»No«, the judge says, »he cannot be saved«)3 he picks up from the judge’s third-person utterance and shifts into a play of person and pronoun that fashions an elaborate weave of address, relation and community: »You cannot be saved, unhappy one! I see clearly, we cannot be saved«.4 As he speaks he shifts grammatical position, showing the sentence to be a narrative, a fable of mirroring and the gestures that follow therefrom. Werther begins the narrative by addressing the young peasant, adding dimension to the young man’s condition by inserting a melancholy apposition (»unhappy one«). Then, suddenly (though one cannot say without warning), he shifts person from singular to plural, turning the subject of the address from the unfortunate peasant to a community of two that includes the equally unfortunate speaker of the utterance. In the act of addressing the peasant Werther recognizes his own pain, realizes that where he thought he was (outside looking in) is not where he actually is (inside looking around); or perhaps one ought to say that he is outside and inside at once, for he shows himself to be, at once, addressor and addressee. The pronominal shift has other curious effects. In Werther’s earliest letter on the peasant he spoke of the young man as part of the vast social Other different from, opposite to, his own kind and class. The question of kind and class never gets negated and is never likely to change. That aspect of their relation will always be based on Otherness, never be socially neutral. Yet a different suggestion is being uttered sotto voce. The peasant is not only socially Other to Werther but, as killer, morally Other to society as a whole. That is where Werther, coveter of another’s wife, discovers the authority to utter the collective pronoun, second person plural. The peasant is not only socially Other to Werther; he is his moral brother as well. Looked at in more general terms: every utterance of »I« creates a »You« as well, explicit or implicit, creates, therefore, an address. The framework of address is built into the grammatical system because »I« and »You« are grammatical functions, positions within the system. Though the content of these pronouns changes with the change of the person uttering, their function does not change. Thus, if one addresses a »You« that is an aspect of oneself the function is the same as when one addresses a »You« in which the content is an Other. This means that when Werther utters, »You cannot be saved, unhappy one!« it is perfectly possible for him to be speaking to the young peasant, and it is also perfectly possible for him to be speaking to himself. In fact it is perfectly possible for him to be speaking to both at once, and that is precisely what happens in the first of these sentences, »You cannot be saved, unhappy one!« Of course the German text utters »du« for the informal second person singular, and that establishes a complexity of address not available to the English translation. The two-sentence narrative in the German text has somewhat different components than the two-sentence narrative in the English version. Somewhere between the »du« in the first sentence and the »wir« in 3.

»Nein, er ist nicht zu retten« (ibid., 96).

4.

»Du bist nicht zu retten, Unglücklicher! Ich sehe wohl, daß wir nicht zu retten sind« (ibid., 97).

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the second comes Werther’s recognition of the mirroring relationship between himself and the peasant. It is that recognition, revealed in its results, that causes the change from »du« to »wir«. In fact the plot is classic: an Aristotelian recognition causes a change in the plot’s direction leading to an unexpected conclusion. Much of this is unavailable to the English version, which, using »You« in all circumstances, lacks a crucial nuance that comes out in any rereading of the two-sentence German narrative. A rereading of the first sentence in the German text reveals an intricate simultaneity, a concomitant reading of the »du«, written on the page, and a subtextual »Sie«, unscripted but very potent. Since that »Sie« can be read as a formal version of the singular as well as a general version of the plural a multi-leveled dialectical play gets immediately into motion. The play of self and pronoun, person and community, single and double, singular and plural, address and positioning, establishes a dialectic of address that characters as different as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Anselmus, Stendhal’s Julien Sorel and Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym live in, live through, in their narratives of Bildung. That question of differing characters also takes in Werther and the young peasant who could not manage his passion in a manner acceptable to structured society. On the basis of »wir/we« we have called their relation a community-of-two. Yet »wir/we« takes in more than Werther alludes to at the time of his utterance: he knew of two other figures crushed by unfulfilled passion, both described in terms of inferior social rank, both sharing with Werther and the peasant a particular role in the socio-moral order. One was a young woman leading a bland and narrow life who is taken over by passion before it finds an object, then finds the object and loses it and drowns herself in conclusion. The other is a madman whom Werther discovers looking for flowers in November. Werther finds out later that the man had been working for Lotte’s father and had fallen in love with her. Revealing his love he had, like the young peasant, been dismissed from his position, then, unlike the others, had cracked as a consequence of his passion. Werther relates to the other characters in this community-of-four in terms of multiple mirrors intricately placed. He and the young woman died self-inflicted deaths; he and the madman suffered from love of Lotte; he and the young peasant violated social and moral order, the peasant through murder, Werther through the coveting of someone else’s wife. In fact there are three subcommunities within the community of four, Werther ensconced in all of them simultaneously. Of course the community-of-four is, like the community-of-two, quasiliminal, a society of outsiders foreign to the order of structured society. Still, these partners in outsidedness differ in intent from those in the quasi-liminal otherhood described by Turner: their outsidedness was forced on them by compulsions they could not endure. Whatever else Goethe’s novel is about it is a text about the contexts that enclose us and define us and declare the particular qualities of our being in the world. However singular those contexts they are not necessarily single. Goethe’s novel shows Werther playing with more contexts than the version of liminality he shares with the other outsiders. Shortly after Werther performs the shift in grammatical position he performs another shift — or perhaps one ought to say that he reveals a simultaneous multiple positioning, concurrent connections to several communities, a geography of grammar that has social and moral and even archetypal effects:

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And what does it mean that Albert is your husband? Husband! That is for this world — and for this world it is a sin that I love you, that I would tear you out of his arms into mine? A sin? Very well, and I punish myself for it.5

Sin is what the structured world says that sin is, and Werther takes part in the saying as well as the sinning. If the grammar and syntax of Werther’s »we/wir« put him squarely into the position of the sinner, he continues in that position in the subsequent quotation (»A sin? Very well«). At the same time, however, he puts himself into the position of judge and jury, organizing his trial and coming to a verdict on his case. Of course this is put ironically: Werther is fully aware of his repositioning, his placement within the structured socio-moral order, at once its enemy, its victim and the wielder of its legal apparatus. By positioning himself for suicide, the punishment of which he speaks, he satisfies himself as well as society. Though this sounds tongue-in-cheek Werther is in fact saying that as long as he lives in this world he must abide by its principles, follow the law of the land. To scorn the law is one thing; to reject it is another. To accept it is, whatever the ironies, to go along with its dictates, to say that, for this context, the acceptance is right and proper. Once again this novel instructs us about contexts, and here it does so by saying that he is, simultaneously, in two communities, that of the punisher, that of the punished. The most effective syntax with which to describe this condition is a self-reflexive statement in which he performs simultaneously as both »I« and »You«, and that is what he gives us: »A sin? Very well, and I punish myself for it«. Syntax and community work fluently together, mutually supportive. In his play with jurisprudence’s discourse of relation Werther becomes society’s representative, a functionary within its juridical order, a master of its grammar and syntax. At the same time, though, he gives the situation an archetypal twist. Werther modernizes, ironizes, the figure of the scapegoat by turning the self-reflectiveness inherent in romantic experience, essential to its ways of being in the world, into the instrument of punishment society demands. One sees versions of that gesture in a number of Werther’s successors, in the life and death of Atala, in René’s life and that of his beloved sister, in Julien Sorel’s preference for the cell that mockingly echoes the cave where, earlier, he had felt so much at home. Whatever else these texts are they are, like Goethe’s novel, texts about contexts, allegories of community. They can also be called, with the proper shift of perspective, allegories of address; or, with another shift, allegories of relation, depending on the direction from which one approaches an issue, addresses its components. Each has a place and role in the overall design, the scheme that lines up their order as address-relation-community. Address is necessarily the introductory act: one of its primary meanings involves a speaking-to or speaking­-toward that gets an intention going. We address before we relate, we address in order to relate: a time scheme is involved, a diachronicity with a purpose. Bakhtin speaks often of how we are continually addressed by all manner of elements in our surroundings, the manifold utterances of our heteroglossic context. We pay attention to these, or do not, depending on their ability to come into relation with us. Addressing is thus a kind of wooing. One way of wooing is to catch our attention by shifting the mode of address previously used with us. Consider, for instance, the mode in which Werther 5.

»Und was ist das, daß Albert dein Mann ist? Mann! Das wäre denn für diese Welt — und für diese Welt Sünde, daß ich dich liebe, daß ich dich aus seinen Armen in die meinigen reißen möchte? Sünde? Gut, und ich strafe mich dafür!« (ibid., 117).

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speaks in his mind to the peasant who has been tried for murder. Werther’s previous speech to him, and the way he described that speech to the addressee of his letters, were steeped in the sounds of class. Here is Bakhtin on that point about class: Under the conditions of a class structure and especially an aristocratic class structure, one observes an extreme differentiation of speech genres and styles, depending on the title, rank, wealth, social importance, and age of the addressee and the relative position of the speaker (or writer) (Bakhtin 1986, 96).

Consider, then, what happens when Werther addresses the murderer within the turf of Werther’s own mind: »You cannot be saved, unhappy one! I see clearly, we cannot be saved«. There is nothing in this utterance suggesting class or hierarchy, questions of power and influence, indeed any such distinction. The language is classless, unhierarchical, precisely what one would expect in Turner’s liminal condition, the radical equality of the communitas. It is interesting to speculate whether Werther would have spoken thus if he were addressing the peasant directly. One guesses he would not, especially from what happens when he concedes to the judge’s view of the guilt of the peasant. The communitas may well be only in Werther’s mind. In any case, by speaking of the peasant in this way Werther sets up a new, classless relation to the murderer, speaking in direct address to him and then, with the pronoun shift, to both of them together. Werther comes to address himself while addressing the peasant in a perfectly classless mode that, in its combination of plurality and equality, makes clear the kind of relation that would, in theory at least, result from this change in his mode of addressing. Addressing precedes relation, necessarily. It is the way one gets to relation. Put in a different perspective: addressing seeks to cause an opening-out in the addressee, a receptivity to the wooing. It is precisely what happens in ritual, which seeks to create a breakthrough, the opening of an avenue from addressor to addressee. Ritual too is a wooing. Of course there are other ways of making an address, for example eschewing the nuances of the Wertherian model and behaving like the helmet, huge, crude and deadly, that crashes its way into the rituals at Otranto and argues to its audience that, yes, there has been a relation going on all along but most of you knew nothing of it and here, now, is the revelation of a connection, the proving of a relation. The crashing-in is the performance of an address, seeking to persuade its audience that we must speak of relation because in fact there is one, this is no accident, not when it takes place on this day of multiple rituals. Through such violent addressing the helmet seeks to establish a relation, another version of that which, it claims, already exists. Address is intentional. It is difficult to imagine a relation without somewhere, somehow, a previous act of address. That concept of the »previous« returns us to the question of diachronicity and therefore history and therefore temporality. One woos in order to produce a relation, hostile as in Otranto, ironically warming as in Werther. Whether or not the relation will eventually take us out of time (as would be the case with Buber, where God addresses us out of His own time) the fundamental frame of the act of relating is radically narrational, telling the story of what comes next. Relation comes after address; address produces relation. What comes after relation is the fact of community: to foster a relation is to produce a community or, in many cases, to produce the recognition that a certain community exists. Since the laws of primogeniture dictate the legality

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of what Manfred did to get the property he has, since Manfred knew what he did (no one else knew), he quickly recognizes why the Other has come so openly into their lives: it wants Manfred and eventually the other inhabitants of Otranto to acknowledge that they have, all this time, been living in a community of laws and those laws will now be enforced. In the case of Werther and the peasant, the address that produces relation produces his awareness of their communityof-two as well as the slightly larger communitas of outsiders. That recognition is a prime source of the drama in what comes through as a classically ordered narrative, not merely a sequence of events. It is not relation and address and community but relation then address then community. The structure is not just additive but causal. 3.

Defining communities

This chapter argues that the pattern we have displayed is basic to Romantic fiction because it is basic to a great deal of romantic experience. That it may well be archetypal, one of several frames through which we read the world (to be in the world is to be in relation), means that the ironies in archetype and the ironies in Romanticism may converge to produce an extraordinary richness of dimension and tone. The rest of this paper explores further developments of the pattern, several modes of its Romantic embodiment. The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for instance, whatever its mixed message on sensibility, is essentially a response (more precisely, a rejoinder) to Otranto and its successors on the question of community. We need to begin with its socio-historical specificity, its status as a fiction from a particular stratum of a particular society at one point in that society’s history. From at least The Spectator on, the English middle class had sought instruction on values and comportment, how to behave now that sufficient goods were at hand to afford those who had them the leisure to learn how to act in public situations. Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), the master novel of this and perhaps any time, took its origin from a collection of model letters for various occasions. Udolpho centers its own study of comportment on the question of sensibility. Sensibility embodied values widely admired in its time. Those values were, however, difficult to work with because they threatened to conflict with another widely admired organization of values, a reading of »reason« that seemed basically to intend that which was »reasonable«, given to proportion, not excess. (Recall Otranto’s handling of the question of proportion.) Udolpho begins with, and never lets up on, extensive, elaborate landscapes revealing the gorgeous or the grand, but the novel simultaneously puts values into play that deal as much with a restricted reading of the proper and the good as with delicacy of response. Much the same collocation of values had appeared in Goethe’s Werther, as classful a text as any by Radcliffe but with its own pungent awareness of potential irony. Werther spoke aspects of the relevant discourse fluently but with fatal ambivalence. Emily St. Aubert’s father showed no such ambivalence and urged none on his daughter. When, weak and dying, he offers Emily a final warning, it treats of the nature of the human person as seen through the values of proportion supported by their community (Radcliffe 1998, 79–80). That St. Aubert’s humanism could not contain or even suggest — likely would not even know — all she would learn of community is only one of the ironies infusing this labyrinthine text. Sensibility, St. Aubert argued, is »the pride of fine feeling […] which is

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continually extracting the excess of misery or delight from every surrounding circumstance«. Apathy is a vice that can lead to »positive evil« but so can »an ill governed sensibility« (79–80). Dialectical opposites end up in the same context, keep bumping into each other. St. Aubert’s advice leads Emily to reject sensibility as such but it offers her no protection from attacks of superstition (close kin to sentimentality in some readings of both) and does not prevent her from extolling her own modesty when she repeats her father’s judgments: »it is not natural to me to boast, and if it was, I am sure I would not boast of sensibility — a quality, perhaps, more to be feared, than desired« (281). St. Aubert’s advice is not broad enough to sustain her when her world of innocence, protected and decorous, full of what it sees as the finer things of life, encounters the crudities of a vulgar, insensitive aunt. Through that aunt’s marriage to the icy and clever Montoni Emily encounters what she never imagined, a violent will and power sought purely for themselves, touchstones of amorality in this text that seeks out the subtler gradations of value. Though it is doubtful that Emily comes to see all those gradations the novel’s activities deal mainly with her maturation. Her journey to Udolpho operates within the frame of a classic ritual of initiation, in her case a rigorously passive learning process. Emily never actually does anything. Her main task is to learn about another sort of comportment, not a sort that could lead her to counter what she discovers out there (the novel never suggests that she can do very much about it) but one that would, at least, produce a shock of recognition when it addresses us. What she comes most of all to sense, what she most of all learns about, is the existence of a world of vulgarity and naked will, beholden to no law but its own (compare the status of law in Otranto), a world frighteningly proximate to wherever she happens to be. That shock of proximity is the same that Manfred suffers when a fragment of the Other, brutal and arrogant, crashes the party at Otranto in a violent address. Manfred learns a very important thing about the world into which he has long been indoctrinated, while Emily, in her status as full-fledged ingénue, learns a great deal more about the world as it is outside of her parents’ narrow grounds. The extent of what she learns about being in this world makes it possible to call her experience a process of initiation. Emily learns about other values as well as other geographies, learns about their connections, their modes of relation. Manfred learns one more thing about community, that the brute power he knows of abuts the borders of his turf. Emily learns about limens as well as the communities that inhabit the edge and irrupt into her own with a terrifying address. As she and Valancourt, battered survivors, make a communitas together they have to learn how to cope with other collectivities (502). Emily’s recognition of the difficulty of coping appears with particular force in a retrospective passage two-thirds of the way through the text: »to her, the late events and her present situation — in a foreign land — in a remote castle — surrounded by vice and violence — seemed more like the visions of a distempered imagination, than the circumstances of truth« (329). She sees all these difficulties, understands where they might be coming from; yet in the midst of that recognition she hears »solemn music« that does what reason suggests such sounds ought not to do, excite a »superstitious dread«. Reason, even when seen as reasonableness, cannot cope with such surprising invasions of her present place. (We cannot call it her turf since she is totally unconnected with the place where she stands, to which she is foreign and other.) Is she being addressed or simply overhearing a passing situation? Is relation being asked for, even

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demanded? »Human reason«, the narrator suggests, »cannot establish her laws on subjects, lost in the obscurity of imagination, any more than the eye can ascertain the forms of objects, that only glimmer through the dimness of night« (330). »When imagination guides the thoughts« we have to expect inconsistency, inconclusiveness, fear (330). These are not Addisonian pleasures of the imagination, the sort he described in The Spectator (issues 411–421) to guide its readers to the finer feelings visualization can invoke. Emily carries on Addison’s dicta on the imagination’s power to make images that move us (one of the stages of meaning »imagination« went through before it got to the High Romantic creative imagination), but in her reading it takes on a sinister tonality when it links with sensibility, generating feckless fantasy and crippling superstition. Though she knows of the dangerous »visions of a distempered imagination« she cannot turn the imagination’s deceits and hallucinations into Addisonian pleasures. That she recognizes such traps shows how far she has come; that she still falls into fantasies shows how far she has yet to go. In her introduction to an edition of Udolpho Terry Castle describes the reactions of her readers as though her text fostered compensatory daydreams: By giving themselves up to the nostalgic reveries of its characters, Radcliffe’s readers also gave themselves up to a fantasy about mind itself: that by its godlike powers of spiritual transformation, the imagination itself might assuage longing, provide consolation, and confuse everyday life with mysterious and fantastic beauty (Radcliffe 1998, xxiv–xxv).

But Emily’s hapless recognition of what imagination can cause suggests what other elements in the novel confirm: whatever her constant recognition of the joys of looking at landscape, Radcliffe also argues that imagination generates ambivalence and ambiguities, close in tone and effect to what some High Romantic figures saw as imagination’s threat. Poe knew his Radcliffe as well as his Germanies. Emily seems to have sensed more than imagination’s threat: the passage ends by suggesting that she is gaining some perspective on even broader issues. Regretting her superstitious fear she »looked with anxiety to the next night, when, at the same hour, she determined to watch whether the music returned. ›If those sounds were human,‹ said she, ›I shall probably hear them again‹« (331). That she entertains the option of a human source suggests not only the reading of »reason« that comes close to »reasonableness«; it also suggests how close she is getting to that explained supernatural (»explained« in the sense of »explained away«) always associated with Radcliffean Gothic. Though much of such explaining would happen later in the text (see e.g. 535 f. and 634), the ending of this passage hints broadly at a cure for hysterical superstition. Emily is working toward explanations that reject the usual readings of the frightening numinous, disown an other-than-human cause for all those unsettling fears. Whenever there is irruption (her world is full of such invasions, often in rapid sequence), what breaks through is not an absolutely Other out to harm the human but only (!) the human itself. If there is no supernatural but finally only the human then all the evil in the world has a single source, the human. Put in terms of High Romantic dogma this could be seen as a Pre-Romantic parody of natural supernaturalism. Put it in the Late Modernist phrasing of Walt Kelly’s Pogo (»We have met the enemy and he is us« [Kelly 1982, 224]), that could be more frightening than the version that dwells on the numinous. We are the Other; the Other is made up of us. It is not just that we share kind and community with the source of radical evil: the Other, with all its dangers, is

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always at our threshold, always poised to address us, because it is always where we are, we are always where we are. Whatever the moral difference between a Montoni and a St. Aubert, they share in fundamental kind. Radcliffe comes with grim logic to a concept of human community, a chilly humanism St. Aubert would have shuddered to see. 4.

Consequences of poetic election

Geographies that begin to look like metaphors of proximity, narratives that begin to look like allegories of relation: Gothic took an uneasy interest in these formulations, sensing their central position in issues that, for reasons Gothic could not always clarify, seemed terribly important. Romantic fairy tales, fundamentally linked to Gothic, puzzled over them too, seeking to understand them by absorbing them into matters of particular Romantic interest. Consider the beginning of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Goldne Topf (The Golden Pot, 1814) where the student Anselmus, habitually clumsy, bumps into a basket of apples and cakes put out for sale by an ugly old crone. With his passion for specifying, Hoffmann cites that encounter as occurring at three in the afternoon of Ascension Day at the Black Gate in Dresden. The apples and cakes go flying and are picked up by hangers-on. The other crones leave their tables and surround Anselmus in a tight, threatening circle, vilifying him with a vulgarity he is clearly not used to hearing and which combines with his clumsiness to render him ashamed. But he is so closely circumscribed, the circle around him so tight, that there is no place for him to break out of that shape of humiliation. Only when he offers his purse to the victimized hag does the circle open up and permit him to escape. By proffering his purse Anselmus ransoms himself, his act of self-redeeming imaged in the opening of the circle that Hoffmann puts with such suffocating intensity that its memory lingers within the scene as a ghostly after-image even after the bevy disperse. But he is not as redeemed as he thinks: a suggestion that he cannot finally buy his way out of clumsiness comes through the old hag’s closing words in the scene. As he runs from this highly charged moment she shouts to him something about crystal that, however unsettling, makes no sense right then. In fact she was warning him that the buyout was temporary. His imprisonment within the tight circle of hags will echo in his tight imprisonment within a glass bottle, trapped there by the hag he thought he paid off so he could be free on Ascension Day. She was right after all: one does not so easily break free of a ritual moment, a moment of address and irruption, something breaking through into our lives in a reaching out for relation. If Anselmus had fathomed the shadings of ambivalence within the scene at the gate he might have been better prepared for the future. The crowd of passers-by begins by laughing at his clumsiness, then stands still, amazed at the old crone’s grating voice while Anselmus goes through dread: »The student Anselmus (the young man was no one else) felt himself, though he did not fully understand the woman’s strange words, seized by an involuntary dread«.6

6.

»Der Student Anselmus (niemand anders war der junge Mensch) fühlte sich, unerachtet er des Weibes sonderbare Worte durchaus nicht verstand, von einem unwillkürlichen Grausen ergriffen« (Hoffmann 1993, 229 f.).

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Then the crowd’s tone changes to sympathy for Anselmus, partly because the hag’s voice imparts a sense of the tragic, partly because he is handsome and they can forgive even his out of date clothes. An accident-prone figure who plainly exudes the erotic; the materialism of fashion facing the unmaterial sublime: these dialectical patterns establish a shifting/shifty ground on which we are to build our reading of Anselmus, his place within his world; or, given what we have seen of the situation in Otranto, his place among the margins of several worlds. That shiftingness ensures that he will meet the circle again, even if indirectly, through the machinations of others. Veronica meets a witch who claims to be old Liese, her former nurse. Together they go to the woods where the hag, carrying a cauldron, builds a magic circle of fire that boils the brew in the pot and — the goal of the witch’s ritual — produces an image of Anselmus (by that time shown to be a passive participant in a battle he knew nothing about; compare Walpole’s unfortunate Conrad). His appearance in the brew suggests his capture by the witch, a point that seems confirmed when Veronica looks into a small, round mirror, a gift from the witch, and sees Anselmus doubly circled, within the mirror, within the fire. That magic circle of fire is a weapon in a struggle between supernatural forces. Those forces are manifested in Dresden as the old hag with apples and cakes and her opponent, the Archivarius Lindhorst, owner of strange writings and father of three snakes (with one of whom Anselmus has already fallen in love). Perpetually threatened with empotting or embottling, Anselmus cannot avoid connection with that struggle, is always just a step away from encirclement. The scene at the Black Gate in Dresden at three in the afternoon of Ascension Day is patently part of this context, providing, through the circle, a defining figure for the scenes that follow upon the actions of this ritual moment. Once again Coleridge provides a classic Romantic text that establishes a major strain in the taxonomy of such moments. This is from »Kubla Khan« (1798/1816): A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight ’twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise (Coleridge 1969, 298).

Once he had a vision, a singular occurrence that he hopes is not unique, an occurrence that clearly is a strong act of addressing. Greedily he wishes for that moment’s reoccurrence, wishes,

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therefore, that it could become a ritual event. His revision of the maid would turn her into a Muse. Then he could recreate the vision of Khubla’s pleasure dome. It is not that one vision directly begets the other but that the re-achieved vision of the maid would prove the existence of that deep delight (the »Joy« of Coleridge’s »Dejection«) that is the sine qua non of Coleridgean creativity. Buoyed by that joy he would build the dome out of music, the art that some of Coleridge’s symbolist successors wanted to make the soul of art, its finest manifestation. Hoffmann knew well what Coleridge was suggesting, shared that sense of the status of music, knew too the broader implications of the magically defined circle. Intimations of the Coleridgean reading appear in Hoffmann’s text. The old witch, as Lise, sensed the need to capture Anselmus, destined to become the son-in-law of her enemy the salamander; thus she embottles him. Veronica, daughter of one of the arch-bourgeois, sensed the same need when she saw Anselmus within the round mirror Lise gave her in order to keep him captured, held as potential husband. And then there is the trap the mercantile hags make to keep Anselmus within their control. In a reading that combines the Coleridgean and the Hoffmannian, Anselmus would be seen a bourgeoning poet, bumbling, stumbling, retreating and moving forward, working his way toward becoming the poet as Coleridge sees him, the artist frightening to the bourgeois (or their cohorts, such as old Lise, who surely knows what he can become). They fear the energy crackling in »his flashing eyes, his floating hair«, and have good reason to do so. The poet figured in »Kubla Khan« is one of the defining Romantic images of the poet as outsider. As such he is, necessarily, other to the bourgeois world, often hair-raisingly so; so scary indeed that he terrifies in a way like that of the pure and powerful Other in texts such as Otranto. Geography helps to confirm that: both the poet and the Other inhabit that outsider site which is, in all ways, contrary to the bourgeois world (as Coleridge and Hoffmann would put it), contrary to the structured world (as Turner would put the issue). The outsider, that is, sits in the place of the Other while the Other sits in the outsider’s place. For the bourgeois insider that means they are surely the same. To wall off the poet’s flashing eyes and floating hair is to keep that fearful potency shared by the poet and the Other at least partly under control; such is the Coleridgean conclusion, a version of which is evident as more than an undertone in The Golden Pot. The Hoffmannian conclusion gives the circle a different fate, in fact several of them. The mirror the old witch gave to Veronica cracks in two after the salamander conquers old Lise. At the end the author (now one of the voices within the narrative) recalls Anselmus’ imprisonment within the glass bottle. At that point the Archivarius Lindhorst disappears, then quickly returns bearing »a beautiful golden goblet out of which arose a crackling blue flame«.7 The Archivarius goes for a swim within the goblet and the author finishes the drink, linking, thus, with the salamander-asOther through the ritual of imbibing. Later Serpentina carries in the golden pot, within which has grown a lily that stands for »knowledge of the holy harmony of all beings«,8 an appropriate conclusion to a text that begins with disharmony, disorder. Of course the Anselmus we see at the Black Gate, scattering the apples and cakes, reveals none of this potency or potential to the assembled hags who surround him and bully him into 7.

»Der Archivarius Lindhorst verschwand, erschien aber gleich wieder mit einem schönen goldnen Pokal in der Hand aus dem eine blaue Flamme hoch emporknisterte« (Hoffmann 1993, 318).

8.

»Erkenntnis des heiligen Einklangs aller Wesen« (Hoffmann 1993, 320).

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yielding up his purse. Clearly they do not know who he is, what he is doing (as apprentice poet he is going through a liminal state, beginning from the moment when he scatters the apples and cakes). Equally clearly, neither does he. The only one who knows what Anselmus is doing is, of course, the old hag, who was surely expecting him. The breakthrough at the gate is thus a peremptory strike designed to gain an early advantage over Anselmus. (Address is not always a boon for the addressee). She seeks that advantage through playing on his bumbling ways, through an addressing that seeks entrapment, a relation that would keep him bound down. At this introductory point — at the gate in Dresden on Ascension Day — he is clumsy and oafish in the way that Baudelaire’s albatross will be when he is not in his medium, not on his personal turf. Anselmus has to learn what his medium is, indeed that he has a proper one. That is the goal of his Bildung, his initiatory acts. Until he reaches that point social greed has the power to surround and bully him. Only when he knows what he can do (or might be able to do: »could I revive within me« as Coleridge’s figure puts it) will the circle change in character, becoming an acknowledgement of his power and his glory, his potential for harmony. The line from Coleridge to Hoffmann to Baudelaire is by no means straight but it can be descried through the allegories it makes. Those allegories of the poet have all manner of links with address-relation-community, and Hoffmann is especially good at proving the attendant complexities. Consider community. Anselmus is a resident of Dresden, a student of theology and therefore one from whom the townspeople expect a certain gravity and decorum. The public world in which he takes part is ordered, hierarchical, fundamentally role-oriented, and so must Anselmus be. Yet he enters the scene under the impetus of disorder, proving himself to be a successful chaos-maker (he does this ultimately, of course, for »the sacred harmony of all beings« represented by the lily Serpentina brings him at the end). Given the orientation of the Turnerian structured world, which works to the degree that its orderliness is honored, Anselmus is willy-nilly an antagonist to that world: the city bumpkin busts up the market place which represents the system of commerce that holds the structured world together. Anselmus is, at once, a citizen of Dresden in an honorable role and a radical undoer of that citizenry’s order. Of course he does not, at this point, conceive of himself as such, while the hags in the market place, though they see the chaos he can foment, see him primarily as a soft and naïve touch who can easily be relieved of the burden of his cash. As for Anselmus’ place within the world he shares with the passers-by: beginning as a city bumpkin he turns tragic in their eyes, then turns into a model of a most attractive young man for whom they can certainly find a place in this fashionable world, this parcel of the community that frames his roles as citizen and student. Hoffmann’s handling of such tones is masterly. What, then, of the old hag whose apples and cakes he scatters? She obviously knows what Anselmus does not know, that he has a place waiting within another community, the spirit world that houses an ongoing battle among several groups of its creatures. The witch, too, has a place within the spirit world, indeed is one of its main denizens; for her the mercantile world is a site where her war with the Archivarius Lindhorst can work on another plane, in still another scene. She and the Archivarius and eventually Anselmus himself do precisely as Werther did when he condemned himself in the eyes of social law: they live in several scenes at once, on several levels of being, in several communities, a multiple positioning that only they know about.

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In effect they own a multiple citizenship, at least for as long as their battling continues. Having a bundle of connections seems no problem for the Archivarius, who tries in vain to explain his status to friends who know only the world of Dresden. When they laugh at him in the same way the crowd laughed at Anselmus he reacts with indifference, his mind otherwise occupied. Nor is the attitude of the bourgeois world a problem for the witch, who makes skillful use of the things of Dresden’s world (fancy door-knockers, for example) to continue her war with the Archivarius. For others, though, the situation may be different: for the crowd, for Anselmus, the more communities one partakes in the more allegiances one has; therefore the more opportunities for ambivalence, shifting loyalties. The crowd of passers-by turns from laughing at the bumpkin to sympathizing with him, seeing him, accurately, as a victim. In effect they change allegiance. From a position that sees Anselmus as an outsider to their standards, the crowd moves to a fear that he (and they?) are threatened by a hostile order; then, with a certain logic, they move to absorbing Anselmus within their materialism. Anselmus himself is by no means pleased with the effects of his oafishness, wanting no more than to get to the ritual festivities and the attendant girls. What happens, of course, is that he walks into a scene where there is a single vulnerable spot that he unerringly finds, that he is surely destined to find. It is at that spot that the membrane is thinnest, that the Other breaks into his world in direct and upsetting address and he walks into its own, the result a ritual moment that leads to relation and the onset of initiation. From that point he alternates between communities, rejecting one and then the other in a frantic dialectic until he works into a track that leads to marriage with Serpentina and his own apotheosis as the poet at his most exalted. 5.

Elusive recognitions

Despite the diverse links between Hoffman and Poe there is no such exaltation of the creative figure in Poe, no similar apotheosis. Poe pictures several neurasthenics like Roderick Usher, who composes impromptus and paints images of vagueness, or the Byronic decorator in »The Assignation« (1834), or the similar character in »Ligeia« (1838). The artist in »The Oval Portrait« (1842) paints a portrait that is life itself but at the cost of the life of his model. The most successful, perhaps, is Dupin, who is not quite as strange as some of the other figures, his creativity appearing in a mode of intuitive empathy, effective though practiced with several dubious moves. All these figures are elaborations of eighteenth century types, those heroes and heroines of sensibility who, ingénues, played passive parts in Rousseau or Mackenzie or Radcliffe or extended the image of Werther into overripe decadence. Poe was an anthologist of many factors in the literature that preceded his own, a connoisseur of kinds who showed figures like those in Chateaubriand or the early Byron turning hapless and even rotten. When one turns successful, as happens with Dupin, it is often with a closet morbidity that affects the tonality of his success (compare the tales of Dupin with »The Domain of Arnheim« and »Landor’s Cottage« [both 1850]). Poe sensed the vulnerability within his predecessors. He understood what happened in the triadic narrative of address-relation-community, absorbing it into his work with such potent intensity that, as Baudelaire recognized, it came to be one of the time’s most cogent

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commentaries on the significance of the triad and its ways of reading the world. Many roads led to Poe. This was one of the most productive. Consider, for instance, the odd relations at the beginning of »Ligeia«. The narrator is not entirely certain when or even where he met his beloved Ligeia, though he thinks it was in an old Rhineland city. Even more curious, it strikes him as he is writing this description of their life together, and as though he had never thought of it before, that he still does not know his beloved’s paternal name, her patronymic, the group signifier through which she affirms her position within her original community. He is not even certain which of them wanted him to be ignorant of that aspect of her which separates her from the narrator, who is her spouse and, apparently, her only companion: Was it a playful charge on the part of my Ligeia? or was it a test of my strength of affection, that I should institute no inquiries upon this point? or was it rather a caprice of my own — a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion? (Poe 1984a, 262).

Given the circumstances described it seems likely that it was Ligeia who withheld the patronymic. We can guess at some reasons: knowing her only by her first name cuts him off from any other links to her context than his link to her (though family links cannot be discarded they can be disowned). That leaves his full attention devoted only to her. She shares him with no one else, he shares her with no one else, even the sort of sharing a patronymic performs. Her withholding, then, ensures a pure community-of-two, its passion undiluted, fully contained within their frame. Throughout the text Poe stresses the intensity of their ardor, his when he wonders about a caprice (»the most passionate devotion«), hers when she learns she is dying and then confesses a love for him so intense that it amounts to a kind of worship: »the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate devotion amounted to idolatry« (267). Note that his is »the most passionate devotion«, hers a »more than passionate devotion«; Poe intends the distinction to be very precise. This is more than a bandying of terms, of love expressed in the discourse of religion, what Poe had practiced more conventionally in his lyrics. Now we can see the fuller effect of the narrator’s ignorance of her patronymic: he can utter only her personal name, only the single word that contains her in as pure a singularity as his words can effect: Ligeia! Ligeia! Burdened in studies of a nature more than all else adapted to deaden impressions of the outward world, it is by that sweet word alone — by Ligeia — that I bring before mine eyes in fancy the image of her who is no more (262).

Naming her becomes what naming always is in ritual, an invocation/evocation of that which we want to bring forth in singular immediacy. Naming is a ritual gesture, part of that wooing we act out in ceremonials. (Poe will show us what happens when such wooing turns ironic.) Community, thus, is carefully constructed to satisfy its members’ needs; or at least the needs of one, though which one is unstated. Questions of community and the satisfaction of needs take on so many variations in Poe, cover so broad a spectrum, that they have to be taken as a primary thematic he examines to the point of obsession. »Ligeia« builds the issue with particular care, treating it from the beginning as a question of knowledge, as it is with the patronymic. The narrator, for instance, pores over, in memory, aspects of her person, and is frustrated because he cannot get through to one or another aspect whose nature eludes him.

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He quotes Bacon on beauty always having some strangeness in it, yet, though he could sense strangeness in her beauty, he »tried in vain to detect the irregularity« that defined it (263). Her eyes puzzle him most: »something«, he says, »lay far within the pupils of my beloved« (264) but he cannot get through. »How frequently«, he says, »in my intense scrutiny of Ligeia’s eyes, have I felt approaching the full knowledge of their expression — felt it approaching — yet not quite be mine — and so at length entirely depart« (265). To approach but not quite break through; to push at but never push open: perhaps it is some lack of sufficient will on his part, what he suspects Ligeia to have possessed sufficiently though perceptible only in the violence of her passion, the mysterious depths in her eyes, the fierce energy of her softly-spoken words. Her eyes, he says, »delighted and appalled him« (266). The same reaction applies to the energy of her words. The difference between the lovers seems much like the difference between spectators and poet in »Kubla Khan«. Poe’s narrator senses that difference not only in Ligeia’s will and energy but in her extraordinary knowledge, the subject to which he jumps just after his comments on being delighted and appalled at what he can see in her. That certain elements in Ligeia are radically other to the speaker, that something of her will always be inaccessible to him, whatever their shared affection as well as their shared turf, is clear from his remarks (cf. Poe on Fouqué’s Undine in: Poe 1984b, 252–258). That his insufficiency affects (effects) the tenor of their relation, that it grounds the tenor in deep ambivalence, that such deficiency determines not only the tone of their life together but even the framework through which their relation is shaped, comes through in the speaker’s immediately following remarks. In a sense they read like the far side of a jump cut (how does he get from the wildness of her language to the awesome extent of her learning?) but in another sense, in terms of address-relation-community, they are perfectly consistent with what immediately precedes. At the same time they open up dimensions within the pattern, especially the question of domestic politics, of which Poe is one of the master Romantic explorers. What he explores in the speaker’s remarks turns out to be a narrative about, among other things, status and power. Ligeia owned an extraordinary learning, far beyond anything he had seen in other women. Proficient in classical languages, faultless in the modern (watch how he ups the ante as the paragraph proceeds, his mind reaching ever outward to take in greater feats), she knows much more than languages, is in fact without fault »upon any theme of the most admired, because simply the most abstruse of the boasted erudition of the academy«. That, he remarks, is a point he has only lately noticed and it leads him to rewrite some of what he has said so far. The gender distinction with which he instinctively began when he compared her only to other women — the intellect of men being clearly of a different order — is written out of his remarks and he admits that he knows of no man who knew what Ligeia learned, »all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science« (266). Beginning out of habit, wielding a familiar notion of gender politics, he is so awed by Ligeia’s achievements that he is forced to retreat, admitting that she has no peers in any gender. This classically structured narrative of comparative capacities (a recognition leads to a reversal) ends with a self-induced comeuppance. Early in their relation he saw that the game of capacities would have to begin again, relations reformed:

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I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most busily occupied during the earlier years of our marriage (266).

If their relation is, at one level, that of lovers, it is at another that of mother and child (the image of incest familiar from Chateaubriand and Byron as well as other works by Poe). Cultural roles and their dogma have gone deeply awry, the speaker drawing on archetype to fashion a comforting reading of the conditions of their relation. Putting it in some of our earlier terms: they had chosen to live in a quasi-liminal condition that, apparently, they are wealthy enough to sustain (no gaunt monasteries here, no groups of bohemians in attics, no trios of frontiersmen such as Cooper designed). Theirs is a willed outsideness within which the speaker explores, in his intellectual Wanderjahre, »the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation«. Still, whatever it looks like this is no communitas, no concourse of equals; instead it continues the patterns of structured society with its roles for all comers, its host of hierarchies. Poe’s tale discards illusions of equality, discards, finally, the dream of communitas, whatever his characters’ communing in the world of metaphysics. Politics cannot be escaped, neither the gender politics the narrator learns to reject nor the archetypes of familial order in which degrees of power are carefully spelled out. Questions of community are finally and always questions of power. To be in the world is to be in relation. To be in relation is to be in a politics. Those are primary points in »Ligeia« and in many other scenes Poe explores compulsively. The ending, when it comes (if the last words of this tale can be called an ending), comes with all these issues in full-fledged openness. The speaker (we never know any of his names) moves to an English abbey that he refuses to name, then marries an English woman (»fairhaired and blue-eyed«, the opposite of Ligeia) whom he names elaborately: »Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine« (270). Clearly he does not mind sharing her with her family; clearly too, he loathes her (272). As for his relation to Ligeia he transforms his earlier status into »a child-like perversity« when he furnishes the abbey with »regal magnificence« (270). At times giving way to opium he would call aloud upon her name, during the silence of the night, or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by day, as if, through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the consuming ardor of [his] longing for the departed, [he] could restore her to the pathway she had abandoned — ah, could it be forever? — upon the earth (272).

That calling upon her name may well be what started Ligeia on her way back. She pushes at the membrane between death and life, seeking to break through just as the helmet had broken through in Otranto; but where Walpole’s fiction had focused on primogeniture, a question where we would expect the political, »Ligeia« reveals the political precisely where we, naïvely, do not expect it to be, in the idyll depicted in the first half of the tale. It comes as no surprise, then, to find political gestures in the latter half of the tale, with the body of the »fair-haired, the blueeyed Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine« as the turf where the struggle occurs, where the usurpation takes place. Beginning as an idyll shot through with oddities the tale turns quickly parodic. Thus does Poe mock some of the themes and proclivities that appear in his own lyrics, drawing as they do on popular schemes and tonalities he did much to extend. Thus does he

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turn the idyllic into a Gothic tale of resurrection, of the invocative power of ritual, of a wooing so effective that it works even when we perform it unconsciously. Poe is a master commentator on the literature he continues, intensifying the implicit, correcting the naïve. His major work provides an elaborate meta-commentary on the allegories of his time. Bibliography Bakhtin, M.M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin: Texas UP. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1969. Poetical Works. Ed. by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. New York: Oxford UP. Gennep, Arnold van. 1960. The Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: Chicago UP. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1963. Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Werke [Hamburger Ausgabe]. Ed. by Erich Trunz. Vol. 6: Romane und Novellen 1. Ed. by Benno von Wiese. Hamburg: Christian Wegner. Hoffmann, E.T.A. 1993. Der Goldne Topf. Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 2.1: Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier. Ed. by Hartmut Steinecke. Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Kelly, Walt. 1982. Pogo Sunday Comic Strip Original Art. Ed. by James L. Halperin. New York: Heritage Capital Corporation. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1984a. Poetry and Tales. Ed. by Patrick F Quinn. New York: The Library of America. ———. 1984b. Essays and Reviews. Ed. by Gary Richard Thompson. New York: The Library of America. Radcliffe, Ann. 1998. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Ed. by Bonamy Dobree. New York: Oxford UP. Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Walpole, Horace. 1969. The Castle of Otranto. Ed. by Wilmarth S. Lewis. London: Oxford UP.

Torn halves Romantic narrative fiction between homophony and polyphony Monica Spiridon One of the almost universally accepted narrative distinctions is that between »story« (diegesis, histoire, fabula, das Erzählte) and »discourse« (mythos, discours, and sujet, das Erzählen) (Ge­ net­te 1973; Chatman 1978, 19 f.; O’Neill 1996, 7; 20 f.). European authors of literary fiction have constantly been challenged by the uncanny gap between the two and by the manifold possibilities of playing with its tensions. In some literary periods, writers have instrumentalized this alternative. Sterne in the 1760s and the Romantics afterwards have indulged in using the rich potential of the »discourse« to interfere with the »story«. The discursive play between narrative homophony and polyphony highlights one of the main characteristics of Romantic fiction: self-mirroring. According to a naive preconception, homophony stands for a complete concealment of the discourse — attributing it to a »single-string« voice — behind the ostensibly transparent story (diegesis). By contrast, polyphony shifts the emphasis to the mechanisms of telling. Yet though homophony keeps pretending that discourse is unproblematic, this strategy is, in fact, equally capable of sabotaging the story by pointing to the very activity of telling. An almost unquestioned commonplace in criticism, at the start of the twenty-first century, is Bakhtin’s hypothesis that Dostoievskii founded the modern novel and deconstructed the monologue-oriented European narrative (Bakhtin 1970). A thorough investigation of the rich phenomenality of Romantic fictional prose could, however, easily falsify this hypothesis. The semiotic approach that I will attempt in this essay will thus implicitly display some of Bakhtin’s theoretical fallacies. As a modern technique of interpreting texts, semiotics is defined as »the study of codes: the systems that enable human beings to perceive certain events or entities as signs, bearing meaning« (Scholes 1982, ix). Such an approach is entirely appropriate to my purpose, as narration is currently being identified as one of the main cultural codes. I plan by no means to discuss homophony or polyphony in general. Narrative formulas rely on particular tensions and on specific equations between the two, depending on highly variable historical and cultural criteria. Over various periods of time, narratives display distinct dynamics and motivations and are assigned specific functions, as I will show in my discussion of several Romantic fictional works focusing on the level of the narrative devices. In the European novel, there was no linear evolution from homophony towards polyphony. On the contrary, these should rather be seen as contextual counter-reactions to pre-existing narrative models, conventions or forms, which were considered to be technically and emotionally obsolete. As a result, some key devices of Romanticism are more apt than others to be examined as highly significant contextual systems of reference, which demonstrate the interplay between homophony and polyphony in the narrative fiction of the time. Among the most important are: Romantic irony, either displaying or concealing the author’s strict control of his text; poetry as an arch-genre, setting up a dialogue of literary genres; the dramatic qualities of the Romantic discourse; the conventions of the novel as art (»poetic novel«), displaying »phony« ways of fictional motivation.

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Romantic irony and the splitting of narrative voices and levels

In this section, I shall refer back to the major principle and subject matter which Romantic Irony, under the editorship of Frederick Garber (a predecessor volume in the Romanticism subseries of the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages), treated in a fuller variety of aspects. Here I shall concentrate exclusively on the relationship between homophony and polyphony. In its widest sense, irony should be seen as a manifest contrast between two literal discursive levels that (potentially) builds up a field of tensions (Spannungsfeld). Whenever there is room for interpretation (Spielraum), there is a potential ironic effect. Following Beda Allemann, this should be called »constructive irony« (Alleman 1978, 396). In almost the same way as parody, irony can be seen as a genuine synthesis, both bi-textual and bi-discursive (Hutcheon 1978, 469). As far as its bi-discursive status is concerned, irony might end up as a peculiar type of the ventriloquism effect (O’Neill 1996, 58–61). Pointing to only one of the aspects of this type of polyphony, Mieke Bal singles out the quasi-synonymous concept of »text interference« (Bal 1985, 142) — mostly regarding it as a form of speech representation. The most obvious example of the ventriloquism effect in fiction is when the narrator represents, within his text, what is said (or thought) by its characters. In such cases, the primary voice of the narrator allows one or more of the characters’ voices to express themselves through it. Operating as an efficient way of disguising the origin of its discursive voice, ventriloquism is a potential temptation for all narratives. When exercised at its maximum potential, this narrative device allows the author to be less (if at all) interested in the story and gratifies the reader with the privilege of being extensively informed about it. Obviously, in Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Henry von Ofterdingen, 1802), homophony predominates, thanks to the narrative frame of a third-person travel story. Irony is, however, still present in different ways. The chapter in Nemoianu’s The Taming of Romanticism dealing with »Romantic Irony« is a helpful reference at this point. For the sake of argumentative coherence, I confine myself to one essential remark. Whereas Nemoianu cross-examines the issue from a more extensive perspective, my approach will be restricted to the discursive play. However, I would call Nemoianu’s approach complementary to, rather than different from my own. Our perspectives converge, as Nemoianu stresses that the work of the German High Romantics illustrates an inclusive, philosophically ambitious and rather »serious« view of irony. As Nemoianu puts it: »Novalis internalized better than anybody else the message of multiplicity and all-inoneness that irony was seeking«. In contrast, by the end of the Romantic age, »E.T.A. Hoffmann provides an example of total commitment to the principle of universal irony« (Nemoianu, 164). Novalis’s story is not directly undermined but rather obliterated and confused by polyphony. At a certain point, Heinrich’s father remembers that he had come across an old man and had been engaged with him in an exchange about poetry. As a matter of fact, the father re-tells what the old man has re-told and what poets used to tell about poetry (Todorov 1978, 108). Let us call this the multiple echo effect. (In this wider system of reference, the ventriloquism effect is only a particular case.) Thus the narrative discourse diverges more and more from the story. In Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831), irony is present on various levels. Sometimes the author himself undertakes the mission to push the reader towards the path of evasive comprehension:

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It seems needless to inform the reader that he is not to accept literally the figures of speech that we are here obliged to employ in order to express that singular assimilation, symmetrical — immediate — consubstantial — of a man to an edifice.1

More frequently however, irony covers wide discursive surfaces, functioning mostly as an undergarment of the story. The chapter dedicated to Esmeralda’s public trial is aped by the detailed account of an animal indictment: Nothing was more common in those times than to indict animals for sorcery. Among others, in the accounts of the provost’s office for 1466, may be seen a curious detail concerning the expenses of the trial of Gillet-Soulart and his sow, executed for their demerits at Corbeil. Everything is there: the cost of the pen in which the sow was put; the five hundred bundles of short fagots for the wharf of Morsant; the three pints of wine and the bread, the last repast of the victim, shared in a brotherly manner by the executioner; down to the eleven days custody and feed of the sow, at eight Paris pence each.2

The author’s suspicious fervor in meticulously describing every possible detail eventually deconstructs the human plot-model. This may be perceived as an astute narrative formula, meant to undermine the reader’s natural interest in the events, drawing it towards the stage directions of the discourse. This kind of irony lays the credibility of the story open to debate and reveals the authorial craft. In Walter Scott’s novels, the same approach is present on various textual levels. The frequent iterations, in authorial discourse, of the novel’s subtitle, Waverley or ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), are worth noticing. This »Sixty Years Since« promptly surfaces every time when the narrator puts obvious distances between himself and his narrated, word-made, world. This kind of narrative game may be perceived as a breech between the word and the world and, even more, as a negotiated complicity between the author and his reader: »And with this resolution Waverley went to drink tea (as the fashion was Sixty years since)« (Scott 1973, 371). The readymade iterative formula institutionalizes the dissociation between story and discourse, offering a formal denial of their common substance. This may also be identified as a subtle ventriloquist trick (or a multiple-echo narrative effect). The narratorial instance usually seeks the company of its reader, mocking his own custom of referring to poetical models established by textbooks, in order to portray Waverley’s actions. In a certain passage, Waverley’s mood is unexpectedly compared to a horse’s being »warm in the harness«. Immediately after this, the narrator praises his simile in an overt self-referential

1.

»Il est inutile d’avertir le lecteur de ne pas prendre au pied de la lettre les figures que nous sommes obligés d’employer ici pour exprimer cet accouplement singulier, symétrique, immédiat, presque consubstantiel, d’un homme à un édifice« (Hugo 1964, 177).

2.

»Rien de plus simple alors qu’un procès de sorcellerie intente à un animal. On trouve entre autres, dans les comptes de la prévôté pour 1466, un curieux détail des frais du procès de Gillet-Soulart et de sa truie, exécutés pour leurs démérites, à Corbeil. Tout y est, le coût des fosses pour mettre la truie, les cinq cent bourrées de cotrets pris sur le port de Morsant, les trois pintes de vin et de pain, dernier repas du patient fraternellement partagés par le bourreau, jusqu’au onze jours de garde et de nourriture de la truie à huit deniers parissi chaque« (ibid., 352 f.).

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address. Keeping the doors of his narrative workshop wide open, the writer jeopardizes any possible mimetic effect: This simile so much corresponds with the state of Waverley’s feelings in the course of this memorable evening, that I prefer it (especially as being, I trust, wholly original) to any more splendid illustration, with which Bysshe’s Art of poetry might supply me (ibid., 315).

On an all-encompassing level, the Waverley model — a subtle and original way of manipulating authorship — deserves careful analysis. When Waverley was published, Scott was publicly acclaimed as the author of various obsolete literary genres, usually associated with Gothic fiction and drama: verse romances, historical novels, translations and imitations of supernatural ballads and German plays. As a writer of verse romances Scott had previously been targeted by Byron’s poem »English Bards and Scotch Reviewers« (1809) as addressing female audiences. In addition, his work was being perceived as less consistent with British innate realism than with the fantastic and melodramatic German tradition (Gamer 2000, 168). The fact that he did not claim authorship for Waverley and later on engaged in an elaborate discursive play with extensive introductions, explanations and comments of his decisions turns »Walter Scott« into an exemplary authorial construct. Technically, this formula is grounded in a well-orchestrated confusion between Scott as a writer (the flesh and blood person), Scott as a dramatized author (the frequently dramatized speaker purportedly narrating the story of Waverley) and the implied author (as an inference or an effect of the whole novel) (Booth, 268–270). Recent studies interpret the expression »the author of Waverley« as a significant reaction against German Gothic prose formulas as well as against Scott’s previous poetic production: If romantic ideology constituted itself, as I have urged, through a series of skirmishes with gothic and with its reception, then the relation of the legitimate author ›Walter Scott‹ to the Gothic exemplifies and embodies this relation (Gamer 2000, 195).

This intertextual relation is the source of Scott’s special irony and his playful attitude towards his materials and himself. At the same time, it offers the constructive narrative ground for the writer’s reflection on the novel as a genre as well as on himself as a novelist. In the case of E.T.A. Hoffmann, the ironic tension is almost entirely transferred onto the diegetic level. In his Die Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern (Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, along with a Fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler in Stray Printer’s Sheets, 1820), supposedly »edited« by Hoffmann, there are at least two narrations, engaged in an ironic counterpoint: Murr’s discourse and a parallel one, attributed to Kreisler. The novel displays a certain homophonic narrative background — the first-person confession of the tomcat — but even this is frequently disrupted by dialogues between the fictitious editor and his implied readers, if not between the editor and Murr himself. This framing story gets more and more contradictory, confusing and obscured by the noisy bilateral polyphonic comments. Moreover, the tomcat is a typically unreliable narrator. Günter Grass follows the same model in his Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959), where the narrator is, in several respects, a deviant person. In this post-World-War-II novel, the ventriloquism effect seems, however, to be subdued to a political and to an ideological statement:

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Treating the horrors of two world wars The Tim Drum most overtly exemplifies the possibilities of a totally unreliable narrator and thus invites the reader to construct an alternative locus of narrative authority (O’Neill 1996, 130).

As we have already noticed, in Romantic prose fiction homophony and polyphony may either alternate or engage in an animated dialogue. They may also fuse or be confused with each other, as in Gogol’s fictions. The technical device patterned by the Russian writer is the self-narrated monologue, radically blurring the distinction between the experiencing and the narrating selves. In such cases, the word becomes the arena of conflict between two voices, revealing the basic identity of the novel as a conventional literary genre (Bakhtin 1973, 106). The narrative frame of the short story »Nos« (The Nose, 1835) is undermined by noisy and contradictory allegations, presented by the author as produced by all sorts of unreliable sources. Among these, the curious people from Nevskii Prospect (gathered in front of a fancy shop, where the nose has been purportedly noticed); the students from the Surgical Academy (claiming that, on the contrary, the allegedly rambling nose has been located in the City Gardens, since the reign of the Persian prince Khozrev-Mirza). A most respectable lady attempts to convince the administration of the Gardens to turn the event into a didactical show. The local dandies are in quest of a provocative topic for their relentless gossip. The earnest and responsible citizens try to persuade the government to stop these harmful lies by all available means. And so on and so forth, until the only event left to be accounted for by the story is the confusing way in which these faces of the same situation interfere with and mutually reflect each other. The exchange of letters between the nose’s owner, Platon Kovalev, and Aleksandra Grigorievna Podtochina, the widow of a high rank officer, adds a further dimension. The extensive comments of the stupid and unreliable lady can be identified as infelicitous readings of Gogol’s own story. Using overt narratorial intrusion, Gogol explicitly masquerades it by supplying the professional critical interpretation. The reader is constantly presented with embedded strata, contradicting the assumptions of the strata immediately above or below. This is how Gogol displays the very process of imposing form on contingent matter, through the discursive organization of »plot«. On a scale starting with Novalis and Hugo and ending with Hoffmann and Gogol, a more and more striking gap emerges between the different settings in the story and the various discourse settings. To quote again Nemoianu’s textual comment to support my discursive hypothesis: »Setting contradictions side by side must be enough. The two sides will somehow interact with each other on the page or on the stage by the mysterious virtues of the text itself. The efforts of the interacting author are weakened or abandoned. The road from High Romanticism to its lower reaches is one from fusion to interaction and hence to juxtaposition« (Nemoianu 1984, 165). In almost the same way, Thomas Mann much later ironically evokes the perpetual distance between the presented story and the discourse presenting it in Joseph und seine Brüder (Joseph and his Brothers, 1933/34), Doktor Faustus (Doctor Faustus, 1947), and Der Erwählte (The Holy Sinner [literally: The Chosen One], 1951). In Der Erwählte, the ventriloquist strategy is, so to speak, turned inside out. The localization of voices and the narrative focalization are revealed rather than concealed by the discourse.

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In the wake of the same technique, (post)modern authors of fiction often end up by treating the discourse as a story. In Bulgakov’s Master i Margarita (Master and Margarita, begun 1928, published 1966/67) the most appropriate way of accounting for Jesus Christ’s trial and ordeal is turning it into a diegetic feud between the Devil and the writer called Berlioz, between the Master and his critics, and eventually between the Master, Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ himself. Among the British (post)moderns, John Fowles claimed to be the literary descendent of the Romantics, especially of Sir Walter Scott. In The Ebony Tower (1974), he reworks Marie de France’s Eliduc (ca. 1155–1189), who, in turn, had reshaped the so-called »matière de Bretagne«. At a certain point, one of Fowles’s characters starts re-telling Eliduc, presenting the medieval character as a model for his own life and personality. Fowles recounts Marie de France’s original story, displaying it as a remote pattern of his novel, and The Ebony Tower as a free variation on a pre-existing and successively re-processed traditional epic. Whereas Fowles’s self-reflexivity works as a self-sufficient game we cannot be sure if there is still anything worth narrating in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) — apart from the confusing, contradictory voices legitimized by a tolerant narrator. 2.

Poetry and narration and the polarity »poetic« – »non-poetic«

For the study of narrative voices in Romantic fiction, the Romantic theory of poetry is of equal importance. During this period, poetry has been perceived as the literary genus proximum. Several Romantic prose writers started their careers writing poetry but continued as novelists. In order to legitimize the authors’ choice of including extensive monologues about the status of poetry, as well as rich samples of their poetic production in their narrative discourse, various characters in Romantic novels are would-be poets and the poetic principle is embodied in diverse ways. There is some reason for a »the chicken-or-the-egg«-type of dispute at this point: one can equally maintain that someone is invested as a poet-character in order to motivate the Romantic authors’ aesthetic discourse about poetry; or — the other way around — that the presence of a poet-character demands a strong emphasis on the narrative discourse. In Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Henry von Ofterdingen, 1802), processing poetry could be seen as the main theme of the novel. Sometimes, the same diegetic allegation is reinforced three times, using different discursive devices. To quote just one example, the opposition between reflection and action, between the poet and the hero is exhibited by at least three different voices: Heinrich’s speech, the narrator’s discourse, and one of Klingsohr’s public statements. According to Todorov, Novalis’s novel might be identified as the perfect example of a mixed generic type — the poetic novel. The French scholar attempts to build a systematics of the discursive genres, starting from the narrative imbalance between the poetic and the non-poetic, illustrated by Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Todorov 1978, 104). Fiction has always been confronted with a technical alternative: either to display the traces of its processing or to identify itself as pure »truth«. Romantic prose writers overtly challenged the so-called zero-degree of realism and the transparency of narrative discourse. One of the most efficient means of doing so is to incorporate into the narrative other literary or non-

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literary genres: for example, poems, essays, letters, diaries. The inner function of such devices is obvious: it puts a strong emphasis on literary craft. In Waverley, the careful attention devoted to the Gothic Library of the Tulle Veollan estate is too obvious an excuse for extensive quotations of and comments on poetry. The eclectic treasure of books, piled up in his uncle’s house, provides the only source of young Edward’s education, under the supervision of old Mr. Pembroke, a would-be tutor addicted to poetry. His departure for the army stimulates Waverley to produce abundant verses, displayed by the narrator, rather tongue-in-cheek, to his virtual audience: If they afford the reader no higher amusement, they of any kind, will serve, at least, better than narrative to acquaint him with the wild and irregular spirit of our hero: Late, when the autumn evening fell On Mirkwood-Mere’s romantic dell, The lake return’d, in chasten’d gleam (Scott, 87).

We are entitled to identify the adventurous journey of the hero towards the Northern Lands as a typical apprenticeship-quest — mockingly imitating the German models of the eighteenthcentury Bildungsroman. The author does not miss a single occasion for introducing to Waverley all sorts of bizarre characters producing, retailing, or hungrily devouring poetry. Under the circumstances, the »alien visitor« of unknown provenance is quick in understanding that — apart from its perpetual restlessness — the prodigal production of verses is one of the preferred pastimes of the Northerners. By and large, one of the most significant facets of the alleged Scottish wilderness experienced by Waverley is the abundant production of Celtic poetry. Waverley’s first visit to the Mac-Ivors’s ancient family mansion revolves around an ostentatious poetical performance offered by Mac-Murrough — »the family bhairdh«. Later on, what we have expected to be Waverley’s moonlit meeting with Flora, in a quite conventional Romantic setting, ends up in a rather didactical session of translating Celtic poetry into English. Fergus Mac-Ivor, Flora’s brother, promptly takes advantage of this parodistic subversion of current literary stereotypes to make a twofold point and emphasize the highly artificial situation: My dear Flora, before I return to the barbarous ritual of our forefathers, I must tell you that Captain Waverley is a worshiper of the Celtic muse, not the less so perhaps that he does not understand a word of her language (ibid., 186).

However, surprisingly enough, a highly strategic letter sent by Fergus himself to Waverly, during the military operations, generously indulges in displaying a poem fabricated by Flora to honor a dead Scottish hero: TO AN OAK TREE In the Church Yard of —, in the Highlands of Scotland, said to mark the Grave of Captain Wogan, killed in 1649 (ibid., 240).

The narratorial voice starts by quoting the ostentatiously long poem and manages to introduce an insightful comment, pointing towards the mischievous situation: Whatever might be the real merit of Flora Mac-Ivor’s poetry, the enthusiasm which it intimated was well calculated to make a corresponding impression upon her lover. The lines were

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Monica Spiridon read — read again — then deposited in Waverley’s bosom — then again drawn out, and read line by line, in a low and smothered voice (ibid., 240).

Scott fully takes advantage of this opportunity to play the narrative discourse on multiple strings, and to minimize — if not indeed kill — our interest in the events themselves. Taking off with a pedantically detailed description of Waverley’s reading habits, the narrative comes back to earth into the most prosaic domesticity: »the entrance of Mrs. Cruiskshanks, with the sublunary articles of dinner and wine, hardly interrupted this pantomime of affectionate enthusiasm« (ibid., 241). As almost all Romantic fiction writers, Walter Scott puts heavy stakes on the notion of fictionality. Especially in the so-called »Waverley novels«, fiction is being perceived against a background of expectations mediated by literary genres and subgenres. Consequently, the artistic craft and the process of fiction are constantly under scrutiny. The two ladies successively courted by Waverley are almost didactically instrumentalized by the author as mere embodiments of the two opposite vocations of his protagonist: the lyricalidyllic and the warrior-adventurous — both of them Romantic patterns of behavior and sources of Romantic literary genres. At a certain point in the story, Flora Mac-Ivor explicitly identifies the always-hesitating Waverley as a poet much more than a soldier: »But high and perilous enterprise is not Waverley’s forte. He would never have been his celebrated ancestor Sir Nigel, but only Sir Nigel’s eulogist and poet« (Scott 1973, 364). One of Waverley’s double-edged comments, addressed to Colonel Talbot, emphasizes the artistic and the poetic side of his adventures, revealing the literary fabric of the whole novel and measuring the disappointing distances between it and the alleged »reality« of the story: Enough, says our homely proverb, is as good as a feast. The plumed troops and the big war used to enchant me in poetry; but the night marches, vigils, couches under the wintry sky, and such accompaniments of the glorious trade, are not at all to my taste in practice (ibid., 415 f.).

In Rob Roy (1818), Scott fully takes advantage of the would-be poet protagonist to indulge in lengthy poetic divagations, albeit less insistently than in Waverley. The literary leaning of Francis Osbaldistone, discovered in France, nourishes vivid discursive polyphonies — such as the ritual skirmishes between father and son, Francis and the Osbaldistone cousins, or even Francis and Diana, during evening sessions in the old library. In this later novel, discursive contrasts are much stronger than in Waverley. The narrative starting point of Rob Roy is the convention of the written confession, addressed to a friend. Whenever it occurs, set against this narrative frame, the discursive polyphony, the mixing of poetical quotations, the dramatic insertions turn out to be very effective as well as noticeable. The frequent shifting and the constant splitting of the narrative voices jeopardize the realistic illusion, insistently and convergently pointing towards the processing of the textual tapestry. In Hoffmann’s novel Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr the main characters — the tomcat author and Kreisler — occasionally write poetry. It is worth mentioning a certain paragraph in the novel where Hoffmann borrows Murr’s voice, in order to legitimize his own way of mixing the poetic and the epic discourses in the very novel we are reading. What Murr calls simple and earnest prose — which means homophony — turns out to be more delightful for the reader if interspersed with verse, giving the assortment a better tone. The fictional world slides from

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a higher to a lower and trivial level, from the area of aesthetic reception into that of culinary consumerism. According to Murr, in an average novel, a well-written package of verses is as necessary as a slice of tender fat in an old dried sausage. Murr usually concocts plenty of sonnets, and even a gloss — which turns out to be a Goethean fake. His courtship follows the rules displayed by Ovid in Remedia amoris (The Cure for Love, 2 A.D.). The initiatory ritual of the tomcat in a secret brotherhood consists mostly of singing and of abundant recitations. To put it bluntly, the prestigious poetic models are in fact phony procedures of fictional motivation of the weird animal behavior. We might conclude that investing Murr with the high status of a poet is just an excuse for the author’s willingness to break the narrative homophony of his novel in order to let it be more digestible. By the same token, the presence of a well learned and extensively read character in Don Quixote (1605/15) is a mere fictional device for Cervantes’s drive to indulge in abundant savant quotations. We could identify here a typical, scholarly situation of the so-called technical or artistic motivation in narrative fiction. The aesthetic motivation legitimizing a narrative device (Spiridon 2000, 250–255), or (the other way round) a narrative device supporting an aesthetic drive, is essential for Romanticism as a whole. Although fictional worlds are constructed through discourse only (and the procedures, the formulas, the technologies of construction so to speak are crucial) the pretended impersonality of narratorial discourse is usually interpreted by common sense as a way of rendering the discourse transparent and the fictional world »real«. In Romantic fiction, there is a two-way flow between such fake depersonalization and situations in which the authors stress the presence of a narrator and his role in processing fiction and uttering words, with the effect of contradicting conventional expectations. In several Romantic fictional works, the narrative links are meant to account for a poetic functional model of the text (i.e., as Novalis puts it, as a synonym for the non-mimetic). Both the homophonic and the polyphonic discursive devices either point to the aesthetic code of Romantic literature generically speaking or to the text in itself as a token. All these maneuvers end up by distracting the reader from the story, switching his interest towards the discourse itself. 3.

Systematic dialogue between narration and drama

To focus the reader’s attention on the genre itself, Hugo and Scott, Novalis and Hoffmann successfully set narrative against drama and various kinds of artistic techniques. Occasionally, Romantic fiction exhibits theatrical elements. This results in writing which consistently displays its conventionality, which explicitly lays bare its status of artifice and the condition of the so-called »world-stage«. Before emerging as a successful poet, Walter Scott made an attempt at being a dramatist. He translated and imitated no less than five German dramas, among them Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773; Scott’s version: 1799). While celebrating the publication of his Götz, Scott also produced a Gothic tragedy, The House of Aspen (1800). His intensive dramatic work suggests that, by that time, Scott regarded himself as an original dramatist, but also engaged in collecting, imitating and translating English and German ballads. The Doom of Devorgoil, a

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Melo-Drama, by Daniel Terry, Actor. (1830), produced by Scott after his conversion to the novel, offers the opportunity of an authorial game similar to the Waverley model: The writer conceals his personality behind the name of his godson, an actor. As a prose writer, Scott created the »dramatized novel«, relying on a particular pattern of integrating emotionally charged and quasi-autonomous dialogical episodes into a monological frame. Homophony undertakes the role of the discursive »locomotive«. It drives the relatively independent narrative »carriages«, where all sorts of eccentric events occur in constantly changing settings. It is worth noticing that only the prominent fictional characters are allowed to move between different carriages (Waverley, Frank Osbaldistone, Mac Gregor). When Nicholas Jarvie makes up his mind to leave his cozy home and his domestic comfort in order to travel northwards, he starts playing an important part in the plot. Hugo borrows Scott’s brand new narrative model, using it in a personal manner. NotreDame de Paris begins with a popular performance: a Morality play called Le bon jugement de Madame la vierge Marie (The Good Judgment of Madam the Virgin Mary), authored by the fictitious writer Gringoire. We have to keep in mind that the French popular name of Virgin Mary is Notre Dame, in order to notice that Gringoire’s »Notre Dame« announces Hugo’s novel in his predominantly theatrical lines. »La mise en scène« — mentioned from the very beginning — can be regarded as a metaphorical allusion to the novel as a whole. Actually, there is a striking parallel between the medieval performances called »Mysteries« or »Moralities«, whose characters are moral stereotypes (Good, Evil, the Virgin Mary, etc.), and the way in which Hugo’s novel is tailored (cf., for instance, Esmeralda and the male triangle around her) At the same time, this highly schematic narrative structure can be assimilated to a commedia dell’arte production or to a puppet show. Esmeralda’s witchcraft trial is staged as a popular performance, too. Not accidentally, the event occurs in the same public place where Gringoire’s morality had been previously staged (Le Palais de Justice). The narrative, monological discourse insists on this coincidence: On the part of the audience, it was that feeling of gratified impatience which one experiences at the theater, at the conclusion of the last interlude of the play, when the curtain is raised and the last act is about to begin.3

The author’s voice is split by a short comment of the fictitious writer Gringoire stressing the idea of theatrical performance. Using such references to life as art, Hugo’s novel reveals the artificial, theatrical nature of its plot: »›Well‹ said our philosopher, ›we are going to see all these men of the gown devour human flesh. It is a show as good as any other‹«.4 The story of Heinrich von Ofterdingen is made accessible to the reader only by means of a mediating histrionic activity that combines memorization, dreaming, recitation, story-telling, singing, and the rewriting of various pre-existing scripts. However, the critics of the novel have often overrated the metaphysical dimension of its story, and only occasionally taken into account the elaborated rhetorical effects and the sophisticated game of masks involved in its 3. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »De la part de l’auditoire, c’était ce sentiment d’impatience satisfaite qu’on éprouve au théâtre a l’expiration du dernier entracte de la comédie, lorsque la toile se relève et que la fin va commencer« (Hugo 1964, 361). 4.

»– Allons! Dit notre philosophe, nous allons voir tous ces gens de robe manger de la chaire humaine. C’est un spectacle comme un autre« (Hugo 1964, 348).

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discourse. In the monologic fairy tale told by Klingsohr, characters keep changing their masks. If globally perceived as tiny fragments of a larger structure, the homophonic monologues of the miner, the hermit, and the travelling merchants, as well as Zulima’s story, Heinrich’s frequent dreams, etc., end up by being seen as successive acts of a dramatic script. The quick and frequent changes of the scenery also contribute to this global perception. Not to mention the abundant Shakespearian paraphrases and rewritings on a lower, if not trivial, level, switching from the royal settings to the trade travels, from the Romantic sophisticated bookish memory to the bourgeois domestic settings, and always starting the polyphonic discursive mechanisms. Nikolai Gogol’s prose, on the other hand, is a true performance of discourse. The dramatic nature of Gogol’s fiction has been tracked down by the Russian formalists who notice »Gogol’s well structured pantomime, his declamation, his puppet-show idiom«.5 The storytelling discourse is a full-blown show that steals the limelight from the actual events, picked from the most ordinary everyday life and deliberately questionable and uncertain. The narrator’s purpose is to destroy the impression of reality and to emphasize the craft of storytelling and the narratorial stunt. Boris Eikhenbaum has summed this up in a nutshell by calling Gogol a performer, i.e. a comedian. (Eikhenbaum 1965, 224). While Gogol emphasizes the dramatic effects of direct discourse, E.T.A. Hoffmann exploits the representative one. As far as Hoffmann’s novel is concerned, we are carefully guided towards noticing that almost every detail of the story had been somehow previously staged (and therefore has a pre-existing dramatic model). In such situations, when fictional life overtly and programmatically follows a previous dramatic play script, the author displays a paradigmatic motivation, so to speak (Spiridon, 280). For instance, at certain points in the story, everything which has happened in German public life in the aftermath of the French Revolution is depicted as a costume ball. The cross-theatrical references of Hoffmann’s fiction can be confusing. For instance, Prince Irenäus compares the diabolic behavior of Prince Hector to a totally dissimilar event in The Marriage of Figaro (1786). In this way, the would-be-father-in-law justifies Hector’s improper conduct. In fact, the Prince of Sigensweiler is an utterly uninspired manufacturer of literary motivations, since he perceives Kreisler as a genuine Prince Hamlet, whereas Julia sees him more appropriately as a Monsieur Jacques in As You Like It. Hoffmann’s animal world systematically apes the human patterns. In his memoirs, the tomcat fakes the episode of his duel with Ponto in order to correspond to the duel of the jester Tocila in As You Like It. The global dramatization of the novel seems to emerge as an effect of the narratorial habit of explaining unusual aspects of the everyday court life as parts of a show directed by Master Abraham and performed by almost all of the characters. This staging of narrative voices leads to a breakdown of narrative coherence. In (post)modern fiction, this formal uncertainty will be taken to extremes. In the novel Il gioco dell’occa (The Dice Game, 1967) by Eduardo Sanguineti, the one hundred eleven fragments of the text can be read randomly. To be more specific, the reader is invited to order the narrative chain by casting the dice. 5.

»l’articulation mimique de Gogol, sa déclamation, son langage des marionnettes« (Eikhenbaum 1965, 224).

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For Julio Cortázar, the ironic distance he chooses to take from his own text as well as from the entire tradition of the novel is expressed in a new intertextual game. His novel Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963) is divided into two complementary versions: a »First Book«, consisting of 56 chapters, and a second one, called »Chapters we can do without«. This second part is meant to be read in an almost random order, indicated at the end of each chapter. The fictional writer Morelli calls this type of fiction »roman comique« (in French, in the original Spanish text): a generalized self-criticism of the novel as a literary genre. With Cortázar, (post)modern fiction displays its self-consciousness about language, literary form and the act of fiction writing and even a certain degree of insecurity about the validity of its representations. 4.

Romantic theories about the relationship between »reality« and »art«

The, so to speak, aesthetic turn in Romantic fiction and the birth of the novel as art turned out to be highly favorable to the use of various narrative voices in fiction. Romantic fictional prose deliberately and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. On various occasions, Walter Scott explicitly resorts to aesthetic motivation: These circumstances will serve to explain such points of our narrative as, according to the custom of story-tellers, we deemed it fit to leave unexplained, for the purpose of exciting the reader’s curiosity (Scott 1973, 438).

Scott’s narrator frequently addresses the reader and keeps him informed about the progress of his narrative enterprise. The novel advances exclusively due to repeated interventions from the narrator, who calls his reader’s attention to the activity of writing as an event within the novel itself: Shall this be a long or a short chapter? This is a question in which you, gentle reader, have no vote, however much you may be interested in the consequences; just as you may (like myself) probably have nothing to do with imposing a new tax, except the trifling circumstances of being obliged to pay it. More happy surely in the present case, since, though it lies in my arbitrary power to extend my materials as I think proper, I cannot call you into Exchequer if you do not think proper to read my narrative (ibid., 199).

In Hoffmann’s novel Kater Murr, as noted earlier, this function is overtly taken over by the characters themselves. Kreisler, Murr, and the fictitious editor quite frequently point out the »rhapsodic« structure of the whole. We are entitled to identify this as an internal motivation of the text. From a different standpoint, in the specific context of our discussion, »rhapsodic« can be seen as a transparent synonym for narrative polyphony. We should keep in mind that for Novalis music ideally represents the counter-mimetic art, closely followed by its sister art poetry (Todorov 1977, 200 f.). As far as the homology between Romantic fiction and the models of the fine arts is concerned, Notre-Dame de Paris is worth close scrutiny. (For a detailed exposition of models of the fine arts cf. the chapter on the »sister arts« by Szegedy-Maszák in this volume.) Hugo’s chapter »Ceci tuera cela« (This One Shall Destroy the Other) in Notre-Dame de Paris is the homophonic

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extension of Frollo’s remarks. According to him, in the foreseeable future, books would become a substitute for cathedrals, and printing would displace architecture from its status of royal artistic dignity. In terms of the narrative, the chapter, one of the best articulated and compressed contributions of the author’s voice to the fabric of the novel, is a monologue focused on the tension-charged historical dialogue between the arts, more precisely: between architecture and verbal art. The analogy between a cathedral and the novel has a strong tradition in Western culture. The thread of French literature leads from Hugo directly to Proust. In Pastiches et mélanges (Pastiches and Melanges, 1919), Proust reprints the »Preface« to his own translation of Ruskin’s study on the cathedral Notre-Dame of Amiens. Proust begins at Ruskin’s analysis — the cathedral he calls La Bible d’Amiens — which, by extension, leads directly to the analogy novel-cathedral. The equation resulted in rich speculative commentaries (cf. Johnston), among which that by Matei Calinescu deserves particular attention. In his text »Proust, the Cathedral and the Book« (Calinescu, 24–26), Calinescu, drawing on the Proustian simile, in turn highlights the twofold relationship between architecture and architecture: the literal and the metaphorical one. As Calinescu puts it, »Proust’s phrase the Bible of Ruskin conveys two obvious references (Ruskin’s own text and the cathedral which is subject of this text)« (Calinescu 1993, 25). By the same token, we could maintain that Hugo’s references to the edifice called NotreDame have a double aim. At a certain point in the novel, the author explicitly puts forward the suggestion of literally »reading« the façade. The French writer simultaneously points to himself as a producer and points to his novel as the product of a craft: »Indeed, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era, architecture is the great book of humanity«.6 In fact Hugo’s novel is to a great extent the story of a setting. The description of the city and of the cathedral and the uses to which they are put in the narration of the story evidently do not belong to the realm of the story but rather to that of the discourse. Instrumentalizing the description of places is a common means of favoring discourse. Such discursive detours are by no means simply descriptive. They are also hermeneutic. In their complex interaction, they facilitate, impede, complicate and intermediate the reader’s progress through the text. The cathedral, the complicated tapestry of the city, perceived »à vol d’oiseau« (»Paris à vol d’oiseau« [A Bird’s-eye view of Paris]) clearly function as allegories of the novel itself (if not of art itself). Following the same hermeneutic aims, Claude Frollo’s cell is compared by Hugo to a Rembrandt engraving (the painter being called the Shakespeare of painting), representing Doctor Faust’s chamber. Notice that in the narrator’s homophonic discourse there are multiple strata of cultural references, reaching from the explicit Rembrandt/Shakespeare analogies to the implied Rembrandt/Hugo parallels, and embracing the enormous allusion to Faustian mythology (including Goethe’s reworking of it). Walter Scott is similarly familiar with the assets of this artistic intertextuality. In the deliberately conventional episode of Waverley’s moonlit meeting with Flora, the ostentatiously artificial setting strikingly resembles a painting by Poussin: 6.

»En effet, depuis l’origine des choses jusqu’au XVe siècle de l’ère chrétienne inclusivement, l’architecture est le grand livre de l’humanité« (Hugo 1964, 206).

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Here, like one of those lovely forms which decorate the landscapes of Poussin, Waverley found Flora, gazing on the waterfall. Two paces farther back stood Cathleen, holding a small Scottish harp, the use of which had been taught to Flora by Rory Dall, one of the last Harpers of the Western Highlands (Scott 1973, 191).

In addition to this authorial way of weaving aesthetic strands into their fiction, Romantic prose writers »naturalize« their structural options on a parallel level. In one way or another, some of their characters are involved in artistic activities. Kreisler is a conductor, Master Abraham is an organ builder; some of Novalis’s characters produce, perform or allegorically embody music. The possibility of investing a character with a temporary narrative mission in an authorial homophonic fiction is generally perceived by criticism as a potential self-mirroring. Novelists usually take advantage of this, especially by creating a co-operation with other standard forms of the self-centered fiction (Dällenbach 1977, 61–65). In his Notre-Dame de Paris, Hugo attaches particular importance to the prolific character/ author Gringoire, who often launches monologic speeches about creation in the widest sense. It is quite clear that a great number of his considerations should be regarded as ambiguous, referring to the literary universe in which he himself evolves as a fictional character — a universe he initially regards as a comedy, but towards the end identifies as a typical tragedy. The end of the novel is entirely in possession of the outer narrator’s monologic voice. He settles the accounts and draws the necessary conclusions on behalf of the reader. References to Gringoire and to Phoebus generate deliberate confusion between the »model of life« and the »model of the book«. Gringoire, who crossed a wide space of the intellectual discourse of his time, from philosophy and astrology to architecture, ends, symptomatically, in tragedy: »This he called coming to a tragic end«,7 explains the narrator, touching on the heart of the matter. By and large, all the characters of the novel end tragically, from Quasimodo to Esmeralda, from King Louis XI to Frollo or to Esmeralda’s solitary mother. Even about the frivolous Phoebus we are told, with double intent: »Phoebus de Chateaupers also came to a tragic end: he married«.8 This may appear to be a passing remark of the author, but in fact it is a reference to the structure of his own novel. A century later, Alejo Carpentier’s novel Concierto barroco (Baroque Concert, 1974) similarly manipulates artist characters, in order to discuss openly the principles of veracity. The relationships between truth and the fantastic, between history and the artistic conventions are debated between the storyteller of the Spanish Conquest in Mexico and the monk Antonio Vivaldi, a musician who is staging the subject in Venice as the musical script of his opera Montezuma. Presumably, the handiest means of self-reference in Romantic fiction are the numerous textual self-mirrorings. In Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the fairy-tale told by Klingsohr and the mysterious book in the hermit’s cave capture in a nutshell the whole story. The gift of foretelling the narrative events is frequently bestowed on the fictitious creatures of the German writer. In Scott’s novels, self-mirrorings help to problematize the relationship between life and

7.

»C’est ce qu’il appelait avoir fait une fin tragique« (ibid., 565).

8.

»Phoebus de Chateaupers fit aussi une fin tragique. Il se maria« (ibid.).

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fiction. In Waverley it is worth mentioning the theatrical episode which introduces the two Mac-Ivors on stage. The narrator underlines their similarity with Sebastian and Viola: Flora Mac-Ivor bore a most striking resemblance to her brother Fergus; so much so, they might have played Viola and Sebastian with the same exquisite effect produced by the appearance of Mrs. Henry Siddons and her brother, Mr. William Murray in these characters (Scott 1973, 183).

Shakespearean intertextuality plays an important part in organizing Romantic narrative in general. The reading and the public commentary of Romeo and Juliet (1597) has a prominent place in a chapter and plays an important part in the plot, revealing narrative polyphony. It also determines Waverley’s/Romeo’s feelings towards Flora/Rosaline and, subsequently, a potential duel fought by Waverley and Fergus. During a lively debate, Scott’s characters explicitly identify themselves with Shakespeare’s fictitious roles. They shape and justify their options according to bookish patterns. As an immediate result of such reading, Waverley explicitly identifies himself with Romeo, withdrawing his love for Flora and transferring it to Rose: »›I will love my Rosalind no more‹ said he; ›she has given me a broad enough hint for that‹« (ibid., 373). Notice Evan’s translation of this statement into a lower, trivial tone: »It will be just like Duncan Mac-Girdie’s mare« said Evan »if your ladyships please: he wanted to use her by degrees to live without meat, and just had put her on a straw a-day, the poor thing died!« (ibid., 373)

In the European tradition of the novel, in the aftermath of Romanticism, the relationship between fiction and its explicit bookish models will expand and become more sophisticated, while maintaining its self-referential and legitimating role. Linda Hutcheon maintains that Romantic fiction was only a link in the continuous chain of narcissism, starting with Cervantes and leading to postmodernism: This stance shows clearly the line of succession from the early self-consciousness of Cervantes and Sterne to the Künstlerroman, to the novel about novels. The ›narcissistic‹ change is one of degree, not kind (Hutcheon 1984, 12 f.).

In a short story called »Wälsungenblut« (The Blood of the Valsungs, written in 1905, published in 1921) Thomas Mann’s characters, the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, deliberately ape the models of Wagner’s Valkyrie (1856) after they had previously seen the show. In Mann’s biblical tetralogy, the title hero Joseph ostentatiously maintains the confusion between him and Gilgamesh. At the same time, in his narratorial discourse, Mann explains, »sanctimoniously as a rabbi«, why his character has decided to do so (Yourcenar 1962, 224–271). A rather paradoxical version can be found in Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote (1982), where the revealing parallel between fiction and its bookish antecedents becomes a source of rebellion and conflict. As a retort against the modern tradition of the bookish motivation and veracity, Graham Greene’s character Monsignor Quixote, outraged, rejects Cervantes’s model and the literary paradigms, proudly evoked by Sancho. Even turned upside down, as a contest between fiction and an allegedly bookish model, the mise en abyme efficiently helps reinforce the artifice and point towards the gap separating life and the book.

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Conclusion

All the previously considered authors seem less interested in showing what happened than in how to communicate it to the reader. The dramatic split of the narrative levels, the »constructive irony«, the emphasis laid on the generic function of poetry, etc. end up by stimulating a diegetic crisis which expresses itself as a discursive polyphony. In Hoffmann’s as well as in Novalis’s fiction, in Scott, Gogol or Hugo, this reduces the gap between the text and the very process of narrative production. Our semiotic approach has pointed out that homophony and polyphony, which Bakhtin would restrict to particular aspects of the realist novel (Bakhtin 1981, 52), are mere textual mercenaries that can be used for a wide array of functions throughout various literary ages. As far as Romantic fiction is concerned, the discursive play between homophony and polyphony reveals at least two main functions: (1) a deliberate maneuvering by the authors as they manipulate established literary genres, and (2) a critical evaluation of the texts’ self-referential potential, through a dialogue with the models and counter-models of Romantic fiction. Romantic narrative is sophisticated and arrogant enough to stimulate a certain feeling of saturation among its followers. Realism, for instance, systematically laid a strong emphasis on the story and operated as if the narrative discourse were totally transparent and unproblematic. We can identify this as a strong reply to the extreme diversity of narrative discourse in Romantic fiction. In a nutshell, in Romantic fictional narratives, homophony and polyphony are turned into instruments of intensive literary self-reflection. This type of discourse — whose fascination with its own workings relies on the homophony/polyphony tension — ends up in a dense opacity. Using narrative homophony and polyphony (among other narrative devices), Romantic fiction draws attention to its own fictionality and rhetoricity, underlining its particular position in the history of literary forms. Bibliography Allemann, Beda. 1978. »De l’ironie en tant que principe littéraire«. Poétique. 9.36: 385–398. Bal, Mieke. 1985. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Trans. by Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: Toronto UP. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1970. La poétique de Dostoievski. Trans. by Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Editions du Seuil. ———. 1973. Problems of Dostoyevski’s Poetics. Trans. by R.W. Roetsel. Ann Arbor: Ardis. ———. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: Texas UP. Benjamin, W. 1974. »Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik«. Gesammelte Schriften 1.1. Ed. by Rudolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Booth, Wayne C. 1979. Critical Understanding: The Power and Limits of Pluralism. Chicago, London: Chicago UP. Calinescu, Matei. 1993. »Proust, the Cathedral and the Book«. Rereading. New Haven, London: Yale UP. 24–26. Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, London: Cornell UP.

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Cohn, Dorrit. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Models for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP. Dällenbach, Lucien. 1977. Le récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Eikhenbaum, Boris. 1965. »Comment est fait le Manteau de Gogol«. Théorie de la littérature: Textes des formalistes russes. Ed. and trans. by Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Editions du Seuil. 212–234. Ferris, Ina. 1991. The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Garber, Frederick (ed.). 1988. Romantic Irony. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Gamer, Michael. 2000. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception and Canon Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Genette, Gérard. 1973. Figures III: Discours du récit. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Hugo, Victor. 1964. Notre-Dame de Paris. Paris: Editions Baudelaire. Hoffmann, E.T.A. 1999. The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr. Trans. by Anthea Bell. New York: Penguin Books. Howard, Jacqueline. 1994. Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 1978. »Ironie et parodie: strategie et structure«. Poétique. 9.36: 467–477. ———. 1984. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. New York, London: Methuen. ———. 1985. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York, London: Methuen. Johnson, Theodore J., Jr. 1987. »Marcel Proust and Architecture: Some Thoughts on the Cathedral Novel«. Critical Essays on Marcel Proust. Ed. by Barbara Bucknall. Boston: Hall. 133–161. O’Neill, Patrick. 1994. Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative. Toronto, Buffalo, London: Toronto UP. ———. 1996. Acts of Narrative: Textual Strategies in Modern German Fiction. Toronto, Buffalo, London: Toronto UP. Mihailescu, Calin-Andrei and Harmaneh, Walid (ed.). 1996. Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology and Poetics. Toronto and Buffalo: Toronto UP. Nemoianu, Virgil. 1984. The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard UP. Newman, Robert (ed.). 1996. Centuries’ Ends, Narrative Means. Stanford: Stanford UP. Novalis. 1990. Henry von Ofterdingen: A Novel. Trans. by Palmer Hilty. Albany Waveland Press. ———. 1997. Philosophical Writings. Trans. by Margaret Mahony Stoljar. New York: State of New York UP. Proust, Marcel. 1947. Pastiches et mélanges. Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française. 93–136. Robertson, Fiona. 1993. »Castle Spectres: Scott, Gothic Drama, and the Search for the Narrator«. Scott and Carnival. Ed. by Alexander J.H. and David Hewitt. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies. 444–458. Scholes, Robert. 1982. Semiotics and Interpretation. New Haven, London: Yale UP. Scott, Walter Sir. 1973. Waverley. London, New York, Dent (Everyman’s Library). Spiridon, Monica. 2000. Melancolia descendentei: O fenomenologie a memoriei genetrice in literatura [Melancholy of Descent: A Phenomenological Approach to Generic Memory in Literature]. 2nd ed. Iasi: Polirom. Sutherland, John. 1995. The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1977. Théories du symbole. Paris: Editions du Seuil. ———. 1978. Les genres du discours. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Whale, John. 2000. Imagination under Pressure, 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics and Utility. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Yourcenar, Marguerite. 1962. »Humanisme et hermétisme chez Thomas Mann«. Sous bénéfice d’inventaire. Paris: Gallimard. 224–271.

The fragment as structuring force Remo Ceserani / Paolo Zanotti

1.

The ideal of an organic unity and the uncanny experience of fragmentation

A distinction has been put forward by some historians, particularly those specialized in French culture and literature (Schor 1980, 1987, 1990), between fragment and detail. It is an important distinction, behind which it is possible to perceive two different epistemological attitudes. According to this distinction, the fragment pertains to a more traditional epistemology: a way of looking at and knowing things that implies an organic conception of the world and the idea that it is always possible to reconstruct the whole from a small part of it. (Convinced of this, for instance, the student of archaeology reconstructs from a fragment of a vase the entire object, then proceeds, from that object, to reconstruct the material culture, the beliefs, the ways of living of an entire society.) The detail, on the other hand, is more random and casual; it does not allow a reconstruction of the whole and pertains to a different, more tentative and hypothetical, typically modern, epistemology. Such an epistemological stance is implied, for instance: (1) in the practice, established at the end of the nineteenth century by Giovanni Morelli, of identifying the authorship of an old painting or art-work by looking at the most insignificant detail; (2) in the interpretation of the language of dreams or of the unconscious expounded by Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis; (3) in the way of studying the past theorized and put into practice by the so-called micro-historians; (4) in the narrative mode typical of the crime novel, in which detective and reader are engaged in the epistemological exercise of solving a mystery by identifying and interpreting the right clue; (5) the modern techniques of communication, narration, and reproduction of reality such as those of photography and the cinema, which exploit creatively the technical possibility, offered by the new media, of cutting out a detail, or blowing it up. Our contention would be that in the culture of the Romantics — and this can be considered a mark of their modernity — the experience of a subject split, alienated, and incapable of recapturing the organic unity of the world was central and of the utmost importance; and all forms of representations — from the lyrical fragment to the random impression entered in a diary to the scattered thought to the unfinished and incomplete narration — were exploited in order to investigate that particular aspect of the existential condition. Yet the Romantics only rarely, and only when they were more fully and more painfully conscious of the modern condition, pursued to its final consequence this vision of a world reduced to a heap of fragments and of a human being alienated from himself, from society, and from Nature, abandoned by the Gods. In order to restore the lost unity of the world and of the human experience, they resorted to the great creative and mytho-poetic power of the imagination to represent their nostalgic desire of a lost wholeness. This is probably the reason why the fragment (rather than the more accidental detail) was at the centre of their experience and often of the very structure of their works: so many of their writings are indeed fragmentary, so many seem to have no shape and no possible closure or to leave shape and closure to the imagination of the reader, so many attempt to give at the same time the impression of fragmentation and of infinity. There is an interesting

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and powerful contradiction here: on one side the painful experience of a loss, of an internal and external trauma, on the other side an urge, almost an ideological compulsion to construe images and forms of integrity, to find ways to recapture a sense of finality in man’s life and a unifying force in the world. The contradiction is embodied both in the themes of the narrative works of the time (loss and laceration dynamically opposed to wholeness and a need of totality) and in their structure and form (the fragment that continually implies and aims at the whole). The dialectical relationship between fragment and totality was of the utmost importance in Romanticism. The writers were in a continuous state of indecision between an optimistic hope of attaining in the future a sense of fullness in nature and in human experience and a pessimistic tendency to accept the unfruitful barrenness and the inevitability of chaos. A typical way of atoning and making up for the troubling awareness of an alienated and fragmented, internal and external reality was that of construing the image and the ideal of the new, autonomous, human individual, master of himself and of his destiny. This conception was connected, of course, with a new social figure that had entered into the world of economic transactions: that of the modern capitalist and entrepreneur, who assumed a new and central position in society and began to consider himself capable of making his own economic fortune and went so far as to think that the very process of creating his fortune could constitute his entire aim in life. A new human type had made his appearance in the world, and thought in completely new terms of his relationship with labour, profit, and money. The archetypal literary figure of this new human being was, of course, Robinson Crusoe, a symbolic if not an allegorical embodiment of the new bourgeois man, able to survive on a desert island, relying on hard work and faith in God, on his intelligence and skills, but also on some indispensable tools that Defoe had providentially put at his disposal after the wreck of the ship and the death of all his companions. From that moment on, his only aim on the island was to enter into a relationship with nature, colonizing it, transforming and possessing it, exploiting it for his own sustenance and ultimately for the accumulation of great wealth. It might be useful to recall, in this connection, an important study by a contemporary German philosopher, Hans Blumenberg (1983, 138), in which an interesting concept is elaborated in reference to the modern individualistic subject: that of self-assertion (»Selbstbehauptung«), which at times Blumenberg presents as a sort of self-programming. According to him modern man is programmed in order to assert himself, adapt to the various conditions of reality, develop all his potentialities and achieve all his goals. The main goal of modern man would no longer be his simple biological survival but a programmed acquisition of knowledge. Crusoe’s reaction to his new environment at the beginning of his adventure was not simply an attempt at biological maintenance and survival. As such it was, as we know, destined to fail. All the sailors who, in his century, were shipwrecked on a desert island met with madness and death; only Crusoe, a fictional character, made it to the end, probably because, as a fictional embodiment of modern man, he was endowed with a programme of self-assertion. It is possible to establish a link between Blumenberg’s concept of self-assertion and some of the new themes and forms that shaped the cultural and literary products of the early nineteenth century. We need only look at some literary genres resulting from the great change in the new system at the turn of the century and at the new dominant position given to lyric poetry (Ceserani 2001). As to the narrative genres, to which many of the essays in this book

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are dedicated, it is enough to think of the significant position reached by the new genre of the novel of education or Bildungsroman, which tells the story of a character who slowly builds up not only his fortune and position in the world but also asserts and forms his own self. Blumenberg’s programme of self-affirmation becomes the novelistic plot of a process of self-education (cf. M. Engel’s chapter on the Bildungsroman in this volume). A similar path was followed by a parallel genre, also typical of the age, that of the historical novel, from Walter Scott onwards, which had as its principal aim that of telling the story of the self-fashioning and self-assertion of an entire nation (cf. the chapters by M. Bernauer and V. Nemoianu). It is no mystery that both the Bildungsroman and the historical novel had the powerful ideological task of imposing a pattern of intentionality, purposefulness, and inevitable conclusiveness on the fortuitousness and contingency of the life of an individual or that of a nation. But literature is not only the place in which human beings apply, in their imaginary explorations of the world, the ideological and epistemological schemes that dominate the culture of their time, it is also the seat of critique, ambiguities, and contradictions. The great Romantic literature of the nineteenth century, besides placing at its centre the »lyrical I« or inventing the frame for the stories of self-education of the new individual subject, also produced a whole series of forms and structures representing failures in the programmes of self-assertion and attempts at understanding the serious crises that could befall those programmes. On the one hand there was a powerful ego that created its own path and progress on the basis of a linear and consistent development, imposed a story on its own biological being (as witnessed by the enormous importance of the new literary genre of Autobiography) and − although its body might change and become mutilated or ill and the cells that constituted it die or become transformed or renewed − represented itself in the form of identity and continuity, according to a precise internal logic. In the other hand there was a weaker ego, which conceived itself in terms of discontinuities, breaches and sudden changes of direction, internal fragmentation and lacerations. In some cases the fragment opens irreparable holes and cracks in the construction of the whole, it fails to provide clues for constructing a sense of coherence and closure in the work, it produces structures that do not allow the hermeneutic gesture of connecting and completing the disparate incidents and circumstances of the narration, it leaves the reader in a state of uncertainty, it tends, in short, to become a detail. A typical case in point is that offered by »fantastic« literature. One of the interesting features of this genre is that all of a sudden, within a generally realistic and rational context, a fragment of the experience narrated appears in discordance with the normal logic of development and expectations of human events, it escapes all possible rational explanations, it inspires in the characters of the story and in the reader a sensation of uncanniness, it leaves the reader in a state of uncertainty. It is in this kind of literature that we often encounter examples of subversion of the values cherished by the official ideologies, and also by the most popular genres of the literature of the time. When the new individual takes the programme of self-assertion to its logical extreme he can easily go out of limit: the self-conscious ego becomes the monomaniacal ego, his mind an obsessed mind; when the search for a lost unity and congruity is compulsive and gripping, the unexpected result can be the catastrophic loss of the integrity of the subject and its splitting into fragments or a multiplicity of subjects. In the texts of the fantastic, these experiences give

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birth to the theme of madness, especially of the obsessive, paranoid type; or to the theme of the double, which more aptly pertains to the split, schizophrenic type. 2.

The fragmentation of narrative forms as conscious creative endeavour

When we turn to the programmatic declarations of the Romantic writers, to their actual experimentation with creative forms, and to the critical and historical reconstruction of their work we inevitably discover that the concept of fragment is not at all that clear and that it covers a variety of distinct phenomena, from the increasingly widespread social practice of diary-writing (and its increasing literary worth) to the widely imitated tradition of humorous prose à la Sterne, from the frequent cases of interrupted works to the pretended remains of a lost masterpiece of antiquity, from the brief philosophical or moral aphorisms to the haphazard descriptions of landscapes of ruins, from the lyrical illumination to the petit poème en prose. It might be of help, here, to distinguish between fragmentation or incompleteness as material feature of a text (the consequence of a work left unfinished) and fragmentation or incompleteness as thematic content of a text (the sense of endlessness and infinity that is captured in the formal and semantic structure of a work) (Ceserani 1992, 6–9). A further distinction should be made between incompleteness as the result of external motives (the vanishing of the creative impulse in the author of a text or an interruption in its material transmission) and as an intentional and programmatic phenomenon (the open work, the casual entry in a diary, an aphorism, etc.). The word »fragment«, from Latin fragmentum, is traditionally linked with the first meaning and was technically applied in the Renaissance to incomplete and patchy relics of works from antiquity (for instance the fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers). To this meaning Diderot’s Encyclopédie remains faithful in its entry: »In literature a fragment is a portion of a work that we do not have in its entirety, either because the author has not finished it or because time has not allowed it to reach us«.1 There can be, of course, a relationship between formal and thematic fragmentation. It was common among the Romantics to resort to the formal procedure of the unfinished and the fragmentary in order to express a tension toward infinity: in this case the incompleteness of a text would present itself as a device for producing an effect of sublime infinity. There are critics, such as Thomas McFarland (1981), who believe that there is a strict correspondence between the Romantic awareness of the chaotic state of the world and the fragmented condition of human experience on one side, and the fragmentary state of many of their poetical works on the other. Many scholars have also seen a possible coincidence between the multiplication of narrative voices in Romantic literature and the frequent use of double personae and pseudonyms — as was the case, for instance, of the many personae of Stendhal’s writing practice, or of the projection of Ugo Foscolo in two different and contradictory voices and styles, the lyrical one of Jacopo Ortis and the Sternean one of Didimo Chierico, or of the three different and complementary 1.

»En littérature un fragment, c’est une partie d’un ouvrage qu’on n’a point en entier, soit que l’auteur ne l’ait pas achevé, soit que le tems n’en ait pas laissé parvenir jusqu’à nous qu’une partie« (D’Alembert/Diderot, XV: 303).

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personalities assumed by Robert Schumann: Eusebius (personification of melancholic pessimism), Florestan (personification of Romantic enthusiasm), and Meister Raro (personification of artistic self-awareness and craftsmanship) − the three of them being counterparts of Vult, Walt, and possibly Wieck (but also of Schumann himself) in Jean Paul’s novel Flegeljahre (The Awkward Years, 1804/05). Yet not even in Romantic literature do the thematic treatment of the fragmentary in thought and experience and the formal feature of incompleteness necessarily correspond. Giacomo Leopardi’s poem »L’infinito« (The Infinite, 1819) is a typical case: the theme of cosmic infinity is expressed, in this famous poem, in a classical, tightly structured, and closed form. There are some interesting theoretical and pragmatic problems behind the phenomenology of the fragmentary and the incomplete. Literary forms and stylistic procedures do not have an intrinsic and autonomous meaning. Take, for instance, a technical feature, which is linked with the dichotomy fragment/totality: the one studied by Leo Spitzer (1945) under the name of »chaotic enumeration«. In biblical and liturgical texts as well as in many Romantic ones, up to Whitman (Spitzer 1949 and 1963), chaotic enumeration is a device that aims at expressing the totality and fullness of the world; in many modern texts, from Naturalism to Post-modernism, the same stylistic device aims at representing a world without hierarchies and meaning, shattered, reified, paradoxical. In many cases, moreover, and this seems to be particularly true of Romantic literature, it is almost impossible to decide whether the unfinished state of a text was determined by an act of the author’s will or by chance or external motivations. Especially in poetry, the unfinished state of a text might depend on the vanishing of the inspiration; but, given the Romantic theory of poetry and inspiration, that act of vanishing cannot be considered an external fact. In Romantic poetry any work of composition can remain unfinished; the disappearance of the inspiration is always a possibility. The phenomenology of the fragmentary that we have sketched applies more easily to poetry than to prose. In poetry the formal aspect is more evident and relevant than in prose: a lyrical fragment by Shelley is clearly a lyrical fragment, at times it resembles a passing impression recorded in a poetic diary. After the disappearance of all unified visions of the world and of the unifying structures offered by classical tradition the Romantic poet felt the necessity to reinvent a voice and a style each time that he wrote a poem. In narrative prose these phenomena are less observable, due to the weaker influence of classical tradition, the lesser importance of the formal structure of the work, and also the different general view that we have today of the system of genres of Romantic prose. While it seems clear that in our conception of »modern poetry« fragmentation plays an important role, the same cannot be said of narrative prose: the Bildungsroman, for instance, which seems to embody one of the central structures of nineteenthcentury fiction, appears to be incompatible with the notion of fragment and is connected with totality and closure. If we want to find examples of fragmentation we have to pay attention to literary forms which are closer to the philosophical or moral essay (aphorisms, for instance), or to biography and social custom (the practice of diary-writing), or, within the field of novel writing, to the forms that seem to be secondary and less structured, peripheral to the »great tradition«: instead of the Bildungsroman, the humorous and self-conscious novel of Sterne (who, in any case, enjoyed a very large diffusion in the nineteenth century and gave birth to a »Sternean

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tradition«); instead of the autobiography the diary, instead of the philosophical treatise or the systematic theory and phenomenology of human knowledge, the essay and the collection of aphorisms. We might have the impression of having to do with the genres that were unimportant and marginal, the »poor relatives«, in the literary system of the time. That impression could even increase if we considered that some of those marginal narrative forms (the fairy-tale, the Gothic story, the travel-report, etc.) might seem to be only survivors from the great eighteenthcentury experimental melting pot of narrative forms: »poor relatives« that do not even seem to be related among themselves. Yet, from the point of view of Romantic theory of fiction, that relatedness does exist. Tristram Shandy (1759–67), for instance, which could appear, if taken in isolation and out of context vis-á-vis the Romantic tradition, as a curious and pre-modern example of an open work written in a purely subjective vein, when placed in connection with the Romantic experience of the fragmentary and digressive narration, takes a central role and even becomes the model of a number of autobiographical and philosophical writings. There is a special viewpoint in European Romanticism, from which it is possible to have a general perspective of this constellation of fragmentary genres and comprehend their overall significance, the reason why, as Friedrich Schlegel said in one of his Athenäum’s aphorisms, »Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the modern are fragments at the time of their origin« (Schlegel 1968, 134).2 It is not by chance that this viewpoint coincides with a moment in which the fragment (especially the fragment of thought) took form as a genre in itself. The moment is that of the so-called Frühromantik, of the circle of young Romantics who gathered in Jena: the Schlegels, Novalis, Tieck, and Schleiermacher. For them the fragment represented a mode of thinking and writing that was at the same time non-systematic and communal. The key figure among them, for the history and theory of the fragment, was Friedrich Schlegel. As it has been shown (cf. Zinn and Behler), Friedrich Schlegel took up and renewed a tradition which was typically German and went back to Luther’s translation of Paul’s »First Letter to the Corinthians« on the partiality of human knowledge: »For our knowledge is partial«.3 Of course, Schlegel was also familiar with the classical and especially with the French tradition (in particular Chamfort) of literary forms such as the epigram, the maxim, the sentence, the pensée; the famous definition that he gave in the Athenäum is connected with the concept of classical measure which was typical of that tradition: »An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog« (Schlegel 1968, 134).4 Taking up those various traditions, Schlegel worked out a theory of the critical and literary fragment and turned it into a new genre. The fragment became the favoured means of thinking and communicating in a fragmentary world, the appropriate tool not so much for evoking as for preparing a future totality. The awareness that in modern times the world was inevitably perceived as fragmentary was also at the base of the sixth of Friedrich Schiller’s Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des 2. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Viele Werke der Alten sind Fragmente geworden. Viele Werke der Neuern sind es gleich bei der Entstehung« (Schlegel 1967, 169; Athenaeum 24). 3.

»Denn unser wissen ist stückwerck!« (Luther 1972, 2318; Paulus, Corinther I, 13: 9).

4.

»Ein Fragment muß gleich einem kleinen Kunstwerke von der umgebenden Welt ganz abgesondert und in sich selbst vollendet sein wie ein Igel« (Schlegel 1967, 197; Athenaeum 206).

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Menschen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795), in which are developed concepts such as the dissociation of sensibility, the infinite perfectibility of science to the detriment of art and of the community to the detriment of the individual person. The solution offered by Schlegel to the problem of a fragmented world was, however, different from the one offered by Schiller. The latter one appealed to man’s »urge to play« (Spieltrieb), that is on art and in general on beauty, in order to envision a reform of man’s situation in a future harmonious world. Also Schlegel and the Frühromantiker cherish the perspective of a utopian future, a »third period« in which communication will be blameless and the arts, philosophy, and science will be merged into a whole. In the present period, however, in which it is necessary to resort to fragments of thought in order to express oneself, reality is for them dominated by forces — chaos, revolution, endless becoming — that cannot be overcome. In other words, true Romantic art is at the same time that of the future and, more concretely, that of the present. That »many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the modern are fragments at the time of their origin«, is due to the fact that modern literature is permeated with thought, is endlessly perfectible, always in becoming. But the drive towards infinite perfectibility is an ideal that is always on the move and never will be fully accomplished; yet its becoming, in itself, is always positive: One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As soon as one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one. […] Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. Its mission is not merely to reunite all separate genres of poetry and to put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. […] The Romantic type of poetry is still becoming; indeed, its peculiar essence is that it is always becoming and that it can never be completed (Schlegel 1968, 136, 140 f.).5

Chaos, at this point, is at the same time a peril and a productive force: »Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos« (ibid., 155).6 The vigorous link between destructive tension and creative chaos is provided by wit, the play on words (Witz), by irony: »Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos« (ibid.).7 The ironic and cunning artifices of discourse are the only outlets in an epoch in which it was not allowed to express absolute truths and have a perfect communication. In the presence of such an ideal of ironic and infinitely perfectible fragmentariness an attempt at building great unifying systems is premature and methodologically incorrect (this does not exclude that Schlegel and Novalis did utilize, in a non-systematic way, the thoughts of Fichte and Schelling). The situation in the field of literature was very similar. The crucial genre, as it could be expected, was the novel. Yet the novel was re-considered in fragmentary terms. True, the first Romantics had before their eyes the example of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795/96), but their 5.

»Man kann nur Philosoph werden, nicht es sein. Sobald man es zu sein glaubt, hört man auf es zu werden. […] Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie. Ihre Bestimmung ist nicht bloß, alle getrennten Gattungen der Poesie wieder zu vereinigen, und die Poesie mit der Philosophie und Rhetorik in Berührung zu setzen. [… ] Die romantische Dichtart ist noch im Werden; ja das ist ihr eigentliches Wesen, daß sie ewig nur werden, nie vollendet sein kann« (Schlegel 1967, 116 and 182 f.; Athenaeum 54 and 116).

6.

»Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos, aus der eine Welt entspringen kann« (Schlegel 1967, 263; Ideen 71).

7.

»Ironie ist klares Bewußtsein der ewigen Agilität, des unendlich vollen Chaos« (Schlegel 1967, 263; Ideen 69).

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wavering (especially in the case of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis) between enthusiasm and strictures is significant. Novalis, for instance, speaking of the genres of prose fiction in a fragment of 1800, asserts that Romantic prose (also in the sense of »romance«) is not yet born, and when it will see the light it will be very different from Goethe’s, it will be an extremely mobile prose, a hodgepodge of genres and preferences that will bring about also the breaking down of the barriers between prose and poetry: We still lack a romantic rearrangement and transformation in our thinking. Extremely simple style, but highly daring, romance-like, dramatic beginnings, transitions, consequences — now dialogue — then speech — then narration, then reflection, then image and so on. Wholly an impression of the soul, with perception, thought, opinion, image, conversation, music, etc. changing incessantly and quickly, and placed one next to the other in clear, bright masses.8

Schlegel, in his turn, addressed the situation of novel writing in his »Brief über den Roman« (Letter about the Novel), which is a part of his Gespräch über die Poesie (Conversation on Poetry, 1800). As it could be expected, he rejects almost everything that today would come to our mind when we think of the novel. He starts out with a key figure, that of Jean Paul: »You asserted that Friedrich Richter’s novels are not novels but a colourful hodgepodge of sickly wit, that the meagre story is too badly presented to be considered a story; one simply has to guess it. If, however, one wanted to put it all together and just tell it, it would at best amount to a confession. […] I admit the colourful hodgepodge of sickly wit, but I shall defend it and emphatically maintain that such grotesques and confessions are the only romantic productions of our unromantic age« (Schlegel 1968, 95).9

He is talking, of course, of the Sternean tradition and discarding completely the realistic »novel« of Fielding and similar authors. He admires works that are digressive and, in his words, »ironic, fantastic, romantic«, as are those of Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot (Jacques le fataliste, 1792, is, with a term borrowed from Goethe, a perfect »arabesque«), Jean Paul. Schlegel loves the personal »confession«, which expresses the subjective mood of the author and indulges in his humour. Travel descriptions (of the type of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, 1768), epistolary exchanges, autobiographies are, from the point of view of the Romantic reader, much more interesting than the realistic novels. Thus Schlegel includes in the realm of literature fragmentary writings that used to be considered outside of it: »A Dialogue is a chain or a wreath of aphorisms. A 8.

»Es fehlt noch an romantischer Anordnung und Veränderung in den Gedanken. Äußerst simpler Stil, aber höchst kühne, romanzenähnliche, dramatische Anfänge, Übergänge, Folgen — bald Gespräch — dann Rede — dann Erzählung, dann Reflexion, dann Bild und so fort. Ganz Abdruck des Gemüts, wo Empfindung, Gedanke, Anschauung, Bild, Gespräch, Musik etc. unaufhörlich schnell wechselt und sich in hellen, klaren Massen nebeneinander stellt« (Novalis 1960, 654 f.).

9.

»Das unsrige fing damit an, daß Sie behaupteten, Friedrich Richters Romane seien keine Romane, sondern ein buntes Allerlei von kränklichem Witz. Die wenige Geschichte sei zu schlecht dargestellt um für Geschichte zu gelten, man müsse sie nur erraten. Wenn man aber auch alle zusammennehmen und sie rein erzählen wolle, würde das doch höchstens Bekenntnisse geben. […] Das bunte Allerlei von kränklichem Witz gebe ich zu, aber ich nehme es in Schutz und behaupte dreist, daß solche Grotesken und Bekenntnisse noch die einzigen romantischen Erzeugnisse unseres unromantischen Zeitalters sind« (Schlegel 1967, 329 f.).

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correspondence is a dialogue on an enlarged scale, and memorabilia are a system of aphorisms« (Schlegel 1968, 137 f.).10 For Schlegel, however, Jean Paul represented only a stage in the development toward the true »Romantic novel« (or Roman) which was destined to take a central place in the system of genres of Romanticism and to acquire these features: imagination and »arabesque«, fragmentation as a structuring force. Romantic art will be possible, on the other hand, only when it will base its own foundation in a new mythology, which will take the place of the ancient one. This new mythology will of course be an artificial creation: »das künstlichste aller Kunstwerke« (the most artful of all works of art). Thus in a famous passage from the »Rede über die Mythologie« (Talk on Mythology), also a part of the Gespräch: You yourselves have written poetry, and while doing so you must often have felt the absence of a firm basis for your activity, a matrix, a sky, a living atmosphere. The modern poet must create all these things from within himself, and many have done it splendidly; up to now, however, each poet separately and each work from is very beginning, like a new creation out of nothing. […] Our poetry, I maintain, lacks a focal point, such as mythology was for the ancients; and one could summarize all the essentials in which modern poetry is inferior to the ancient in these words: We have no mythology. But, I add, we are close to obtaining one or, rather, it is time that we earnestly work together to create one. […] The new mythology […] must be forged from the deepest depths of the spirit; it must be the most artful of all works of art, for it must encompass all the others (ibid., 81 f.).11

But if the aim will be that of attaining a perfect communicability based on a new mythology and a transparent language, the means suggested are the farthest possible from the desired outcome. The new mythology will be, explicitly, the result of an effort and the construction of a transparent language will be the outcome of an intense communication based on artifice, irony, arabesque, and wit. The fragment, in its double meaning of provisional conclusion and suggestion of totality, in its nature of paradoxical speech, communicating by irony and play on words, is therefore the key form of this wide creative operation, its ambiguous structuring centre. The Romanticism of Jena has been a moment of extraordinary creativity in the history of European culture. It was of course impossible to maintain for a long time such a revolutionary fervour and faith in the freedom and creativeness of the human subject. Lacking those qualities, the fragment runs the risk of losing its positive role of bridge towards a hidden or desired 10.

»Ein Dialog ist eine Kette oder ein Kranz von Fragmenten. Ein Briefwechsel ist ein Dialog in vergrößertem Maßstabe, und Memorabilien sind ein System von Fragmenten« (Schlegel 1967, 176; Athenaeum 77).

11.

»Ihr habt selbst gedichtet, und ihr müßt es oft im Dichten gefühlt haben, daß es euch an einem festen Halt für Euer Wirken gebrach, an einem mütterlichen Boden, einem Himmel, einer lebendigen Luft. Aus dem Innern herausarbeiten, das alles muß der moderne Dichter, und viele haben es herrlich getan, aber bis jetzt nur jeder allein, jedes Werk wie eine neue Schöpfung von vorn an aus Nichts. […] Es fehlt, behaupte ich, unsrer Poesie an einem Mittelpunkt, wie es die Mythologie für die der Alten war, und alles Wesentliche, worin die moderne Dichtkunst der antiken nachsteht, läßt sich in die Worte zusammenfassen: Wir haben keine Mythologie. Aber, setze ich hinzu, wir sind nahe daran eine zu erhalten, oder vielmehr es wird Zeit, daß wir ernsthaft dazu mitwirken sollen, eine hervorzubringen. […] Die neue Mythologie muß im Gegenteil aus der tiefsten Tiefe des Geistes herausgebildet werden; es muß das künstlichste aller Kunstwerke sein, denn es soll alle andern umfassen« (ibid., 312).

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totality. To construe a mythology through fragments and subjective analogies is an extremely risky undertaking (Zagari 1985). To be precise, there are two possible risks: (1) that of plunging too deep in the ironic abyss of chaos, and therefore losing any faith in a possible future totality and unification of the fragmented ego: thus the most »nocturnal« line of Romanticism, a great part of the production of E.T.A. Hoffmann, the uncanny creations of the fantastic; (2) the temptation of Alexandrinian ornamentation and of the artifice as an end in itself. This second risk, paradoxically, is better perceptible in the author that, among the Jena Romantics, was more given to utopian thought. Novalis, in whose writings it is possible to read passages that anticipate with great precision Symbolist developments, says in a fragment of 1799: Narrations, without coherence and yet with associations as in dreams. Poems — truly harmonious and full of beautiful words — but also without a general meaning and coherence — at the most single strophes.12

The second step towards a new — and today disparaged — conception of the fragment, the so-called »lyrical fragment« will be taken by the American populariser of Schlegel, Edgar Allan Poe, in his »Philosophy of Composition« (1846). According to Poe, a literary work has to be short enough to be taken in simultaneously: »If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression — for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and every thing like totality is at once destroyed«. As a consequence, any work that is too long can be appreciated only in some of its parts: »For this reason, at least one-half of the Paradise Lost is essentially prose« (Poe, 15). 3.

A tentative typology of fragmentary prose writings in Romanticism

3.1 Fragment and narration We will take into consideration only those texts in which there is a strong relationship between the fragmentary as a formal feature of the text and the fragmentary as one of its themes. We will therefore leave out all the cases of fragmentary readings of realistic novels — which would be, in any case, mainly a problem of reception (cf. Dällenbach 1989). We will also leave out all discussion of the role of detail in the nineteenth-century novel and in the tales of the fantastic. An important preliminary observation has to be made: in narrative literature, contrary to what happens in poetry, the fragmentary is in general linked with the sense of infinity and the sublime only in a subsidiary or ironic way. This happens even in the case of unfinished works. Some poems, for instance, such as Keats’s The Fall of Hyperion (1820) or Coleridge’s »Kubla Khan« (written 1798, published 1816), close abruptly with words (respectively: »Celestial« and 12. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Erzählungen, ohne Zusammenhang, jedoch mit Assoziation, wie Träume. Gedichte — bloß wohlklingend und voll schöner Worte — aber auch ohne allen Sinn und Zusammenhang — höchstens einzelne Strophen verständlich — sie müssen wie lauter Bruchstücke aus den verschiedenartigsten Dingen sein. Höchstens kann wahre Poesie einen allegorischen Sinn im großen haben und eine indirekte Wirkung wie Musik etc. tun« (Novalis 1960, 654).

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»Paradise«) which seem to thematize the incompleteness of the text and its yearning for the sublime. In narrative prose, this typology of the fragmentary occurs rarely and tends to appear only when there is a fusion of prose and poetry (lyric or prose epiphanies, poetic prose or prose narration including verse), or when the narrative impulse tends to weaken or become secondary. The fact is that in lyrical tradition the instances of sublime incompleteness stem from attempts — necessarily remaining frustrated — to put into words the experience of the sublime. In narrative tradition that sort of search usually is not reflected in the formal texture of the work and at most is embodied in discourses on the sublime quality of an unfinished œuvre (a poem, a picture, a musical piece − which are, of course, non-narrative forms of art); a famous example of this is Balzac’s Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece, 1831). Any formal fragmentation in a narrative work, instead, is logically connected with the instance of narration itself and with the harmonization of different strands in the progressive movement of the narration. Also cases that might appear similar to those of sublime incompleteness in lyric poetry must be read in exclusively narrative terms. The fragment of a projected novel, for instance, by Aleksandr Pushkin, entitled Egipetskie nochi (Egyptian Nights, 1837; Pushkin 1983, 249–258), ends abruptly with the recital, on the part of the improvisatore, of a poem on Cleopatra and her lovers (which derives from a preceding and independent tale in verse by Pushkin, written in 1832). The impression of suspension that is communicated to the reader could appear similar to that of many unfinished poems of the time (the tale does, after all, end with a poem). But things are more complicated. First of all, the tale’s fragmentation is due also to the pre-eminence that the poetical parts tend to have over the narrative ones. Second, in considering the poetic recital at the end we must not forget that the Italian improvisatore has been presented as a greedy and rather unpleasant character. The lack of closure in the tale depends on the impossibility to reconcile in narrative and theoretical terms a conception of poetry as spontaneous creation (at the same time appropriate and inappropriate to the vulgar and greedy appearance of the improvisatore) with another conception of poetry as conscious working and reworking. Or, in other words, after a momentary experience of the sublime we become promptly aware that the narrative line could lead only to that kind of termination. It is possible to see all the various movements toward fragmentation, both narrative and lyrical-sublime, included and summed up in a great Romantic genre which appears at first irreconcilable with the burgeoning tradition of modern poetry: the Romantic narrative poem, which is at times connected with the novel (especially the Künstlerroman), with old mythology, autobiography, the most curious literature of entertainment. Faithfulness to the mythological repertoire is often conducive to lyrical fragmentation: it is enough to think of the sudden »sublime« interruption of Hyperion and of the conception (put forward by Keats himself and reproached by Poe) of Endymion (1818) as an aggregate of scarcely integrated poetical loci — a phenomenon which is even more evident in Ugo Foscolo’s long unfinished poem Le Grazie (The Graces, 1848). Poems made up of autobiographical material like Wordsworth’s The Recluse (1814), transform themselves — due to the inexhaustible nature of the matter and to the philosophical ambitions of the author — into unending magna opera and are inevitably destined to remain unfinished. Mikhail Lermontov’s Demon (The Demon, 1856), which stemmed from a specific personal mythology, was somewhat more compact in its conception and was therefore

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ultimately brought to an end, even though at the cost of an interminable activity of rewritings. More interesting is the case of those poems that come closer to the usual matter of the novel. Lord Byron, in his Don Juan (1819–24), harks back to the old Italian tradition of the burlesque and mock-heroic poem (but also to the typical eighteenth century classical and light-hearted ironic style), thus producing the model of a poem much freer in its moods and digressive in its narrative structure. In Aleksandr Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin (Eugene Onegin, 1823–30), on the other hand, which is subtitled »A novel in verse«, we encounter the continuous switch from narration to lyrical openings that was characteristic of Byron’s early poems, but also especially the typically Pushkinian »sense of the unfinished«, in this case represented by an ironic use of narrative gaps, in the absence (due also to reasons of censorship) of some stanzas, and in the separate publication of what was supposed to be Chapter 8, the »Fragments of Onegin’s Journey« (Pushkin, 1: 321–34), with the consequence that the reader is left not only without the typical exotic-picturesque experience of travel which had made so popular Byron’s narrative poems, but also without the motive that would justify the psychological evolution of Eugene and Tatiana. These two works by Byron and Pushkin — the first one by referring to a pre-modern narrative tradition, the second one by the vigorous application of ironic procedures that deconstruct the classical Bildungsroman (and it is no coincidence that Franco Moretti, in his study of the Bildungsroman (1987), treats Onegin on the same level as Stendhal) — exemplify very well the fragmentary tendencies of Romantic narration. As Schlegel had so clearly pointed out, the predilection for the fragmentary in Romantic narration seemed to derive from a combination of the arbitrariness of pre-modern narration with contemporary ironic subjectivity. If we try to make an inventory of the principles of composition that hinder any type of linear narration we encounter technical devices that are as old as the art of narration itself: – – – – –

the incompleteness or the abrupt ending; the extensive use of digressive devices (which can be narrative, lyrical, ironic, essayistic, etc.); the multiplication of narrative voices or the extensive use of the tale within the tale; the insertion of diverse textual material (quotations, poems, lyrical prose, diaries, letters) or the complete intermixture of genres (including the fusion of poetry and prose); the meta-literary textual dimension (conceived as the frequent act of consciously underlining the compositional devices or the materiality of the text, with the effect of turning the reader away from following the narrative plot).

The usage of these devices in the Romantics was to a great extent accompanied by the awareness that they were retrieving old narrative techniques. The archaeological attitude in many cases was developed to the point of their becoming interested in the stylistic and syntactic peculiarities of ancient and Oriental languages (suffice it to mention Goethe’s and Leopardi’s interest in Latin, Greek, or Hebraic parataxis; or Goethe’s interest in the metaphoric and digressive freedom of Oriental literatures). Thus literary techniques that are not altogether new acquire a new significance. Any narrative innovation or retrieval — and also, then, the idea of the work’s unity — must be compared with, or measured against, the system of genres of its time or of the period just left behind. This is the reason why Friedrich Schlegel can foster a new idea of a narrative

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prose based on the fragmentary and the arabesque simply by contrasting it with the most recent tradition of the »novel«. The situation in nineteenth-century Russia was, however, largely different: there explicit theories of the fragmentary can be found only in poetry, while the writers of narrative prose never really adhered to the »European« idea of the novel. It is no accident that in our century it has been a Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, who has reconstructed a genealogy of the novel much more open than any traditional one (1981). Bakhtin, in his book on Rabelais (1984), considers Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to be the first subjective retrieval of pre-modern open works such as the Menippean satire, the anatomy or, if you will, the mock-heroic epic of the Italian tradition recuperated by Byron. It is possible to consider a great part of the fragmentary experiments in prose (not only the narrative ones) of the Romantic era as retrievals or exaggerations of Sternean attitudes (cf. Conrad 1978). It is, however, necessary to specify that the fortune of Sterne among the Romantics was in reality limited to countries such as Germany (cf. Michelsen, Brandi-Dohrn, Montandon 1985 and 1987) or Italy (cf. Mazzacurati and Testa), where the tradition of novel writing developed late (and was strongly opposed by many men of letters), hardly comparable with the burgeoning of the novel in England and France. If we look at France, we can see that the Sternean influence survived mainly in journalistic writings, or was active only locally, although it could involve at times even authors like Balzac (Mazzacurati 1990, 17). To show in which ways the example of Sterne was taken up and brought to the extreme, it is enough to analyze one of the most evident narrative devices of Tristram Shandy: the digression. In Chapter 22 of the first volume, after having launched a long digression in the very middle of a dialogue, the author explains to the reader that the digression has an essential role in outlining the features of one of the characters, and so clarifies how his book is supposed to function: By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by itself; two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled, which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, — and at the same time (Sterne 1978–84, 1, 80 f.).

Analogous explicit declarations on the digressive or chaotic principles on which their works are based are abundant also in the writings of the Romantics. Friedrich Schlegel, for instance, in his whimsical novel Lucinde (1799), uses the following words to explain the structural criteria that govern the work: For me and for this book, for my love for it and for its true formation, there is no purpose more purposeful than this: from the very beginning I destroy what we call order, remove it far away from it and explicitly claim for myself the right to a fascinating confusion and confirm it with my action. This is particularly necessary in view of the fact that the matter which our life and love offer to my spirit and my plume is so incessantly progressive and so inflexibly systematic.13 13.

»Für mich und für diese Schrift, für meine Liebe zu ihr und für ihre Bildung in sich, ist aber kein Zweck zweckmäßiger als der, daß ich gleich anfangs das was wir Ordnung nennen vernichte, weit von ihr entferne und mir das Recht einer reizenden Verwirrung deutlich zueigne und durch die Tat behaupte. Dies ist um so nötiger, da der Stoff, den unser Leben und Lieben meinem Geiste und meiner Feder gibt, so unaufhaltsam progressiv und so unbiegsam systematisch ist« (Schlegel 1985, 13).

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Sterne’s idea is thus renewed in Schlegel’s theory of the arabesque and of the great productivity of the fragmentary (with an arbitrariness which is even more provocative). The emphasis on progression and on a conclusive unity of the work is certainly less strong, but the ideal of an achievable unity is still preserved: digressions and disorder are presented as a productive method of work. In August Klingemann’s Nachtwachen des Bonaventura (The Night Watches of Bonaventura, 1804), chaos, and therefore any refusal of linear narration, will become a value in itself: What wouldn’t I give to be able to narrate with the same nice coherence and directness as other honest Protestant poets and magazine writers, who become great and splendid in so doing and exchange their golden ideas for golden realities. […] Unfortunately I was already corrupted in my young years, in the bud already, as it were, for whereas other scholarly boys and promising youths make it their business to become more and more clever and reasonable, I have constantly had a special predilection for folly and tried to bring about absolute confusion in myself just so as, like our Lord, to achieve a fine and complete chaos first, out of which afterwards opportunely, whenever it occurred to me, a tolerable world could be arranged. — Indeed, it sometimes strikes me in extravagant moments that the human race has botched chaos itself and been too precipitate in ordering; and on this account, then, nothing can come to rest in its appropriate place and the Creator will have to set about as soon as possible deleting and nullifying the world as a miscarried system.14

Also the Sternean devices for making evident the material substance of the text are largely recovered in Romantic narration. Between Chapters 23 and 25 of the fourth volume of Tristram Shandy, for instance, there is a blank, which is followed by the author’s comments: – No doubt, Sir — there is a whole chapter wanting here — and a chasm of ten pages made in the book by it — but the book-binder is neither a fool, or a knave, or a puppy — nor is the book a jot more imperfect, (at least upon that score) — but, on the contrary, the book is more perfect and complete by wanting the chapter, than having it, as I shall demonstrate to your reverences in this manner (Sterne 1978–84, 1: 372).

The promised demonstration consists in the statement that the removed part was too attractive and threatened to damage the tonal unity of the text. In the work of the Romantics, the most evident analogies to these inventions of Tristram Shandy can be found in Schlegel’s Lucinde (where Julius decides casually to insert in the text the letters of the loved one), and in Hoffmann’s Kater 14.

»Was gäbe ich doch darum, so recht zusammenhängend und schlechtweg erzählen zu können, wie andre ehrliche protestantische Dichter and Zeitschriftsteller, die groß und herrlich dabei werden und für ihr goldene Ideen goldene Realitäten eintauschen. […] Ich bin leider in den Jugendjahren und gleichsam im Keime schon verdorben, denn wie andere gelehrte Knaben und vielversprechende Jünglinge es sich angelegen sein lassen, immer gescheuter und vernünftiger zu werden, habe ich im Gegenteil stets eine besondere Vorliebe für die Tollheit gehabt und es zu einer absoluten Verworrenheit in mir zu bringen gesucht, eben um, wie unser Herrgott, erst ein gutes und vollständiges Chaos zu vollenden, aus welchem sich nachher gelegentlich, wenn es mir einfiele, eine leidliche Welt zusammenordnen ließe. — Ja, es kommt mir zu Zeiten in überspannten Augenblicken wohl gar vor, als ob das Menschengeschlecht das Chaos selbst verpfuscht habe und mit dem Ordnen zu voreilig gewesen sei, weshalb denn auch nichts an seinen gehörigen Platz zu stehen kommen könne und der Schöpfer bald-möglichst dazutun müsse, die Welt wie ein verunglücktes System auszustreichen und zu vernichten« (Klingemann 1971, 96).

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Murr (Tomcat Murr, 1819–21; where an alleged mistake at the printers becomes the generating principle of the text, transforming its creation into a true tour de force). If it is true that Sterne’s originality did not only consist in the unbridled digression but also, paradoxically, in the praise of control on the part of the author, then we can understand the reasons for the great Romantic interest in Tristram Shandy. Pushed to the extremes, Sterne’s compositional devices were able to evoke the dream of an inexhaustible creative subjectivity, the fear and simultaneously the exaltation of Chaos, but were also able to sustain the cause of the cycles of auto-creation and auto-annihilation typical of Romantic irony. 3.2 Fragment and »Bildung« As was pointed out already, to perceive the fragmentary as such we need to confront it with a parallel or precedent model of unity. While for lyrical poetry the criteria of confrontation are offered by the ideal of classicism, for narrative prose the model of confrontation will have to be searched in a stronger and more linear narrative structure, such as that of the Bildungsroman. The oscillation, among the Jena Romantics, between admiration for and serious criticism of works like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years, 1795/96) is well known. The criticism was particularly aimed at the rigid superior control imposed on the Bildung of Wilhelm and the excessive space that was granted to the prose of the world. This reservation can help us to understand how much the idea of the novel in the group from Jena — and particularly in Novalis — was removed from the great nineteenth-century tradition. Even the realistic novel, once Goethe’s trust in harmonious compositions had failed, ended up concentrating on the same rupture between individual subject and world which was at the centre of the preference for the fragment, thus representing in its texts the insatiable Sehnsucht (longing) of the protagonist. The only difference was that in the realistic novel the conflict was expressed mainly through the so-called »sad finale«: the hero is defeated, although we are all sad that this happened. It rarely occurs that the theme of the fracture would touch the form of the text, scratch its surface, affect the narrative techniques and the linearity of the plot. Among the few cases we should mention belongs Stendhal, as shown by the frequency, unusual in a novelist of the nineteenth century, of works left unfinished, by the surprising number of »etc.« that appear in Le Rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black, 1830), by the striking changes in the point of view, by the conclusions that suddenly re-launch the action, by the inclusion of poems and songs in La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839). An example of what the Romantics from Jena intended as a possible alternative to Goethe’s Bildung is offered by some of Jean Paul’s novels, in particular by Flegeljahre (The Awkward Years, 1804/05), which is remarkable both for its use of Sternean digressions within a novel that at first seemed a typical story of education, and what appears to be an impossibility to conclude and an inherent irreconcilability of two opposite narrative logics. It is difficult to decide, at first sight, whether the Flegeljahre is an unfinished work. Jean Paul’s explicit opinion was that the work was incomplete, but this did not deter him from publishing it. The publication of an unfinished work, which the author intended, sooner or later, to follow up with a succession, was not an uncommon event — we need only to think of Schlegel’s Lucinde or Ludwig Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen: Eine altdeutsche Geschichte (Franz Sternbald’s Ramblings: An

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Ancient German Story, 1798). It is, in any case, impossible to think of a true conclusion for Jean Paul’s Flegeljahre (Neumann 1966 and 1992). From the very first pages, this pedagogical-humorous novel (on Walt’s trials to take possession of his inheritance) deviates from the pattern of the Bildungsroman and concentrates on the relationship between Walt and his complementary brother Vult. Walt’s rather peculiar Bildung is immediately interrupted by long digressions. The work, seen from this perspective, is digressive rather than progressive and Walt’s Bildung is substituted by the story of a conciliation between two characters symbolizing two different sides of the same personality. The coincidentia oppositorum, however, is impossible, and the novel ends with its failure. The merely poetic idea of totality expressed in this book is left to the strange and at first incongruous titles of the chapters, with names from mineral specimens that seem to allude to the dream of a pre-Romantic »total« science, but also allude, ironically, to the rewards that the narrator receives from the collection of Van der Kabel for each chapter that he writes. The novels of the early Romantics are in reality very different from those of Jean Paul. Instead of indulging in Sternean allusions, humour, and pastiches, these works are much more poetical and abstract, and very often the protagonists are artists (Künstlerromane). These novels are, on the other hand, also made up of many different components, with a large mixture of autobiography, fairy-tale, legend, dialogue, and, as we said, a frequent Mischung (mixture) of prose, lyrical prose, and poetry. Also this Mischung has an original character. While, for instance, in Stendhal’s Chartreuse the occasion for a fusion of prose and poetry will be offered by the free translation into French prose of what the reader is called to imagine as very poetical and passionate sonnets or arias in Italian, the novels of the early Romantics contain poetry in all possible forms: prologues, recitals, continuous slippings into poetical prose. It is not impossible, on the other hand, to find in the novels of the early Romantics some of the formal devices of the Flegeljahre. Incompleteness is widespread. We have mentioned Tieck’s Franz Sternbald, whose lack of an ending seems due to the impossibility of finding a narrative compromise between some extreme opposites: North/South, life/world, life/art, spirituality/ sensuality, ideal/real. We could also mention the more famous Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Henry von Ofterdingen, 1802) by Novalis, although in this case the incompleteness could be accidental (being the least ironic among the Romantic novels, it could easily have found a conclusion). Another feature that the novels of the early Romantics had in common with Jean Paul’s work was the use of oneiric or fairy-tale like utopianism. The utopian dream-tale, however, turned up in the Flegeljahre only in the pre-final scene, ironically followed by Vult’s escape, while the novels of the early Romantics, and especially those of Novalis, place the fairy-tale at the centre of their project and of the structure of their work and seem to consider it as the only literary form that can express fully any future harmony (and this is true also of Hoffmann). It is mainly due to those poetical programmes that the novels of the early Romantics present themselves to the reader as extremely modern works (characterized by radicalism of ideas and complex mixture of genres) as well as decidedly archaic in their abstractness, in their obstinate decision of representing stories of initiation and of constructing a narration by a series of scenes — or, if we take Novalis as an example, by a mosaic of episodes, of independent fragments linked by the principle of analogy. Within this structural frame the elements of the fairytales function as revealing details, in their static and allusive essence:

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A fairy-tale is actually like the vision of a dream — without coherence. An ensemble of wondrous things and events, for example a musical Fantasie — the harmonious sequences of an Aeolian harp — Nature itself.15

3.3 The pessimistic mode of the fragment In the novels of the early Romantics, as we have seen, a frequent central figure was that of the artist as Wanderer (cf. the chapter by A. Lorant in this volume). It can be said, in general, that in those novels the Wanderer played the role of a sort of sentimental version of the classical hero. While, for instance, in the traditional novel or epic the unity of the world was bound to be confirmed by the successive and well-directed trials of the hero, the Wanderer was bound to follow more winding and arbitrary movements; he would grasp by intuition only subjective and provisional totalities. It is true that in some Bildungromane of early Romanticism, the Wanderer’s movements have a narrative and teleological model in another type of journey, i.e. that of the apprenticeship. It remains true, in any case, that casting a Wanderer in the role of the central character of a narration that aims to represent a totality cannot but be risky and precarious. The experiences of the Wanderer, once the flair for creating new myths that was typical of the early Romantics was exhausted, will inevitably be better transcribed in the fleeting impressions of diaries and travel books. It happens rarely — probably due to the enduring Romantic myth of the all-encompassing nature — that the process of fragmentation and destruction of the self can be perceived in the course of a Wanderung. One could mention, however, the novella Lenz (1839), by Georg Büchner, an author who is very important in this essay for other aspects as well: the textual situation of his masterpiece Woyzeck (posthumously published in 1913), the way in which he assembles pieces of dramatic discourse on the basis of analogy, and the tendency of including in his texts a large number of quotations − it has been calculated that at least a sixth of his drama Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death, 1835), is made up of second-hand materials. Lenz, being the rewriting of the chronicle of the mental illness of J.M.R. Lenz, is no exception. In the character of the poet Lenz, as it is recreated by Büchner, the most tormented side of German Idealism becomes visible: he is tantalised by the idea that the world and nature are simply projections of his self. In the first pages in particular, which describe the journeys of Lenz, the impressions left on the protagonist by the landscape are rendered in a lucid, almost surrealistic style. In those pages, the discourse that presents the sublime aspects of nature experienced during the Wanderung is blended with the discourse of folly — also a widespread theme in Romantic literature, although never expressed with such an abruptness. More often, however, we do not find a Wanderer at the centre of the texts representing the experience of fragmentation, nor the subject of Bildung, but artists (Künstler) or characters with extraordinary faculties. They usually are endowed with a remarkable perception of their uncertain and unstable social condition. They are usually represented in a static context, normally an urban one (destined to become the ordinary background of fantastic literature), and 15.

»Ein Märchen ist eigentlich wie ein Traumbild — ohne Zusammenhang — Ein Ensemble wunderbarer Dinge und Begebenheiten z. B. eine musicalische Fantasie — die Harmonischen Folgen einer Aeolsharfe — die Natur selbst« (Novalis 1960, 454).

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their breaking away from the surrounding world, the everyday and philistine one, is particularly violent. E.T.A. Hoffmann, as is well known, has represented the anguish and predicament of the modern artist especially in the figure of the musician Kreisler. The ultimate failure of Kreisler is narrated in Lebens-Ansichten der Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern (The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr: Together with a Fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper, 1819–21), through an extreme application of the Sternean principles of drawing attention to the materiality of the text: due to a printing error, the writings of the improbable and philistine cat are interpolated with the writings of Kreisler (much more interesting, but, alas, fragmentary). The name of Hoffmann prompts us to mention, at this point, the extensive usage of diaries, letters, multiple narrators that is typical of his production, and in general of all Gothic literature. There, the use of multiple narrators has a meaning and function which clearly differs from the combination of narrative voices and the prose-poetry Mischung that was typical of the early Romantic novels. In Gothic literature, the »fragments« had the role of suggesting a higher, more or less attainable, truth, and many of the voices had the dry static quality of a revelation; in Romantic texts the situation is more mobile and the various voices are often partial and unreliable. The usage of diaries, letters, and a plurality of narrators was bound to become, in the late nineteenth century, a typical feature of popular genres such as the adventure story, the thriller, the Gothic novel — as, for instance, in Dracula (1897), by Bram Stoker. A good example for the Romantic representation of the divided self at odds with the diurnal and philistine world is Kreuzgang, the narrator of August Klingemann’s Nachtwachen des Bonaventura. In this case, the real link seems to be not so much with Sterne as with the tradition of the Menippean satire, studied by Mikhail Bakhtin. The night-watchman Kreuzgang is the offspring of a union between a gypsy and an alchemist during a satanic rite. During his night watches Kreuzgang recites a eulogy of chaos and organises his narration (variations in tone, flashbacks, frequent digressions) according to a principle of chaotic combination. It must be added that in the course of his lucubration Kreuzgang does not spare even his brothers of the night: the poets who hopelessly strive to reach the absolute by writing poetry in their mansards. By his very rejection of every sort of order or constructive value, Kreuzgang ends up in producing a paradoxical praise of the Romantic artist as a second maker. The Night Watches of Bonaventura are clearly related to successive developments in literature. Kreuzgang is a kind of »underground man« ante litteram. The book has established the sub-genre of the »nocturnal diary«, whose distant prototype can be identified with Edward Young’s popular poem Night Thoughts (1742–45), but whose later and most representative embodiment was, of course, Dostoevskii’s Zapiski iz podpol’ia (Notes from Underground, 1864). Yet not even in the period of its publication, is Bonaventura an isolated case. We can in fact consider »Night Watches« as a peculiar Romantic sub-genre, characterised by the centrality of the nocturnal dimension and the rambling meditations prompted by that situation. This sub-genre developed in various directions. At its centre is the idea of liberty of expression — a stylistic, structural, thematic liberty, which often takes the form of an elegy and practices the exploration of new thematic territories. A different and curious variant of »Night Watches« is the fake text, for instance Tasso’s Night Thoughts — first edition in French Les Veillées du Tasse (1800),

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first Italian edition Le veglie di Tasso (1803) — by the Italian Giuseppe Compagnoni (cf. Rieger), which had an enormous success in all of Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century and which probably was not unknown to the author of the Bonaventura. Compagnoni’s Night Thoughts, falsely attributed to the Italian Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso and to his nocturnal torments, seem to belong to the tradition of »Night Watches«, due to their attempt to create and transcribe the language of folly and subversion (without, however, any link with the Menippean tradition). On the other hand, they also seem to belong to the rich tradition of false imitations of works from the past, by which some writers of the new era tried to project their ideal of an effusive, fragmented, and very lyrical kind of prose. The (anonymous) introduction to the English translation (1825) of Compagnoni’s The Night Thoughts of Torquato Tasso goes so far as to compare it with James Macpherson’s Ossianic poems (Fragments of Ancient Poetry, 1760; Fingal, 1762; etc.), especially because of its tendency to overcome the distinction between prose and poetry. It is significant that many of the Romantic works that — as a whole or in part — crossed the barrier between prose and poetry were promptly translated or anthologised in regular verse: this is true both of the Night Thoughts and of Ossian, and also of the most lyrical passages in Werther. As to the language of folly, the fact cannot be ignored that it constitutes a great ideal of fragmented and enlightened babbling: besides being a false antique, the Night Watches aspire also to be the diary of a modern madman. To us today, it is true, Compagnoni’s experiment of giving voice to folly appears to be an evident failure, so much so as to induce us to regret that the Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart was discovered only in 1939. It is not difficult to identify Compagnoni’s stylistic model: the syncopated style of Alfieri’s tragic monologues and of the first version of Ugo Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis (1802). This particular link suggests a parallel with the Romantic evolution of the epistolary novel. After Rousseau, this genre tends to become monological, and any single letter tends to transform itself into lyric prose (we have recalled already that even of Werther partial verse translations had been circulated). 3.4 Diaries and other genres traditionally outside the field of the »literary« In accordance with the choices of taste expressed by philosophers and critics like Friedrich Schlegel (the preference, for instance, for autobiographical and diary-like writings over the realistic novel), which were widespread in the Romantic milieux, was the tendency to include in the field of literature a whole series of textual types and genres traditionally kept outside the boundaries of the »literary«, and to even grant them a more or less central place. Moreover, they often became considerably more narrative in structure and tone. The travel-book or the diary of a journey, for instance, starting with Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, lost the abstract objectivity of the chronicle and was impregnated with the subjective impressions and outbursts of the author, full of fragments of readings, sketches, humorous remarks, and passages of lyrical prose. Along this line, the travel-book could evolve in various directions: it could become the instrument for jotting down the most significant moments and impressions of a Wanderung, or it could transform itself into a mixed genre, undecided among lyrical prose, essayistic meditations, political or social critique, satire (even personal attacks) — as in Heinrich Heine’s Reisebilder (Travel pictures, 1826–31) —, or it could give birth to free forms of writings modelled on the Sentimental

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Journey, totally independent from the actual experience of a true and proper voyage, as in ����� François Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre (A Journey round my Room, 1795), or Expédition nocturne autour de ma chambre (A Nocturnal Expedition round my Room, 1796). The greatest revolution, however, was that undergone by the genre of the diary. As a form of literary creation, it was not unknown in the preceding centuries, and as such it continued to live, even producing the particular case of fictive diaries. A remarkable case pertinent as well to this general overview of fragmentary writings is represented by Zapiski sumasshedshego (Diary of a Madman, 1835), by Nikolai Gogol. The appearance of the Journal intime, however, represents the most momentous change. For the first time in the Romantic period the diary could become one of the most important works of a writer and in some cases make him famous even in the absence of any other work. Such is the case of the Swiss writer Henri-Frédéric Amiel and of his extended day-by-day diary, published partially in 1883–84 with the title Fragments du journal intime de Henri-Frédéric Amiel (Fragments from the Intimate Journal of H.-F. Amiel), and as a whole in 1939–48. Almost all the major writers kept a diary, even though a large part of those works were not published before 1850. The most relevant exception is that of Byron, whose first diaries (which readers across Europe were anxious to attain) appeared in 1830, six years after his death, and were immediately translated into French. Like the travel-book, the diary, in various ways, is important to the theme of the fragment. As a tool for practical annotation, the diary can be a composite collection of very different textual materials: observations, aphorisms, memos, notes on people’s customs, preparatory papers of works-in-progress, transcriptions of dreams (Robert Southey has left us a complete diary of his dreams). Given this accumulative nature, it is not surprising that the diaries of many writers were published at first in an even greater fragmentary state, in the form, that is, of excerpts or fragments of a diary. On the other hand, the diary can be considered a model of analytical discourse by the self, in opposition to the synthetic one of autobiography. This opposition is similar to the ones that we have encountered examining the Bildungsroman or non-linear narrative forms. The diary can offer a more unsteady image of the self than the Bildungsroman or the autobiography. In particular the diarist’s discourse takes the form of an individual act of communication in opposition to the ideal of sociable communication that is so important for the Bildung of the self. We must, however, make some further distinctions. It often happens that diaries contain the project of a Bildung in fieri: it is enough to think of the reading programmes contained in the diaries of Tolstoy or Amiel, or, at the dawn of the new sentiment of individuality, of Robinson Crusoe’s Log-Book. Moreover, while the diary is often the specialised and confidential space for the registration of all the self ’s oscillations of identity (even Byron, in his Detached Thoughts — which appeared only after Prothero’s edition of his diaries and letters in 1899–1901 — lists, partly out of boredom, partly out of irritation, half a page of historical or fictional characters to whom his personal self had been compared), it is also true that the autobiographies are not always consistently unitary works. We could mention Leopardi’s autobiographical fragments (a series of intuitions, annotations, and, sometimes, more extensively narrated episodes), but the clearest example is that of the writer who was without any doubt the most celebrated pseudonymous author of pseudonyms: Stendhal. His »autobiographical« pages are programmatically written (with the aim of avoiding any false detail) in the form of immediate entries in a diary according to a set of self-imposed rules: to write every day, never

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re-read, never follow the chronological order. If we take into consideration the Vie de Henry Brulard (Life of Henry Brulard), posthumously published in 1890, we can see that it is anything but a synthetic autobiography. The style is fragmented; the digressions have a primary role, with passages that have an immediate Sternean flavour, as when, at the end of the second chapter, Stendhal announces that »After all these general reflections, I am about to be born« (Stendhal 1995, 22).16 Descriptions are systematically avoided and substituted by drawings. Even more significant are the lacunae. Of one of the key-moments of his Bildungsroman, that of the duel, Stendhal says that he does not remember the outcome. Memory, according to Stendhal, is like a Renaissance fresco: »Next to the clearest mental picture I find gaps in this memory, it’s like a fresco, large parts of which have fallen away« (ibid., 121).17 The incongruity between the neatness of the remembered images and the explicative prose is therefore absolute. The digressive autobiography through fragments, therefore, is for Stendhal a kind of musical score that requires an execution. He announces a further and superior moment of synthesis (which would be, materially, the final revision), but we know that, as always, that moment will never come. 3.5 Fragments of thought; essayistic writings In the field of philosophy the fragment belongs to the tradition of non-systematic thought and of aphoristic writing. One should remember that S. T. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) was started in the form of preface for a projected longer work, which carried a rather Sternean title: Autobiographia Literaria: Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions. One should also remember that Friedrich Schlegel often said that the literature of modernity was bound to be both fragmentary and permeated with philosophical thinking. This double character is certainly true of Schlegel’s novel Lucinde. However, to sketch out the relationship between fragment and thought we could also follow, for once, a way that is not properly Sternean, but looks at one of the literary antecedents that were recovered by Sterne: the tradition of erudite satirical writing of François Rabelais or of Robert Burton, or, going further back in time, of the Menippean satire. The example of a work of large dimensions — one of the few modern epics that tend to capture a whole world-system (opere mondo), according to Franco Moretti (1996) — that was constructed according to that model, bringing together erudite materials, digressions, theatrical scenes, etc., is of course Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Within the tradition of shorter forms we could mention the recovery of Lucian’s Dialogues in Leopardi’s Operette morali (Short Moral Tales, 1827), or, even more poignantly, some of Edgar Allan Poe’s writings. The allusion to passages from ancient writers − the most rare and unusual ones − is characteristic of Poe, even in the most famous and, in terms of narrative structure, tightly-woven works. Even more interesting, from our point of view, are some of his shortest and most fragmentary texts, many of which are of difficult classification in terms of genre. Some of these works are typical »threshold dialogues« in the tradition of Lucian (»The Colloquy of Monos and Una«, 1841, for example). Others, such as »Silence 16.

»Après tant de considérations générales je vais naître« (Stendhal 1973, 45).

17.

»A côté des images les plus claires je trouve des manques dans ce souvenir, c’est comme une fresque dont de grands morceaux seraient tombés« (ibid., 130).

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— A Parable« (1835), or »Shadow — A Fable« (1838), are pseudo-narrative fragments that have reached a certain popularity as poèmes en prose. They contain frequent reminiscences of archaic texts (The King James’s Bible, Ossian) or of modern archaistic and poetical texts (Coleridge, De Quincey, Bulwer-Lytton). The fascinating fragment »The Island of the Fay« (1841) combines, instead, the style of a poème en prose (destined to accompany an engraving) with that of a moral essay. After a typically essayistic introduction on the possibility of an artistic or natural object of beauty that would do without the actual presence of a recipient/spectator, the narrative voice starts telling of when in one of his Wanderungen he came across a strange island. Since he insists on maintaining that the island had in itself a magical and beautiful quality, independent of his presence, »The Island of the Fay« is bound to become one of the most surprising modern allegories of the survival of genius loci. Probably even more interesting are other kinds of narrative fragments by Poe. In these texts Poe creates characters that represent another model: the character who, rather than in a world of fragments, seems to be moving in a world of strange details. It is enough to think of »The Angel of the Odd« (1844), in which the lay rite of reading the newspaper transforms itself into an accumulation of connected details preparatory to the appearance of the Angel of the Odd. This turns out to be a very bizarre character. He speaks with a funny German accent, his body — as in an Archimboldo picture — is made of a series of bottles and flasks. We could, with a shade of arbitrariness, read the Angel of the Odd as a parable of the decay of Romantic artificial creations. The Romantic conception of the organic fragment was founded, as we have seen, on a consciously artificial mythology. Given this original artificiality, Romantic mythology was bound to dissolve into Kitsch, into Biedermeier ornamentation and bric-a-brac. This development had been in a way anticipated by Goethe, by his refusal to truly believe in the worlds that the early Romantics were prone to evoke with conviction, even though he needed those worlds as structures of restraint or escape routes to avoid catastrophic outcomes. The religious upper-world at the conclusion of the Wahlver­wandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809), amd the fairy-tale and fictitious world of the Novelle (Novella, 1828), can be considered as pure quotations, as »props« (Zagari 1965). This is the reason why the second part of Faust (1832), and not the works of the Romantics, was the true forerunner of the collage and cut-up techniques that would be typical of successive artistic experiments with the detail. Poe’s character, too, who moves, like Grandville’s little fellow, among the incomprehensible, ridiculous and hostile objects around him (even the Angel of the Odd can be considered one of these incomprehensible objects), among the meaningless causality of the modern world, somehow reveals the artificiality of the Romantic attempts at reconstructing a unity as well as at giving an organic and unitary image of the world. In »The Man of the Crowd« (1840), after an essayistic prelude, dedicated to a descriptionclassification of the London crowd, Poe creates instead a narration which shows the deep relationship between the two figures who were bound to take the place of the Romantic Wanderer: the detective (protagonist of the search — in this case disappointing — for a revealing detail), and the man of the crowd, a figure that Charles Baudelaire identified with the Parisian flâneur. In the contemporary post-modern novel detective and flâneur will inevitably tend to coincide and give birth to the paranoid detective, in search of traces that, although connected with his private world and memory, should enable him to reconstruct the profile of a threatening totality in the form of a conspiracy.

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Bibliography Alembert, Jean le Rond D’, and Diderot, Denis (ed.). 1777. Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Genève: Pellet. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. by Michael Holquist. Trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: Texas UP. ———. 1984. Rabelais and his World. Trans. by Hélène Jewolski. 2nd edition. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Behler, Ernst. 1985. »Das Fragment«. Prosakunst ohne Erzählen: Die Gattungen der nicht-fiktionalen Kunstprosa. Ed. by Klaus Weissenberger. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 125–143. Blumenberg, Hans. 1983. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Trans. by Robert B. Wallace. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. Brandi-Dohrn, Beatrix. 1964. Der Einfluß Laurence Sternes auf Jean Paul: Studie zum Problem des literarischen Einflusses. Diss. München. Ceserani, Remo. 1992. »Incompiutezza, senso dell’infinito e frammentarietà: Considerazioni preliminari«. L’Asino d’Oro. 3.5: 6–16. ———. 2001. »La théorie et la subversion des genres«. Le tournant du siècle des lumières 1760–1820: Climat général de l’époque. Ed. by Horst Albert Glaser and György M. Vajda. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Compagnoni, Giuseppe. 1992. Veglie di Tasso. Ed. by Dietmar Rieger. Roma: Salerno. Conrad, Peter. 1978. Shandyism: The Character of Romantic Irony. New York: Barnes & Noble. Dällenbach, Lucien 1989. The Mirror in the Text. Trans. by Jeremy Whitely and Emma Hughes. Cambridge: Polity. Engel, Manfred. 1993. Der Roman der Goethezeit. Vol. 1: Anfänge in Klassik und Frühromantik: Transzendentale Geschichten. Stuttgart: Metzler. [Klingemann, August]. 1971. Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura — The Night Watches of Bonaventura. Bilingual edition. Ed. and trans. by Gerald Gillespie. Austin: Texas UP. Luther, Martin. 1972. Die gantze Heilige Schrift. München: Verlag Rogner & Bernhard. McFarland, Thomas. 1981 Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin. Princeton: Princeton UP. Mazzacurati, Giancarlo. 1990. Effetto Sterne: La narrazione umoristica in Italia da Foscolo a Pirandello. Pisa: Nistri-Lischi. Michelsen, Peter. 1962. Laurence Sterne und der deutsche Roman des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Montandon, Alain. 1985. Réception de Laurence Sterne en Allemagne. Clermont-Ferrand: Université de ClermontFerrand. ———. 1987. Jean Paul romancier: L’étoile shandéenne. Clermont-Ferrand: Adosa. Moretti, Franco. 1987. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Trans. by Albert J. Sbragia. London: Verso. ———. 1996. Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez. Trans. by Quintin Hoare. London: Verso. Neumann, Peter Horst. 1966. Jean Pauls Flegeljahre. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 59–74. ———. 1992. »I Flegeljahre di Jean Paul: Il frammento necessario«. L’Asino d’oro. 3.5: 17–24. Novalis. 1960. Schriften. Vol. III: Das philosophische Werk II. Ed. by Richard Samuel with the help of HansJoachim Mähl and Gerhard Schulz. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1984. Essays and Reviews. New York: Library of America. Pushkin, Alexander. 1975. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse. Trans. with a commentary by Vladimir Nabokov. Revised ed. Princeton: Princeton UP. ———. 1983. Complete Prose Fiction. Trans. and intro. by Paul Debreczeny. Stanford: Stanford UP. Rieger, Dietmar. 1992. »Poesia« und »Pazzia«. Giuseppe Compagnonis romantische Tasso-Fälschung (»Le Veglie di Tasso«). Heidelberg: Winter. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1967. Charakteristiken und Kritiken 1 (1796–1801). Ed. by Hans Eichner. München, Paderborn, Wien, Zürich: Schöningh.

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———. 1968. Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms. Trans. by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc. University Park, London: Pennsylvania State UP. ———. 1985. Lucinde: Ein Roman. Ed. by Ursula Naumann. München: Goldmann. Schor, Naomi. 1980. »Le Détail chez Freud«. Littérature. 37: 3–14. ———. 1987. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen. ———. 1990. »Reading in Detail: Or, Aesthetics, the Feminine, and Idealism«. Criticism. 32: 309–23. Spitzer, Leo. 1945. La enumeración caótica en la poesía moderna. Buenos Aires: Coni; later collected in Lingüística e istoria literaria. Madrid: Gredos. ———. 1949. »Explication de texte: Applied to Walt Whitman’s Poem ›Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking‹ «. Journal of English Literary History. 16: 229–49; later collected in Essays on English and American Literature. Ed. by Anna Hatcher. Princeton: Princeton UP 1962. 14–36. Stendhal. 1973. Vie de Henry Brulard. Ed. by Béatrice Didier. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1995. The Life of Henry Brulard. Trans. by John Sturrock. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sterne, Laurence. 1978–84. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Ed. by Melvyn New and Joan New. Gainesville: Florida UPs. Testa, Francesca. 1999. Tristram Shandy in Italia: Critica, traduzioni, influenze. Roma: Bulzoni. Zagari, Luciano. 1965. »Sovramondo melodrammatico e pericolo estetizzante nell’ultimo Goethe: A proposito della Novelle«. Studi di letteratura tedesca dell’Ottocento. Roma: Ateneo. ———. 1985. »Giochi nihilistici con l’imago die«. Mitologia del segno vivente. Bologna: Il Mulino. 33–77. Zinn, Ernst. 1959. »Fragment über Fragmente«. Das Unvollendete als künstlerische Form. Ed. by J. Adolf Schmoll, gen. Eisenwerth. Bern: Francke. 161–171.

Mirroring, abymization, potentiation (involution) Sabine Rossbach Something strange happens to the protagonist of Novalis’s novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Henry von Ofterdingen, 1802): He finds a book that tells the story of his own life. Heinrich cannot read the book (it is »written in a foreign tongue«1), but when he looks more closely at the illustrations »he discovered his own figure recognisably enough among the others«.2 As he reads the book, Heinrich discovers people he knew in the past; and indeed his own future is written there — »the final pictures«, though, »were dark and indecipherable […] the end of the book seemed to be missing«.3 Thus Novalis’s book, the life-story of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, contains itself in miniature as if in a reducing mirror — or, one might say, in the same way that the historical life-story of the troubadour Heinrich von Ofterdingen is itself mirrored in Novalis’s biography. This textual enclosure or »book within the book« technique becomes common enough in Romantic writing after Novalis. Thus the fictional editor of Jan Potocki’s Le manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (Manuscript Found At Saragossa, 1805) finds a manuscript written in Spanish that, as he realises later in captivity in that country, contains the complete family history of one of his enemies (Potocki 1996, 3 f.). Similarly, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s monk Medardus in Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs, 1815/16) comes across a book that tells the story of his life and origins. Romantic framing techniques continue the tradition, an inversion of Romantic potentiation, for instance in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833/34) and above all in Potocki’s textual enclosures of stories within stories within stories. 1.

The Romantic journey

The reducing mirror that projects one book into another can, however, just as well be seen as an enlarging mirror, creating out of the »inner« text an »outer« one — or a set of outer ones — that contains and transcends it. This concept is fundamental to those fictional Romantic biographies that set out to lead their naively prescient protagonists to an understanding of the world and their own place in it. In many cases the subject of these biographies feels the painful restrictions of home: Christian in Runenberg (Rune Mountain, 1804), Peter von Provence in the Phantasus (1812–16), Franz Sternbald, or Heinrich von Ofterdingen, among others. Infected by a nameless yearning, they have to go out into the world; but whatever they encounter on their journey seems somehow familiar, seems to have a preordained meaning for them. The Romantic protagonist grows and develops through contact with the phenomena of an alien world; but he can only develop because these phenomena were present within him in their totality all along. In his journey through the world, he gradually learns that all he sees is a mirror of himself. 1.

»in einer fremden Sprache geschrieben« (Novalis 1997, 111).

2.

»wie er recht zusah, entdeckte er seine eigene Gestalt ziemlich kenntlich unter den Figuren« (ibid., 111).

3.

»die letzten Bilder waren dunkel und unverständlich […] der Schluß des Buches schien zu fehlen« (ibid., 112).

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The Romantic journey is subsumed in the epiphany experienced by the Lehrlinge zu Sais (The Disciples of Sais, 1802) when the protagonist finally succeeds in lifting the veil of the goddess: »But what did he see? He saw — wonder of wonders — his own self«.4 The moment the Romantic subject sees itself as being and containing the whole world, however, it has stepped out of the confines of its own selfhood into an unlimited, infinite identity. The Romantic »Bildungsroman« transforms the life-story of its protagonist into a step-by-step approximation of a higher ideal state (cf. the chapter by Manfred Engel in this volume). Thus Heinrich, leafing through the book of his life, sees himself not only »in various situations« but »towards the end […] as greater and nobler«.5 A similar utopia seems to underlie the work of the English Romantic, John Keats, for whom the transcendental union of life and love can only be achieved in a realm of dreams beyond the bounds of common reality. One thinks of Isabella (1820) and The Eve of St. Agnes (1820), and above all of Endymion, the shepherd, who, falling in love with a goddess in a dream, leaves heritage and home to seek her. Only in his dreams can he embrace his heavenly beloved; the moment he wakes and returns to reality her image fades. The resolution only comes when, at the end of his quest, Endymion renounces the world and lives as a hermit. Then the sufferings and privations he undergoes finally make him worthy of an ideal love, and the goddess can transport him with her into immortality. 2.

Kant, Fichte, and Schelling

Before the Romantic journey through life could be made at all, however, another great voyage of discovery was needed — an expedition into the realm of human cognition. Immanuel Kant set out in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781) to explore this territory thoroughly and map out its frontiers. At the beginning of the transcendental doctrine of judgement, which treats the »Basis for the Distinction of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena«, Kant looks back on his project, a critical survey of the unknown continent of reason, in the following terms: We have now not only travelled through the land of pure reason and carefully examined every part of it. We have also charted it thoroughly and apportioned every thing to its place. This country however is an island contained by nature itself within unchanging boundaries. It is the land of truth (a charming name), surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean which is the source of all appearances, where many a bank of mist and quickly melting ice offers the illusive promise of new countries, never ceasing to deceive with empty hopes the seafarers who rove there on their explorations.6

4.

»Aber was sah er? Er sah — Wunder des Wunders — Sich selbst« (Novalis 1978, I: 234).

5.

»in verschiedenen Lagen […] gegen das Ende […] größer und edler« (Novalis 1997, 111).

6.

»Wir haben jetzt das Land des reinen Verstandes nicht allein durchreiset, und jeden Teil davon sorgfältig in Augenschein genommen, sondern es auch durchmessen, und jedem Dinge auf demselben seine Stelle bestimmt. Dieses Land aber ist eine Insel, und durch die Natur selbst in unveränderliche Grenzen eingeschlossen. Es ist das Land der Wahrheit (ein reizender Name), umgeben von einem weiten und stürmischen Ozeane, dem eigentlichen Sitze des Scheins, wo manche Nebelbank, und manches bald weg-

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Kant’s journey through the realm of pure reason, his examination of the laws, conditions and scope of human cognizance yielded the insight, therefore, that the land of truth and reason was an island in a sea of doubt, deception and appearance. That was the revolution he inaugurated in metaphysics. For this island of reason and truth stops short at the »frontiers of possible experience«, beyond which we, with our »a priori capabilities […] can never go«.7 Man cannot know the world as it »really« is. However much there is to learn as he voyages across the seas, he will never arrive at his desired destination. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was the first determined to cross the boundary Kant had laid down in his three Critiques (of Pure Reason, Practical Reason and Judgement, respectively). In his lectures Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Knowledge, 1794/95) he showed how the entire universe, both island and ocean, derived from a single principle of subjective cognition, the primal »act« or enactment of the self (Fichte 1965, 259). By this he meant that self and world — or self (»Ich«) and what he called non-self (»Nicht-Ich«), the complement to the self, representing everything that lies beyond the self — corresponded to each other. He argued, first of all, that the non-self was a function of the self: Inasmuch as the empirical self and the non-self arise sequentially out of the enactment of the (absolute) self, it is clear that »The self as well as the non-self […] are both products of prior acts of the self«.8 Secondly (and conversely) he argued that the self is a function of the non-self; indeed »The nonself actively determines the self (which is thus a suffering self)«.9 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling proceeded to construct his system of Romantic nature-philosophy, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature, 1797) and System des transcendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism, 1800), on the basis of Fichte’s epistemological conviction (against Kant) that thing and idea can at one and the same time be distinct from and identical with each other. Schelling argued that object and idea — or in more general terms nature and mind — are strictly speaking no more than two different manifestations of the same phenomenon: nature is invisible mind, and mind invisible nature. From this congruence of subject (mind, intelligence) and object (nature) Schelling then derived the concept of »self«-consciousness: the self producing in complete freedom both itself and (unconsciously) the world of objects. At the highest moment of its theoretical consciousness, in the absolute act of the will, the self realizes this two-fold production: »Selfconsciousness is the absolute act through which all is established for the self«.10 Unlike Fichte, Schelling did not declare the world to be the negative of the self (non-self), but, rather, conceived nature — following Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733/34) — as a »chain of being«, schmelzende Eis neue Länder lügt, und indem es den auf Entdeckungen herumschwärmenden Seefahrer unaufhörlich mit leeren Hoffnungen täuscht« (Kant 1956, 267 f.). 7.

»Grenze möglicher Erfahrung [über die wir mit] unserem Vermögen a priori […] nie […] hinauskommen können« (ibid., 27).

8.

»Das Ich sowohl, als das Nicht-Ich […] beides Produkte ursprünglicher Handlungen des Ich« (Fichte 1965, 269).

9.

»Das Nicht-Ich bestimmt (thätig) das Ich (welches insofern leidend ist)« (ibid., 287).

10.

»Das Selbstbewußtseyn ist der absolute Akt, durch welchen für das Ich alles gesetzt ist« (Schelling 1965, 395).

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organised teleologically by the power of mind in a series of steps reaching exponentially to the absolute. Only a few years later, Novalis was to declare this principle of gradual approximation of the ideal to be the fundamental notion of the »Romantic book« — which was Schlegel’s definition of the novel or »Roman« as such.11 3.

Novalis and Schlegel

From about 1798, Novalis began working in an aphoristic but, at the same time, systematic way on the design of the novel. What he was aiming for was nothing less than the »romanticization« or what he called »potentiation« (Potenzierung) of the world: The world must be romanticized if we are to rediscover its original sense. To romanticize is simply to potentialize qualitatively. In this operation the lower self is identified with a better self. […] By giving a lofty sense to what is common, a mysterious aspect to the everyday, the dignity of the unknown to the familiar, the appearance of infinity to the finite, I am romanticizing these things.12

In his novel fragments Die Lehrlinge zu Sais and Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Novalis had demonstrated how this romanticization of the world should function, with the self, step by step, attaining knowledge of a higher realm, and, eventually, of the absolute itself. This self, it must be added, stood for every single individual, for the true Romantic biography, according to Novalis, contained all possible biographies, just as »every new highway takes one through new countries and yet every road finally leads back to these dwellings, this sacred home«.13 Designating to the novel the »symbolic construction of the transcendental world«,14 Novalis exclaimed »the novel […] grows on and on«, and spoke of »geometrical progression in the novel«.15 It may not be immediately evident from this phrase that he really conceived of the romanticization of the world in the novel as happening in a sort of geometric progression, a sequence reflected in the »stones, flowers and beetles of every kind« collected and »laid out in rows in the most various ways«16 by the apprentices at Sais, or revealed in the rows of leaves arranged by the king and princess in Klingsohr’s fairytale, a long, neo-mythological tale imbedded in the novel Heinrich 11.

»Sie verlangten […] eine Definition, was ein Roman sei […]. Ein Roman ist ein romantisches Buch« (Schlegel 1967, 335).

12.

»Die Welt muß romantisirt werden. So findet man den urspr[ünglichen] Sinn wieder. Romantisiren ist nichts, als eine qualit[ative] Potenzirung. Das niedre Selbst wird mit einem bessern Selbst in dieser Operation identificirt. […] Indem ich dem Gemeinen einen hohen Sinn, dem Gewöhnlichen ein geheimnißvolles Ansehn, dem Bekannten die Würde des Unbekannten, dem Endlichen einen unendlichen Schein gebe so romantisire ich es« (Novalis 1978, II, 334).

13.

»jeder neue Weg durch neue Länder geht, und jeder endlich zu diesen Wohnungen, zu dieser heiligen Heimath wieder führet« (ibid., I, 204).

14.

»symbolische […] Construction der transscendentalen Welt« (Novalis 1929, II, 536).

15.

»Der Roman […] wächst fort […] — im Roman geometrische Progression« (ibid., 534).

16.

»Steine, Blumen, Käfer aller Art [sammeln und] sie auf mannichfache Weise sich in Reihen [legen]« (Novalis 1978, I, 202).

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von Ofterdingen. But Novalis was an educated mathematician, and in each of these activities we see the immanent poetics of his novel-form manifest as a pantomimic variant of the series ∞ n n=0∑ q  = 1 / 1 − q. The progression consists of two operations, one inner, one outer. The inner operation yields the formula for potentiation (qn, n ∈ {0, 1, …, ∞}) relevant to the single moment of Romantic divination — where the individual reveals that the general and the common belong to a higher realm. This is the moment, for example, experienced by Heinrich von Ofterdingen as the »opening of a door hidden behind the pattern in the wallpaper« when he hears one of the marvellous tales that cause »a thousand other memories of his life […] [to knit together] on a magic thread«.17 The outer operation orders the individual powers — the epiphanies of the »higher« in everyday life — into an ascending series which can be expressed as 1 + q + q2 + q3 + …. Combining the two operations into a geometric progression creates the exponential series as the formula for the romanticization of the world, the structural principle of the Romantic novel. This, then, reveals mathematically the truth of Schlegel’s dictum about »Romantic literature« (»Poesie«) as a »progressive and universal literature« (»progressive Universalpoesie«, Schlegel 1967, 182). For the formula yields with exactitude the finite approximation to an infinite quantity, K n n=0∑ q  ≈ 1 / 1 − q (where the value of K is large), and thus precisely that »symbolic construction of the transcendental world« which Novalis saw as the basis of any theory of the novel: The novel as such contains no definite result. Neither as image nor fact does it issue from a single proposition. It is the plastic and visible expression and realization of an idea. But an idea cannot be reduced to a single proposition. An idea is an infinite series of propositions — an irrational quantity.18

On the one hand, this implies that the novel must always remain a fragment, a finite approach to the infinite — or as Schlegel put it, the essence of Romantic literature is to be eternally in a process of becoming, never to be ended. Yet on the other hand, the novel has always already achieved its goal. For just as the mathematician finds »the constructive formula of a series […] by means of a few known members [which] enable him to determine an infinite number of unknown members«,19 so the novel from the very beginning establishes the »law of its own development«20 ad infinitum, providing within its finite scope a formula for the infinite, and opening within the phenomenal world a window onto the unconditioned, the absolute Idea itself. Even before Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel had formulated the Romantic concept of utopia in the image of a continuous process of mirroring. In the famous 116th »Athenaeum Fragment« he pledged his hope for a Romantic literature that could »potentiate […] poetic reflection and 17.

»eine versteckte Tapetenthür in ihm […] öffnet [und sich nunmehr] tausend andere Erinnerungen seines Lebens […] von selbst an einen zauberischen Faden [knüpfen]« (Novalis 1997, 299).

18.

»Der Roman, als solcher, enthält kein bestimmtes Resultat — er ist nicht Bild und Factum eines Satzes. Er ist anschauliche Ausführung — Realisirung einer Idee. Aber eine Idee läßt sich nicht, in einen Satz fassen. Eine Idee ist eine unendliche Reihe von Sätzen — eine irrationale Größe« (ibid., II, 570).

19.

»[durch] wenige Bekannte Glieder […] die Constructionsformel der Reihe [findet und hierdurch] in Stand gesezt wird eine unendliche Menge unbekannter Glieder zu finden« (ibid., III, 68).

20. »Gesetz [sein]er Fortschreitung« (ibid., II, 570).

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multiply it as in an endless series of mirrors«.21 Schlegel’s idea of potentiation (Potenzierung) entailed not only the exponential raising of the initial impulse or image with every act of mirroring, but also the lack of any limit to the number of times this act could be repeated. Thus Romantic literature would — so the theory went — increase its scope with every step of the mirroring process; it would »unite […] once more the separate genres of writing, and bring […] literature into contact with philosophy and rhetoric«,22 until it finally became »a mirror of the entire surrounding world«.23 Hence Schlegel’s dictum about Romantic literature as a »progressively universal literature«.24 4.

Mixed genres

Central to Schlegel’s concept of potentiation was the idea of the Romantic novel as collating and unifying all the categories of literature and science. Thus Schlegel noted apodictically: The essence [of Romantic literature] is not simply to reunite the disparate genres of literature and bring poetry into contact with philosophy and rhetoric. It wishes to, and is supposed to, mingle and fuse together poetry and prose, imagination and criticism, the poetry of art and of nature.25

The mixing of genres had indeed been characteristic of German Romantic writing ever since Schlegel’s Lucinde (1799) and Tieck’s Runenberg, and Romantic authors had been active not only in the literary field but also in those of philosophy (Schlegel) and science (Novalis and Ritter). Novalis’s novel Ofterdingen shows with exemplary clarity how both the mixing of genres and the gathering of disparate material into the literary process contributed elements which might lead the Romantic subject to higher things. Whenever Heinrich makes new acquaintances on his journey, he hears new stories: A knight sings to him the ancient song of the crusaders, a girl recites a love poem for him, merchants and miners tell Heinrich about their work, and Klingsohr recounts a long neo-mythological tale — on each occasion Heinrich learns a little more about the world and its history, about love and man’s daily life, and finally about the poetic arts. However, it was the English Romantics — above all Byron, Keats and Shelley with their verse narratives, epics and dramas — who developed the mixing of genres into a fully fledged literary style. And later E.T.A. Hoffmann remoulded the mixture into yet another influential form 21.

»[poetische] Reflexion […] potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen« (Schlegel 1967, 182).

22.

»alle getrennten Gattungen der Poesie wieder […] vereinigen, und die Poesie mit der Philosophie und Rhetorik in Berührung […] setzen« (ibid.).

23.

»ein Spiegel der ganzen umgebenden Welt« (ibid.).

24. »progressive Universalpoesie« (ibid.). 25.

»[Die] Bestimmung [der romantischen Poesie] ist nicht bloß, alle getrennte Gattungen der Poesie wieder zu vereinigen, und die Poesie mit der Philosophie und Rhetorik in Berührung zu setzen. Sie will, und soll auch Poesie und Prosa, Genialität und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie bald mischen, bald verschmelzen« (ibid.).

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when he inserted all sorts of different tales (night pieces, fairy-tales and so on) into the social and philosophical gatherings of friends that form the framework of his Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brotherhood, 1819–21), using these pieces as material for the literary activities — the readings and subsequent critical and aesthetic discussions — of the brotherhood. In his Russkie nochi (Russian Nights, 1844), Vladimir Odoevskii took up this structure of novella inserts framed within a debate — in this case on the philosophy of mysticism, Schelling, and rationalism. 5.

Irony

The progression of Romantic potentiation from the finite to the absolute is reflected in Friedrich Schlegel’s postulate of irony as its founding attitude. Schlegel defined the concept of irony in a new way, as the »constant interchange of self-creation and self-destruction«.26 Schlegel built his philosophy of permanent self-transcendence on the premise of the ironic method, which educes out of every act of knowing a new and contrary act. Schlegel’s ironic philosophy has sometimes been equated with the dialectical principle, and Romantic irony identified with Romantic potentiation. There is some truth in this, inasmuch as both ironic and dialectical process are grounded in negation and antithesis. One should not, however, forget that the most vehement critic of Romantic irony was Hegel himself, who could not accept what he saw as its nihilistic tendency: The immediate form of this ironic negativity is […] on the one hand the vanity of all objects, all morals and all that has content, the nullity of all that is objective and valid in its own right. If the self insists on this standpoint, everything will appear to him empty and purposeless — everything except his own subjectivity, which is thereby rendered hollow and vacuous and itself vain.27

With respect to Friedrich Schlegel, however, Hegel was mistaken. If Schlegel’s irony »nullified« its object, it did so not in a gesture of empty subjectivity but in pursuit of a higher absolute. If the yearning of Romantic poetry for the infinite had led Schlegel to invoke irony as its driving force, Hegel’s polemics was based on a reading of late Romanticism and an aversion to what he saw, for example in E.T.A. Hoffmann, as its »ghastly humour and […] grotesque irony«.28 And yet Hegel was objecting to an irony that had not even convinced the early Romantics. Novalis had already equated Schlegel’s irony with humour: »What Friedrich Schlegel defines so emphatically as irony […] seems to me to be genuine humour«.29 And although Jean Paul, the prolific German novelist, in the Vorschule der Ästhetik (Pre-School of Aesthetics, 26. »stete Wechsel von Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung« (ibid., 172). 27.

»Die nächste Form dieser Negativität der Ironie ist […] einerseits die Eitelkeit alles Sachlichen, Sittlichen und in sich Gehaltvollen, die Nichtigkeit alles Objektiven und an und für sich Geltenden. Bleibt das Ich auf diesem Standpunkte stehen, so erscheint ihm alles als nichtig und eitel — die eigene Subjektivität ausgenommen, die dadurch hohl und leer und die selber eitel wird« (Hegel 1986, 96).

28. »Humor der Abscheulichkeit und eine Fratzenhaftigkeit der Ironie« (ibid., 289). 29. »Was Friedrich Schlegel so scharf als Ironie charakterisiert […] scheint mir echter Humor zu sein« (Novalis 1929, II, 428 f.).

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1804), and again in the Kleine Nachschule zur ästhetischen Vorschule (Little Post-School to the Aesthetic Pre-School, 1825) admitted the distinction between irony and humour, he allowed the epithet »poetic« only to humour, which was warm and excited empathy, but not to cold intellectual irony. Subsequently, in fact, it was not Schlegel’s theory of irony but Jean Paul’s humour that caught the literary imagination — one need only think of Thomas Carlyle’s humorously distancing autobiography Sartor Resartus. Therefore, the Romantic self can attain higher knowledge not through irony but only through laughter. This is the laughter that takes possession of King Ophioch and Queen Liris (in Hoffmann’s Prinzessin Brambilla, 1820) when they see the whole world, and themselves within it, inverted in the mirror of the Urdar spring: King Ophioch and Queen Liris […] were the first to gaze into the water. And as they now saw mirrored and inverted in its endless depths the brilliant blue of the sky, the bushes, trees, flowers, the whole of nature and their own selves, it was as if a dark veil had been lifted […] They had been gazing a long time when at last they rose, looked at each other and — laughed.30

With its inverted, distancing madness, the mirror had shown the King and Queen a new world of estrangement, but also of gaiety. These cursory remarks may suffice to chart the link between Romantic potentiation, irony and humour. The underlying theory and further literary and historical development of these themes are the subject of the volume Romantic Irony, already published in this series (Garber 1988). 6.

Britain

At a time when the German Romantics still believed in the perfectibility of the individual as well as of creation as a whole — in their continuing development towards the ideal — the English Romantics had already become thoroughly suspicious of any concept of »goodness«, order or higher perfection when applied to the experienced world. Lord Byron created the figure of the Romantic rebel battling in despair with the world as he found it, a protagonist who wore his suffering publicly to conceal a secret guilt, his voice storming heaven in a furious tirade against God. The first incarnation of this figure was the protagonist of Cain (1821), whose quarrel with God derived from his refusal to accept the limitations of the human condition (Wiegand 1967, 69–78). His Romantic revolt was not against God as the principle of goodness, but against the creator of a world of suffering, ugliness and death: Even he who made us must be, as the maker Of things unhappy! To produce destruction Can surely never be the task of joy, And yet my sire says he’s omnipotent: Then why is evil — he being good? (Byron 1994, 525). 30. »König Ophioch und Königin Liris […] waren die ersten, die hineinschauten in das Wasser. Als sie nun aber in der unendlichen Tiefe den blauen glänzenden Himmel, die Büsche, die Bäume, die Blumen, die ganze Natur, ihr eignes Ich in verkehrter Abspiegelung erschauten, da war es, als rollten dunkle Schleier auf […] Lange hatten sie hineingeschaut, dann erhoben sie sich, sahen einander an und — lachten« (Hoffmann 1994, VII, 190).

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It was only logical, then, that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) wanted, like a new Prometheus, to improve the world, overcoming sickness, death and corruption: I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life (Shelley 1992, 44).

Discovering how to give life to dead matter (»I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter«, ibid.), Frankenstein sets out to create a new being and dreams of a new race. Because his creature is to be immortal, he composes its body with parts taken from corpses: I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame […] The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials (ibid., 47).

But this body will soon show that, although the laws of creation no longer apply to it now that it has potentialized death into life, it will be still hounded and possessed by evil. The creature’s deformed frame, ugly and half corrupted, is hateful to men; and for this reason it no longer wants to resemble them as it had when it learned to speak, read and write, but begins to slaughter them. 7.

Mirroring in Hoffmann et al.

The German Romantics, too, soon abandoned their early hope that the process of mirroring could derive the infinite from the finite, the transcendent from limited nature, the absolute from the human. They began to suspect that the transforming power of the mirror could tear its subject down into the depths as readily as it might elevate him to the heights. This fear seems present as early as 1799 in the Phantasien über die Kunst für Freunde der Kunst (Fantasies About Art For Friends of Art), published by Tieck from Wackenroder’s posthumous papers (cf. the »Brief Joseph Berglingers« [Joseph Berglinger’s Letter]); and Brentano’s Chronica des fahrenden Schülers (Chronicles of the Travelling Pupil) of 1818 tells a new, and quite a different mirrorstory — that of a man who invents a special concave mirror: when people spoke or sang at some distance, the sound in the mirror was far sweeter and clearer, and when the sun shone upon it, its warmth became so powerful that one was able to melt metal with its rays.31

The mirror made by the master’s hand intensifies — or, in other words, potentializes — heat, light and sound. But this very potentiation, so central to Romanticism, becomes fatally destructive when a child lies down to sleep in front of the mirror and is burnt to death by the rising sun. Scaling the heights of being, the Romantic utopia has turned into its opposite. 31.

»wenn in der Ferne geredet, oder gesungen ward so klang es in dem Spiegel weit lieblicher und klarer, ja und wenn die Sonne hineinschien, ward ihre Wärme so gewaltig, daß man in ihrem Abstrahl Metall konnte fließen machen« (Brentano 1987, 144).

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When things appear in a mirror, they do so as an inversion — and a fantastic one, at that (Todorov 1970) — of the real world. This world may be comical or wondrous or it may be a fairytale world — the early Romantics trusted in all these qualities, and in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) Alice was to find them behind her parents’ looking-glass: »Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House!« (Carroll 1954, 146). But with increasing frequency the Romantic mirror also gave rise to the uncanny — or what Freud called das Un-heimliche, which is »unlike home«, »un-familiar«, deeply alien (Freud 1986). Thus it is from the turbulent pages of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Phantasiestücke (1814/15) and Nachtstücke (1816/17) that the French, English and American Romantics were to draw their own furies. When Hoffmann’s figures look into a mirror they are often overcome with horror. Erasmus Spikher, from Die Abenteuer der Silvesternacht (New Year’s Eve Adventures, 1815), has every mirror draped, because he has lost his own reflection. When on the other hand the composer Kreisler in Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr, 1819–21) looks into the mirror, he sees himself double — and mad. Wandering around one night he happens to see »his dark figure in the water«;32 in the image, however, he recognises not himself but someone else: »it seemed to him as if the mad painter Ettlinger was gazing at him out of the depths«.33 Kreisler runs from the spot to the house of Master Abraham, where »not far from the door, in the full clarity of light« he encounters »his image, his own self walking beside him«.34 In this distorted double — which, it transpires, is caused by the projection of a concave mirror — he recognises himself walking in his own person towards him: »that’s how it is — there are the two of us, me and my ›doppelgänger‹«.35 In the reflection in the puddle he may have seen not himself but Ettlinger; now, however, he has to come to terms with the reduplication of his own self in the mirror. 8.

Hoffmann’s Serapiontic principle

From this insight Hoffmann educed an entire aesthetic, that of Serapiontic vision. The artistic imagination is conceived as a transforming, anamorphous mirror; but in the place of divine enthusiasm Hoffmann sets the fire of alcohol. If the creative mania is like an inner flame »igniting«36 the powers of the artist, Hoffmann simply provides a recipe for the production of that flame by alcohol:

32.

»seine dunkle Gestalt im Wasser« (Hoffmann 1994, VI, 113/178).

33.

»da war es ihm, als schaue ihn Ettlinger, der wahnsinnige Maler, an aus der Tiefe« (ibid., 178).

34.

»[er trifft] unfern der Türe, im vollen Schimmer des Lichts [auf] sein Ebenbild, sein eignes Ich, das neben ihm daherschritt« (ibid., 179).

35.

»es ist nun nicht anders, wir sind unserer zwei — ich meine ich und mein Doppeltgänger« (ibid., 180).

36.

»recht entzündet« (Hoffmann 1994, I, 66).

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People speak so often of the enthusiasm artists force upon themselves by imbibing strong drink — […] the imagination seems to me here to be like a mill-wheel that is driven more quickly by the swelling stream — as wine is poured on them, the inner wheels turn faster.37

Kreisler, noting this under his Höchst zerstreuten Gedanken, may assert that he »does not believe in it«38, but in the very next moment a fairytale world reveals itself to him in a glass of punch: what […] I see steaming before me in that glass is the drink that […] is produced when cognac, arrack or rum are lit and sugar placed upon a grid to drop into the burning liquid. — […] When the blue flame curls up I see the salamanders coming out, glowing and sparkling, and fighting with the earth spirits who live in the sugar. These in turn deploy themselves bravely, crackling in the yellow luminescence of their enemies.39

The punch burns with a blue flame, and it burns within when one drinks it, artificially stimulating the imagination as if it were a narcotic. What it produces may be as wild and feverish as the works of the painter Francesco in Die Elixiere des Teufels when he drinks Syracuse wine and rages inwardly »as if Mount Vesuvius were spitting wild founts of flame which issued […] in ravenous streams from deep within«.40 Alcohol, in other words — no matter, if wine or punch — can rapidly decentre the subject. What arises from the creative energy which it infuses is a phantasmagoria, and the condition of the subject, drifting haplessly on the »stormy ocean« of these »inner dreams and apparitions«,41 borders closely on madness. Walter Scott was perhaps the first to understand this (cf. his groundbreaking essay on Hoffmann’s universe of the fantastic). Wine, he wrote, creates a fever of exalted imagination that contains within itself a »touch of mental derangement« (Scott 1968, 328); its constructs are as chimerical as the punch that produces them, at times fairytale phantasm, at others wild phantasmagoria. One might indeed say that when the blue flame of the punchbowl replaces the »blaue Blume« — the blue flower of Romantic inspiration — the mirroring process has been counterfeited, putting forgery in the place of the high Romantic absolute. The Brotherhood of Serapion drink punch the evening they are discussing the stories of the hermit Serapion and Counsellor Krespel — it is in this same session that they decide to meet every week in the name and for the furtherance of the »Serapiontic principle«. Serapion was the name of the hermit found by Cyprian in a wood near B***. He claimed to be that same priest who had once »fled from Emperor Decian into the Theban desert and suffered martyrdom in 37.

»Man spricht so viel von der Begeisterung, die die Künstler durch den Genuß starker Getränke erzwingen — […] mir kommt die Phantasie hier vor wie ein Mühlrad, welches der stärker anschwellende Strom schneller treibt — der Mensch gießt Wein auf, und das Getriebe im Innern dreht sich rascher« (ibid., 67).

38.

»[er] glaube nicht daran« (ibid.).

39.

»was […] da vor mir im Glase dampft, ist jenes Getränk, das […] durch den Prozeß erzeugt wird, wenn man Kognak, Arrak oder Rum anzündet und auf einem Rost darüber gelegten Zucker hineintröpfeln läßt. — […] Wenn so die blaue Flamme emporzuckt, sehe ich, wie die Salamander glühend und sprühend herausfahren und mit den Erdgeistern kämpfen, die im Zucker wohnen. Diese halten sich tapfer; sie knistern in gelben Lichtern durch die Feinde …« (ibid.).

40. »wie der Berg Vesuv in wildem Brausen verzehrende Flammen aussprüht, […] in Feuerströmen heraus aus [seinem…] Innern« (Hoffmann 1994, II, 282). 41.

»[auf dem] wogenden Meer [dieser] inneren Erscheinungen und Träume« (Hoffmann 1994, I, 30).

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Alexandria«.42 In fact, however, he was the nephew of Count P** of M —, who had been one of the »most brilliant and widely read minds«43 of his day and a man of »exceptional poetic talents«.44 In the course of that evening’s conversation, Lothar analyses the madness of P**/ Serapion and concludes that the hermit has lost all sense of the meaning and reality of the world outside himself; so much so that he denies its objective existence (»you, my hermit, laid down no outer world«45), believing it the product of his own imagination: »you [asserted] with cruel accuracy […] that only the spirit sees, hears, feels and grasps event and fact, and that therefore those events really happen that the spirit recognises as such«.46 Serapion’s madness, for Lothar, lies in the fact that his inner world has extinguished the outer, (subjective) phantasm replacing (objective) reality. Serapion »recognizes« the wood at B*** as the Theban desert and B*** itself as Alexandria. He is, in other words, the poet-seer, a poet (only) under the condition of his madly displaced vision. The hermit’s stories strangely affected Cyprian when he heard them: »All these figures appeared with such plastic depth and glowing vitality that, swept away as if by magic force, as if in a dream, one was compelled to believe in them«.47 This had nothing to do with the laws of poetry, Lothar remarked; on the contrary: many a work whose form and expression are by no means thought worthless [remains] as ineffective […] as a faded picture that fails to move us, its mighty words serving only to increase the inner coldness pervading us.48

True poetry can only move one if »the poet has really seen what he speaks of«, when this has »touched him with its fire, an inner flame streaming out in glowing words«.49 On the one hand reason, on the other enthusiasm; on the one hand frost, on the other fire; on the one hand »deceiving puppets, laboriously glued together«,50 on the other »burning vitality«.51 Only in Serapiontic vision can poetry attain the real; and if that is true, the inner phantasm of madness 42.

»unter dem Kaiser Decius in die Thebaische Wüste floh und in Alexandrien den Märtyrertod litt« (Hoffmann 1994, IV, 23).

43.

»geistreichsten, vielseitig ausgebildetsten Köpfe« (ibid., 21).

44.

»ein ausgezeichnetes Dichtertalent« (ibid., 21 f.).

45.

»du, o mein Einsiedler, statuiertest keine Außenwelt« (ibid., 65).

46.

»du [behauptetest] mit grauenhaftem Scharfsinn […], daß es nur der Geist sei, der sehe, höre, fühle, der Tat und Begebenheit fasse, und daß also auch sich wirklich das begeben, was er dafür anerkenne« (ibid.).

47.

»Alle Gestalten traten mit einer plastischen Ründung, mit einem glühenden Leben hervor, daß man, fortgerissen, bestrickt von magischer Gewalt wie im Traum, daran glauben mußte« (ibid., 31).

48.

»[es bleibe doch] so manches Dichtwerk, das keineswegs schlecht zu nennen, wenn von Form und Ausarbeitung die Rede […] ganz wirkungslos […] wie ein verbleichtes Bild, daß wir nicht davon hingerissen werden, daß die Pracht der Worte nur dazu dient, den inneren Frost, der uns durchgleitet, zu vermehren« (ibid., 64).

49.

»[wenn] der Dichter […] das wirklich schaute, wovon er spricht [, wenn es ihn] begeisterte, entzündete, so daß nur die inneren Flammen ausströmen durften in feurigen Worten« (ibid.).

50. »trügerische Puppen, mühsam zusammengeleimt« (ibid.). 51.

»glühendes Leben« (ibid., 31).

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is the precondition of artistic truth. The »truth« of reason deceives the poet; only when reason becomes its counterpart (and counterfeit), only when it is replaced by madness, can he achieve true art. That is the essence of Hoffmann’s Serapiontic system, his aesthetics of the simulacrum. 9.

Hoffmann’s vision

Serapiontic vision changes the world, whether through a mirror, through alcohol or through madness — or indeed through simple perspective, as the student Nathanael in Der Sandmann (The Sandman, 1817) discovers when he looks through the eye-glass of the demonic Coppola and suddenly, »as he gazed ever more intently through the glass«,52 the dead (viz. fake) puppetgirl Olimpia appeared to him alive and real. Nathanel’s young fiancée Clara explains to her lover that the world he sees is in its true perspective false and counterfeit. She writes that Olimpia is merely »the phantom of [his] own ego«,53 and the shapes and figures she assumes are his »own mirror-image«54 — one could scarcely wish for a clearer analysis of the mechanics of Hoffmann’s simulacrum than in its effect, described here, on Nathanael’s vision. If the student Nathanael needed no more than an eye-glass or a pair of spectacles, and the Brotherhood of Serapion no more than a bowl of punch, in order to perceive the world of the fantastic hidden within the real, the semi-insane creations of Edgar Allen Poe, foremost among them Roderick Usher, entered that same world through opium-induced stupor. From Coleridge’s »Kubla Khan« (1798) to Baudelaire’s »Rêve Parisien« (1857), the universe built by Euro-American Romanticism extensively on the foundations of Hoffmann’s variously distorted visions saw an aesthetics of drugs as the gateway to its artificial paradise. Thus Baudelaire noted: Intoxication, so long as it endures, will be nothing but an overwhelming dream thanks to the intensity of its colours and the speed of its images, […] hashish will serve as an enlarging mirror for the impressions and familiar thoughts of man.55

In his Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821/22), Thomas De Quincey had remarked that opium has the advantage over alcohol that it does not disturb the mental faculties but reorganizes them: whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner), introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man of his self-possession; opium sustains and reinforces it. Wine unsettles the judgment […] opium, on the contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties (De Quincey 1922, 194). 52.

»wie er immer schärfer und schärfer durch das Glas hinschaute« (Hoffmann 1994, III, 34)

53.

»Phantom [seines] […] eigenen Ichs« (ibid., 21).

54.

»[sein] eignes Spiegelbild« (ibid., 21).

55.

»L’ivresse, dans toute sa durée, ne sera, il est vrai, qu’un immense rêve, grâce à l’intensité des couleurs et à la rapidité des conceptions […] le hashisch sera, pour les impressions et les pensées familières de l’homme, un miroir grossissant« (Baudelaire 1976, 409).

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Under the influence of opium the subject perceives the world quite differently, transforming every aspect of reality into a dream. By exchanging habitual (rational) vision for a »creative state of the eye« (ibid., 255), opium alters the world-as-perceived, translating every thing, thought, feeling and memory into a language of images. As De Quincey writes: whatsoever I happened to call up and to trace by a voluntary act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams; […] whatsoever things capable of being visually represented I did but think of in the darkness, immediately shaped themselves into phantoms for the eye. (ibid., 255 f.)

Thus, under the influence of opium, the creative eye transmutes the unreal constructs of the mind into a deceptively authentic vision, a dream that seems fully and entirely real, the drug changing and deforming rational perceptions into an anamorphous »other«. In his »Rêve Parisien« Baudelaire speaks of the building of a city (Paris) in a dream. Asleep — for »the sleep is full of miracles!«56 — the subject sees a vast landscape modelled on the opium-induced architecture of Coleridge’s »Kubla Khan«, a landscape that will return in the hashish-land of Baudelaire’s Paradis artificiels (Artificial Paradises, 1860). Here, however, it is not to the unconscious self that the dream is revealed; on the contrary, the subject itself builds the land of its visions: »architect of my own fairy-worlds I made […]«.57 Whether dreaming or intoxicated, the visionary is both artist and architect: »And, as a painter proud of his genius, I savour in my canvas the intoxicating monotony of metal, marble and water«.58 Here, the dreamcity is the work, and art the very universe, of intoxication. Reflected in a mirror, we read in another part of Hoffmann’s Abenteuer der Silvesternacht, »the self [splits] […] into truth and dream«.59 For Gérard de Nerval, too, the world would become a double of itself. The opening sentence of Aurélia (1855) speaks of dreams as a second life, a second, transformed existence: »The Dream is a second life […] where the subject in another guise continues the work of existence«.60 This may at first sight seem a conventional enough formula (and since Nodier’s Smarra of 1821 it had been that for French Romanticism, too), for dreaming had long signified the opposite state to rational waking experience. But to Nerval the term meant something else: not the transposition of consciousness into another state, but a condition parallel to and accompanying reality, visible to the person who is capable of looking on reality with a double vision: »everything sometimes adopts a double form«.61 It may happen to this person that while he is actually lying on a camp-bed (»Lying on a camp bed, I heard the

56. »Le sommeil est plein de miracles!« (ibid., 101). 57.

»architecte de mes féeries, je faisais […]« (ibid., 102).

58.

»Et, peintre fier de mon génie, je savourais dans mon tableau l’enivrante monotonie du métal, du marbre et de l’eau« (ibid., 101).

59.

»das eigene Ich [spaltet sich] […] in Wahrheit und Traum« (Hoffmann 1994, I, 343).

60. »Le Rêve est une seconde vie […] où le moi sous une autre forme, continue l’œuvre de l’existence« (Nerval 1966, 359). 61.

»tout prenait parfois un aspect double« (ibid., 363).

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soldiers discussing a stranger arrested like me«),62 and without losing awareness of that external reality for one moment, he begins to perceive another, quite different world around him: Reclining on a camp bed, it was as if I saw the sky unveiled and opened in a thousand forms of extraordinary magnificence […]. Immense circles were traced onto infinity, like the rings formed by water troubled by a body falling into it; each region, peopled by radiant figures, blushed and dissolved in turn, and a god, always the same, rejected the furtive masks of its diverse incarnations with a smile […]. This vision […] did not seem to me unconnected to what was happening around me. 63

Thus the dream rises out of historical life as a second, anamorphous view of reality, one in which every object changes its form and meaning: »Everything was transfigured before my eyes; every person […] appeared to have changed, material objects had something like a half-light which modified their form«.64 The result is a world in which things appear not changed but doubled. Nerval once remarked that to men of reason his peculiar visionary world seemed a sort of illness »in a series of visions […] or pathological vulgarity«.65 There was some truth in this, inasmuch as his ability to lead a »double« existence corresponded biographically with the phases of his madness — just as Aurélia reflected much of his own life-story. Whenever Nerval dreamed, he would wake in the psychiatric clinic (ibid., 365), where his visionary condition was diagnosed as hysterical cramps: The cataleptic state in which I found myself for several days was explained to me scientifically, and the stories of those who saw me thus provoked a certain irritation when I saw that they attributed to the aberration of my spirit the movements and words which coincided with diverse phases, which to me constituted a series of logical events.66

To the world of science, the autobiographical doubling of Nerval’s ego (»Man is double […] I feel two persons within myself«67) is simply madness.

62.

»Couché sur un lit de camp, j’entendais que les soldats s’entretenaient d’un inconnu arrêté comme moi« (ibid., 364).

63.

»Étendu sur un lit de camp, je crus voir le ciel se dévoiler et s’ouvrir en mille aspects de magnificences inouïes […]. D’immenses cercles se traçaient dans l’infini, comme les orbes que forme l’eau troublée par la chute d’un corps; chaque région, peuplée de figures radieuses, se colorait et se fondait tour à tour, et une divinité, toujours la même, rejetait en souriant les masques furtifs de ses diverses incarnations […]. Cette vision […] ne me laissait pas étranger à ce qui se passait autour de moi« (ibid., 364).

64. »tout se transfigurait à mes yeux; chaque personne […] semblait changée, les objets materiels avaient comme une pénombre qui en modifiait la forme« (ibid., 365). 65.

»dans une série de visions […] ou vulgairement maladives« (ibid., 364).

66. »L’état cataleptique où je m’étais trouvé pendant plusieurs jours me fut expliqué scientifiquement, et les récits de ceux qui m’avaient vu ainsi me causaient une sorte d’irritation quand je voyais qu’on attribuait à l’aberration d’esprit les mouvements ou les paroles coïncidant avec les diverses phases de ce qui constituait pour moi une série d’événements logiques« (Nerval 1966, 371 f.). 67.

»L’homme est double […]. Je sens deux hommes en moi« (Nerval 1966, 381).

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10. Dream and madness Romantic mirroring, we may conclude, points towards a single broad equation: The gaze in the mirror is aligned with intoxication (whether by alcohol or drugs), natural dreaming and madness as a series of anamorphous visionary states which transform the phenomenal world and thereby become paradigmatic translations of poetic creativity. So far as dream and madness are concerned, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, an important figure for German Romantic philosophy, would certainly have concurred. In his Symbolik des Traumes (Symbolism of Dreams, 1814), he wrote of both conditions as preparing human consciousness for »the gift of a new and higher aspect«,68 leading man once more to the rich and long-forgotten source of an enhanced awareness: »the psychically awakened power of that faculty of knowing proves its natural shaping and creative force at least in the shadow world of the dream-images which arise from it«.69 Schubert saw dream and madness as poetic conditions — or preconditions — and twentieth century Surrealism with its devotion to »art brut« would think likewise. In mirrors and dreams, in intoxication and madness, new worlds appear to the person who can see them — and sometimes immemorial artistic creativity has been ascribed to the faculty of vision. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Serapiontic aesthetics postulated the artist-visionary in Romantic form as a madman. But it was Arthur Rimbaud who elevated the equation »art = seeing differently = madness« to the status of a modernist programme. In his »Lettres du voyant« (Letters of a Seer), addressed to his friends Georges Izambard (14 May 1871) and Paul Demeny (15 May 1871), he wrote that his work as an artist was simply to enable him to see: »I am working to achieve vision«.70 This presumes a transition at the end of which the self finally is another: »Je est un autre« (Rimbaud 1990, 10) — a condition to be achieved by the »disruption of all the senses«,71 an intentional and calculated state of poetic disordering and dementia that distorts the fine beauty of the rational soul into monstrosity: »The soul should become monstrous, just like the comprachicos, or what? Imagine a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face«.72 11. Poe It is not by chance, therefore, but in pursuit of an early modernist manifesto that, some decades before Rimbaud, Poe systematically situated his narrators on the borders of opium-induced madness. Roderick Usher lives in a permanent drug-soaked delirium, reading, writing poetry, playing music and listening intently for the cries of the sister he has buried alive. Ligeia’s sister 68. »die Gabe eines neuen, höheren Gesichtes« (Schubert 1968, 201). 69. »[es] beweißt jenes psychisch erwachte Erkenntnißvermögen, seine Natur-bildende und schaffende Kraft wenigstens noch im Schatten, an der aus ihm hervorgehenden Bilderwelt des Traumes« (ibid., 201 f). 70. »je travaille à me rendre voyant« (Rimbaud 1990, 10). 71.

»dérèglement de tous les sens« (ibid.).

72.

»il s’agit de faire l’âme monstrueuse: à l’instar des comprachicos, quoi! Imaginez un homme s’implantant et se cultivant des verrues sur le visage« (ibid., 24).

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is working (metapoetically) on a theatrical production when she falls into an opium-dream — and another woman is sacrificed. Poe’s narrators insist on the undiluted rationality of their logic — as in »The Tell-Tale Heart« (1850): »How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story« (Poe 1978, 792). Yet however much they do this, one cannot believe them, for it is all too evident that they simply see things differently: why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. […] It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. […] I think it was his eye! […] I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever (ibid.).

Their story, then, is less than credible, and the task of untangling the real or realistic, the rationally »right« from the twisted, mad and false remains for ever insoluble. Two points of view cross and recross each other in these tales, one of them envisaging the real, the other an imaginary world. 12. Conclusion: Parallels in Romantic painting In conclusion let us turn to the Romantic vision enacted in Caspar David Friedrich’s »Kreidefelsen auf Rügen« (Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, c. 1818). The perspective presented in the painting is vertiginous. In the foreground three figures are placed at the extreme upper edge of an abyss, the chalk cliffs falling away directly beneath them to the sea, which fills the centre background and rises to the pale line of the distant horizon. Two principal lines of interpretation suggest themselves: The wild, threatening cliffs set against the eternal calm of the sea are a metaphor of the sublime, and the painting’s perspective is a powerful metaphor of Romantic vision. For all three figures in the painting are engaged in looking — they are the implied viewers and readers of the landscape it depicts. The central figure has crept forward timidly on all fours to the edge of the precipice and is looking down vertically towards the sea. To the left a woman dressed strikingly in red holds fast to the root of a shrub and looks steeply downwards, pointing with her outstretched arm in the direction of her line of sight. Only the figure on the right, a man dressed in traditional German costume, does not look down but gazes straight at the expanse of sea before him, on which two tiny boats are sailing. The scene is framed by the trunks and upper branches of trees that bend in towards the centre of the picture, the tree-tops meeting there and concealing most of the horizon. And the chalk cliff formation echoes this movement, falling away from the left and right of the picture towards the lower centre, while the strip of grass in the immediate foreground curves upwards from its slightly off-centre mid-point towards the right and left margins of the picture. Altogether this creates an unbroken frame around the centre of the painting, which becomes a window looking out across the sea, and looking at the same time at the three figures it contains. Friedrich’s painting thus doubly thematizes the act of vision: both in the eyes of the three figures at its focus, and in the aesthetic of telescopic vision imposed on the viewer, whose line of sight repeats and reflects what is happening in the inner drama of the picture.

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For Friedrich, seeing is a metaphor of the imagination: »Shut your bodily eye«, he demands of the artist, »and with your inner eye […] you will see what you are to paint«.73 Viewed like this, what the painting sees is not the cliffs at Rügen but the creative imagination itself. What is seen within remains outwardly unseen, as invisible as the scene enacted before the eyes of the figures in Friedrich’s painting. What that scene is we do not know, but in terms of the history of Romanticism we can think of it as the new in its purest manifestation. The message of Friedrich’s painting is that you will only see this if you stand at the edge of the abyss — the abyss that is at one and the same time the limiting depths of vision, of the imagination and of the inner self. Rimbaud had written that attainment of the unknown depends on the ability to loosen the bonds of reason: The poet achieves vision by a long, immense and reasoned disruption of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself […] For he will arrive at the unknown!74

This is the unseen mystery of Friedrich’s vertiginous perspective, which creates a radically different, ir-rational act of vision as a self-explicating icon. It was Poe who contributed the aptest of all descriptions of this process, when he wrote (in »The Imp of the Perverse«, 1845/46): We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss — we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling. […] out of this […] there grows […] a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height (Poe 1978, 1222 f.).

In his story »A Descent into the Maelstrom« (1849), Poe had already sent his protagonist right down into the abyss — to explore the lure of the depths of the sea and the thrill of daring to endure its (sublime) terrors. Prior to Poe’s protagonists, the mirrored Frankenstein monster (in Shelley’s Frankenstein) in a love-death encounter had plunged into the all-engulfing abyss of the Arctic sea. Ever since the Romantic subject grew afraid of looking in the mirror, he has begun to indulge the sensations of descending into the abyss. When the monk Medardus in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Elixiere des Teufels meets Count Viktorin, his exact double, at the edge of the Teufelsgrund (Devil’s Hollow), he pushes him over the precipice, committing the first in an endless series of crimes. Romantic mirroring has ceased to lead to higher realms; on the contrary, it has become in a very literal sense a »mise en abîme«.

73.

»Schließe dein leibliches Auge« (fordert er den Künstler auf), »damit du mit dem geistigen […] siehest dein Bild« (cit. Kupfer 1996, 408).

74.

»Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens. Toutes les formes d’amour, de souffrance, de folie; il cherche lui-même […] Car il arrive à l’inconnu!« (Rimbaud 1990, 24).

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Bibliography Baudelaire, Charles. 1976. Œuvres complètes. Ed. by Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade). Brentano, Clemens. 1987. Chronica des fahrenden Schülers [first version]. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Vol. 19: Prosa IV. Ed. by Jürgen Behrens. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Byron, George Gordon. 1994. Cain: A Mystery. The Works of Lord Byron. Ware: Wordsworth. 511–535. Carroll, Lewis. 1954. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice found there; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Through the Looking-Glass and Other Writings. Ed. by Robin Denniston. London, Glasgow: Collins. 133–266. Engel, Manfred. 1993. Der Roman der Goethezeit: Vol. 1: Anfänge in Klassik und Frühromantik: Transzendentale Geschichten. Stuttgart: Metzler. ———, and Lehmann, Jürgen. 2004. »The Aesthetics of German Idealism and Its Reception in European Romanticism«. Nonfictional Romantic Prose: Expanding Borders (A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages 18). Ed. by Steven Sondrup, Virgil Nemoianu, and Gerald Gillespie. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamin, 69–95. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 1965. Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre. Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Ed. by Reinhard Lauth, Hans Jacob. Vol. I, 2: Werke 1793–95. Stuttgart, Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. 173–451. Freud, Sigmund. 1986. »Das Unheimliche«. Gesammelte Werke: Chronologisch geordnet. 6th edition [1st edition 1947]. Ed. by Anna Freud. Vol. 12. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer. 227–268. Garber, Frederick (ed.). 1988. Romantic Irony (A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages 8). Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1986. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I–III. Werke. Ed. by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. Vol. 13–15. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. 1994. Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben. 8 vols. Ed. by Hans-Joachim Kruse and Rudolf Mingen. Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau. Kant, Immanuel. 1956. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Ed. by Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt/M.: Insel. Kupfer, Alexander. 1996. Die künstlichen Paradiese: Rausch und Realität seit der Romantik: Ein Handbuch. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler. Nerval, Gérard de. 1966. Aurélia. Œuvres. Ed. by Albert Béguin and Jean Richer. Paris: Gallimard. Vol 1: 357–425. Novalis. 1929. Schriften. Ed. by Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel. 3 vols. Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut. ———. 1978a. Die Lehrlinge zu Sais. Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich Hardenbergs. Ed. by Hans-Joachim Mähl and Richard Samuel. Vol. 1: Das dichterische Werk, Tagebücher und Briefe. Ed. by Richard Samuel. München, Wien: Hanser. 199 — 236. ———. 1978b. »Vorarbeiten zu verschiedenen Fragmentsammlungen« [1798]. Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe. Vol. 2. München, Wien: Hanser. 311–424. ———. 1997. Heinrich Ofterdingen. Reprint of the first edition of 1802. Ed. by Joseph Kiermeier-Debre. München: dtv. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1969–1978. The Collected Works. Ed. by Thomas Ollive Mabbott. Vol. 3. Cambridges, Mass: Belknap. Potocki, Jan. 1996. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. Trans. by Ian Maclean. London: Penguin. De Quincey, Thomas. 1922. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Berlin: Internationale Bibliothek. Rimbaud, Arthur. 1990. Seher-Briefe / Lettres du voyant. Trans. and ed. by Werner von Koppenfels. Mainz: Dieterich. Scott, Walter. 1968. On Novelists and Fiction. Ed. by Ioan Williams. London: Routledge. 312–353. Schelling, Friedrich Joseph Wilhelm. 1965. System des transzendentalen Idealismus. Schellings Werke. Ed. by Manfred Schröter. Vol 2: Schriften zur Naturphilosophie 1799–1801. München: Beck. 327–634.

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Schlegel, Friedrich. 1967. »Brief über den Roman«. Kritische Ausgabe. Vol. I: Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796–1801). Ed. and intr. by Hans Eichner. München, Paderborn, Vienna: Schöningh. 329–339. Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich. 1968. Symbolik des Traumes. Bamberg 1814. Repr. Heidelberg: Schneider. Shelley, Mary. 1992. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Ed. by Wendy Lesser. New York: Everyman. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1970. Introduction à la Littérature fantastique. Paris: Edition de Seuil. Wiegand, Anke. 1967. Die Schönheit und das Böse. München, Salzburg: Pustet.

Romantic novel and verse romance, 1750–1850 Is there a Romance continuum? John Claiborne Isbell

0.

»You’re going to need a bigger boat«. Steven Spielberg, Jaws (1975).

Prefatory remarks on terminology

This chapter is a quest, or if you prefer a hypothesis. It treats two Romantic-era corpuses: the novel and the long poem, and argues for their common debt to the medieval and early modern romance tradition. Two alien objects still distort our grasp of Romantic-era production: for prose, 200 years of goal-directed work on the »realist novel«, and for verse, the much longer epic critical tradition. English usage also severs the novel from the romance, and that prompted this project, bothered as I was to see Friedrich Schlegel’s magical ideal, as stated in his 1800 »Brief über den Roman« (Letter on the Novel), simply translated as a novel instead, while he cites Shakespeare and Ariosto as models. Retranslate his term, and we can argue that his vision for a new art form was indeed carried out by the Romantics. This will historicize some lingering positivist historiography and trace a new continuity between Romanticism and the twentieth century, in particular the history of the modern novel from Joyce to magical realism. To begin with, »novel« and »romance«. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and German share the word »novela«/»nouvelle« and variants, meaning in origin a short fiction presented like a news item. The Oxford English Dictionary evokes Boccaccio, and cites a source from 1566, a century prior to Littré’s first source. Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Russian, Serbo-Croat and Czech however use »román« and variants for both novel and romance, as Italian uses »romanzo«; their term »romansa«, »romans«, »romance« is for ballads and music, a distinction shared by all twelve languages. In short, half Europe’s major languages have no separate term »novel« to distinguish verse from prose in extended narratives. The French and German term »nouvelle«/»Novelle« is for a minor genre, the short story, though German keeps »Romanze« for verse. England’s anomalous »novel« category and history evidently misrepresent European Romantic production, a distortion that our using the term »romance« will avoid. This also seems truer to the history of the genre; the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (Great Dictionary of the Italian Language, 1961 ff., 19 vols) opens with an apt historical review, moving from the Greek Daphnis kai Chloë (Daphnis and Chloë) to eleventh-century romancelanguage narratives, »originally in verse« but shifting to prose in the later Middle Ages, to the sixteenth-century verse of Ariosto, then back to Cervantes and Rabelais presented as a prose »transformation of the epic and heroi-comic poem«, to what we might call a refilling of that form with new content in the works of Fielding, Richardson and Defoe.1 The verse Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt (1812–18) and Evgenii Onegin: Roman v stikhakh (Eugene Onegin: 1.

»originariamente in versi«, »trasformazione del poema epico ed eroicomico« (Battaglia 1961, »Romanzo«).

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A Romance in Verse, 1825–33) are as much a part of that long romance tradition as are Austen, Dickens, Balzac or Manzoni — or Scott and Fenimore Cooper, for that matter, who called their works romances. A word on the musical form. Central to Spanish literature is the »romance« or short ballad. The form begins before the reconquista as narrative fragments from epic poems, on Le Cid (The Cid, 1636) for instance; the sixteenth-century »romancero« is one of many collections. As Europe rediscovered ballads in the late eighteenth century, France in particular acquired a taste for writing »romances«, borrowed like the word from Spain, embedded in stories where hero or heroine sing them or sung aloud in Paris salons. The musical fashion, like the word (»romansa«, etc.), reached Europe from France, and German and Italian composers produced famous settings: Beethoven, Rossini, Verdi. Mendelssohn’s Romances sans paroles (Romances without Words, 1829–45) are a paradox Verlaine later exploits in poetry. This short form may seem tangential to our romance vs. novel investigation, much as a Tasmanian wolf is not a wolf, but it is linked both historically, in the breakdown of medieval Spanish »epic« or romance; thematically, as a narrative form whose favored content is love and chivalry; and generically, since romance ballads are frequently embedded in romance fictions by Romantic authors, even in fictions in verse. Again, I posit that the Romantic era perceived a »romance continuum«, which has since and regrettably been occluded by critical vocabulary. The very word »romantic«, which derives directly from »romance« (as in Scott’s »Essay on Romance«, 1824), might have warned against that occlusion. What is a non-musical romance? It seems worth listing some elements, to compare with Schlegel’s list for his »Roman«. The term derives from the Latin »romanice«; a tale in the vernacular. So it is a tale, a narrative, not drama or an »I love you« lyric poem; narrated, it is not an epistolary novel, though those may have romance elements. Since its naming, it has reviewed love and chivalry, or at least courtly etiquette; this applies also to the works of the seventeenth-century »précieuses« like Mlle de Scudéry, the influential soil from which Defoe and Mme de La Fayette arise, and to the popular romance tradition that continues through the next century alongside canonical male novelists and leads uninterrupted through the 1790s. The romance genre is thus, bizarrely, simultaneously a courtly, popular and folk tradition: its heroes are courtly, its popular success visibly continues today, and it speaks for a national against a Classical tradition, a sort of people’s voice. Its place in the political spectrum, for a revolutionary-imperial Europe, is thus usefully ambiguous, more complex than that of the »bourgeois« realist novel we have inherited from Champfleury. Two other themes are wit and imagination. Wit is more than humor; Mlle de Scudéry’s fairly serious romances are full of the embedded narratives and arabesques which represent Schlegel’s ideal, and which he finds splendidly expressed in Ariosto or Cervantes. The arabesque is pure form independent of any mimesis; the romance tradition frees art from imitating reality, and I will trace this freedom in some »realist novels« we shall mention. I think of Lukács’s argument that to be truly real, Balzac needed characters who were larger than reality, or of Baudelaire’s bewilderment that people should ever call Balzac a realist. As with modern magical realism, an art where the real and the ideal cohabit has more scope than straight realism for showing how will and circumstance — or energy and matter — divide the human condition, in a truth self-evident to Europe after 1789.

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The remainder of this chapter briefly reviews various Romantic literatures, focusing on the verse-prose frontier and the presence of »romance« in this art. Giving a new entelechy to these creations will sometimes be an act rich in ideological consequences, notably in resituating the artwork’s relations to the imagination and to the European tradition, literary and historical. As I state, this is a global hypothesis, making minimal use of biographical sources, for instance, which offer ground for further remarks. 1.

In German lands

Friedrich Schlegel in 1800, like Wordsworth the same year in his new preface to Lyrical Ballads, writes in reaction to »frantic novels« and »outrageous stimulation«; Schlegel’s entire Letter addresses a woman who has been reading the wrong novels, and Wordsworth’s parallel reminds us that Gothic romances were Europe’s best-selling fictional genre in the 1790s and perhaps beyond. Though Schlegel calls her reading immoral, this is not a simple stand against a feminized or Gothic reading tradition (contrast II: The British Isles); instead, he targets Fielding and the forgotten Lafontaine. Within this didactic space, Schlegel both describes his ideal for the future and anchors it in a past tradition, by means of examples stretching from antiquity to contemporary writing; the whole lies within the larger frame of his Gespräch über die Poesie (Conversation About Poetry, 1800), reminding us that verse and prose are for Schlegel intimately linked. The text opens with Amalia’s remark that Jean Paul’s works are not romances (or novels), but »a bright jumble of sickly wit«.2 The narrator agrees, calling such »grotesques« — one thinks of Hugo — »the only romantic products of our unromantic age«; the term »novel« loses both pun and etymology in this famous remark, as in the subsequent »A novel is a romantic book«.3 He links »sickly wit« to the arabesque, stressing Sterne and Diderot but adding Swift, Ariosto, Cervantes, Shakespeare in his argument that in an unfantastic, ironic age, natural poetry (»Naturpoesie«) emerges as playful wit and arabesque. The terms echo those of Schiller’s 1795 Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naive and Sentimental Poetry), which calls modernity divided; Goethe’s »I call the Romantic the sickly« also seems apt. Schlegel goes on to praise both the fantastic in art and the ironic reading of bad books as kitsch, the suspension of disbelief or a divided self winking at its own enthusiasm. Schlegel cites the history of the term »Roman« in an apt definition of the romance: »that is Romantic which gives us a sentimental content in a fantastic form«.4 He compares Petrarch and Tasso with what he calls Ariosto’s »Romanzo«, stating that the spirit of love must be invisibly omnipresent in Romantic poetry. In the visible world, fantasy and wit must intimate the riddle of eternal love; and the next words contain Schlegel’s epochal distinction, the first in history, between Classical and Romantic poetry. Romantic or romance poetry pays no attention to »the difference between appearance 2.

»ein buntes Allerlei von kränklichem Witz« (F. Schlegel 1978, 202).

3. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »die einzigen romantischen Erzeugnisse unsers unromantischen Zeitalters«, »Ein Roman ist ein romantisches Buch« (ibid., 203, 209). 4.

»ist eben das romantisch, was uns einen sentimentalen Stoff in einer fantastischen Form darstellt« (ibid., 206).

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and reality, between play and seriousness«.5 Where the Classics use mythology, Schlegel argues, Romantic poetry rests on history, and romances from the Roman d’Alexandre (Romance of Alexander, 12th century) to Le grand Cyrus (The Great Cyrus, 1649–53) five centuries later are famous precisely for their magical treatment of historical figures. He concludes thus: »I seek and find the Romantic in the older moderns, in Shakespeare, Cervantes, in Italian poetry, in that age of knights, love and fairy tales, whence the thing and the word itself arise […] As our poetry with the romance, so that of the Greeks began with the epic«.6 Visibly the standard term »novel« will do odd things to this statement. Schlegel opposes this genre to the drama, not an organic whole, and to the epic, lacking wit and an individual’s voice. Songs are different: »I can hardly imagine a romance otherwise than mixed with narration, song and other forms«.7 Any theory of the genre must itself be a romance, he adds, with authors as characters; Novalis will do this with Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Henry von Ofterdingen, 1802), and it foretells the history of Romantic painting. Romance, Schlegel suggests, should contain the author’s quintessence; he praises memoirs and confessions, and values peculiar detail even in the false school of Richardson and Rousseau, so lacking in lived reality. In »realist« novels’ plots, Schlegel values only the closing arabesque where fates are magically tidied. In all this, one thinks of Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination. German authors carried out almost this entire agenda. Schiller wrote a romance, Der Geisterseher: Aus den Papieren des Grafen O (The Ghost-Seer, 1787). Schlegel contrasts fairy tale (Märchen) and novella (Novelle); Goethe writes one of each under its generic name. Like Voss’s Luise: Ein ländliches Gedicht (Luise: A Rural Poem, 1782–94), Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea (Hermann and Dorothea, 1797) is an idyll rather than a verse romance; Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther, 1774; 1787) is epistolary, and ���������������������� Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809) closer to Henry James, but Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (William Meister’s Apprenticeship Years, 1795/96) is the first Bildungsroman, tracing a child’s rejection of bourgeois utility in favor of the theater’s illusion, a self-reflexive meditation on art, illusion and the self. Like Faust (1808/32), it contains embedded songs. Schlegel reviews Meister, and Novalis writes Ofterdingen, as a non-realist reply: during the Crusades, the dreamy Ofterdingen (a historical Minnesinger) travels with merchants and family, finding his own story and face in an ancient romance manuscript, learning of the poetry hidden in all things — war, mining — and of the coming magical transformation of the world; embedded tales and eighteen embedded poems dissolve borders between poetry and prose, dream and waking, and disperse the framing narrative into a harmonic pattern which ends unfinished. Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen: Eine altdeutsche Geschichte (Franz Sternbald’s Ramblings, 1798) is a less fantastic 5.

»romantischen Poesie«, »auf den Unterschied von Schein und Wahrheit, von Spiel und Ernst« (ibid., 208).

6.

»Da suche und finde ich das romantische, bei den ältern Modernen, bei Shakespeare, Cervantes, in der italiänischen Poesie, in jenem Zeitalter der Ritter, der Liebe und der Märchen, aus welchem die Sache und das Wort selbst herstammt […]. Wie unsre Dichtkunst mit dem Roman, so fing die der Griechen mit dem Epos an« (ibid., 208 f.).

7.

»Ja ich kann mir einen Roman kaum anders denken, als gemischt aus Erzählung, Gesang und andern Formen« (ibid., 210).

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reply to Meister: it is the artistic wanderings of Dürer’s pupil, echoing the delicate meditation on art Tieck co-signed with Wackenroder, Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar, 1796). Tieck is more ludic and self-reflexive in plays like Der gestiefelte Kater: Ein Kindermärchen in drei Akten (Puss in Boots, 1797) or Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva: Ein Trauerspiel (Life and Death of Saint Genevieve, 1800), mixing lyric and drama; his later historical romances like the Shakespearean Dichterleben (Poets’ Lives, 1826/31) or Vittoria Accorombona: Ein Roman (Vittoria Accorombona: A Novel, 1840, a year after Stendhal) draw on Scott. Hölderlin’s Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechenland (Hyperion or the Hermit in Greece, 1797/99) is a poet’s epistolary novel, a Werther fighting for Greek independence with his lovely »Song of Fate« near the end. Schlegel wrote his own dullish Lucinde: Ein Roman (Lucinde: A Novel, 1799). Jean Paul’s dozen good novels are not full of lyric pieces, but they are Schlegel’s model. Die unsichtbare Loge: Eine Biographie (The Invisible Lodge, 1793) and its appendix Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterlein Maria Wuz in Auenthal (Life of the Contented Schoolmaster Wuz, 1793) were, he said, held together by the binding (Casey 1992, 12). Von Knör promises his daughter to the man who can beat her at chess; her child is brought up underground for eight years, then tutored by Jean Paul. Hesperus (1795) is narrated by another Jean Paul, a man who lives on a remote island, basing his news on dispatches from his dog. Blumen-, Frucht- und Dornenstücke oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten F.St. Siebenkäs (The Marriage, Death and Wedding of the Poverty Lawyer Sevencheese, 1796/97) has the hero, or perhaps his double, writing Jean Paul’s Teufelspapiere (Devil’s Papers) for him; we are midway between Sterne and Flann O’Brien. Jean Paul and Siebenkäs reappear in Titan (1800/03), which ends in a wild parody of Fichte; Des Feldpredigers Schmelzle Reise nach Flätz (The Field Preacher Schmelzle’s Trip to Flätz, 1809) is full of footnotes, »numbered at random and with no reference to anything in the text« (Casey 1992, 35). A desolate imitator of Jean Paul, signing himself Bonaventura (i.e. August Klingemann), produced the brilliant Nachtwachen (Night Watches, 1804). So much for Weimar and the Berlin Frühromantiker. Charles Dickens certainly knew of Jean Paul, whom Carlyle translated, and his influence on the arabesques of E.T.A. Hoffmann is marked, as is his mix of sentiment, wit and magic. In Hoffmann’s Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie […] in zufälligen Makulaturblättern (Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, along with a Fragmentary Biography […] in Stray Printer’s Sheets, 1819), for instance, the philistine tomcat uses the verso of the violinist Kreisler’s tormented memoirs to write his own dull autobiography, and the two stories are published interleaved, parody and enthusiasm together. Bleak House (1852) does something like this, juxtaposing idyllic and ironic chapters. Among Hoffmann’s shorter pieces, Der Sandmann (The Sandman, 1817) opens Offenbach’s opera, linking magic and nightmare grotesque as Nußknacker und Mausekönig (Nutcracker and Mouse King, 1816) does; in Hoffmann’s world, heroines are thrown out of windows or bump their heads — Rat Krespel (Councillor Krespel, 1818), Doge und Dogaressa (Doge and Dogaressa, 1818) — in a call to earth from romance. In sum, Jean Paul and Hoffmann perfectly fuse the ideal, the real and the parodic, as Schlegel desired; Hoffmann is rarely self-referential (Don Juan, 1813), but his tales are full of artists. Chamisso and La Motte Fouqué, fellow Prussian Romantics, produced two more classics in this vein: Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story, 1814), in which Schlemihl sells his shadow to the devil, and Undine (1811), in

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which a water sprite weds a mortal, as in Andersen. Two other Berliners: before his 1811 suicide, Kleist presages in his tales another aspect of Hoffmann, the weird combination of deadpan and grotesque, though he lacks the fantastic element; Eichendorff ’s short Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Good-for-Nothing, 1826) has fourteen embedded poems in its idyll reminiscent of Jean Paul. Heidelberg produced Brentano’s folk tale Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl (Story of Good Kasperl and Beautiful Annerl, 1817), Godwi oder das steinerne Bild der Mutter: Ein verwilderter Roman (Godwi, or the Stone Image of the Mother, 1801), whose hero narrates his own death — like the frenetic Pétrus Borel’s Champavert. Contes immoraux (Champavert, 1833), and Achim von Arnim’s Isabella von Ägypten (Isabella of Egypt, 1812) and Die Kronenwächter (Guardians of the Crown, 1817), two romances: Isabella enchants Charles V, two noblemen guard the last emperor. Arnim’s 1817 preface, »Poetry and History«, stresses the value of historical romance before Scott, Cooper or Dumas. Such is German prose narrative, 1780–1830; German has no prominent verse romance in this period, though Bürger’s ballads and Klopstock’s epic Der Messias (The Messiah, 1748) drew attention. Ironic play and aporia, magic, and historical romance — three elements which are largely anathema in the »realist novel« — run throughout this corpus, midway between Sterne and the twentieth century; Fontane’s later realism seems almost a diversion. Moreover, this production is routinely seen as the central corpus of the period; even the theater of Schiller draws on elements from this magical tradition — e.g. in Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans, 1801) — as do Goethe and the Romantic dramatists, the great anthologies and translations, the critical texts. Clearly the corpus elaborates a self-conscious German national identity, anchored in folk and medievalism in distinction to French classicizing hegemony; the ironic play between will and circumstance seems at its most extreme in Hoffmann, where heroes bump heads and the sandman’s glasses blind Nathanael, but this only crystallizes a gulf between dream and reality that runs throughout this war-torn society and its productions. It is not the commonsense world of Fielding, it is the terrible, post-1793 world of romance; this is no tranquil bourgeois ascendancy, though tranquility may be regretted or desired. Much of this local tradition stayed in Germany, but not all: besides Schlegel’s epochal distinction, Werther, Jean Paul and Hoffmann had a broad influence on world Romanticism, notably France, Britain and the United States (Mérimée, Gautier, Dickens, Poe). 2.

The British Isles

A growing consensus (cf. Williams, Kiely, McDermott, Langbauer, Ross, Richter, Hoeveler) has traced a continuous, largely female British romance tradition from approximately Lyly to the Brontës, presenting the realist school of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding as a »younger sister«, to quote an author of 1787 (Williams 1970, 341): linked, rival and semi-independent. Williams’s 101 eighteenth-century prefaces, extracts and reviews realign post hoc distinctions, calling Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749) a »prose epick composition« like his own preface to The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742) or reviewing Richardson’s »romances« (ibid, 126, 437). Kiely cites Clara Reeve in 1785: »The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it was written. The Romance in lofty and elevated language,

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describes what has never happened nor is likely to« (Kiely 1972, 3), an apt definition of Kiely’s twelve »Romantic novels«: Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764), Beckford’s Vathek: An Arabian Tale (1786), Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Godwin’s Things as They Are: or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance (1796), Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), Scott’s Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818), Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale (1820), Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Reeve continues: »Romances at this time were quite out of fashion, and the press groaned under the weight of Novels« (The Progress of Romance, 1785, in Langbauer 1990, 64), but her The Old English Baron is subtitled A Gothic Story. Walpole, Beckford, Lewis, Shelley and Maturin use magic directly — Vathek, the monk and Melmoth all deal with demons — but as Schlegel stated, Romanticism depends from its outset (a start possibly in Walpole?) on doubt and ironic suspension. Hogg’s murderer, who killed his older brother, may also have made a satanic pact; like him, we cannot be certain — any more than Radcliffe’s and Austen’s »silly« heroines are certain about reality, or Scott’s Edward Waverley or Emily Brontë’s narrator quite understand events they encounter. As in Kant or Berkeley, there is an epistemological gap between the perceiving self and perceived reality. Here lies the horror of Caleb Williams: discovering Falkland’s murder of Tyrrel, he has crossed that gap into a world he cannot present within a Tom Jones plot, and his epistemological isolation makes him a hunted pariah. Curious that Godwin calls this work Things as they are, while his Imogen: A Pastoral Romance (1784) and St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799) are called romances. Even the straightest contemporary heroic romances, like Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820), tend to have Gothic elements like prison, torture and witch trials to them, reflecting the compromising of romance that Schlegel and the Gothic both address. In these terms, Romantic »parody« has a fantastic, compromising function, less An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1741) than Schlegel; Kiely reflects that view in his inclusion of Nightmare Abbey, and we will meet the idea again throughout Europe, from Byron to Stendhal and Pushkin. If Gothic irony and wit rely on a divided self, this also appears formally in the systematic new use of chapter epigraphs, starting with Radcliffe and Lewis, then followed by countless Romantics — Scott, Shelley, Maturin, Peacock and Eliot in England; Cooper and Poe in America; Hugo, Mérimée, Vigny and Stendhal in France; along with Byron and Hemans in poetry. Epigraphs are broadly unknown in the European novel until then. Epigraphs have countless functions — fetish authenticity for a narrative, a marker for historical continuity (Vigny), a tuningfork setting for what follows — but three functions closely echo Schlegel: first, ironic play in the Jean Paul tradition, an invitation to dialectical arabesque; like Scott’s »Old Play« attributions or Hugo’s Han d’Islande (Han of Iceland, 1823), Stendhal routinely concocts epigraphs, even »Truth, bitter truth«,8 to open Le rouge et le noir: Chronique du XIXe siècle (The Red and the Black, 1830); second, a fracturing as in Novalis of linear narrative and the hegemonic self it implies (who speaks these epigraphs?); and third, again like Novalis, a breakdown of the borders between poetry and prose, between dream and reality. Lewis’s taste for Augustan poets neatly reverses priorities, locating their reason amid his satanic chaos. Despite Genette’s excellent 8.

»La vérité, l’âpre vérité« (Stendhal 1957, epigraph to ch. 1).

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work, there is more to be said here; epigraphs are, after all, the primary means by which lyric interlude punctuates Romantic narrative. Since Scott and Byron shaped world Romanticism and other British authors did not, they merit focus. One reason for this chapter was Scott’s switch in 1814 from best-selling metrical to prose romances, often attributed to Byron’s huge success with Childe Harold (1812–18). The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), influenced by Southey, sold 15,000 copies, followed by six other verse romances up to Harold the Dauntless (1817) — Scott wrote verse even after Waverley. All sold very well, and as his biographer Lockhart suggested, he likely switched for esthetic, not financial reasons: Byron, he felt, could reveal »a deeper region of the soul than his own poetry could stir«, an apt verdict that Scott’s pooh-poohing of his own poetry supports (Roberts 1999, 179 f.). Scott’s verse narratives seem listless, distracted by form from storytelling, while his 28 prose narratives explode with invention. America and Europe (Cooper, Dumas) followed Scott in using prose romances — vox populi — to tell their nations the story of their existence, and the century’s historians had equal debts to his work. Waverley opens these windows. Whalley’s chapter in Eichner has traced the rare and contested instances where Britain’s major Romantic poets use the term »romantic«, what you find in a romance; as Pepys wrote, »The whole story of this lady is a romance and all she does is romantic« (McDermott 1989, 120). Kiely finds three instances of the term describing Waverley’s initial impressions, each qualified — »almost, not precisely, bordering on« — and concludes that Scott is ironizing an »adolescent fever fed by exotic reading« (142), as do Peacock or Austen. Lukács and others thus argue that Scott is an antiromantic ironist, reclaiming him for the realist novel; Kiely notes instead how the irony diminishes, and the hero’s way of seeing things »is quite literally swallowed up by his new environment«, until Waverley can be led by a fair Highland damsel, writes Scott, »like a knight of romance« (138–144). Verse and the Gothic are stylized forms that constrain their authors; Scott in Waverley has found a bridge to Coleridgean suspension of disbelief by passing through irony at the outset, and this will simplify the task of all his successors. Richter likewise argues that Scott’s footnote erudition licensed male readers to enjoy the »female« romance genre, much as his embedded Gothic narratives offset the comparative »realism« of a still-Gothic plot like the epistolary Redgauntlet (102–105). In England, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, and Thackeray draw on Scott’s innovations after 1826. Byron’s solution is different. With Childe Harold’s subtitle, A Romaunt, Byron works to reclaim the long romance tradition and highlights the »t« in »romantic«; as in Sternbald and Ofterdingen, a divided artist encounters Europe, but Byron, like Goethe in Meister or Chateaubriand in René, makes his story contemporary, thus stressing the self-reflexive link between author and hero, and ironizing the gap between our dreams and prosaic, post-Waterloo reality. In sum: »straight« Romantic-era verse romance lacks tension and bite, and I say this regretfully of Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz: czyli Ostatni zajazd na Litwie as of Longfellow; the form requires irony to live. It is fitting that Don Juan (1819–24) like Beppo: A Venetian Story (1818) is in the ottava rima of Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso, Italy’s three great Renaissance romancers; just as Ariosto lovingly mocks what others play straight, so Byron parodies his own Byronic persona (McGann 1999, 28, reviews his comic debunking in Manfred: A Dramatic Poem [1817], as in Beppo). The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale (1813) and The Corsair: A Tale (1814), even Mazeppa (1819) are largely »straight« Eastern romances with a unilinear narrative, though Mazeppa concludes,

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»The king had been an hour asleep«. The narrator of Don Juan is omnipresent, as Schlegel desired, conflating his tale with an encyclopedic, parodic review of existence, art and the self in one superb, monstrous arabesque, stretching from love to anthropophagy. Britain’s great female romance tradition — Behn, Manley, Haywood, Lennox, Burney, Smith, Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Edgeworth, Austen, Shelley, the Brontës — has at its core, Ross implies, a sensible female witness, a continuity misread by men insisting in Gothic on the male villain’s primacy, unlike the sentimental novel, and regretting the heroines’ search for logic (Ross 1991, 143 f.). Ross’s broader terms show Radcliffe’s and Burney’s closely related plots and, as she writes, they confound »traditional categories such as ›novel of manners‹, ›sentimental novel‹, ›didactic novel‹ and ›Gothic novel‹« (ibid., 136). »The life of every Woman is a Romance!«, writes Burney (cited ibid., 39); but as Don Quixote explains to Sancho in answer to Northrop Frye, romance subverts the existing order so that it can re-establish divine distinctions that have been lost (ibid., 98). It is odd that men should value in their fictions the aping of reality, and condemn romance for its freedom — but as Ross remarks, »official truth was merely verisimilitude for women, something lived second hand« (ibid., 4). In these terms, all these women’s heroines, Gothic or sentimental, share a Romantic, even a fantastic epistemological enterprise: to identify reason in the romance they inhabit. Haywood, Lennox, and Austen parody in short not romance convention, but its reading of reality; Wollstonecraft’s Maria, in The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria. A Fragment (1798), is told by her brutish husband that her sentiments are »romantic« (Langbauer 1990, 100); Radcliffe punctiliously explains each Gothic event she presents; Edgeworth’s narrator in Castle Rackrent (1800), who cannot read his own stupidity, narrates deadpan a Jewish wife’s years of imprisonment by her husband for money; Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) is an apocalypse reconstructed from ancient fragments; Wuthering Heights is narrated through a double veil, as Nelly Dean talks to the male narrator; and Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) goes blind. Reality is darkness visible. This is far from all; Richter reminds us of Lane’s Minerva Press, suggesting that roughly 40% of works of fiction published in 1795–1820 »would be classified as Gothic novels« (Richter 1996, 90, 101). Is this Schlegel’s ideal? Love and epistemology are omnipresent in this tradition; ironic suspension is recurrent, as is his play »between appearance and reality« — compensating for the dearth of formal play between verse and prose, since that formal play is subsumed within a deeper play between mystery and reason, even perhaps in Austen’s great studies of mores. Hazlitt and De Quincey, in the Liber Amoris: or, The New Pygmalion (1823) and the Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821/22), answer as Hogg does to Schlegel’s stress on the possibilities of the confessional genre; Dickens, finally, speaks directly to the romance tradition. As Langbauer illustrates, his »contemporaries and early critics unhesitatingly labeled his work as ›romance‹«, and Dickens says as much himself: in the preface to his weekly journal Household Words, »in all familiar things […] there is Romance enough, if we will find it out«; in the preface to Bleak House, which dwells »upon the romantic side of familiar things«; and in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836/37) — »there’s romance enough at home without going half a mile for it« (Langbauer 1990, 133, 148). Dickens does not mix genres, and his two historical novels, of sixteen, are set in the recent past: the French Revolution, the Gordon Riots of 1780 (A Tale of Two Cities [1859], Barnaby Rudge [1841]). Only his Christmas stories have supernatural events, as in A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (1843). Yet magic runs all through

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his production, from the »Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so« wandering up Holborn Hill on the first page of Bleak House to the way in Great Expectations (1860/61) that every new stranger is someone’s lost wife or father, as if in Ariosto. Dickens completes our survey of British novel writing, 1750–1850, and romance has evidently touched every part of it. Now for the bridge to verse romance. Roberts’s catalog of Romantic and Victorian Long Poems reminds us just how neglected this genre has been, despite its evident centrality to the age and its authors, who largely considered their short lyrics as occasional and tangential productions. Critics are reclaiming the Big Six here — Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats — but still neglect Southey, Moore, Campbell, Landor, Hemans, Tighe among many. I also regret that Roberts misses Rogers and Crabbe, along with Combe’s lovely Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1812), that Hudibrastic verso to Childe Harold’s tormented wanderings. Around 1800, the novel’s amorphous critical and empirical heritage makes the romance border fluid, and a centuries-old tradition suggests revising our criteria; the long poem had much sharper boundaries, and idylls, pastorals or epics are self-evident poetic vessels which romance will do no more than color. Blake’s long visionary poems for instance — Vala: or the Four Zoas (1797), or Milton (1809), or Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1810) — are not romances per se but theogony, echoing Klopstock’s and Milton’s Christian epics in their lack of human agon; as Schlegel said, romance rests on history. Yet Blake’s vision of giants, palaces and divine order betrayed until triumphant is that of Novalis or El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (Don Quixote, 1605/15); romance inhabits his epic structure. Keats later faces this question in Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818) and Hyperion: A Fragment (1820); Endymion echoes the Greek shepherd romances of Spenser or Mlle de Scudéry, while Hyperion adapts that romance pastoral setting to the fall of the Titans before Olympus. Wolfson’s very good chapter on romance in Keats finds the genre central to his project, reviewing his repeated shift from expected »old Romance« to a meta-romance shaped by irony (285): Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes (1820), »La Belle Dame sans Merci« (1820). Shelley’s Greece, as in Byron or Hölderlin, is not always antique; The Revolt of Islam: A Poem (1818), neglected though twice as long as Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama (1820), is modern romance, following Laon’s and Cythna’s adventures and struggle against oppression. Coleridge’s narratives — »Christabel« (1816), »The Ancient Mariner« (1798) — are perhaps romances in the Spanish sense, and certainly both magical and fantastic, but too short for our criterion; Wordsworth’s short pieces are similar — »The Idiot Boy« (1798), »The Ruined Cottage« (1797) — but his longer poems raise interesting questions. The Prelude: or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (published 1850), after considering producing »some old/ Romantic tale, by Milton left unsung« (I, 169), instead traces like Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre the artist’s formation from childhood, though it eschews the magic of Tieck or Novalis; The Excursion (1814), a story of long chats with neighbors, also more closely resembles prose narrative than most contemporary poetry — for instance, Wordsworth like Byron favors first-person narration, unusual in long poems, encouraging Keats’s calling his art »the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime« (Wolfson 1986, 35). The famous Rogers did not write romances; Crabbe, also quite celebrated, did, and The Borough (1810) and Tales of the Hall (1819) deserve a look from students of Wordsworth’s terrible and simple tales. Cooper certainly knew Campbell’s fine Gertrude of Wyoming or the Pennsylvanian Cottage (1809), where evil Mohawks kill all but the last Oneida; Landor’s Gebir

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(1798), set mainly in ancient Egypt and the underworld, has a good romance plot of love, magic, betrayal and obstacles. Campbell and Landor have seen, like Wordsworth and Crabbe, that they can versify material common in contemporary prose; Southey and Moore likewise draw on prose orientalist romances such as Vathek or the Livre des Mille et une Nuits (Book of the 1001 Nights), Southey in the Arab and Indian Thalaba, the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810), Moore in his playful Persian Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (1817). Wilkie notes that Southey carefully distinguished these two romances from his three epics (Wilkie 1965, 36). Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s The Improvisatrice (1824), a response to Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (Corinne, or Italy, 1807) features embedded romances improvised by the heroine; Hemans’s three long poems Modern Greece: A Poem, The Abencerrage and The Forest Sanctuary (1817–25) form a curious trio, showing Greece oppressed by Muslims, medieval Spaniards fighting Muslims, and a Spaniard fleeing the Inquisition for the New World; the last two are what Scott called »metrical romances«, while the first is a philosophical poem. Tighe’s Psyche: or, The Legend of Love (1805), a Greek or Spenserian romance, influenced Shelley and Keats. In sum, verse romances are a lost planet in Romantic-era British fiction, standing oddly alongside the prose romances of the age and casting new light, I hope, on the canon in verse and prose alike. One thinks of the word romance in Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, which does not specify verse or prose: »A military fable of the middle ages; a tale of wild adventures in war and love. […] A lie; a fiction« (Johnson 1775). 3.

France

The French eighteenth century produced little in the vein of Mlle de Scudéry. Paralleling the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Françoise (Dictionary of the French Academy) on the word »roman« — »A work ordinarily in prose, containing fictions which represent adventures rare in life, and the complete development of human passions«9 — Marivaux, Rousseau and the epistolary novel trace human passion, while Voltaire’s tales certainly have rare adventures; but despite Voltaire’s ironic play, Schlegel carefully avoids him, and he rejects Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse: Lettres de deux amans […] au pied des Alpes (Julie, or The New Heloise, 1761) in favor of his Les confessions (The Confessions, 1782–88). As the century’s verse demonstrates, the age lacked poetry. To Diderot, who is one of Schlegel’s models, let us add de Sade in the 1790s Gothic tradition, though the mission of his heroines is less to interpret than to suffer pain. Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginie, 1787) and La chaumière indienne (The Indian Cottage, 1791) gave Europe the term pariah; two fine, and very influential, compromised romances, where today’s tropics do not protect man from himself. Barthélemy’s popular Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (Voyage of Young Anarcharsis in Greece, 1788) uses a romance frame to present Greek civilization. French eighteenth-century critics stressed believability, a refusal of epistemological crisis (they liked Condillac), a position uncongenial to romance, and all these authors except Diderot and Sade present a surface less troubled than 9.

»Ouvrage ordinairement en prose, contenant des fictions qui représentent des aventures rares dans la vie, et le développement entier des passions humaines« (Dictionnaire 1813: »Roman«).

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Wordsworth. Epistemology, not its crisis, is of course central to authors like Mme de Graffigny or Choderlos de Laclos, in his splintered Les liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons, 1783). Is the French Romantic novel quite different? Staël, Genevan like Rousseau, published in both centuries; she first tells »romance« stories set in Africa or the West Indies, with embedded sung romances; moving to longer narratives, she tries letters (Delphine, 1802), then an exploded form — written alongside Schlegel’s older brother August Wilhelm — combining lyric interlude, play performance, text copied or read aloud and diary fragments (Corinne, 1807). Chateaubriand’s short romances Atala (1801) and René (1802), set in French Louisiana, are in the Paul et Virginie tradition, while Les martyrs: ou Le Triomphe de la religion chrétienne (The Martyrs, or The Triumph of Christian Religion; 1809), set in Diocletian’s Empire, combines epic catalogs and nations in movement with romance hermits, love and adventures in what he called a prose epic — certainly a new creation. Mme Cottin and the equally popular Mme de Genlis wrote historical romances of love and chivalry: Mathilde (1805) is set in the Crusades, Mademoiselle de Clermont (1802) in the court of Louis XIV. Critics continue to sever Romantic-era French poetry and prose, a misguided and misleading act given that France’s canonical Romantic poets all published novels: Vigny’s Cinq-Mars (1826) learnedly reviews a key moment in national history, and follows Scott even in using chapter epigraphs (like Hugo, Mérimée and Stendhal); also before Dumas, Mérimée’s 1572: Chronique du règne de Charles IX (1572: Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX, 1829), with its ending left for the reader to determine, does likewise, as, among other things, does Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris 1482 (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831). Vigny also wrote Stello (1832), Daphné (begun 1837, published 1912), and Servitude et grandeur militaires (Military Servitude and Grandeur, 1835), focused on the divided modern self as are Lamartine’s Raphaël: Pages de la vingtième année (1849) and Graziella (1851), and Musset’s bleak Confession d’un enfant du siècle (Confessions of a Child of His Time, 1836); but Musset also wrote Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet (Letters of Dupuis and Cotonet, 1836/37) and Histoire d’un merle blanc (Story of a White Blackbird, 1842), like Byron burlesquing all Romantic cliché. The Letters quite visibly shaped Flaubert’s later Bouvard et Pécuchet (Bouvard and Pécuchet, 1881). In sum, French Romantic poets combine poetry and prose most directly by writing both; the term »romance« seems directly applicable to all their above work, and Schlegel’s criteria are largely satisfied by their taste for love, (national) history, the self-reflexive growth of a divided self and the muted presence of irony and formal experimentation. There is also a more frenetic, sentimental-grotesque tradition, seen notably in Hugo’s Han d’Islande and Bug-Jargal (1826), set in Norway and Haiti respectively, both featuring psychopathic dwarfs who share Quasimodo’s red hair; here Schlegel’s arabesque may be more in evidence. Nodier, Mérimée, Balzac, Gautier continue this mood in the French Romantic short story, a fantastic genre still neglected in favor of the realist canon. Nodier has explicit magical events, as in his vampire tale Smarra (1821); Mérimée prefers fantastic irresolution, as in La Vénus d’Ille (Venus of Ille, 1837), where a statue apparently comes alive to kill someone, or Lokis: Le manuscrit du professeur Wittembach (Lokis, 1873), whose hero may be both man and bear. This doubt is a good handle on »realist« tales like Carmen (1852), whose events are less simple than they seem to their naïve narrators. Balzac for his part wrote Gothic novels in the 1820s; La peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin, 1831) sucks its Parisian owner’s life with each wish it grants, and La fille aux yeux d’or (The Girl with Gold Eyes, 1843) hides Sadean crime in contemporary Paris.

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Balzac and Mérimée����������������������������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ are not the canonical realists they have been labelled. In Balzac’s superhuman output of 88 novels for his Comédie humaine (Human Comedy, 1842–48), as in Dickens, a magical thread runs throughout a realist universe — not only in the Philosophical Studies, which feature Melmoth réconcilié (Melmoth Reconciled, 1835), but in modern Paris, as we have seen. Balzac largely avoids historical novels, but his world is filled with the lost past: Le Colonel Chabert (Colonel Chabert, 1832) returns from the Napoleonic wars to find himself written out of history; the senile Baron Hulot in La cousine Bette (Cousin Bette, 1846) calmly sets up shop with his pubescent mistress Atala — an acid nod to Chateaubriand! — in ghetto Paris as if in Tahiti, while his desperate family searches for him. These are magnificent novels, where reality is transformed by poetry and savage irony, and the price of existence is marked. Sainte-Beuve’s Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (Joseph Delorme, 1829), often seen as a lyric anthology, is perhaps France’s closest link to the Germans in its fusion of Bildungsroman prose frame and extensive lyric interlude; Volupté (Delight, 1834) has another self-reflexive, divided narrator. The poets Gautier and Nerval, two other Romantics of 1830, also wrote novels as did all the French canon: Gautier’s large and diverse oeuvre includes three historical novels, notably Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), whose heroine cross-dresses, with its famous art for art’s sake preface attacking the bourgeoisie. Nerval’s Sylvie. Souvenirs du Valois (Sylvie, 1853) is the romance Schlegel wanted: a love story full of illusion and occult meaning at the urbane Romantic narrator and hero’s expense, constantly undercut by irony both playful and tragic, and with the present filled by the generations of the past. Like Nerval, Sand inflects the pastoral, though realist critics have read her uninflected: La Mare au diable (The Devil’s Pool, 1846) and La petite Fadette (Little Fadette, 1849) show folk reality always edging on the magical, as in her masterpiece Les maîtres sonneurs (The Master Pipers, 1852), where Joset may well have sold his soul to the devil; we cannot know, as we found in Mérimée or Hogg. Sexist critics have understandably preferred these »domesticated« pastorals to Sand’s novels of revolt — Indiana (1832), Lélia (1833), Mauprat (1837); in those texts, Sand’s idealism is more patent. Schor has argued that a realist canon served male critics who chose to exclude magic from the ledger; Sand’s more than 20 novels are her data, but even Stendhal is, splendidly, not what he has seemed: in the realist classic Le rouge et le noir (1831), for instance, Julien Sorel finds a newspaper clipping with his own name in anagram (Louis Jenrel) and the story of his eventual execution. This precisely matches what Ofterdingen encountered. Stendhal’s irony, like Mérimée’s or Nerval’s, reads differently when set alongside Schlegel’s divided self; La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839) also pulls between irony and romance idyll, between will and circumstance, with another alienated hero escaping oppression through a devoted maid. Stendhal has simply tilted the scales of compromised romance: his Promethean heroes retreat into isolation, then die, leaving poetry defeated or ridiculed — as Mathilde rides off on the final page with Julien’s severed head in her lap. Dumas wrote more than Balzac, including 80 historical novels, but three famous novels will serve: Milady ends Les trois mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers, 1844) beheaded by her first lover, now a public executioner; in Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte-Cristo, 1845/46), a man betrayed, but made fabulously wealthy by a prison confidence, wreaks his opium-calmed revenge upon society; La Reine Margot (Queen Margot, 1845) saves La Mole’s severed head, just as La Mole’s descendant Mathilde saved Julien Sorel’s. These texts are anchored

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in French history, as Schlegel desired, even Monte-Cristo depending on Napoleon and Waterloo, and Dumas can indeed be read as serious national history. His avowed aim was to offer France a living heritage: accused of violating French history, he said, but look at the children I have given her. His history is transformed by romance at every step, far more so than in Scott; Rob Roy (1818) is not The Three Musketeers. This chapter often uses Schlegel to explain and justify its search for Romantic-era European romance; Dumas is very far from Schlegel, but romance is the core of his enterprise. Unlike Britain, France like Germany produced almost no extended verse romance in this period. Hugo, Vigny, Musset, Sainte-Beuve, Nerval wrote none; Lamartine wrote Dernier chant de pèlerinage d’Harold (The Last Song of Harold’s Pilgrimage, 1825), after Byron, and Jocelyn (1836) and La chute d’un ange: Épisode (An Angel’s Fall, 1838), two fragments of a Christian epic with romance elements — love, disguises, obstacles — set during the French Revolution, then before the Flood. Gautier wrote Albertus ou L’Âme et le péché: Légende théologique (Albertus or the Soul and Sin: Theological Legend, 1833), a Faustian parody where the devil sneezes, the poet says bless you and a witches’ sabbath disappears; the poet’s mutilated corpse, ending the poem, evokes »Monk« Lewis. La comédie de la mort (The Comedy of Death, 1838) also combines magic and burlesque. In our redrawn Romantic-era corpus, Gautier’s work may seem more central than it has, a production considerably larger than his canonical Émaux et camées (Enamels and Cameos, 1852), billed as anti-Romantic. France’s dearth of Romantic-era verse romances, and the »novels« produced by every canonical French Romantic poet (unlike the English, for instance, who wrote none), suggest that these poets found aspects of French verse constricting, and were more able to complete their extended narratives in prose, benefiting from the same amorphousness that attracted Schlegel. This in turn suggests that their novels deserve more careful study in future reviews of French Romantic poetry, much as in theater these same authors routinely abandoned the Paris stage in favor of closet drama. In this context, verse and prose overlap, and other resonances of the term »romance« again seem more useful than a simplistic division between two warring canons, »the realist novel and the Romantic lyric«. 4.

Italy

Italy’s Romantic poets — Monti, Foscolo, Manzoni, Leopardi, Pellico — wrote dramas or (Monti) epics but no verse romances. In their large prose output, three novels are remembered: Foscolo’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1802), a fragmentary epistolary novel indebted to Werther, whose »saintly« hero runs over a stranger, pays off the family without confessing and accepts their praise; Pellico’s Le mie prigioni (My Prisons, 1832), wisdom memoirs about ten years of prison, which influenced Primo Levi; and Manzoni’s I promessi sposi: storia milanese del secolo XVII scoperta e rifatta (The Betrothed, 1825/26; first entitled Fermo e Lucia in an early manuscript), set in plague-stricken Spanish Lombardy in the 1630s. Foscolo and Pellico reflect the vogue for first-person narration that Schlegel favored; Manzoni’s Betrothed (a Scott title in 1825) is Italy’s most famous novel, using Scott better than Vigny or Mérimée do to make past history a national statement, even down to its Milanese dialect. In post-Waterloo Europe, all Scott’s imitators offer veiled political manifestoes: Vigny the aristocrat condemns emergent

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royal despotism, Scott the Tory values a paternalist establishment; using history allows claims about the nation’s true identity. Manzoni’s Spaniards stand for the Austrians of 1820, as he appeals for national liberation. This nationalist discourse is absolutely central to the Scottian romance vogue throughout Europe and America. Writing in answer to Ivanhoe, Manzoni, like the historian Thierry, focuses on the humble, rejecting historic figures; he goes on to write a history of the French Revolution and to condemn romance’s mix of fact and fiction in »Del romanzo storico« (The Historical Novel, 1850). Foscolo wrote two more novels, Hypercalypseos liber singularis (Hypercalypseos a Singular Book, 1815) and Viaggio sentimentale di Yorick lungo la Francia e l’Italia (Yorick’s Sentimental Journey, 1817), the latter a satire in the language of Dante’s La vita nuova (The New Life, approx. 1293) and simultaneously an imitation of Sterne. Schlegel also called for a theory of the novel (or romance) in novel form, something more than the eighteenth century’s routine use of a thin narrative frame for didacticism. Europe’s romances focus repeatedly and self-reflexively on artistic creation, as we have seen; straight criticism mixed with creative play is rarer but extant, from Byron or Hazlitt to Gautier and the Milan 1816 debate — notably Berchet’s Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figliuolo (Grisostomo’s Semiserious Letter, 1816), which ends with a damaged statue of Italy wheeled out to unite opposing parties. In this Romantic genre, criticism is romanced much as history is in the age’s historical novels; romantic parodies deserve further study in that light. 5.

Northern and Eastern Europe

I started this chapter thinking about Europe and America’s foundational national Romantic narratives, and was struck by their deep resemblances, though in verse or prose depending on the country. What Scott, Dumas, Fenimore Cooper build in a series of prose romances, Pushkin and Mickiewicz build in extended verse. Without the word romance, we chop this phenomenon in half. We might call Mickiewicz’s 12-book Pan Tadeusz (1834) a folk epic with fantastic elements, a genre rare in Western Europe, though one thinks of Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea — in fact, Mickiewicz began his poem with Goethe in mind, then found Scott a better model. Between 1795 and 1918, with a brief Napoleonic interlude, »Poland« did not exist; Westerners, even Germans and Italians, easily lose sight of what Romantic narratives meant for Slavic countries in particular, with no national map or language. Set in Lithuania under Napoleon, Pan Tadeusz, like The Betrothed, avoids great names, in favor of a love story crossed by a feud, with speeches, village battles and comic interludes; war here brings order to a disharmonious peace. Norway and Finland produced little in the way of Romantic romance. Sweden has Tegnér’s populist Frithiofs Saga (1825), with its lovely metrical variety; Denmark has, besides Andersen, the poet Oehlenschläger — Vaulundurs Saga (1805) for instance — Grundtvig’s long poems, and Hauch’s and Ingemann’s imitations of Scott. Estonia has Kreutzwald’s folk epic Kalevipoeg (1857–61). Latvia and Lithuania, Rumania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Macedonia and Albania have national stirrings in the period but no romances; Greece’s Solomos is mainly a lyric poet. Ukraine has Shevchenko’s nationalistic Cossack verse. Serbo-Croatian has at least two folk epics, Petar Petrović Njegoš’s Gorski vijenac (The Mountain Wreath, 1847) and Ivan Mažuranić’s

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Smrt Smail-age Čengića (The Death of Smail-Aga Čengić, 1846), both about the Montenegrin struggle against the Turks. Czech has Ján Kollár’s expanding sonnet cycle Slávy dcera (The Daughter of Sláva, 1824–52), narrating love and national sentiment; Hanka’s folk forgeries, influenced by Macpherson and Chatterton; and Karel Hynek Mácha’s Máj (May, 1836), a Byronic verse romance, both nationalist and nihilist, about a murderer awaiting execution. Hungarian has folk epics — Kisfaludy, Vörösmarty’s Zalán futása (Zalan’s Flight, 1825) — and Jósika’s novel Abafi (1836), indebted to Scott. Knowing only Tegnér and Shevchenko, I note the use of folk epics in Northern and Eastern European nationalism, whereas the West favors prose. These folk epics resemble medieval romance. Pushkin’s bitter, joyous Evgenii Onegin (Eugene Onegin, 1825–33) surpasses Byron in its fusion of pathos and burlesque; the urbane narrator gently mocks Lenskii, his heart »all but crushed with pain«, moments before Lenskii’s best friend Onegin kills him in a duel for no reason.10 Even in English (see bibliography for all translations from the Russian), the poetry is stunning — Lenskii »early found both death and glory/ In such a year, at such an age« — as Pushkin shifts in dazzling arabesque between sublime and parodic mode, insisting on a discord in reality whose pain the choice of simple irony would negate.11 Pushkin’s narrator invokes his Muse in Chapter 7; he reads Apuleius, while Tatiana (he regrets her vulgar name) reads Byron, Nodier, Stendhal, Lafontaine. Pushkin, suffused with European authors, and Mickiewicz contrast well; Pushkin’s is the hard way to construct the »free romance« he wanted (Pushkin 1998, viii), keeping a universe of antinomies in suspension until the final verse: »As, my Onegin, I drop you«.12 Ruslan i Liudmila (Russlan and Ludmilla, 1820) is a mildly parodic, magical folk epic. Pushkin’s splendid prose lacks this tension between poetry and bathetic reality, though his Istoriia sela Goriukhina (History of the Village of Goriukhino, 1830) contains a wonderful seven-line history of poetry in the narrator’s series of attempts to poeticize the village, moving from an epic »abandoned on the third verse« to the portrait he decides on.13 Like Mérimée, Pushkin also enjoys fantastic tales, somewhere between reality and magic: Vystrel (The Shot, 1830) and Pikovaia dama (The Queen of Spades, 1834). Gogol’s tales share Pushkin’s play between poetry and reality, though his tension is grotesque, less elegant than violent, closer to Hugo or Hoffmann. »Strashnaia mest’« (The Terrible Vengeance, 1836) has a sorcerer, a murdered baby and a woman saying of her husband: »He was buried alive, you know. Oh, it did make me laugh«; »Nos« (The Nose, 1836) has a minor functionary lose his nose and converse humbly with it, now disguised as a State Councillor, in Kazan Cathedral — the nose refuses to return; »Portret« (The Portrait, 1835) has a soul caught on a canvas, presaging Dorian Gray, while »Shinel’« (The Overcoat, 1842), with another minor functionary, presages Dostoevskii and Kafka.14 Gogol’s novel Mertvye dushi (Dead Souls, 1842; 1855) continues his grotesque realism but eschews the fantastic, contributing to a reputation that 10.

»Szhalos’/ V nem serdtse, polnoe toskoi« (Pushkin 1991, 162: 6.xix).

11.

»Pogibshii rano smert’iu smelykh,/ V takoi-to god, takikh-to let« (ibid., 180: 7.vi).

12.

»Kak ia s Oneginym moim« (ibid, 286: 8.li).

13.

»i ia brosil ee na tret’em stikhe« (Pushkin 1964, vol. III, 287).

14.

»Ved’ ego zhivogo pogrebli […] kakoi smekh zabiral menia« (Gogol 1940, vol. I, 273).

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has praised Gogol’s realism in neglect of his magic. Lermontov’s verse romances like Demon (The Demon, 1856), subtitled Vostochnaia povest’ (An Eastern Story), face neglect beside his bleak, superb Geroi nashego vremeni (A Hero of Our Time, 1840), five interwoven and embedded tales about or by the bored, fatalist Pechorin, who meets smugglers, kidnaps a Circassian girl and later kills and is killed at random: »Perhaps some readers will want to know my opinion of Pechorin’s character. My answer is the title of this book«.15 6.

Iberia and the Low Countries

Portuguese Romanticism begins with Almeida Garrett’s elegant verse romances Camões (1825) and Dona Branca (1826), about Camoëns and a Christian princess in love with a Moor, both published in exile in Paris; his later prose recalls both Sterne and Scott, and his Romanceiro (1843–51) parallels Spanish work collecting the Romanceros in 1828–32. Spain produced mainly drama, but Espronceda’s dramatic poems El estudiante de Salamanca (The Student of Salamanca, 1840) and El diablo mundo (The Devil World, unfinished) use romancero format to mix lyric and dramatic forms, magic and reality much as Schlegel wanted. The Student retells the Don Juan story. Scott also influenced Rivas’s 12-canto romance El moro expósito (The Exposed Moor, 1834), based on a medieval legend. The Fleming van Duyse writes mainly lyrics; Ledeganck writes national tales in verse. Conscience’s 100 novels include De leeuw van Vlaanderen (The Lion of Flanders, 1838), a violent 13th-century romance again indebted to Scott, populist but without Scott’s self-aware narrator, and giving prestige to Flemish eight years after the creation of Belgium. In Dutch, Drost’s Hermingard van de Eikenterpen (Hermingard of Eikenterpen, 1832), also influenced by Scott, and Bosboom-Toussaint’s national novels from Het Huis Lauernesse (The Lauernesse House, 1840) onward are famous. As reading Espronceda, Garrett and Conscience shows, the link between romance and emergent local nationalism remains striking — if unsurprising, since romance speaks to medieval locality in answer to the imperialist neoclassical universalism that Napoleon had encouraged, a contrast Scott aptly represents. There is also some contemporary work in this romance vein in Breton and Occitan, though perhaps not in Erse or Catalan. 7.

The Americas

All Latin America achieved independence in the years 1806–1826. Romance, though, is scarce: Echeverría’s Elvira, o la novia del Plata (Elvira, 1832) and Mármol’s Cantos del peregrino (Songs of the Pilgrim, 1846) are Byronic verse romances; Hernández’s El gaucho Martín Fierro (Martin Fierro, 1872) is Argentina’s national poem. Nélod lists no Romantic novels here or in the Caribbean. Anglophone America had similarly little verse romance: Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855) is one of the few major examples. 15.

»Mozhet byt’, nekotorye chitateli zakhotiat uznat’ moe mnenie o kharaktere Pechorina? Moi otvet — zaglavie etoi knigi« (Lermontov 1969, 74).

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Porte’s The Romance in America opens, »the rise and growth of fiction in this country is dominated by our authors’ conscious adherence to a tradition of non-realistic romance sharply at variance with the broadly novelistic mainstream of English writing« (Porte 1969, ix). His focus is Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne; let us add Irving. Cooper’s moments of national crisis, Porte suggests in a key insight, »could not be dealt with in the realistic novel as he knew it« (ibid., 8); nation and individual emerge as symbiotic concepts in the Romantic era, and authors shaping nations from Argentina to Estonia — an activity unknown before 1776 — do so in the footsteps of Scott. Fielding’s hermetic world allows no bridge between private destiny and the polis, between the clerks and the masses; making it droll that ivory tower critics later rejected Europe’s historical romances as escapist, reserving their praise for the Fielding tradition. As Frye writes, »There is a strongly conservative element at the core of realism, an acceptance of society in its present structure« (Frye 1976, 164). Porte cites Simms in 1835: »the modern Romance is the substitute which the people of the present day offer for the ancient epic« (Porte 1969, 39), and this of course also perfectly fits the criteria of Europe’s Romantic-Classical distinction. Of Cooper’s fifty-odd novels, the five Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41) gave him international fame. Like Scott, he shows tribal structures dissolving before a larger nationhood, and uses systematic verse epigraphs to multiple effect, but there is an epic tone which refuses Scott’s irony, and a new insight into local color, into the alienness even of those who seem very close: the Christian Hawkeye in The Deerslayer: or The First War-Path (1841) believes chess pieces must be idols. Cooper rejects magic in his preface to The Pioneers: or the Sources of the Susquehanna (1823), and refuses comparison with Homer; but his forest is full of romance, though compromised by »civilization«, and Hawkeye is a true hero, unerring in virtue as in battle. The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826) opens with this same careful distinction, between »an imaginary and romantic picture of things which never had an existence« and »the business of a writer of fiction«, which is »to approach, as near as his powers will allow, to poetry« (Cooper also curiously links Native Americans and the Orient). Hawkeye is a fiction, but he is possible. Hawthorne’s ironic prefaces, by contrast, stress the radical divide between a novel’s probability and a romance’s exposure to the »truth of the human heart«; as Porte notes, he »entitled or subtitled all of his four major fictions romances« (95 f.). Hawthorne wants to build, says his preface to The Blithedale Romance (1852), in art’s neutral territory, »Fairy Land«: the elf-child Pearl in The Scarlet Letter: A Romance (1850) perhaps cannot cross streams; a wolf greets her, »but here the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable« (Chapter XVIII); we fear an evil spirit, and in walks Roger Chillingworth, chilling as his name. As often in the fantastic, heuristic problems produce a divided narrator or, as in The Blithedale Romance and in The Marble Faun: or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1852–60), increasing focus on heroes struggling with art and illusion; and like almost all Europe’s fantastic writers, Hawthorne refuses to resolve heuristic irresolution into magical certainty. Irving plays likewise between doubt and burlesque; »Rip van Winkle: A Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker« (1819) and »The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Found Among the Papers of the Late Diedrich Knickerbocker« (1820), which gave him international fame, are folk legends about a man who sleeps for twenty years and a headless horseman, encountered by narrators as urbane as those of Byron, Pushkin or Nerval. It is apt that Irving began his career with a burlesque history of New York, and The Alhambra (1831) sets orientalist Moorish legends within a similarly urbane arabesque.

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If Cooper, Hawthorne and Irving delicately explore the limits of belief, leaning increasingly toward magic, then Poe completes this series. His narrator is urbane, but so are vampires; he is there first-person for Hop-Frog’s appalling revenge, for the House of Usher’s fall into the lake; he is in the pit as the pendulum swings; he himself rips his beloved Berenice’s teeth from her entombed body, though still alive; he personally walls Fortunato up alive in »The Cask of Amontillado«. Surveying the world’s Romantics, what is amazing is not their magic, but their almost total refusal to do what Poe does; to stop flirting with magic — suspending their disbelief — and step wide-eyed into what Schubert calls the »night-side« of reality (Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft, 1808). Poe, Novalis, Hoffmann and yes, the »realist« Gogol are almost alone in doing so. The power of the Enlightenment had waned to this extent. 8.

Conclusion

Two primary facts, I believe, emerge from this study: that the Romantic border between poetry and prose is less formal than epistemological, a truth the age repeatedly stresses; and that romance allows a nation-building enterprise that the realist novel cannot make room for. Its folkish tales echo an oral form, fitting the folk agenda of Warton, Percy, Görres and the Grimms. The age addressed these two agendas, answering to the political and epistemological crises it faced, in two main types of romance, a global term I find more apt and useful than novel or long poem: the ironic/magical and the national/historical. The age chose verse, prose or both according to circumstance, showing national and individual variation: Slavic folk epic, Scott, the French Romantics. British women authors I place in my first, heuristic category; there is of course massive overlap, and narrators throughout this corpus show a divided self torn between inside and outside, Schopenhauer’s will and representation. Recording this crisis in narrative, which is a fictional entity alien to the self, invites parallel self-reflexive meditations on art’s role in forming events and perceived reality. Romance is a superb tool with which to examine this problem: it is, as Johnson writes, »a lie«, a claim that parallel to our world of objects is the observer/narrator’s world of thoughts and memories, with its own pull on the present. Waverley and Keats expect romance, and they are not alone; I suspect that all Europe heard romance in the word romantic, as Pepys or Scott did, conveying the sense that we have all grown up with stories and they influence what we do, for better or worse, but that without them, reality would be an arid and narrow place. This is why romance caused the age problems, and why children love Hugo or Dumas. Bibliography Battaglia, Salvatore (ed.). 1961. Grande dizionario della lingua italiana. 19 vols. Torino: Unione tipografico-editrice torinese. Brownlee, Kevin and Marina S. (ed.). 1985. Romance: Generic transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes. Hanover: New England UP. Chaves, Castelo Branco. 1979. O romance histórico no romantismo português. Amadora: Instituto de Cultura Portuguesa.

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Dictionnaire de l’Académie Françoise. 1813. 5th edition, 2 vols. Paris: Nicolle. Duncan, Ian. 1992. Modern Romance and the Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, and Dickens. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Eichner, Hans (ed.). 1972. »Romantic« and its Cognates: The European History of a Word Toronto: Toronto UP. Frye, Northrop. 1976. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. by Jane Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Gillespie, Gerald. 1967. »Novella, Nouvelle, Novelle, Short Novel? A Review of Terms«. Neophilologus. 51: 117–127, 225–230. Gogol, Nikolai V. 1940. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Moskva: Akademia Nauk U.S.S.R. ———. 1965. The Overcoat and Other Tales of Good and Evil. Trans. by David Magarshack. New York: Norton. Gougelot, Henri. 1943. La Romance française sous la révolution et l’empire: Choix de textes musicaux. Melun: Argences. Harvey, Sir Paul. 1946. The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford UP. ———, and J.E. Heseltine. (ed.). 1959. The Oxford Companion to French Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP. Hoeveler, Diane Long. 1998. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP. Hoffmeister, Gerhart (ed.). 1990. European Romanticism: Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models. Detroit: Wayne State UP. Ilgner, Richard M. 1979. The Romantic Chivalrous Epic as a Phenomenon of the German Rococo. Bern: Peter Lang. Jean Paul. 1992. A Reader. 1992. Ed. by Timothy J. Casey, trans. by Erika Casey. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Isbell, John Claiborne. 1996. The People’s Voice: A Romantic Civilization, 1776–1848. Bloomington: Lilly Library. Johnson, Samuel. 1755. A Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. London. Rev. and abbreviated edition, Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary. Ed. by Jack Lynch. Delray Beach, FL: Levenger Press, 2002. Kiely, Robert. 1972. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. Langbauer, Laurie. 1990. Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Lermontov, Mikhail. 1969. Geroi nashego vremeni. Ed. by D.J. Richards. Letchworth: Bradda. ———. 1992. A Hero of Our Time. Trans. by Vladimir and Dmitri Nabokov. New York: Everyman’s. Lukács, György. 1955. Der historische Roman. Berlin: Aufbau. McDermott, Hubert. 1989. Novel and Romance: The Odyssey to Tom Jones. Totowa: Barnes & Noble. McGann, Jerome J. 1999. Byron and Wordsworth. Nottingham: University of Nottingham School of English Studies. Martini, Fritz. 1951. Deutsche Literaturgeschichte von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Stuttgart: Kröner. Nélod, Gilles. 1969. Panorama du roman historique. Paris: SODI. Porte, Joel. 1969. The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James. Middletown: Wesleyan UP. Puppo, Mario. 1985. Romanticismo italiano e romanticismo europeo. Milano: Istituto Propaganda Libraria. Pushkin, Aleksandr S. 1964. Sochinenia. 3 vols. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo »Khudozhestvennaia literatura«. ———. 1991. Evgenii Onegin. Roman v stikhakh. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Atrium. ———. 1998. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse. Trans. by Babette Deutsch. Mineola: Dover. ———. 1999. The Collected Stories. Trans. by Paul Debreczeny. New York: Everyman’s. Raimondi, Ezio. 1997. Romanticismo italiano e romanticismo europeo. Milano: Mondadori. Richter, David H. 1996. The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP. Roberts, Adam. 1999. Romantic and Victorian Long Poems: A Guide. Aldershot: Ashgate. Ross, Deborah. 1991. The Excellence of Falsehood: Romance, Realism, and Women’s Contribution to the Novel. Lexington: Kentucky UP. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1978. Kritische und theoretische Schriften. Stuttgart: Reclam.

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Schor, Naomi. 1993. George Sand and Idealism. New York: Columbia UP. Shaw, Harry E. 1983. The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Siebers, Tobin. 1984. The Romantic Fantastic. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Smith, C. Colin (ed.). 1964. Spanish Ballads. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Sötér I., and Neupokoyeva, I. 1977. European Romanticism. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Steinberg, S.H., J. Buchanan-Brown (ed). 1973. Cassell’s Encyclopedia of World Literature, 2nd edition, 3 vols. London: Cassel & Co. Stendhal. 1957. Le Rouge et le Noir: Chronique du XIXe siecle. Ed. by Henri Martineau. Paris: Garnier. Tieghem, Paul van. 1969. Le Romantisme dans la littérature européenne. Paris: Michel. Wilkie, Brian. 1965. Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition. Madison: Wisconsin UP. Williams, Ioan (ed.). 1970. Novel and Romance 1700–1800: A Documentary Record. London: Routledge & Kegan. Wolfson, Susan J. 1986. The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell U.P.

Myth in Romantic prose fiction Dorothy Figueira

1.

Introduction

The development of myth theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries primarily contributed two factors to general intellectual and scientific history. It initiated a gradual change in understanding aesthetics: by instigating the movement from objective and rational imitation to a more subjective and emotional concept of expression. Secondly, it contributed to the development of historiographical, philological and theological hermeneutics, in other words, to the beginning of historical biblical criticism. During the Enlightenment, the source of myth was believed to reside in the subjective inwardness of humanity, in imagination and fantasy. Myths were seen as intentionally and arbitrarily invented by the individual. Created out of an arbitrary freedom of consciousness, myths were viewed as trans-empirical. Herder (at least in his Sturm und Drang period) challenged traditional conceptions. The compiler of the Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (Voices of Peoples in Songs, 1778) encouraged Germans to seek new inspirational models and question the absolute value of Greek classical norms. The study of songs, fables, and myths of different nationalities was thought to contribute to the development of one’s own national culture which, in turn, contributed to the development of Humanität (Herder 1877–1913, vol. 13: 256, vol. 14: 230). Herder defined Humanität as the sum of the virtue and talents peculiar to human beings as well as that aspect of the divine that existed in all mankind (Herder 1877–1913, vol. 13: 350). To present popular songs against the Classics and to underline the sacred character of inspiration, in other words, to found a Weltliteratur, already entailed the assertion of the artistic equivalence of all developed cultures. Herder’s understanding of myth thus focused on the democratic character of its revealed truths. The Romantics (beginning with Schelling and culminating with Bachofen) shifted the origin of myth from the individual sphere into the collective and from the conscious into the unconscious. It was through myth that the greatest nations of the world put their stamp upon all history. Under the influence of the historical school and its founder and leader Savigny, myth was thought to emanate from unconscious necessity and the regulation of natural instinct, out of a general human need or within specific national Volksgeister. Historically real and concrete myth traditions needed to be collected and categorised, since they held the power to mediate the unconscious nature of humanity. By placing the source of myth in the collective unconscious, German Romantic myth theorists such as Görres, Kanne, the Grimm brothers and Bachofen presupposed a unified mythical among all peoples, epochs, and generations that evidenced objectively knowWeltanschauung ��������������������������������������������������������������������������� able and legitimate Truth. This mythological sensus communis developed unmistakably from the Enlightenment construction of natural religion and vision of common beliefs in a common humanity and Herder’s cosmopolitanism. Görres, in particular, presents the underlying unity of existence in myth by which he means the collective unconsciousness as expressed through particular mythologies. Myth is a language of nature, a hieroglyph of creation and the innocent

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human response to the world. Just as Romantic Naturphilosophie valued nature as the emanation and objectification of the Divine, so too did myth function as Naturpoesie, developing out of nature and returning to the Divine. In different geographical and time-specific points of empirical history, myth articulated renewing repetitions of divine revelation. In the following discussion, I wish to investigate how myth functioned as a structuring force in Romantic prose fiction. I will first examine how myth and symbol were theoretically conceived. Basing my discussion on representative selections from German prose, I will highlight how the symbolic was valorised over imitations of reality. I will then contextualise the German use of myth as a form of cultural mapping by comparing several popular mythic constructs found in German Romanticism with their analogues in other Romantic prose traditions. Finally, I will touch upon why German authors emphasised myth in their works and what were the implications of their appropriation of myth in subsequent social reality. 2.

Myth theory

In his Philosophie der Kunst (Philosophy of Art, 1859), F.W.J. Schelling defined myth as a system of signs and symbols (Schelling 1985, 2: 245 ff.). Schelling believed that the finite and earth-bound reality of history united with the infinite unconditional truth of the Absolute through symbol. He shared this conception of myth with Friedrich Schlegel. In the »������������������������������� Rede �������������������������� ü������������������������� ber die Mythologie������� « (Discourse on Mythology), part of his Gespräch über die Poesie (Dialogue on Poetry) in the Athenaeum (1798), Schlegel bemoaned the lack of any mythology in the modern Occident and called for the creation of a new mythology, a suggestion whose very possibility Schleiermacher challenged. Schleiermacher doubted that a new mythology could be »made« (Schleiermacher 1922–23, 168). He voiced his concern to Schlegel and faulted him for what he viewed as the synthetic character that he ascribed to myth. Schleiermacher was responding, no doubt, to Schlegel’s »Rede über die Mythologie«, where we hear of fictional writers having artfully arranged confusion in their work (Schlegel 1967, II: 318). Schlegel claimed that the literary task suspended laws and processes of rational thought and plunged the reader into a beautiful confusion of imagination. The literary product recreated the original chaos of human nature for which Schlegel did not know any more beautiful symbol than the motley throng of ancient gods (ibid., 319). Schlegel’s new mythology was grounded in a structural conception only to the extent that individual utterance is determined and produced by the context in which it occurs, a legacy of Idealism’s notion of authorial intent. Schlegel’s abstract and arbitrary notion of a symbolic matrix thus differed considerably from Schleiermacher’s conception of the individual as responsible for semantic and political change. When Schlegel called for the creation of a new mythology, he did not seek the renewal of ancient myths. In fact, the German Romantics would reject classical Roman and Greek mythological subjects in favor of other sources of inspiration. Schlegel believed that mythology in general was an untapped reservoir of inspiration (Schlegel 1846, 4: 179) and that the translator became the prophet addressing the lamentable intellectual and cultural state into which his country had fallen (Schlegel 1906, 2: 362). All mythologies, he believed, had the potential to supply the raw material for the formation of the new mythology and provide the medium through which the ideas of Idealist philosophy could be expressed.

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Schlegel made no mention of Germanic myth as the privileged source for the new mythology. When he mentioned German mythology in the Gespräch über die Poesie (Schlegel 1798–1800, 3: 86), the notion of »Germanic« mythology was understood in the broadest imaginable sense of the term, including specimens from as distant a source culture as India. Since his theorising on myth roughly coincided with his study of Sanskrit, Schlegel specifically sought mythological models from India. Old »German« literary works also included French and Spanish medieval literature and history. Myth signified for Schlegel any literary or historical theme, European or Indic, wherein some »alte Kraft« (ancient power) could be revealed and awakened in order to liberate philosophical and moral power and animate any literary work upon which it was based. In Friedrich Schlegel’s enlargement of the notion of Germanic mythology, the influence of his brother is evident. August Wilhelm Schlegel understood Germanic mythology as anything that was pervaded by what he called the »������������������������������������������������������������������������� Geist des gothischen Ritterthums����������������������������������������� « (spirit of Gothic chivalry; A.W. Schlegel 1884, 3: 17). Just about everything fell into this category. The importance of the shift from classical models to the chivalric tradition was the implicit valorisation of the role played by Germans in Europe after the Fall of the Roman Empire (Mornin 1991, 20 f.). Europe at its best was essentially German, since the Germans gave medieval Europe its political unity (A.W. Schlegel 1884, 3: 15 f.). Medieval literature was essentially German. A similar argument, different only in its contours, was made for India. In Über die Sprache und die Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, 1808), Friedrich Schlegel made the case for India’s filiation, on mythological and linguistic grounds, with Germany. Not only were the geographical boundaries of what was considered »German« enlarged tremendously in these formulations, but so too was the genre of myth itself. By the term »national«, indigenous and popular forms of expression were meant. The Grimms saw folk literature as an heir to myth and as such, related to divine revelation. It was thought that the further one moves from the mythical and paradisiacal past, the greater the deterioration. The obvious corollary is that the closer one approaches one’s origins, the better. This view led the Grimms to collect legends and folktales as part of their contribution to Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn, 1805). They interpreted the myth of a nation or group as the collective imagination of humanity as a whole. This supra-personal function of myth mediated the God-nature complex and its primitivistic content, namely, the secularisation of paradise in a presumed Golden Age. In this context, myth in German Romanticism clearly no longer signified the symbolic stories of gods and supernatural beings, but much more. It could be taken, as it was in Achim von Arnim, La Motte Fouqué and the Grimms, to include all traditional German lore — customs, popular superstitions, folksongs, fairy tales and legend. All these genres were seen as remnants of a German mythology that had been shattered and was in need of restoration (Mornin 1991, 21). 3.

Myth in German Romantic prose fiction

The new mythology demanded a hieroglyphic system of connections and correspondences (Schlegel 1967, II: 318). However, in the Romantic recreation of myth, the organization of symbols represents an infinite abundance. With this use of myth, the writer is pointing beyond

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himself to something he cannot fully comprehend or adequately express. One thinks particularly of Novalis. In Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night, 1800), the night is presented in different symbolic modalities, as a state of beatitude, the sentiment of liberation or mystical ecstasy. Novalis juxtaposes life with death, day with night, and this world with the realm beyond. The hymns move from this varied and inchoate representation of the night, with its accompanying apparition of Sophie, to a realisation of the narrator’s passion. Love for the departed, however, is inescapably bound up with love for God. From Sophie’s grave, a symbol for the poet’s experience of knowledge, the hymns culminated at Christ’s grave with the realisation of the higher life with God and a nostalgia for death. Such use of symbolism is simultaneously pregnant with meaning and vague. Because the abundance is infinite, it cannot be wholly grasped and must, therefore, be the subject of yearning. The Romantic writer seeks to negotiate the tension between the quest for an infinite idea and the reality of finite phenomenon. He knows that synthesis is both needed and impossible. We are confronted, therefore, with this conundrum in all its permutations. In Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Henry von Ofterdingen, 1802), it takes perhaps its most notable expression in the blue flower, a symbol of longing that appears in a dream as a goal. The Romantic author views the nature of experience in a relative light. Conscious of the provisional, he becomes selfaware or, at least, conscious of being conscious. Dream, therefore, and its counter-state, reality, stake their respective claims. Heinrich invites the reader to enter a realm where dream is never truly distinct from reality. It is a place where animals, plants and stones all speak. The New Mythology fostered a symbolic understanding of nature that guaranteed intersubjectivity (Frank 1982, 223 ff.). This sense of nature, combined with symbolism that cultivated the imprecise, became indistinguishable from mysticism. Romantic nature mysticism could be Christian, »Oriental« or both. In Jean Paul’s Hesperus (1795), Victor and Clotilde are brought to a realisation of their eternal love through the intercession of an Indian philosopher. Through Emmanuel Dahore, they discover a transfigured world, where nature becomes an expression of their interior joy. The lovers do not so much plunge themselves into nature as the sun, stars and flowers appear to reflect the movement of their spirit. In Novalis’s Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (The Disciples of Sais, 1802), another teacher reveals to his disciples the mystical bonds between humans and the stars, stones, animals, clouds and plants. Here too, the figure of the »oriental« magus is significant. The disciples live in an atmosphere of magic where both master and disciple aspire after hidden truths and the experience of nature in direct contact with man, as in the Golden Age. The fable of Hyacinth and RosenHere nature becomes godblüthchen is embedded into the narrative of Die Lehrlinge zu Sais.������������������������� like, demanding total obedience. Nature must be allowed to develop with free reign. If the Ego does not plunge itself entirely into nature, it will remain mute. The disciple must actively seek to decipher nature and extract from it its secrets. Such a vision of nature owes much to Fichte’s notion of the fusion of the Self with nature and Schelling’s speculation on natural history as inspired by the holy world of nature and spirit. The connection between nature and spirit also found expression in Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Aspects of the Nightside of Science, 1808), which directly inspired E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf (The Golden Pot, 1814). Nature specifically appears as a fierce organism that speaks to us in symbols, as in Klingsohr’s Märchen from Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert (Eckbert

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the Fair, 1796), and Brentano’s Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl (The Story of Good Kasperl and Beautiful Annerl, 1817). The Romantic world is a realm imbued with the presence of powers that are not always Christian. As we have seen, they can take exotic expression as in Klingsohr’s »Oriental« poetry and Zulima’s songs in Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Sometimes they take the form of classical paganism. In Tieck’s Vittoria Accorombona (1840), the heroine is an amalgam of Venus, Juno, Minerva, and Diana. In Eichendorff ’s Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue, 1818) magic enters into the statue of Venus. Heine’s Elementargeister (Elementary Spirits, 1837) makes an ironic comment on the afterlife of pagan gods. Most frequently, however, the powers that animate Romantic prose fiction are daemonic. In Die Judenbuche (The Jew’s Beech Tree, 1842), Annette von Droste Hülshoff presents nature as unforgiving; it serves as both judge and witness to the action of men. Evil events occur on stormy nights in the magical realm of the Brederwald. The Judenbuche itself takes on the force of the evil actions that occur around it. The world is often peopled with demonic creatures, such as Coppelius in Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann ���������� (The Sandman, 1817), superhuman creatures, such as in Heinse’s Ardinghello und die Glückseligen Inseln (Ardinghello and the Blessed Islands, 1787) or the dwarves, elves, devil and sprites as in Heine’s »Elementargeister« (Elementary Spirits, 1827). Characters are often possessed by the supernatural. In Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau (The Mad Invalid of Fort Ratonneau, 1818), Achim von Arnim plays less upon the theme of demonic possession and more on the belief in the powers of demons. Francoeur’s possession is a result of his demonic mother’s curse and the power of belief in its efficacy that results in the daughter-in-law’s sacrifice. Nature is not the source of evil force except in those instances where man becomes alienated from it, where one loses one’s inner sense of justice. Once one loses unity with nature, as in Die Judenbuche or when one lives in a demonic nature and tortures oneself with fear of it, as in Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert, nature becomes a destructive force. Once the boundaries between reality and fantasy are erased, the spirit/body equilibrium is destroyed, as in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brotherhood, 1819–21). The pagan elemental forces of nature are juxtaposed with the Christian life of the village, as in Eichendorff ’s Ahnung und Gegenwart (Presentiment and Present Time, 1815) and Tieck’s Die Gesellschaft auf dem Lande (Party in the Country, 1824). Symbols of Christianity could be applied to animal life (Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf). The fairy tale served as a model as in Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Emigrants, 1795) and Chamisso’s Adelberts Fabel (Adelbert’s Fable, 1806). In a text such as Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story, 1814), many of these elements come together: the magical devices (the seven mile boots and magical sack), the demonic (the pact with the devil), Märchen motives, and allegory (shadow/country). Nature here is represented as an alternative to the problematic artistic existence. The Romantic notion of artistic alienation from society is expressed through representations of the fantastic. The figure of the tormented artist took many forms and was a fundamental theme common to all Romantic traditions. The notion of history, too, was expanded in Romanticism, with the distinction between factual reality and mythic hyper-reality often blurred. In Romantic prose fiction, history and myth coexisted easily. In Armut, Reichtum, Schuld und Buße der Gräfin Dolores (Poverty, Wealth, Guilt and Atonement of the Countess Dolores,

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1810), Achim von Arnim introduces the higher world into the stream of history by reaching back into the primitive past for universal and unifying models. Figures of the past emerge in visions, myths, fables, and songs to support the reconciliation of the husband and wife. In Tieck’s Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva (Life and Death of Saint Genevieve, 1800), the Middle Ages offers a vision of passion in which the participants are absolutely faithful (Genoveva) or melancholic dreamers (Golo). Medieval chivalry, while it supports a romantic concept of love and sacrifice, can also be figured as anachronistic, as in Achim von Arnim’s Die Kronenwächter (The Guardians of the Crown, 1817) or absurd, as in Brentano’s »Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl« (Story of Good Kasperl and Beautiful Annerl). In such works, one sees echoes of Schelling’s vision of mythology and history. The interpenetration of myth and medieval reality seeks to release the forces of the past in order to highlight the mysterious unity underlying all being. In Isabella von Ägypten (Isabel of Egypt, 1812), Achim von Arnim focuses on this coexistence of mythological characters alongside historical people. Their coexistence is accepted by the characters themselves. However, for the reader, it casts doubt on the very existence and reality of man himself. Emblematic Romantic prose texts such as Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Tieck’s aforementioned Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva, and Kleist’s Marquise von O… (Marchioness of O…, 1808), all seem to pose the fundamental question: Are we waking or dreaming? Romantic mythography’s concept of nature, mystery, and religious cryptograms is echoed throughout this literature. The past has presence (both generally and in Germany), but also embodies suprapersonal truth through folksongs, fairy tale, legend and popular superstition. The very title of Eichendorff ’s Ahnung und Gegenwart reflects the emplotment of history within Romantic prose fiction. It should be about the present (Gegenwart), that is, the confused period of Napoleonic domination. But the present is related to both the past and the future by Ahnung, i.e. presentiment, foreboding, intuition. The very concept of Ahnung derives from Görres and F. Schlegel. The external world to which we are constantly exposed is a hieroglyph awaiting decipherment. In the literary context, vague premonitions need not be resolved, foreboding could be relished, intuition left sterile and the hieroglyph of the world undeciphered. These realisations had to wait until myth entered the social sphere where this vision of reality found resonance in the historical climate of the time. When the New Mythology was promulgated, it was a particularly low time for national morale in the German states. 1806 saw the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire, the defeat of Prussia by France at Jena, and the foundation of the Rheinbund as a French protectorate. There was a pressing need to bring the German states closer together. It was hoped that a sense of German identity could be rekindled through an evocation of objects that were both Germanic and poetic. Myth could be used to promote a vision of history that was dynamic. Romantic historiography viewed history as a living organism in a state of motion. Myth provided the means whereby universal history could be structured organically and reduced to certain recurring elementary phenomena of birth, development and death. The cultured were bound by a common destiny. Culture was Faustian, constantly in progress or, more importantly, for those cut off from nature, subject to decay. In German Romanticism, it can be said that myth provided a way of laying out a scene of the world as an explicit model. In this respect, cultural myths were the equivalent of a philosophy

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of history. The issue of identity, be it national or individual, served as a structuring force in all Romantic traditions. On a national level, myth gave meaning to history. On a personal level, identity was defined through the representation of artistic alienation. 4.

History and identity in other Romantic traditions

As in German Romanticism, so too in other literatures, the gods were not dead. There was a conceptual presence of powers that were often pagan and usually not Christian. Vigny’s Daphné (ca 1840) takes us back to the old pagan philosopher Libanius and his disciples, Basil and John, who become Saints Basil and John Chrysostom, and the Emperor Julian. Just as paganism died, so too, we learn, will Christianity. Vigny’s Stello (1832) speculates on what new religion will come into being to save morality. The Romantic quest to penetrate the secrets of heaven so evident in the work of Hölderlin and Novalis also found expression in the work of Beckford. The protagonist of Vathek (1786) dedicates himself to the pursuit of evil that takes him into a supernatural realm of horrific visions where he and his beloved meet their doom. In Balzac’s Séraphita (1835), Minna and Wilfrid seek illumination in Swedenburgian visions communicated to them by angels and other symbolic figures. Gérard de Nerval presents a world replete with visions and mysteries. In Sylvie (1853) and Octavie (1854), as well as Aurélia ou Le rêve de la vie (Aurelia, or The Dream of Life, 1855), the hero pursues an imprecise image of a unique love in an attempt to grasp the Ineffable. Nerval was the French author of his generation perhaps most influenced by German literature and his work is marked by its focus on the otherworldly. A number of Romantic writers tended to eschew what might be termed the geistig element of the German quests of the Absolute and focus on the earthbound (Levine/ Knoepflmacher 1979, 6 f.). They sought the Absolute within the milieu of production. Thus, we find throughout Romantic literature a plethora of mad scientists of various practical persuasions: opticians, watchmakers, violinmakers, laboratory doctors and insane professors, with Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) being the most overdetermined. In Godwin’s St. Leon (1799), the hero discovers the secrets of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. His efforts are thwarted and he must in the end turn to cultivating human ties that have been destroyed by his hubristic quest. The figure of the doomed experimenter, whose stock characterization owed much to the Faust myth, wonderfully articulated the Romantic crisis of identity. In Balzac’s La recherche de l’absolu (The Quest for the Absolute, 1834), the hero Balthazar Claes joins forces with a mysterious Polish chemist in order to seek out the Absolute. The title character in Vigny’s Stello, another Faustian character, debates with Doctor Noir on the value of sentiment as opposed to reason. All these seekers, alchemists, and alienated creators serve as models for the Romantic self-destructive artist. Nathaniel Hawthorne creates a veritable menagerie of such figures in »The Artist and the Beautiful« (1844), »The Man of Adamant« (1835), »Egotism, or the Bosom Serpent« (1843), »The Ambitious Guest« (1855), and »The Christmas Banquet« (1844). In Hawthorne’s »The Birthmark« (1843), a disciple of Albertus Magnus seeks to improve on nature. These artists all discover the destructive qualities of their creations. In many of their quests, the consequences are fatal, once one seeks to encroach upon God’s powers. A common thread of

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these tormented artist/mad scientist narratives is the manner in which the secret skill becomes obsessive and eventually dissolves social bonds, especially those of romantic love. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1817) presents Nathaniel who is estranged from his fiancée Clara by the sinister optician Coppola, and the magic doll Olimpia becomes the object of his affection. Councillor Krespel defenestrates his pregnant wife when she interrupts his work. The ardent pursuit of Nature’s secrets is presented as both an obsession and labor. In Die Bergwerke zu Falun (The Mines of Falun, 1819), it is both the attraction of earthly gain and the lure of nature’s mysteries that ensnare the sailor in a subterranean realm and lead to his demise. The Faustian quest becomes intertwined with the Promethean. In many of these narratives, damnation is brought about not by demonic force, but by the demands of industry and production, as in Die Bergwerke zu Falun, where work becomes indistinguishable from the quest for the Absolute. The Promethean model of transgression can also be found in Hawthorne’s »Ethan Brand« (1850) and Melville’s »The Bell Tower« (1855). Its most forceful expression, of course, occurs in Moby Dick (1851), where Ahab explicitly assumes the role of Prometheus. Myth fully informs such a character. Melville not only models Ahab on mythological figures (Jonah, Job, and Prometheus), but portrays him as someone for whom myth structures exist. In Moby Dick as well as Mardi (1849), myth exerts power over individual belief and structures the narrative. In Romantic prose fiction, myth thus served the fundamental role of explaining man’s relationship to nature. Myth also functioned in the service of ideology. It provided a forceful means whereby a nation’s relationship to nature could be illuminated. In a Freudian view, myth is seen as the wishful thinking of whole nations (Freud 1953, 9; 141–54, cited in Clark 1984, 93). This function of myth is clearly evident in the American Romanticism, where the Edenic myth appears in Moby Dick and Typee (1846). Hawthorne juxtaposed the prelapsarian with the Puritan foundational myth of America in The Scarlet Letter (1850). In the American context, myth functioned (as it would later in Germany) as a rewriting of history, and in some instances as a denial of history. In The Pioneers (1823), James Fenimore Cooper contrasts Indian barbarism to white civilisation in order to support America’s divine mission to expand across the continent. Natty Bumppo represents the innocent hero of the American frontier. Refusing to live in a community and leading a nomadic existence, he becomes a noble white savage as opposed to the ignoble Indian. By incarnating an innocent nobility representative of a true communion with nature, Natty Bumppo provides an alibi for the white man’s extermination of the Native American. In this mythic rewriting of American history, the non-exploitative white man goes out West to conquer with good intentions. As a whole, the Leatherstocking Tales reduce the historical complexity of the American expansion to a schema of noble/ignoble, civilised/savage. The Deerslayer (1841) elaborates upon this thematic. Whiteness is presented as an essence to be temporarily rejected. Even in the face of contradictory evidence of white savagery, as in the case of white scalp-hunters, white nobility can always be proved. Similarly, noble red men under their skin are always ignoble savages. This mythic rewriting of history is all in the service of Cooper’s overriding theme of justifying the white man’s possession of the land. Identity, whether in the form of a nation’s history or that of an individual, sought its rationale in the world of mythic paradigms. As important as myth was in the formation of a distinctive American ethos, it was only in Germany that myth-making became a science. Moreover,

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the case may be argued that the myth of the American pioneer, with all its positive and negative traits, underwent little revision after it was codified. One finds clear references to it, even today, in the discourse on the American imperium. In Germany, however, one cannot say that the use of myth was static or uniform. At the risk of sounding simplistic, the Germans have always been quite creative in their use (and abuse) of myth. 5.

Conclusion

For the German Romantics, myth was viewed in the ethical sense as an internal embodiment of the summum bonum: uncontrived, original, and natural. It was thought to reveal the nature of the universe by articulating the infinite in the finite terms of symbol. The Romantic sacralisation of the world sought to fulfil a compensatory function in connection with a crisis in the worldview brought on by the Enlightenment. In those instances where something was found that could replace the need for the mythic, such as the militant Catholicism of Friedrich Schlegel or the rabid nationalism of Fichte, it invariably led to the abandonment of mythological paradigms as the fundamental theological and metaphysical activity. Myth faded away, once revealed religion or some equivalent becomes the basic hermeneutic framework. The case of Friedrich Schlegel provides the paradigm for the use of myth in Romanticism. Schlegel’s search for a new mythology led him increasingly to history, including the history of religion. His translations from Sanskrit and epoch-making studies in Indian thought led him to think of mythology more exclusively in terms of religion — whether it be the spiritual idea of the Church itself (Schlegel 1967, IV: 166) as manifested in the Middle Ages or the ideals he projected onto the Orient. With his formal conversion, he shifted the former quest for salvation in literature to salvation through religion. Ardent hope transformed itself into ultimate hope; the quest for poetic divination became the desire for revelation and cultural goals transformed into the workings of salvation. Myth functioned as an index of internal and external life, a medium whereby modern society and culture could be analysed. The childlike, pure and innocent virtues found in myth appeared as a positive Gegenbild to the rotten and degenerative affectedness of modern civilisation. The past was better than the present, the mythical past could be viewed as a model for an ideal form of present and future society. Romantic fascination with myth effected a flight before worldly, artistic and political difficulties and duties of the modern world into a sentimental and idealised past. Grounded as it was in historical traditions, the valorisation of myth necessarily entailed the valorisation (and mythologisation) of ancient, medieval and exotic cultures as favored worldly sites of the Divine. A mythology of an ideal past was promulgated by Romantic mythographers. It was developed in Romantic theory and informed the experiments undertaken within the literature of Romanticism. These Romantic concepts of myth and the Absolute were fundamental to the development of German nationalism in the later half of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries. In the work of figures such as Arthur de Gobineau, Max Müller, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, we find so clearly the Romantic theses of the degeneration of revealed and

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primitive religion and the view of history as an unfolding expression of the spirit of a people followed by decay and stagnation. These themes were crucial to the European intellectual climate late into the nineteenth century. Stagnation would become a keyword in discussions of national identity and would eventually find its way into the general writings of philosophers like Hegel, Marx and Spengler. Romantic myth theory and its appropriation in literature set the stage for the subsequent emplotments of myth that were to derail much of German late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history. The Romantics bequeathed to the Fascists the celebration of myth as the most majestic form of expression and action. For both, myth supplied a poetic realisation of truths pertaining to natural and supernatural realities (Mali 1997, 434). Myths, however histrionic or sentimental, revealed sublime truths. For a future generation, Romantic literature valorised notions of a fictive past and glorified presumed ancient native virtues. It conditioned nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germans to view themselves as bearers of culture and custodians of truth. In its Romantic literary practice, myth remained fragmented, obscure, and unconvincing. In its subsequent social manifestation, it became an effective agent of terror. The hieroglyph of the world was now clearly deciphered and those outside the structure of new myths suffered the consequences. Bibliography Clark, Robert. 1984. History and Myth in American Fiction, 1823–52. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Frank, Manfred. 1982. Der kommende Gott. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1877–1913. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. by Bernhard Suphan. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. Levine, George and U.C. Knoepflmacher (eds.). 1979. The Endurance of »Frankenstein«. Berkeley: California UP. Mali, Joseph. 1997. »Retrospective Prophets: Vico, Benjamin, and Other Mythologists«. CLIO. 26: 427–448. Mornin, Edward. 1987. »Ludwig Uhland and the Romantic Mythology«. The Germanic Review. 62: 20–27. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. 1985. Ausgewählte Schriften. Ed. by Manfred Frank. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. 1884. Vorlesungen über die schöne Literatur und Kunst. Ed. by Jakob Minor. Heilbronn: Henniger. ———. and Friedrich (ed.). 1798–1800. Athenaeum. Berlin: Vieweg. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1846. Sämtliche Werke. Vienna: I. Klang ———. 1906. Seine prosaischen Jugendschriften. Ed. by Jakob Minor. Vienna: C. Konegan. ———. 1967. Kritische Ausgabe. Ed. by Ernst Behler. München: Schöningh. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1922/23. Schleiermacher als Mensch: Sein Werden und Wirken. Ed. by Heinrich Meisner. Gotha: Klotz. Wilke, Sabine. 1991. »Authorial Intent versus Universal Symbolic Language: Schleiermacher and Schlegel on Mythology, Interpretation and Communal Values«. Soundings. 73: 411–425.

From historical narrative to fiction and back A dialectical game Virgil Nemoianu 1.

Varieties of history and the invention of the historical novel

The year 1814, when Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley was published anonymously but to unexpected acclaim and popular success (both in England and abroad), is conventionally taken as the year when a new genre (or sub-genre) was born: the historical novel. Similarly we can say that what a British male had done, was replicated, indeed with some chronological precedence, by a British woman: Mary Shelley launched the powerful and still ever-increasing field of science-fiction with her Frankenstein. Neither of the two was devoid of a literary pedigree or emerged on an empty territory. In the case of Waverley (since this is a core topic of this chapter) we can think of eighteenth-century »Gothick« and/or horror novels, of diverse »Rittergeschichten« (chivalric stories), even earlier of dramatic productions which clothed moral and psychological issues in historical garb (not least the neo-classical writings by Corneille, Racine and their descendants throughout Europe; but then again this was a writing strategy to which already the Spanish »siglo de oro« had occasionally resorted). The question therefore arises why the historical novel as revamped and reconstructed by Walter Scott was perceived as something genuinely innovative and why it was so eagerly imitated throughout Europe and North America, and soon even outside the confines of the Western world. Part of the answer, but, I hasten to say, not the only or probably not the most important, was the lifeline that Scott had established to poetry. It has been said more than once that Scott switched over to the novel as a vehicle, when and because he felt that the plot(s) of his narrative(s) could no longer be contained inside the verse stories that he had practiced with some enthusiasm; and I believe this is true, and, more broadly, this is the point of prominent commentators such as György von Lukács when they regarded the historical novel as the middle-class substitute for the agonizing epic. (The exercise in epic-writing was continued, although seldom and without a powerful echo, e.g. in Olympischer Frühling [Olympian Spring, 1900–05] by Carl Spitteler, inspired by Ancient Greek mythology, or, even more typical, in Das Kaiserbuch [The Book of Emperors, 1922–1936] by Paul Ernst, which followed the pattern of medieval Persian historical chronicles in verse.) I believe however that a more contextual examination can provide us with richer explanations and I will refer briefly to three of these contexts. One is the age-old dispute between poetry and history, a matter that preoccupied such luminaries as Aristotle or Sir Philip Sidney. The second one is the explosive emergence of history as a central discipline in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and the need and desire of many (perhaps most!) other discourses to emulate it. Here however the process became dialectical, history itself learning and borrowing from literature. The third is what some describe as ideological, though I for one prefer to call it morpho-cultural: conveying a message of solution, of peaceful reconciliation, of »taming«

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of the radicalities of Romanticism and revolution. Or, in other words, producing real historical detente through the writerly discourse of historical detente. Let me dwell briefly on each of these and provide some examples. Sir Philip Sidney at the end of the sixteenth century defends poetry mostly against the arguments that imaginative literature must inevitably be inferior to »realistic« or »factual« narrative in as far as the latter deals with truth and reality, whereas the other one is merely a creature of invention. Sidney argues (to some extent) ironically that »poetry« (in the broadest sense of the word, of course) reaches truth in different ways, namely by focusing on the central ideas, the Platonic archetypes, and depicting them in ways in which history could never do it. The historian, »laden with old mouse-eaten records, authorizing himself (for the most part) upon other histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundation of hearsay« (Sidney 1996, 30), is more likely to be a liar. By contrast, poetry is the most ancient form of human learning, does not contain evil, mixes delight and goodness (Sidney 1996, 48). It is the least likely to contain lies, since it does not affirm anything; it is profitable to memory, rich in morality, able to stir courage, to strengthen man, and is rightly praised by such luminaries as Saint Paul and Plato (Sidney 1996, 48–60). Although Sydney can be fairly described as a neo-Platonist, there is also an obvious continuity with Aristotelian thinking here. We remember that, in the Poetics, Aristotle had also argued that »poetry is something more philosophic and of more serious import than history; for poetry tends to deal with the general, while history is concerned with delimited particular facts«. An instance of the general (with which poetry undertakes to deal) is this: What are the sorts of things which, according to the law of probability and necessity, various types of individuals tend to do and say? This is what poetry aims to make when it attaches names to characters. An instance of particular facts is: what did Alcibiades do, or what was done to him? (Aristotle 1972, sect. 9, 18 f.).

Also, »if the objection is raised: ›this is not true‹, the answer is: perhaps the poet is portraying it as it should be« (Aristotle 1972, 58 f.). The main point that we want to keep in mind for our further demonstrations is that both these powerful Classicist thinkers were keenly aware of a kind of dialectic between history and fiction. They realized similarities and they tried to draw distinctions at the same time. Narrative and memory provided a common ground, yet at a certain point there was a branching out depending on the mode in which they were used and on the goals that were pursued. This is, in my opinion, the general background of aesthetic philosophy against which eventually the historical novel appeared. To come now to my second point: It is prudent to think of the socio-cultural context that emerged at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. This age was dominated by the »discovery« of history as a leading force in intellectual life. Why? Let us first answer that, precisely because there was an increasing sense of acceleration in society at all levels and a kind of »revolutionary« need to reform more and more radically, the dialectic between the present and the past arose. The social and the natural sciences inscribed themselves immediately, vigorously and enthusiastically in this comprehensive historicizing tendency. Thus paleontology sought a variety of explanations as to how the animal world had reached its current stage, and though the answers of Cuvier, Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, or Erasmus Darwin

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may have differed (until Charles Darwin’s unifying, but equally »historical« theory seemed to provide common explanatory ground), they and others had one thing in common: they agreed to a kind of historical methodology for research. The questions asked were directed toward the process of development in nature. In linguistics (to take a totally different example), although earlier (eighteenth-century) questioning concentrated on the philosophy of language, changes were soon apparent and throughout the nineteenth century, in fact until Saussure, Potebnya, and Baudoin de Courtenay, the respectable academic pursuit was that of the way in which language changed: how modern Romance and Germanic tongues grew out of Latin and »common Germanic«, the latter together with Slavic, Celtic, Sanskrit and others out of Indo-Germanic ancestors; admissible research included also dialectology, that is to say the branching out and the diversification of one common trunk into its regional or local variants, another historical process. It has been argued that sociology also came out of historical curiosity: finding out the causal regularities that led to the construction of present-day inter-human worlds. (This was argued recently by Spaemann for instance, with respect to Bonald, but there had been suggestions in that direction already in the disagreements between François Guizot and Jaime Balmes during the 1820s and 1830s). No less active was the history of law when it tried to establish continuities and pedigrees connecting Roman law or primitive Germanic law with the current legislation. As to the study of literature it was, in academic institutions, until well after World War I, primarily an examination of sources, of manuscripts, of the »ancientness«, and thus credibility and validity of texts. In fact history of literature tended to stop short of contemporary vernaculars and to deal admiringly with »dead literatures« of different kinds. Above all it is of course impossible to overlook the explosive development of historical research itself of all kinds. Naturally this included the older »philosophical« approaches of Bossuet, Voltaire, and Herder. It also included however the passionate collecting of facts and details, of »monuments«, the emergence of systematic museums, along with the analysis of shorter, more focused periods. Clearly much of this work had a political and ideological purpose. It was, for instance, a competitive agon between nations as to cultural achievements, moral perfection, antiquity of glory, victories of all kinds. Or, alternatively, for nations that were struggling to establish their identity and to validate themselves, it could be an accumulation of justifying evidence of their admissibility in the company of the higher and most civilized nations. (This applies primarily to non-independent nations such as the East European ones: Hungarian, Czech, Romanian, Polish, and numbers of others, but also to major and culturally insecure ones such as Russian or Italian). However, another and more general motivation ought to be considered. There was a widespread anxiety of continuity and of origin. As long as the religious and specifically Biblical framework was still very solid, the scrambling for historical validation could remain marginal: an »antiquarian«, dilettantish, innocuous pursuit. The moment this religious framework became uncertain or shaky, the fear of chaos, the anxiety of »free-floating« suddenly lent an enormous seriousness to the historical work. In Freudian terms this is a search for the lost father: a theme that is incredibly frequent in literature throughout the nineteenth century. It seems very likely that the emergence of the historical novel is largely due to civic, rather than to aesthetic pursuits. The writers of historical novels and plays were subconsciously convinced that they

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could contribute in their own way and with their own methods to a common effort toward a worthy goal. Thus the historical novel is, on the one hand, a solution to the age-old tension between fiction and history, but it is also a mode to reach a wider audience than the one of the scientific historian. The historical novel is meant to popularize and to explain in a more gentle way continuities, breaks, or just causalities that had led to the present-day situation. This brings us to the third contextual element. The historical novel is born as an actual and active mode of writing precisely at the time when Western society was grappling with the issue of moderating or taming its own »revolutionary« tendencies and handling them in an acceptable way. (Obviously, »revolutionary« is not used here in its much narrower political sense, but rather in the broadest possible one: it refers to mentalities, to ways of life, to values, orientations, and standards and so forth.) A great variety of vehicles and approaches were devised in order to serve the goal of such a reconciliation between the past and the rapidly arriving future and in order to appease the looming conflicts. Collaborations with religious discourses, interweaving with travel literature and a host of other generic techniques were resorted to, not to speak about directly theoretical works. Inside this luxuriant vegetation of ingenious literary techniques the historical novel occupied a place of honor. As conceived by Sir Walter Scott in his Waverley cycle, the historical novel was meant to dramatize the conflict between two great modes of life (socioeconomic systems, Weltanschauungen (world views), systems of customs and of existence, philosophies of behavior), but above all how to reach a reasonable synthesis between the two, how to re-establish continuities, how to reveal stabilities, how to transfer values. In the novels of Walter Scott and of his followers we always find the argument that a certain reconciliation is possible between the past and the onrush of the future. Naturally, such broad intentions can only be described as conservative. It would be futile to repeat here what was so often and so well explained: that Scott himself was a staunch conservative, and in several ways too — a conservative of the Scottish identity, an adversary of the French Revolution (clearly a Burkean), an individual desirous to be included in the landed squirearchy of his time. It is also clear that the Lukácsian theory of »translation« of the ancient epic into the bourgeois prose of the historical novel will not be very helpful or take us very far. In my opinion, Scott revealed again, and brilliantly, how a psychomachia, fictional though it may be, can have an eloquent influence on the audience. His theory of history is certainly not unique, as a matter of fact it may be regarded as somewhat utopian, at least in the sense that it implies some wishful thinking. Nevertheless it is not wrong in my opinion. It moves in the direction of human or social progress, it takes into account losses over the years and centuries, and it emphasizes adroitly the issue of »transfer of values«. Scott proposes solutions to issues that were at the time (and largely continue to be) of great moment for everybody. 2.

Spread of the new mode

We can thus explain the overwhelming success of the Waverley cycle, as well as of other novels written by Scott, and we can account most convincingly for the host of imitators in most countries. Perhaps the most successful and percipient among these was James Fenimore Cooper, who transferred to America the struggle between a modernizing English society and a

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traditional, localist and diversitarian Scotland, this time at the even more terribly serious level of racial interaction: Amerindian against Euroamerican, with even deeper chasms separating them — one might argue whether the Leatherstocking pentalogy is not perhaps the first great »multiculturalist« work (at least in North America). However, some early works by Balzac — Les Chouans (The Royalist Insurgents, 1829) for instance — Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831) and Vigny’s only novel Cinq-Mars (the name of the title figure, 1828) also follow Scott. Hugo’s chief historical novel is particularly subtle and significant. Hugo sets up in Notre-Dame de Paris the opposition between »cathedral« and »book«: the former is supposed to represent the concreteness and the organicity of human handicraft, the latter the »mechanical reproduction of the work of art«, the quantification, the numerization of existence. The French Romantic, at least in his youngest creative years, presses this opposition into a kind of confrontational melodrama, with Quasimodo and other characters connected to the Cathedral as deformed (a signal of defeat), even monstrous images. Balzac frankly and unabashedly imitates Scott, while Vigny projects (as Alexandre Dumas père was to do a little later) the opposition into the contrast between a waning feudalism of liberty and individuality versus the ordering and leveling power of centralized absolutism. (I will not even speak here about comparatively minor figures such as Barginet, Mortonval, or even Vitet, who were nevertheless much read and discussed at the time.) Gil y Carrasco in Spain proudly recognized himself as a descendant of Scott. Manzoni is more original, undoubtedly, and his thematics are somewhat different, but it would be difficult to understand and even imagine him outside the horizon outlined by Scott, the same being true of Pushkin’s Kapitanskaia Dochka (The Captain’s Daughter, 1836). Other examples followed thick and fast, in Germany — Willibald Alexis might be an excellent example, but even Immermann’s Die Epigonen (The Epigones, 1836) might be mentioned here, as well as the considerably later Witiko (1865–67) by Adalbert Stifter, just to mention in passing some highlights — and particularly in Eastern Europe, not least being Mickiewicz’s admirable Pan Tadeusz (Lord Tadeusz, 1834). A special place is occupied here by the subgenre of Christian historical novels that enjoyed great popularity in the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, beginning with Chateaubriand’s Les Martyrs (The Martyrs, 1809), but soon learning from Scott, particularly in the matter of the antagonism between an old and decadent but aesthetically beautiful classical culture in its opposition to a grosser but vigorous and young Christian one. A word is in order here also about Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), a work that was not, I contend, influenced by the tradition of Scott but was a true historical novel nevertheless; moreover one that is quite original in its own way — standing as it does exactly at the borderline between fiction and the documentary. It is clearly not one of Dickens’s major works, but it is interesting for the way in which it replicates Carlyle’s vision about the French Revolution, and the way in which the characters are tailored to represent corresponding historical typologies. It ought to be added that it is interesting that precisely in English literature of all places the influence of Sir Walter seemed to have been less rather than more ponderous. This can be seen also by looking at Thackeray’s historical novels, Pendennis (1848–50) above all. (This does not mean that a strain of Scottianism did not survive all the way to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Black Arrow in the 1880s and later). Let me now revert to the original question, that of the borders (if any) between history and fiction, borders that were patently porous for the writers of the early nineteenth century.

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There is no better way to deal with this than by engaging Scott’s novels not in their strict text but as whole »packages«, that is to say by including in our text-reading the prefaces and (in our specific case) the long final notes that are added to the Waverley novels in particular. Thus for instance in Waverley itself we find explanations and justifications regarding the personality and the conditions of the death of Colonel Gardiner (notes 3 and 19), geographical circumstances in the same novel (notes 7, 16, 17 and others), customs alluded to in the text (notes 5, 10, 11 and others), or else highly visible historically attested figures like Prince Charles-Edward (long note 22). In Redgauntlet (1824) Scott not only resorts to a post-script by »Mr. Dryasdust«, but also to justifying notes on the characters and the circumstances in the novel. Likewise, in Rob Roy (1818) we find at the end several documentary letters written by the chief and title character. This goes on in novel after novel. Curiously enough, literary scholars have not thought that it is worth engaging in serious or extensive research on Scott’s ample works of history and »antiquarianism«, and we likewise miss in-depth discussions of his prefaces to the novels. For our purposes however it is enough to say that Scott clearly had the ambition to evoke history by literary means, by expanding suddenly the angle of view, presenting scenes, exploring the psychological motivations, imagining the emotions of historical characters, and depicting backgrounds (habitual human beings and natural or urban scenery). The »notes« were supposed to bolster the narrative and offer convincing material as to the mimetic truth of the texts. 3.

The French contribution and belletristic history

This is largely what many legitimate historical authors, in particular French, were trying to do. It is quite true that the early nineteenth century also hosted the beginnings of a »positivist« strain of history-writing: from Leopold von Ranke to the later Theodor Mommsen, albeit that in these cases one can also find moral and philosophical implications and agendas, structures proximate to the lesson and to the sermon. In any case the dominant Romantic school from one end of Europe to the other was generated in France. The most typical contrastive case is provided by Augustin Thierry in his Récits des temps mérovingiens (Narratives from Merovingian Times, 1840) and to a great extent Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands (History of the Conquest of England by the Normans, 3 vols., 1825). Thierry divides historicity into two parts: critique and evocation. About two fifths of his Merovingian book (a little less than half therefore) contains a kind of general theoretical judgment of prior authors, as well as an attempt to define the specificity of his research field (of what French history is, or how it ought to be defined). The actual bulk of the text is composed out of narratives, based on sources, to be sure, but freely extended and expanded on the basis of psychological probability, imaginative complements, free formulation of »likely« speech. »Balzacian« characters appear and cross each other (actually Thierry freely admitted that he felt influenced by Scott) from one story to the other. The distinction between the »two races« — the barbarous, treacherous and violent Frankish one, and the refined, thoughtful, and thorough Roman-Gallic one, much underlined by later commentators — seems to me less interesting than the historical methodology and horizon of Thierry. For him historicity seems to be the fact that there is no complete formal closure; instead we have characters, destiny, colorful adventures, but not exactly a termination

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and final points. The best proof as to Thierry’s breakthrough was that he influenced the right, as well as the left (not least Marx). In any case, the lessons of Thierry found analogies or else were solidly assimilated by other early nineteenth century historians, in France and abroad. The multi-volume Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne (History of the Dukes of Burgundy, 1824–26) by Prosper de Barante mixes the »naïveté« and directness of the medieval chronicles with a most conscious art and practised pictorial skill. Jules Michelet goes above and beyond Thierry in his literary-visionary discourse, ultimately including geology and cosmology in his depiction of history — I refer here primarily to some of his works of the 1850s and 1860s such as L’Oiseau (The Bird, 1856), La Mer (The Sea, 1861), La Montagne (The Mountain, 1868) and others. We might say that his colleague and »disciple« Edgar Quinet follows him in as far as he dabbles in vast syntheses of spirituality and visionary democracy and openly turns historiography into the ancilla of this kind of ideological program. Both can be placed in useful parallel with the »cosmological« poems of Victor Hugo. François Villemain is the very epitome of writers of »belletristic historiography«. Even as sober-minded a figure as François Guizot followed the trend of the times in the kind of discourse he used when writing his Histoire de la révolution d’Angleterre (History of the English Revolution, 1826–56). The 11 volumes of Karamzin’s Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo (History of the Russian State, 1804–26, perhaps the pioneering work of Russian historiography) are rich in memorable literary portraits of major figures such as Ivan the Terrible or Boris Godunov, who in turn remained models and fixtures for later literature and for the collective imaginary of Europe in general. In Germany at the same time Friedrich von Raumer’s multi-volume Geschichte der Hohenstaufen und ihrer Zeit (History of the Hohenstaufens and Their Time, 1823–1825) served as a treasure-house for future literary adaptations, and in fact was soon dramatized by Raupach into a cycle of sixteen performances that enjoyed enormous success in Berlin, as shown by the fact they were sold out. The five-volume Geschichte von Böhmen (History of Bohemia, 1836–1867) by the Czech František Palacký and Istoria românilor sub Mihai Vodă Viteazul (Romanian History in the Age of Prince Michael the Brave, printed only in 1878, but written before 1848) by the Romanian Nicolae Bălcescu are just two further examples of »belletristic history«. The former tends to demonstrate that the Czech nation is Janus-faced in as far as it was constructed out of the dialectic between a Slavic foundation and a Germanic/Romanic context. The latter chooses to turn a short episode of early Romanian history (approx. 1593–1601) into a model for what a revived nation could and ought to be: brave and unified, a respectable player on the European chessboard. 4.

History as a literary vocation in Britain

Nor can it be said that British history-writing falls outside this domain. Above all the figure of Thomas Carlyle stands out here. His justly famous French Revolution (1837) has often been said to be a model of the perfect combination of journalistic reporting, history, and literature. There is clearly a certain amount of ideological intentionality in it, not excluding nationalism (the English gradualist way is seen as preferable to the wild oscillation between extremes of French history: from absolutism to outright populist terror). Nevertheless, the literary principle of combining a kind of direct »eye-witness« account with the psycho-moral portrayal of

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individuals and scenes and with an abundance of details (often culled from documents, but more than once invented or »intuited«) is what truly stands forward and justifies the contemporary success and the continuing influence of the work. On the other hand, the cavalier way in which philosophers, poets, literati of all kinds managed to write history is amazing: Goldsmith and Hume (in the eighteenth century), Scott and Southey (in the nineteenth) are just some of the names that come to mind, their number being swelled by those of figures like Schiller in Germany or Chateaubriand and Lamartine in France, among many others. Naturally these were not »professional historians«. However they encouraged and justified »true historians«, like Thomas B. Macaulay in their specific writing. Not only is Macaulay’s masterpiece, The History of England (3 vols., 1849–1861) a kind of novel and hymn of praise addressed to the Whig development of England, but his actual historical research alternates with pieces that are more purely literary, such as portraits of historical figures of sundry ages. Echoes of their influence can be recognized in the writings of later authors such as Henry Buckle, James Froude, and William E. H. Lecky, all the way to Lord Acton, or even to Gilbert K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who all injected the imaginative into their historical writings. 5.

Fictional means of memorialization

In between these extremes of discourse (if indeed extremes they may be called), that is in the space opened up between fictional prose and poetry and »scientific« historiography, a remarkable variety of writings placed themselves. I will briefly discuss three of these: the historical portrait, the above-mentioned »tableau vivant«, and the writing of memoirs. Historical portraits were extremely popular and, one may assume, in great demand. Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen (1824–29) — ­­­­of which we have no fewer than 152 printed between 1824 and 1853 — are perhaps the most typical and the most sophisticated intellectually. What Landor was trying to do was to explore the motivations and the psychological and cultural mechanisms and contexts of major and best historical figures that may or may not have met each other, but who in any case engage in almost Plato-like dialogues of intellectual self-justification. These are clearly works of fiction, but their purposes are also clearly those of research: reaching out toward zones that are inaccessible to the mere historian, who remains tied to strict rules of documentation and reference. The fact that they are meant to be »just literary« can be seen in the elegant and careless way in which the method was taken over by poets, above all Robert Browning, who composed literary monologues in verse, a kind of »stream of consciousness« of historical figures of varying importance. Many of the essays of Sainte-Beuve and of Macaulay (while much more craftsman-like) could be considered »imaginary portraits«. The »tableaux vivants« became, by the end of the nineteenth century, a kind of parlor-game: reproduction of famous paintings, for instance, or representation of great historical scenes; they were almost a kind of predecessors of cinema. However, at the time we are talking about (i.e. the early nineteenth century), they were of interest primarily for painters and for authors. Historical painting may be said to have dominated the nineteenth century from Benjamin Haydon and Eugène Delacroix all the way to the Impressionist revolution. My chief point here would be the matter of size: it is quite clear that the abundance of figures and the dimensions of the paintings

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were such that they implied a historical ambition, a substitute of the missing documentary. Similar efforts can be recognized on a literary level, although they are nowadays more often forgotten than the painterly ones. Prosper Mérimée scored a genuine public success with his La Jacquerie: Scènes féodales (The Jacquerie: Feudal Scenes, 1828), presenting in 36 scenes the revolt of the peasants in France against the nobles in the year 1358, and he prepared something similar for the history of Russia. George Sand composed Une conspiration en 1537 (A Conspiracy, 1831) which is known to have influenced Musset’s Lorenzaccio (1834). Vitet was particularly diligent with his Les Barricades (The Barricades, 1826), La Mort de Henri III (The Death of Henry III, 1829) and numerous others. Lamartine’s Historie des Girondins (History of the Girdondists, 1847) could also be included here. Finally, while the Romantic and the Biedermeier Ages were not the inventors of the memorialistic genre, they used it systematically as a vehicle for historical writing that should also be subjective; and these writings are as often as not included in surveys of literature, simply because they were read as literature by contemporaries and posterity. Celebrated examples are Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Memoirs beyond the Tomb, 1848–1850) and François Guizot’s eight-volume Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps (Memoirs to Serve toward the History of My Times, 1858–1867); the very title indicates the prudence and the moderation of a Biedermeier statesman. 6.

Using subjectivity to deepen historical writing

I arrive here at my conclusions. What we notice in examining this dialectic between historiography and historical fiction in the early nineteenth century is a kind of feedback and shuttling back and forth between two domains, an intertwining that is rarely equalled at other points in history. Twentieth-century history-writing can serve as a good contrastive example. Unquestionably both periods have in common the fact that history is presented in a »biased« way, that is to say from a certain point of view; it is presented based on an ideological or philosophical agenda. Nevertheless, I prefer the early nineteenth-century approach. The reason is that in its case these preferences, value choices, and intentions are outlined in a much more honest and open way. In twentieth-century historiography ideology is more often than not hidden, twentiethcentury historiography claims to be objective, indeed almost absolute and definitive. A certain sneakiness and lack of sincerity is perceived unpleasantly by the reader. Obviously, ideological intentions always exist: the question is what the historian is doing with them. Does he lazily allow himself to float with them, is he carried along? Or is he on the contrary trying to limit such ideological purposes, keep them within bounds, create counterbalances, and ultimately consciously deal with them? The interesting thing in studying the historical writing of the early nineteenth century is that authors chose neither the first solution, nor the second one. They preferred this very special relationship between the subjective and the objective. Almost a hundred years were to pass until a truly solid theoretical justification of this approach came about: I refer to the philosophy of history of Wilhelm Dilthey with its formulation of empathy as an indispensable tool of the historians. Although it was not theorized, in actual practice this discursive procedure remained

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amply illustrated. The relationship between history and subjectivity was understood not only in the early nineteenth century, but even later as the instrumental and auxiliary use of subjectivity in order to penetrate more deeply and more efficiently inside the dynamics of historical unfolding. In fact subjectivity was seen as something indispensable, and the errors of past historians were attributed to their failure to make use more courageously of subjectivity. One last point in this respect. Later Romanticism, the Biedermeier Age, is generally founded on the substitutive mode. Aesthetics and religion, geography and social (or national) physiognomy, hard and soft sciences, liberalism and conservatism, the arts and literature, sometimes the special uses of the educational, literature and music; the line can continue, and it does, precisely with the history/fiction dichotomy, as outlined above. Bibliography Aristotle. 1972. The Poetics of Aristotle. Trans. by Preston Epps. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP (repr. edit. 1942). Bălcescu, Nicolae. 1878. Istoria românilor sub Mihai Vodă Viteazul. Bucharest: Alcalay. Barbéris, P. 1967. »La Pensée de Balzac: Histoire et structures«. Revue d’Histoire de la Littérature Française. 1: 18–55. Barthes, Roland. 1987. Michelet. New York: Hill and Wang. Barzun, Jacques. 1941. »Romantic Historiography as a Political Force in France«. Journal for the History of Ideas. 2: 318–329. Burrow, J. W. 1982. A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Crossley, Ceri. 1993. French Historians: Thierry, Guizot, the Saint-Simoniens, Quinet, Michelet. London: Routledge. Ermarth, Elizabeth. 1997. The English Novel in History 1840–1895. London: Routledge. Lampart, Fabian. 2002. Zeit und Geschichte: Die mehrfachen Anfänge des historischen Romans bei Scott, Arnim, Vigny und Manzoni. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Maignon, Louis. 1970. Le Roman historique à l’époque romantique. Geneva: Slatkin (repr. edit. 1898). Marsch, Edgar (ed.). 1975. Über Literaturgeschichtsschreibung: Die historisierende Methode des 19. Jahrhunderts in Programm und Kritik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Moreau, Pierre. 1957. Le Romantisme. Paris: Del Duca. Neff, Emery. 1947. The Poetry of History: The Contributions of Literature and Literary Scholarship to the Writing of History since Voltaire. New York: Columbia UP. Orr, Linda. 1976. Jules Michelet: Nature, History and Language. Ithaca NY: Cornell UP. Palacký, František. 1836–67. Geschichte von Böhmen. 5 vols. Prague: Kronberger. Powers, Richard H. 1957. Edgar Quinet: A Study in French Patriotism. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP. Raumer, Friedrich von. 1823–1845. Geschichte der Hohenstaufen und ihrer Zeit. Leipzig: Brockhaus. Ricoeur, Paul. 1980. The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory of History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Schlaffer, Hannelore and Heinz. 1975. Studien zum ästhetischen Historismus. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Seillère, Ernest. 1919. Edgar Quinet et le mysticisme démocratique. Paris: Société d’économie sociale. Sidney, Sir Philip. 1996. A Defence of Poetry. Ed. by Jan van Dorsten. Oxford: Oxford UP. Srbik, Heinrich von. 1951. Geist und Geschichte: Vom deutschen Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart. 2 vols. München: Bruckmann, Salzburg: O. Müller. Spaemann, Robert. 1959. Der Ursprung der Soziologie aus dem Geiste der Restauration: Studien über L.G.A. de Bonald. München: Kosel.

Romantic prose fiction and the shaping of social discourse in Spanish America Annette Paatz We had only saved three tattered volumes from the waves […]: There was a small Italian book by Ugo Foscolo, called Lettres de Jacopo Ortis, a sort of half-political, half-romantic Werther, in which a passion for his country’s liberty is mingled in the heart of a young Italian with his passion for a beautiful Venetian woman. […] This book […] was at that time in the hands of all the young men, who nursed within them, as we did, this double dream of all those who are worthy of noble dreams — love and liberty.1 Alphonse de Lamartine, Graziella

1.

Introductory remarks: The literary situation in Latin America

Nineteenth-century Spanish American literature has to be viewed against the backdrop of political independence, which has been attained by most Spanish American countries — with the important exception of Cuba — by 1824. At least from this moment, the idea of individual national literatures that differ from the literature of the colonial power begins to take shape. But the political constellations did not consolidate in the various regions for long, during which time the literary production was thought to contribute to the search for national identity. As far as prose fiction is concerned, the novel begins to flourish in Spanish America at exactly the same moment at which it also reaches a hitherto unknown boom in Europe (e.g. in France), and supports the interests of the new bourgeoisie. In Spanish America, writing novels is directly translated into a patriotic act. Since novels had been forbidden during the colonial period, reading as well as writing them could be considered a hallmark of autonomy in the now »liberated« societies. In this context, Romanticism to a great degree means social change and has therefore to be distinguished from the nostalgic-regressive versions prevalent in European contexts. Due to this specific functionalization of Spanish America’s literary and novelistic production, Spanish American Romanticism cannot be viewed as a break with the traditions of the previous century. Many of the Spanish American novelists still remind us of the »polígrafos« of Enlightenment universalism. In addition to their literary activities, they often were historiographers or occupied political functions, and their attitudes clearly reflect the Enlightenment sense of mission which, under the premise of docere et delectare, was concerned with the education of the masses.

1.

»Nous n’avions sauvé des flots que trois volumes dépareillés […]: c’était un petit volume italien d’Ugo Foscolo, intitulé: Lettres de Jacopo Ortis, espèce de Werther, moitié politique, moitié romanesque, où la passion de la liberté de son pays se mêle dans le cœur d’un jeune Italien à sa passion pour une belle Vénitienne. […] Ce livre […] était alors entre les mains de tous les jeunes hommes qui nourrissaient, comme nous, dans leur âme, ce double rêve de ceux qui sont dignes de rêver quelque chose de grand: l’amour et la liberté« (Lamartine 1955, 47).

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The notion of Europe’s economic, technical, political, as well as cultural progress shaped the behavior of the Spanish American cultural elites to a great degree. This orientation toward Europe primarily focused on France, Great Britain, and, to a lesser extent, Italy. Since Spanish American intellectuals were competent in French as well as Spanish, French literature had a strong presence on the continent. Besides the general affinity displayed by the cultural realm of »latinidad« towards France as the country of republican traditions, there is a very pragmatic explanation for this fact: strong relations with Germany, for instance, did not exist because of the well-known mediation of German Romanticism by Germaine de Staël, and later on, philosophers like Herder or Hegel were mainly known in the Spanish American intellectual scene via their French reception through Cousin or Leroux. Generally speaking, the first Spanish American writers commanded a broad literary background out of which they eclectically chose those aspects that seemed to be relevant for the specific situation on the continent. Since cultural differentiation from the former colonial power constituted Spanish America’s primary goal, Spain was often associated with the »dark« Middle Ages and absolutist rule; it was contrasted with an Enlightenment orientation associated with the spirit of the French Revolution. At the same time, however, the liberal-minded »young Spain« could be included in the panorama of literary and cultural affiliations. In fact, the representatives of this generation displayed a clear orientation towards French democratic traditions and a very critical attitude towards the contemporary sociopolitical reality in Spain. This tradition of liberal Romanticism in Spain thus plays a crucial role in the context of Spanish American conceptualizations of Romanticism, which, as in France and Spain, focus on the sociopolitical conditions of literary activity to a very high degree. It is the shared language that constitutes an important factor, and the position of Spanish liberals often served as a bridge to the cultural discourse in Europe. Moreover, personal relationships developed because Spanish or Spanish American intellectuals went into exile in Europe or in the Latin American metropolises. The radical-liberal Spaniard José Joaquín de Mora may serve as an example. Already in Spain de Mora had been implicated in a debate about Romanticism and exerted an enormous influence on the Spanish American debate along with Andrés Bello. Yet the politically liberal »afrancesado« Mora remained neoclassical in his literary positioning, like Andrés Bello, who, in his polemical debates with the Argentinean Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, defended the formalistic eighteenth-century traditions. But the neoclassical position neither kept Bello from translating Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, nor Mora from translating Chateaubriand and Sir Walter Scott (cf. Varela Jácome 1987, 94, and Suárez Murias 1963, 99, 101). In this way, Spanish America’s cultural discourse during this period proves to be highly complex and controversial, which can be explained by the political motivations that suffused these literary debates. If the liberal position in Spain can be associated during its initial phase with neoclassicism — Mora vs. Juan Nicolás Böhl de Faber —, and if, in France, we can speak of a first, politically conservative phase of Romanticism at the beginning of the century and a second, liberal phase around 1830, it is evident that it is impossible to establish a direct correspondence in Spanish America. In the course of this essay I will try to elucidate how different factors affect the literary production, including both the appropriation of attractive topics and modes of writing and the alliance between Romanticism and liberalism.

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This dialectics is further strengthened by the temporal discontinuities, given that the Spanish American novel does not really begin to spread up to the 1840s. At this time, the Spanish American writers could already rely upon a broad repertoire of European, although not Spanish, models. In fact, no major Spanish novel had been written in the first half of the nineteenth century, and in comparison to Spain, we even have to point out that some of the outstanding works of the Argentinean Esteban Echeverría were written as soon as in the early thirties, and are thus at least contemporaneous to the Romantic highlights of the former colonial power. 2.

General features of Spanish American Romantic prose fiction

Emilio Carilla, in his fundamental work about the Romantic movement in Spanish America, affirms that »in Spanish America, the novel and the short story are actually born along with Romanticism«.2 Antonio Benítez Rojo describes the literary practice of nineteenth-century Spanish American novelists as »expropriation«, thus challenging the widely shared notion of a merely imitative Spanish American dependence on the traditions of European prose fiction. »Expropriation« includes an active nuance, connoting the creative appropriation and modification of existing literary modes: »As a result, references to European novels found in Spanish American narratives ought not to be seen as the result of disinterested, accidental, passive, or merely imitative intertextual relationships, but, on the contrary, as the product of utilitarian relationships (expropriation) providing benefits (prestige, authority, power) to the economy of the national novel« (Benítez-Rojo 1996, 429). It is significant that this affirmation stresses the intra-literary contextualization in addition to the sociopolitical functionalization of literature mentioned above: A nineteenth-century Spanish American novel has to draw on the European reading conventions while at the same time adapting them to the conditions of the autochthonous social life in order to be accepted by a Spanish American audience. The practical value of prose fiction is related to the symbolic capital (Bourdieu) of literary practice, thus underlining the notion that literary production always takes place within an international system of relationships. In this system, specific modes of writing predominate at any given time and, in turn, determine the expectations of both writers and readers. In this way, the national novel primarily serves to accumulate symbolic capital — not only with regard to individual writers, but also in the broader context of a »nation’s« international recognition. One of the specific characteristics of Spanish American novels is the fact that literary form and sociopolitical function are related in a very complex and at times even contradictory way. Doris Sommer has read nineteenth-century Latin American novels as »national allegories« (Sommer 1991, 41) with regard to their content because the love stories described in these texts constitute manifestations of »imagined communities« (Anderson 1983) in a »mutual dependence of family and state« (20). Leo Pollmann has also noted the high degree of parabolic writing detectable in the nineteenth-century Spanish American novel. Yet the combination of literary and social practice goes even further, transcending the symbolic dimensions of the 2.

»[En] Hispanoamérica, […] la novela y el cuento nacen, en realidad, con el romanticismo« (Carilla 1967, II: 59).

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content. In their narrative representation of manners, habits and attitudes, these texts fulfill a very concrete social function within the collective project of the constitution of autochthonous societies. The love stories, for example, rather function as an appropriation of the literary aesthetics of Romanticism. This explains why the protagonists quite often do not build families in order to exemplify social productivity but are, in a typically Romantic fashion, affected by disease and death. The medial conditions of literary production constitute a very important factor in determining the function of novel writing in nineteenth-century Spanish America. If the novels were, above all, meant to communicate, we have to ask which the specific factors were that determined this (literary) communication, a communication that was conducted via periodicals to a great degree? Here we have to consider »costumbrismo«, whose importance in Spanish America primarily consists in the presentation of scenes of a particularly everyday American way of life — both present and past. »Costumbrismo« was not only instrumental in initiating an autonomous literary genre that reached its climax with the Tradiciones peruanas (Peruvian Traditions, 1872–83) by Ricardo Palma, who actually invented a Peruvian national past. It also contributed to the integration of a mode of writing, originally established in Spain, into the Spanish American novelistic discourse. There is hardly any Spanish American novel that does not include »costumbrist« passages in order to depict the Spanish American way of life. Spanish American authors adopted both the costumbristic critique of contemporary society as it manifested itself in the Spanish liberal Mariano José de Larra, as well as the idealizing descriptions of traditional character types and historical sketches produced by the conservative Spanish costumbrists Ramón de Mesonero Romanos and Serafín Estébanez Calderón. Their intention was to construct an autochthonous past as a component of their collective identity, but also to inform an emerging public literary audience about the particular living conditions shaping their autochthonous contemporary reality. However, we must not forget that »costumbrismo« is a primarily journalistic genre, and the fact that its practitioners were simultaneously able to draw on the traditions of literary travel writing highlights the Europeanized reading expectations of the Spanish American elites. For in a European cultural context, Latin America at that time was commonly reduced to an exoticized object of journalistic, i.e. »costumbrist« travel descriptions. In this context, the eighteenth-century fashion of exoticism is also still in effect, with journalistic writing at this point still drawing on fictional elaborations. As is well known, the boundaries between narrative and essayistic genres remain quite permeable throughout the nineteenth century, and for Aníbal González this forms a constitutive element of Spanish American narratives. But above all, this permeability opens up the possibility to inscribe oneself into the European viz the international literary system, thus fulfilling one of the fundamental needs of Spanish American writers. The nineteenth-century Spanish American production of novels, perhaps more so than any other literary production, thus has to be understood as a result of its specific form of intertextuality, which can be defined not in the sense of a repetitive recycling of materials, but of a creative modification, appropriation, and functionalization of existing literary motifs, topics, and modes of writing.

Romantic prose fiction and the shaping of social discourse in Spanish America 3.

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Main currents of the Romantic novel

In an overview of the main currents of Romantic prose fiction in Spanish America, at least three subgenres that correspond to the common European categorization, and additionally two thematically organized groups that emerge because of the specific autochthonous circumstances can be, and have generally been, ascertained. I am referring to the historical novel, the sentimental novel and the social novel as general subgenres as well as the »novela indianista« and the »novela abolicionista« as particular groupings in Spanish America. However, it is not only this combination of general and autochthonous categories that will inevitably lead to cross-over, but also the fact that, for example, almost every Romantic novel deals with a love story or that even historical themes have an explicit connection to contemporary times. That is why such categorizations bear their limits; but, on the other hand, they may serve to structure a first, very general spectrum of Spanish American novel production in the realm of Romanticism. 3.1 The historical novel Firstly, the relative abundance of historical novels proves that the prominence of Walter Scott extends to the Spanish American context. The historical novel served the invention of a national past and therefore was used to create something like a collective memory, to compensate for the lack of founding myths for the emerging nations. This could happen by writing about preColumbian times, or the period of conquest, respectively; but also by constructing anti-Spanish visions of the colonial period or by utilizing the struggle for independence as a theme for national affirmation, recent as it was. The first novelistic exploration of the indigenous theme is Jicoténcal (1826), published in Philadelphia and attributed to the Cuban philosopher and priest Félix Varela. This novel treats the theme of the conquest of Mexico and the activities of Cortés taking advantage of the inner conflicts between the Aztecs and the Tlaxcaltecs; however, it does not bear any Romantic traits other than the simple fact of being an historical novel. It thus remains a rather philosophical explanation of the author’s rationalist Enlightenment point of view, contrasting the despots Cortés and Moctezuma with the republican leadership of Jicoténcal. Guatimozín (1846) by the Cuban author Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda also deals with the theme of a famous Indian opponent to the Spanish conquerors, but, in contrast to Jicoténcal, with a clear indebtedness to Walter Scott. This novel is particularly rich in typically Romanticist dramatics and exaltation of the hero Cuauhtémoc. It is carefully documented historically and based upon chronicles and historiographic works. The first national novel of Colombia, Yngermina, o La hija de Calamar: Novela histórica, o Recuerdos de la Conquista, 1533–1537 (Yngermina, or The Daughter of Calamar: Historical Novel, or Memoirs of the Conquest, 1533–1537; 1844) by Juan José Nieto proposes the union of a conquistador and an Indian woman as the foundational act. The novels of the Mexican Eligio Ancona also adopt a critical attitude towards conquest and an emphatic revaluation of the Indian communities. Los mártires del Anáhuac (The Martyrs of Anáhuac, 1870) again takes up the topic of Jicoténcal and Guatimozín and has been qualified by

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Suárez Murias as »the most pro-indigenous novel of the indianist-historical group«.3 La cruz y la espada (The Cross and the Sword, 1866) connects to European Romanticism by adapting the Romantic cult of ruins to the history of the Maya population. The theme of the literary elaboration of the indigenous population will have to be reconsidered within the thematic group of »novela indianista«; nevertheless, it is necessary to mention already here the main representatives of this mode of writing because of their historical setting. In the case of Enriquillo (1882) by Manuel de Jesús Galván from the Dominican Republic, a text heavily based on Las Casas’s Historia de las Indias (History of the Indies, written 1552–1559, first edition: 1875), the mystification of the indigenous element serves to obscure the country’s African reality, which, from the hispanophile author’s point of view, constitutes the actual social threat (cf. Gewecke 1996). With Cumandá o Un drama entre salvajes (Cumandá, or A Drama amongst Savages, 1879), by the Ecuadorian Juan León Mera, we reach the second historical period that is generally treated in the historical novel, the time of colonization. The influence of James Fenimore Cooper is stated in the prologue, and the novel itself is set in the eighteenth century during the time of Jesuit missionary activity in Ecuador and demonstrates a highly paternalistic attitude (see below, Section 3.4.). Most of the colonial novels, however, are situated in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, and in Lima or Mexico as the most important centers of the Spanish Viceregencies. They tend to turn away from the ethnic focus and often deal with the Inquisition as the most outstanding sign of Spanish tyranny. In La novia del hereje (The Heretic’s Bride, 1846/54), the Argentinean novelist and historiographer Vicente Fidel López narrates the love story of a Catholic girl and an Englishman, set in late sixteenth-century Lima, from a liberal perspective. Presenting the marriage of the Catholic protagonist to the Protestant Englishman against the backdrop of the battle of the Armada, the novel opts for an anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish position. Another historical novel of the colonial period is El Inquisidor Mayor: Historia de unos amores (The Grand Inquisitor: History of Some Love Affairs, 1852) by the Chilean Utopian Socialist Manuel Bilbao that also takes place in Lima, where Bilbao stayed in exile. This text, written in the sensationalist mode of the French serialized novels, sets the enlightened ideas of a young Frenchman against the Inquisition, by which the hero is accused in eighteenth-century Lima. In Mexico we also find novelistic treatments of the Inquisition, such as La hija del judío (The Daughter of the Jew, 1848/49) by the liberal Justo Sierra O’Reilly, which relies upon Scott and the French feuilletonist style of Eugène Sue and Alexandre Dumas, as well as Monja, casada, virgen y martir (Nun, Wife, Virgin, and Martyr, 1868), by Vicente Riva Palacio, whose production of historical novels was extremely prolific. Nina Gerassi de Navarro has recently shown that a theme widely treated in the historical novel is piracy. López’s La novia del hereje thus evokes the historical figure of Francis Drake; further examples are El filibustero (The Freebooter, 1866) by Eligio Ancona, Los piratas del golfo (The Pirates of the Gulf, 1869) by Riva Palacio and Los piratas de Cartagena (The Pirates of Carthage, 1885) by Soledad Acosta de Samper, a novel that shows realistic tendencies, and has been considered the best work of this Colombian woman writer. To the novelists, pirates seemed to be appropriate figures to represent the threat of the Spanish Empire — and at the 3.

»[L]a novela más pro-indígena del grupo indianista-histórico« (Suárez Murias 1963, 199).

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same time to connect to the European Romantic tradition that shows a particular predilection for the audacity and freedom of this social outlaw, for example in the works of Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, José de Espronceda or James Fenimore Cooper. Where the historical novel treats the period of Independence, it often tries to revaluate its heroes within the contemporary political constellation. Gil Gómez el insurgente o la hija del médico (Gil Gómez the Insurgent, or The Doctor’s Daughter, 1859) by the Mexican author Juan Díaz Covarrubias for example, deals with the rehabilitation of Hidalgo, thus opposing the contemporary monarchist press and historiography. Another example is the Bolivian novel Juan de la Rosa: Memorias del último soldado de la independencia (Juan de la Rosa: Memoirs of the Last Soldier of the Independence Movement, 1885) by Nataniel Aguirre. This work is particularly interesting, not only because it represents a rare example of nineteenth-century prose writing in Bolivia and actually is the country’s first historical novel, but because of the autobiographical form and the novelistic treatment of the hero’s infancy and mysterious origin. The novel reminds us of Charles Dickens and already gives way to Realism, but at the same time retains Romantic features and costumbrist parts that include the utilization of Quechua vocabulary, and is thus a perfect example of the peculiar hybridity of Spanish American Romantic prose writing. Precisely because these Independence Novels are situated in time closer to contemporary time, they often bear characteristics of the sentimental or the social mode. Thus, the Argentinean novel Soledad (1847) by Bartolomé Mitre, whose love story is also set against the battle of Independence, and the short novel El Capitán de Patricios (The Captain of Patricios, 1843) by Juan María Gutiérrez have been considered historical novels. I think we should not adhere too closely to categorizations. Soledad, for example, indeed fits into all three categories, its thematic indebtedness to the novel Indiana (1832), by George Sand, however, in my opinion shows very clearly that the historical setting cannot be taken for the most outstanding aspect of the work. 3.2 The sentimental novel Mitre’s novel will introduce the second section of the sentimental novel. The work infuses a sentimental plot, including the criticism of marriage — probably borrowed from George Sand — with liberal republican patriotism when, at the end of the novel and after the death of her old and unloved husband, the heroine is set free to be with her Independence warrior. A similar connection exists between a patriotic message and a love story in Clemencia (1869), a novel by the important Mexican novelist and literary critic of indigenous origin Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, who assumed a sort of cultural leadership throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. In Clemencia, the action takes place during the French invasion of Mexico, and the pattern of the Romantic love story is intertwined with the presentation of moral social behavior and republican patriotism, for which the hero voluntarily sacrifices his life. The sentimental novel perhaps should better be called the arch-genre of Romantic prose fiction; in Spanish America at least, it is rather difficult if not impossible to find a fictional text that is not constructed around a love constellation. I will range within this category those texts that foreground the love story in an eminent way, neglecting by this the social or historical contextualization of the plot. Generally, the sentimental novel is indebted to the British and French

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eighteenth-century tradition as well as to genuinely Romantic sentimental texts. The majority of novels written in the nineteenth century were sentimental novels. Apart from a few exceptions there exists a multitude of novels of low aesthetic value responding to the increasing reading habits of the population. In spite of this reservation, it cannot be doubted that in María (1867) by the Colombian Jorge Isaacs, the sentimental mode finds the most successful and most widely read novel of all Romantic prose fiction in Spanish America. This retrospectively told love story between the young landowner’s son Efraín and his cousin María, who dies of a hereditary disease, pulls out all the stops of Romanticism: We find an idealized feminine protagonist, hidden eroticism, subjectivized nature descriptions, expressive sentimentality as well as melancholy and an elegiac atmosphere that surrounds the plot as a whole. The novel draws on Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand, but the evocation of the paternalistic slaveholder’s world that is destined to disappear due to the imploration of commercial capitalism also reveals its particular Romanticism with regard to the awareness of a past that cannot be retrieved. Surely, the intertextual relationships established in the text do not only hint at the elegiac Romantic mode, but also at a reformed Christianity that comments upon the sociopolitical developments (cf. Engelbert 1966; Bremer 1992). And even this prototype of the sentimental novel in Spanish America contains a considerable number of costumbristic scenes, proving once more the particular hybridity of Romantic prose fiction in Spanish America. Further examples of this elegiac current of the sentimental novel are Carmen (1882) or Angelina (1895) by the Mexicans Pedro Castera and Rafael Delgado. Esther (1851) by the Argentinean Miguel Cané is an original text about the tragic love between an English Aristocrat and a young Argentinean, whose setting in Italy and discussion of Florentine art already points to Modernistic writing. In La peregrinación de Bayoán (The Peregrination of Bayoán, 1863), echoing Goethe’s Werther (1774; 1787), the Puerto Rican Eugenio María de Hostos combines the sentimental plot with a political allegory. By the union of the protagonists, he proposes a West Indian nation composed of Puerto Rico, Cuba and Santo Domingo, which led to the prohibition of the novel in colonial Puerto Rico. Finally, the category of the sentimental novel includes the highly moralistic Julia (1861) by the Peruvian Luis Benjamín Cisneros (see 5.1 below), as well as the early works of the Chilean »Romantic Realist« (cf. Alegría 1978) Alberto Blest Gana, for example El primer amor (The First Love, 1858). 3.3 The social novel By the term »social novel« I understand those texts with a contemporary setting that give descriptions of social customs and behavior, generally in an urban setting. In contrast to the sentimental novel, the love stories in the center of these texts more frequently end happily, granting the protagonist the possibility of social advancement, and exhibiting in this way one of the main topics of Romanticism. Yet the work that is commonly considered the first Latin American novel, El periquillo sarniento (The Mangy Parrot, 1819–31) by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi contains descriptions of Mexican everyday life. This variation of the Spanish picaresque tradition appeared before Independence and presents a view of Mexican society in the satirical tradition of the Enlightenment era. What will be taken over to Romanticism from this novel,

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which stands at the very beginning of Spanish American prose fiction, is the costumbristic mode and the critique of the contemporary society. Those cross sections of the urban life typical to »costumbrismo« will continue in Mexico throughout the nineteenth century, for example with Manuel Payno — in novels such as El fistol del diablo (The Devil’s Tiepin, 1845–46), Los bandidos de Río Frío (The Bandits of Río Frío, 1889–91) — an author who is a good example of the current that links socialist utopianism to Romantic prose writing, or José Tomás de Cuéllar and his Linterna mágica (The Magic Lantern, 1871–92). Besides the »costumbrismo« tradition Balzac, Stendhal and George Sand, and also the French feuilletonist Eugène Sue turn out to be the most important influences on the Spanish American social novel, which commonly takes an explicitly liberal perspective. In Cecilia Valdés o La loma del ángel (Cecilia Valdés or Angel’s Hill, 1839) by the Cuban Cirilio Villaverde, the sentimental plot gives way to a complex description of contemporary society in the style of Balzac, and the presentation of the heroine, a mulatta preoccupied with the notion of social advancement, corresponds to the structural model of contemporary French novels. Amalia (1851–55) by the Argentinean José Mármol is an extensive novel with significant parts of costumbristic descriptions in a highly politicized mode of writing. This text will be discussed below (see chap. 4), as well as La clase media (The Middle Class, 1858) by Juan Díaz Covarrubias or El Padre Horán: Escenas de la vida cuzqueña (Father Horán: ��������������������������������������������������� Scenes of Life in Cuzco, 1848) by the Peruvian Narciso Aréstegui, which defend liberal middle class values (see chap. 5.1). A further outstanding example is the Colombian Manuela (1866) by Eugenio Díaz Castro, which describes everyday country life with a clearly remarkable tendency towards progressive liberalism. Finally, Alberto Blest Gana, the most important Chilean nineteenth-century novelist, significantly subtitles his most outstanding work Martín Rivas (1862) »novel of politico-social manners«.4 The »costumbrismo« of the Romantic novels grouped in this section surely draws upon »realistic« modes of writing because of their references to contemporary reality. Still, it has to be considered a typically Romantic genre because of its folkloristic features. In recent years it has also been reinterpreted as a decisive factor in the emergence of Realism, thus offering an argument in favor of the connection between Romanticism and Realism (Palomo et al. 1997). Moreover, »Realism« — in the sense of a description of contemporary social life and hence as a literary mode — also constitutes a characteristic feature of the French novel during the first half of the nineteenth century. Therefore, the works of George Sand, Stendhal, and Balzac occupy an intermediate position, as they were written during the period commonly referred to as »Romantic«. With respect to the Spanish American novel, this blurring of boundaries — which doubtlessly also occurs in other literary areas — between Romanticism and Realism can be considered as one of its constitutive aspects. 3.4 »Novela indianista« and »novela abolicionista« Due to the ethnic constellation in various Spanish American regions, the thematic subgenres of »novela abolicionista« and »novela indianista« have been established. Comparatively speaking, these subgenres reveal particular interest because they rely very much upon the literary motif of 4.

»Novela de costumbres político-sociales« (Blest Gana 1981).

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the Noble Savage established in Europe with the exotist mode of Enlightenment and taken over to Romanticism with the texts of Chateaubriand, in particular Atala (1801), which were widely read in Spanish America. The »novela indianista« takes its beginning in Mexico with the short novel Netzula (1832) by José María Lafragua. It flourishes throughout the whole continent, with special intensity, however, in those regions where the indigenous population is proportionately high. Thus, the publication of La quena (The Indian Flute) by the Argentinean writer Juana Manuela Gorriti in 1845 has to be seen in relation to the biographical fact that Gorriti had spent many years in Peru. Concha Meléndez groups within her work about La novela indianista en Hispanoamérica a great number of examples, including some of the texts that have already been mentioned above (Guatimozín, Cumandá, Enriquillo, see chap. 3.1.). Because of their linking to the exotist literary tradition, the »indianist« novels often show a highly mediated view of the indigenous reality that, furthermore, is functionalized due to the sociopolitical purposes of the authors. The »referents proposed as autochthonous« are thus »mediated by the anthropological discourse of the Other« (Benítez Rojo 1996, 424). However, the decisive factor seems to have been the conviction that ethnicity could be reclaimed as a distinctive element of Latin American reality and could thus contribute to an autochthonous identity construction, while at the same time providing a connection to established literary practices. Juan León Mera’s Cumandá, for instance, manifests its Creole perspective in the fact that the indigenous reality remains the backdrop for the love story between the son of a missionary and a supposed Indian princess who finally turns out to be the sister — once carried off during a revolt — of the protagonist who, in turn, is stylized as Romantic »poeta«. The action of Cumandá demonstrates a highly paternalistic attitude, emphasizing Catholic missionary work. The European perspective is additionally highlighted through the geographical descriptions, which constitute an intertextual reference to both Atala as well as to the Enlightenment tradition of travel writing. Furthermore, the novel’s intertextuality includes an inter-American link to Cooper’s Wept of Wish-ton-wish (1829). The Cuban »novela abolicionista« comes to light even before the great success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851/52) with Anselmo Suárez Romero’s Francisco (1880, written in 1838). Commonly, it also includes Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés, in spite of the fact that the abolitionist theme does not actually appear until the second version of the novel is published in the United States in 1881. Suárez Romero and Villaverde belonged to the liberal literary circle of Domingo Delmonte, which is responsible for the upwelling of this literary current (cf. Varela Jácome 1987, 96–98). One outstanding »novela abolicionista«, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841), however, appeared outside of this literary circle. This novel could be called the »most« Romantic piece of prose writing of the period because it displays an extremely high degree of Romantic stereotyping in its aesthetic design. The novel was written at a time when its author was already living in Spain, where she spent a large part of her life. Its importation into Cuba was explicitly prohibited in 1844. I shall use the example of Sab to demonstrate the ways in which Spanish American texts tend to rework traditional elements of European literature under different sociocultural circumstances. Sab was written in Spain for a Spanish audience and shows the highly stereotypical characters, the idealization of the main protagonists, the subjective descriptions of nature, the Manicheism and emphatic sentimentality of Romantic prose fiction. The novel’s central arch-text is Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826), its character constellation corresponds to Goethe’s

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Werther (the female protagonist’s name is Carlota), and its comparison of slavery and marriage recalls the novels of George Sand, whom Avellaneda highly admired. The action takes place in a sugar mill, where the mulatto Sab adores the proprietor’s daughter in a manner that cannot be surpassed in its moral integrity. The novel’s most important functional element, however, consists in the fact that the idealized depiction of Sab’s »superior soul« exactly corresponds to the model of the Noble Savage.5 This text shows perfectly how the motif of the Noble Savage corresponds to the Europeanized reading expectations of Spanish America’s Creole elite as well as to those of a European audience, while at the same time allowing for an autochthonous topic. 3.5 Generic hybrids The novelistic subgenres and their interconnectedness may have shown that Spanish American prose fiction above all demonstrates that novel writing is a dialogic process: both reading and writing occur in reaction to existing literary and cultural patterns. Readers of prose fiction have very concrete expectations with regard to the thematic issues to be fictionalized, while writers respond to formations of narrative discourse, purposefully adapting them to their own needs. If, as Doris Sommer has argued, »nation« and »romance« reach a productive relationship at the level of plot formation (Sommer 1991, 30–51), we can also speak of the utilization of established literary motifs and genre conventions for the acceptance of autochthonous themes. Spanish American authors employ intertextual techniques in order to cater to their audience’s specific expectations and to create trans-cultural texts that foreground the socio-cultural conditions of their autochthonous contexts. This strategy produces a variety of combinations and generic hybrids that subvert both the conventional distinctions between »novela histórica«, »novela sentimental«, »novela social« as well as specific thematic classifications such as »novela indianista« and »novela abolicionista«. Such techniques do, however, characterize all prose writing to a certain extent, and there is basically no conceptual difference between French authors referring to French models or Alberto Blest Gana referring to Balzac. El Zarco: Episodio de la vida mexicana 1861–63 (El Zarco the Bandit, 1901, written 1886–88) by Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, is a fine example that transcends all three subgenres. The novel stays close to Romanticism with the love story between its female middle class protagonist and a social outlaw. Suárez Murias considered it the best Mexican and even an outstanding Spanish American Romantic novel (Suárez Murias 1963, 202). The protagonist turns out to be a Mexican Emma Bovary whose feelings are soberly analyzed by the narrator, and thus the novel can be situated at the turn toward literary Realism. In any case, the publication date of El Zarco as well as that of the other novels listed above under the different categories already show that the literary paradigm of the Romantic novel has such a strong presence in Spanish America that »novelas románticas« can be found nearly throughout the nineteenth century, which complicates the periodization of Romanticism as a literary epoch. In spite of this discontinuity, it seems sensible to establish an — albeit permeable — temporal limit around 1870. Romantic modes of writing predominate up to the 1860s, and it is not until 1867 that Jorge Isaacs published María, the work that would be canonized as the epitome of Romantic prose fiction in Spanish America. The 5.

»[A]lma superior« (Gómez de Avellaneda 1970, passim).

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drastic change in the sociopolitical situation in the majority of the Spanish American countries from the 1870s, followed by a complementary change in the literary situation from the 1880s, makes such a caesura seem appropriate from a macro-perspective. 4.

The interdependence of literature and politics and the beginning of literary discourse

Having surveyed the Romantic novel, I will now explore the socio-political function of Spanish American prose fiction on the basis of selected examples. In Argentina, political involvement stands at the very beginning of novel writing, and this region will serve to outline a chronological perspective of Spanish American Romanticism. Afterwards, I will examine to what extent the Spanish American novelists responded to the particular autochthonous circumstances by integrating specific features of an emerging social discourse into their texts (chap. 5). This contextualization may also serve to view the conventional canonization of the nineteenth-century prose production in relative terms. Finally, I will summarize my findings and relate the special functionality of Spanish American Romanticism to the particular conditions of Spanish American prose production (chap. 6). With regard to the Romantic movement, the interconnectedness of literature and politics is particularly obvious in the case of Argentina, since most Argentinian Romantic literature directly refers to the contemporaneous political conflict. Furthermore, Argentina is an outstanding example for the complexity of Spanish American Romanticism; therefore, I shall now discuss the situation in Argentina in greater detail than in the case of the succeeding national contexts. The beginning of Argentine Romanticism is commonly situated in 1830, the year in which Esteban Echeverría, who was called the Lamartine of the Río de la Plata, returns from France to Argentina and begins to introduce his country to the writers of French liberal Romanticism. The early socialist »Asociación de Mayo«, which included Echeverría, Vicente Fidel López, Miguel Cané and Juan María Gutiérrez, was strongly influenced by the optimism of the French Revolution of 1830 and was directed against the dictatorial, xenophobic regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas which lasted from 1835 to 1852. Because Echeverría and many of his companions had to leave Argentina, the Argentine novel had to take its beginnings in the Chilean, Uruguayan or Bolivian exile. But these sojourns in exile led to continuities within the literary development in individual Spanish American nations; from the 1830s an — albeit highly discontinuous — literary discourse throughout individual Spanish American countries, including Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and even Cuba (despite the fact that it would remain Spanish until 1898) was emerging. The 1842 dispute between the »neoclassicist« Andrés Bello and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, supporter of the new Romantic movement that demanded freedom in every regard, is especially important in this context — not so much because of its concrete particulars, but because of its significance as a public event that clearly demonstrated the dynamic developments that were going on at the time. The case of Argentina is of special interest here because within the heated political climate of the Rosas era early examples of Spanish American novel writing were created. Before I comment on Amalia as the outstanding Romantic novel in Argentina, I shall briefly turn to Echeverría’s narrative El matadero (The Slaughterhouse, 1871, written 1838–40). This text not

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only exemplifies the close intertwining of literary and political practice but also stresses the continental discontinuities inherent in literary periodization. El matadero, written around 1839, but not published until 1871, allegorically depicts the situation under the dictator Rosas — during which the francophile »Unitarians« were opposed to Rosas’s »Federalists« — as a slaughterhouse. With regard to the literary mode of writing, this narrative proves to be pure naturalism avant la lettre. José Mármol’s Amalia, on the other hand, corresponds very well to the Romantic paradigm in terms of its subject matter and its literary form. Benítez Rojo observes that »following nationalist criteria, one could say that Amalia is to Argentinean narrative what El periquillo is to Mexican narrative« (Benítez Rojo 1996, 450), and Oviedo has said that Cecilia Valdés signifies for Cuba what Amalia signifies for Argentina (cf. Oviedo 1997, 81). Like Echeverría’s Matadero, the novel treats the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas and the conflicts between Unitarians and Federalists, both of which appear in the highly stereotypical character constellations so characteristic of Romanticism. The political conflict is intertwined with the love story between the heroine Amalia and Eduardo, an opponent to the Rosas regime, and the novel can be read as a Romantic novel of manners, with many passages representing social interactions and illustrating the way of life of the Argentine Creole society. Even though the action takes place in 1840, Mármol highlights the novel’s contemporaneity in his introductory remarks of 1851. He explains that, even though most of the people who appear in his novel are still alive, he prefers to describe »in a retrospective form the persons who live in actuality«6 because this is the usual procedure in novel writing and because this text should serve as a testimonial for future generations. Mármol’s novel was widely read in Argentina, and the existence of a series of imitations produced throughout the 1850s, even though they do not reach the complexity of Mármol’s opulent work, demonstrates that Amalia, besides its political mission, is also a good example of literary entertainment (cf. Devoto 1978, 348). This is confirmed by the fact that we can find responses to Amalia even in France, where in 1867 Gustave Aimard (i.e. Olivier Gloux) published two novels with the titles La Mas-horca (the name of Rosas’s secret police) and Rosas. Both are largely literal translations of Amalia, with some modifications corresponding to the needs of the French audience (cf. Devoto 1978). Apart from the exoticist value of Spanish American themes, the existence of these books may also be explained by France’s interest in Argentina, which had manifested itself through French shipping blockades of the Río de la Plata during the Rosas regime (1838–40, and together with Great Britain 1845–49). By and large, however, the reception or appropriation of a Spanish American text by France clearly constitutes an exception in an inter-literary situation characterized by a profoundly asymmetrical cultural hierarchy and a general flow of cultural goods in the opposite direction (Ette 1994). Juana Manso de Noronha’s novel Los misterios del Plata: Episodios históricos de la época de Rosas (The Mysteries of the Plata: Historical Episodes of the Rosas Epoch, 1846), for example, has to be seen in relation to Eugène Sue’s serialized novel Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris, 1842/43), which had been published just three years earlier. The only aspect that Sue’s novel, which had actually sparked a wave of »Misterios« in South America, shares with Manso’s text is its explicit political functionalization. In Manso’s case, as well as in that of many other responses to Sue’s Mystères, 6.

»bajo una forma retrospectiva personajes que viven en la actualidad« (Mármol 1991, 1).

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the main reason for this affiliation probably lies in the ready reception of popular literature. In the meantime in France, popular literature had become as widespread as it was controversial. Sue’s recipe suggested diversion but at the same time it also included a politico-didactical function. With regard to the implication of women in these political debates, Francine Masiello has further demonstrated how the female perspective of Juana Manso served to relativize her companion Mármol’s patriarchal and highly conventional notions of confining female activities to the private sphere (cf. Masiello 1992, 70–76). This additional aspect emphasizes the complex sociopolitical dimension of the novelistic discourse in nineteenth-century Argentina. 5.

The novel and social discourse

5.1 Liberalism and morality This section will show which values and attitudes are defended in the Spanish American novels of the Romantic period and how some general features of social discourse can be explained in terms of the particular autochthonous situations. My examination of the literary scene in Spanish America will include the common canonization practices. Thus, I hope to establish a spectrum which goes beyond the so-called foundational fiction, and which tries to explore the reasons for the course of canonization as well as for the special features that can be observed in the novelistic practice. If the social reality of the indigenous population often seems to fade into the background in the context of its intra-literary contextualization within the tradition of exotism, this mode of treating ethnic themes is by no means the only option available in early Spanish American prose fiction. Efraín Kristal has demonstrated that with Narciso Aréstegui and Juana Manuela Gorriti strong signs of social criticism have existed in Peru from early on. Their texts challenge the frequently advanced hypothesis of an idealizing »indianismo«, which is contrasted with a politically committed »indigenismo« that allegedly does not begin to develop until the end of the nineteenth century in the context of literary naturalism. Kristal’s observation can also be confirmed for other regions. The tendency in Aréstegui and Gorriti exhibits functionalization of novel writing in the name of liberalism, and also the importance of French-style social Romanticism as a constitutive element of Spanish American prose fiction. The support for the indigenous population expressed in these texts often constitutes merely one aspect of social critique among many others, including anticlericalism, the need for European immigration, or women’s education. In Ecuador, Miguel Ríofrío’s La Emancipada (The Emancipated One, 1863), is an explicitly social Romanticist statement. Yet this novel appears about ten years before Mera’s Cumandá, the text commonly considered to be Ecuador’s »foundational fiction«. In La Emancipada, anticlericalism, rebellion against paternal authority, support for the subaltern indigenous population, and women’s education complete an extensive liberal program. The plot contains many elements of Romantic rebellion: The protagonist Rosaura is educated by her mother (who is familiar with the Lancasterian teaching method) in the spirit of liberalism; but when the mother dies, her father no longer permits the girl’s education to continue. Rosaura agrees to marry the

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husband assigned by her father only to liberate herself from paternal authority: After the wedding ceremony, she leaves the church and her village in order to live a free and autonomous life. In the context of Spanish America, which holds social productivity and moral integrity in very high esteem, this action proves to be of particularly explosive force, and the comparison of the bride to Byron clearly illustrates the protagonist’s daring decisiveness: something could be seen that seemed to be a beatific vision: it was Rosaura in her wedding dress. When she reached the threshold, she raised her veil as if it troubled her, and there remained, exposed to the public, a face that was no longer that of the shy and modest virgin […]. Rosaura at this moment showed the kind of strange boldness that characterizes the portraits of Lord Byron. It could be said that her soul was made of gunpowder and that an explosion would occur soon.7

The subversive power of La Emancipada consists in the demonstration of how far the revolution reaches into the private sphere. However, the protagonist ultimately chooses death because the one she loves cannot accept her behavior. On the one hand, this ending suggests the impracticability of such an option in a Spanish American society, but on the other hand it can also be interpreted as a concession to the Romantic ideal of the individual’s desire for freedom and its destruction through restrictive social conventions. Even though this relatively short novel does show certain weaknesses with regard to style and elaboration, it is nonetheless particularly expressive in the way it situates the self within a social discourse. Even if the canonization of Cumandá is understandable from an aesthetic point of view, Ríofrío’s Emancipada makes clear that the spectrum of Ecuadorian novel production clearly exceeds the pattern of »novela indianista«. In Peru, the liberal orientation of novel writing already manifests itself during the 1840s, when, in El padre Horán, Narciso Aréstegui proposes a liberal program that includes the Creole middle class as well as the Mestizo and Indian population and advocates rejection of Peru’s feudal structures and support of commerce and immigration within a constitutional monarchy, hence explicitly reflects the political measures of the contemporary Peruvian government (cf. Kristal 1987, 42–55). With regard to the novel’s anticlericalism, Benítez Rojo (1996, 453) has stressed the relationship to Sue’s Le juif errant (The Wandering Jew, 1844/45), another famous serialized novel by the French author that had a very strong political impact throughout the continent (cf. Jaramillo Uribe 1977 in a Columbian context). Significantly, it may have been this very comparison that prevented the canonization of Aréstegui’s novel, thus turning Luis Benjamín Cisneros into the commonly accepted first Peruvian novelist (cf. Suárez Murias 1963, 126; Toro Montalvo 1994, 198). This is the case if we do not include the texts by Juana Manuela Gorriti, and if we do not place the beginning of the Peruvian novel as late as the 1880s and already in the realm of naturalism, with Clorinda Matto de Turner. Cisneros’s novel Julia, o Escenas de la vida en Lima (Julia, Or Scenes of Life in Lima), written in Paris in 1860, corresponds much

7.

»se presentó algo que parecía una visión beatífica: era Rosaura con las nupciales vestiduras. Al tocar en el umbral levantó su velo como si le estorbase, y quedó en pública exposición un rostro que no era ya el de la virgen tímida y modesta […]. Rosaura mostraba en ese instante no sé qué de la extraña audacia que se revela en los retratos de Lord Byron. Podía decirse que su alma era de pólvora y que bien pronto iba a hacer una explosión« (Ríofrío 1984, 58).

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more to the postulate of morality so highly esteemed in Latin America. Cisneros explicitly foregrounds this in his preface (preceded by an emphatic dedication to his mother): The spirit of the modern French romance, basically noble and moral, has been corrupted in its cradle. To transplant it without its elements of scandal and prostitution into a society like ours, […] is a task that turns out to be more difficult than it seemed to be at first sight. […] As for the moral conviction that has guided me, I leave its appreciation to the conscience of each individual [reader].8

With these words, Cisneros identifies the very circumstance that contributed to reducing the attractiveness of French models in the eyes of Spanish American novelists: the moral reprehensibility of (serial) novels, which had begun to be debated in 1836 in the British Quarterly Review, a debate that almost certainly found its way to Spanish America, e.g. via Andrés Bello’s European connections (cf. Rodríguez Monegal 1969). But there were also many critical voices within France, even more so after the immense success of Eugène Sue’s serialized novels in the early 1840s. The complaint about the »industrialization of literature« often went hand in hand with a reproach for immorality and was additionally connected to the question of social distinction (Bourdieu; cf. Heitmann 1970, Paatz 2000). In Spain, novels produced in France were also harshly criticized, in particular by the papist Catholic side, which placed a good number of works on the Inquisition’s index (cf. Zavala 1971). But even if the moral critique of French prose fiction constitutes a commonplace in nineteenth-century literary criticism, the importance of the moral paradigm in Latin America should not be considered merely as a form of subscribing to this international trend. It is precisely the social functionalization of novel writing that requires socially productive models, and this, in my opinion, is the main reason why Spanish American texts often tend to combine liberalism and morality. In fact, the Spanish American texts more often have positive endings, as has been demonstrated by Manfred Engelbert for the case of Alberto Blest Gana’s Martín Rivas, and Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black, 1830), and as I have illustrated for Bartolomé Mitre’s Soledad and George Sand’s Indiana (1832). Yet this moral paradigm also has to be seen under the premise that these novels intended to present exemplary codes of behavior, and that transgressions were normally punished. Moreover, the privileging of this moral paradigm helps to explain certain curious structural breaks in these texts, such as the Uruguayan Alejandro Magariños Cervantes’s Caramurú (1848). Eva Findenegg has recently shown how this early literary treatment of the gaucho-motif ends up with the unconvincing integration of the outlaw into an urban environment where he is transformed into a model representative of bourgeois society as a caring husband after marrying the woman whom he had kidnapped earlier. If we take into account to what extent the gaucho has been considered the personification of Spanish American »barbarism«, opposed to a Eurocentric concept of desirable »civilization«, as in Sarmiento’s famous essay Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (Facundo or, Civilization and Barbarism, 1845), we can see the curious alliances this need for social productivity can produce. 8.

»El espíritu del romance francés moderno, noble y moral en el fondo, ha sido corrompido en su cuna. Transplantarlo sin sus formas de escándalo y prostitución a una sociedad como la nuestra, […], es un trabajo más difícil de lo que a primera vista parece. […] En cuanto al pensamiento moral que me ha guiado, dejo su apreciación a la conciencia de cada cual« (Cisneros 1939, 83).

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5.2 Spanish American middle class life and social change In Europe as well as in Spanish America, Romanticism is associated with drastic social developments. Novels take part in this process, commenting on the changes and the importance of gaining a certain degree of social stability, shared value systems and life concepts. Novel writing contributes to societal formation, presenting domestic life and social advancement. We can observe a number of women writers taking part in this discourse of domesticity in Spanish America. In El médico de San Luis (The Doctor of San Luis, 1860) the Argentine writer Eduarda Mansilla de García presents the domestic sphere as a »refuge from violence and immorality« in an anarchic society (Masiello 1992, 78). In this novel, widely acknowledged at the time of its publication but nearly forgotten until recently, maternal authority is considered the crucial element in overcoming »social anarchy« (77). This requirement of secure family structures as the basis for social progress — an issue that can frequently be found in nineteenth-century Spanish American novels — also explains why Mansilla de García draws on an eighteenth-century European pattern, that of the British domestic novel. The novel’s arch-text is Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and, at the same time as guaranteeing moral impeccability, Mansilla de García also satisfies the Spanish American cultural elite’s »desire for Anglo-Saxonness« (Benítez Rojo 1996, 452, passim) through the figure of the British family father. A Chilean counterpart can be found in Rosario Orrego de Uribe’s Alberto el jugador (Albert the Player, 1860), a novel published, significantly enough, under the pseudonym »A Mother«: Orrego de Uribe depicts the ways in which gambling posits a threat to family life and presents a whole liberal program that includes the education to citizenship, women’s education, as well as a pedagogical penal system (cf. Löfquist 1998). Such texts emphasize both the urgency with which Spanish America was searching for reliable criteria that guaranteed the functioning of society, as well as the fragility and the permanent threat to existing social formations. Here the private is the political to an extent otherwise rarely encountered in the history of world literature, and this is why the novel, and with it the possibility of representing privacy, is of such crucial importance. Even the historical novel takes this aspect into account, as exemplified by Vicente Fidel López, who stresses in his prologue to La novia del hereje the importance of the (re-)construction of family life: But as it is true that besides the historical life there has always existed the family life, just as each man who has left memories also had a face, the skillful novelist can use his imagination to recreate the lost part, i.e. he can freely recreate the family life while strictly subjecting himself to the historical life in combining the one and the other in order to reproduce the complete truth.9

But this would not be Romanticism if, in addition to novels which highlight the importance of family life, we did not also encounter others that depict individuals in their attempts to gain a position in a yet-to-be-formed social order. This aspect is closely related to the consolidation 9.

»Pero como la verdad es que al lado de la vida histórica ha existido la vida familiar, así como todo hombre que ha dejado recuerdos ha tenido un rostro, el novelista hábil puede reproducir con su imaginación la parte perdida creando libremente la vida familiar y sujetándose estrictamente a la vida histórica en las combinaciones que haga de una y otra para reproducir la verdad completa« (López 1917, 19).

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of the liberal-capitalist paradigm, on the Latin American continent as well as in Europe, where the Romantic novel, as is well known, has been the genre par excellence of the rising middle classes. In Spanish American prose fiction we frequently encounter the motif of the socially upwardly-mobile middle class hero, usually advancing by means of an advantageous marriage. Alberto Blest Gana’s novels are the best-known examples: La aritmética en el amor (Arithmetics and Love, 1860) and Martín Rivas. Even if, in the first novel, the hero’s choice between two girls is eventually decided in favor of the girl with a more modest social background, this has to be seen in the context of the hero’s moral integrity. In accordance with the moral paradigm, the protagonist is finally rewarded for his choice by a comfortable inheritance that guarantees a living for his family. In Martín Rivas the social advancement of the hero by means of his marriage to the daughter of a financial oligarch eventually leads to a very optimistic evaluation of the social possibilities in Chile. As a consequence, we can identify explicit pleas for the developing middle classes in Spanish American novels even before the onset of the massive processes of modernization that shape the final two decades of the century. This observation seems to be particularly valid for Mexico, for example in Juan Díaz Covarrubias, the strong advocate of the ideas of the 1857 Mexican constitution, who in his writings had managed to establish a liberal program against the strong resistance of a traditionalist-monarchist opposition. Díaz Covarrubias was shot during the Civil War by the conservatives when only 22 years of age, which is why his literary work remains immature. Nevertheless it may be compared to the early novels of Alberto Blest Gana, for example. In La clase media, the stratification of Mexican society is represented by the contrast between a vicious, unproductive »aristocracy« and a middle class supplied with all possible virtues and abused by the representatives of the »aristocracy«. In Díaz Covarrubias’s narrative, the middle class cannot yet reach social productivity: There is no happy ending for the middle-class couple at the center of the text because the protagonist has lost her honor — she has been violated by a member of the »aristocracy«. But this neither diminishes the social function of the middle class as projected into the future by the novel nor the suggested decadence of the »aristocracy«: And those youngsters, and those beautiful women, and that bad army — this is called aristocracy? My God! What is going on? But no! Have faith and hope, middle class, intelligent class, virtuous class, democracy and equality will come, the century advances, sweeping away with its force the villains and the traitors! Faith and hope, if theirs is the present, yours is the future!10

With regard to the vehemence of his Romantic conviction, Díaz Covarrubias can be compared to the Spanish costumbrista Larra, whose person is surrounded by a similar mythical aura because of his suicide in 1837. In conclusion, I will return to the most outstanding figure of nineteenth-century Mexican prose fiction, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano. Altamirano imparted decisive impulses for Mexican literary discourse in the 1860s and, in his »Revista literaria,« he stressed the importance of Díaz Covarrubias for the development of the Mexican novel (cf. 10.

»¿Y esos jovencitos, y esas bellas mujeres, y ese mal ejército, se llama aristocracia? ¡Dios mío! ¿Qué es lo que pasa? ¡Mas no!, ten fe y esperanza, clase media, clase inteligente, clase virtuosa, la democracia y la igualdad vienen, el siglo avanza arrastrando en su empuje a los malvados y los traidores. ¡Fe y esperanza, si es suyo el presente, tuyo es el porvenir!…« (Díaz Covarrubias 1959, 389).

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Altamirano 1988, 63 f.). In this text, which constitutes a recapitulation of Mexican literary production, Altamirano establishes a direct link between liberalism and the creation of a collective bourgeois habitus by means of literature and especially grants crucial importance for the social process to the novel: The novel of the nineteenth century has to place itself next to journalism, theatre, technological and industrial progress, the railway, the telegraph and the steamship. It contributes with all these inventions of the genius to the improvement of humanity and the leveling of the classes by education and manners.11

As a conclusion, he formulates the didactic function of novel writing, a declaration which stands out among the many other programmatic declarations that can be found throughout the entire continent: That’s why the despotic governments forbid popular lectures, that’s why the really progressive governments take more care to protect them […] winning the people’s sympathy and […] providing their own best defense through the instruction of the masses, an eternal monument blessed by posterity.12

This sounds like a summary of the turbulent literary developments on the continent, and it illustrates that, after more than forty years of political independence, the focus of the discussion has not changed substantially. 6.

Conclusion: Social discourse and the conditions of literary production in Spanish America

By way of conclusion, we can point out that Romantic prose fiction in Spanish America goes beyond the often assumed Eurocentric perspective in a very dialectic way. In fact, the Spanish American novels make European cultural conventions trans-cultural, while at the same time always remaining in touch with Europe as their addressee. For this reason, many texts include discursive explanations of Spanish American political constellations, geographical realities, botanical peculiarities, or just lexical codes that require an explanatory meta-language since the »Eurocentrist reading [counts] as the only real and canonizing one«.13 Yet we have to take into account that this need for explanation actually also existed on the part of the Spanish American metropolitan audiences. The autochthonous contextualization of Spanish American novels — which was considered a form of »Americanismo« and hence a positive aspect by literary history 11.

»la novela del siglo XIX debe colocarse al lado del periodismo, del teatro, del adelanto fabril e industrial, de los caminos de hierro, del telégrafo y del vapor. Ella contribuye con todos estos inventos del genio a la mejora de la humanidad y a la nivelación de las clases por la educación y las costumbres« (Altamirano 1988, 48).

12.

»Por eso los gobiernos despóticos prohiben las lecturas populares, por eso los gobiernos verdaderamente progresistas cuidan de protegerlas […] [y] conquistarles la simpatía popular y […] asegurarles con la instrucción de las masas la mejor defensa, un monumento eterno que la posteridad bendice« (ibid., 83).

13.

»[L]ectura eurocentrista como la verdadera y consagratoria« (Rama 1984, 51).

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and criticism — for a long time represented virtually the only criterion for canonization, and it did not matter too much whether this »Americanismo« served to establish cultural identity or to satisfy the exoticist expectations in a Eurocentric view. We have seen, for example, that even the autochthonous scenery of the »indianist« novels is indebted to a strong European perception in aesthetic practice. Thus, it could be useful to go beyond this »Americanismo« that at first sight claims Spanish American authenticity, and to look for more subtle tendencies of social discourse that hint, for example, at a greater morality in comparison with the European texts, at a higher degree of social success and at the necessity of depicting exemplary everyday life or a particular inclination to the treatment of liberal values. All these features can be linked to Romanticism and related to the specific social changes that had to be dealt with in the New World as well as in the Old World. This sociopolitical contextualization stands at the very beginning of Spanish American prose fiction, whose emergence, however, has to be seen in close relation to the narrative possibilities offered by the temporarily preceding and contemporaneous European movements. The didactic orientation of these texts militated for as wide a distribution as possible, which serialization via periodicals enabled. The label of »folletinesco« has been employed time and again in the reception history of nineteenth-century Spanish American novels to exclude certain texts from the literary canon. But around the mid-nineteenth century, the Spanish American situation differed substantially from that in France, even though Spanish American literary life was characterized by a transatlantic orientation. Thus, the »folletín« did not so much denote a mode of writing à la Sue, Dumas, or Ponson du Terrail. Rather, Spanish American literary production — and consumption — was still in its infancy to such a degree that each attempt to write a voluminous piece of prose fiction has to be seen as a contribution to the construction of an autochthonous novelistic culture, while deficits in the print industry still did not allow largescale book publication. The serialized publication mode in Spanish America was instrumental in establishing the literary field. This constitutes a considerable difference to the French situation, where criticizing the »roman-feuilleton« was tantamount to regretting that an increase in readership at the same time meant the loss of a social privilege. The Spanish American position thus proves to be more democratic, and thereby situated itself between French cultural elitism and US-American conditions, where, due to literacy programs and the development of the print industry, novel reading had already begun to assume the proportions of mass culture. On the Southern continent, both the US-American as well as the French situation had their attraction in a cultural climate that, comparatively speaking, was mainly characterized by deficiencies in both the educational system and the production of literature. In any case, the major part of Spanish American Romantic prose fiction was originally published as »folletín«. This includes such important contributions to Spanish American prose writing as José Mármol’s Amalia, Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés and Alberto Blest Gana’s Martín Rivas, as well as the above mentioned works by Juana Manso, Bartolomé Mitre, Narciso Aréstegui, Miguel Ríofrío and many others. The paradigm of Romanticism thus better manages to capture these works if it takes into account the specific conditions of their production.

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Bibliography Alegría, Fernando. 1978. »Aspectos fundamentales de la novela romántica latinoamericana«. Recopilación de textos sobre la novela romántica latinoamericana. Ed. by Mirta Yáñez. Havanna: Casa de las Américas. 61–128. Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel. 1988. »Revistas literarias de México«. Obras completas XII: Escritos de literatura y arte. Vol. 1. Ed. by José Luis Martínez. México: SEP. 29–174. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. 1996. »The Nineteenth-Century Spanish American novel«. Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Vol. 1: Discovery to Modernism. Ed. by Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 417–489. Blest Gana, Alberto. 1981. Martín Rivas: Novela de costumbres político-sociales (1862). Ed. by Guillermo Araya. Madrid: Cátedra. Bremer, Thomas. 1992. »María«. Der hispanoamerikanische Roman. Ed. by Volker Roloff and Harald WentzlaffEggebert. Vol 1. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. 64–77. Carilla, Emilio. 1967. El romanticismo en la América hispánica. 2 vols. Madrid: Gredos. Cisneros, Luis Benjamín. 1939. Julia o Escenas de la vida en Lima. Obras completas. Vol. 2: La prosa literaria. Lima: Librería e Imprenta Gil S.A. 79–219. Devoto, Daniel. 1978. »›Las hijas de Amalia‹: Reflexiones sobre la novela histórica«. Revue de Littérature Comparée. 52: 339–66. Díaz Covarrubias, Juan. 1959. La clase media. Obras Completas. Vol. 2. Ed. by Clementina Díaz de Ovando. Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas/Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 327–397. Engelbert, Manfred. 1996. »Julien Sorel, Martín Rivas und die anderen«. Romanistik als vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft: Festschrift für Jürgen von Stackelberg. Ed. by Wilhelm Graeber, Dieter Steland and Wilfried Floeck. Frankfurt/M., Bern, New York: Lang. 23–34. Ette, Ottmar. 1994. »Asymmetrie der Beziehungen: Zehn Thesen zum Dialog der Literaturen Lateinamerikas und Europas«. Lateinamerika denken: Kulturtheoretische Grenzgänge zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne. Ed. by Birgit Scharlau. Tübingen: Narr. 297–326. Findenegg, Eva. 2002 »¿El gaucho malo o el gaucho bueno? La novela histórica Caramurú por Alejandro Magariños Cervantes«. Do the Americas have a Common Literary History? Ed. by Barbara Buchenau and Annette Paatz. Frankfurt/M.: Lang. Gewecke, Frauke. 1996. Der Wille zur Nation: Nationsbildung und Entwürfe nationaler Identität in der Dominikanischen Republik. Frankfurt/M.: Vervuert. Gerassi de Navarro, Nina. 1999. Pirate Novels: Fictions of Nation Building in Spanish America. Durham, NC: Duke UP. Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis. 1970. Sab. Ed. by Carmen Bravo-Villasante. Madrid: Anaya. González, Aníbal. 1993. Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Heitmann, Klaus. 1970. Der Immoralismus-Prozeß gegen die französische Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert. Bad Homburg: Gehlen. Jaramillo Uribe, Jaime. 1977. »Influencia de los románticos franceses y de la revolución de 1848 en el pensamiento político colombiano del siglo XIX«. Homenaje a Rodolfo Grossmann: Festschrift zu seinem 85. Geburtstag. Ed. by Sabine Horl, José M. Navarro de Adriaensens and Hans-Karl Schneider. Frankfurt/M., Bern, Las Vegas: Lang. 13–33. Kristal, Efraín. 1987. The Andes Viewed from the City: Literary and Political Discourse on the Indian in Peru 1848–1930. New York et. al.: Lang. Lamartine, Alphonse de. 1955. Romans d’amour: Graziella; Raphaël. Ed. by Jean Des Cognets. Paris: Garnier.

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Löfquist, Eva. 1998. »Familia y juego en Alberto el jugador, la primera novela de autora chilena«. América Latina: ¿Y las mujeres qué? Workshop-Seminario »Investigación Nórdica sobre la Mujer en América Latina« (=Serie Haina I). Ed. by María Clara Medina. Göteborg: Red. HAINA/Instituto Iberoamericano. 5–35. López, Vicente Fidel. 1917. »Carta-Prólogo«. La novia del hereje o La Inquisición de Lima. Buenos Aires: La Cultura Argentina. 11–19. Mármol, José. 1991. Amalia. México: Porrúa. Masiello, Francine. 1992. Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, & Literary Culture in Modern Argentina. Nebraska: Nebraska UP. Meléndez, Concha. 1934. La novela indianista en Hispanoamérica (1832–1889). Madrid: Librería y casa editorial Hernando. Oviedo, José Miguel. 1997. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. Vol. 2: Del Romanticismo al Modernismo. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Paatz, Annette. 2000. »Zur Rezeption von George Sand in Lateinamerika im 19. Jahrhundert«. George Sand: Jenseits des Identischen/Au-delà de l’identique. XIII. Internationales George-Sand-Kolloquium/XIIIe Colloque International George Sand. Ed. by Gislinde Seybert and Gisela Schlientz. Bielefeld: Aisthesis. 455–471. ———. 2003. »Die Gefahren der literarischen ›Massenproduktion‹: Positionen der Literaturkritik in der Revue des Deux Mondes«. Eine Literatur für den Leser. Ed. by Jörg Türschmann. Aachen: Shaker. 39–55. Palomo, Pilar, Pérez Vidal, Alejandro, and Rubio Cremades, Enrique. 1997. »La literatura costumbrista«. Historia de la literatura española: Siglo XIX(I). Ed. by Guillermo Carnero. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. 151–234. Pollmann, Leo. 1982. Geschichte des Hispanoamerikanischen Romans. Vol. 1: Die literarische Selbstentdeckung (1810–1929). Berlin: Schmidt. Rama, Angel. 1984. La ciudad letrada. Hannover: Ed. del Norte. Ríofrío, Miguel. 1984. La Emancipada. Quito: El Conejo. Rodríguez Monegal, Emir. 1969. »Contra los folletines«. El otro Andrés Bello. Caracas: Monte Ávila. 422–427. Sommer, Doris. 1991. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: California UP. Suárez Murias, Marguerite C.1963. La novela romántica en Hispanoamérica. New York: Hispanic Institute in the United States. Toro Montalvo, César. 1994. Historia de la literatura peruana. Vol. 5: Romanticismo. Lima: Editorial San Marcos. Varela Jácome, Benito. 1987. »Evolución de la novela Hispanoamericana en el XIX«. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. Vol 2: Del neoclasicismo al modernismo. Coord. by Luis Iñigo Madrigal. 91–133. Zavala, Iris M. 1971. Ideología y política en la novela española del siglo XIX. Salamanca: Anaya.

Part Three: Contributions of Romanticism to 19th and 20th Century Writing and Thought Narrative maneuvers in the »periphery« The Spanish and Latin American novel during Romanticism Jüri Talvet 1.

Defining the Hispanic periphery

The observations made by Iurii Lotman in his late writings about the nature of culture, in the sense of artistic activity, seem to be especially true when one comes to the topic of Romanticism. Artistic process develops »paradigmatically«, that is, by unpredictable »leaps« and »explosions«, rather than »syntagmatically«. Culture, the essential part of the semiosphere — the intersectional »border« between the biosphere and the noosphere, as Lotman claimed — is definitely not confined to logically derived sets of norms, in contrast with the sciences and that area of human activity which is directly or indirectly submitted to the control of human intellect. (These ideas are mostly reflected in Lotman 1992). Romanticism, as a historical type of culture, can be seen as a genuine cultural »explosion«, a liberation of artistic potentiality in the widest sense, and at the same time, as a mighty »leap« to a radically new quality in the philosophical-perceptual understanding of the world. For the first time in the modern history, the intellectual-artistic avant-garde of the West managed to establish a tentative dialogue with the »other«, while the noble dream of »world literature«, capable of representing the most valuable part of the creation of all nations and nationalities, however great or small, centric or peripheral, »civilized« or »uncivilized«, gradually emerged principally from Germany, impelled by the ideas of Herder, the Schlegel brothers, Goethe, and others. To follow Lotman’s thought, even the most unexpected and powerful »explosions«, however, once they have taken place, can be (and have been) explained, a posteriori, as something inevitable, even logical and »normal«. Madame de Staël, at the very peak of Romanticism, observed acutely that the »passionate« Romantic culture was paradoxically not germinated in the European Romance people — the »centric« area of exoticism and passion, at least in the eyes of the Northerners, the Romantics —, but mainly among the Germanic peoples, who were apparently more inclined to rational and pragmatic principles. The three epicenters of the Romantic »explosion« — German, English, French culture — have subsequently been thoroughly described, their multiple characteristics delineated and their canon firmly established. The »peripheral« areas of Romanticism, however, still look much more vague and unexplored. There is also a deep precipice between the canon established by the Western »center«, on the one hand, and the national canons described from the »inside« of peripheral and smaller cultures, on the other. Pushed on by the Western Romantic »explosion«, some extensive peripheral cultural

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areas — like the Russian and North American — emerged during the nineteenth century themselves as new fertile »centers« of artistic creation, while other equally extensive areas, especially Spanish and Latin American culture, could not at least until the very end of the nineteenth century overcome its peripheral status. Even seen from the »inside«, the literary canon of Spain and Latin America during Romanticism is still full of ambiguities. International scholarly and critical consensus regarding the greater canon of world literature has never really managed to identify that local canon in Spanish beyond scarce data sketches provided by international dictionaries. To illustrate the above point, suffice it to say that of seven Spanish and Latin-American novels I am going to discuss in the framework of a possible canon of prose fiction written in Spanish in times of romanticism, only one has been partly translated into English (Cecilia Valdés, 1839, of which a translation of the novel’s initial part appeared in the United States in 1862). The same work and its author, the Cuban Cirilio Villaverde, are entirely ignored, for instance, by the comprehensive modern German Der Literatur- Brockhaus, as well as by a recent French three-volume (more than 3000 pages) Dictionnaire universel des littératures (Paris, 1994). The latter does not offer any information about Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Fernán Caballero, or José Mármol. It does mention that Larra’s El doncel de Don Enrique el Doliente (Don Enrique the Sorrowful’s Page, 1834) is the only Spanish historical novel that has »deserved the honor of having been translated into French«, but it fails to provide precise data about the translation. I could not find any data about English or German translations of Fernández de Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento (The Mangy Parrot, 1819–31), Mariano José de Larra’s El doncel de Don Enrique, or Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841). There are nineteenth-century translations in German of Fernán Caballero’s La Gaviota (The Seagull, 1849), of José Mármol’s Amalia (1851– 55), as well as of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1874). Alarcón’s novel — perhaps the most conservative and anachronous in our selection — is among the seven books the only one that, ironically, has deserved a modern translation into German (1965), and, to add a curious detail, has recently been translated into one of Europe’s minority languages, the Estonian (2001). However, this apparent paradox has a simple explanation: Alarcón’s novel not only provided a subject for Manuel de Falla’s famous ballet of the same title (1919), but also for a comical opera by Hugo Wolf (Der Corregidor [The Corregidor], 1896), a farce-opera by Ricardo Sandovan, and a popular movie. Hence its exceptional redemption from oblivion outside Spain. I do not think historical or sociopolitical background factors would suffice to explain such a meager presence of the Spanish and Latin American Romantic canon in the wider Western canon of Romanticism or in the canon of world literature. Geniuses in the arts and literature simply work paradigmatically, to use Lotman’s terminology once more. There is little explanation for how Francisco de Goya, amid the overall decline of the Spanish society and culture, from the deep European »periphery« (that Spain had become during the eighteenth century) managed to produce an authentic artistic »explosion« and a »leap« reaching well into postmodern times. For the same reason I do not believe that exhaustive inter-textual sequences were at work »immanently« in directing and determining the artistic process. It is definitely not the case that Spain had lost its internal literary intensity at the time of Romanticism. On the contrary, between 1800 and 1830 some 100 novelist were active in Spain, and

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approximately 200 novels were published, in addition to some 300 translated novels (Ferreras 1987, 18 f.). Especially when censorship was abolished, after the despotic regime of Fernando VII ended (1833), there was an unprecedented outburst of literary activity. Like in the glorious »Siglo de Oro« in the past, now Spanish writers emerged demonstrating exceptional literary fertility. The genre of the historical novel manifested a great variety of subtypes, while the current of costumbrismo, with deep roots in the earlier tradition (the picaresque narrative of the »Siglo de Oro«) expanded ever more. Although Latin American countries (with the exception of Cuba) gained their independence and were politically detached from Spain at the start of the nineteenth century, they continued to form a common cultural space with Spain (while Brazil continued to share with Portugal). Even during the harshest years of censorship in Spain, books printed abroad in Spanish and destined for Latin American countries could infiltrate into Spain (Llorens 1989, 301). Of four Latin American authors included in our selection, the Cubans Cirilio Villaverde and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda lived and worked really in a Spanish colony where slavery still existed until 1886, i.e. the eve of the collapse of the Spanish rule there. Especially Gómez de Avellaneda spent a good deal of her life in Spain where she also wrote her Sab. In fact, she can be qualified as both a Cuban and Spanish writer. As for the Latin American countries themselves, the idiosyncrasy of the different regions gradually emerged, but they still continued to form a cultural unity (as they have done, in fact, until our postmodern days). At the time when the two great metropolitan nations of Iberia, Spain and Portugal, had long ago become mutually estranged — both in the political and cultural sense —, Latin-American countries despite temporary tensions and even military conflicts between some of them still provided an ample common theater of social and cultural activities, without national-ethnic frontiers. The author of Amalia, the Argentinean José Mármol spent many years of his life — partly in a politically forced exile — in the Uruguayan capital Montevideo, as well as in Brazil. Both Spain and Latin-American countries were culturally still strongly orientated towards France during the nineteenth century. On the one hand, this was due to the long political influence France had exercised in Spain — from the end of the seventeenth century — and, on the other hand, because of the great impact the French Revolution had had on the political emancipation of Latin America. Most Spanish and Latin American writers of the epoch could easily read French, while access to English and German literature and philosophy, by contrast, mainly depended directly on translations. This is also one of the reasons why the romanticist current in Russia, as well as in Spain and Latin America, did not really start earlier than at the end of the 1820s and the beginning of the 1830s, i.e. when the main current of French Romanticism, headed by Victor Hugo, had come into force. Especially in Mármol’s Amalia the French orientation of the young Latin American political and cultural elite is eloquently demonstrated: the interiors of their homes look like the salons of French aristocrats, and the utterly idealized beautiful heroine Amalia entertains herself by reading Lamartine’s Méditations poétiques (Poetic Meditations, 1820). However, we can also see the equally idealized sweetheart of Amalia, Eduardo, translating parts of Byron’s Manfred (1817) for Amalia. Not only Byron was an exemplary model for Mármol, in the spiritual sense; Mármol also describes with admiration the social order in England,

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contrasting it with individualistic principles ruling in Latin American societies. The budding influence of the emancipated giant neighbor of Latin America, the United States, is also symptomatically present in Amalia. Depending on the Argentine political situation of those times, the dignity of the United States — a young liberal society striving to democracy — is positively contrasted with the imperialist ambitions of France and England. For the Cubans, because of Cuba’s geographical vicinity with Florida, the United States was not a platonically admired northern neighbor but a last resort in political terms. Persecuted and condemned to death in the Spanish-ruled Cuba, the author of Cecilia Valdés, Cirilio Villaverde, fled in 1849 to the US where he lived continuously, with the exception of a short return to Cuba in 1858–1860, until the last days of his life. In its complete form his masterpiece Cecilia Valdés first appeared in New York (1882). The temporal stretch covered by the novels I am going to describe may call for a short explanation. In the same way as it would probably be exaggerated to define Fernández de Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento in the core framework of Romanticism, Alarcón’s romantically shaded farce-idyll The Three-Cornered Hat uneasily fits into the then contemporary pattern of the Spanish novel. The latter had not only acquired by the later nineteenth century, with the extensive work of Benito Pérez Galdós, an unmistakably realistic quality but was starting to reveal features of a budding naturalism. Yet I believe that the beginnings of the Latin American novel, located in the intersection between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, deserve a rereading. The next area of intersection, that between Romanticism and the realistic/naturalistic current, would similarly call for a revision. Not only was Spanish Romanticism still in vigor in the 1860s, but late reverberations also from the »epicenter« of European Romanticism reached the symbolist-governed fin-de siècle under the spell of the Symbolists. Suffice to say that Victor Hugo’s last Romantic masterpiece in the novel genre, Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-Three, 1874), appeared in the same year as The Three-Cornered Hat. 2.

Self-Conscious narrative framing and the puzzled narrative: El periquillo sarniento, Amalia, and El sombrero de tres picos SONNET However delinquent man could be, however distant he could be to virtue, however bad he could be and extravagant, still he should not vainly despair. If he becomes really converted, if by a constant faith he wishes to follow God, if his virtue is not false and hesitant, God will certainly pardon him. Thus our dead man is happy: while in his young days he sinned so much, finally he became a sum of virtues. It’s true he sinned; but by his weeping he washed off all his errors;

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in life he was a sinner, and died a saint.1 because the oppressed people will need only one man, one cry, one monument, to rise spectacularly from slavery to liberty, from stagnation to action.2 that year of which our story tells (let us suppose 1805) the old regime still reigned in Spain in all public and private spheres, as if amidst so many novelties and disturbance the Pyrenees had turned into the Great Wall of China.3

I will first consider three novels that in my opinion would more clearly be recognized as belonging to the Romantic canon were they not also still deeply influenced by older narrative patterns. I will try to show that dependence on these older patterns very much conditions their content (thus also their aesthetical-perceptual status). As a conspicuous sign or symptom of that factor I will refer to the textual segment that has been, in the modern terms of literary science, characterized as a kind of a paratext. I have in mind the chapter titles used in novels. I will further argue that these textual segments, although they may look like something »auxiliary«, external to the main narrative text or, literally, beside the texts, are still very much an essential part of the main text in the sense that they can be seen as symptomatic of the general way the narrative is conceived by the author. A fundamental change took place in the narrative framing of the novel genre. It is not only that the verbal content of chapter titles changed but there was also an important transition from the verbal sign to the mathematical sign: the words were replaced by numbers or, to be more exact, numbers alone were left to signal what was earlier signaled both by numbers and words. Until the end of the eighteenth century nearly all novels used chapter titles that were mostly characterized by a lavish verbosity. In these titles not only the main content of the corresponding chapter was summarized (i.e. what was going to happen), but often also the moral features of the action as well as of characters were predefined. All important narrators of the past — the authors of the novels of chivalry, Rabelais, Cervantes, Alemán, Grimmelshausen, Lesage, Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, et al. — unanimously and invariably used long or longish chapter titles. This was part and parcel of narrative encoding until Romanticism. However, there were some exceptions. Madame de La Fayette seems to be one of the first important novel writers who abandoned verbal chapter titles and limited her chapter encoding to numbers. Even in »epicentric« Romanticism itself one can still find the use of verbal chapter titles in Hoffmann, Hugo and Dickens, though in the case of Hugo they became shorter, being limited 1.

»SONETO: Por más que fuere el hombre delinquente,/ por más que esté de la virtud distante,/ por más malo que sea y extravagante,/ desesperar no debe neciamente./ Si se convierte verdaderamente,/ si a Dios quiere seguir con fe constante,/ si su virtud no es falsa y vacilante,/ Dios lo perdonará seguramente./ Según esto, es feliz nuestro difunto,/ pues si en su mocedad delinquió tanto,/ después fue de virtudes un conjunto./ Es verdad que pecó; mas con su llanto/ sus errores lavó de todo punto;/ fue pecador en vida y murió santo.« (Fernández de Lizardi 1968, 423)

2. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »porque los pueblos oprimidos no necesitan sino un hombre, un grito, un monumento para pasar estrepitosamente de la esclavitud a la libertad, del marasmo a la acción« (Mármol 2000, 324). 3.

»el año de que se trata (supongamos que el de 1805) imperaba todavía en España el antiguo régimen en todas las esferas de la vida pública y particular, como si, en medios de tantas novedades y trastornos, el Pirineo se hubiese convertido en otra muralla de China« (Alarcón 1975, 33).

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to brief cue phrases or even just a few words. There was an increasing tendency among novelists to abstain from announcing the moral features of what was going to happen. The chapter titles of the novels of Dickens can be seen as especially illustrative of the change that was under way in this particular aspect. In his Pickwick Papers (1836/37) Dickens faithfully followed in the footsteps of Cervantes, giving his chapters effusive titles like »Illustrative, like the Preceding One, of the Old Proverb, that Adversity Brings a Man Acquainted with Strange Bed-Fellows, likewise Counting Mr Pickwick’s Extraordinary and Startling Announcement to Mr. Samuel Weller« (ch. 42). However, in his later novels, in which realistic tonality started to prevail, Dickens abandoned his initial verbosity and started to follow rather the type of chapter titles used by Victor Hugo. Dickens’s chapter titles now became short and were limited almost exclusively to external features of a corresponding chapter. Thus, in Bleak House (1852) one can find chapter titles like »Obstinacy«, »The Track«, »A Wintry Day and Night«, »Esther’s Narrative«, and in Little Dorrit (1855–57), examples such as »Something Right Somewhere«, or simply, »Introduces the Next«. Nonetheless, Dickens is still strongly attracted by the moral — even though symbolic — characterization of events and characters in titles like »Men and Masters«, »Lost«, »Found«, etc., in Hard Times (1854). Fernández de Lizardi, Mármol and Alarcón all follow that old narrative pattern, epitomized by longer or shorter chapter titles. In El periquillo sarniento, a novel essentially imitating the Spanish picaresque narrative pattern, the chapter titles sound like »In which Periquillo (Parakeet or Tidbit) tells about his leaving the prison, criticizes bad court clerks, and finally refers to the motive for his leaving Chanfaina’s house, and the unfortunate way of doing it«.4 In José Mármol’s Amalia (1855) the shorter type of chapter titles, like those in Hugo’s novels, is used, e.g.: »The first cure«, »Dinnertime«, »Party scenes«, »Daniel Bello«, »Continuation of the preceding«,5 etc., which are rather neutral, transmitting solely the external side of events. However, like Dickens, Mármol does not avoid moral-symbolic characterization in chapter titles like »The angel and the devil«, »Angry Pylades«, or »The soul’s clock«.6 In chapters involving the character of don Cándido, a good-natured and naïve humanistic figure resembling Don Quixote or Mr. Pickwick, Mármol’s titles become expanded and sound like direct borrowings from Cervantes: »How we understand clearly that Don Cándido Rodríguez resembled Don Juan Manuel Rosas«, »How Don Cándido decides to emigrate, and what were the consequences of his first attempt«, or »Where our Don Cándido appears, as he always appears«,7 etc. The use of chapter titles may look especially anachronous in Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1874), as by the time this novel was published, most 4.

»En el que escribe Periquillo su salida de la cárcel, hace una crítica contra los malos escribanos, y refiere, por último, el motivo por qué salió de la casa de Chanfaina y su desgraciado modo« (Fernandez de Lizardi 1968, 194).

5.

»La primera curación«, »La hora de comer«, »Escenas de baile«, »Continuación del anterior« (Mármol 2000, 85, 112, 298, 380).

6.

»El ángel y el diablo«, »Pílades enojado«, »El reloj del alma« (ibid., 176, 702, 813).

7.

»Cómo sacamos en limpio que don Cándido Rodríguez se parecía a don Juan Manuel Rosas«, »Cómo don Cándido se decide a emigrar, y cuáles fueron las consecuencias de su primera tentativa«, »Donde aparece, como aparece siempre, nuestro don Cándido Rodríguez« (ibid., 472, 566, 681).

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important Spanish novelists (like Benito Pérez Galdós), following the example of the realistic narrative pattern, had started to mark chapters exclusively by numbers. However, we should not overlook the fact that Alarcón, while writing his novel, apparently had never had ambitions beyond creating a farce-like humorous story, in the vein of »a good old« comic narrative of Cervantes. That is why chapter titles like »The basis of happiness«, »Where it can be seen that Uncle Lucas had a very light sleep«, »Corregidor’s wife is also beautiful«,8 and the like are used as something entirely self-understood in his novel. On the other hand, I do not exclude entirely that such a use of chapter titles could have been an intentional anachronism on the part of Alarcón — just a pastiche in the style of an old comedy. The same narrative attitude we find in chapter titles of these novels is fully present in their main text. This means first and foremost a pre-determining of characters and events by conferring on them moral features that hardly change in the course of the narrative. The characters and their action are defined, beforehand, as morally good or bad. There is little room for surprise or contradiction. Any psychological development is paralyzed in the very bud. The characters do not live their own lives, but are puppets in the hands of an omniscient author. The moral content is transmitted to the reader directly from the author: he indulges in long discussions, delivers his moral opinions, and provides for his characters a complete moral framework that they never transgress. These features I regard as the main drawbacks in Lizardi, Mármol and Alarcón. Their novels have nonetheless an established place in the national canon that nobody will probably ever dispute. Fernández de Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento is rightly considered to be the first Latin American novel of any literary value. Mármol’s Amalia, in its turn, has the honor to be the first novel written in the influential Río de la Plata cultural region (comprising Argentina and Uruguay), and is also claimed to be »one of the most outstanding manifestations of the Spanish American social romanticism« (Teodosio Fernández, Introduction in Mármol 2000, 53). Changing their status in the international canon, however, will obviously be seriously inhibited, as they hardly share any truly innovative narrative features with the pioneering novel authors of the Romantic »epicenter«. The above said does not mean at all that there is nothing worth reading or capable of attracting our special attention in these narratives. Especially the novels by Fernández de Lizardi and Mármol show a keen and advanced awareness of the social reality of their time. Both men, besides being writers, were active in the social and political life of their respective home countries, Mexico and Argentina. Fernández de Lizardi took part in the fight for political liberation and democratic reforms, while Mármol was among those who opposed one of the first dictatorships which Latin America experienced after establishing political independence. Both men were apologists of the ideas of the Enlightenment and at the same time radical critics of conservative tendencies in their countries’ political and social life. The Spanish writer Alarcón, by contrast, clearly rejected from a national-popular posture the invading Napoleonic army, with its imperialist ideology. Alarcón was critical of Spain’s stagnated social habits, but his ideals still seem to have been couched in terms of values in the »good old times«. The only feature 8. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »El fondo de la felicidad«, »Donde se verá que el tío Lucas tenía el sueño muy ligero«, »También la corregidora es guapa« (Alarcón 1975, 48, 89, 142).

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he truly shared with Romanticism was his love for simple people whom he — though in a rather black-and-white manner, reminding one of the historical plays of Lope de Vega — contrasted with the morally decayed representatives of local power. It is obvious that Fernández de Lizardi and Mármol employed their novels first and foremost as vehicles for transmitting social and political ideas. Most probably they failed to give adequate dues to the artistic-aesthetic forms they resorted to. Fernández de Lizardi worked deeply in the Spanish classical narrative canon. As an admirer of Cervantes, he himself wrote a novel, relying on the Quixotic image borrowed from Cervantes: La Quijota y su prima (Quijota and her cousin, 1819). In El periquillo sarniento he directly followed the narrative type provided by the Spanish classical picaresque novel and specifically, that of one of the most famous Spanish picaresque narratives, Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (Guzman of Alfarache, 1599–1604). Like in Alemán’s model, in the novel of the Mexican writer the protagonist, ambiguously nicknamed Periquillo Sarniento (periquillo: parakeet/love bird, or sweet tidbit/sugar plum; sarniento: mangy, scabrous, and suggesting sarmiento: vine shoot), is cast as a young man into a cruel world in which situations quickly change. He is forced to conform to the decadent social underworld, spends some time in prison, becomes dependent on his delinquent friends, experiences a long series of ups and downs, but finally, after harsh experiences and self-reflection, exactly like Guzmán de Alfarache, he abandons his wild ways. Now from the position of a morally improved man, with a rich life experience, he tells (writes) before his death his life story, to leave it to his children, that they may learn from it a true moral lesson for their lives. The classical Spanish picaresque narrative mould had been quite productive at least until the middle of the eighteenth century. Let us recollect that one stream of the German novel began with Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (The Adventurous Simplicissimus, 1668) — a philosophically shaded picaresque narrative par excellence —, while Lesage, Defoe and Smollett exploited the same mould, to expose in the first place their views on the contemporary social order. However, it also seems to be true that by the end of the eighteenth century the picaresque narrative form started to become exhausted. A new awareness of the complexity of human psychology emerged, while the picaresque narrative, with its clear aversion for the intimate and the more deeply psychological, could scarcely serve for transmitting such a new sensibility. It was no accident that when the first-person picaresque narrative declined, the first-person narrative was resuscitated to a new life in the Bildungsroman, a novel type capable of embracing the average »normal« life pattern to a far larger extent than the picaresque narrative which was limited mostly to the »low« life. Besides successfully adducing psychological features, the Bildungsroman or Erziehungsroman was also more apt than the picaresque narrative to blend essayistic elements into the text. Philosophical discussions on various aspects of contemporary society and culture sounded by far more natural in the mouth of an adolescent artist than in that of a pícaro or a social outlaw. In El periquillo sarniento there is an evident contradiction between, on the one hand, the author’s wish to transmit to the reader encyclopedic knowledge about all spheres of life — as in the vein of French or English Enlightenment writers —, and the structure of older picaresque narrative, on the other. In the course of more than a hundred pages of the initial part of his voluminous novel Fernández de Lizardi discusses educational matters, almost in the manner of Rousseau’s Émile (1762). The novel’s didactical load is clearly more than a modern reader is prepared to receive. The following picaresque adventure also abounds in didactical discourses, but

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on the other hand provides — with the apparent aim of stressing the story’s faithfulness to reality — lavish »testimonial« details, like those that can be found, for example, in Defoe’s narratives. Fernández de Lizardi’s main critical pathos is directed against corruption and all kinds of abuses in his contemporary Mexican society. Criticism of one’s surroundings had abounded in the eighteenth-century European novel. However, in some chapters of El periquillo sarniento Fernández de Lizardi goes beyond that, anticipating in his ideological criticism some of the most radical positions of the later Latin American novel. Thus, in the initial chapter of Part III of the novel, where the action is located in Manila, the Philippines, Periquillo reproduces a significant dispute between an Englishman and a Negro. It is not perhaps a coincidence that the first Latin American novel voices a radical protest against racial discrimination and slavery. These deep wounds in the American conscience were destined to be reflected over and over again in the literature of the New World. Fernández de Lizardi’s critical vision about slavery and racial discrimination, based on the ideas of Buffon, were subsequently expanded in a number of Latin-American novels. Of the books discussed here, Cirilio Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés and Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab are strongly centered on the issue of slavery and racial discrimination. Maybe just because Fernández de Lizardi is so much attracted and restrained by the late Renaissance narrative pattern, he lets his characters discuss the relativity of cultures and civilizations very much in the vein of Montaigne’s essays, especially those passages in which the »clash of civilizations« is mentioned using the example of the conquest of America. There is no need to say that these ideas were taken to the fore as elements in the idearium romanticum. In the construction of its spatial-temporal frame, Mármol’s Amalia differs completely from the picaresque narrative of Fernández de Lizardi. It strives, instead, to be a political document, registering in minute details a concrete and real historical-political event in the history of the new Argentine independent republic: the conspiracy of the liberally minded military (the Northern League, or the Coalition, or the Unitarians, as they were called) against the dictatorship of General Juan Manuel Rosas. The novel, though at least as voluminous as Fernández de Lizardi’s narrative, is temporally limited to events taking place during six months in 1840, from May 4 to October 5, when the conspiracy was disclosed and the rebellious forces made to surrender. The main plot of the novel is quite elementary: A young and noble military officer, Daniel Bello, who thanks to his rich and influential father has full confidence in the high governmental circles of Rosas, skillfully hides his wounded friend Eduardo Belgrano, a Unitarian and participant in the conspiracy, in the house of his cousin Amalia, a beautiful young widow. Subsequently Daniel undertakes a risky double play of being an agent of the conspirators (and as such, moving between Buenos Aires and Montevideo), organizing the opposition, and at the same time feigning to serve the cause of the »restoration« forces of Rosas. As the reader of the novel could expect, Eduardo and Amalia fall in love. Gradually the conspiracy is discovered by the secret police of Rosas. Persecution starts, and in the tragic events of an ambush, at the end of the novel, both young patriotic heroes, Daniel and Eduardo, are killed. Even though intended as a patriotic tragedy, Marmol’s novel — similar, for instance, to the case of Victor Hugo’s pathetical dramas — has an obvious difficulty in conveying to the reader a genuine tragic emotion. This is because the intended tragedy fails to be prepared psychologically. The novel’s foreground is so intensely occupied by socio-political developments and patriotic ideas, that the human plane, the personal and the individual — the precondition of a

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tragedy in whatever work of art — appears, at best, as a meager skeleton. Mármol’s narrative is not »held back« by old narrative patterns, but rather by the current of Enlightenment ideas; in its striving for universality it failed to grasp the concrete and the historically individual. Mármol’s characters are just ideals — direct derivates of an idea. Daniel, Eduardo, and Amalia are meant to incarnate the idea of goodness, but literally they fail to »in-carnate«, as they have no flesh or body — or, to put it in milder terms, even their flesh-and-body is directly constructed on ideals. Just to give a glimpse of how the author describes the heroine of his novel: At this moment, Amalia was not a woman: she was a goddess of those that were imagined by the mythological poetry of the Greeks. […] Her arms that would have made envious the chisel that carved the Venus of the Medici.9

The main characters are morally pre-determined from the very beginning of the novel. The omniscient author repeats the same features throughout his narrative over and over again. Although already in Chapter 1 of Part I we learn that Eduardo is »calm, valiant, energetic and skilful«, the same characteristics reoccur for many more times in the course of the narrative. In the same way, the reader has no doubts whatsoever, from the beginning of the narrative, about the noble moral qualities of Daniel. Yet the author feels a need to reassure him repeatedly that Daniel is »young« and that his virtues are »strong spirit and proud mind« (Mármol 2000, 3). Similarly and by contrast, General Rosas is shown as deeply corrupt, as an authentic monster (as, for instance, Cardinal Richelieu is in Hugo’s drama Marion de Lorme, 1831, and in Alfred de Vigny’s novel Cinq-Mars, 1826). The omniscient author first extensively comments on the political situation of Argentina, and then enters Rosas’s private rooms, describing the dictator at his intimate doings — like eating —, not sparing irony, which at times acquires shades of the grotesque (Mármol 2000, 4). So the image of General Rosas provided by Mármol could be seen as a foretaste of the image of a tyrant dictator, which subsequently appears in a series of twentieth-century Spanish and Latin-American novels, starting from Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas (Banderas the Tyrant, 1926) and continuing with García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1980). However, it is likely that beside those shades of the grotesque intentionally conferred by the author on the character of Rosas, a modern reader of Amalia could intuit almost as grotesque the overload of the author’s own idealizing exaggerations. There is a strong intertextuality reaching from the European Romantic »epicenter« to Mármol’s ideas. Mármol became famous when, in a forced exile in Montevideo, he wrote a poem in alexandrines against the dictator: »A Rosas, el 25 de Mayo de 1843« (To Rosas, the 25th of May, 1843). He was above all fond of Byron, and also started to write a long poem El Peregrino (The Pilgrim) in imitation of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18). He certainly had learnt a lot from the ideas of the late Byron and also, perhaps, from those of Musset, when he imagined that history was, first and foremost, the result of the action of some strong individuals, either heroes or anti-heroes. One can get the impression from Amalia that Argentina’s vice and evil, at that historical moment, was almost exclusively lodged in one man, Rosas, and that, to overcome the evil, it would do just to eliminate the 9.

»En ese momento, Amalia no era una mujer: era una diosa de ésas que ideaba la poesía mitológica de los

griegos. […] Sus brazos, que habrían dado envidia al cincel que labró la Venus de los Medicis« (Mármol 2000, 242–244).

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dictator. Like Byron or Musset, Mármol distrusted and undervalued people at large, as the uncivilized masses. Rather, he imagined that Rosas was just an offspring of that coarse uneducated and wild gaucho folk who did not and could not represent the »real« nature of humankind. That »real« nature, for Mármol, had to emanate from a noble Nature, God’s ideal creation. To follow Mármol’s conception, only some select sensible spirits, like the young patriotic heroes Daniel and Eduardo, could faithfully respond to that noble call. And almost fatally, they had to fail in their effort, as the just fighters for humankind’s future fail in the works of Byron and Musset. That idealized conception of the individual almost forcibly led Mármol to turn his Daniel Bello — who by far more than Amalia or Eduardo is the central character of the novel — into a kind of a superman. Like the modern agent James Bond, Daniel manages to come out brilliantly from the most dangerous situations. (This suggests some parallels with the figure of pícaro, except for the final failure). Like Cooper’s Harvey Birch, in The Spy (1821), Daniel appears always there where he should appear, to save the situation. The strong idealization of characters tends to leave the narrative space hollow. Yet, without the concrete and the individual, a novel would scarcely work. Perhaps understanding that danger, Mármol brings in dialogue, which occupies good stretches of the novel’s overall narrative space. However, these dialogues and conversations, for the most part, carry surprisingly little significant information. »Empty talk« that could have a perfectly allusive quality, for instance, in Hemingway’s narratives of the 1920s, in Amalia scarcely amounts to more than just empty talk, without any transcendence whatsoever. On the other hand, filling the idealized hollowness of the narrative space, Mármol inserts abundant documentary material: letters, political declarations, extensive lists produced by the secret police, with the names of suspects and enemies of the dictator, minutes of meetings, etc. Thus the whole of Chapter 3 in Part V, entitled »Un vaso de sangre« (A glass of blood) is constituted by presenting lists with the names of »enemies« (both real and fictional). By all these means, Mármol aspires to write a narrative in which, as he himself claims, »the novel has been a real history«.10 However, a modern reader of his narrative may still be left with a suspicion that as a novel his work has been a relative failure, while its history, too, has been submitted to a strongly idealizing and sentimental interpretation. 3.

High Romantic poetry and philosophy in rhythm: El doncel de Don Enrique el Doliente and Sab Love me, Elvira, for pity’s sake!11 this unfortunate race without human rights […] I am a mulatto and a slave.12

Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper not only consecrated history as a principal narrative space for Romantic prose fiction, providing the novel genre with a new breath and scale. 10.

»la novela ha sido una verdadera historia« (Mármol 2000, 763).

11.

»Amadme, Elvira, ¡por piedad!« (Larra 1984, 269).

12.

»aquella raza desventurada sin derechos de hombres […] soy mulato y esclavo« (Avellaneda 1976, 130).

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Thereafter, that new narrative breath was transferred into the contemporary scene. There was an attempt to show a wider human sphere in movement. Scott and Cooper were also among the first in giving up chapter titles in their novels, to leave in their place mere numbers, as identifying signs of each chapter. Predetermining or announcing the course of the story was thus dropped, to leave room for surprise changes not only in narrated events, but also in characters’ development. The reader was made more actively participant in discovering by himself the reality told by the writer. At the same time, a new »paratextual« element appeared, in a way, to replace the abandoned chapter titles. Both Scott and Cooper place at the head of each chapter an epigraph or motto, which is generally a borrowing from some earlier literary work. Above all, these mottoes used to be fragments from earlier poems, or other significant works. There is no attempt to return to Renaissance or Baroque allegory and emblematics; the mottoes employed in Romantic prose fiction above all were meant to provide philosophical and poetical shading for the main story, to place the latter in a wider spiritual if not mythical context. They became an integral part of the Romantic narrative, absolutely fitted to the taste of the epoch that kept the blend of poetry and philosophy persistently in the foreground. All four novels treated here model their »paratextual« poetics after Scott and Cooper. With the exception of Fernán Caballero’s La Gaviota (The Seagull, 1849), in these novels all chapters start with a motto — a piece of intertext borrowed from national as well as international tradition. This new trait can be seen as a symptom of a change in general narrative approach. The narrators (authors) were still omniscient, and often intervened in the story, to share their opinions directly. However, pre-defining the characters’ moral features became definitely less common than it was in the narratives of Fernández de Lizardi, Mármol or Alarcón. The characters were still idealized in Larra’s and Gómez de Avellaneda’s novels. Yet they were provided with more narrative space to reveal their »self« by themselves, through their action and speeches. Mariano José de Larra is perhaps the greatest personality in Spanish Romanticism. A versatile talent, he was at the age of twenty-eight unfortunately fated to follow the call of a Romantic love suicide, like the German Heinrich von Kleist some twenty years earlier. Larra’s literary work, therefore, could not be extensive. He has been appreciated above all for his lively essays on Spanish society and culture, as well as for his theater criticism. French Enlightenment ideas, in the first place, molded his ideological posture. The only novel Larra managed to write, however, shows his keen interest in Spanish national history. It could well have been a conscious aspiration to create in Spain an equivalent for the historical narrative by which Scott, Cooper and Hugo had made English, North American and French literature so famous. Indeed, Larra wrote quite a good novel, in a perfect rhythm with the best European Romantic narratives. The fact that it has not earned a worthier place in the Western canon has hardly anything to do with its aesthetic quality or perceptual scope. What has probably restricted the international audience of Larra’s novel is, rather, that it did not introduce anything that would have been completely absent in Scott or Cooper. And Larra did not undertake to write about El Cid, or »Roderick, the last of the Goths«, or »Arab nights in Spain«, in other words, something that would have been readily known to the public abroad. Instead, he chose to write about Macías, a legendary Castilian poet from the late Middle Ages, of whose life the main legend is that he was constantly in love and also lost his life for love, being

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killed by the husband of the lady whom he loved. There are few poems attributed to Macías that have come down to us, so Larra certainly could not rely on them in developing his narrative. He rather gathered the scanty data provided by various legends about Macías’s life, to expand the story by his own imagination. Yet as if counterbalancing the fictional story, Larra shows a special care for reproducing the historical background in its minute and rich details. The intrigue of the novel is triggered by the political ambitions of Count Enrique de Villena, a man devoted to science who has become estranged from his wife María. To obtain the high political position of the Master of Calatrava, his vow of chastity is needed, so he stages the rape of his wife, whom he really orders to be confined in a castle in remote mountains. At the same time, the page of the Castilian king Enrique the Sorrowful, the poet Macías, pays a visit to Villena and revives his old affection for María’s companion, the lady Elvira, whose husband Vadillo is Villena’s close friend and aid. There is also a Jewish astrologer in action, who tries to keep the middle way between two oppositional bands. The initial situation of the novel reminds one of Calderón’s famous drama La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream, 1634/35) in which one of the principal motives is the alienation from love and humanness, forced by political ambitions of power, as well as by man’s scientific instincts. One is reminded also of Walter Scott’s novel Kenilworth (1821), with an analogous conflict between power ambitions and love. However, Larra did not develop these motives, but centered his intrigue and action exclusively on the intimate terrain of love. One could suppose, then, that the novel would take a turn towards psychological development. And yet, one should probably agree with the opinion (see the introduction by José Luis Varela, in Larra 1984, 37) that Larra failed to write a psychological narrative. Again, the main stumbling-block in achieving psychological depth seems to originate from the obvious tendency to idealize the novel’s characters. We can see noble feelings in Macías and the greatness of his amorous passion, and yet we learn next to nothing about him as a personality, or as a poet. There are passages in which his amorous feeling for Elvira becomes so pathetically persuasive that he appears almost as if obliging Elvira to love him by the formula: I love you, that means you must love me, too. The reader probably would not accept as psychologically credible Elvira’s passionate love for Macías, a love that after Macías’s death drives her to madness, since by the last fourth of the novel it is still not clear if she really loves him more dearly or her husband, Vadillo. What Larra wanted to show was probably just the greatness of amorous passion in men and women through all human history, leading in many cases to a tragic end. However, Larra did not seem to make any attempt to relate love’s tragedy to other circumstances than individual fate or chance. In Chapter 32, he evokes a historical legend connected with the castle where María and, later, Macías, are imprisoned. It’s a Moorish love story, from which a symbolic conclusion, to be repeated in the novel, emerges: »it is late«.13 Also the mottoes at the head of each chapter are mostly derived from Spanish medieval romances echoing tragic love stories. The novel abounds in action, fighting, duels, casualties, coincidences, suspense and mystery (for instance, the veiled Elvira, who, incognito, denounces to the King the villainy committed by Villena; the duel determining Elvira’s fate, in which at the very critical moment a unknown knight appears, wearing black arms — and very much reminding one of the »Black Knight« in 13.

»es tarde« (Larra 1984, 335, 419, 424).

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Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), and so forth). Larra’s novel fits perfectly in the established norm, known from the novels of Scott and Cooper, and conforms to the basic rhythm of Western Romantic prose fiction. It never attempts to go beyond it. The author of a thorough introductory word in a modern Cuban edition of Sab (1841), Mary Cruz, has every reason for admiring her compatriot Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda who at the age of twenty-four, ten years in advance of Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851/52), managed to write the first Cuban abolitionist novel (Gómez de Avellaneda 1976, 28), which at the same time was one of the earliest anti-slavery novels in the whole American continent (Avellaneda 34). In her extensive study looking for parallels Cruz mentions Victor Hugo’s early novel Bug Jargal (1826), in which the protagonist is an educated slave heading a Negro revolt in Haiti (Avellaneda 44). Similarly, the main character in Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel, Sab, is an educated mulatto young man who voices a fully conscious protest against racial discrimination and slavery. Sab is also a wonderful example of how the narrative breath, initiated in the historical novels of Scott and Cooper, was soon transferred to contemporary scenery. The chapter mottoes in Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel not only provide lyrical-symbolic associations, to complement the main narrative, but testify to ample philosophical-intellectual interests of that young Cuban-Spanish lady, who in her very young days, staying in France, wrote a short treatise about Montesquieu. The chapter mottoes in Sab thus include verses by the Cuban Romantic poet José María Heredia, who from his Mexican and North-American exile exalted liberty and Nature, but there are also quoted fragments from Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815), Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606/11), Vigny’s Cinq-Mars (1826), from the work of Lope de Vega, Metastasio, and even from Mariano José de Larra’s El doncel de Don Enrique el Doliente (Don Enrique the Sorrowful’s Page, 1834). Indeed, in Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel, like Larra’s, we find a tragic love story, but the historical background — by contrast with Larra’s work — is not separated from the intimate narrative. On the contrary, the main source of the tragedy is clearly derived from historical circumstances. Like ten years earlier George Sand in her Indiana (1832), Gómez de Avellaneda launches a passionate protest against the historical submission of woman to the laws established by the male gender, as she compares the status of woman, in her times, with that of slaves: »Oh, women! Poor and blind victims! Like slaves, they drag along their chains and lower their head under the yoke of human laws«.14 The protest against the historical discrimination and harassment of woman, enslaved by social laws and norms, was not of course new. It had expanded during the Enlightenment, to reach its apex in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or The New Heloise, 1761) and Goethe’s Werther (1774; 1787). However, the novelty in Sab is that the protest against the unjust laws governing woman’s historical status becomes part of a protest against racial discrimination, in more universal terms. Maybe for the first time in Western narrative, woman is shown in Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel as part of the historical »other« enslaved by white males, as a co-victim of racial discrimination. 14.

»¡Oh, las mujeres!, pobres y ciegas víctimas! Como los esclavos, ellas arrastran pacientemente su cadena y bajan la cabeza bajo el yugo de las leyes humanas« (Avellaneda, 280 f.).

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The main pathos of Sab is directed against slavery as humiliation in physical terms, but above all as a moral crime committed by Western man. If in Goethe’s Werther social prejudices and norms are a source of the anguish and desperation of the protagonist, inhibiting his love to Lotte, in Gómez de Avellaneda’s love story Sab — Werther’s mulatto double in many ways! — is inhibited directly by his racial status. Even though he is made legally free by his generous owners, his social status continues to be directly conditioned by his past, so that his love for Carlota — another Lotte! —, from the family of an impoverished landowner, is an impossible love from the very beginning. The sensibility and sufferings of Sab are paralleled by those of Teresa, Carlota’s cousin and companion who secretly loves Enrique Otway, Carlota’s bridegroom and later husband. Sab and Teresa develop a mutual confidence and reveal to each other the sources of their suffering. This symbolically accentuates analogies in the status of colored people and woman, whatever the latter’s race. Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel abounds in passionate protest against racial inequality that reigned in Cuba in her lifetime. However, she goes even deeper into history, referring to the origins of Western man’s »heroic deeds« in the times of the Renaissance, when the indigenous tribes of Cuba were practically annihilated by the Spanish conquistadors. Among the novel’s characters there is an old lady, descendent of Cuba’s autochthonous people, who in her gusts of delirium voices a prophesy of vengeance: »The land that was moistened with blood will be so once more: the descendants of the oppressors will be oppressed, and black people will be the terrible avengers of bronze men«.15 It is certainly to the advantage of Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel that it is not too long. Although she, too, morally pre-defines her characters, in a smaller narrative space its restraining impact, as for the reader’s liberty to discover and interpret them, is less manifest. The main characters, no doubt, are again idealized — thus, in one passage, Sab in his exalted adoration of Carlota makes her identical with Christ —, but their inner life is revealed more completely than in the novels I have discussed so far. The author retains her omniscient position, as in the majority of Romantic narratives, but she definitely offers more chance than Larra or Mármol to her characters to reveal their moral features by themselves. Much of the novel’s narrative space is occupied by confessional letters, while the work’s »Conclusion« comprises mainly a long letter Sab had written before his death to Teresa. The letter, revealing Sab’s long-time secret passion to Carlota, is read by Carlota herself, by Teresa’s death-bed. A good deal of the fictional reality, thus, becomes disclosed from »inside« the novel, though, as a whole, Gómez de Avellaneda’s narrative still follows in the rhythm of the Romantic »norm«.

15.

»La tierra que fue regada con sangre lo sera aún otra: los descendientes de los opresores serán oprimidos, y los hombres negros serán los terribles vengadores de los hombres cobrizos« (ibid., 187).

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Romanticism stretching forward into Realism: La Gaviota and Cecilia Valdés However the apostles of rationalism cut the tree of faith, if the latter has its roots in a good soil […], it will grow eternally strong and blooming branches that rise to the heaven.16 of course I do like white more than brown people. I would blush with shame if I were to be married and had a throwback child.17

Another Cuban anti-slavery novel is Cirilio Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (initial version of Part I — 1839, complete edition in 4 parts — 1882). In fact, Villaverde’s novel was published prior to Sab, and only three years after Richard Hildreth’s The Slave (1836), considered to be the first antislavery novel on the American continents. Yet the Cecilia Valdés of the year 1839 (published in the monthly magazine La Siempreviva) was only just the very initial part of the novel, and could hardly have been noticed outside the island of Cuba. I do not possess data about the extent to which the English translation of Cecilia Valdés in the USA (1862) became known to the reading public or if that translation comprised more than just the initial part of the novel published in Cuba. In any case, it is a fact that Villaverde’s novel in its integral and complete form was published when not only realistic but also naturalistic narrative had become firmly established in the Western literary canon. We observe the initiation of the naturalistic current in Spanish letters starting from Benito Pérez Galdós’s novel La desheredada (The Disinherited, 1881). However, it is also undeniable that Villaverde’s important novel was conceived in the ambience of Romantic culture, which at the middle of the nineteenth century was at its very peak in Spanish-speaking countries. In his prologue to the definitive edition of Cecilia Valdés Villaverde confesses that he had not been able to read anything for the past 30 years and that his only possible models in writing the novel could have been Scott and Manzoni (Villaverde 1964, 16). He also mentions that he had to work on Cecilia Valdés with great intervals and therefore apologizes for not having been able to give it more coherence (ibid.). In the same prologue Villaverde, however, admits that his writing method was Realism: »I have carried realism, as I understand it, to the point of presenting the principal characters of the novel with all details and tokens […] copying as much as possible d’après nature.«18 Villaverde admits having consciously avoided any idyllic presentation of Cuban reality, and that is why, he says, the novel had come out in somber tonality (ibid., 16). At the same time he confesses his reluctance to include details that might have harmed, as his says, »the virtue and the modesty of the reader«.19 Villaverde also mentions that, for the final edition, he had thoroughly rewritten the first part of the novel (ibid.).

16.

»Por más que talen los apóstoles del racionalismo el árbol de la fé, si tiene éste sus raíces en buen terreno […], ha de echar eternamente ramas vigurosas y floridas que se alcen al cielo« (Caballero 1968, 84 f.).

17.

»mucho que sí me gustan más los blancos que los pardos. Se me caería la cara de vergüenza si me casara y tuviera un hijo saltoatrás« (Villaverde 1964, 358).

18.

»he llevado el realismo, según entiendo, hasta el punto de presentar los principales personajes de la novela con todos pelos y señales […] copiando en lo que cabía, d’après nature« (Villaverde 1964, 17).

19.

»la virtud y la modestia del lector« (ibid., 18).

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Indeed, consciously or unconsciously, the Cuban novelist had »leaped« from the Romantic canon into the mature canon of Western realistic narrative. From the beginning of the novel until its end the author manages to maintain a wonderfully balanced way of narration. He describes in his characters only their external features, those that could be seen, for instance, by the spectator of a dramatic work on the theater stage. The rest and the most important attributes in the characters, i.e. their moral qualities, are revealed gradually to the reader in the course of the narrative by the characters themselves; they are never morally predetermined, but autonomous. Nothing is predefined by the author, but the reader has full liberty to discover by himself what is going on in the novel. This is a fundamental »leap« in narrative quality. The other great achievement in Villaverde’s art is that he does not limit himself to present the point of view of just one ideological sector of the society, but reproduces multiple points of view. Not only the main characters speak and voice their views, close to the author’s own viewpoint — as in the novels by Mármol or Gómez de Avellaneda. Rather, Villaverde makes all layers of Cuban society speak. Even what may seem as a very trivial talk, like the lower middle class women’s gossip, discussions about clothes and fashions, etc., has its essential function in the novel. Villaverde consciously avoids exaggeration of any kind. He does not use the grotesque, nor make his characters »social types« — as criticism has mainly defined the treatment of characters in the realistic canon derived from Balzac. In a word, Villaverde’s realism comes fairly close to the later phase of Western narrative realism that reaches from Tolstoy to the work of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, the Spaniard Clarín, the Estonian Eduard Vilde, and many others. One can even detect some curious parallels between the narrative art of Villaverde and García Márquez, an author from the end of the twentieth century — perhaps not only because they share the same Caribbean reality in their work. I can notice a similarity in the basic human approach to reality in the work of these two Caribbean writers. They share also a kind of melancholic humor, which despite the grim reality they describe makes here and there a sudden alleviating appearance. The plot of Villaverde’s novel is, similarly, revealed gradually to the reader. It is a complicated story about how a rich slave-trader, Don Cándido, tries to hide from his family and the public being the father of a daughter (Cecilia Valdés), who was born from a mulatto woman. Subsequently that gentleman’s son Leonardo, a young man hampered by his mother and given to wild ways, falls in love with Cecilia, who as a brilliantly beautiful young lady (»a Venus of the hybrid Ethiopian-Caucasian race«,20 as she is described in the novel), naturally, has other pretenders. After a long series of events, with rapidly changing scenes of action — which allow the author to present practically all strata of his contemporary Cuban society — the narrative maintains its »suspense« up to the last pages. The story ends almost like a detective novel. After Cecilia has had a baby from Leonardo (her step-brother!) and the truth is at last revealed to Don Cándido’s family, Leonardo’s marriage with Isabel Ilincheta is hastily arranged. Furious Cecilia takes revenge, her mulatto suiter kills Leonardo at the wedding party. Don Cándido succeeds in arranging Cecilia’s confinement for a year in the same mental hospital where her mother was confined after Cecilia’s birth. Villaverde never explains what happened to the heroine of his novel after that. 20. »Venus de la raza híbrida etiópico-caucásica« (ibid., 62).

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The »heroine«, applied to Cecilia, is in Villaverde’s novel a relative term. There are no idealized characters in Cecilia Valdés. Despite her extraordinary beauty, Cecilia is quite an ordinary girl who naturally enjoys being admired by men, including those from the white upper class. Even more, she just dreams of getting married to a white man, preferably from a wealthy family, like Leonardo. As her own skin does not betray her colored origin much, she sees her great chance just in »improving« her lineage racially, not worrying over the fact that she is, as her grandmother says, »poor, and of obscure origin«.21 The same lack of black-and-white moral definition, on the part of the author, is true of all characters of the novel. Although for Don Cándido the black Africans whom he transports to Cuba are little more than »sacks of coal«, without soul, and to save his ship he asks to throw those weaker and ill into the sea, he is not depicted in the novel as a monster, but as a good family man who, besides, is not inwardly indifferent to the fate of his bastard daughter Cecilia. While Sab in Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel was an exception among the colored slaves (as Carlota comments: »Sab has never been confounded with other slaves«,22 Villaverde, on the contrary, shows without euphemism the fate of ordinary slaves who seldom are called by their lords by another name than »dogs«. Villaverde’s novel does not contain such speeches full of pathos against slavery as could be found in Sab. Yet maybe just because the message in Villaverde’s work is »dispersed« in his fictional reality, i.e. made to emerge from multiple images and situations, through different points of view, the effect of the message is likely to be deeper. Villaverde is without any doubt one of the first realistic fiction writers in the Western tradition who with his brilliant insights has shed light on the complex problematics of »otherness« based on racial grounds. The Spanish scholar Vicente Lloréns starts his monographic study about Spanish Romanticism with a chapter entitled »Calderonian polemics«.23 There he provides data about that extraordinary man, the German Juan Nicolás Böhl de Faber, who, having founded a German commercial house in Cádiz and having been named, from 1805, the Consul of the Hanseatic League there, at the same time became the main »importer« of German Romanticism, as well as one of the most influential promoters of the Romantic cultural movement in Spain. The Spanish Academia Real named him an honorary member. Lloréns observes that Böhl de Faber’s admiration for the past, in the vein of German Romanticism, and the enthusiasm of the German Romantics for Calderón encountered serious opposition from young Spanish intellectuals, who in the reactionary and backward political circumstances of their country sought redemption for Spain rather in the ideas of the French enlightenment and revolutionary movement. However, Nicolás Böhl de Faber’s greatest contribution to Spanish culture might have been his marriage in 1796 with Francisca Larrea y Aherán, the daughter of a Spaniard and an Irishwoman, who in the same year gave birth to a daughter. Cecilia Böhl de Faber, as the firstborn was called, was to become, under the male pen-name of Fernán Caballero — to be sure, modeled after George Sand — a leading Spanish fiction writer of the middle of the nineteenth century, and a renowned introducer of »prerealismo« (see Ferreras 1987, 12, 55–59) in Spanish

21.

»pobre y de origen oscuro« (ibid., 309).

22.

»Sab no ha estado nunca confundido con los otros esclavos« (Avellaneda 1976, 149).

23.

»La polémica calderoniana« (Lloréns 1989, 11–28).

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letters. In the following passage I will analyze only the first of her numerous novels, La Gaviota (The Sea-Gull, 1849), which, however, has often been considered her best work. In the first place, I would cast doubt on the term »pre-realism« used by some leading Spanish literary scholars, as applied to Fernán Caballero’s narrative work. Indeed, the unanimously recognized introducers of realistic narrative in Spanish letters, Juan Valera and Benito Pérez Galdós, were somewhat ironical about the work of Fernán Caballero, considering it — especially in the ideological sense — reactionary and simpleminded. (See Martínez de Portal’s introduction in Caballero 1968, 13, 22). There is no denying that Fernán Caballero had inherited something of her ideological attitudes from her father and the German Romantics. However, one could argue that if for instance Miguel de Unamuno at the start of the twentieth century echoed the same ideas of German Romantic philosophy, manifesting even a striking similarity with the ideas of Fernán Caballero, should he be qualified a reactionary writer and philosopher because of that? A closer look at the narrative art of La Gaviota should make it absolutely clear that Fernán Caballero had produced a surprising break-through in the Romantic narrative canon, a »leap« to a narrative Realism that, by the way, in the early work of Pérez Galdós and also in his monumental series of historical novels, the »Episodios nacionales« (46 volumes), still seems to work with a certain hesitation. I would first of all call attention, in La Gaviota, to the same signs of realistic narrative that I have just tried to explain in the case of Villaverde’s novel. The characters in La Gaviota reveal their moral features from »inside«; they are not predetermined by the author from »outside«. The omniscient author steps back, to liberate both the characters and the reader. Like Villaverde, Fernán Caballero was fully conscious of the principles of narrative art and the new approach that she aspired to follow. She put the following views into the mouth of the budding writer Rafael in La Gaviota: This is a novel par excellence […], useful and pleasant. Every nation should write its own novels of the kind. Written with exactness and with a genuine spirit of observation, they will be very helpful in the study of humankind, of history, of practical morals, in the knowledge about places and epochs. If I were a queen, I would order a novel of customs to be written in every province, without leaving out anything that can be referred to and analyzed.24

The fact that here the ideal novel is conceived as a »novel of customs« (novela de costumbres) should not mislead us. The aim is, indeed, to reproduce the concrete reality, embodied by historical traditions and customs of every particular geographical space. No doubt, in a sense Fernán Caballero could be well fitted into the influential current of costumbrismo that had a long tradition in Spanish letters, at the intersection of Romanticism and Realism. Yet there are differences within the narrative patterns of »costumbrism« and realism themselves. There were still influential narrative authors at the beginning of the twentieth century, like Vicente Blasco Ibáñez — extremely widely translated and read outside Spanish borders 24. »Es la novela por excelencia […], útil y agradable. Cada nación debería escribirse las suyas. Escritas con exactitud y con verdadero espíritu de observación, ayudarán mucho para el estudio de la humanidad, de la historia, de la moral práctica, para el conocimiento de las localidades y de las épocas. Si yo fuera la reina, mandaría escribir una novela de costumbres en cada provincia, sin dejar nada por referir y analizar«����� (Caballero 1968, 216).

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—, who despite being mostly qualified as realistic writers faithfully followed the »poetics« of Romanticism in predetermining their fictional characters’ moral features. I think that the principle of »observation« that Fernán Caballero insists upon just means a conscious attempt to abandon the moral predetermination of characters and action, and to replace that structure by a more objective presentation — which, at the same time, coincided with the principles of realistic poetics. These principles had begun to work, within the temporal framework of Romanticism, in the narratives of Stendhal, Balzac, Mérimée and Poe, not to mention some earlier »core« Romantic writers (Hoffmann, Kleist), who had found other means to avoid a merely schematic moral predefinition in their narrative work. That is why the narrative in La Gaviota artistically very much resembles, for instance, the advanced narrative style of Pío Baroja, one of the most renowned novelists of the famous Spanish »Generation of 1898«. It bears resemblance to Baroja also in the sense that Fernán Caballero tries to provide a vision of Spain from the »border«. One of the purposes of her novel was to oppose and reject the myths about Spain that had been constructed from »outside«, and that often were extremely biased, in the negative sense (e.g. the notorious »black legend« or »leyenda negra«). However, being of mixed origin (German father, Irish grandmother), Fernán Caballero never identified herself entirely with the »inside«. It is a curious fact that La Gaviota was written first in French, from which probably José Joaquín de Mora, one of the Romantics belonging to the circle of Juan Nicolás Böhl de Faber, translated it into Spanish (Martínez del Portal’s introduction, Caballero 1968, 13). This fact proves eloquently that one of the most essential changes in the Spanish narrative pattern of the nineteenth century was produced from the »border«, i.e. from the cultural intersection of the »inside« and the »outside«. It is also noteworthy that the »outside«, in this case, despite the original language used as her medium, was not embodied by French culture — whose model had been followed in Spain since the eighteenth century —, but by a more distant culture, German, the very origin of European Romanticism. The dialoguing »border« vision in La Gaviota works horizontally and vertically. At the start of the novel, in 1836, a young German doctor, Federico Stein, arrives in Cádiz, to proceed as a volunteer to the Carlist wars. On board ship he becomes acquainted with a Spanish nobleman, Don Carlos de Cerda. Three years later, Stein returns, disillusioned, from the war, to settle in an Andalusian village, with a simple peasant family. Soon, his marriage with a solitary young lady, a fisherman’s daughter, is arranged. María (or Marisalada, or even more ironically, »La Gaviota« — »Seagull« — as she is called) is radically distant from the idealized Romantic heroines of the novels of Mármol or Larra. She belongs, rather, to the cultural code that apparently puzzled Fernán Caballero herself and was at the center of Mérimée’s Carmen (1845): the dark, sexual aspect of Spanish nature and culture. With that exception, Fernán Caballero admired Spanish traditional-popular culture without reservations. The narrative text of La Gaviota is interwoven with popular songs, traditional proverbs, phrases and historical legends. Stein admires the vitality and humor of simple Spanish people, as well as adores the religious sentiment that has historically inspired Spanish culture. Nature, religion and culture are shown in their deepest intertwinement. The narrative in the novel, however, takes a sad turn at the end, as »La Gaviota« who in the meantime has become an applauded singer, cannot help but follow the »call of the wild«, her dark sexual nature. She becomes a paramour simultaneously of duke Cerda and the bull-fighter Pepe, a man whom she really loves.

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After Pepe is killed in the bull-fighting arena and »La Gaviota«’s secret affairs are revealed, she is left in misery, while her offended German husband goes to Cuba, where he soon dies. Liberating the characters and action from moral predetermination is a fundamental premise in constructing a »border« dialogue between different points of view, visions from »inside« and outside«, »up« and »down«. Although some direct »interventions« of the author in her narrative still occur, I would not agree with the opinion that novel is moralizing, as Ferreras sees it (1987, 58). Indeed, Fernán Caballero leaves us with no doubt that she considered, for instance, bullfighting a rather barbarous sport. She was known as a defender of animals, so she denounces the fate of poor defenseless horses in the bullfight with a special vehemence, and admires not the skill of toreadors but the heroic collective self-defense of bulls in the fight (Caballero 1968, 308). However, at the same time she presents the point of view of Don Cerda, an educated and humane man, who still likes the spectacle of bullfighting, as a play. Although the sad fate of »La Gaviota« is shown, the author avoids any direct moral opinion about her conduct. Mérimée, with his Carmen, no doubt, contributed to the vision of Spain from »outside«, making its dark and sexual side prominent — probably that is why Mérimée’s work, as a whole, was rejected in Spain. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Colomba (1840) was the only story by Mérimée that appeared translated in Spain (Lloréns 1989, 250). Fernán Caballero produced a less Romantic and more realistically dialogic vision of Spain than the one mostly constructed from »outside«. The main significance of her La Gaviota should be sought in a new philosophical approach to Spanish reality. In that, Fernán Caballero deserves to be considered a direct forerunner of Miguel de Unamuno and the great literary »Generation of 1898«, the extraordinary constellation of writers who, half a century later, submitted their country and its history to a completely refreshing philosophical-ideological revision. Bibliography Alarcón, Pedro A. de. 1975. El sombrero de tres picos. Ed. by Andrés B. Couselo. La Habana: Editorial de Arte y Literatura. Caballero, Fernán. 1968. La Gaviota. Ed. by María Martínez de Portal. Barcelona: Editorial Bruguera. Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín de. 1968. El periquillo sarniento. Introd. by Jefferson Rea Spell. México: Editorial Porrúa. Ferreras, Juan Ignacio. 1987. La novela española en el siglo XIX (hasta 1868). Madrid: Taurus. Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis. 1976. Sab. Introd. by Mary Cruz. La Habana: Editorial Arte y Literatura. Larra, Mariano José de. 1984. El doncel de Don Enrique el Doliente. Ed. by José Luis Varela. Madrid: Cátedra. Lloréns, Vicente. 1989. El Romanticismo español. Madrid: Editorial Castalia. Lotman, Iurii M. 1992. Kul’tura i vzryv. Moskva: Progres. Mármol, José. 2000. Amalia. Ed. by Teodosio Fernández. Madrid: Cátedra. Villaverde, Cirilio. 1964. Cecilia Valdés. La Habana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura.

Romantic thought and style in nineteenth-century Realism and Naturalism Jeanne J. Smoot The purpose of this study is to show that Literary Realism and Naturalism in the United States were decidedly more benign than they were in Europe and also that American letters retained aspects of Romanticism longer than other countries. A number of key reasons contribute to these major differences: the strong influence of religion in the United States, the long life of the Rousseauistic concept of the Noble Savage, and the sheer expansiveness of America, which fostered optimism. Insofar as other Western nations replicated or duplicated aspects of these influences, their Realistic and Naturalistic works also echo Romantic ideals. As a counter current in France and other parts of Europe, there is also a strong negative Romanticism that emerges, virtually a Romanticism gone sour, as belief in the innate goodness of humanity, expounded by Rousseau and others, yields to the onslaught of war and political upheaval. Of all the European countries, however, Russia is unique, perhaps because of its initial isolation and singular cultural experiences. Russia, despite its suffering or perhaps because of it, looks to the inner reality of the human soul. 1.

USA — From Rousseauism to naturalism

One of the central ironies in the history of international literary Realism is that one of the best known of all Realistic writers, America’s Mark Twain, or Samuel Langhorne Clemens, reveals this decidedly American Rousseauistic or Romantic mindset. Despite Clemens’s realistic attention to detail and his examination of such brutally graphic subjects as a besotted »Pap« (in Huckleberry Finn, 1884), who beats his son until welts torment his body, or of churchgoing country folk who delight in periodic feuding slaughters, Twain still has his young hero Huck joyously unfettered gliding down the Mississippi River on a raft with his loyal companion, the runaway slave, Jim. The two are naked, in a state of nature. All about them on the shore swirls evil of all kinds, yet they are safe as long as they are together on the raft and no intruders come from the outside. While Twain is not so simplistic as to suggest that anything associated with the shore is malevolent, the impression is clearly given that the young lad Huckleberry Finn is a good person by nature. It is »civilization« that seeks to corrupt him. That Mark Twain often displays a similarly Romantic view of natural man is apparent in another of his widely read and known novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). This novel deals with a young man of a higher social class than the beleaguered Huck, son of the town drunk, but the picture of idealized youth remains overwhelmingly Romantic. Again, despite adults who lie, scheme, rob and even commit murder, Tom and his friends remain amiable pranksters who are basically decent youngsters. Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, both largely autobiographical novels, remain essentially nostalgic works looking, as Romantic works so often do, at an idealized past. By allowing both main characters, Huck and Tom, to be youths, Twain can maintain both his Realistic posture and his Romantic view of humanity. After all, brutally Realistic situations

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do confront his two novelistic heroes, but they are still callow youths, not yet completely besmirched by civilization. The closer they come to civilization, the worse they get, as in the case of Tom and the reluctant Huck toward the end of Huckleberry Finn, who both subject the slave Jim to a series of humiliating and debilitating tests to enhance a distorted sense of adventure, ironically derived from Tom’s reading of Romantic novels. A look at other American authors, even some of the seemingly most Naturalistic, reveals a similar longing for a Romantic view of human personality and conduct. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) by Stephen Crane and dubbed the first Naturalistic novel in America, depicts a young prostitute who starts out wanting to bring beauty and order to her tenement dwelling despite the drunken outrages of her violent father. The reader comes to associate Maggie’s longing for blue ribbons to adorn the curtains of her family’s dingy apartment with the aspiration for something higher. While Crane clearly shows the pervasive influence of environment on human behavior, the reader is led to believe that Maggie, throughout the story, is inherently decent, striving for something better. After all, as the title of the work states, she is a girl, a mere innocent, not yet a woman of the streets. Crane’s novel, with the characteristic almost antiseptic depiction of reality in the America of the late nineteenth century, ends just as Maggie’s life as a prostitute is about to take full force, and throughout the detailing of her life not a single blasphemous or obscene word appears in the text, other than »hell« and »damn«. The closest Crane comes in this supposedly Naturalistic novel is the euphemistic reference to the »maledictory defiance« Maggie’s brother Jimmie hurls at the local police (Crane 1893, 148). Crane’s reluctance to openly offend censors and his own sensitivity to the public taste and morals of his audience have a direct bearing on the depiction of character in the novels of Crane and other American authors. Even his selection of a title, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, evokes the name of Mary Magdalene, another prostitute whose name would be well known to the predominantly Christian audience Crane confronted, though his Maggie would not give her life to Christ, but rather succumb to the evils of the Bowery, New York’s lower East Side. Other works by American authors writing in the naturalistic vein, such as Crane’s autobiographical The Open Boat (1898) or Jack London’s Call of the Wild (1903), clearly stress the dignity of humankind; in fact, that dignity is enhanced and ennobled by the characters’ struggles against fate, often depicted as a force of nature. Only the clumsier and less successful Frank Norris has oafish characters like McTeague from the 1899 novel of that name. The animalistic dentist McTeague is the central figure of the novel and seems almost a parodic representation of the seamier side of French naturalism, probably absorbed by the young Norris when he studied art in Paris from 1887 to 1889. Even the best known of the American naturalists, Theodore Dreiser, depicts characters, who, though obviously tainted in their behavior, nevertheless almost tease the reader with the hope that they will succeed, that they are not really as bad as they seem. Sister Carrie (1900), which is also sometimes termed the first naturalistic novel in America, is an excellent example. This outwardly innocent girl comes from the farm and is quickly caught up in the glamour and allure of the bustling Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century. Progressively she commits a scandalous deed for her day, living first with a young drummer, or salesman, and then absconding with an older man whose life she proceeds to destroy for her own advantage; yet all the while she seems so innocent that the reader almost believes her rationalizations and wants her

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to succeed. Ironically, this distortion of the American dream — for the blatantly immoral Carrie does, in fact, succeed in a materialistic way — is a factor in the recurrence of the idealized picture of humanity in much American realism. Another significant novel by Dreiser, the ponderous An American Tragedy (1925), focuses on almost a male version of Sister Carrie who starts out as a bellhop and proceeds to ingratiate himself up the ladder of success. Through deft maneuvering and courting of a wealthy man’s daughter, the hero, Clyde Griffiths, is on the brink of financial success when a former girlfriend announces that she is pregnant by him. Our hero then has no way out but to contrive her murder, and even after he is sitting in prison accused of the crime, the reader maintains sympathy for him and almost perversely hopes he will once again wriggle his way out of a dilemma. As if in response to anticipated audience concerns, Dreiser has his hero reform in the end and repent his sins. Ironically, the cynical Dreiser, once again, through the storyline itself and even through the reader’s response to that narrative, completely undercuts the notion of a truly noble American dream. The amoral Clyde and his utterly contrived eleventh-hour confession in no way represents the loftiness of what passes for the American dream in the popular mind in the United States. American literature abounds, as it does in the examples given from Twain, Crane and Dreiser, with characters who, for better or worse, are depicted on a higher moral plane than they might otherwise occupy in reality, or who, like Huck, rather than succumbing to the violence and dissipation of their fathers, seem to reflect innate goodness; but now we must ask, why is American literature like this? Why is it less cynical, less graphic, and even inclined in some bizarre way, as in the Dreiser examples, to doggedly defend or wish the best for characters who in another national literature might simply be stripped of Rousseauistic pretensions and consigned to their own degradation. The particular aspect of Romanticism that we have been talking about here as lingering in American Realistic and Naturalistic expression is the Rousseauistic view of humanity. This view, while born in Europe, was based on an idealized vision that Europeans first had of things natural or exotic to them. What better home for the so-called Noble Savage than America — the land across the sea? While early American settlers themselves, such as Cotton Mather or the early American diarist, Sarah Kemble Knight, had no Rousseauistic illusions about Native Americans, or anyone else for that matter — Mather compared Native American speech to the brutish utterances of beavers on the stream and Knight called the Indian the »most salvage [sic] of all the salvages [sic]« — Europeans increasingly came to see the American Indian as an idealized Noble Savage (Mather 1691, I.80; Knight 1825, I.195). Yet so pervasive became this European influence that despite the prejudices and the experiences of the early North American colonialists, by the time we come to an American transitional figure such as the Philip Freneau (1752–1832), who spans the period between the Enlightenment and Romanticism in America, we read such lines as »And Reason’s self shall bow the knee« before the Native American, or Indian, who is depicted as possessing superior, almost mystical dignity (Freneau 1788, I.446). So, quite simply, one of the reasons for the perpetuation of the idea of the Noble Savage is that European Romanticism nurtured this creation and gave him a natural home in the American wilderness. Numerous European Romantics spawned this notion, notably Chateaubriand with his Atala (1801) and René (1802), along with American scientific explorers, such as William

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Bartram, who catalogued the American flora and fauna and delighted largely European audiences with his exquisite descriptions of the lushness of the new American land. Ironically, and cynically, of course, as this process was going on, there was almost a direct correlation between the exaltation and glorification of the Noble Savage and the complete disappearance if not eradication of the Native American as the tribes were pushed farther and farther west. Along with the fantasy of the Noble Savage as a creature flourishing in America, there were other optimistic forces that also almost precluded a brutally Realistic or cynical view of humanity. Unlike Europe, America was a land of opportunity. During the colonial period, while Europe was swiftly seeking to deploy its surplus population to the Americas, what was later to become the United States was rapidly and gladly absorbing this new influx. Potential settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were being offered vast holdings just for coming to the New World. We are not simply speaking of the nobility or the second and third sons of the nobility, but anyone who was willing to build ships or provide other important raw materials or goods for the mother country. While Europe was crowded and the land often under the control of the few, North America, specifically the British colonies, represented opportunity. American literature reflects this optimism, even as it passed into the Realistic and Naturalistic periods, since the westward expansion in America continued well into the nineteenth century with the Gold Rush of 1849 and the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered 160 acres for cultivation and ownership to encourage settlements in the new territories. Moreover, the influence of Puritanism in America, which prevailed from 1720 to 1820, meant that Americans were imbued with the Christian ethos. While the sterner Calvinists among them might complain about the natural depravity of all humankind, even those staunch presbyters had to admit that, according to Christian dogma, anyone can be saved — even the proverbial thief who was hanged beside Christ on Calvary. With the strong influence of Christianity in America, optimism prevailed, for even the lowest of the low could be saved through Christ. Americans of the mid-nineteenth century were being raised on such essentially optimistic and facile philosophers as Ralph Waldo Emerson with his sloganesque »Self-Reliance« (1841). Emerson in turn extracted from writers like France’s Charles Fourier those ultra-Rousseauistic theories that supported an inspiring view of human potential. Theories such as these also influenced other members of the American Transcendental School. Emerson and his successors dominated the American philosophic scene until almost the time of William James, brother of the novelist Henry James. And even with the advent of James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) and his later The Will to Believe and Other Essays (1897), there was strong support for beliefs that could not be proved through rational or scientific, i.e. »realistic« evidence. In the popular mind, even the more sober Henry David Thoreau, who did indeed suffer through imprisonment for his own convictions, seemed simply an eccentric lover of nature, who encouraged Americans to march to the beat of a different drum. This is not to say that Americans were not undergoing travail. The Civil War was wrenching apart the United States from 1861–65, but even here there was a decided difference in the way American authors responded to that conflict. Moreover, whereas Romanticism in Europe had reached its height in most countries in the very early part of the nineteenth century, it would take the devastation of the Civil War to bring to a formal close Romanticism in America, which prevailed from 1820 to 1865. Even after the Civil War,

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however, Romantic themes continued in such writers as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier and others. After the defeat of the South, most of the major authors in America were from the North. The few Southern authors there were at the close of the Civil War wrote, like the poet Sidney Lanier of Georgia, nostalgic lines about a lost South, or perhaps even a South that never was. The famous Realist Twain managed to avoid the bitterness and cynicism that might have resulted had he actively participated in the conflict. Though his sympathies were clearly with the Confederacy — his parents, after all, were slaveholding — his older and wiser brother Orion deftly removed him from the fray by suggesting they go west while the Civil War in America raged elsewhere. Instead of losing his life in a lost cause or hardening his sentiments against humanity even more than they might naturally be hardened by the vicissitudes of life and aging, Twain sharpened his powers of observation and his awareness of the expansiveness and vastness of the United States through his trip to the rip-roaring West. It was after this and other exciting travels and experiences that Twain came to look nostalgically on his boyhood when he began to write Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. 2.

Germany and Scandinavia

Far different was the situation in Europe, which at the dawn of the nineteenth century whirled beneath the expansive conquests of Napoleon. Consider the case of Germany, for example, where Napoleon dominated from 1803 to 1813. Though Napoleon would eventually be defeated in Germany and elsewhere, far from the exuberance of victory, many simply found themselves under new control and reactionary policies, such as those of Austria’s Metternich, for example. Only in 1848, when open rebellion broke out in Germany, did social, political and economic forces there usher in Realism. But along with it, and fused with the philosophies of Schopenhauer and others, came pessimism. Scandinavian writers, especially the Norwegian authors Henrik Ibsen and Björnstjerne Björnson and the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, were also profoundly influenced by these pessimistic philosophers. Björnson, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1903, retained his optimism, however, and was a key figure in Norway’s independence from Sweden. Like Emilia Pardo Bazán in Spain, Björnson came from a staunch religious background — he was the son of a parish priest. Such a background would ultimately preclude the strict determinism of naturalism. Moreover, similar to another great Spanish writer, Cecilia Böhl de Faber, Björnson had faith in the Norwegian peasant as the source of the strength of the national character. 3.

France

Far different from any idyllic picture of society was the perception and presentation of human character and its potential resulting in France. There perhaps the greatest upheaval and pessimism staggered the people in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War that saw the streets of Paris, in many ways the intellectual and literary capital of Europe, reduced to rubble. Gerald

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Gillespie, in his essay »The Discourse of Defeat in Nineteenth-Century Narrative« (1988), has written on this phenomenon, citing the many works that treat »a deheroicized world« in European fiction, particularly in French and German letters. He sees these disillusioned writers as, in a sense, deconstructing Romanticism, as subsuming Romantic dreams into grotesque nightmares and despair. He offers as perhaps the best and most poignant example of this process Julien Sorel from Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black, 1831), who discovers only under sentence of death his true feelings. And in Tolstoi’s War and Peace (1865–69), Gillespie sees the Russian author acknowledging the inadequacy of individuals in shaping history, though this same awareness was to lead the later Tolstoi to realize the importance of all elemental forces acting on humankind, including that of Divine Providence. Yet against this presentation of the survival of Romanticism as a negative quality in Realism, a disillusionment with the old, Romantic assumptions, the careful reader must acknowledge vestiges of a desire for something better even in European Realism/Naturalism, though for very different reasons. In European Realism, the astute reader will often see, as Gillespie recognizes, a retention of certain Romantic tendencies that coalesced with the more Realistic theories. For example, French Realists revolted against Romantic subjectivism, idealism, escapism and occasional vagueness. At the same time, these Realists tended to endorse Romantic humanitarianism, social reform and democracy. Stylistically, French Realists, like Realists throughout the Western world, retained other Romantic characteristics. The French Realist Balzac’s work, for instance, is replete with Romantic melodrama, violent events, sentimentality, mysterious and grotesque characters, and emphasis on individualism, the exaltation of the passions and the imagination. Balzac’s emphasis on these elements is reminiscent of the British Realist Charles Dickens, who also cannot be considered a consistent Realist because of his use of characters drawn from fairy tales or dreams and representative of the grotesque. Like Balzac, Dickens’s improbable plots also recall the melodramatic stage. So pervasive are these Romantic echoes in Balzac, Stendhal, Mérimée and other French Realists that the critic Kathleen T. Butler during the early part of the twentieth century maintained that French Realism was simply a branch or growth of Romanticism (Butler 1923, II.195 f.). Whether this darker side of Romanticism is called simply an extension of the movement or a negative interpretation or response, it is a palpable manifestation, even among some of the later symbolists, such as Charles Baudelaire. Consider, for instance, his obsession with the bizarre, the perverse, the strange and violent. Later critics, of course, generally saw Realism and the Naturalism that followed as genuine transmutations, or reactions against Romanticism, as writers lost faith in many of the basic Romantic assumptions about human nature and life in general. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) is perhaps one of the greatest examples of modern prose fiction, but far from the sympathetic and almost uplifting view of the human spirit we have in Twain’s presentation of Huckleberry Finn, we have the sardonic, bitterly ironic picture of Emma Bovary. If there is sympathy at all for a character in Flaubert’s great novel, it is for Emma’s beleaguered husband, Charles. It is certainly not for the philandering and blatantly stupid and foolish Emma. And what is one of the main reasons for her behavior? — the unrealistic adventure novels she has read and the completely inadequate religious education she received from the Roman Catholic Church. Like Felicité from Flaubert’s »Un Cœur Simple« (A Simple Heart),

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from Trois Contes (Three Stories, 1877), Emma has been influenced more by the trappings and aesthetics of church service than by true devotional experience. Yet no reader of Flaubert can escape reading »������������������������������������������ Un Cœur Simple���������������������������� « without feeling that somehow Felicité, for example, earns Flaubert’s grudging sympathy. Foolish, pathetic, used and misused, she is nevertheless an admirable figure in her own way. The gently mocking Flaubert treats her far more kindly than he does the sometimes ridiculously adventuresque Emma, with whom he more closely identified. What are the reasons behind this sympathetic portrayal that insinuates itself into Flaubert’s presentation? The answer may lie in seeing the same kind of sympathies in Emile Zola’s work, L’Assommoir (1877). Here the almost preprogrammed Gervaise sinks increasingly into alcoholism and eventually pathetic prostitutional begging in order to support her habit; nevertheless, she continually has the reader’s sympathy. However, there is no illusion that she will ever rise or do better. The novel itself is simply a playing out of her decline, but there is steadfast sympathy for her character and regret for her demise. A similar tone pervades Zola’s Germinal (1885). No one really thinks the miners will be triumphant, but again there is almost a natural rumbling within the earth itself that things should be different, that a new order should be established. As the miners band together there is the latent hope that mass action will be a solution to the myriad problems confronting modern society. As the main character in Germinal, Etienne Lantier, the son of Gervaise from L’Assommoir, leaves the village where he has fought and suffered so much for the rights of the miners, he hears the sounds of the picks beneath the ground and reflects that they sound »like an ever-growing army stretching into the future« (trans. Salvan 1943, 41).1 Some of the reasons for the sympathetic treatments in novels by both Flaubert and Zola may have to do not only with the sympathies of the authors emerging almost despite their desires for objectivity, but also with the reality of literary aesthetics. Readers want to identify with characters. Readers vicariously become involved in the lives of their characters, and deft writers manipulate this aesthetic distance to their advantage. 4.

Italy

The great Italian novelist Giovanni Verga is an excellent example of an author who recognized the aesthetic need for sympathetic figures. More importantly, his emphasis on »verismo«, truth, rather than Zola’s programmed or scientific method, brought a more interesting and multifaceted character to Italian fiction. While verism was a part of the great positivist movement in Europe, it nevertheless corresponds to the need, poorly satisfied by Romanticism, to make Italian literature leave the abstractions of the antiquated classical tradition. Verga and his followers sought to give concrete social value to literature. They saw the treatment of contemporary events and problems as offering new freedom to the artist by infusing a freshness, a vitality, indeed an actuality to Italian literature. At the same time, these verists sought to express the sense of world grief, the »fatalità tragica«, the irony as well as the Homeric dignity that marks Verga at his best. 1.

»une armée […] grandissant pour les récoltes du siècle future« (Zola 1885, VII, 6).

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Interestingly, in describing his writing, Verga, in contrast to Zola, who compares the writer to a medical doctor, compares the novelist to a sculptor in his introduction to the short story »L’Amante di Gramigna« (The Lover of Gramigna, 1883). Verga, like the Romantics before him — and, indeed, like all great writers of whatever literary tradition or school — remains an artist, a critic, not merely a reporter. Like the Russian Realists writing their greatest novels at about the same time as Verga’s masterpiece, I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree, 1881), Verga acknowledges both an inner and an outer Realism; hence, his works are often rich with psychological penetration of character. While Verga leaves behind the excesses and sentimentality of his earlier Romantic phase, which virtually all Realistic writers of his generation seem to have passed through, the fundamental awareness of passion and sheer human love remains with him. While acknowledging fate as an overriding force in individual lives, Verga nevertheless depicts the importance of will as his characters struggle to maintain their integrity in an openly hostile world. The Provvidenza, on which the fortunes of the Malavoglia family sail, often comes back to port, like Huck Finn’s raft, battered and bruised, but it is still seaworthy, and ultimately, despite deception, lies, criminality and rapaciousness of all kinds, the family in Verga’s House by the Medlar Tree, endures. This seasoned optimism of Verga is not the Romantic exuberance of a new nation, like America, where the solution to many problems was »Go West, young man, go West«. It is the product of an Italy that until the mid-nineteenth century knew nothing but domination by Spanish, Austrian, French or even Papal powers, yet the confidence in the human spirit in Verga is no less genuine, perhaps even more so because it is infused by hard experience. Moreover, Verga’s attention to Realistic re-creation of spoken language, his overuse of certain expressions, such as »che«, after the manner of the peasants, or his putting standard Italian words into Sicilian word order to make the reader aware of the rhythm of the dialect in the Italian sentence not only reformed the Italian language, but also made Italians proud of their native dialects and showed how the common speech could be used not only to provide a realistic tone but also to impart an even greater richness to the language. Ironically, then, this master of Realism carried forward the best ideals of the Romantics in restoring pride in language and contributing to the spirit of Risorgimento (Resurgence) in Italy through his sympathetic, yet Realistic depiction of the common individual. Verga’s later compatriot, the Nobel laureate and dramatist, Pirandello, reveals more of the Naturalistic view or of a negative Romanticism, a Romanticism gone sour, in a sense. The philosopher playwright Pirandello believed life is largely determined by heredity and environment. Human beings are worse than animals, and unhappier, because we cannot simply yield to primitive urges without rationalization, self-deception and other lies. We are not, in effect, the Noble Savage, simply the calculating beast, torn by the discrepancy between our self-deluding ideals and the ugliness of the realities in which we actually find ourselves. Out of this conflict comes the grinding pessimism of the modern period, so apparent in the works of Pirandello. Such a modern/postmodern philosophy, of course, is ultimately terribly unattractive and unsettling, and a critic, like the late great René Wellek, would argue that literary Realists and Naturalists succeeded in spite of their theories and, in fact, never really swallowed the philosophic concoctions they compounded. If, for example, they had, they would never have written. Why write about the dangers of alcoholism unless one hopes for a cure? Why write about the plight of the mining class unless one hopes for amelioration? Why even write about the

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petty and hard lives of Norman French unless one hopes for change? And change, within the naturalistic theories of determinism is not possible. Ironically, Zola, in his own »Le roman expérimental« (The Experimental Novel, 1880), refutes his own theories that human beings are essentially at the mercy of determinism when he altruistically expresses the desire that the application of the principles of Naturalistic Determinism can improve life. In other words, human beings’ lives can be changed. Zola writes: »To be master of good and evil, to regulate life, to regulate society, in the long run to resolve all problems of socialism, above all, to bring a solid foundation to justice by experimentally resolving questions of criminality, is that not to do the most useful human work?« (trans. Becker 1963, 177).2 5.

Spain

Echoes of the kind of Rousseaustic vision of humanity seen in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn are evident in selected authors of other national literatures. In Spain, for example, there has always been a strong tradition of the »Noble Moor«. There are a number of narratives and folk tales based on this theme, but the main antecedent seems to be the »Historia del Abencerraje y de la hermosa Jarifa« (History of Abencerraje and the Beautiful Jarifa, an Arab folktale first included in Jorge de Montemayor’s pastoral romance La Diana, 1565), whose beginnings go back to the mid-sixteenth century. Ironically, like the Rousseauistic notion of the Noble Savage in America, the idea of the Noble Moor seems more myth than truthful expression of the way Spaniards regarded the Islamic invaders, who first intruded on Spanish soil in 711 and were expelled from their final holdings by Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492. Just as the Americans only began idealizing the Native Americans after they had been killed or removed to reservations, the Spanish also only began idealizing the Moors after they had been expelled by Ferdinand and Isabela. This idealization reached perhaps its highest expression during the Romantic Period in Spain and continues as a motif in Spanish literature today. Along with the idea of the »Noble Moor«, there is another Rousseauistic echo in Spanish literature in the recurrent glorification of the people of the provinces, seen in virtually all the writers of the nineteenth century and particularly in those most often called »costumbristas«, or regional realists. The greatest of all Spanish novelists of the nineteenth century, Benito Pérez Galdós strongly dramatizes this sentiment in his four-volume Fortunata y Jacinta (Fortunata and Jacinta, 1887) depicting the lives of two women engaged with the same man. Ironically, the legitimate wife, while a decent and kindly woman, is not dubbed »Fortunate«. That title is reserved for her husband’s mistress from the lower classes, and, while Jacinta longs to bear a child, it is the more robust and passionate Fortunata who is able to produce an offspring. Gerald Gillespie argues convincingly in his previously cited essay, »The Discourse of Defeat in Nineteenth-Century Narrative«, that Galdós, at least in his early novel La sombra 2.

»Etre maître du bien et du mal, régler la vie, régler la société, résoudre à la longue tous les problèmes du socialisme, apporter surtout des bases solides à la justice en résolvant par l’expérience les questions de criminalité, n’est ce pas là être les ouvriers les plus utiles et les plus moraux du travail humain?« (Zola 1890, III).

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(The Shadow, 1871), reflects the nadir of Romanticism with his almost »cheerfully Positivistic« work (Gillespie 1988, 231). True, Galdós wrote a multitude of novels (he is credited with some seventy-seven novels in total) that could be considered in the Realistic/Naturalistic mode. But this prolific author, like any great writer, in a sense, defies classification. He also has works that could clearly be designated Romantic. More importantly, regardless of the literary school to which Galdós may lean in a given literary offering, his Romantic exaltation or preferencing of the peasant class remains constant throughout his corpus. Despite this obvious idealization of the peasant, there has always been a strong tradition of Realism in Spanish literature. In fact, the picaresque tradition, from which Twain drew his inspiration for Huck Finn, began in Spain with Lazarillo de Tormes in 1554. But in Spain there was always a harder edge than the rendering of boyhood experience seen in Twain’s work. Little Spanish waifs did not find their Aunt Sallies or even their owl-eyed Miss Watsons or Widow Douglasses, the way Huck does in Twain’s tale. These relatively benign authority figures from Huckleberry Finn truly loved their young ward, and their main crimes seemed to be their hypocritical dipping of snuff and their keeping of slaves, whom they treated benevolently by the standards of the day. In Spain there is, coming down to the nineteenth century, a truly sharper edge to the Realism, as in the case of the coldly repressive Pepita Jiménez from Galdós’s novel by that name (1874). That Auntie’s efforts to »civilize« her nephew, Pepe Rey, result in his tragic death, not in his »light[ing] out for the Territory«, as the hero of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn blissfully announces he will do at the end of his story (Twain 1884, 265). While the sharper edge to Spanish Realism is due to the long-standing tradition of Realism in Spanish letters, it is also due to the nature of Romanticism in Spain. While American Romanticism had prevailed from 1820 to 1865, Spanish Romanticism was relatively short-lived. Moreover, even this brief period of Romanticism in Spain, which roughly flourished from 1833 to 1848, exhibited a more somber tone, signs of what some critics would call »negative Romanticism«, a reaction against Romantic excesses or against the implications of Romanticism’s major themes. Doubt and pessimism, for instance, are strong characteristics in the short heyday of Romanticism in Spain. In Spain, interestingly, two female authors are prominent in ushering in aspects of Realistic and Naturalistic fiction, Cecilia Böhl de Faber and Emilia Pardo Bazán. At the same time, the two writers reflect assimilations and reactions against the earlier Romanticism. De Faber, like her counterparts George Eliot in England and George Sand in France, wrote under a male pseudonym, that of Fernán Caballero, which enabled her to appeal to a generation of readers not yet ready for female authors. Her 1849 La Gaviota (The Sea Gull) is credited with introducing the modern novel to Spain. De Faber also helped to inaugurate costumbrismo, a nineteenth-century literary movement that flourished in Spain and Latin America and corresponds to regionalism or local color in English/American literature. The movement’s name is based on the word, »costumbre« meaning the habit or custom of a people. Like the Romantics, de Faber saw the countryside — particularly Spain’s Andalusia — as the appropriate corrective to what she viewed as the evils of the advancing city life. (Other Spanish costumbristas often shared this view of the corrupting influence of the cities, notably José María de Pereda y Sánchez de Porrúa, the best known regional realist from the Santander area of Spain.) Thus, de Faber’s first and greatest novel betrays many Romantic elements. The plot itself is of a peasant woman who rises to be an opera star, and there are myriad lyrical and detailed

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descriptions of Spanish provincial life. At the same time, de Faber duplicates the inconsequential prattle of the upper classes, in whose circles she moved. She excels, then, at the description of both upper-class and peasant life. She further rebels against the artificial descriptions and dialogue of the then popular historical Romantic novel by striving to accurately depict the life and speech of the Spain of her day. Unfortunately de Faber’s work does not translate well because of the difficulties in reproducing the earthy speech of the peasants, the constant play on words, and the folk sayings and snatches of songs and ballads that she interweaves throughout her text. Further alienating her from some modern readers is her occasionally moralistic tone and staunch conservatism that caused her and others of her generation and background to fear the changes resulting in Europe after the revolutions of 1848. Still, de Faber remains a pivotal figure in Spanish letters and a striving Realist who nevertheless displays obvious Romantic stylistic and philosophic concerns. Coming after de Faber, Emilia Pardo Bazán, who was both a regional writer from Galicia and also a Naturalist in practice, if not in theory, expressed great admiration for the artist in Zola and praised him accordingly when she stated that »Teniers, Rubens and Rabelais, of whom there are traces in Zola, are all united in L’Assommoir«.3 Nevertheless, she challenged his literary theories. In her »La cuestión palpitante« (The Burning Question) of 1882, first published in serial form in Madrid’s La Época during the winter of 1882 through 1883, she sought to interpret Zola for Spanish audiences and critics. This work contains the crux of her reaction to Zolaesque Naturalism, though other critical comments can be found in the prefaces and prologues to many of her short stories, novels, and essays. As a Roman Catholic and a believer in free will, Pardo Bazán admitted that she could never accept the concept of materialistic determinism, as espoused by the French leader, Zola. This reaction, stemming from being a product of a Roman Catholic Spain that produced the Counter Reformation and the Inquisition while the Protestant Reformation was sweeping much of the rest of Europe, is typical of most Spanish writers of her period. Moreover, Spain, unlike France, never experienced a Dreyfus Affair to feed the idea of the duplicity and corruption of the Church. While intellectuals everywhere tend to question the Church, there was no wholesale turning away from religion in Spain as there was in France, for example. And so, even as the Spanish authors criticize the Roman Catholic Church, as the anticlerical Galdós was wont to do in his masterpiece, Pepita Jiménez, they reveal in their writings a basic faith in God and in the concept of free will. Pardo Bazán also reacted in other ways against Naturalism. She said her sensibilities were offended by what she considered »naturalists’ extremes« — the insistence on heavy-handed descriptions of the obscene, the low, and the vulgar. Pardo Bazán viewed Zola’s characters as essentially neurotic. Indeed she objected to the fact that their lives seemed too predetermined and therefore lacked spontaneity. She also criticized the overemphasis on details, which, she said, left little to the imagination of the reader. Finally she objected strongly to the utilitarianism of art, returning to the Romantic ideal of »l’art pour l’art«. For her, any didactic elements in literature should emanate naturally from the beauty of the narrative and not be the result of »pulpit 3.

»El Teniers, el Rubens y el Rabelais de que hay rasgos en Zola, se unieron en el Assommoir« (Coello 1937, 22).

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pounding«. Pardo Bazán charged that the French Naturalists, and Zola in particular, had sold themselves to the mob in exchange for literary fame. Despite her own attacks on Naturalism, Pardo Bazán herself came under attack for even introducing the concept of Naturalism to Spain and for suggesting that authors like Zola, despite their critical theories with which she said she disagreed, had literary merit. Also encouraging the attacks is the fact that Pardo Bazán’s own works exhibit blatant Naturalistic tendencies. Her emphasis on sex, the use of sustained animal imagery, which implies that human beings are on the same level with animals, the detailed descriptions and the general pessimistic tone of both Los Pazos de Ulloa (The Pazos of Ulloa, 1886) and La madre naturaleza (Mother Nature, 1887), ironically distinguished Pardo Bazán from the other Spanish »costumbristas«, or local color artists, but also brought her vilification for following foreign models that were viewed as obscene. Pardo Bazán reacted strongly to this criticism. She responded by writing that she considered her works within the tradition of Spanish Realism. She reminded her people of the often earthy scenes and subject matter of the Spanish classics La Celestina (1499) and Don Quixote (1605–15). In so doing, she helped release Realism from its confines as a specific literary movement, or a mere reaction against Romanticism that was anchored in time, and glorified it as part of a continuing aesthetic tradition. Pardo Bazán cited Cervantes, Rabelais, Molière, Diderot, and Prévost as outstanding »Realists«. In discussing the relationship between literature and society, she acknowledged the profound influence of society on literature. Indeed, she believed that literature is the result of a people’s way of looking at life and not vice versa. Finally, she called for a national Spanish literature, one that would express realistically the thoughts, the needs and the aspirations of the Spanish people. Though her gender kept her from ever achieving entrance into the highly conservative Spanish Academy, it is significant that the force of her ideas undoubtedly helped her to become the first woman to occupy a chair at the University of Madrid. 6.

Latin America

Meanwhile Latin American literature, like its counterpart above the Rio Grande, proclaimed independence from European models, while all the while being very much mired in them. But, unlike the United States with its multiplicity of Christian denominations and sects and other non-Christian religious groups, which has the overall effect of deadening the overwhelming control of any one particular religion, Latin America was very much under the control of the Roman Catholic Church. For this and other historical reasons of repression, opportunities for self-advancement were not as rich or as grand in South America, and the literature portrays a correspondingly pessimistic and stark Realism and Naturalism at times. The Church itself is often ridiculed or becomes the culprit in human suffering. This trend continues from the nineteenth to the twentieth century and even to the present day with perhaps one of the best examples being the presentation by Mexican author, Agustín Yáñez (1904–1980) of an utterly repressed Mexican village that literally lives, »al filo del agua«, »on the edge of the storm« (the title of his 1947 novel). Yáñez employs sexual imagery to convey the frustration and unhappiness

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of the villagers as if by the Roman Catholic Church’s stifling of the creative urges within them, their little village is swollen, ripe to explode in a torrent of rushing water. It is clear that the Church insinuates itself and inhibits every aspect of human existence in the village. 7.

USA revisited — Deeper Romanticism vs. Realism/Naturalism

A careful critic will now no doubt recall the so-called darker Romantics in earlier American literature, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and suggest that these authors also attacked religion. Certainly these critics leveled considerable opprobrium on Puritanism and its effects. Hawthorne is profoundly aware of the hypocrisy and corrosive effect of the Puritan belief in natural depravity in the short story »Young Goodman Brown« (1835), for instance; but remarkably in his greatest work, The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hawthorne retains something of what Twain was later to extol in Huckleberry Finn, the basic faith in natural humanity. Pearl, the flower of Hester Prynne and the Rev. Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale’s love in The Scarlet Letter is indeed that, a pearl, and a beautiful, sylph-like creature who alternately taunts and brings joy to the lovers. The good New Englander Hawthorne constantly teases his reader as to his real feelings about the sin of adultery that Hester and Arthur commit, but Pearl remains an alluring, natural child; and while Hawthorne repeatedly attacks the Puritans of the fourth and fifth generation, who have sunken to intolerance and bigotry, with which they continually harass Hester, he clearly respects and upholds the memory of the more stalwart Puritans of earlier times, whom he sees as the true founders of America. Similarly, in Melville, while as a latter-day Romantic he broods in Moby Dick (1851) over the true nature of humankind, using the whiteness of the whale, Moby Dick, as an ambivalent symbol of humanity’s very nature, be it evil or be it good, he clearly opts for redemption in the end, allowing his narrator Ishmael, symbolic of the outcast tribe of Israel, to escape in a coffin, crafted not by a Christian but by Queequeg, a tattooed South Seas islander, Rousseau’s Noble Savage personified. Again, remarkably the United States — even in her darkest moments, most notably the Civil War, which touched the lives of both Hawthorne and Melville — produced writers who still believed in redemption. For instance, even in Arthur Dimmesdale’s death at the end of The Scarlet Letter, the reader has every indication that the penitent preacher will at last be purged of his sins. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, considered by some the greatest American novel, resonates in American literature at least in terms of a more optimistic and uplifting depiction of human nature and particularly natural man. The Civil War in America that should have torn away the philosophic and religious underpinnings simply did not have the same catastrophic effect as, for instance, the Franco-Prussian War had in France, where the French suffered a humiliating defeat in their splendid capital of Paris. Even an American hard-core Naturalist, such as Hamlin Garland in the poignant short story »The Return of a Private« (1890), writing about the Civil War itself, shows that love and human dignity endured the bitter conflict. A father, his health and hearing gone, struggles to return to his family, saving a precious apple for the children he has not seen for so long, even though he himself desperately needs the nourishment. And when he returns home, he finds a weary, but faithful wife. Though their lot in life will be anguish,

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they still love, care for and respect one another. They are not mired in their own vomit as, for example, Zola’s completely demoralized Gervaise and Coupeau are in their drunken sieges. 8.

Russia

Russian Realistic and Naturalistic fiction that is reflective of Romantic thought and style falls into a special category precisely because of the unique evolution of this national literature. It was not until 1682 that Peter the Great even opened Russia to Western influence, and a feudal society basically existed in Russia until 1861 when Alexander II freed the serfs. For these reasons, Russian literature as a vital force worthy of global scrutiny did not emerge until the nineteenth century, and there are essentially only two great Romantic figures of Russian literature against whom the Russian Realists and Naturalists could even react or respond, Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. Both these Romantics are primarily known for their poetry, but Pushkin’s famous »novel in verse«, Evgenii Onegin (Eugene Onegin 1825–33), reveals traces of Realistic description even though Realism in Russian letters was not to flower until the 1840s, when it is said to have begun with Gogol’s Mertvye dushi (Dead Souls) in 1842. What distinguishes Russian Realism — and what really makes it a great literary achievement — is the sympathy for human suffering apparent in each of the outstanding authors of the period: Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Fedor Dostoevskii and Lev Tolstoi. These Russians, and in particular the master Dostoevskii, seemed especially deft at what has been termed »Inner Realism«. This is something more than mere psychological penetration. It is an awareness and a depiction of the very soul of humanity. In this regard, some critics might say that the nineteenth-century Russian novelists simply carry forward the Romantic awareness of the inner spirit, the emotions, and of the individual soul, and that in their sensitivity to human suffering and deprivation they embody the humanitarian consciousness of the Romantic Movement. But if the Russian Realists carry forward a sympathetic awareness of the inner self and of the sufferings of humanity, the reason is not that such an awareness is particularly Romantic; rather such an awareness is characteristic of good literature anywhere at any time. Further, there is a profound anagogical sense in much of the Russian writing, as if these authors were truly searching for the soul and its meaning. There is no posturing. They are not simply »falling on the thorns of life« in a Romantic pose. Whether of humble beginnings, like Chekhov and Dostoevskii, or born into the nobility or other positions of power and privilege like Gogol, Tolstoi and Turgenev, they have experienced the turmoil and anguish of a Russia struggling within itself. Chekhov, for example, was the grandson of a serf, who only through sheer dint of labor, sacrifice and cunning trade maneuvers had been able to buy his freedom and that of his family. And the suffering of Dostoevskii, his placement before a firing squad and his later imprisonment and isolation in Siberia, graphically recorded in Zapiski iz mertvoga doma (Memoirs from the House of the Dead, 1860–62), bear searing testimony to the unique formation of many of the Russian Realists. These men knew there is something more to life than mere surface reality, or, quite simply, they would not have survived, and their literature at times bears witness in an almost mystical way, to this greater, this inner reality. Particularly Dostoevskii, as a fervent, albeit by his own admission, a flawed Christian, stressed the freedom of the individual will — not

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as a Romantic titan, but rather as a child of God. The nineteenth century is the great century of Realism in Russian letters, not of Naturalism, whose fundamental assumptions about human life Christians like Dostoevskii and Tolstoi simply could not accept. Tolstoi, interestingly, exhibits a considerable Rousseauistic view of humanity and nature, particularly in his early work. Throughout his fiction there is the sympathetic portrayal of the peasant, or common person. In the Sevastopol’skie rasskazy (Sevastopol Sketches, 1855/56), for example, he praises the common soldier rather than the leaders. In Kazaki (The Cossacks, 1863) he depicts a young man, Olenin, who becomes disillusioned with the dissoluteness of the city and seeks meaning in the Cossack life. It is only with Anna Karenina (1875–77) and works written after his conversion in 1879 to what he was to term »Christianity without Churchianity« that he was to increasingly muzzle this earlier Rousseauistic tendency and adopt an increasing moralistic tone that most critics see as detracting from rather than enhancing his work. 9.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Russian Realists, and likewise especially the Americans, Giovanni Verga in Italy, Bjórnson in Norway, and also many of the outwardly anticlerical Spanish authors of the nineteenth century retained elements of Romantic style and idealism. Ultimately, because of strong religious influence and other elements of their cultural experience, these authors tended to reject or to modify the harsher forms of Literary Realism and Naturalism. Even as this genuinely more optimistic strain of Realism/Naturalism tempered by Romanticism continued in Western letters with its belief in the Noble Savage and its glorification of the peasant as embodying the best of the national character, there were aspects of negative Romanticism evident in Realism/Naturalism practiced elsewhere in the Western world and seen particularly in the works of French writers, disillusioned by their own historical experience. Bibliography Abrams, M.H. 1958. The Mirror and the Lamp. New York: Norton [first edition 1953]. Arrihi, Paul. 1937. Le Vérisme dans la prose narrative italienne. Paris: Boivin. Auerbach, Erich. 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP. Becker, George J. 1963. Documents of Modern Literary Realism. Princeton: Princeton UP. Bloom, Harold. (ed.). 1970. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Consciousness. New York: Norton. Böhl de Faber, Cecilia. 1895. La gaviota. Madrid: Sucesos de Rivadeneyra. Boller, Jr., Paul F. 1974. American Transcendentalism, 1830–1860: An Intellectual Inquiry. New York: Putnam. Butler, Kathleen T. 1923. A History of French Literature. 2 vols. New York: Dutton. Chandler, Richard E. and Kessel Schwartz. 1961. A New History of Spanish Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP. Coello, Alejandro A. 1937. Mujeres de España: La Condesa Emilia Pardo Bazán, Doña Concepción Arenal y Doña Concha Espina. Quito: Imprenta Ecuador. Crane, Stephen. 1968. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; The Red Badge of Courage; Selected Prose and Poetry. 3rd ed. Ed. by William M. Gibson. New York, London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

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Freneau, Philip. 1994. »The Indian Burial Ground«. The American Tradition in Literature. 8th ed. Ed. by George Perkins and Barbara Perkins. New York: McGraw-Hill. Vol 1, 426 f. Gillespie, Gerald. 1989. »The Discourse of Defeat in Nineteenth-Century Narrative«. Neohelicon. 15.1: 227–236. Klibbe, Lawrence. 1973. Fernán Caballero. New York: Twayne. Knight, Sarah Kemble. 1994. The Journal of Madame Knight.8th ed. Ed. by George Perkins and Barbara Perkins. New York: McGraw. Vol. 1, 190–196. Lewis, Richard Warrington Baldwin. 1955. The American Adam: Innocence, Tradition and Tragedy in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: Chicago UP. Lorch, F.W. 1940–41. »Mark Twain and the Campaign That Failed«. American Literature. 12: 454–470. Mather, Cotton. 1956. Marginalia Christi Americana, Book III. Rev. ed. Ed. by Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom Beatty and E. Hudson Long. New York: Norton. Vol. 1, 74–85. Matthiessen, Francis Otto. 1941. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York, London: Oxford UP. Mirskii, Dmitrii Petrovich. 1999. A History of Russian Literature from Its Beginnings to 1900. Ed. by Francis J. Whitfield. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP. Naess, Harald. S. (ed). 1993. A History of Norwegian Literature. American-Scandinavian Series: History of Scandinavian Literature. Vol. 2. Lincoln: Nebraska UP. Nemoianu, Virgil. 1984. The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Nitze, William A. and E. Preston Dargan. 1965. A History of French Literature from the Earliest Times to the Present. 3rd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Pardo Bazán. Emilia. 1885. »Prólogo«. El cisne de Vilamorta. Madrid: Ricardo Fe. i–iv. ———. 1886. »Apuntes autobiográficos«. Los pazos de Ulloa. Barcelona: Daniel Cortezo. 5–92. ———. 1910. La literatura francesa moderna. 2nd. Ed. Madrid: V. Prieto y compañia. ———. 1891–1923. »La coletilla a la cuestión palpitante«. Polémicas y estudios literarios. Obras completas. Vol. 6. Madrid: Biblioteca de la Mujer, 104–144. ———. 1881. Un Viaje de Novios. Madrid: Impr. De M. G. Hernandez. ———. 1907. »Prólogo«. La dama joven. Barcelona: Biblioteca Arte y Letras. i–viii. ———. 1956. »Prólogo«. La tribuna. Obras completas. Vol. 2. Madrid: Biblioteca de la Mujer. 102–104 ———. 1998. La cuestión palpitante. Ed. by Rosa de Diego. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. Perkins, George and Barbara. 1994. The American Tradition in Literature. 8th ed. 2 vols. New York: McGrawHill. Pizer, Donald. 1960. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Rosen, Charles. 1995. The Romantic Generation. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Salvan, Albert J. 1943. Zola aux États-Unis. Brown University Studies. Vol. 8. Providence: Brown UP. Twain, Mark. 1995. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Ed. by Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston, New York: Bedford Books. Wellek, René. 1963. Concepts of Literary Criticism. Ed. by Stephen G. Nichols. New Haven: Yale UP. Zola, Emile. Germinal. 1890. Paris: G. Charpentier et Cie. ———. 1902. Le roman expérimental. Paris: E. Fasquelle.

Romantic legacies in fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century fiction Joel Black Explore connection between romanticism and scientific objectivity. Does a scientifically minded person become a romantic because he is a left-over from his own science? Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1961).

1.

The afterlife of Romantic prose writing

Recent work by comparatists has uncovered unexpected instances of a Romantic return in the work of both modernist and postmodernist fictional prose writers. One need only look at the papers from the 1994 ICLA Congress in Edmonton, published in the volume Comparative Literature Now (Tötösy 1999), to find pertinent examples. Thus Monika Schmitz-Emans traces Italo Calvino’s prose »dreams about poetic machinery« to the Romantic imaginings of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Clemens Brentano, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (Schmitz-Emans 1999, 844–846). In the same volume, John Burt Foster, Jr. calls attention to the »crucial ways« in which writers as different as Nietzsche and Nabokov »look back to Romanticism broadly defined«. Foster notes how these pre-eminent modernist prose writers trace their respective genealogies back to the great German and Russian poets of the Romantic era, Goethe and Pushkin (Foster 1999, 356). Such isolated examples provide evidence of a general literary legacy of Romanticism that is worthy of more comprehensive and systematic investigation. Customarily the Romantic legacy is identified with extreme subjectivist movements in the arts that have become key components of modernism. It is common for literary historians to trace late nineteenth-century Symbolism associated with Stéphane Mallarmé and early twentieth-century Surrealism founded by André Breton (who said the movement was better designated with the term »supernaturalism«) back to Romanticism and its preoccupation with dreams, the unconscious, visionary subjectivity, artistic creativity and aesthetic intuition. In reaction to the objectivizing, documentary tendencies of late nineteenth-century Naturalism — which were in turn in large part a reaction against the ideals of nature and the creative imagination celebrated by Romantic writers — the modernist movements of Symbolism and surrealism extended the Romantic emphasis on subjectivity to the point that they upset the relative balance between poetry and prose that characterized fictional writing of the Romantic period. As prose fiction became associated with the social and scientific Naturalism of Zola, Symbolist and post-Symbolist fiction writers increasingly turned to poetic forms, prompting Anna Balakian, following Mallarmé, to declare the »true fiction« of the fin de siècle to be »that of the poet« (Balakian 1992, 16). Yet as Charles Simic reminds us, Mallarmé »has been both an ideal and a dead end for poets […]. Once there’s nothing left but a few cryptic words for the initiates, what started out as a new understanding of aesthetics has turned into mysticism« (Simic 2001, 64). The Neoromantic privileging of poetic fiction over imaginative prose fiction tends to distort Romantic attempts to achieve a balance or to forge a synthesis between poetry and prose.

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One thinks, for example, of Wordsworth’s declaration that »there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition« (Wordsworth 1974, I:135). And one recalls the abrupt transitions from poetry to prose in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister so admired by the Schlegels, the hybrid genre of the lyrical novel (Freedman 1963), or what Mario Praz simply termed the »lyrical« (»prose work in which the connection of thoughts and the vivacity of digression are as free as works written in verse« [Praz 1922, 645]), as well as later experiments in free verse and the prose poem. Calling the latter genre the »exemplary genre of a modernity«,1 Doris Kolesch considers Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en prose (in Le Spleen de Paris, 1869) far more significant than his Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) in their influence on the Symbolism of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, on the aestheticism of Huysmans, and on such twentieth-century writers as Gide, Proust, Breton, Stein, Rilke, Kafka, Benjamin, Ponge, and les nouveaux romanciers (Kolesch 1999, 483). Critical studies like Tzvetan Todorov’s La Poétique de la prose (1971) have simply extended Romantic insights into the inherently poetic principles of prose narrative. The error of reducing the Romantic literary legacy to the purist enclave of Modernist poetry (whose pre-eminent practitioners have, as in the case of Pound and Eliot, repudiated Romanticism for its excessive subjectivity) stems from a more basic misconception — the nature of Romantic aesthetics, and its relation to Modernist aesthetics. All too often Romanticism’s aesthetic legacy is described as a withdrawal into — or an expansion of — subjectivity that in turn entails a break with the prosaic reality typically found in realist prose narrative. Romantic aesthetics is thought to lead ultimately to Decadence — to the later nineteenth-century embrace of art and artifice for their own sake, and a turning away from, and even a betrayal of, nature and the natural. The trajectory of such a transition is easily traced from Novalis’s blue flower at the beginning of the nineteenth century to Oscar Wilde’s green carnation and Mallarmé’s flower (»the one absent from all bouquets«)2 at the century’s end. The overly simple notion of an anti-Naturalist, aestheticist bias in Romanticism has fostered the perception that its nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary legacy is chiefly to be found in the domain of »pure« poetry rather than poetic prose, and in the domain of poetic rather than prose fiction. Such a simplified view has carried over into the idea that twentieth-century modernism is itself divisible into an earlier, Neoromantic phase of »Symbolist modernism« that privileged poetry over prose and a later, less overtly Romantic, postmodernist phase in which prose presumably reasserted itself over poetry. Gerald Gillespie has convincingly argued against this reductionist view in his recent delineation of the »modernist context« underlying Proust’s, Mann’s, and Joyce’s major prose works (Gillespie 2003, 2–9). Even as Romantic writers sought ways to integrate verse and prose without privileging one or the other, their attitudes to nature and the natural — and ultimately to reality and truth — were extremely complex, and cannot be reduced to later critical categories of naturalism or anti-naturalism. After all, the Romantics had no uniform attitude to nature, and were as likely to be staunch adherents as they were to be fierce critics of the biological, organic realm. Thus, the German philosophical tradition represented by Kant and Schiller identified nature with 1.

»genre exemplaire d’une modernité« (Kolesch 1999, 483).

2.

»l’absente de tous bouquets« (Mallarmé 1945, 368).

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necessity, and as being anathema to human free will. On the one hand, this view was radicalized by Fichte’s opposition of Nature to the will as the Not-Self; on the other hand, it was countered by Schelling’s positive valuation of Nature as unconscious will that had yet to become conscious of itself. Similarly antithetical attitudes to nature were evinced by the English Romantics, from Wordsworth’s nature-worship to Blake’s view of fallen Nature, and Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s complementary attempts to integrate the natural and supernatural realms in the Lyrical Ballads (1798). In short, Romanticism involved a balance (however precarious), a creative tension between the creative mind of the poet/artist and a fecund nature that were linked at least to some degree. After the depictions and enactments of the complex interplay of natural and human creative processes in Romantic prose works — especially the Bildungs- and Künstlerromane of authors like Goethe, Novalis, and Tieck — later nineteenth-century writers found it difficult to maintain this creative tension. Nature, and even human nature, was increasingly treated as the »dead« object of scientific study, while the increasingly isolated creative subject withdrew to a realm of private fantasy in which it could nurse dreams (or nightmares) of desire and/or domination. As writers became increasingly polarized between naturalism and aestheticism, those artists who claimed to be carrying on Romantic ideals decisively privileged the fictionalizing, transformative capacities of art over the merely reproductive agencies of nature. The first major statement of the post-Romantic subordination of life and nature to art is itself found in a work of prose fiction — Gautier’s 1835 novel Mademoiselle de Maupin. »Nothing beautiful is indispensable to life«, Gautier declares in his preface, adding that »Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful place in a house is the lavatory« (Gautier 1981, 39).3 (A century later from an Eastern perspective, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki would claim to the contrary that the toilet should be the most aesthetic location in the home [»In’ei raisan«; In praise of shadows, 1933].) Poised between Romanticism and Modernism, Gautier transcends the natural dichotomy of sexual identity through art in his novel, inventing a masculinized female protagonist — the »mother« of all those feminized male aesthetes and dandies who abound in the novels written at the century’s end. In the work of decadent prose writers like Sacher-Masoch, Huysmans, and Wilde, who mark the divide between Romanticism and Modernism, such feminized male protagonists routinely transgress the conventional ideology of gender, and even the naturalist regime of sexual identity itself. The implications of the Neoromantic doctrine of »l’art pour l’art« announced in Mademoiselle de Maupin set the stage not only for the highly subjective modernist artistic movements of Symbolism and Surrealism, but also for a more pervasive and potent »emancipation of the aesthetic« first intimated by Baudelaire (in his 1852 article on »L’école païenne« [The Pagan School] in which he mockingly describes »the frenetic passion for art« as »a cancer that eats up everything else«), and later celebrated by Nietzsche as the »aesthetic justification of the world« 3.

»Rien de ce qui est beau n’est indispensable à la vie […]. Il n’y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir à rien; tous ce qui est utile est laid, car c’est l’expression de quelque besoin, et ceux de l’homme sont ignobles et dégoûtants, comme sa pauvre et infirme nature. — L’endroit le plus utile d’une maison, ce sont les latrines« (Gautier 1883, 21).

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(Calasso 2001, 20). These subjectivizing and aestheticizing tendencies extended the Romantic revolt against Enlightenment rationalism and scientific reductionism, now in their new literary guise of Naturalism. Like their Romantic predecessors, Neoromantic writers de-emphasized the traditional view of nature as God’s creation, but while the most visionary and ironic Romantics still treated nature as a necessary fiction (or simply as the principle of necessity itself), Neoromantic writers regarded this fiction itself as dispensable and inauthentic in comparison with explicitly artistic fictions. For these writers, art triumphed over nature, and sometimes even seemed to triumph over life itself. 2.

From Symbolism to Surrealism: Fiction reacquires poetic powers

Huysmans’s 1884 novel A rebours (Against Nature) would seem to signal a definitive break with the Romantic nostalgia for organic nature and wild, panoramic landscapes. The novel’s protagonist Des Esseintes, the last scion of an aristocratic line that will die out with his death, is filled with admiration not for nature as God’s creation, but for human artifice as the distinctive mark of human genius. Nature, he used to say, has had her day […] There can be no shadow of a doubt that with her never-ending platitudes the old crone has by now exhausted the good-humored admiration of all true artists, and the time has surely come for artifice to take her place whenever possible (Huysmans 1968, 36 f.).4

Yet the novel might as well be translated Against Naturalism as Against Nature since it marks Huysmans’s break with the Médan group of young Naturalists led by Zola with their penchant for writing social documentaries. As Huysmans wrote in his 1903 preface to A rebours: »We began to wonder […] whether Naturalism was not advancing up a blind alley, and whether we might not soon be running our heads into a wall« (Baldick 1955, 79).5 Small wonder that Des Esseintes’s favorite form of literature is the prose poem. »Handled by an alchemist of genius it should, he maintained, contain within its small compass and in concentrated form the substance of a novel, while dispensing with the latter’s long-winded analyses and superfluous descriptions«. Des Esseintes devotes himself to pondering »the fascinating problem of writing a novel concentrated in a few sentences and yet comprising the cohobated juice of the hundreds of pages always taken up in describing the setting, drawing the characters, and piling up useful observations and incidental details«. Short of achieving his ideal of the novel »condensed in a page or two« that »would become an intellectual communion between a hieratic writer and an ideal reader«, Des Esseintes relishes the prose poem as »the dry juice, the osmazome of literature, the essential oil of art«, and turns to Baudelaire and Mallarmé to find »this succulent

4.

»Au reste, l’artifice paraissait à des Esseintes la marque distinctive du génie de l’homme. Comme il le disait, la nature a fait son temps […] A n’en pas douter, cette sempiternelle radoteuse a maintenant usé la débonnaire admiration des vrais artistes, et le moment est venu où il s’agit de la remplacer, autant que faire se pourra, par artifice« (Huysmans 1928, VII, 35).

5.

»nous devions nous demander si le naturalisme n’aboutissait pas à une impasse et si nous n’allions pas bientôt nous heurter contre le mur du fond« (ibid., xi).

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extract concentrated in a single drop« that »he savoured with such rare delight« (Huysmans 1968, 198 f.).6 Of course, as Gerald Gillespie has remarked (2003, 54), Huysmans’s own achievement in A rebours was to have taken the novel in precisely the opposite direction of Des Esseintes’s ideal of the distilled prose poem. Huysmans’s decision »to shake off preconceived ideas, to extend the scope of the novel, to introduce into it art, science, history: in a word, to use this form of literature only as a frame in which to insert more serious work« (Baldick 1955, 79)7 is, as Lilian Furst has observed, »strongly reminiscent of the Frühromantik ideal of a universal art form which would gradually embrace all aspects of human life« (Furst 1979, 130). As in Novalis’s quintessentially Romantic novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Henry von Ofterdingen, 1802), with which it otherwise seems to have little in common, the aim of A rebours »was an expansion of the traditional novel in favor of a fluid amplitude« (ibid.). Yet perhaps the strongest reason for locating A rebours in the post-Romantic tradition is its radical anti-Naturalism — its emphasis on artifice and imagination as a way of circumventing or subverting nature considered as the fixed, established, predetermined, scientifically sanctioned order of things. Published in 1884, A rebours appeared one year before the beginning of the ten-year period between 1885 and 1895 that has been identified with French Symbolism. This movement would seem to be thoroughly in the Romantic tradition, a subjectivist reaction to the documentary tendencies of Naturalism. Yet it has been observed by Anna Balakian, one of the movement’s leading commentators, that far from being the »countermovement to naturalism« it was intended to be, Symbolism actually turned out to be a variation of [naturalism] rather than its antithesis. If the Naturalist presumed the human will to be enslaved to the physical forces of nature, the symbolist of those end-of-the-century years was not far behind in acquiescing in somewhat equivocal statements to the fatality of nonsubjective forces. […] Both points of view reveal man’s destiny as controlled by forces other than his will […]. Both concur in accepting the hopelessness of man’s condition on earth (Balakian 1986, 37 f.).

In Balakian’s view, it was not Symbolism but Surrealism that offered a way out of the labyrinthine forest of symbols, a surrender to dreams and even to death. Surrealism provided a way out of the impasse of Naturalist/Symbolist fatalism, a return to — or rather a resumption of — the imaginative, spiritual, Romantic vision of William Blake. As Balakian writes, »It is this very

6.

»Maniée par un alchimiste de génie, elle devait, suivant lui, renfermer, dans son petit volume, à l’état d’of meat, la puissance du roman dont elle supprimait les longueurs analytiques et les superfétations descriptives. Bien souvent, des Esseintes avait médité sur cet inquiétant problème, écrire un roman concentré en quelques phrases qui contiendraient le suc cohobé des centaines de pages toujours employées à établir le milieu, à dessiner les caractères, à entasser à l’appui les observations et les menus faits. […] Le roman, ainsi conçu, ainsi condensé en une page ou deux, deviendrait une communion de pensée entre un magique écrivain et un idéal lecteur. […] En un mot, le poème en prose représentait, pour des Esseintes, le suc concret, l’osmazôme de la littérature, l’huile essentielle de l’art« (ibid., 301 f.).

7.

»de secouer les préjugés, de briser les limites du roman, d’y faire entrer l’art, la science, l’histoire, de ne plus se servir, en un mot, de cette forme que comme d’un cadre pour y insérer de plus sérieux travaux« (ibid., xxiii).

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distinction between recognizing the tragic and surrendering to it that proves to be the crux of the philosophical difference between symbolism and surrealism« (ibid., 41). The historical evolution from Naturalism to Symbolism to Surrealism re-enacts the dialectic of the will already evident in Romanticism itself. For the expressions of extreme subjectivity typical of the period, which in their positive form was manifested in those heroic assertions of individual willfulness and rebellion (Schiller’s Karl Moor, Byron’s Manfred, Kleist’s Kohlhaas), all too soon attenuated into a passive condition of will-lessness in which the subject indulges in reveries and dreams (the prototype of Symbolism), or lapses into an altogether abject state, surrendering to a greater, often hostile, cosmic will (the prototype of Naturalism). Unable to sustain itself, the heightened subjectivity of Romanticism inevitably gives way either to the nostalgic dreams of a bygone age or to paranoid nightmares of imminent dissolution. As noted earlier, the two most obvious modernist offshoots of Romanticism — Symbolism and Surrealism — present a glaring problem for a study of fictional prose. In her 1992 study The Fiction of the Poet, Balakian declares that ever since Zola introduced Naturalism into the novel, »fiction has passed out of the novel, which is becoming more and more the graphic processing of an assortment of data, resembling a police file, a psychiatric case study, or a slightly altered autobiography« (Balakian 1992, 5). The imaginative, transformative project customarily associated with Romanticism was largely abandoned in twentieth-century prose according to Balakian who finds it »curious that the word fiction has for so long become associated with prose rather than with poetry. Even in the most fantastic and imaginative writings in the novel form, the connection of the romanesque with reality is more evident (although it is often considered tangential) than in the case of poetry in its most realistic vein. The true fiction is that of the poet« (ibid., 16). It would seem, following this view, that a survey of post-Romantic fictional prose must confine itself to the nineteenth century, since most twentieth-century postNaturalist and post-Symbolist literature that continues the Romantic ideal of fictionalizing the world, and of reinventing or re-imagining reality, has taken a poetic form. »The major poets of the twentieth century«, claims Balakian, »moved in a direction diametrically opposed to that of writers of prose narrative. The modern novel does not exploit irreality even in its most preposterous manifestations of so-called fantasy« (ibid., 19). While Balakian may be right in finding a sharp divergence beginning in the late nineteenth century between the novel as a principally realist mode of literature and poetry as a more imaginative, fictive mode, she surely overstates the case. Mallarmé and Zola have not had a decisive impact in shaping twentieth-century poetry and prose respectively. The dichotomy between the two is by no means universal, and already in fin-de-siècle literature important exceptions are evident. Thus, in the case of francophone Belgian writing, Christian Berg has noted the »non-polarization between novel and poem (and thus between Naturalism and Surrealism, for example)« in contrast to French literature of the time.8 In the Comte de Lautréamont’s classic surrealist work Les Chants de Maldoror (Maldoror, 1868/69), we find a Romantic mélange of genres and styles that include »prose poetry, poetic prose, the Gothic fantasy, the serial novel, horror and humor, authorial interventions, disruptions of space and time, stories within stories, 8.

»non-polarisation entre roman et poème (et donc entre naturalisme et symbolisme par exemple)« (Berg 1999, 275).

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plagiarism, techniques of collage, changes of style as frequent as his hero Maldoror’s own metamorphoses, and an elliptical rather than linear structure« (Simic 2001, 64). Walter Pater’s impassioned prose can hardly be considered realist; rather, he can be credited, as Gerald Gillespie has noted, with »carr[ying] us over a threshold conceptually into Symbolism and Impressionism and on toward the anti-realist codes of most of Modernism« (Gillespie 2001, 7). Alternatively, Gillespie has shown how even the tradition of nineteenth-century Naturalist drama from Büchner to Ibsen was »in some respects a conduit for late-Romantic anxieties«. Ultimately, however, Romanticism »overcame the Realist code and broke the grip of rational illusion and historical teleology in the theater«, most demonstrably »by establishing dream processes as an organizing principle« in Neoromantic works like Strindberg’s Ett Drömspel (A Dream play, 1901) (Gillespie 1994, 447, 457, 449). D’Annunzio’s novels of the 1890s have been considered »hopelessly romantic« works »in which reality and imagination are fused in such a way that literature is transformed from the mirror of life into a ›way of life‹« (Pacifici 1973, 42, 44). And a work as late as D’Annunzio’s fragmentary Notturno (1921) has been hailed as a »lyrical diary« comparable in its intensity and vivacity to Coleridge’s »Kubla Khan« (1798/1816; Praz 1922, 645). Symbolism, as Isaiah Berlin acknowledges, »is central in all romantic thought« — a fact »that has always been noticed by all critics of the movement« (Berlin 1999, 99 f.). Yet Symbolism is not the only Romantic doctrine whose influence can be detected in Modernist movements in the arts. Berlin traces a second Romantic influence back to Fichte’s fundamental doctrine of the »free untrammeled will«, arguing that this doctrine entails a quasi-nihilistic »denial of the fact that there is a nature of things«, and a consequent »attempt to blow up and explode the very notion of a stable structure of anything« (ibid., 117). As long as nature is considered in the sense of an objective, fixed order of things, the Romantics regarded it as a fiction. As Berlin summarizes, Any such assumption that there are objective laws is simply a human fantasy, a human invention, an attempt on the part of human beings to justify their conduct, particularly their disreputable conduct, by calling into being, and placing responsibility upon the shoulders of, imaginary external laws (ibid., 126).

While Romantic writers working in the visionary, symbolist tradition were likely to be drawn to poetic forms of expression, Romantic ironists like Hoffmann and Tieck often used prose to blur to the point of obliteration the distinctions between illusion and reality, dreams and waking, and the conscious and the unconscious. Berlin’s view that these Romantic ironists are »the predecessor[s] of Pirandello, of Dadaism, of surrealism, of the theatre of the absurd« (ibid., 116) is amplified in the recent comparatist volumes on Romantic Irony and Romantic Drama. Thus Gerald Gillespie has noted the recurrence of »one of the primary Romantic ideas — that of a theater of the mind not limited by the stage apparatus or older conventions [– in] various guises«, the most recent being »the period of Absurdist drama after World War II to the present«. He carefully traces the »grotesque, farcical brand of ›comedy‹« of the postwar period (Beckett, Ionesco, Dürrenmatt, Ruibal) back to the first half of the century (Strindberg, Jarry, Pirandello, and Wilder), and ultimately finds its source in the German Romantic drama of Tieck (Gillespie 1994, 429, 461, 464). We need, in short, to distinguish at least two separate literary legacies in Romanticism. While the first Romantic doctrine of Symbolism looked forward to a visionary modernist

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poetics elaborated by Balakian, the second doctrine of Romantic irony anticipated what might be termed a postmodernist prosaics (or metapoetics) that anticipated, and indeed provided the stimulus for, such poststructuralist undertakings as a critique of the symbol and rehabilitation of allegory as a figural trope, and theoretical formulations of the notion of a »literary absolute« derived from Friedrich Schlegel’s fragments (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy), or an »absolute literature« exemplified by Lautréamont’s writings (Calasso 2001, 21, 85) that combines and ultimately transcends all formal dichotomies including that of poetry and prose. 3.

Aestheticism as a rebirth of Romantic irony

Oddly, Berlin neglects to mention the writer who is perhaps most representative of both these Neoromantic aesthetic legacies — Oscar Wilde. Initially inspired by the pivotal figure of Pater and his »awareness of the breakup of solid nature that occurred in both literature and painting« (Gillespie 2003, 86), Wilde was introduced to the subjective power of artistic reflection to transfigure the fixed objects in the external world »into a group of impressions — color, odor, texture — in the mind of the observer« (Pater 1959, 157). But subsequently influenced by the extreme, ironic aestheticism of Huysmans’s A rebours, Wilde was led to replace the Romantic persona of the creative artist in his sensational novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) with the Neoromantic persona of the hyperaesthetic connoisseur. His fictional narrative about the dandyish protagonist who assumes the ageless quality of a work of art while his mortality is transferred onto his portrait overturned both the classical commonplace of vita brevis est, ars longa and the Romantic assumption that the work of art will endure, as Keats puts it, »When old age shall this generation waste«. In writing a novel that played a key role in subverting the Classical doctrine of mimesis, Wilde was less a revolutionary, however, than a Neoromantic harking back to a Romantic anti-mimetic and, as we shall see, to an anti-Modernist aesthetic as well. The preface added to The Picture of Dorian Gray is a brief manifesto of aestheticism in the manner of Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin in which Wilde declares that »All art is quite useless«, and in which he suggests that Realism and Romanticism are two sides of the same coin: The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth-century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass (Wilde 1966, 17).

And not only are Realism and Romanticism two sides of the same coin for Wilde, but so are nature and art. As Richard Ellmann notes, Wilde’s preface »flaunted the aestheticism that the book would indict«. The Picture of Dorian Gray is, in Ellmann’s words, »the aesthetic novel par excellence, not in espousing the doctrine, but in exhibiting its dangers […] What he did was to write the tragedy of aestheticism« (Ellmann 1988, 315). Wilde hardly remained the »apostle of aestheticism« of his youthful North American tour three years earlier in 1882. Despite his role in popularizing the ironic neo-aesthetic insight of life as an imitation of art, he disavowed the slogan »art for art’s sake« espoused by Pater (Ellmann 1988, 310; Chai 1990, 103 f.). For Wilde, art doesn’t merely precede nature, and nature doesn’t merely imitate art; rather, nature is revealed fundamentally to be art. And »art«, for Wilde — in contrast to many Modernists — is beauty,

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but beauty always coupled with intelligence. In contrast to »dumb« nature, art entails those pagan, Odyssean virtues of wit, guile, craft, deception, and even (or especially) outright lying. Perhaps more than any other work, The Picture of Dorian Gray embodies the competing and conflicting legacies of Romanticism. On the one hand it is a Neoromantic celebration of the cult of beauty in the tradition of Pater; on the other hand, it is a devastating critique of beauty’s seductive and illusory aspects. Following Huysmans’s subversion of the beautiful by the sublime and the grotesque, Wilde looks forward in Dorian Gray to a Modernist aesthetics that is suspicious of the beautiful for being merely an illusion and lacking an enduring and compelling reality. Despite their similarities, Des Esseintes and Dorian Gray are different in one crucial respect: whereas the former, »after his early excesses, was content with sublimating his desires by acting them out in the theater of his imagination or by the contemplation of works of art, Dorian Gray must have reality« (Eichner 1997, 200). If for Wilde »subjective impressions have ceased to matter, because life has taken on a form of its own« (Chai 1990, 102), his character Dorian adopts a nihilistic, Neoromantic aesthetic in which the artifice that produced Frankenstein’s monster now produces the urban(e) dandy, the self-as-artifact in whom art takes on a violent and destructive life of its own. Insofar as we can speak of Modernism’s break with Romanticism, it may be said to have occurred shortly after Wilde’s death in 1900. In twentieth-century Modernism, art (human creation) all but eclipsed nature (God’s creation). Not that nature entirely disappeared; in God’s absence, either it went underground where it became »the new heightened or lowered nature of the city«, or it was repressed in the unconscious where »by century’s end [it] was widely held to exert its powers« (Gillespie 2003, 71). Severed from nature, art became increasingly formal and abstract — the preserve of a pure, elite zone of human autonomy and superiority opposed to all that was conventionally deemed real or beautiful. Nowhere, as Wendy Steiner has shown, were these tendencies more evident than in the visual arts: »Through the imperative of form and the notion of genius in abstraction, avant-garde modernists attempted to separate themselves from romanticism« (Steiner 2001, 47). It was only in the late twentieth century and in our own time, when the forbidding, austere, sublime aesthetics of Modernism has exhausted itself, that renewed interest began to be shown in Wilde’s Neoromantic cultivation and promotion of the ornamental, the decorative, the playful, and above all, the artificial as part of a postmodern revival of Romantic aesthetics (Brooks 1990, Larrissy 1999). As for the twentieth century, it is full of examples of novels ranging from Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905; Steiner 2001, 65–70) to Pynchon’s V (1963) — not to mention the entire genre of science fiction books and films harking back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and featuring cyborgs, replicants, and automatons — in which Wilde’s ideal of aestheticizing existence and of transforming the self into a work of art is pushed to the point where the self becomes a murderous artistic subject, and ultimately a dead objet d’art. Neoromanticism, then, is less a return to or rediscovery of organic nature and the organic nature of art celebrated by many Romantics than it is a recognition that there never was such a primal, innocent neutral realm of nature which art subsequently discovered, represented, and transformed. Forget the ghost in the machine; the machine was already lurking within »Nature« as an immanent logic, an algorithmic replicative agenda that we recognize today in the rampant mutation of biological and computer viruses. Citing cyberneticist George Dyson’s dictum

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that nature is already »on the side of the machines«, Bill Joy reports that »The replicating and evolving processes that have been confined to the natural world are about to become realms of human endeavor« (Joy 2000, 243). With our new genetic and cybernetic technologies, we are only just beginning to implement the mechanistic, replicating processes that are now known to pervade the natural world. 4.

Neoromantic impulses in drama and cinema

In short, the machine/nature opposition attributed to Romanticism which has been relentlessly deconstructed during the past several decades was already anticipated by Wilde. Pointing the way beyond some of Modernism’s polarizing tendencies that set art in opposition to nature, and poetry in opposition to prose, Wilde looks forward to the postmodern blurring of boundaries which in many ways represents a resumption of Romanticism’s transgressive impulses: the breaking of rules, the leveling of hierarchies, the mixing of styles, and blending of forms. Far from being a decadent departure from eighteenth-century German aesthetic theory as some recent critics have claimed (Bell-Villada 1996; Chai 1990, who omits the entire German aesthetic tradition from his study of post-Romantic literature [xiii]), Wilde’s aestheticism can be seen as a logical development and even as the fulfillment of that theory. Indeed, Wilde can be viewed as the comic genius whom Schiller heralded as the noblest practitioner of the arts. After all, it was not as a novelist but as a comic dramatist that Wilde had his greatest artistic successes — in the theater of art in contrast to the theater of life represented by the courtroom of the Old Bailey where he experienced his greatest downfall. Yet for all the blazing wit and verbal sallies of plays like An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), these domestic dramas are quite conventional formally and naturalistic in content. For the most visible legacy of Romanticism in the drama, we must look elsewhere. Following Berlin’s suggestion, we need to turn to »Pirandello […] Dadaism […] surrealism […] the theatre of the absurd« which, as Berlin writes, try to confuse reality with appearance as far as possible, to break down the barrier between illusion and reality, between dreaming and waking, between night and day, between the conscious and the unconscious, in order to produce a sense of the absolutely unbarred universe, of the wall-less universe, and of perpetual change, perpetual transformation, out of which someone with a powerful will can mould, if only temporarily, anything he pleases. This is the central doctrine of the romantic movement, and naturally it has its political analogue as well (Berlin 1999, 116).

The revision of the Romantic scenario of the artist’s co-participation in nature’s creative processes as the Neoromantic scenario of the artist’s transformation of his supposedly »natural« self into a work of art (or simply pure artifice) was realized beyond even Wilde’s expectations in twentieth-century theatrical innovations. We have already distinguished the poetic Neoromantic tradition exemplified by Symbolist writers from a primarily prose-oriented strain of Neoromanticism derived from Romantic ironists like Schlegel, Tieck, Hoffmann, and De Quincey, and revived and revised by writers like

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Lautréamont, Wilde, Jarry, and Beckett, as well as by the artistic movements of Dadaism, Surrealism, and the theatre of the absurd. (A direct link to the Romantics can be discerned in the case of Pirandello who studied in Germany, derived his concept of »umorismo« from Tieck and Schlegel, and »became the main channel by which Romantic perception finally was released in the drama a full century after the first major challenge to the rationalist tradition« [Gillespie 1988, 355 f.].) Yet a further distinction needs to be made within the tradition that Berlin traces back to Fichte’s doctrine of the »free untrammeled will«. Besides the playful, ironic, quasinihilistic expression of this doctrine of an absolute literature which continually questions the existence of a stable, ultimate nature of things, and which pushes all literature (including that of the Romantics) »to the limit [in order] to destroy it« (Calasso 2001, 99), a counter-lineage of deadly serious, fully nihilistic works »attempt[s] to blow up and explode the very notion of a stable structure of anything« (Berlin 1999, 117). This lineage of Satanic Romanticism running from Sade to Schopenhauer to D’Annunzio (whose »blood-rhetoric« at the time of the First World War arguably helped forge Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fascistic discourse [MacBeth]), and on to our contemporary vogue of true crime and »realist horror« (Freeland 1995), represents the high-bourgeois continuation of the Neoromantic doctrine of art for art’s sake in the fin-de-siècle tendency to aestheticize nature and life to the point where they are disdained and despised. In contrast to the ironic and absurdist strain of Fichtean free will in which nothing is taken seriously (thus, for all Lautréamont’s graphic depictions of violence, »he left not a single sentence — not even in his letters — that we might with any confidence take seriously« [Calasso 2001, 85]), there is little room for irony and humor in Satanic expressions of the Romantic sublime. There is yet another way in which the Neoromantic program exceeds the scope of Berlin’s sketch of twentieth-century developments in theatrical performance and spectacle. For as Balakian expresses Apollinaire’s prophecy, »the realm of the future poet will indeed be in the cinema (and in the theatre playing a mobile role like that of the cinema), as the screen (and any viewed space) replaces the white page and becomes a more propitious meeting ground of inscape and landscape, of physical action and psychic energy, of associations of distant realities, as a more believable transformer of time and place« (Balakian 1986, 24). Despite film’s graphic realism, Apollinaire and other early twentieth-century writers could apply the Neoromantic doctrine of l’art pour l’art to this new medium, especially in the years when it was still a silent form and still sufficiently distinct from real life to retain the aura of art’s cult value. Writing in 1916, Hugo Münsterberg called the photoplay »an art in itself« which »cannot gain but only lose if its visual purity is destroyed«; in this purely visual medium »the conversation of the spoken word is as disturbing as color would be on the clothing of a marble statue« (Münsterberg 1916, 203). And a few years later, in 1922, Walter Bloem anticipated the likelihood that, with the advent of sound, »the film public will suddenly be brought to realize that the silent, speechless motion picture gives it more stimulation and more pleasure than the speaking film, for the latter will have nothing original about it«. Should the sound-film gain acceptance, Bloem declared, one of the most beautiful, and one of the most recent, messengers of peace known to the human family will have been lost. For the film speaks today the silent language of the emotions, that language which is understood by all people and races wherever they may live; it speaks the reconciliatory language of the human heart (Bloem 1924, 13 f.).

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As late as 1933 Rudolf Arnheim declared in Film as Art that the introduction of sound would spell the end of film as an art form. Yet even before these early claims for film’s artistic purity and integrity, and well before the introduction of sound, Pirandello discerned this new recording medium to be fundamentally different from the traditional representational art forms of literature and drama. Already in 1915 he described film’s cultural impact in a new literary sub-genre, the »film novel« (Moses). Arguably the earliest of such works, Pirandello’s novel Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, 1915), is narrated by a kind of anti-artist — a cameraman working at a movie studio — for whom film is a recording art that duplicates real life with unparalleled accuracy, but that also has an unprecedented ability to transform unreal fictions and fantasies into a new, virtual reality of cinematic effects. Here it is no longer a question of art reproducing nature, nor of nature imitating art; rather it is a matter of the cinematic apparatus producing reality by making dreams and fantasies visible and graphic as never before (Black 2002, 20 f.). Nature — not just in the banal sense of real life, but also in the specifically Romantic sense of wild, autonomous freedom — is all but effaced by this newest art form, as in the novel’s climactic scene of the tiger’s literal and figurative »shooting«. At the last moment, however, Pirandello shows nature violently reasserting itself with the tiger’s violent attack on the actor who was supposed to kill it, at least according to the script. We have come a long way from Blake’s preternatural »tyger« as a fearsome fantasy of the terrified speaker’s overactive imagination. Pirandello’s perception of a distinct break between nineteenth-century literary culture and twentieth-century film culture anticipates Walter Benjamin’s classic study »Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit« (The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction, 1936). Small wonder Benjamin cites key passages from Pirandello’s novel in his essay, and proceeds to critique the aesthetic doctrine of l’art pour l’art as »a theology of art«, as a reaction to »the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography«.9 Henceforth, art will no longer be seen as occupying a separate, sacred realm apart from the profane world of life and society, but it will be inseparable from life, and, indeed, increasingly indistinguishable from it: »by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental«10 (Benjamin 1969, 222, 224). Moreover, the arts themselves will also cease to be separated from each other. Like the prose poem, the sound film, and the film novel, the different arts will interact in a variety of multi-media combinations. An art-based aestheticism — specifically a literary, and yet more pointedly, a poetic aestheticism — will give way to a multi-media and intermedial neo-aestheticism. In short, the Romantic legacy was revitalized in unexpected ways by writers like Pirandello who not only used innovative theatrical techniques to »confuse reality with appearance« and »break down the barrier between illusion and reality, between dreaming and waking«, as Berlin noted, but 9. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »eine Theologie der Kunst«; »mit dem Aufkommen des ersten wirklich revolutionären Reproduktionsmittels, der Photographie« (Benjamin 1961, 156, 155). 10.

»����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� so wird heute das Kunstwerk durch das absolute Gewicht, das auf seinem Ausstellungswert liegt, zu einem Gebilde mit ganz neuen Funktionen, von denen die uns bewußte, die künstlerische, als diejenige sich abhebt, die man später als eine beiläufige erkennen mag« (ibid., 157).

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who also described the confusions and realignments that they observed in the culture at large in visionary works of prose fiction that themselves blurred the boundaries between representational and recording media. Bibliography Balakian, Anna. 1986. Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute [first edition: 1970]. Chicago: Chicago UP. ———. 1992. The Fiction of the Poet: From Mallarmé to the Post-Symbolist Mode. Princeton: Princeton UP. Baldick, Robert. 1955. The Life of J.-K. Huysmans. Oxford: Clarendon. Bell-Villada, Gene H. 1996. Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life: How Politics and Markets Helped Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism 1790–1990. Lincoln: Nebraska UP. Benjamin, Walter. 1961. Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. ———. 1969. Illuminations. Ed. by Hannah Arendt. Trans. by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken. Berg, Christian. 1999. »La Fin-de-siècle en Belgique comme polysystème«. Comparative Literature Now. Ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek et al. Paris: Champion. 272–81. Berlin, Isaiah. 1999. Roots of Romanticism. Ed. by Henry Hardy. Princeton: Princeton UP. Black, Joel. 2002. The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative. New York: Routledge. Bloem, Walter S. 1922. Seele des Lichtspiels: Ein Bekenntnis zum Film. Leipzig. Zürich: Grethlein. ———. 1924. The Soul of the Moving Picture. Trans. by Allen W. Porterfield. New York: E.P. Dutton. Brooks, Linda M. 1990. »Sublimity and Theatricality: Romantic Pre-Modernism«. Modern Language Notes. 105.5: 930–964. Chai, Leon. 1990. Aestheticism: The Religion of Art in Post-Romantic Literature. Columbia UP. Calasso, Roberto. 2001. Literature and the Gods. Trans. by Tim Parks. New York: Knopf. Eichner, Hans. 1997. »Against the Grain: Huysmans’ A Rebours, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and Hofmannsthal’s Der Tor und der Tod«. Against the Grain. Transl. Rodney Symington. Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi. 191–206. Ellmann, Richard. 1988. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf. Foster, Jr., John Burt. 1999. »Beyond ›Domestic‹ and ›Foreign‹: Nietzsche and Nabokov as Transnational Authors«. Comparative Literature Now. Ed. by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek et al. Paris: Champion. 353–64. Freeland, Cynthia. 1995. »Realist Horror«. Philosophy and Film. Ed. by C. Freeland, and T. Wartenberg. New York: Routledge. 126–142. Freedman, Ralph. 1963. The Lyrical Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP. Furst, Lilian R. 1979. The Contours of European Romanticism. Lincoln: Nebraska UP. Garber, Frederick (ed.). 1988. Romantic Irony. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Gautier, Théophile. 1883. Mademoiselle de Maupin. Œuvres complètes. Vol. V. Paris: Charpentier. 1–384. ———. 1981. Mademoiselle de Maupin. Trans. by Joanna Richardson. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gillespie, Gerald. 1988. »Romantic Irony and Modern Anti-Theater«. Romantic Irony. Ed. by Frederick Garber. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. 343–357. ——— (ed.). 1994. Romantic Drama. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ———. 2001. »Beyond Our Romantic Agony: Or, Toward a Unified Theory of the Arts, Again«. Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature. 49: 1–18. ———. 2003. Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. 1928. Œuvres complètes. Paris: Crès. ———. 1968. Against Nature. Trans. by Robert Baldick. Baltimore: Penguin. Joy, Bill. 2000. »Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us«. Wired. 8.4: 238–262. Kittler, Friedrich A. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford UP.

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Kolesch, Doris. 1999. »La Provocation du poème en prose«. Comparative Literature Now. Ed. by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek et al. Paris: Champion. 483–489. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1978. L’Absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Larrissy, Edward. 1999. Romanticism and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. MacBeth, George. 1964. »The Sick Rhetoric of War«. Critical Quarterly. 6.2: 154–163. Mallarmé, Stéphane. 1945. Œuvres complètes. Ed. by Henri Mondor et G. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard. Moses, Gavriel. 1994. The Nickel Was for the Movies: Film in the Novel from Pirandello to Puig. Berkeley: California UP. Münsterberg, Hugo. 1916. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. New York, London: D. Appleton. Pacifici, Sergio. 1973. The Modern Italian Novel: From Capuana to Tozzi. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Pater, Walter. 1959. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. New York: Mentor. Pirandello, Luigi. 2005. Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio. Trans. by C.K. Moncrieff. Chicago: Chicago UP. Praz, Mario. 1922. »A Letter from Italy«. The London Mercury. 5.30: 644–46. Schmitz-Emans, Monika. 1999. »The Machine as Allegory and the Literary Text«. Comparative Literature Now. Ed. by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek et al. Paris: Champion. 835–846. Simic, Charles. 2001. »Paradise Lost«. New York Review of Books. Sept. 20: 62–64. Steiner, Wendy. 2001. Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art. New York: The Free Press. Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. 1977. In Praise of Shadows. Trans. by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker. Branford, CT: Leete’s Island Books. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1971. La Poétique de la prose. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven, and Milan V. Dimić with Irene Sywenky (ed.). 1999. Comparative Literature Now: Theories and Practice. Paris: Champion. Weisgerber, Jean (ed.). 1984. Les avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. 2 vols. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Wilde, Oscar. 1966. Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. London, Glasgow: Collins. Wordsworth, William. 1974. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. by W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Framing C.J.L. Almqvist The narrative frame of Törnrosens bok and Romantic irony Steven P. Sondrup 1.

Almqvist reconstitutes the Swedish novel

The novel like so many other cultural innovations was relatively late in arriving on the northern edge of the Europe. Whereas Great Britain, France, and Germany to varying degrees witnessed a flowering of the genre in a typically modern sense during the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century, what is often regarded as Sweden’s first novel — Anders Törngren and Jacob Henrik Mörk’s nine-hundred-page Adalriks och Giöthildas Äfventyr (The Adventure of Adalrik and Giöthilda; 2 volumes; 1742–44) has much more in common with the Baroque novels written throughout Europe a hundred years earlier than with the innovative practices of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Prévost, Voltaire, or Goethe. As a result, though, of Denmark’s greater proximity to the continent and its generally more extensive integration into European cultural developments, the history of the novel there reaches back somewhat further and is more varied. In his still useful 1936 dissertation, Romanen i Danmark i det Attende Aarhundrede: En komparativ Undersøgelse (The Novel in Denmark during the Eighteenth Century: A Comparative Investigation), Hakon Stangerup points toward Danish readers’ growing awareness of novels written outside Denmark during the early decades of the eighteenth century as well as their translation into Danish as important steps in preparing the soil for the emergence of homegrown manifestations of the genre. Its belated arrival in Scandinavia notwithstanding, the novel established itself as a viable and generally respected mode of literary expression within the conceptual framework of Romanticism during the early decades of the nineteenth century as was the case throughout the rest of Europe. Although the exact time that it took root in Nordic soil varied from country to country and continues to invite discussion among literary historians, the novelistic oeuvre of Carl Jonas Love Almqvist is recognized as a milestone of paramount importance in the early history of the genre in the region. Almqvist’s own biography, moreover, reads in many respects like a fantastic Romantic novel itself. Biographers have often pointed to sensitivity particularly hospitable to the most varied and sometimes contradictory influences as at least part of the explanation of his extraordinary — even bizarre — personal history. Seemingly fully aware of the excesses of his personality and the fundamentally revolutionary nature of his character, Almqvist looked to the contrasting poles of his familial background as represented by his mother’s innate warmth, inwardness, and sensitivity in contrast to his father’s pragmatic, this-worldly, and occasionally abrasive aggressiveness. Upon the early death of his mother, his rearing was entrusted to his maternal grandfather by whom his receptive attention was directed toward mystically tinged strains of Moravian pietism and a Rousseauistic appreciation of the original goodness of nature. Although he took a degree from the University of Uppsala, the nationalistic Romantic thinking that permeated the university community had little significance in orienting his intellectual or aesthetic outlook. He became well acquainted, however, with the

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thinking of Kant, particularly the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment, 1790), as well as with Jacobi, Schiller, Fichte, Schleiermacher, and Schelling (cf. Holmberg, Lamm, Olsson, and Blackwell). Texts dating from his student days and the years immediately thereafter reveal an arresting mastery of the fundamental tenets of transcendental idealism, which Almqvist in turn endeavored to accommodate to the visionary and mystical thinking of Swedenborg, which had a particular appeal to the young Almqvist. After receiving his degree, he took a position in the civil service that demanded relatively little of his energy and was thus able to continue his studying and begin writing. Unhappy as a clerk, he pursued religious and philosophic studies but eventually turned his hand to a novel entitled Amorina that was extremely critical of contemporary society and conventional morality. Just as the printing of the volume was nearing completion, publication of the volume was stopped and the edition destroyed, probably at the behest of his uncle, who was trying to save his nephew’s respectability and career. The suppression of his novel that he had hoped would launch his literary career had a devastating personal impact that in turn only served to heighten his discontent with the civil service. Seeing little possibility of advancement, Almqvist was more attracted to the idea of taking up the simple and idyllic life of a farmer. The prospect of leaving the unnatural life of the city and living a Rousseauistic existence in harmony with nature was so attractive that in January of 1824 he left Stockholm and relocated in rural Värmland in a community of like-minded idealists. Although he only remained on the land until the middle of 1825, the experiment with agrarian primitivism was not a total failure in that he returned to Stockholm with a trunk full of manuscripts during the late summer or 1825. In 1828 he began a new career as a teacher and shortly thereafter as the principal at a wellknown experimental school. While engaged with these pedagogical pursuits, he once again took up his religious and philosophical studies, often engaging Swedenborgians and Moravian Brothers in protracted discussion. Upon leaving the school, Almqvist was frequently harried by financial worries since his new employment as a journalist and regimental chaplain did not provide an entirely adequate income. Financial matters became particularly grave in 1851 when he was charged with forging and stealing promissory notes and then endeavoring to cover his tracks by poisoning his creditor. He may well have been framed, but he hurriedly left Sweden and traveled throughout the United States, where in 1854 he again married, his wife and family back in Sweden notwithstanding. In 1865, he left the United States with the intention of returning to Sweden but only made it as far as Bremen where he died. His body was returned to Sweden in 1901, and discussions of the details relating to the legal case against him still continue to attract attention. By the early 1830s, Almqvist returned to his belletristic interests and in 1833 published the first volumes in what would eventually become Törnrosens bok (Book of the Wild Rose), a collective work consisting of a total of seventeen volumes, which are divided into two series — the duodecimo edition in fourteen volumes and the imperial octavo edition in three volumes — which occupied Almqvist until 1851. The initial idea for this mammoth collection was first conceived in the early 1820s and suggested that everything Almqvist wrote was to be integrated into a magnificent whole. The cycle in true Romantic fashion is an extravagant mixture of genres that are both juxtaposed and interlaced in the same work; it contains, moreover, both explicitly factual as well as obviously fictional texts representing and achieving a kind of

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fusion of extremely varied genres: essays and tracts as well as novels, shorter narratives, poems, plays, and music. 2.

Interplay between narrative cycle and frame

The challenge of any kind of organizing and unifying structural design is obvious. It is the same problem that beset Balzac in bringing some kind of coherence to the vast though more stylistically unified cycle that eventually became La Comédie humaine (Human Comedy, 1842–48). Almqvist’s solution was one that had deep philosophical roots extending into his reading of German idealist philosophers and profound implications for the reader’s understanding of each of the works in the cycle as well as the cycle as a whole. On the most immediate level, Almqvist situated all of this material in the context of an extended and ingeniously conceived frame initially elaborated in the first narrative of the cycle, Jagtslottet (The Hunting Lodge, 1832), which explains how it happened that Herr Hugo Löwenstjerna, members of his extended family, and Richard Furumo, a mysterious and perhaps even demonic neighbor, gather in the yellow salon of his lodge where the various works making up the series are narrated, acted out, or sung. The narrative function of this frame is taken up and problematized in two later accounts, the novels Hinden (The Hind, 1833) and Baron Julius K.* (1835), which together with the first are collectively known as the Slottskrönikan (The Lodge Chronicle). The frame represents an important aspect of the cycle in its own right in that it introduces and characterizes the members of the circle who gather with Herr Hugo each evening and also narrates the event specifically involving the circle of friends and relatives at the hunting lodge. Herr Hugo and Richard quickly emerge as the most important members of this company, but neither is to be taken as the voice of Almqvist himself. The importance Almqvist attributed to the frame narrative is signaled by the fact that it introduces both the duodecimo sequence of works as well as those in the later imperial octavo, but in the case of the latter, he added a sixth and final chapter to the frame to accommodate them. The use of a frame as a means of providing a plausible context for the most diverse and disparate array of stories is far from original with Almqvist but has, rather, a very long and venerable history extending at least from Il Decamerone (approx. 1350), The Canterbury Tales (1478), and Don Quixote (1605–1615) down to the German Romantics including, notably, Ludwig Tieck and E.T.A. Hoffmann. The frame, thus, not only provides a means by which the individual parts of Almqvist’s vast initiative can be related to one another, but also proffers an interpretive context echoing many of the strands of Romantic thinking that came to particular prominence in the Jena Romantic circle. In this regard, it is particularly important to note that perhaps Almqvist’s most significant contribution to the broadly international Romantic tradition consists of his having carefully constructed this frame that gracefully sustains an arch of ironic play and detachment over such a vast narrative, expositive, lyric, and dramatic expanse. Indeed the breadth of the material that Almqvist has brought in under the rule of a single controlling ironic structure may well be without parallel. In his discussion of Romantic irony in Scandinavia, George Bisztray stresses the importance of irony in Denmark but surprisingly only briefly mentions the best-known novels in this cycle (Garber 1988, 178–87). The magnitude

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of Almqvist’s contribution, however, invites a more ample discussion of his profoundly ironic narrative stance. The fact that Almqvist is explicitly situating his undertaking within a heuristically ironic realm is made abundantly clear by the title page that introduces the whole series and the title page referring specifically to Jagtslottet. Both bear the date 1832 although they appeared in 1833. The first reads, »Free Fantasies/ which, considered as a whole,/ by/ Herr Hugo Löwenstjerna/ are sometimes called/ The Book of the Wild Rose/ sometimes/ The Wandering Hind«.1 The reference to free fantasies immediately alerts one that he is entering a realm where typical constraints of necessity and causality may not be consistently operative and an unfettered imaginative latitude will be a necessary interpretative tool. The heuristic problem of understanding the relationship of the whole to the parts, which will be significantly developed later, is here at least broached. The idea of fantasies will, moreover, acquire an important specific meaning in the course of the novel that will suggest that the term is not always used in its most obvious sense and does not always mean what it seems to say. In addition, the fact that the cycle as a whole is sometimes designated by Herr Hugo — the fictional master of ceremonies — with a reference to the wild rose and sometimes with an allusion to the wandering doe suggests that the originative act of naming remains flexible and thus offers varying perspectives on the whole. Both images also stress that which is free, unbounded, and uncircumscribed and assert the imagination’s claim to capricious freedom characteristic of Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of the arabesque. The title page of Jagtslottet provides a subtitle that characterizes the work as a »Romantic Tale/ from/ the Present Time«,2 a designation that leaves little doubt about Almqvist’s sense of where in literary history the novel should be situated. The title page also has an epigraph immediately preceding the subtitle: »Do you intend to set the dogs/ On the roe deer in our groves?«.3 An obvious referent for the image so full of ferocity and violence does not immediately suggest itself, other than the wandering hind mentioned in the alternate title Herr Hugo gives to the series. It proposes inter alia that a teleologically insistent reading of the text like that of dogs in pursuit of prey, which does not value the simple and undirected movement of the deer through the forest will do the same violence to the text that dogs set on the deer among the trees. (For a discussion of the Romantic irony of titles, subtitles, and epigraphs, see Garber 1988, 103 f.) The hunting lodge, which is where all the tales are set, is introduced in a manner that well reveals Almqvist’s formidable descriptive powers and stresses the portentous location of the lodge precisely at the intersection of ordinary and typical experience and the unbounded, infinite expanse. The reader is first guided through the surrounding forest and into the lodge by Henrik, a member of the community inhabiting Herr Hugo’s estate. Seen from afar on its small island in the lake, it [the lodge] looked like a swan resting in a peaceful grace bathed all around by limpid, refreshing waves. But it was like a haughty beauty who lives proudly alone and only for herself, because in the surrounding regions no farmsteads 1. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ »Fria Fantasier/ Hvilka Betraktade såsom ett Helt,/ af/Herr Hugo Löwenstjerna/ stundom kallades/ Törnrosen Bok/ stundom/ En irrande Hind.« (Almqvist 2003 [2]). 2. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Jagtslottet./ Säg, ämnar du hetsa hundar/ På råddjuren i våra lundar?/ En Romantisk Berättelse/ ur/ Närvarande Tid.« (Almqvist 2003 [3]). 3.

»Säg ämnar du hetsa hundar/ På råddjuren i våra lundar?« (ibid.).

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were to be seen, only long dark stretches of pine forests along the shores of the lake lay open to the gaze interrupted here and there by ridges of happy, light green birches and in the distance a wild, blue, and indistinct mixture of cloudy skies and trees melted together with the boundless immensity one is wont to call the firmament of heaven.4

Thus situated in a location where highly evocative though entirely natural features of the landscape are fused with the infinite reaches of heaven, the lodge is an ideal venue for the unfolding of a self-consciously Romantic narrative. As the reader is taken into the lodge, the characters who populate the frame narratives are introduced, beginning with Herr Hugo Löwenstjern himself. He is presented as having been not only an ardent reader of history but also something of an accomplished bibliophile with a wide-ranging mastery of the major languages of the world and an understanding of antiquities that surpasses that of many professors. A cultured gentleman, he appreciates painting, music, and literature as well as the other arts. This generous polyhistor had had a successful career in government service but as the frame narrative begins has retired to his country estate with independent wealth and a mental sovereignty that renders him socially and intellectually autonomous, open to the new, and imaginatively curious. 3.

Synesthesia and multiple narrators

Richard Furumo, the guest of Herr Hugo who at his invitation relates most of the stories, emerges from the forest surrounding the lodge under the most remarkable circumstances. Julianus, Herr Hugo’s nephew, is portrayed riding in the forest when through the crystalline silence of the brilliant morning the soft and gentle tones of a simple flute melody are heard. »The playing dissolved before his soul into drifting, indefinite beauty — like the colors quivering among the leaves early on a glorious morning«.5 The music and its effect seem almost otherworldly and can be evoked only in terms of a synesthetic simile presenting the music in terms of the play of light and color. As enthralling and mysterious as the moment may be, it is suddenly and brutally ruptured by a wolf ’s ferocious attack on Julianus. The beast lunges at him and, having knocked him to the ground, is about to plunge his teeth into his victim’s throat when a single shot sends the wolf reeling down toward the bank of a stream where, dead, he comes to rest against a stone. Having shot the wolf just in the nick of time, the marksman then takes Julianus and his wounded horse home to recover, where Julianus learns that the hunter and the musician whose playing had been so entrancing are one and the same. Julianus in turn invites Richard Furomo to accompany him back to his uncle’s lodge. 4. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Då man på något afstånd såg den på sin holme i sjön, liknade den en Svan, hvilande i stilla behag, omfluten af klara, svalkande böljor: men det var som denna högmodiga Skönhet, hvilken lefver ensam, blott för sig sjelf och stolt af sig sjelf; ty i hela trakten rundt omkring syntes för öfrigt intet ställe, blott långa mörka sträckningar af tallskogar utmed stränderna af Insjön utbredde sig för anblicken, emellanåt afbrutna af åsar med glada, ljusgröna björkar, och längst bort smälte en vild, blå, obestämd blandning af skyar och trän tillsammans med detta Omätliga, som man blifvit van att kalla Himlahvalfvet« (Almqvist 2003, 7 f.). 5. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Spelet upplöste sig för hans själ i en sväfvande obestämd skönhet — likt färgernas darrning emellan löfven tidigt en himmelsk morgon« (ibid., 36 f.).

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Richard is, thus, introduced in the society of the hunting lodge. A man with extraordinary skill as a musician and a marksman — both abilities that have a long series of associations with diabolical assistance in a wide variety of European literary traditions —, who appeared unbidden at the critical moment in order to save Julianus’s life is invited into the community of Herr Hugo’s lodge situated at a point where the heavenly and the earthly not only intersect but are fused. Readers attentive to Romantic topography and the vast series of intertextual cognates Richard represents can hardly avoid anticipating the unfolding of a sequence of events with rich Romantic resonances. Herr Hugo invites Richard to join him and the members of his family in the Yellow Salon every evening at six o’clock and promises good food, drink, and company and, moreover, offers to compensate him for any expense he may incur in doing so. The generosity of Herr Hugo’s offer is genuine but also has its roots in a frustration that has been vexing him. The stories that the members of the family circle have been relating have no inner connection with one another, no necessary inward coherence — which is a result of the fact that several different narrators are at work telling the stories. It is natural and right that each narrative should be a finished and individual piece in and of itself, but I wanted, moreover, that they, in addition to their own independence, stood together with one another in an inner (even if not always immediately perceived) union in which they together constituted a single, continually growing organic and perfect whole.6

4.

Ironic consciousness and the relation of part to whole

Implicit in Herr Hugo’s acute awareness of the shortcoming of his family’s narrative efforts is the desire that Richard would be able to implement a narrative strategy that would bridge the gap between the integrity of the individual and the particular on the one hand and the comprehensive unity of the whole on the other. His anxiety about the lack of cohesion of preceding attempts at narrative world-making is a particularized instantiation of the more general paradox of the hermeneutic circle, which in a more abstract formulation posits that any part can only be understood in terms of its relationship to the whole of which it is part; but the whole can only be approached by way of its parts. The challenge Herr Hugo, accordingly, offers his guest is not a simple matter of narrative orientation, ability, or technique but rather one that arises from the deepest recesses of Western epistemology, which came explicitly to the fore among the pre-Socratic philosophers, led in many respects to the formulation of the Platonic doctrine of ideal forms, and remained a locus of philosophical investigation well into twentieth-century hermeneutic phenomenology. Herr Hugo is even more explicit with Richard with regard to what — ironically — seems to be straight forward expectations for the narration with which Richard will reciprocate and 6. ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Det är naturligt och rätt, att hvarje Berättelse skall vara ett slutet och enskildt stycke för sig: men jag önskade tillika, att de, jemte denna egna sjelfständighet, äfven stode med hvarann i en inre (om också ej alltid genast insedd) förening, som bildade dem allesammans till ett enda allt mer och mer växande organiskt and fullkomligt Helt« (ibid., 61).

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regale his host. He wants a clear understanding of what is expected. »Let us come to an understanding of the way. Dear friend, you come with your pieces so that together they all constitute a single great, orderly, and comprehensible whole; I am entirely captivated by the idea, it is my dearest thought: I have always had it, and I am even more excited about it now«.7 Although Richard gives every indication of having understood the magnitude of the challenge facing him, he remains undaunted and recognizes that what are ostensibly narratives about the course of world events will often necessarily veer into philosophical and theological realms. As is typical especially of strains of Romantic thought emanating from Jena, Romantic literature can scarcely be distinguished from philosophy. Richard expressly indicates that he intends to fulfil Herr Hugo’s expectations. I mean that a number of narratives can stand in an inner, genuine, and vital relationship with one another without always having come one after another more or less like measurements on a string follow upon one another. One should, therefore, be able to tell Herr Hugo the entire history of the world from the beginning to the end in such a way that all accounts taken together constitute a single vital gestalt, an organic whole, without the stories, however, coming after one another in chronological order. I do not deny that it is good to follow the course of time — in some cases — perhaps in all cases — but that cannot be expected from me.8

Richard’s response to Herr Hugo not only indicates his willingness to rise to the occasion, it also suggests the approach he will employ. His understanding of the problem of the one and the many — of multiplicity as opposed to unity — is grounded in a sense of temporality not unlike the Heraclitean conception of flux suggested in the famous epigrammatic observations about a river, and like Heraclitus, he postulates a unity that transcends sequentiality. The project Richard thus proposes is stunning indeed: he offers the narrative constitution of the entire world from beginning to end in all of its richness and variety that is grounded in a unity that transcends the ordinary categories of perception — most particularly sequential temporality — and operates inwardly in a way not always perceptible to human observation. The implication of this endeavor is that he will be able to provide a satisfactory accounting of the challenging philosophical problem of causality. 5.

Romanticizing the world through the power of irony

The narrative frame that is here advanced is daring in its conception and far-reaching in its consequences. It affords, moreover, the basis for a broadly encompassing ironic treatment of all 7.

»Låt oss äfven komma öfverens om sättet. Bästa du! kom med dina stycken så, att de alla tillsammans bilda ett enda stort, ordentligt och förståndigt helt. Jag är intagen häraf, det är min käraste tanke: jag har alltid haft den, och jag eldades ännu mer deraf« (ibid., 65).

8.

»Jag menar att ett antal berättelser kunna stå i ett inre, verkligt och lefvande sammanhang med hvarann, utan att alltid behöfva framstå efter hvarandra, ungefär som alnarne på ett band följa på hvarann. Derföre skulle en person kunna breätta för Herr Hugo hela verldens historier ifrån begynnelsen till slut, på ett sätt, att alla framställningarna tillsammans utgjorde en enda lefvande gestalt, ett organiskt Helt, utan att de historierne ändock komme efter hvarann uti kronologisk ordning. Jag nekar visst icke, att det är godt att följa med Tidens gång — i vissa fall — kanske i alla fall — men af mig kan det ej alltid väntas« (ibid., 67).

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subsequent narratives. Given that the ironist is typically equipped with the ability to perceive reality on more than one level at a time — he sees a deep and often obscure level of reality diverging from surface appearances — Richard is ideally suited for the Romantically ironic portrayal of the history of the world. Every account will be seen simultaneously as an independent and entirely self-sufficient narrative episode, yet it will at the same time also be understood and interpreted as a part of a broadly encompassing whole. Each will also have a sequential place in an order for which an ordinary causality can be postulated, but more importantly each will also be linked to all other parts of the whole by an inward — one might almost suppose noumenal — necessity. The fundamentally ironic structure of the frame not only involves the well-known narrative procedure of embedding stories within stories, but goes even further in establishing a fundamentally dualistic point of view from which everything it encompasses invites if not requires polyvalent interpretation and understanding. The ironic framework Almqvist has constructed is particularly richly variegated in that it draws on a philosophical position that had its clearest explications in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (The Science of Knowledge, 1794/95), which in turn provided much of the conceptual foundation for Friedrich Schlegel’s thinking about Romantic irony. The context in which the narratives are thus to be situated is not stable and does not provide any invariable point of reference with regard to which the claims to authority of any story can be assessed. Almqvist, though, is by no means through with complicating and diverging inventions. Richard explains that his account of the history of the world must begin with a »Företal till hela verlden« (A Preface to the Whole World) that will be an »ingress« or introduction to the vast narrative project that is to follow. Remarkably an asterisk here obtrudes inviting the reader’s attention to a footnote that explains that the story entitled Hinden will expound the development of this immense project at Herr Hugo’s behest. The note then goes on to relate why the editor has preferred to present Jagtslottet as the introduction to the series of novels rather than the introduction that Richard and Herr Hugo seem to have just stipulated in the text. Who is this editor? How did the text fall into his hand? What role did he play vis-à-vis Richard and Hugo in establishing the order — either inner or outer — and therefore the meaning of the cycle? No answers are immediately given, but the unexpected intrusion of an editorial note subverting the authenticity and originary authority of the text and establishing yet another order of narrative authority only contributes to the instability of any provisional grounding or frame of reference. And appropriately in this deeply ironic footnote commenting on the main body of the text itself, the first explicit indication that the dominating tone of the text is ironic appears. The note concludes with a brief discussion of Herr Hugo’s decision to entitle the collection Free Fantasies in which the editor reminds readers that earlier both an excellent meal and an intuition of the kingdom of heaven — a stunning disparity — were identified as constituent parts of his conception of fantasy. He conjectures further that Herr Hugo’s intentions could not have been expressed in a more distinguished manner than with the title Free Fantasies infused as it certainly is with the self-ironies emanating in every direction from the evening gatherings in the salon. Consistent with this pervasive sense of irony that is, thus, openly acknowledged, the note closes with the observation that in the Nordic region the wild rose (törnrosen) produces more thorns than blossoms. The reader is left to reflect on the implications of that slightly subversive remark for The Book of the Wild Rose with little else given for the sake of orientation.

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If the footnote’s indication placing the details concerning the completion of the editorial project in Hinden is pursued, complications are multiplied. The title page of Hinden notes that the novel consists of scenes from the Hunting Lodge Chronicle, thus clearly aligning it with the exposition of the frame narrative for the entire series. Its subtitle, Romaunt, suggests most broadly an affiliation with the tradition of the romance, but the peculiarity of the term points to a spiritual and intellectual kinship as well, which will later be acknowledged, with Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt (1812–18) published two decades earlier and long revered as a work affluently embodying the ironic spirit. In the tenth of the twelve books, the promised explanation of how this monumental initiative came to fruition is provided. Herr Hugo, the narrator explains, had made Richard the official court story teller (Slottberättare) and saw in him a kind of literary hero. He ordained, moreover, that all of the stories that Richard told, which were for the most part improvised narratives, were to be written down for permanent keeping in a great leather-bound volume. Textual authority is here once again divided between the authenticity and immediacy of its oral performance and its secondary but enduring transformation into a written text that by its nature can only approximate the force of the original rendition. Ironically what is transitory is authentic, while what is preserved is proximate at best. Notwithstanding this inherent fallibility, this imposing tome was also to contain according to Herr Hugo’s direction »everything that happened both inside as well as outside the lodge involving members of the family and the inhabitants of the region«.9 The narrative, thus, bends back on itself uniting Richard’s fabulation presuming to a narrative ground of the world with a chronicle of the most mundane and ordinary events from everyday life. »Us«, the narrator explains, who were among the least noteworthy of the inhabitants of the lodge and were distinguished only by our silence while others spoke but who are tireless in tracking down what we heard, »us, in a word, Herr Hugo chose as editors, but our names do not deserve to be mentioned«.10 With this narrative development the integrity and authority of all the narrative strands of Törnrosens bok are thoroughly compromised in that they are now clearly removed by at least one additional step involving selection, arrangement, redaction, and all the other vagaries of such transmission. Almqvist’s procedure is perhaps related to the violation of artistic illusion that is often associated with Romantic irony, but the aesthetic illusion is not so much transgressed as continuously problematized. Narrative strands both parallel and intersect one another in ways that give rise to a complex series of intertextual relationships. Rather than having the willing suspension of disbelief shattered by the disruptive force of quotidian reality, the reader of this elaborately varied array of texts comprising Törnrosens bok is left haplessly looking for a credible source of textual authority. Near the end of the novel, however, Herr Hugo’s son Frans, who has been keeping the record of what happened in the hunting lodge, expresses his desire to publish and distribute the fruits of his labor. What had been a private record available to the members of Herr Hugo’s circle is to reach a wider reading public including, presumably, the present reader of the novel. Frans continues, though, explaining that there is a text about which his father and the others 9.

»äfven allt, som tilldrog sig i och utom slottet mellan familjens medlemmar eller nejdens invånare, skulle antecknas i en egen volum till Slottskrönika« (ibid., 381).

10.

»oss, med ett ord, valde herr Hugo till redaktörer; men våra namn förtjena ej vidröras« (ibid., 381).

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do not know, which relates in a fragmentary way the events that transpired on a day-to-day basis at the lodge. He is, of course, referring to the novel presently at hand, which he wants to entitle Hinden, in part because he has explained why his father mentioned the wandering hind in the alternate title to the series, in part because »that animal is of all others the most beautiful I know«.11 Now the ironic force of the epigrammatic inquiry at the beginning of the novel about setting the dogs on the deer among the trees, at least fictionally affixed by Frans himself, comes full circle. 6.

The ambiguous ontological status of irony

With Frans having emerged as the editor and occasional author of the chronicle, one further brief discussion of irony specifically invites attention. In Baron Julius K*, the final installment of the Lodge Chronicle, Frans exchanges a series of brief observations about the nature of irony with Angelika. She observes that all of the people at the hunting lodge are not as kind as Frans, but are rather characterized by a desire to ridicule the ideal, by pure irony. Frans counters that it is an irony with regard to earthly matters, never heavenly, to which she responds that heaven never ironizes but rather weeps over failings on earth. Frans’s rejoinder is telling: »Even in irony there is a tear«.12 In his wide-ranging study, Pagrot rightly calls attention to the importance of this passage in identifying it as the juncture at which Frans »accepts the term irony as the designation for the unique character of the hunting lodge circle«.13 Although Frans’s comment narrowly construed applies specifically to a frame of mind or prevailing attitude among those who gather each evening, the image with which the acknowledgment is made is telling in implying that irony is indeed widely pervasive and its sphere of influence may be broader than Angelika suspects. In addition to these complexities, Almqvist offers another notable challenge that stands outside the frame structure but reflects back on it. Richard explained in Jagtslottet that a preface was necessary in order to understand the subsequent narratives in their entirety. What follows Jagtslottet in the imperial octavo sequence, therefore, is a series of short accounts that provide a description of the creation of the world from a tear and a drop of blood of the heavenly figure Astarte (»Skönhetens tårar«; Tears of Beauty), which explain how they gave rise to everything in the world (»Semirmis«), and which provide a commentary on the two preceding sections (»Under hoppets träd«; Under the Tree of Hope). In this commentary, the question of a first cause is taken up with specific reference to the preceding portrayal of the initial act of creation. The tear that fell from Astarte’s eye could not have been the first cause because there must have been an eye from which it fell. Derceto responds that Astarte’s tears are essentially true rather than determined to be so.

11.

»detta djur är af alla det vackraste jag vet« (ibid., 402).

12.

»›Även i ironi är en tår‹« (Almqvist 1921, 101).

13.

»accepterar termen ironi som beteckning för jaktslottskretsens egenart« (Pagrot 1962, 163).

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Steven P. Sondrup You, o tear, are not an emblem. I do not want to say that Astarte’s weeping is an emblem because I do not want to deceive anyone. No, beauty’s tears are a reality. Thus it is with the weeping, thus it was with the beginning of the life of the world. That story is a truth according to the word; as true as truth in this world is.14

The elaborate attempt to establish the ontological status of the tear is curiously circular but also serves to recall or anticipate Frans’s conjecture that irony like heaven also knows tears. The subtle but unavoidable implication is that by means of tears, which along with blood are the primal material ground of the cosmos, all creation — at least as conceived within the narrative context of Törnrosens bok — is in part essentially and fundamentally ironic. Although this recognition offers no secure sense of a centering principle, it relieves the reader of any lingering inclination to look for one and invites full enjoyment of unbounded aesthetic play. In a recent study of Swedish Romantic texts, Horace Engdahl rightly points to this passage as being of critical importance in understanding the wide ranging consequences of Almqvist’s Romantic vision. In the narrative that comments and reflects back on the founding and original narrative symbolic function that had been implied is then explicitly denied. Since the narrative, thus, both is and is not to be construed emblematically, one must ask how it is to be understood? What kind of truth claim can it then make? It is true according to the word, but is the word to be understood as the logos that in various schools of both Greek philosophy and Christian theology grounds all ultimate truth claims and thus warrants inward truth in spite of outward contradictions, or is it true according to the word of the narrative — Richard’s fabulation — that in this reflexive narration is being drawn into question? And the assertion that it is as true as truth in this world can be only serves to beg the question and endlessly defer any possible resolution. How true can a truth in this world — indeed in which world? — be? That these questions have no answer is precisely the point. Almqvist has led his readers into a region in which the unambiguous and univocal have been left behind and have been replaced by an implicit invitation to savor the ironically undecidable. Not only does the frame fail to circumscribe the narratives it ostensibly contains, but the myth of creation — far from providing a stable point of departure and thus subsequent orientation — foregrounds the indeterminacy that necessarily follows from it. It is significant that precisely in a discussion of first causes and ultimate grounds Almqvist reflexively subverts the possibility of textual stability. If the textual status as well as the inherent veracity of the founding narrative are compromised or at least drawn into question, the reliability, fidelity, and verity of succeeding narratives emerging genetically from it are similarly moot if not doubtful. Though looking back to the breaking of artistic illusions in the way frequently associated with Tieck and Heine, Almqvist’s gambit is both more daring and broadly consequential and looks forward presaging numerous contemporary critical stances that stress the openness and polyvalence of literature. It opens a vast narrative terrain upon which the subsequent narratives in this prodigious cycle can play themselves out with considerable imaginative latitude and defines the locus of literary constitution as one characterized by considerable indeterminacy 14.

»Du, o tår, är icke någon sinnebild. Jag vill icke säga, att Astartes gråt är någon sinnebild, ty jag vill bedraga ingen. Nej, skönhetens tårar äro en verklighet. Så, som de grätos, så var detta världs-livs upphov. Denna berättelse är en sanning efter orden; så sann, som sanningen i världen är« (Almqvist 1923, 125).

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and openness. In the company of European writers whose works were seen to adumbrate the critical discussion of Romantic irony by the Jena circle — Cervantes, Shakespeare, Sterne for example — as well as nineteenth-century contemporaries frequently discussed in that context — like Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Jean Paul, Byron, and Diderot — Almqvist emerges as an able fellow traveler of the often tortuous, ironic bypaths. His technical skills as an ironist are well cultivated, and his project by any standard is ambitious. He stands out most clearly in terms of the extraordinary breadth and variety that he sought to bring within ironic purview. The framing narrative of Törnrosens bok is just one manifestation of his ingenuity and originality, which both find commensurate expression in the ever engaging diversity of the works that eventually came to fill the frame. Bibliography Almqvist, Carl Jonas Love. 1921. Samlade Skrifter: Forsta fullständiga upplagan, med inledningar, varianter och anmärkningar: Törnrosens bok. Ed. by Frederk Böök. Vols. 5–7. Stockholm: Bonniers. ———. 1923. Samlade Skrifter: Forsat fullständiga upplagan, med inledningar, varianter och anmärkningar: Törnrosens bok, Imperialoktavupplagan. Ed. by Frederik Böök. Vol. 1. Stockholm: Bonniers. ———. 2003. Samlade Verk. Vol. 5: Törnrosens bok Duodesupplagen Band I — III: Jagtslottet/ Hermitaget/ Vargens Dotter/ Hinden. Ed. by Olof Holm and Petra Söderlund. Stockholm: Svenska Vitterhetssamfundet. Bisztray, George. 1988. »Romantic Irony in Scandinavian Literature«. Romantic Irony. Ed. by Frederick Garber. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. 178–87. Blackwell, Marilyn Johns. 1983. C.J.L. Almqvist and Romantic Irony (Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien: Filologisk-filosofiska serien 20). Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Engdahl, Horace. 1986. Den romantiska texten: En essä i nio avsnitt. Stockholm: Bonniers. Garber, Frederick (ed.). 1988. Romantic Irony (A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages 8). Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Holmberg, Olle. 1919. »Kronologien i Törnrosens bok«. Samlaren. 40: 173–209. Lamm, Martin. 1915. »Studier i Almqvists ungdomsdiktning«. Samlaren. 36: 15–198. Olsson. Henry. 1927. C.J.L. Almqvist före Törnrosens Bok. Stockholm [Diss.]. Pagrot, Lennart. 1962. »Almqvist och den romantiska ironien«. Samlaren. 83: 135–75. Romberg, Bertil. 1977. Carl Jonas Love Almqvist. Trans. by Sten Lidén (TWAS 401). Boston: Twayne. Stangerup, Hakon. 1936. Romanen i Danmark i det Attende Aarhundrede: En komparativ Undersøgelse. København: Levin & Munksgaard. Törngren, Anders, and Jacob Henrik Mörk. 1742–44. Adalriks och Giöthildas äfwentyr. Stockholm: n.p.

Romanticism, occultism and the fantastic in Spain and Latin America José Ricardo Chaves In the following pages I shall trace the relationship of esoterism, the fantastic, and the late Latin American version of literary Romanticism: Modernismo. I will use the term Modernismo to indicate the Hispanic-American movement, as Octavio Paz did in Los Hijos del Limo (The Children of the Mire, 1974). Retaining the Spanish term Modernismo allows me to distinguish it from the very different phenomenon of Modernism in England and the United States. The chapter discusses significant Modernista texts and authors in Spain and Latin America at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth: the novels of the Spanish writer Juan Valera (1824–1905) and the Argentinean Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938), as well as the short stories of the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío (1867–1916) and the Mexican Amado Nervo (1870–1919). My focus will be on the close connection of Modernismo and the occultism of the time, especially in its Spiritualist and Theosophical currents. In doing so, I offer a comparative panorama, using Rubén Darío as the center of a literary web. 1.

Early Romantic strains of the fantastic

During the nineteenth century it is possible to identify a literary production of the fantastic departing from Romanticism in the realm of literature written in Spanish. In the HispanicAmerican context Romanticism appeared with the support of liberal ideas such as the emerging Republican model and the creation of a national identity. This was manifest among different forms of literary and intellectual activity, by the gathering of legends and stories spread by word of mouth, within the oral tradition and anonymous folklore. As it has occurred in Europe, such gathering was finally written out. But even though disperse manifestations exist, it was not until Modernismo, at the end of the nineteenth century, when a more systematic and autonomous development of the fantastic genre occurred mainly in the short story. Ever since that time the short story has been the most privileged textual form in Latin America, as becomes clear when considering Darío, Lugones and Nervo, the three major figures of the fantastic trend within the Modernista movement in the Spanish literature of that time. This can also be appreciated in lesser-known authors such as the Peruvian Cle­men­te Palma (1872–1946), the Mexican Bernardo Couto Castillo (1879–1901), or the Guatemalan Rafael Arévalo Martínez (1884–1975). This use of the short story as a device of the fantastic genre continued with the successors of the next generations, such as the Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga and the Argentineans Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. It is probable that the predominance of the short story was favored by the influence of E.A. Poe, since his work was quite well-known (read and commented upon) by Modernista writers, from Darío to Quiroga, and later on admired by Borges and Cortázar, who even translated all of Poe’s stories and essays). The fact that the fantastic genre was relatively unknown before the nineteenth century can also be observed in Spain, a country with a more realistic literary tradition. This tradition can

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be traced from the Poema del Cid, which stands in contrast to the more imaginative mood of other literatures, such as the English and the French. Thus Don Quixote, in spite of its fantastic possibilities, ends up leaning towards realism with the defeat of the protagonist and his return to »reality« and death. José Luis Guarner, one of the few editors of fantastic literature in Spain states that During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, our main authors — Quevedo, Lope, Calderón — approach the fantastic with a resolute moral purpose. This also occurs in other countries, but in Spain remains, insistently, all the way up to the twentieth century with the most extravagant excesses of Zamacois and Hoyos y Vinent. It will take until late Romanticism to secure the first autonomous works.1

Such late Romanticism mentioned by Guarner swiftly tends to join with the Modernismo of the other side of the Atlantic whose emblem was Rubén Darío. In the case of Spain the emblem was Valle-Inclán, at least for a while, since later on this author would follow different literary tracks closer to the avant-garde between the two world wars such as the »esperpento«. As far as the twentieth century is concerned, Guarner recognizes that »the experiences — isolated but valuable — of Galdós or Ms. Pardo Bazán do not contribute in fact anything new. Only Valle Inclán incorporates in 1899 something truly original to Spanish literature: the rich supernatural folklore of misty Galicia«.2 When Guarner makes his list of the fantastic in Spain — and the same occurs with Alejo Martínez Peralta, another more recent anthologist — he leaves out a nineteenth-century author: Juan Valera, very well-known for his more realist and psychological work, concludes his literary career with a fantastic novel that was widely read as a historical recreation of the glorious times of the Spanish Empire. This novel is Morsamor (1899) and in its narrative ideological nucleus we find Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism and Theosophy at their best. We will come back to this later. 2.

The connection between Romanticism and occultism

One of the most surprising ideological developments of the nineteenth century, in the midst of a process of secularization, was the appearance of various occultist movements. Although some of these movements stemmed from the ideas of Renaissance and Baroque predecessors, they added new elements from scientific and positivist fields. For example, the concept of evolution, which had belonged to the field of biology, was applied, by some occultists, to other fields, both spiritual and cosmic. As a result, the whole universe, not just its natural parts, was considered 1.

»Durante los siglos XVI y XVII, nuestros principales autores — Quevedo, Lope, Calderón — abordan lo fantástico con un decidido propósito moralizador, que también se da en la literatura de otros países pero que en España se presenta con insistencia, aun en pleno siglo XX, con los más disparatados excesos de un Zamacois o un Hoyos y Vinent. Habrá que esperar a nuestro tardío Romanticismo para poseer las primeras obras autónomas« (Guarner 1969, 11).

2.

»las experiencias no por menos aisladas menos valiosas de Galdós o la Pardo Bazán no aportan, de hecho, nada nuevo. Sólo Valle-Inclán incorpora, en 1899, algo original a la literatura española, el rico folklore sobrenatural de la brumosa Galicia« (ibid.).

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to be »in evolution«; not just the body was subject to evolution, but the soul as well. Human beings and the whole universe were thought to be undergoing a teleological metamorphosis that would lead to a state of spiritual superiority. This is the case for Blavatsky’s Theosophy. H.P. Blavatsky, born in Russia in 1831 and died in London in 1891, was the most important figure in the occultist field in the nineteenth century: she founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 and wrote two principal books: Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888). The spread of occultism in the nineteenth century did not develop on the fringe of socially respectable scientific knowledge, but at the very heart of the great movement of ideas, sensibility and mores that dominated the whole century, that is, Romanticism. Indeed, these two ideological phenomena, occultism and Romanticism, were interdependent in their literary and magic-religious manifestations. While Romanticism was a radically new cultural structure, occultism was a specific nineteenth-century cultural form of a broader magical or esoterical current that has ebbed and flowed during the whole of western history. Its basic ingredients have been neo-platonism, hermetism, alchemy and the Christian cabala. This esoterism, which had experienced a resurgence through the Renaissance that continued through the Enlightenment, was the ideological source of many Romantic ideas, something already studied in detail by authors such as Albert Béguin, Meyer Abrams and Auguste Viatte. It is significant that it was in the nineteenth century that terms such as »occultism« and »esoterism« were coined in France, a country that worshipped reason. Before the nineteenth century, various terms existed for this broad range of doctrines and practices: magic, hermetic art, hermetism, and so forth. Each of these terms explained one or several aspects of this complex of ideas, but not the whole of the system, such as the new nouns »occultism«, from the French, or »esoterism«, a word that appeared almost at the same time in French and English (cf. Riffard 1990, 77 f.). Such philological coinage in English and French are indications of new communicative and cultural needs that were to invade the remaining western languages in a short time, in accordance with the ideological changes of the century. It is ironic that during the nineteenth century occultism was to expand in a context of increasing secularization that diminished the influence of Judeo-Christian religious dogma and enhanced the authority of science as an explanatory paradigm for the world, at least among the educated classes. In this panorama of the decline of traditional religion and the advance of science, occultism provided a means of harmonizing these opposing tendencies. Very much in line with Romantic interpretation, occultism recognized a spiritual crisis in human beings facing the loss of a metaphysical faith on the one hand, and the danger of falling into materialism or atheism, on the other. Occultism benefited from the decline of church dogma and repression, since it allowed for the emergence of »occultist« religious forms that had survived clandestinely, sometimes under severe repression. Occultism rejected the materialistic focus of science but not its systematic exploration of the world, which it tried to incorporate into its own modus operandi. This gave way to expressions such as »occult science«, namely, occultism trying to appropriate the scientific paradigm applied to the fields where positivist science did not intervene (through incredulity or its own incapacity). This intention of occultism to combine science and religion in a new interpretative scheme had been developed with high intellectual ambition but with meager results, by some Romantic

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philosophers belonging to the movement called »Philosophy of Nature«. This group worked under the inspiration of F.W.J. Schelling, around the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. 3.

Occultism and Latin American modernismo

For our immediate purposes, it is important to hold on to the idea of occultism in terms of »magic«, influenced by modern ideas of science and influencing them at the same time. Occultism did not achieve its goal in the scientific area (since science continued its autonomous development, underrating its old Renaissance ally), but it was extremely successful in the artistic and literary world in Europe and the Americas. In the case of Spain and Spanish America, this would become evident during the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, with the appearance of occultist forms that bore fruit, first with the movement of Spiritualism and later with that of Theosophy. The former was more accessible, and became popular in the mid-nineteenth century, while the latter required more education, and became current from the 1880s onwards. In the words of Mexican modernista writer Amado Nervo: »Mediocre spirits consult wooden tables. Superior spirits wander in the forest of Theosophy«.3 The growth of occultism in Spain and Latin America coincided with the literary flourishing of Modernismo, a term that should not be understood in the sense it normally has in the United States and Europe, where modernism is identified with the avant-garde, approximately at the outset of World War I. In Spanish, Modernismo is not equivalent to the avant-garde but to the movements immediately preceding it: Symbolism, Aestheticism, Decadentism and others. Modernismo in Spanish precedes the avant-garde, it belongs more to fin-de-siècle culture and its literature adds aesthetic, thematic and stylistic concerns to religious and metaphysical ones. In this aspect occultism nurtured Modernismo in philosophic and thematic matters, a fact most clearly apparent in the genre of the fantastic. Although it is possible to identify fantastic texts from the beginning of the nineteenth century (cf. Hahn 1978), it is only from the outset of Modernismo, at the end of the century, that we can truly speak of such a genre in Spanish, especially regarding the short story. It may be said that the fantastic short story in Spanish was launched systematically by authors such as Rubén Darío from Nicaragua, Amado Nervo from Mexico and Leopoldo Lugones from Argentina. Later, in subsequent decades, this genre continued its transformation with authors such as Horacio Quiroga, Virgilio Piñera, Jorge Luis Borges, Felisberto Hernández and Julio Cortázar. Modernismo introduced a numinous component that Latin American Romanticism, inherited from Europe, had missed. Romanticism in the New World was principally concerned with social and political matters related to the consolidation of the new states, after they achieved independence from Spain since the second decade of the nineteenth century. Latin American Modernismo recovered the religious and metaphysical themes of European Romanticism, as well as its criticism of the Age of Reason. However, lacking an eighteenth-century movement 3.

»Los espíritus medianos consultan las mesas de pino. Los espíritus superiores se emboscan en la teosofía« (Nervo 2000, 244).

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of »enlightenment« in Latin America, it was positivism that became the ideological enemy. As Octavio Paz mentions in Los Hijos del Limo (Children of the Mire): Modernismo was the answer to positivism, the criticism of sensibility — the heart and also the nerves — to empiricism and positivistic scientism. In this sense its historical function was similar to that of the Romantic reaction in the early days of the nineteenth century. Modernismo was our real Romanticism and, like French Symbolism, its version was not a repetition but a metaphor: the other Romanticism (Paz 1974, 88).

In contrast to Romanticism, which was clearly imported from Europe (updated in vocabulary but not in thought), Modernismo, in spite of its great French influence, appeared as a movement conceived, felt and written in Latin America. In fact, it is the first aesthetic movement that developed on this side of the Atlantic, based on certain European lines of thought, yet restated in America. In Spanish America, it was conceived as the heir to a decadent Latin culture that was threatened by a vigorous, barbarian culture, that of the Anglo-Saxons. Modernista writers saw a racialized embodiment of this conflict in the 1898 war between Spain and the United States, which resulted in the occupation of Cuba by the Americans. This conflict stirred the political and cultural atmosphere on the Spanish side (the »Generation of 98«), as well as among the Latin American Modernists, who with their French bias became closer to Spain, perhaps in solidarity in the face of defeat. In this sense, Rubén Darío is an emblematic figure, who moves from a sumptuous style in Azul (Blue, 1888), and Prosas profanas (Profane Prose, 1896), published before the Spanish-American war, to Cantos de vida y esperanza (Songs of Life and Hope, 1905). Although this book is in line with some of Darío’s previous work, there is also a social concern in terms of love of Spain, a consciousness of Spanish America, and distrust of the United States. In the first stanza of his poem »To Roosevelt«, he exclaims: »You are the United States/ you are the future invader/ of a naive America with native blood/ that still prays to Jesus and still speaks Spanish«.4 It was Darío who took the American plague, i.e. literary Modernismo, to Spain. 4.

The geography of occultism in Spain

Before presenting Darío and his fantastic connections to his friends Lugones, Nervo and the Spaniard Juan Valera, I will draw a map of occultist influences by identifying two main currents reaching Latin America from Europe and the United States. The first is Spiritualism, which had emerged in the United States at the end of the 1840s, the influence of which was mainly felt during the second half of the nineteenth century. This current involved the spirits of the dead, which continued in another dimension and could communicate with the living through an appropriate medium. From them knowledge could be obtained pertaining to this and the other world. The other current was Blavatskian Theosophy. This was soon tinted by the Christianizing interpretations of Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, which flourished at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It is interesting to note that both currents 4.

»Eres los Estados Unidos,/ eres el futuro invasor/ de la América ingenua que tiene sangre indígena,/ que aun reza a Jesucristo y aun habla en español« (Darío 1987, 123).

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had their origin in the United States, in New York, and from there they spread to Europe, as well as to Latin America and Asia. In Spain, Barcelona has a special place in the history of Spiritualism. During the 1850s, the works of French Spiritualist Allan Kardec were burned publicly by the Bishop of Barcelona. At the end of the 1890s the First International Spiritualist Meeting took place in that same city. Newspapers, magazines and books on Spiritualism appeared everywhere, in Spain as well as in the Latin American countries. Spiritualism and Theosophy were well represented and moved from Spain to the Latin American countries, and also directly from the United States. By the end of the century, when literary Modernismo appeared, both currents were at their peak, competing against each other. Many Theosophists came from Spiritualist ranks, beginning with the founders of the Theosophical Society, Blavatsky and Olcott. France was another important source of occultist influence among the American élite. Victor Hugo, Gautier and a myriad of Symbolists headed by the Belgian Maeterlinck became effective heralds of Spiritualist doctrines, either the Anglo-Saxon versions, such as Conan Doyle’s, or the French version, such as that of Allan Kardec. France had its own tradition of »magic«, represented first by Éliphas Lévi, and later, by other occultists at the close of the nineteenth century, such as Stanislas de Guaita, Joséphin Péladan or Papus. The French proclaimed their relationship with a western tradition influenced by Christian-hermetic-cabalistic thought. This caused some people to reject Theosophy, which represented an Eastern tradition under Hindu and Buddhist influence. In fact, at the beginning, Theosophy was called »esoteric Buddhism«, since many people took it for historical Buddhism. It was not until well into the twentieth century that people separated Theosophy from Buddhism. Theosophy takes many elements from Asiatic Buddhism, distorting them in the process. The Theosophical message was more fruitful in the Spanish and Latin American worlds than in France, in spite of Catholic and positivist opposition. Theosophy did not deny Spiritualist phenomena, but it explained them in a different manner. According to Blavatsky, what happened during the séances was not the result of a visit from the dead but a manipulation of the ectoplasm of the medium through the combined will of the medium and the rest of those present. Theosophy tried to overcome the philosophical shortcomings of Spiritualism, which was trapped in a practice of trances, raptures and automatic writing. To achieve this, Theosophy devised a modern syncretistic system combining Western esoteric currents (that is, NeoPlatonism, Hermetism and the Cabala, all of them Christianized) and Eastern elements (mainly Hinduism and Buddhism). This is why Theosophy is linked to another ideological process of the age, Orientalism, the process whereby Europe constructed the »Orient« in a variety of discourses: social, philosophical, political and religious (cf. Said 1990). Theosophical discourse belonged to this process, which, following the Romantic line, connected Europe to Asia, the cradle of religion. Orientalist vision was strengthened by the discovery and study of Sanskrit, and it acquired academic seriousness and literary imagination throughout the nineteenth century. Orientalism developed parallel to occultism and sometimes converged, but with a different discourse. There is a secular, aesthetic, worldly, erotic Orientalism that is unrelated to occultist matters. Concerning religious Orientalism, Theosophy plays a central role as a pioneer in the incorporation of

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Hindu-Buddhist elements into the magical-philosophical wealth of the West. The Theosophical »Orient« had a myth-making function that attracted many people in secular times, offering artists and writers new aesthetic possibilities. Spain was not immune to the charm of the »Orient«. Orientalism arrived from the north, through Germany, France and Britain, though Spain had in its history an Orient of its own — its Arabic and Jewish heritage. However, this »Orient« was too near: it did not extend to India, much less to Tibet or China. Regarding Sanskrit, Francisco García Ayuso had published in 1871 his La Filología en su relación con el sánscrito (Philology in its Relation to Sanskrit), and Juan Gelabert y Gordiola published his Manual de lengua sánscrita (A Manual of Written Sanskrit) in 1890. There was wider penetration of Sanskrit in Barcelona than in Madrid, the two most important Theosophical centers of the country. Nevertheless, a high-level academic Orientalism like that of France and England was not generated. Some Spanish Theosophists met Madame Blavatsky personally. They distributed her works, translated them into Spanish, organized lodges and magazines. Among them were José Xifré and the Duchess of Pomar. Xifré was one of the founders and promoters of Theosophy in Spain. Their Theosophical mission was so successful that when the president of the Theosophical Society, Henry S. Olcott, toured Spain in 1895, he stated that Madrid, London and Stockholm were its most important European centers. As in several Latin American countries, many of the organizers of the first Theosophical lodges in Spain at the close of the nineteenth century had been Spiritualists who had joined the philosophical faction of the Theosophists. During the last part of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Theosophical movement gained importance in Europe, the Americas and Asia, in spite of the divisions between the larger »Besant-Leadbeaterians« of Adyar (India) and the North Americans following Judge, Blavatsky’s disciple and one of the founders of the Theosophical Society in New York. Therefore, if Spain was one of the most important Theosophical centers, its activity must have been noteworthy. In fact, occultism was linked to the literary and artistic worlds in terms of new proposals in religion and philosophy. The artists and the public were enthusiastic about Theosophical ideas on different levels, ranging from the popular seances and their para-psychological shows, to a more philosophical, Gnostic level. There were different degrees in some artists’ commitment to Theosophy and in general to occultism, which ranged from the superficial use of picturesque and diverse thematic elements to a deep commitment to aspects of the Gnostic, creative process. The Colombian critic Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot: In spite of the vagueness of occultism or the »theosophies«, they had a function in nineteenth century literature: independent of their dogmatic origin and content, such a function was primarily aesthetic. This function was dual: to express »correspondence« in a world mainly ruled by the principle of the symbol […] and to explain the process of creation itself, as in the case of W.B. Yeats in A Vision (1938) or Valle Inclán’s La lámpara maravillosa (The Wonderful Lamp, 1916). However, these »theosophies« had another function as well: they were »knowings« — in the broadest sense of the word — they addressed the question about the origin of the world

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[…] they were a substitute for religion and at the same time a way to protest against the modern world of science.5

Having drawn this general map of the penetration and spread of occultism in Spanish speaking countries, we may review certain important writers of Modernista fantastic narrative. 5.

Occultism, Darío and his fantastic stories

Rubén Darío played an essential role in the Modernista movement, that is »our true Romanticism« (Paz dixit). I will begin by locating Darío’s work in relation to occultism and fantastic literature in Spanish. In Darío’s case, given his rural origins, with their oral and mythic charge, we find a cultural leaning toward the fantastic. Thus, the main character in one of his stories, »La larva« (The Larva, 1910) says: I was born in a country where, as almost everywhere in America, witchcraft was practiced and witches communicated with the invisible. The native mystery did not disappear with the arrival of the conquerors. On the contrary, during the Colony, with Catholicism, the practice of invoking strange forces, demonism and »the evil eye« increased. In the city where I spent my first years I remember it was usual to speak of diabolical apparitions, ghosts and goblins.6

In this story, the narrator relates an encounter with a terrifying supernatural creature, which occurred when he was in a state of perfect lucidity, that is, without alcohol or drugs or the suggestion of psychosis. It is a literary version of a personal experience, for in his Autobiografía (Autobiography, 1912) Darío states: »A text of mine has appeared in Caras y Caretas [Faces and Masks], where I recount how in the Cathedral plaza in León, Nicaragua, one day at dawn I saw and touched a larva, a horrible sepulchral materialization. I was in complete command of my senses«.7 The text published in the Argentine magazine is, of course, »La larva« (larva: mask, ghost). About the importance of this magazine, Fraser says: »For an introduction to the 5. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Con todo, pese a la nebulosidad del ocultismo o de las ›teosofías‹, éstas tuvieron una función en la literatura del siglo pasado: independientemente de su procedencia dogmática y de su contenido, dicha función fue primariamente estética. En un doble sentido: para expresar ›correspondencias‹ en un mundo predominantemente regido por el principio del símbolo […] y para explicar el proceso de la propia creación, como es el caso de W.B. Yeats con A Vision (1938) o La lámpara maravillosa (1916) de Valle-Inclán, Pero esas ›teosofías‹ tuvieron otra función. Fueron ›saberes‹ — en el sentido más amplio de la palabra — que servían a la pregunta por el devenir del mundo […] eran un sustituto de la religión y a la vez una forma de protesta contra el mundo moderno de la ciencia« (Gutiérrez Girardot 1988, 81). 6. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Yo nací en un país en donde, como en casi toda América, se practicaba la hechicería y los brujos se comunicaban con lo invisible. Lo misterioso autóctono no desapareció con la llegada de los conquistadores. Antes bien, en la colonia aumentó, con el catolicismo, el uso de evocar las fuerzas extrañas, el demonismo, el mal de ojo. En la ciudad en que pasé mis primeros años se hablaba, lo recuerdo bien, como de cosa usual, de apariciones diabólicas, de fantasmas y de duendes« (Darío 1982, 67). 7.

»En Caras y Caretas ha aparecido una página mía, en que narro cómo en la plaza de la catedral de León, en Nicaragua, una madrugada vi y toqué una larva, una horrible materialización sepulcral, estando en mi sano y completo juicio« (Darío 1966, 118).

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extensive influence of Spiritualism in the ›polite society‹ of Modernismo at its peak, we should consult the pages of Caras y caretas, Buenos Aires’s most popular family magazine, which commenced publication in 1898 during the glory days of the movement« (Fraser 1992, 44). Darío had been in contact with esoteric doctrines since he was an adolescent, when he met the Polish mason José Leonard y Bertholet, a professor at the Instituto Leonés de Occidente. He relates that »a book on Masonry fell into my hands and I felt like becoming a Mason. I became familiar with Hiram, the Temple, the Kadosh knights, the apron, square, compass, batteries and all the devilish and symbolic liturgy the simple-minded follow«.8 Clearly Masonry would not satisfy him intellectually, even though he continued reading and researching esoteric media. In Guatemala, Darío met Jorge Castro, a young, talented, highly cultivated diplomat from Costa Rica, who had studied law in France, and was very enthusiastic about occult science. It was he who introduced Darío to theosophical works (Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, by Blavatsky, as well as books by Annie Besant and H. Olcott). Castro, the son of Dr. Castro Madriz, ex-president of Costa Rica, unsuccessfully tried to interest another Modernista writer, Soto-Hall from Guatemala, in his occultist research. The three young men made an agreement, according to Darío’s biographer Edelberto Torres: Jorge Castro proposed that the first one to die agreed to appear to the others in order to testify to the survival of the soul. Shortly after, Dr. Castro was appointed ambassador to Panama and took his son as secretary. Jorge died there and Rubén, during one of his banquets with SotoHall, clearly saw Castro in person. Soto-Hall saw nothing, but through a letter from Panama, heard the death of his friend had taken place on the date of the apparition. On the same occasion, the friends noticed other strange phenomena, such as spontaneous piano playing and other equally strange noises. Deeply moved, Rubén wrote one of his most beautiful texts in memory of his departed friend.9

Darío’s text begins: »It is not the old Greek verse about those who die young that is in my mind today, but a mysterious, occult law of the Buddhist karma, with all its deep fatality«.10 It is obvious that this mention of the »Buddhist karma« is an allusion to his Theosophical bond with his dead friend. 8.

»Cayó en mis manos un libro de masonería, y me dio por ser masón, y llegaron a serme familiares: Hiram, el Templo, los caballeros Kadosh, el mandil, la escuadra, el compás, las baterías y toda la endiablada y simbólica liturgia de esos terribles ingenuos« (ibid., 28).

9.

»Uno de los incidentes de la conversación es que Jorge Castro les propone convenir en que el primero que muera ha de aparecer a los otros como testimonio de la supervivencia del alma. Poco después el doctor Castro es trasladado con igual cargo a Panamá, llevando siempre como secretario a su hijo. Allá fallece éste, y el anuncio lo recibe Rubén cuando en uno de sus acostumbrados ágapes con Soto-Hall, ve la persona, íntegra y claramente, de Jorge Castro. Soto-Hall no ve nada, pero tiene conocimiento de la muerte de su amigo, ocurrida en la fecha de su aparición, por carta que llega después de Panamá, anunciando la dolorosa pérdida. En esa misma oportunidad otros fenómenos tienen lugar, sonidos arrancados al piano que hay en el comedor donde se hallan, y ruidos igualmente inexplicables. Hondamente impresionado, Rubén escribe una de las más bellas páginas necrológicas en memoria del amigo ausente« (Torres Rivas 1982, 135 f.).

10.

»No es el viejo verso griego, que habla de los que mueren jóvenes, lo que hoy traigo a mi memoria, sino la ley misteriosa y oculta del karma búdico, con toda su profunda fatalidad« (Darío 1982, 149 f.).

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His conversations on occult matters continued later on in Buenos Aires with Leopoldo Lugones and Patricio Piñeiro Sorondo, as Darío himself mentions in his Autobiografía: As I have stated, with Lugones and Piñeiro Sorondo we talked a lot about occultism. I had been devoted to those studies for a long time and later abandoned them because of my extreme nervousness and the advice from my doctor friends. Since I was very young I had been able, although not often, to observe the presence and action of strange and mysterious forces, which are not yet known or controlled by official science.11

It is evident that Darío did not doubt the existence of »strange forces« (which will become the title of one of Lugones’s collection of fantastic tales), but says that he abandoned his studies due to »extreme nervousness and the advice of doctor friends«. In Spain, Darío continued his occultist conversations with his literary sponsor, the writer Juan Valera, among others, and in France he was in touch with Papus, the magician. »In Paris, with Leopoldo Lugones we have seen extremely interesting things with Doctor Encausse, that is, the renowned ›Papus‹, but as I have already said, I have discontinued that type of investigation for fear of some kind of brain alteration«.12 In fact, occultist ideas and doctrines permeate Darío’s poetical vision, as was made evident in the seminal book by Cathy Jrade (1986). Back in Nicaragua, in an interview a few days before his death, Darío went back to his esoteric interests. Torres, Darío’s biographer, writes: Next he touches the subject of occultism, which had excited his curiosity throughout his life. He read from Allan Kardec to Ana Besant. He confesses he has been faithful to those shrines: »I have been that; I have believed. I have studied and seen a lot, in Paris, in Italy. Surprising, inexplicable things happen. Those are extraordinary deeds, like mysterious cabalas«.13

He goes on in this interview to recall his visits to the famous Italian medium of the time, Eusapia Paladino. Thus it is clear that, from adolescence to a few days before his death, Darío was interested in occultism, although fear and health prevented him from delving deeper. In a story called »El caso de la señorita Amelia« (The Case of Miss Amelia, 1894), there are several references to occultism and Theosophy. The main character exclaims: I who have been called wise in distinguished academies and long books; who have devoted my whole life to the study of humanity, its origins and its aims; who have penetrated the cabala, occultism and Theosophy […] I know how Apolonius of Tyana and Paracelsus acted, and have 11.

»Como dejo escrito, con Lugones y Piñeiro Sorondo hablaba mucho sobre ciencias ocultas. Me había dado desde hacía largo tiempo a esta clase de estudios, y los abandoné a causa de mi extremada nerviosidad y por consejo de médicos amigos. Yo había tenido ocasión, desde muy joven, si bien raras veces, de observar la presencia y la acción de las fuerzas misteriosas y extrañas, que aún no han llegado al conocimiento y dominio de la ciencia oficial« (Darío 1966, 118).

»En París, con Leopoldo Lugones, hemos observado en el doctor Encausse, esto es, el célebre ›Papus‹, co12. �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� sas interesantísimas, pero según lo dejo expresado, no he seguido en esa clase de investigaciones por temor justo a alguna perturbación cerebral« (ibid.). 13.

»Enseguida topa con el tema del ocultismo, que durante toda su vida tentó su curiosidad. Llevado por esa afición leyó desde Allan Kardec hasta Ana Besant. Ha sido feligrés en esas capillas y lo confiesa: — Yo he sido eso; yo he creído. He estudiado, he visto mucho, en París, en Italia. Suceden cosas sorprendentes, inexplicables. Son hechos extraordinarios, como cábalas de misterio« (Torres Rivas 1982, 402).

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assisted the British Crookes in his laboratory, I who have delved into the Buddhist karma and Christian mysticism.14

Later, the same character says: I was already thirsty for the occult sciences, when I went to study among the mahatmas in India what poor western science cannot teach us yet. My epistolary friendship with Madame Blavatsky had opened a wide field in the country of the fakirs […] I travelled throughout Asia, Africa, Europe and America. I helped Colonel Olcott to found the New York Theosophical branch.15

Just as references to Theosophy are plentiful in this story, so are allusions to Spiritualism and its presence in Mexico in another one called »Huitzilopoxtli« (1915). For instance, Mexican revolutionary leader Francisco I. Madero, who was later assassinated, was a declared Spiritualist and is mentioned in Darío’s story. In his narrative, Darío introduces the idea of syncretism between European and Indian beliefs, where the dead among the Spiritualists become the ancient prehispanic deities. »Here in Mexico one lives on mysterious ground. All those Indians do not breathe anything else. The destiny of the Mexican nation is still in the hands of the primitive deities of the natives«.16 Later on, a priest states that »with the cross we have accomplished very little here, the soul and shapes of the primitive idols defeat us inside and out. There were not enough Christian chains here to enslave the former divinities and they appear every time they can and especially now«.17 The priest’s intention is to demonize the old gods. We find a clear example in the following dialogue between the priest and the narrator, in which the priest refers to Madero’s Spiritualism: – If Madero had not been voluntarily misled… – By the politicians? – No my son, by the devils… – How is that? – You know. – Spiritualism…

14.

»Yo que he sido llamado sabio en Academias ilustres y libros voluminosos; yo que he consagrado toda mi vida al estudio de la humanidad, sus orígenes y sus fines; yo que he penetrado en la cábala, en el ocultismo y en la teosofía […] que sé cómo obraba Apolonio el Thianense y Paracelso, y que he ayudado en su laboratorio, en nuestros días, al inglés Crookes; yo que ahondé en el Karma búdhico y en el misticismo cristiano« (Darío 1982, 45).

15.

»Iba yo, sediento ya de las ciencias ocultas, a estudiar entre los mahatmas de la India lo que la pobre ciencia occidental no puede enseñarnos todavía. La amistad epistolar que mantenía con madama Blavatsky, habíame abierto ancho campo en el país de los fakires […] Viajé por Asia, África, Europa y América. Ayudé al coronel Olcott a fundar la rama teosófica de Nueva York« (ibid., 47).

16.

»Aquí en México, sobre todo, se vive en un suelo que está repleto de misterio. Todos esos indios que hay no respiran otra cosa. Y el destino de la nación mexicana está todavía en poder de las primitivas divinidades de los aborígenes« (ibid., 82).

17.

»Con la cruz hemos hecho aquí muy poco, y por dentro y por fuera el alma y las formas de los primitivos ídolos nos vencen… Aquí no hubo suficientes cadenas cristianas para esclavizar a las divinidades de antes; y cada vez que han podido, y ahora sobre todo, esos diablos se muestran« (ibid., 84).

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– Not at all. It is that he achieved communication with the old gods.18

In this way, Spiritualism becomes a new form of paganism: under this modern mask, there is a prehispanic face. 6.

Juan Valera’s theosophical novel

Juan Valera, a Spaniard, was the critic and narrator who presented Darío to Spanish readers in his critical text on Azul, published in the Monday literary page of El Imparcial (The Impartial) in Madrid, in October 1888. Darío liked it so much that he used it as a preface from the second edition on. These »American letters« written by Valera helped promote Darío and his book, which was fundamental to Modernista poetry in Spain. Although many things separated these two writers, they both shared an interest in occultism and the Orient. Valera was not immune to the attraction the »Orient« exerted at the time; indeed, he was rather a promoter. He wrote in Spanish the kind of Romantic literature that appeared in the works of Victor Hugo, Nerval, Flaubert and Gautier. In the introduction to his Leyendas del Antiguo Oriente (Legends of the Old Orient, 1907), Valera states that he fled to the »Orient« in order to allow his fantasy free rein, and adds: There is another reason for writing these legends. We wish to make old oriental literature known and to start using it in our own modern Spanish literature. The oriental renaissance has been influencing art and poetry in France, England and Germany for some time. In Spain it is not felt yet.19

Valera’s intellectual openness stands in contrast to many of Spanish writers of that time. His diplomatic career contributed to this broadminded view, since he had lived in Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Dresden, and other places. In addition to his diplomatic work, he had studied at length, which gave him prestige as a great intellectual and literary critic. His endorsement of Darío gave this author greater renown. Valera perceived the religious dimension of Darío’s literary revolution and placed it clearly in a setting of secularization where »the latest fashionable literature« was dominated by two attitudes: either atheism or blasphemy. He says that »in this dark unfathomable infinite the imagination may perceive, such as in the ether, nebulae or star breeding grounds, fragments and debris of dead religions with which to form something different to test new beliefs and renewed mythologies«.20 Valera states that both attitudes appear in Darío’s book, although perhaps there 18.

»– Si Madero no se hubiera dejado engañar…/ –¿De los políticos?/ — No, hijo, de los diablos…/ –¿Cómo es eso?/ — Usted sabe./ — Lo del espiritismo…/ — Nada de eso. Lo que hay es que él logró ponerse en comunicación con los dioses viejos« (Darío 1982, 84).

»Otra razón nos impulsa también a escribir estas leyendas. Deseamos divulgar un poco la literatura orien19. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� tal antigua y empezar a emplearla en nuestra moderna literatura española. En Francia y en Inglaterra y en Alemania, el renacimiento oriental, de que hemos hablado, deja, tiempo ha, sentir su influjo en el arte y en la poesía. En España aún no se nota nada de esto« (Valera 1958, 901). 20. »que en este infinito tenebroso e incognoscible perciba la imaginación, así como en el éter, nebulosas o semilleros de astros, fragmentos y escombros de religiones muertas, con las cuales procura formar algo

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is more of the latter when he talks of the »powerful and fresh production of fantastic beings, evoked or extracted from the gloom of the unfathomable, where ruins of destroyed beliefs and ancient superstitions wander«.21 Among his contemporaries, Valera was considered a connoisseur of oriental literature as well as of occultist secrets. His contemporary, Emilia Pardo Bazán writes about Valera’s Theosophical proclivity: »I shall not state this about his credulity — I respect his clear mind too much — but his imagination and his thought were under strong, active influences exerted by the legends of the mahatmas in India that the miracle-faking Theosophist Madame Blavatsky spread in Europe«.22 Valera’s interest in these doctrines also shows in the article »Teosofía« (Theosophy), written for the Diccionario Enciclopédico Hispanoamericano (Spanish American Encyclopedic Dictionary). In the literary sense, nothing is more revealing of Valera’s taste for the esoteric than his last novel, Morsamor, defined by its author as »a modern novel of chivalry, aspiring to reveal, through fantastic dream action, the real greatness of a glorious historic age for Spain and Portugal«.23 Some people have tried to find a historical novel in Morsamor, which is problematic since the importance of fantasy in the plot hinders the reconstructive impulse that lies at the bottom of any historicist undertaking. Valera published this novel about the glorious age of the Empire, as a sort of ideological compensation when Spain lost its last overseas colonies. Valera’s Orientalism takes up the notion of the »Orient« as the spiritual cradle of humanity, as »custodian of occultist science«. Of course, such a »sublime« situation existed only in an idealized past, not in the twentieth century, when »orientals« seem »idle and inert«, so they must be freed by European Christians from the »abject dejection in which they have fallen«. Morsamor is one of the first fantastic novels in Spanish, since in the late nineteenth century the fantastic appeared mostly in short stories, as with Darío, Nervo and Lugones (who published a late novel with fantastic touches, El ángel de la sombra [The Angel of the Dark, 1926], but it is not as good as his short stories, from both a literary and a philosophical viewpoint). Valera cannot be considered a Modernista in the same sense as the Latin Americans, although as a contemporary, he shared their textual and thematic sources from late nineteenth-century occultism and especially from Blavatsky, who had been extremely successful among certain artistic and intellectual circles. Valera’s Orientalism, at least in this novel, is shaped by Theosophy. The author does not distinguish the Hindu and Buddhist particularities from the Theosophical ones, and when writing about the former, they are seen through a Theosophical and Christian lens. As a result, there

nuevo como ensayo de nuevas creencias y de renovadas mitologías« (Darío 1987, 8). 21.

»la poderosa y lozana producción de seres fantásticos, evocados o sacados de las tinieblas de lo incognoscible, donde vagan las ruinas de las destrozadas creencias y supersticiones vetustas« (ibid., 9).

22.

»No afirmaré que sobre su credulidad — respeto demasiado el claro entendimiento que don Juan poseía —, pero sobre su imaginación y su pensamiento ejercían sugestión activa y fuerte las leyendas que se refieren de los mahatmas de la India, difundidas en Europa por la señora Blavatzky, teósofa y milagrera« (Valera 1984, 39).

23.

»un libro de caballerías a la moderna, donde se aspira a manifestar la grandeza real de una época histórica para España y Portugal gloriosísima, a través de una acción fantástica y soñada« (ibid., 36 f.).

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are clear doctrinal distortions, not only because of how Theosophy understands the »Orient«, but also of how Valera understood Theosophy. Morsamor was read and liked by Spanish Theosophists, as shown by the review Viriato Díaz-Pérez wrote in the famous theosophist magazine Sophia, which was widely read in Spain and Latin America. It was popular not only among the Blavatskians, but among artists and writers as well, since it was not merely doctrinal but was also open to aesthetic and philosophical discussion (writers such as Darío and Lugones, among others, contributed to it). In this review, Díaz-Pérez writes about Valera’s novel: If the Spanish Theosophical Society had ever thought of spreading its teachings through common publicity, they never could have dreamed of a more artistic expression or a more clever means, than through the reading of Morsamor. It awakens people’s curiosity about Theosophy, and moves them to deepen their study, disregarding fear of the terms used by its writers.24

Strangely, and in spite of the Theosophists’ enthusiasm, the solution to the protagonist’s religious conflict is not Theosophical but Christian. Morsamor, the main character, having experienced bodily rejuvenation, undertakes several adventures, including a trip to India and finally to some hidden spot in Tibet, a true »Shangri-la« avant-la-lettre. There he has profound conversations with a »mahatma« about diverse and complex matters, and finally rejects occult knowledge, considering that such doctrines imply atheism, pessimism and annihilation of the soul. The final ecstasy of the character is neither Theosophical nor Buddhist, but Christian and quietist, along the lines of Miguel de Molinos, a Catholic heretic. In spite of his heterodoxy, there is in Valera a strong Catholic leaning, which triumphs in the long run. We find in this last novel by Valera a good example of the Orientalist literature that was very much in fashion with Modernismo and was cultivated by writers such as Enrique Gómez Carrillo from Guatemala (chronicles and novels), Argentinean Lugones (short stories) or Cuban Julián del Casal (poetry). It is an Orientalism that often resorts to fantasy to develop the story and to Theosophy for ideas. The result is a fusion between fantastic literature, Romantic Orientalism and Theosophical occultism. 7.

Lugones’s warlike mysteries

We know about Darío’s occultist relationship with Lugones in Buenos Aires as well as in Paris through his Autobiography. In Argentina, Lugones was closely connected to Theosophy (he was even Secretary General of the »Luz« Lodge around 1900). Lugones and Darío met Papus in Paris. In his testimonial on the life and works of Lugones, Arturo Capdevilla mentions how Theosophy became a source of fantastic subjects for the young Lugones:

24. »Si la Sociedad Teosófica de España hubiese pensado alguna vez en propagar sus doctrinas acudiendo al vulgar reclamo, no podría haber soñado expresión más artística, ni medio más ingenioso, que el de la lectura de Morsamor, para despertar en las gentes la curiosidad por saber lo que es la Teosofía y moverlas a profundizar su estudio, perdiendo el miedo a la terminología árida de sus escritores« (Larrea 1993, 193).

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In fact, the last text of Lugones first book Las fuerzas extrañas (The Strange Forces, 1906), is called »Ensayo de una cosmogonía en diez lecciones« (Essay on a Cosmogony in Ten Lessons). In it we can clearly perceive his Theosophical leanings, his paraphrases of Blavatsky’s »Stanzas of Dzyan« and his own animist principles. It should be noted that the title mentions »cosmogony« and not cosmology, which would suggests a scientific, rational discourse on the cosmos as a whole. Lugones prefers the term cosmogony, which is related to his Romantic interest in origins and endings, and which implies certain teleology. The term is equivalent to the one used by Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine, »cosmogenesis«. Such is the similarity between both texts that S. Hewit and N.A. Hall have written: in »the epilogue to Lugones’ short story collection Las fuerzas extrañas (1906), a source relationship to a specific occult text is clear: the ›Ensayo‹ echoes Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888) so frequently and precisely that the question of plagiarism must be raised« (in Fraser 1992, 59). An »architextual« relationship (in Genette’s terms) between Lugones’s »Ensayo…« and Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine does not weaken either their differences or the originality of the Argentinean’s text. In view of his personal interest in science, Lugones directs his text more toward scientism than Blavatsky, who appeals more to myth, vision and oracle. The aesthetic outlook should also be considered: one is a literary text with philosophical aspirations and the other is occultist. Nevertheless, there is a similar narrative perspective in both cases: the text is presented as the transmission of occult knowledge, from an unknown teacher who entrusts his revelations to the narrator, who in turn writes them for the reader. Both Blavatsky’s and Lugones’s characters believe themselves to be elected to communicate such ideas, elected by »an occult fraternity of the initiated«. Lugones was a Mason, unlike Darío, who considered the Masons naive. Lugones’s Masonic experiences provided material for his fiction: he wrote about members of secret lodges, the »formidable brotherhood«, as he called it. These references appear in other texts as well, such as his novel El ángel de la sombra, whose main character also established contact with a member of an esoteric order, who tells him: »I don’t know whether you believe in another life. I could give you real proof of its existence, but you should know that your destiny was once linked to the brotherhood that has sent me«.26 Of course, this link goes back to previous lives, which 25.

»El repertorio teosófico, amplísimo, le brindaba una fiesta intelectual, casi, casi sobrehumana. ¡Cómo sería su apetencia de saber y de misterio que hasta dos veces leyó las obras por momentos inextricables de H.P.B.! Leyó y anotó Isis sin Velo, y con mayor entusiasmo aún La Doctrina Secreta […] Lugones anda en los veinte y tantos cuando bebe de este vino demasiado fuerte. Mucho y largo bebió de este vino viejo, que le sugiere extraordinarias visiones de una nueva Cosmogénesis, de una antes no soñada Antropogénesis« (Capdevilla 1973, 179 f.).

26. »No sé si cree usted en la vida futura. Yo podría darle la prueba real de su existencia. Pero sepa usted que su suerte estuvo unida ya una vez a la hermandad que me ha enviado« (Lugones 1926, 128).

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introduces reincarnation, a subject close to Theosophy but not to other occultist currents more influenced by Christianity, which denied such an idea. In any case, with or without reincarnation, initiation is related to immortality. In some of Lugones’s Cuentos fatales (Fatal Stories, 1924), there are also secret fraternities, as in »Los ojos de la reina« (The Queen’s Eyes) and »El puñal« (The Dagger). The latter is interesting because there is in it a relationship between an occult brotherhood (inspired by Drusean, Islamic and Templarian ideas), initiation rites and the use of hashish. These reappear in El ángel de la sombra, which presents the visionary value of drugs, well known among the occultists and the Romantic artists. Contrary to Blavatsky, who centers the operations of her secret lodge in Tibet and India, Lugones places his lodge in the Near East, in Islamic culture, with esoterism linked to blood and war, to the sword, something akin to his late political thought. This is more oriented towards the Islamic-Christian than to the Hindu-Buddhist, as Capdevilla says: »Lugones’ Theosophy was very serious and it enabled him to find the road to his own orientalism. This was not like that of others, whose limits were the Indian Veda and its mountains, but that of the Holy Land first and later Syria and Lebanon, and singularly, the old Drusean geography«.27 We therefore watch Lugones switch from his socialist political ideas and humanitarian pacifist Theosophy during his youth, to conservative pro-fascist politics and warlike esoterism in his maturity. Thus, in Lugones we find a constant presence of occultism, although it varies in type in his different works: socialism, theosophy and science in Las fuerzas extrañas; conservatism and esoterism with blood and hashish in Cuentos fatales and El ángel de la sombra. To what extent did Lugones take his stories seriously? If his own life and works are not proof enough, Capdevilla clarifies the point: The fact that Lugones had said these things in his creative work does not detract from the reliability of the data or the importance of his mystical tendencies. Those of us who approached those subjects the day after reading one of his narratives remember all too well his persuasive accent and the vague fear in some of his statements.28

8.

Nervo and the ambivalence of mystery

Nervo, who was born in a provincial town in Mexico, was raised as a Catholic. He must have had his first contact with Occultism when he arrived in Mexico City during the 1890s. At the time there was a certain underground excitement for such subjects in the city, especially among artists and intellectuals, who received esoteric news from Paris, Madrid or New York. As we 27.

»Y es que la teosofía en Lugones fue algo muy serio, y por sus senderos llegó a encaminarse hacia su propio orientalismo, que no fue el de los otros — aquel cuyo límite eran los Vedas de la India y sus montañas —, sino el de la Tierra Santa, primero, y luego el de la Siria y el Líbano, y por modo singular la vieja geografía de los drusos« (Capdevilla 1973, 178).

28. »El que Lugones dejara dichas estas cosas en obras de imaginación, nada resta ni a la seriedad de los datos ni al valor probatorio de su inclinación. Quienes al día siguiente de sus fingidos relatos solíamos abordar con él aquellos temas, demasiado bien recordamos su persuasivo acento y el vago susto de algunas de sus afirmaciones« (ibid., 184).

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find through magazines and other publications, Spiritualism was already active in Mexico albeit not very openly, due to the situation regarding politics and religion. Valadez, a Theosophist writer, describes the situation in Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century: A paternalistic dictatorship that denied citizens civil rights governed the country. The dominant religion was intolerant towards the establishment and free expression of other beliefs and exerted decisive influence on popular thought. The few Masonic lodges and Spiritualist centers that were tolerated barely survived. The lodges were tolerated because some members were leaders of the Liberal Reform, the Dictator’s comrades-in-arms; the Spiritualist centers were tolerated because they were considered gatherings of harmless, deluded dreamers.29

Apparently Nervo was excited by Spiritualist practices, which he recorded in some of his newspaper reports, for example »Noches macabras« (Macabre Nights, 1896), »Fotografía espírita« (Spirit Photo, 1895) and »Los espíritus que tocan« (The Spirits that Touch, 1896). He also read Theosophist and occultist authors, especially the French Fabre d’Olivet, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre and Edouard Schuré. Similarly, he was more interested in the French Spiritualism of Allan Kardec, which allowed for reincarnation. At the time, Spiritualism had a strong hold on the elite, among them Francisco I. Madero, who was to become a revolutionary leader and later president of Mexico. References to Madero and Spiritualism have already been made in relation to Darío’s story »Huitzilopoxtli«. In 1896, in an article called »La cuestion religiosa« (The Religious Question), Nervo writes about this atmosphere where people search for new religious options within a landscape of secularization: We are in a stage of radical Spiritualism, and since we are no longer satisfied with the doctrine of salvation through Christ, since we feel it will take us back to that past that the encyclopedists claim to have banished from the minds, we venture on our own through the labyrinth of prehistoric religions, and question the Indian sphinx on the mystery of life. Middling spirits consult wooden tables. Superior spirits wander in the forest of Theosophy.30

As the new century advanced, and especially during and after the Mexican Revolution, Spiritualists and the few Theosophists there were became better organized, and in spite of their ups and downs were able to spread their teachings in the new atmosphere of intellectual, political and religious liberty. In the meantime, whether in Mexico, Madrid or Paris, Nervo nurtured 29. »El país estaba gobernado por una dictadura paternalista que negaba a la ciudadanía libertad para el libre ejercicio de sus derechos cívicos; la religión entonces imperante se mostraba intransigente para admitir el establecimiento y libre expresión de otros credos y ejercía una influencia decisiva en la conciencia popular; apenas si medraban precariamente algunas logias masónicas y centros espíritas que eran tolerados, las logias masónicas porque a ellas pertenecían viejos caudillos de la época de la Reforma, compañeros de armas del Dictador, y los centros espíritas porque se les consideraba reuniones de gente ilusa e inofensiva« (Valadez 1981, 16). 30. »Estamos en plena etapa de jacobinismo espiritualista, y como ya no queremos contentarnos con la salvadora doctrina de Cristo, porque nos parece que esto significará una retrogradación a ese pasado que los enciclopedistas diz que arrasaron en las conciencias, nos aventuramos a la buena de Dios por el dédalo de las religiones prehistóricas, valga la frase; y vamos a preguntar a la esfinge india el misterio de la vida. Los espíritus medianos consultan las mesas de pino. Los espíritus superiores se emboscan en la teosofía« (Nervo 2000, 244).

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his esoteric interest without abandoning his Christian outlook. Alfonso Reyes mentioned the following about Nervo in Madrid: Anyway, this living in continuous communication with spirits and reincarnations, with the beyond, the invisible, the infrared and ultra-violet, lightens the soul and gives men an air of mystery. Nervo walked the streets of Madrid as a living testimony of the ineffable, of the unknown. Through his persistent search for the supernatural without ever finding it, he resigned himself, as apostles of miracle do, to admit that everything is supernatural.31

Nervo, along with Lugones and Darío, is one of the most systematic promoters of fantastic literature, especially the short story. In the development of his stories, he takes different subjects that nineteenth-century occultism was fond of. In spite of this pioneering role, Nervo is better known as a poet than as a prose writer, and much less as a narrator of fantastic stories. Regarding his themes, reincarnation (also called palingenesia or metempsychosis) is suggested in »Las Casas« (Las Casas) and »Amnesia« (Amnesia), and is sometimes shown as a simple self set in two different time frames, as in »Mencía« (Mencía); clairvoyance appears in »El sexto sentido« (The Sixth Sense); unfolding or split personality is seen in »Amnesia«, and androgyny in El donador de almas (The Giver of Souls). Frequently, these themes are connected to a plot where eroticism is central. Very often Nervo uses the fantastic and mysterious to deal with the tensions of couples, the fear of lovers, the unattainable woman (paralyzed in the duality femme fragile/femme fatale), and a number of erotic matters that could have been treated in a realistic or emotional tone, as he does in other narratives. Woman’s erotic alterity with respect to men is turned into a fantastic and sometimes ominous alterity in Nervo. As in Darío and Lugones, Nervo also takes delight in the scientific knowledge of the age, which is not conceived in opposition to occultism but as complementary. He combined scientific knowledge and occultist explanations in his plots in a way that confirms Octavio Paz’s phrase of »the contradictory dialectics uniting positivism and Modernismo« (88). In spite of his fondness for esoterism, Nervo always maintained a strong Christian link, which led him more towards mysticism than Gnosticism, as would become an occultist. In addition, and in spite of his ascetic resolutions, he was attracted by worldly pleasures, which is apparent in his heroes, who eventually fail their spiritual initiation, as in »El castillo de lo inconsciente« (The Castle of the Unconscious) and in »Los esquifes« (The Skiffs). 9.

The Modernista fantastic as distinct from Magical Realism

One last point which I would briefly like to mention is the need to distinguish the Modernista fantastic from the later Magical Realism, which was so popular in the twentieth century. Since the purpose of the present essay is mainly historical and literary rather than theoretical, to 31.

»Como quiera, este vivir en continuo trato con espíritus y reencarnaciones, con el más allá, con lo invisible, con el infrarrojo y el ultravioleta, aligera el alma y comunica a los hombres un aire de misterio. Nervo andaba por esas calles de Madrid como un testimonio vívido de lo inefable, de lo no conocido. A fuerza de buscar lo sobrenatural sin hallarlo nunca, se resignó como suelen los apóstoles del milagro a reconocer que todo es sobrenatural« (Nervo 1990, 21).

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make finer distinctions would require a sojourn upon several categories. One of them would be the fantastic genre in general and its relationship to the Modern and the Romantic in particular. Another would be the Modernista fantastic and the concept of »Magical Realism«. Art critic Franz Roh produced this latter concept around 1925 when he analyzed the post-expressionist painting production. The pioneer use of the concept in a literary context was made by Arturo Uslar Pietri in 1948 and it is must be distinguished from the »Marvelous Real« proposed by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier the following year (cf. Leal 1995, 120 f.). During the so-called »boom« of Latin American narrative in the 1960s and ’70s, the term »Magical Realism« was overused and applied to authors and literatures as different as Borges and García Márquez with the intention of designating something specifically Latin American. Angel Flores even proposed the year of 1935 as the birth date of Magical Realism, marked by the publication of Borges’s Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) (Flores 1995, 113). The reactions to such proposals came soon enough, as we can see from the following response of Luis Leal to the statement made by Flores: So we see that magical realism cannot be identified either with fantastic literature or with psychological literature, or with surrealistic or hermetic literature […] Unlike superrealism, magical realism does not use dream motifs; neither does it distort reality or create imagined worlds, as writers of fantastic literature or science fiction do; nor does it emphasize psychological analysis of characters, since it doesn’t try to find reasons for their actions or their inability to express themselves. Magical realism is not an aesthetic movement either, as was Modernismo, which was interested in creating works dominated by a refined style; neither it is interested in the creation of complex structures per se (ibid., 121).

Independently from whether or not the birth date of Magical Realism is correct, it is important to underline from Leal’s response that Magical Realism is perceived as distinct from the previous Modernista fantastic. Leal correctly points out that this movement has nothing to do with Magical Realism, neither because of the fantastic element nor because of the Modernista factor. The Modernista fantastic makes a clear difference between the real and the unknown and works with a crash between these realms. In contrast, Magical Realism works with a world in which all is or could be fantastic. And when all is fantastic nothing is really fantastic. In this sense, its vision is more realistic than magical. Finally, Modernismo requires the poet to have a certain level of religious belief, even though he may be in crisis. In turn, in Magical Realism there is a greater extent of a secular attitude, which results in a more playful and skeptical point of view, but not necessarily a more lucid one. The prominent role that nineteenth-century occultism, especially Theosophy and Spiritualism, played in the Modernista fantastic weakens and pales in Magical Realism. Moreover, occultism also was a thematic source of several texts in Modernista fantastic. In Magical Realism magic is not a doctrine but an aesthetic resource; it is produced as naturally as the rain without the need for a ritual, a magician, or a medium. It is, thus, more a style than a genre.

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10. At the end of a reading journey I have tried to overcome the traditional silence in Latin American criticism on the relationship between literature and occultism in late nineteenth-century Romanticism. Octavio Paz was well aware of the problem: The influence of the occultist tradition among Spanish American modernistas was no less profound than among European Romantics and Symbolists. Our critics, although aware of this fact, seem to avoid it, as though it were shameful. Although scandalous: from Blake and Yeats to Pessoa, the history of modern poetry in the West is bound to the history of hermetic and occult doctrines, from Swedenborg to Madame Blavatsky (Paz 1985, 94).

I share Paz’s opinion on the critical neglect of a subject that may be difficult, either because of Christian or rationalist prejudice. I do not, however, find this connection »scandalous«. Although I admit that there are important differences between occult doctrines and literature, it is also true that in pre-modern times the same religious sources nourished both phenomena. One was manifested as poetry and the other as »magic«. What is »scandalous« to me is that modernity has secularized this connection and has relegated it from the sacred to the merely psychological. Romanticism, which started as a searching for the divine and the cosmic, devolved into an expression of a neurotic subject devoid of its cosmic roots, in part because of its »psychocentrism«, its emphasis on the individual, psychologized self. I find this tendency in a good many of the fin-de-siècle currents, be it French Decadentism, English Aestheticism or Latin American Modernismo. Resorting to the esoterism of the age signals a philosophical crisis, a loss of traditional religious resources, and a landscape that was gradually becoming secularized. The twentieth-century avant-garde was to go even further toward dehumanization, reducing the human to the mechanical. It is as much an art of the Fall, as the fall of Art. These religious-occultist movements were important in the lives of all of the authors, as well as in their work. Among other things, they were a thematic source that allowed them to conceive stories that were »strange and mysterious«. These movements initiated a process in Spanish American literature that has resulted in a recognizable form of the fantastic. This Latin American fantastic was made possible by the Romantic force that enlivened the Modernista writers and their will to revolutionize the literary landscape of their time. (Translated by Rosario Faraudo) Bibliography Abrams, M.H. 1973. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton. Béguin, Albert. 1981. El alma romántica y el sueño. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Capdevilla, Arturo. 1973. Lugones. Buenos Aires: Aguilar. Chaves, José Ricardo. 1999. Magia y ocultismo en el siglo XIX: De filósofos, magos y brujas. Barcelona: Azul. Darío, Rubén. 1966. Autobiografía. México: Editora Latino Americana, S.A. ———. 1982. Cuentos fantásticos. Selection and prologue by José Olivio Jiménez. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.

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———. 1987. Azul..;. El salmo de la pluma; Cantos de vida y esperanza; otros poemas. Ed. by Antonio Oliver Belmás. México: Porrúa. Flores, Ángel. 1995. »Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction«. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Ed. by L. Parkinson and W.B. Faris. Durham: Duke UP. Fraser, Howard M. 1992. In the Presence of Mystery: Modernist Fiction and the Occult. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP. Guarner, José Luis. 1969. Antología de la literatura fantástica española. Barcelona: Bruguera. Gutiérrez Girardot, Rafael. 1988. Modernismo: Supuestos históricos y culturales. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Hahn, Óscar. 1978. El cuento fantástico hispanoamericano en el siglo XIX. México: Premiá. Hanegraff, Wouter J. 1998. Romanticism and the Esoteric Connection: Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times. Albany: State of New York UP. Jrade, Cathy Login. 1986. Rubén Darío y la búsqueda romántica de la unidad: El recurso modernista a la tradición esotérica. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Leal, Luis Magical. »Realism in the Spanish American Literature«. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Ed. by L. Parkinson and W.B. Faris. Durham: Duke UP. Larrea López, Juan Félix. 1993. Modernismo y Teosofía. Viriato Díaz-Pérez. Madrid: Libertarias/Prodhufi. Lugones, Leopoldo. 1926. El ángel de la sombra. Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer. ———. 1992. Las fuerzas extrañas: Cuentos fatales. Presentation by Noé Jitrik. México: Trillas. Martínez Martín, Alejo (ed.). 1994. Antología española de literatura fantástica. Madrid: Valdemar. Nervo, Amado. 1990. Antología de Amado Nervo: Poesía y prosa. Selection and prologue by Alfonso Reyes. México: Conaculta. ———. 2000. »El castillo de lo inconsciente«. Antología de literatura fantástica. Preliminary study, notes and selection by José Ricardo Chaves. México: Conaculta. Paz, Octavio. 1974. Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Riffard, Pierre A. 1990. L’Esotérisme. Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont. Said, Edward. 1990. Orientalismo. Madrid: Libertarias. Torres, Edelberto. 1982. La dramática vida de Rubén Darío. Managua: Editorial Nueva Nicaragua. Valadez Zamudio, Joaquín. 1981. La Historia de la Sociedad Teosófica en México. México: Editorial Orión. Valera, Juan. 1984. Morsamor. Ed. by Leonardo Romero Tobar. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés. ———. 1958. Obras completas. Vol. I. Ed. by Luis Araujo Costa. Madrid: Aguilar. Viatte, Auguste. 1979. Les sources occultes du Romantisme. Vol. I. Paris: Champion.

Romantic prose fiction in modern Japan Finding an expression against the grain Takayuki Yokota-Murakami 1.

Literary innovation during the Meiji Reformation: Standardization of the realistic novel

The modern Meiji Reformation of 1868 led to an influx of Western literature to Japan, which had been more or less isolated from the rest of the world till 1854 for over two hundred years. This led to the creation of a rather eccentric cultural scene, similar to the condition of literature which existed in Russia towards the end of the eighteenth century. The first twenty years of the Meiji era saw a chaotic, anachronistic vaudeville of practically all the literary genres which had existed in the West up to that point: political novels, Gothic stories, didactic literature, novels of virtue, sentimental narratives, epics, sonnets, lyrics, and so on. All of these were introduced indiscriminately, creating a hodgepodge of competing literary discourses. One of the earliest, most systematic accounts of literary movements, genres, styles, etc., in modern Japan was Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Shōsetsu shinzui (Essence of Novels, 1885–86). (In the following study, I will observe the traditional order of citing Japanese names upon initial occurrence, giving the family name first and personal name second. Very often the first name was a pen-name, with which the given literati were referred to. In such cases, I will do so, too). The treatise depended on the theories of such English critics as John Motley and Matthew Arnold. It was a manifesto that tried to establish the novel as a central genre of literature in the first place. In fact, »literature« per se as a form of art was to be established. When Shōyō himself wrote a novel, Tōsei shosei katagi (The Characters of the Contemporary Students, 1885), putting into practice the principles of literature as propounded in Essence, the very notion of literature was created for the first time, that is to say, literature as a refined, intellectual, and imaginative form of art was acknowledged. The contemporary critic and poet Kitamura Tōkoku wrote in an essay »Current Trends in Contemporary Literature«: »Ever since Shōyō published The Characters and alarmed the reading public of the capital, what is now known as literature has come to be recognized« (Kitamura 1976, 61). It is now widely held that Shōyō failed to materialize his literary theory of Essence in The Characters, not being able to break away from the conventions of traditional Edo pulp fiction. It remains valid, however, that Shōyō’s treatise and novel were normative in the development of modern Japanese literature out of the chaos that it was in during the early years of Meiji. What were the standards of literature and the novel that Tsubouchi Shōyō imposed on the literary circles of the early Meiji period? In Essence Shōyō opens the discussion by declaring that the novel is a form of art, establishing the notion of literature as belles lettres as a norm. He then proceeds to specify the main object of literature, which he claims to be human passion (as opposed to nature and social mores). Somewhat paradoxically, the choice of human emotions as a preferable mode of literature does not lead Shōyō in defense of Romanticism. He argues that the task of literature (the novel)

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is to represent reality (by which he refers to human passion) realistically. Given this task, he vetoes poetry, which, he believes, is too short to express fully the complicated emotions of the moderns. Also, Tsubouchi Shōyō introduced an evolutionary idea of literary genres, highly appropriate for the nation that had launched itself on its way to modernization, industrialization, and capitalism. At the top of that evolutionary ladder was placed the realistic novel (which describes human emotions). In broad summary, then, it is important to note that the Japanese version of Naturalism arose under the contemporary influence of Zola towards the end of the nineteenth century and is considered to be the extreme form of Realism. Japanese Romantic prose was an attempt to recuperate narrativity, fictionality, and the romantic in literature. But as a counter movement, it was always a difficult path, as we see in such writers as Saganoya Omuro and Izumi Kyōka, and was always tainted in some measure by the aesthetic philosophy of Realism / Naturalism. 2.

Negotiating the realistic against the grain of the Romantic

Given this, the literati with penchants and gifts for other kinds of literature felt compelled to respond to this norm in some way or other, showing resistance, negotiation, compromise, and so on. For instance, the leader of modernization of haiku, Masaoka Shiki, obsessively reiterated his insistence in his literary essays that haiku should become »literature«, that is, a form of art, apparently echoing Shōyō’s dictate. Likewise, his valorization of haiku over traditional haikai (linked poetry), since the former relies on emotion whereas the latter relies on knowledge, can be read as his response to Shōyō’s call that the predominant objects of literature should be human passion. However, the valorization of haiku over haikai involved one major difficulty, as the former was to become a world-famous minimal form of art. As mentioned above, Shōyō apotheosized the novel at the expense of poetry for the latter was too short to express complex human emotions. Haiku is not only short, but is extremely short. Shiki was finally able to come to terms with this difficulty, having found another modern principle in Herbert Spencer: economy. This helped Shiki to reinstate poetry. Quoting Herbert Spencer’s Philosophy of Style (1852), he argued that the more concise the expression, the more effective it is and, therefore, the better it is as a literary expression. Having overcome the theoretical difficulty, he, paradoxically, recuperated haiku as a realistic form of literature. He propounded shasei (translatable as »sketch«, but it then meant »mimicking the real«, mimesis, etc.) as a principle of haiku. Again using Spencer as an apologia, he insisted that a shorter form of literature is in fact truer to the real and that, consequently, poetry (and haiku) can be realistic. A rather eccentric genre of supposedly »realistic poetry« thus arose (for more details cf. Yokota-Murakami 1994). Shiki’s trajectory, however, demonstrates the difficult paths that literati had to follow who embraced some principles alien to Shōyō’s realistic model of literature. As described earlier, Shōyō’s treatise not only outlawed Romanticism (as opposed to Realism) but also poetry in general, Romantic or otherwise, as if they were one and the same phenomenon. Not surprisingly, the Japanese Romantics were mostly poets. Kitamura Tōkoku, who initiated a journal Bungakukai (Literary World), which was to be the major arena for Romanticism, was a leading figure in this movement. It is, however, rather ironical that it was he who passed this judgment about

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Shōyō’s work, quoted above, because ever since Shōyō published The Characters and alarmed the reading public of the capital, what is now known as literature has come to be recognized as somehow more centrally connected to the novel. It is equally ironical that the journal Literary World itself was to change its nature and later, surprisingly, became an arena for naturalists. One of the most significant members of the journal, Shimazaki Tōson, was a comrade in the literary coterie of Tōkoku and published many romantic poems in the 1890s in Literary World. He, however, subsequently shifted to prose, realistic prose at that, and became a leader of the naturalistic movement of Japan. He writes: From the time we started writing for this magazine we and the readers saw before us the shifting tides of the sea of letters and the rise and fall of stars of poetry. During this period the study of Shakespeare’s plays, the first attempts to criticize Tokugawa literature in detail, and the analysis of the Japanese language and poetry were initiated. We witnessed the effects of the struggle between the complex Western culture and our simple native thought. And we read the pathetic histories of so many talented men who had perished in the conflict. We observed also how the realistic school advocated by Flaubert, Dandet, Zola and the rest came to exert a remarkable influence over Japanese fiction, and how the seeds of the pitiful flowers of Romanticism were scattered here and there. All this happened while our magazine was being published (Keene 1984, 198 f.).

Thus, Japanese Romanticism (in poetry) on the whole perished, and was replaced by realistic prose around the turn of the century. 3.

The question of terminology

Romanticism, however, survived and persisted in prose. The writer Izumi Kyōka, who produced both drama and narrative fiction, was a representative figure. Several tendencies are evident in him that suggest spiritual affinities to a number of European Romantics. Poulton argues that Kyoka’s works were an attempt to return to a juvenile stage against the grain of the society that itself was striving for maturation (Poulton 2001, 57). Poulton also points out the early death of Kyōka’s mother as a background for his search for the feminine and maternal. »One thus discovers in much of his fiction powerfully maternal figures, projections of the protagonist’s mother-longing, who nevertheless also have sexual desires of their own that cannot ultimately be satisfied by the immature boy-heroes of his stories« (58). »In his construction of the archetypal feminine, one increasingly detects a drift from the realistic toward the fantastic in Kyōka’s fiction« (59). »His idealization of women may be taken as a regard for the feminine sex as the ultimate Other, the erotic source of so many of his supernatural prodigies« (60). In addition, according to Poulton: [i]n his literature, the feminine principle stands for tradition, and women are typically portrayed as the sacrificial victims of a cruel and male-dominated project of modernization. If Kyōka’s fantasy was generated by his longing for women, it was equally informed by his antagonism toward the proponents of the modern age. In this sense, Kyōka’s recourse to fantasy was based on a longing for a mother who had already passed over into the region of death and dreams, and was in effect an act of vengeance upon both the reality of his times and the

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Takayuki Yokota-Murakami rhetoric of realism. Women best represented this resentment, but anyone associated with the karyukai or similar, marginal societies acquired a ghostly aura. As victims of modernization [in Kyōka’s reconstruction of history, an erroneous judgment in my own view], such groups were fast becoming no more than an anachronism« (ibid., 62).

In this respect, Kyōka’s views were shared by Lafcadio Hearn, even before the latter migrated to Japan. In due course, time renders us all ghosts, but those whose way of life has not caught up with the age find themselves as good as ghosts while they still live. This is the conclusion of two old tradesmen of the Yoshiwara quarter in Kyōko’s Chumoncho (The Order Book, 1901), who joke about having become »memorial tablets to dead old Edo«. It was finally in fantasy that Kyōka could conceive of a possible future for his past, a means by which his heroes and heroines could transcend their inevitable misfortunes and achieve, as it were, a post-tragic destiny (ibid.). [G]iven new and attractive paradigms, the erasure of one’s own personal and ethnic memory — which is largely what such a rejection of tradition would have implied — should by all rights be regarded as anathema to the very purpose of writing, equivalent to promoting a kind of cultural amnesia (ibid., 74 f.).

Is Kyōka’s project, then, not already modern in that it posed itself against modernity? Against this background, Donald Keene draws a somewhat pedantic distinction and refuses to consider Kyōka as a »Romantic«. He writes: »Some critics include the works of Izumi Kyōka in the Romantic Movement. If this is allowed, there would certainly be a great exception to this generalization [that Japanese Romanticism mostly consisted of poetic works], but Kyōka differed so much from the Bungakkai (Literary World) writers that he surely belongs outside the movement; he was a Modernist rather than a Romantic« (Keene 1984, 200 f.). A ground for this rather nominalistic argument is, apparently, Keene’s association of Romanticism with poetry (and criticism): »Tōkoku’s fiction consisted of a single, undistinguished short story, Shukkonkyō« (The Magic Mirror, 1893). It was true in general of the Romantic writers that they were most successful in poetry and criticism« (Keene 1984, 194). Keene’s position, if correct, raises a fundamental theoretical question as to the current project: Romantic prose fiction. Can prose be romantic? If so, in what way?, and especially in Japan which had had no Novalis who preached that prose itself should be made poetic, i.e. »romanticized«. To begin with, what do we understand by »Romanticism«? Romanticism is a highly ambiguous conception from which a variety of definitions, explanations, characterizations have derived, often contradicting one another. Arthur O. Lovejoy insisted that the term Romanticism has come to possess such different denotative planes that it has ceased to function as a critical concept. René Wellek opposes this view and tries to show that there exists a certain »unity of theories, philosophies, and style« (Wellek 1963, 129; of course, he speaks of »the unity of European Romanticism«). Wellek, however, though demonstrating the historical connections of the Romantics, does not describe in concrete terms »a coherent group of ideas« that the term Romanticism may imply. Whose argument is more valid, Lovejoy’s or Wellek’s, is beyond the scope of the present chapter. Let me, for now, follow the broad standard definition given in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary:

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a literary, artistic, and philosophical movement originating in Europe in the 18th century, characterized chiefly by a reaction against neo-classicism with its stress on reason and intellect and an emphasis on the imagination and emotions and their freely individualized expression or realization in all spheres of activity, and marked, esp. in English literature, by sensibility and the use of autobiographical material of an introspective cast, and exaltation of the primitive and the common man, an appreciation and often a worship of external nature, an interest in the remote in time and space, a predilection for melancholy, and the use in poetry of older verse forms.

Some of the features here aptly describe »Japanese Romanticism« of the Literary World circle, namely, »an emphasis on the imagination and emotions and their freely individualized expression«, and »the use of autobiographical material of an introspective cast, and exaltation of the primitive«. They are found in critical essays of Tōkoku (imagination and emotions), lyric poems of Tōson (autobiographical material of an introspective cast), and dramatic poetry of Tōkoku (exaltation of the primitive), etc. Japanese Romanticism also featured a call for the irrational. However, a note should be taken here that it was not »a reaction against neo-classicism« with its stress on reason and intellect« as it was in the West. Neo-classicism was simply not existent in Japan before Romanticism. Turning to »Romantic prose fiction«, the problem of our critical language becomes more serious. Kataoka Ryōichi’s The Study of Japanese Romanticism lists such prose writers as Ozaki Kōyō, Kōda Rohan, Takayama Chogyū, Izumi Kyōka, et al. Evidently, none of them perfectly fits in the definition of a »Romantic«, given above. Ozaki Kōyō, teacher of Izumi Kyōka, was a »realist«, although his style and method are considered to be quite different from those of naturalists. It is, therefore, rather strange that Kataoka included Kōyō under the rubric of Romanticism. Apparently, his rationale was that Kōyō, in his admiration for the Edo master fiction writer, Ihara Saikaku, expressed a deep belief in human »love«: »a truly ‘Romantic’ sentiment which believes in this human faculty and its potentiality and leads to their [Saikaku’s and Kōyō’s] extreme valorization of love, viewed as an essence of such faculty« (Kataoka 1979, 96). This feature loosely fits in the definition of Romanticism as an »emphasis on emotion«. If, however, Romanticism in literature foregrounds the »penchant for passion and emotion«, a considerable part of realistic prose of Japan has to be included under this rubric. Shōyō’s definition of Realism stipulated »human emotions« as objects of the (realistic) novel. Futabatei’s »realistic« novel Ukigumo (The Drifting Clouds, 1887–89), featured romantic love and craving for individualism, as has been thoroughly documented and analyzed by Janet Walker, and became a model for a modern novel. If Romanticism foregrounds »liberation of ›self‹«, once again one has to include »naturalistic novels« (which are often identified with first-person narrations), along with the Romantic poems and criticisms of the early Literary World writers, under the rubric of Romanticism. Either way, we encounter terminological and methodological difficulties. These difficulties point to the problems of applying the Western literary categories to the literary tradition of the East. None the less, René Etiemble argues that literary genres and critical terms are universal, insisting that, for instance, Chinese and European Pre-Romanticisms are comparable: I want to point out that all my quotations on the birth of pre-romanticism in Europe were taken from Chinese poets, from K’iu Yuan, who lived before the Christian era, to the epoch

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of the Song […]. [I]f I am able to throw light on all the themes of European pre-romanticism in the 18th century with quotations taken from Chinese poetry prior to the Christian era and the first twelve centuries of the Christian era, it is obviously because there exist forms, genres, invariables, in a word, that man exists, and so does literature (Etiemble 1966, 38).

Eugene Eoyang argues completely the opposite. Just as trying to find the counterpart of a Chinese poetic form Shih ching in the West is pointless, adapting a Western literary category such as »tragedy« to a Chinese literary work is problematic (Eoyang 1989, 11). The above analysis of the way the critical term »Romanticism« can be applied to the modern Japanese literature serves in support of Eoyang’s arguments. (See also my Don Juan East/West). 4.

Defining the Romantic in the Japanese context

Let us, then, among the »Romantic« prose writers, presented by Kitaoka, seek traits, if any, of Japanese »Romanticism« other than the »emphasis on the emotions«. Going back to the Webster’s Dictionary definition, we may turn to its emphasis on the »imagination«, to its interest in the fantastic and the Gothic. For instance, the writer Kōda Rohan, described by Kataoka as a Romantic, often dealt with themes of the supernatural. In Taidokuro (Encounter with a Skull, 1890), the author stays overnight at a mountain hut whose hostess narrates her story about a man who died out of unrequited longing for her. In the morning the writer finds that he has been talking with a skull. Izumi Kyōka, a representative »Romantic prose writer« as mentioned above, consistently displayed a similar interest. His most popular, most critically acclaimed story, Kōya hijiri (The Saint of Mt. Koya, 1900), is a ghastly story, in which a priest stays at an inn and barely escapes being turned into an animal and killed by a beautiful hostess who has acquired a magic power and enjoys toying with travelers. Such heroines in many ways remind us of the Belles Dames sans Merci, described by Mario Praz in his Romantic Agony. Of course, »Gothic« and »Romantic« are related, but distinct, concepts. This again invites our caution against using the concept of »Romanticism« carelessly in the history of Japanese literature. As we have seen, although some critics insist on using the term Romanticism only in connection with the poet-critics of Literary World, their movement was not conceived as an antithesis to Enlightenment/Classicism as in the European formulation of it. Likewise, if we are to include Izumi Kyōka and other prose writers under the rubric of Romanticism, we should be reminded that it was antithetical not to classic literature, but to the realistic writing of Naturalism, a wave historically following it, and because tinged with positivism, once again different from the European formulation of Romanticism, because these separate waves arrived more or less as an accrued bundle of options in Meiji Japan. This is, probably, why the term »Romanticism« (rōman shugi) was seldom used before the 1900s when Naturalism became the established mode of literature. When it was used, it was almost always in the older sense of »the extravagant, the unbelievable«. Shōyō’s The Characters of the Contemporary Students records this earlier usage: »While one is young, one tends to desire to do something Romantic, i.e., something eccentric which may be found in novels and stories« (Shōyō 1969, 75). The Literary World poets and critics of the 1880s and 1890s never described

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themselves as »Romantics«. The inclusion of these literati under the rubric of Romanticism took place only in the 1900s when naturalism became a norm and a term was needed to label what was not naturalistic. Japanese Romanticism was perceivable only as a counter-discourse to Naturalism. For this reason, I take issue with Cody Poulton’s formulation of Kyōka’s Romanticism, i.e. the assertion that »Kyoka’s disenchantment with contemporary society aligned him with a key feature of European Romanticism: its critique of modernity« (Poulton 2001, 62). If Kyōka’s Romanticism was a critique of modernity, it was also part of the project of modernity: in the Japanese context, it was pursued from the vantage point of the modern, not the pre-modern. Naturalism and Romanticism were complementary to the modernization of Japanese literature. If Kyōka dwelled on the themes related to the (preceding) Shogunate society, this can be read as his way of »orientalizing« the Edo culture. It was a realm needed for constructing his modern world. Therefore, he depicts the remnants of the Edo culture such as the mores of the pleasure quarters, the Kabuki theaters, downtown carpenters and rickshaw drivers, etc. in the setting of the present-day cities. The same relationship can be said to underpin his Gothic stories. In terms of time, the setting for them is always contemporary, regardless of whether the place is set in the suburbs or in the mountainside. And he even often chooses to depict ghosts in downtown Tokyo. His is primarily an interest in the supernatural as found in the natural and in the mundane. He defends this in the essay »Yo no taido« (My Attitude): It seems that many are blaming me for my writing about ghosts. […] Yet, I can’t help feeling interested in them. Someone said to me, »If you really want to depict ghosts, you might want to describe them only in the solemn setting of high mountains and deep valleys, but not in a room of several square yards in the middle of Tokyo.« However, I do want them to appear, if possible, in downtown Edo, where one can hear the train bells (Izumi 1966, 356).

5.

Marginalization of the Romantic

We have striven to see Naturalism and Romanticism as complementary elements of modernity. It, however, remains true that Naturalism was the formative and predominant principle of the two; Romanticism was the marginal. And because of the normative pressure of Romanticism, the Japanese writers of fiction had to find their own way of reaction. As we have seen, the choice of the leader of the Literary World circle, Shimazaki Tōson, when he decided to turn from poetry to prose, was to abandon his Romantic style and to adopt Realism/Naturalism. Two of the most distinguished writers of modern Japan, Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki, also achieved a successful career by somehow repressing the Romantic element in their works and turning to realistic writing. Ōgai launched into a literary career with three stories, featuring Berlin and other German cities: Maihime (The Dancer, 1990), Utakata no ki (Foam on the Waves, 1990), Fumidzukai (The Courier, 1991). The Dancer is a story about a young Japanese man, who, studying in Berlin, falls in love with a waitress, only to desert her when he has to return to Japan. In Foam on the Waves, a Japanese student of art in Bavaria meets Marie, an unfortunate maiden whose fate mad Ludwig II toys with and who eventually drowns in the lake with him. The Courier relates a Saxon Princess’s rejection of an unwanted marriage; a Japanese

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officer works as a courier in this scheme, and a shepherd boy, embracing an unrealistic yearning for the princess, throws himself into the lake after her departure from the castle. Part of the special, or indeed »exotic«, color of these narrations derives from their connecting European atmospheres and Japanese experiencing figures. Ōgai largely abandoned such Romanticism displayed in earlier works in his later career, turning to the realistic novel, historical narratives, and even to naturalistic writing. To turn to another literary giant of the Meiji era Sōseki, in his earlier career, demonstrated an ability to create a wide range of styles. But his penchant for Romanticism was pronounced within a collection, Yōkyo shū (Drifting in Space, 1906), consisting of seven Romantic short stories, three of which are based on motifs taken from medieval England. Sōseki, more so than Ōgai, subsequently abandoned the Romanticism and Gothicism found in these works, and produced only purely realistic novels. This may have to do with the fact that Sōseki’s literary career began much later than Ōgai’s and coincided with the peak of Naturalism. Ōgai and Sōseki were exceptional cases because these writers could switch from Romantic writing to Realism without much trouble. There were more unfortunate cases. Saganoya Omuro was a graduate of the Tokyo school of Foreign Languages, studying Russian language and literature together with Futabatei Shimei. In contrast to Futabatei, founder of the Japanese realistic movement, Saganoya was a writer whose disposition was predominantly Romantic. However, possibly under the influence of his friend, Futabatei, and also responding to the normative pressure of realism exerted by Shōyō’s treatise, Essence, Saganoya’s works were from the beginning an awkward mixture of two literary principles. His first successful work, Ajikinashi (The Dreary World, 1888), is a kind of Bildungsroman, but is filled with Romantic images. The novel begins with a scene where a friend of the hero of the story visits his deserted tomb. The tragic mood is intensified by a flying black raven and fallen leaves. The main body of the novel is an autobiography written by the hero and left to his friends. Critic Nakamura describes the novel thus: All the literary elements which he would later develop can be found in The Dreary World: first, his disposition to make a critique of Meiji civilization on the basis of »truth«; second, the tendency that this critique was bound to turn into a yearning for something transcendent, not producing any actual act. […] The first established him as a critic of civilization, pursuer of truth, just like Futabatei Shimei. The second point has invited the view that he was a precursor of romanticism before the Literary World circle (Nakamura 1971, 431).

However, his close tie with Futabatei Shimei, probably, proved to be harmful to the aspiring novelist. His second novel, Hakumei no suzuko (A Miserable Girl, Suzuko, 1888), begins with a Gothic description of a dilapidated house which a mysterious figure is peeping into. A young girl, seriously ill, is staring at this figure from within the room with deep-set eyes. Such fantastic description is quickly replaced by the theme of an unhappy relationship between a young aspiring, intellectual hero and the girl who has now recovered, very much in the vein of Futabatei’s The Drifting Clouds in its quest to depict social problems of the period of modernization and westernization. Apparently, such issues were alien to Saganoya’s temperament, which may explain the abrupt, implausible ending of the story: a man whom Suzuko trusted suddenly turns into a villain, and because of this trust, Suzuko abandons the hero, only to regret her decision later in vain and to convert to Christianity. Saganoya was thus always split between the

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Romantic description to which he was, probably, disposed, and the realistic writing to which he was impelled by the standard of literature of the day. Two works that followed exemplifies this conflict: Hatsukoi (First Love, 1889), being a Romantic story based on the short story of Turgenev; and Kusare tamago (A Rotten Egg, 1889), an unsuccessful novel dealing with social problems. Nakamura believes that Saganoya achieved some literary success in that the writer strictly distinguished his two dispositions in First Love and A Rotten Egg and never confused them, but his subsequent works Nozue no kiku (Wild Chrysanthemum, 1889), and Ruten (Vagrancy, 1889), Nakamura thinks (rightly, perhaps), formed a pair, awkwardly mixing the two literary strains. 6.

Two special cases of Romanticism

There were writers who seem to have been more or less independent of such interaction of »Romanticism« and »Realism« and remained happily in the sphere of the Romantic and Gothic as their personalities dictated. One such figure is Kōda Rohan, whose significantly long literary career spans the emergence of modern Japanese literature up to the mid-twentieth century. He more or less retained a distance from any literary school or movement and continued to create Romantic/Gothic stories which suited his temperament well into the time when both Romanticism and Naturalism were outdated. He could do so by dissociating himself from the literary horizon of the period. However, even he was not completely free from the fetters of the realistic mode in literature. This is demonstrated by the fact that his two novels, in which he atypically attempted realistic description, Fūryū mijin zo (Minute Storehouse of Life, 1893–95), and Amaustu nami (Waves Striking the Sky, 1903–04), were abandoned unfinished. Lafcadio Hearn was, probably, the only Romanticist in Japan whose literary career was not particularly shaped by the realist movement despite his relatively late dates as a writer. Born on a Greek island to an Irish Protestant father and a Greek Catholic mother, having grown up in Ireland and on the European continent, Hearn worked eventually as a journalist and translator in the Caribbean basin and in the United States. He came to Japan late in his career in 1890, but took to the culture as if it had been predestined as his natural home. He married a Japanese woman and became naturalized. Besides essays explaining nuances of the culture to a Western readership, Hearn wrote a series of Gothic stories based on the Japanese folk tales he heard from his wife. His penchant for the ghostly and exotic was life-long; it was represented, for instance, by the account Two Years in the West Indies (1890) in his American days. He did not seem to have a need for coming to terms with the realistic mode that was then flourishing in Europe and had marked Saganoya Omuro et al. Hearn continued to develop his personal taste for forms of Romantic imagination. His marginal identity, both as an Irish-Greek, having lived in the United States for a long time (and having once been married to a mulatto woman in the Midwest who was half African-American and half Irish), may have facilitated his amazing capacity for ever further cultural transplantation. In Japan he was essentially outside the current literary trends and served more as a cultural mediator between East and West.

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The Romantic counterargument

In contrast, the career of Izumi Kyōka, perhaps the greatest modern Japanese Romanticist, had a similar trajectory to that of Saganoya, of swaying between Realism and Romanticism. His earlier works such as Kechō (Monstrous Bird, 1897), and Gaisenmatsuri (The Triumphal Festival, 1897), demonstrate his extraordinary interest in the supernatural, for which he received much criticism. For instance, a review of Kechō in Shigarami sōshi reads: »There might have been some interest in a work of this sort if the writer had taken on something like Aesop’s Fables, but in any event the writer was sadly mistaken to think he could turn this into a work of sentiment (ninjō) that would make us cry. From the writing of Bakeichō to the publication of this work, Kechō, Kyōka himself has gone through some sort of weird transformation. One can only hope that he will return to the real, human world and show us what literature is supposed to be about« (Poulton 2001, 59). Possibly in response to criticism in this vein, Kyōka published a realistic novel, Yushima mōde (Worship at Yushima), in 1899. The critic Gotō Chūgai wrote of Worship: »In this work we find that the author Kyōka has made significant progress in his realistic descriptions. Therefore, the criticisms that have been addressed to him, namely, that his works are too fantastic, too absurd, and too unrealistic, are outdated« (qtd. in Tayama 1923, 115). The Romantic critic Takayama Chogyū, however, made a similar point, but from a different perspective: I admit that in Worship at Yushima Kyōka aimed at realism. Yet, I cannot give him credit for this. When I stop and reflect whether the spirit of the entire work and the realistic expressions are in harmony or not, I feel suspicious. […] There is much that we yearn for in something which transcends nature. For instance, so-called secrets of the heaven and the earth or mysterious communication of life and universe express such yearning. I wish Kyōka gave full swing to his own talent and refrained from attempting superficial realism in vain (Takayama 1914, 810 f.).

Apparently, Chogyū’s opinion that Kyōka’s real talent lay in his Gothic writing proved to be more valid as Kyōka soon returned to it in The Saint of Mt. Koya. However, even after his selfconfident return to Romanticism/Gothicism, Kyōka’s career was almost always pursued as a kind of counterargument to realistic/naturalistic writing and, consequently, continued to be influenced by it, though in a negative fashion. Later Kyōka launched into a harsh debate with naturalists. The leader of the Ken’yūsha school of literature, Ozaki Kōyō, preached to his disciples never to write anything that appeared »unnatural« even if it really took place, but to write something that appeared »natural« even if it did not take place. A major naturalist, Tayama Katai, furiously contested Kōyō’s motto, calling it a banal, »gilded« argument, and insisted that what actually took place had to be written even though it appeared unnatural precisely because it was real and that what was not real, even if appearing plausible, should not be written since it was not real. Such a belief led to the disappearance of narrativity from naturalistic literature and to its loss of fictitiousness and romanesque character. In 1908 Izumi Kyōka published an article, entitled »Romanchikku to shizenshugi« (The Romantic and Naturalism), which is believed to be a response to Katai’s argument and to the

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critique of Ken’yusha literature, to which he had belonged. In it he argues that, naturalists’ insistence notwithstanding, literature cannot be a bare description of reality, but requires »techniques« and beauty. In »My Attitude«, he defends his Romanticism against the grain of Naturalism: »If we only describe the ugly as such [as done by naturalists], I insist that such literature is without merit. […] I wish to touch upon some bigger force through the description of [ugly] reality« (Kyōka 1966, 356). He further defends his penchant for the Gothic: Ghosts are the reincarnation of my emotions. Some of the nursery rhymes that I listened to as a child are quite cruel: there appear serpents and snakes, hurting or even devouring a daughter of a rich man, etc. […] The beauty of subtle treatment of such cruel feelings impresses us and evokes indescribable emotions. These emotions are the origin of ghosts (ibid., 356).

Kyōka, thus, defended his Romantic tenets: emotions, beauty, and the supernatural. But these principles were formulated in conscious differentiation from naturalistic principles, as these were defined by Japanese adherents to Naturalism such as Katai. Kyōka does not deny Naturalism, but accepts it as a counter movement: »When naturalists so eagerly write about materials that are stimulating to the senses [i.e. scandalous — T.Y.-M.], Romantics have to work very hard to create a work whose essence is beauty in contrast to naturalistic works« (Kyōka 1942, 691). We reconfirm that Japanese Romantic prose fiction has remained, thus, not precedent, nor antithetical, but complementary to Realism, in such a way that these tendencies reciprocally define each other. Bibliography Eoyang, Eugene, 1989. »Polar Paradigms in Poetics: Chinese and Western Literary Premises«. Comparative Literature East West: Tradition and Trends. Ed. by Cornelia N. Moore and Raymond A. Moody. Honolulu: The College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature, University of Hawaii, and the East-West Center. Etiemble, René. 1966. The Crisis in Comparative Literature. Trans. by Herbert Weisinger and Georges Joyaux. East Lansing: Michigan State UP. Izumi Kyōka. 1942. Romanchikku to shizenshugi. Vol. 28 of Kyōka zenshū. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. ———. 1966. Yo no taido. Izumi Kyōka shū. Vol. 21 of Meiji bungaku zenshū. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. ———. 1990. The Saint of Mt. Koya and the Song of the Troubadour. Trans. by Stephen W. Kohl. Kanazawa: The Committee of the Translation of the Works of Izumi Kyōka. ———. 1992. Three Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Japanese Gothic by Izumi Kyoka. Trans. by Charles Shiro Inouye. Kanazawa: The Committee of the Translation of the Works of Izumi Kyoka. Kataoka Ryōichi. 1979. Nihon roman shugi bungaku kenkyū. Vol. 6 of Kataoka Ryōichi chosaku shū. Tokyo: Chūō kōron sha. Keene, Donald. 1984. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Kitamura Tōkoku. 1976. »Some Currents of Contemporary Literature«. Kitamura Tōkoku shū. Ed. by Odagiri Hideo. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. Mulhern, Chieko. 1977. Kōda Rohan. Boston: Twayne Publishers. Nakamura Mitsuo. 1971. »Kaidai« (Commentary). Futabatei Shimei/Saganoya Omuro shū. Vol. 17 of Meiji bungaku zenshū. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. Poulton, M. Cody. 2001. Spirits of Another Sort: The Plays of Izumi Kyoka. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan.

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Praz, Mario. 1970. The Romantic Agony. Trans. by Angus Davidson. London, New York: Oxford UP. Ryan, Marleigh Grayer. 1990. Japan’s First Modern Novel »Ukigumo« of Futabatei Shimei. Michigan: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan. Reprint of orig. ed., New York: Columbia UP, 1965. Takayama Chogyū. 1914. »Mudai roku«. Vol. 2 of Chogyū zenshū. Tokyo: Hakubunkan. Tayama Katai. 1923. Kindai no shōsetsu. Tokyo: Kindai bunmei sha. Tsubouchi Shōyō. 1969. Tsubouchi Shōyō shū. Vol. 16 of Meiji bungaku zenshū. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. Walker, Janet. 1979. The Japanese Novel of the Meiji Period and the Ideal of Individualism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Wellek, René. 1963. Concepts of Literature. New Haven, London: Yale UP. Yokota-Murakami, Takayuki. 1994. »Masaoka Shiki: Making of the Myth of Haiku«. Kyoto Conference on Japanese Studies. International Research Center for Japanese Studies. 247–252. ———. 1997. Don Juan East/West: On the Problematics of Comparative Literature. Albany, New York: The State of New York UP.

Ludic prose from Laurence Sterne to Carlos Fuentes A. Owen Aldridge

1.

Sterne in the ludic tradition

Although some literary critics are content to consider the present historical period as the modern age, others insist that we have graduated into a postmodern phase. One of the many new concepts that have entered theoretical discussion is that of »ludic (post)modernism«. From this discussion I propose merely to borrow back the word ludic as an adjective to be applied to literary texts, and instead of limiting myself to postmodernism, I shall cover the period between Roman times and the last decade of the twentieth century in grand outline while emphasizing Laurence Sterne and his direct descendants. The adjective ludic until very recently was not an English word at all, although a derivative ludicrous has existed for centuries. Both are forms of the Latin ludus, play or game, and the Latin verb ludere, to play. The modernist Hermann Hesse dipped back into Latin when entitling the second part of his esoteric novel Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game, 1943) »Magister Ludi«, and Johan Huizinga’s famous treatise Homo Ludens (1938) kept the concept of play as a crucial human attribute before the public between the world wars. The identifying characteristic of ludic prose, therefore, is play or amusement, which may be attained through a number of elements, including plot, characterization, structure, and language. An example of purely linguistic ludics, embodying meaning beyond mere phonetic similarities, would be the series: semiotics, semi-erotics and semi-idiotics. If this capricious chain of associations has the flavor of lines by James Joyce, that is no accident, since he figures among the »classic« ludic writers — and like Laurence Sterne was appreciative of Rabelais as a major predecessor in verbal ludism. The episodic structure characteristic of the free-form novel in which linear narrative chronology is abandoned in favor of a piecemeal jumble of anecdotes and reflections was introduced into European letters in 1759 by Sterne in his The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and carried on in subsequent volumes with accumulated digressions until 1767. In addition to deviations from linear narrative, Sterne’s style features intermittent references to the text, to the presumed author or to the reader as well as visual tricks such as squadrons of dashes and asterisks, pointing figures, hypothetical plot diagrams, a black, a marbled and several blank pages, and variously disordered chapters. Tristram Shandy is noted, moreover, for two apparently contradictory characteristics, sentimentalism and humor, the first associated with Romanticism, the second with classicism. This does not mean, however, that Sterne’s humor derives from Augustan intellectualism that is usually considered inimical to Romantic imagination. Romanticism also has a place for satire as many of Byron’s witticisms attest. Voltaire described Sterne’s style as »bouffon et hardi« (burlesque and daring) and compared it with that of Swift and Rabelais, affirming that it had as much philosophy as buffoonery (Voltaire 1837, 9:121). The latter word is associated with tricks and grotesque gestures, essential qualities of ludic prose. Some commentators have considered Sterne’s title as in itself a satirical reflection on British social distinctions.

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Despite Voltaire’s association of Sterne with Swift and Rabelais, he is more widely known for his sentimentalism, his appeals to the gentler or tender feelings and emotions, to the heart rather than the head. This is just the opposite of satire, ridicule, or lampooning, one of the usual characteristics of ludic prose. Sterne, nevertheless, frequently brings sentiment into contact with reason as in a famous passage in which his military-oriented character Uncle Toby expresses his reluctance to kill a fly, a prime example of Romantic irony. Sterne several times mentions Cervantes as well as Rabelais as his forerunners, the former representing a possible source for his sentimentalism, as well as a tough naturalism. He refers directly to Cervantes, for example, as the source of his tale, in A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1786), of a poor man’s excessive grief over the death of his ass. Carlos Fuentes likewise mentions Cervantes and Rabelais as his own forerunners, not necessarily motivated only by Sterne in doing so, for the Mexican’s humor, which is nearly entirely ludic, is consequently more Rabelaisian rather than sentimental. The most original of Sterne’s ludic devices is a linguistic one, that of expressing in a roundabout manner a concept that would give offense if expressed in a direct manner in straightforward language, a device that has tangential links to sentimentalism. Denis Diderot directly adopted this device from Sterne, but he did it in such a dramatic and forceful manner that the passages in which he does so have practically monopolized literary criticism concerning the two men. Sterne’s other followers imitated a purely structural device of ludic prose, that of designing the format of the printed page in such a way as to startle, puzzle, confuse and/or amuse the reader. As examples, he shifted the conventional positions of preface and dedication, interspersed some blank pages with others entirely black or marbled, and printed some paragraphs in the shape of natural objects, a variant of the shaped verse of some seventeenth-century poets. Another of Sterne’s linguistic devices was the invention or discovery of absurd proper names in a Rabelaisian vein such as Kysarcius, Phutatorius and Triptolemus to vary his humor. Besides his Cervantine playing with the artifices of literary works, one of the most extensive sources of humor in Tristram Shandy is the structural device of a protagonist-narrator who is not (necessarily) a human being but possesses the intellectual and emotional constituents of one. This device goes back in time as far as classical antiquity and was widely used in the seventeenth century as the basis of a subgenre of the Spanish picaresque. Sterne adapted it as an instrument for portraying the idiosyncrasies of the English middle class, and his later disciples have applied it to the cultures of Europe, Japan and Mexico. This device portrays an object or thing as observing the human condition rather than having this task performed by a set of characters involved in surroundings and events. This emphasis on things is called in English reification; in German Dinglichkeit; and in French chosification. The literary genre which utilizes a thing as protagonist or observer of society may be called the »thingaresque«. The origin of the genre goes back in history, however, much further than the Spanish picturesque. The precursor of all works of fiction which portray the human condition by means of protagonists who are not themselves human — whether animals, material objects, or supernatural creatures — is a Roman tale Metamorphoses or the Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius written in the second century A.D. In this first person narrative, a young man who wishes to learn about witchcraft and to be turned into a bird is by error changed into an ass. Although his adventures or mishaps provide a continuous saga of the suffering underdog,

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the main interest of the work is now found in an assortment of erotic and fantastic tales held together by the device of the transformed animal as narrator. 2.

Narrator artifices in Baroque and Enlightenment literature

In the seventeenth century, reification takes place in the major picaresque work of German letters, Simplicissimus (1669), by Hans Jacob Grimmelshausen, a veritable grab-bag of literary styles and folklore. The protagonist participates in a major historical event, the Thirty Years War, he travels throughout Europe as far as Moscow, and he witnesses many feats of magic and the supernatural. Two of the chapters of this literary mélange consist of the autobiographical narrative of a piece of paper, a picaresque novel in miniature within the broader framework of a full-scale picaresque novel. The adventures of this hapless inanimate object may be considered like those of the protagonist of the Golden Ass as a symbolic representation of the human condition. The theme of transformation in which an individual may in a single lifetime be turned into several different incarnations is suggested by Apuleius’s complete title Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass. Parallels may be noted in the original Spanish picaresque novel, the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). In its second part, Lazarillo descends to the bottom of the sea and is transformed into a tuna fish, lives with a school of tuna, and is even given in marriage to one of them. When eventually caught by a fisherman, he once again becomes a man. In the appended »Continuatio« or sixth book of Simplicissimus, the shape-shifting character Baldanders (»Soonother«) undergoes changes into an oak tree, a pig, a bratwurst, a farmer’s turd, a clover patch, a cow’s dung, a flower, a twig, a mulberry tree, and a beautiful carpet. Eventually he flies away as a bird. According to Grimmelshausen, Protean changes such as these exceed those in Ovid or any other writer. Later in the seventeenth century, a French work by Samuel Isarn, combining poetry and prose, Le Louis d’or à Mademoiselle Scudéry (Mademoiselle Scudery’s Golden Coin, 1660), described the peregrinations and transformations of a golden nugget. Taken from the mines and turned into a coin during the reign of Alexander the Great, he subsequently fell into the hands of a miser, various antiquaries, a jeweler, and several gallants. He was melted down several times and turned into statues, coins, and jewelry. Eventually falling and breaking into a million pieces, he was saved from the ignominy of becoming a gold leaf by being at last returned to the shape of a coin. This notion of a coin passing from hand to hand became the most popular form of the thingaresque in the eighteenth century, constituting part of what may be called the genre of the personified trifle. Joseph Addison in an essay in the Tatler (No. 429) describes the adventures of a shilling, born in Peru and transported to London in an ingot by Sir Francis Drake. The theme was developed by Charles Johnstone in Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea (1760–65), which probes the iniquities in every part of European society through the peregrinations of the coin through the hands of the representatives of twenty professions. Francis Coventry in Pompey the Little (1751) described the adventures of a lap dog who changes masters and social milieux in rapid succession. John Hawkesworth in an article of his journal The Adventurer (No. 121; 1754) traced the progress of a louse from the head of an urchin to the bosom of a court beauty

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and eventually to the bodies of an assortment of London dwellers of all professions. Tobias Smollett in Adventures of an Atom (1769) described the peregrinations of an atomic protagonist throughout a maze of situations in Japanese society, intended to represent England. A score or more of similar titles appeared between 1760 and the end of the century, and as recently as 1843 the American historical novelist James Fenimore Cooper published a book-length novel entitled Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief. The protagonist is an inanimate object telling its own story while commenting on social life and customs. The Romantic Cooper takes pains to explain how an inanimate object may possess consciousness and also develops a theory of voyant and mesmerist powers which enable the handkerchief to perceive events taking place beyond its physical presence. In even more recent times, Marguerite Yourcenar published an anti-Fascist novel Denier du rêve (Dream Penny, 1934; 1959), describing the adventures of a peregrinating ten lire coin, which becomes »the symbol of contact between human beings immersed, each one in his own fashion, in his own passions and his intrinsic solitude«.1 A supernatural being rather than an inert object has also been used by Luis Vélez de Guevara in his El diablo cojuelo (The Lame Devil, 1641), as a device for penetrating the secret lives and thoughts of representatives of various social types. Half a century later, a French humorist, Alain René Lesage imitated and greatly expanded this satirical view of urban society in his Le diable boiteux (The Devil on Two Sticks, 1707; 1726). In both the Spanish and the French narratives, a crippled devil is released from a bottle where he had been kept captive and out of gratitude to his human liberator uses his supernatural powers to reveal the events and personalities — primarily sordid ones — of a great city, Madrid. The liberator is a human being, but he has no personality or private life and serves primarily as a mirror or recording device. He does, however, have the privilege, which he exercises, of asking to be shown those aspects of society which interest him particularly. During the eighteenth century elements of the genre of the personified trifle were merged with the Oriental tale in a new combination of eroticism, the supernatural, and social satire. Claude Prosper Crébillon fils exploited the erotic possibilities of the theme of transmigration in Le Sofa (The Sofa, 1742), the autobiographical narrative of a spirit confined to furniture used for reclining. From this vantage he observes the amorous behavior of its occupants. Six years later Denis Diderot combined erotic motifs with social and esthetic concepts in Les bijoux indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels, 1748), written in a variety of styles, including the dialogue, Diderot’s favorite medium. Under the influence of the Oriental tale, Diderot describes the experiences of a sultan with a magic ring which has the power of making the jewel of each lady of the court confess her amorous adventures and also to make the sultan invisible and to transport him wherever he wishes to go. The jewel is an allegory for that part of a lady’s anatomy which she considers to be her greatest sexual treasure. Although the erotic interest is focused on these talking jewels, the narrative thread is held together by the sultan’s magic ring, comparable to the persona or personified trifle in other manifestations of the thingaresque. Although literary history so far as I know has completely overlooked the parallel, Diderot’s non-human narrator is formalistically a precursor of Sterne’s Tristram. 1.

»le symbole du contact entre des êtres humains enfoncés, chacun à sa manière, dans leurs propres passions et leur intrinsèque solitude« (Yourcenar 1982, 162).

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From Sterne and Diderot to Hoffmann

In Tristram Shandy Sterne combines the device of reification with humor and burlesque, particularly through comical names, puns, and sexual innuendo mixed with prurience, along with a wide variety of structural eccentricities, including discontinuous narrative and disarranged contents, for example, as mentioned, a preface in the middle of the book. Although Tristram himself is the narrator, his identity is nonetheless ambiguous. Most of the action in the novel takes place before his birth — when (we may presume) he is nothing but a Homunculus, the eighteenthcentury word for a fetus, which Sterne uses in the first chapter. It is not clear, however, whether the homunculus itself is the narrator or whether Tristram several years after his birth is retelling events which had been related to him. Either way, the perspective is that of the homunculus, for the adult Tristram does not enter into the narrative as a personality in any way except through meditations that are mature in character. Naturally, readers may wonder whether Sterne does more than reintroduce the homunculus theme in the interpolated bizarre story of a supposed actual case of a homunculus author (who propounds the very Sternean doctrine of »gonopsychical« anthropology) in order to underscore how human sentience is grounded in biology. Sterne’s hinting that Tristram, the principal first-person voice, is perhaps a fetus is one of several analogies for his worrisome status as a traumatized sentient being — wounded like his eccentric Uncle Toby. Actual events occupy less space than that given over to digressions and interpolated materials with comic or satirical overtones. In the first chapter, the process of Tristram’s conception is interrupted when his mother asks whether his father has wound the clock. Tristram’s birth is attended to by a mid-wife and a bumbling country physician, Dr. Slop, who damages a sensitive part of the infant’s anatomy, described euphemistically as his nose. In the meantime, Tristram’s father elsewhere in the house relates a story translated from the French about a man with an extraordinarily long nose. The local curate Mr. Yorick is hastily summoned for the baptism, but because of a misunderstanding caused by an inefficient housemaid, he names the child Tristram, a name that his father detests, rather than Trismegistus, the one that the father had selected. The record of Tristram’s boyhood is filled with anecdotes and digressions concerning other members of the household, but has almost nothing about himself. Nonetheless, we are treated to a steady stream of his philosophizing about life and the nature of his own mind and temperament. Much of the space is devoted to his Uncle Toby and the latter’s delicate relationship with the Widow Wadman, who attempts to entrap him into a marriage which he is reluctant to envision. When she persists in inquiries concerning the exact location of an embarrassing wound he had suffered in battle, he breaks off their relationship. Tristram labels this as a cock and bull story, a description that fits the several hundred pages of the novel as a whole. In some ways Sterne’s prose resembles a constant dialogue or conversation between himself and his »dear reader«, whether addressed in this manner or as »your worship« or even »Madame«. Although previous authors had experimented with this technique of addressing the reader, none had carried it to such lengths as Sterne or used it primarily for humorous effect. Other idiosyncrasies include printing of extraneous documents such as one of Sterne’s own sermons, a ritual of excommunication in the Catholic Church, and a sampling of imaginary dedications including one to Voltaire’s characters Candide and Cunegonde, and the translation of a fable concerning noses, which some readers have felt borders on poor taste.

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Diderot was so greatly influenced by Tristram Shandy that he paraphrased entire passages from it into his own Jacques le fataliste (Jacques the Fatalist, 1773–75), published posthumously in 1796. The longest of these borrowed texts consists of a conversation between Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim over the latter’s battle wound and the erotic sensations aroused when a young woman dresses it. Critics have ever since concentrated on the question of whether this represents plagiarism, even though Diderot himself at the end of the novel draws attention to the source of the passage. Critics have, on the other hand, completely overlooked the parallel between Tristram Shandy and Diderot’s earlier Les bijoux indiscrets in that both have a non-human narrator, a resemblance that is implicitly recognized by Carlos Fuentes in Cristóbal nonato (Christopher Unborn, 1987), which I shall treat later in this chapter. Other imitations of Sterne in Jacques le fataliste consist in bawdy jokes, deliberate disorder, constant references to the reader, and the mixing of several distinct plot lines. Two years before the publication of Jacques le fataliste, another French novel, Voyage autour de ma chambre (Journey Around my Room, 1794), by Xavier de Maistre, incorporated a number of parallels to Tristram Shandy. In one chapter the author refers directly to Uncle Toby’s predilection for military affairs, or »the demon of war«, and in the following chapter describes this attachment as »the dada of Uncle Toby«. Like Sterne, de Maistre employs the digressive method and continually addresses the reader in alternating cajoling and scolding terms. The dedication appears at a middle point in the work. One chapter consists of nothing but a series of dots with a single word in the middle, and the following chapter is made up of merely two lines. A Portuguese Romanticist João Baptista de Almeida Garrett published a novel Viagens na minha terra (Travels in My Land, 1846), which has an epigraph from de Maistre as well as a title resembling the latter’s Voyage. He makes, moreover, several direct references to Tristram Shandy. The pioneer exponent of the experimental novel in the Western hemisphere, the Brazilian Machado de Assis, indicates in the preface to his Mémorias Pósthumas de Brás Cubas (Posthumous Memorials of Bras Cubas, 1881), that he has adopted Sterne’s free form in fiction. His borrowings and imitations are related to style, theme, and characterization, however, rather than to structure. He has a chapter on noses used as a euphemism and another on militarism as a hobby horse, and he addresses the reader frequently. The entire novel is permeated, moreover, with the type of sentimentalism associated with Uncle Toby’s refusal to take the life of a fly. Two works by E.T.A. Hoffmann at the height of German Romanticism follow Apuleius in using an animal as a symbolic representation of the human condition. In a short story »Meister Floh« (Master Flea, 1822), Hoffmann portrays the leader of a community of fleas serving as a kind of Near-Eastern genie for a young man in Frankfurt. He observes and judges human behavior and through his microscopic eye enables the young man to read other people’s thoughts. More famous is the same author’s Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern (Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, along with a Fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler in Stray Printer’s Sheets, 1819–1821), a parody of the Bildungsroman in which the ostensible protagonist is a cat who has learned to read and to write. This cat’s owner is Master Abraham, a mysterious magician-artificer, whose life intertwines with that of a true genius, his inspired but socially endangered friend Johannes Kreisler. In contrast to earlier accounts by animal protagonists, Kater Murr has a number of highly developed »subordinate« characters, including

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Kreisler, an orchestra conductor and composer. Murr writes in the first person and in a straight narrative line, and he studiously imitates the way that young educational heroes experience and feel over the course of several waves of literary fashion from Storm and Stress to high Romanticism — extensively mirroring the avid reception of these currents by the bourgeois public. Since Murr himself is supremely egotistical and his view of life is completely solipsistic, he does not engage extensively in observing human beings. This function is carried on in his animal world by a friendly but somewhat patronizing Poodle. Murr himself, a rather smug ordinary type, represents human nature rather than observing it. As Monica Spiridon has shown in an earlier chapter, Hoffmann’s use of improbable non-human characters and sub-narrators is part of a grander strategy of narrative polyphony that endows his novel with a heightened tension between its complex discursive levels and its deeper diegetic strand about suffering artists. As it unfolds in counterpoint, we struggle to piece together the far more important story of Kreisler and the divine singer Julia, of Abraham and his adventures, of their antagonists and the intrigue and madness at the suffocating court of a small German principality. The original German title prepares us for Hoffmann’s ironic contrasts, for the disproportion between what matters spiritually and the banal ordinary world high and low. The artfully contrived disorder in the narrative structure, borrowed straight from Sterne, exhibits a new heightened degree of Romantic irony. The shattered, scattered fragments that are bound »accidentally« interspersed in the cat’s regular tale all come from the (almost entirely lost) tragic life of a genuine, tormented artist, the great musician Kreisler, told in the third person. This doubling of the novel is not the only act of narrative self-reflection; the entire package comes wrapped in Cervantine layers of editorial commentary, and Hoffmann himself appears by name only in an outer editorial function, although the cover may credit him as the historical author. The ludic elements are shot through with the newer Romantic irony toward which the example of Sterne led European writers. 4.

Modern and postmodern inheritors of Sternean and Romantic ludism

Hoffmann’s novel had a decided influence upon an outstanding Japanese novelist of the nineteenth century, Natsume Soseki, whose comic masterpiece Wagahai wa neko dearu (I Am a Cat, 1905/06), parallels Hoffmann’s in many ways, drawing in turn even more extensively than does the latter upon Sterne. Soseki’s cat, who has no name, acquires a superficial knowledge of literature through his master, a pedantic professor of English. Soseki imitates Sterne by using comical names, for example, Madam Conk and Mrs. Sneaze, parallel to Kysarcius and Phutatorius in Tristram Shandy. »Conk« is Japanese slang for »nose«, a further link between Soseki and Sterne. Both authors use the topic of noses as a parody of literary discourse, treating the nose as a euphemism for the masculine organ of procreation. Carlos Fuentes, in his Cristóbal nonato, uses every one of the ludic techniques I have described in this chapter, and even refers to his own work as a »Ludectora« (Fuentes 1987, 150), or in English, »a Ludic read« (Fuentes 1989, 133). Instead of associating his title, like Sterne’s, with a »gentleman«, Fuentes boldly declares that he is writing about someone »unborn«. Fuentes himself participated as joint translator of the English version of his novel, and he may, therefore, be considered as the creator of the many puns and other verbal eccentricities

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in both the Spanish and the English texts. He acknowledges his debt to some of the authors who have preceded him in the thingaresque genre, designating them as the sons of La Mancha or Cervantes. According to his genealogy, his protagonist, Christopher, is son of Jacques the Fatalist, who is in turn son of Tristram Shandy, who is in turn son of Cervantes, or who is, in the contrary direction, the father of Tristram Shandy, who is the father of Jacques the Fatalist (Fuentes 1987, 152). Elsewhere he cites Assis de Chateaubriand as among Christopher’s paternal genes, a combined reference to the Brazilian Machado de Assis and the French François-René de Chateaubriand, the latter because he had, like Machado and Garrett, written a posthumous autobiography. The cats of Hoffmann and Soseki were also presumably both dead when writing their autobiographies. Fuentes also has an entire chapter entitled »Taking Wing with the Crippled Devil«, inspired by the Baroque author Vélez de Guevara’s El diablo cojuelo, whom Fuentes describes as »the first narrator of all things, the first curious individual« (Fuentes 1989, 277). In this chapter and elsewhere in the novel members of Christopher’s family fly through the air, a situation parallel to that in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), in which two uncles, Chamcha and Gibael, engage in free flight after their airplane has been bombed, another contemporary example of fanciful ludic prose. In one of his chapters Fuentes cites in English the complete title of Sterne’s work, and in still another, one that is not included in the English translation, he illustrates the importance of language by means of the episode in which Tristram was given this name by mistake instead of the presumably more prestigious Trismegistus (Fuentes 1989, 106). He playfully associates Sterne with the English poet T.S. Eliot because of the latter’s middle name Stearns, citing first T.S. Shandy and then T.S. Eliot, the latter word meaning in Mexico an ear of green corn. (Fuentes 1987, 84; 1989, 75). The most important — as well as the most conspicuous — link between Cristóbal nonato and Tristram Shandy consists in the framework of the two novels, both presumably narrated by a biological organism still in the womb. Tristram’s Homunculus, according to eighteenthcentury science, entered therein as a constituent part of his father’s semen. Fuentes, writing in a period of more advanced scientific knowledge, portrays the narrator, not as a fetus, but as a spermatozoon. Both novels deal with events prior and subsequent to the birth of the narrator, but Fuentes’s Cristóbal is unique in describing his thoughts and feelings while still in the womb. Also, unlike Tristram, he describes in detail his actual birth. Sterne treats all matters of conception and reproduction at length in a highly euphemistical but still prurient style, whereas Fuentes handles all aspects of sex openly, realistically, and comically. He follows Sterne not only in the basic framework of his novel, but in the use of typographical eccentricities. Among them, Cristóbal nonato has an entire page with almost no punctuation; a blank page; words and sentences printed in various shapes other than conventional straight lines; and a list of words beginning with the letter M. Unlike Sterne, however, Fuentes is seriously concerned with contemporary political and social conditions, particularly with the relations between his country and the rest of the world, especially the United States. These serious reflections on the poverty, political corruption, and economic victimizing of Mexico should be considered as separate from the prevailing comic mood of the novel and may possibly be interpreted as sentimentalism on a high level. Fuentes expertly balances his dedication to serious issues with humor resembling that of Cervantes and satire resembling that of Voltaire. The Shandyan flavor may be illustrated by a line which he writes without spaces between the individual words,

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»myonlyreligionismexico« (Fuentes 1987, 305; 1989, 279). Throughout the novel as a whole, ludic aspects such as this overwhelm the moral and philosophical themes. Without exaggeration one may safely say that Fuentes outdoes any of Sterne’s followers, including Diderot, Hoffmann or Soseki, in carrying on the ludic style and in some ways, for example, in allusions to psychological topics, even going beyond Tristramic limits. As participants at the Twelfth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (New York, 1982) were privileged to hear, Fuentes made one of his earliest, lengthiest, most eloquent statements of his personal attachment to Cervantes and Sterne there in a plenary session. Cristobal nonato is a culmination of this meditation on the tradition that passes through Sterne to Romanticism and then Modernism. Bibliography Fuentes, Carlos. 1987. Cristóbal nonato. Mexico City: Fondo de cultura economica. Fuentes, Carlos. 1989. Christopher Unborn. Trans. by the author and Alfred MacAdam. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Voltaire, François Arouet de. 1837. Œuvres complètes. 13 vols. Mélanges. Paris: Chez Furne. Yourcenar, Marguerite. 1982. Denier de rêve. Œuvres romanesques. Paris: Gallimard (Ed. Pléiade).

Rewrites and remakes Screen adaptations of Romantic works Elaine Martin 1.

Introduction

The phenomenon of screen adaptation of literary works has existed since the earliest days of the cinema, and the appropriation of Romantic works and motifs as cinematic material dates back to the earliest experimental films. Notable in this regard is Georges Méliès’s Coppélia ou la poupée animée (The Animated Doll), made in 1900 and based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (The Sandman, 1817). Although one might expect relatively few Romantic works to have been made into films due to generic impediments — poetry, for example, does not lend itself well to filmic representation — a rather broad range and number of Romantic works have in fact been made into films. These films were made somewhat sporadically over the years and in various countries, but they conformed to identifiable and to some extent predictable cultural patterns. Films based on Romantic works have been linked to developments within cinema itself, such as the hegemony of Expressionism in the twenties and thirties, but also to the role played by the cinema in society overall, and to changing attitudes toward literature and other artifacts of high culture, especially in terms of the alleged superiority of literary art to film (cf. Martin 2004). The present chapter investigates the grandes lignes which have delineated the screen adaptation of Romantic works, including a closer look at several cases that involve rewrites as well as multiple film versions — each with a different perspective on the Romantic aspects of the original work. Elsewhere, specifically in the above-mentioned essay, I have discussed the subgenre of literary adaptation itself and several paradigms of the novel-to-film relationship and have suggested major areas of critical interest and innovation. Because of the diversity among types of adaptations made, an approach based on categories was rendered impracticable. Instead, I have chosen to proceed by country, beginning with the country in which the largest number of writers and works has been adapted: Germany. From there, the discussion moves to France and then Britain. Films made in other countries are woven into these discussions. A few works such as Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (The Sandman), Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther, 1774; 1788), Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Mérimée’s Carmen (1845), and Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1810) recommend themselves for a more detailed exploration because of their narrative, literary, and filmic complexities; thus some additional attention will be accorded these clusters of works. Due to multiple screen adaptations of some works with only slightly varying titles that can potentially lead to confusion, the reader is urged to refer, at the outset and then as needed, to the filmography provided at the end of the essay.

Rewrites and remakes 2.

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Germany

2.1 E.T.A. Hoffmann E.T.A. Hoffman was perhaps the first Romantic writer whose work was adapted for the screen; I write »perhaps«, because in the era of the early cinema, motifs were appropriated from Hoffmann’s repertoire but not entire stories. As already mentioned in the introduction, French filmmaker Georges Méliès used Hoffmann’s motif of the live doll from Der Sandmann for his film Coppélia ou la poupée animée without adapting the work as a whole. He returned to the same motif, again not using the entire narrative, nine years later in La poupée vivante (The Living Doll; Ringel 1995, 86). Another early film based on Romantic motifs was Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, 1913) directed by the Dane Stellan Rye. Here, Hanns Heinz Ewers’s film script develops a doppelgänger motif, influenced by Hoffmann’s »Die Geschichte vom verlornen Spiegelbilde« (The Story of the Lost Mirror Image, 1815), by Poe’s »William Wilson« (1839), and in terms of the pact with the devil, by Goethe’s Faust (1808/32). In addition, this farraginous pattern of borrowing includes »the final words of Musset’s ›La Nuit de Décembre‹ [The Night of December, 1835], quoted twice at different points in the film, [which] are those of the double sitting on the grave: ›Je suis la solitude‹« (Schlüpmann 1986, 20). Early cinematic (technical) interests such as the chiaroscuro, associated especially with German Expressionism, dovetailed with thematic material such as Romantic individualism, the exploration of the psyche, and the dual personality or doppelgänger motif. Remakes of Der Student von Prag were made in 1926 and 1935 — testimony to the continued draw of these conflated subjects and the burgeoning interest in psychoanalysis (see Eisner 1973, 39–74; Kracauer 1947, 28–31; Schlüpmann 1986, 9–24). Stefan Ringel notes a radical shift in the filmic »reading« of Hoffmann in the two remakes: »In the films of [Henrik] Galeen and [Arthur] Robison, the demonic receded and made room for a psychological foundation to the events«.1 As Lotte Eisner observed in The Haunted Screen: »When The Student of Prague came out, it was immediately realized that the cinema could become the perfect medium for Romantic anguish, dream-states, and those hazy imaginings which shade so easily into the infinite depths of that fragment of space-outside-time, the screen« (Eisner 1973, 40). But the new engagement with the psychological, the irrational, and the uncanny had socio-political underpinnings, as one critic has noted (Schlüpmann 1986, 12). The two levels of many Hoffmann stories, the overt representation of the uncanny and the covert iconoclastic implication of the split individual in conflict with himself, and thus with society, made them attractive to further screen adaptation efforts. »This was an old motif«, Siegfried Kracauer wrote in 1947 in his now classic text From Caligari to Hitler, »surrounded by a halo of meanings, but was it not also a dreamlike transcription of what the German middle class actually experienced in its relation to the feudal caste running Germany? […] Face to face with their conscience they had to admit that they identified themselves with the very ruling class they opposed. They represented both Germanys« (Kracauer 1947, 30).

1.

»In den Filmen von Galeen und Robison trat das Dämonische immer weiter zurück und machte einer psychologischen Fundierung des Geschehens Platz« (Ringel 1995, 87).

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Once we leave the topic of motifs, and speak of adaptations proper, the Hoffmann tale most often adapted for the screen has been Das Fräulein von Scuderi (Mademoiselle de Scudéry, 1819), beginning with two film versions from the silent era. The first one was made as early as 1911 by the Italian director Mario Caserini, already known for his lengthy, monumental films. The second followed in 1919 by the German director Karl Frey, who gave the film the new title of Der Besessene (The Obsessed One). Stefan Ringel comments that Caserini’s only interest in the story was »the opportunity it afforded him to represent the opulence of Louis XIV’s Paris«.2 A 1930 Austrian sound version entitled Juwelen (Jewels) was followed by Die tödlichen Träume (Deadly Dreams) in 1951, Das Fräulein von Scuderi (aka Die Schätze des Teufels [The Treasures of the Devil]) in 1955, then Cardillac in 1968, this latter film made by the New German Cinema director Edgar Reitz, and finally a television film made for the ZDF (Second German State Television) by Lutz Büscher in 1975. The steady re-adaptation for the screen of this particular story, as opposed to others by Hoffmann, may be due in part to its popularization through Jacques Offenbach’s operatic Les contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann, 1881). It may be due in part also to the enduring quality and underlying universal appeal of its film noir subject matter (Ebert 1986, 2). Or possibly, as Stefan Ringel has argued, »the Expressionist filmmakers saw in E.T.A. Hoffmann a precursor of their view of art.«3 Hoffmann originally intended to entitle his story Cardillac to emphasize the »problematic of the artist« (»Künstlerproblematik«), but later chose Das Fräulein von Scuderi »in order to highlight the successful development of inspired artistic genius«.4 All four of these adaptations were German productions or co-productions, which is characteristic of Hoffmann film versions as a whole. As Stefan Ringel writes: »After early adaptations in France and Italy, Hoffmann reception was limited mainly to Germanspeaking countries«.5 After the Second World War, one might expect a diminished interest in the »darkly demonic« (»düster-dämonisch«, Ringel 1995, 88 ff.), but Paul Martin’s Die tödlichen Träume from 1951, using only motifs rather than an entire story, focuses on a student’s eerie dreams. Mirroring Hoffmann’s device of the intrusive narrator, Martin obliquely brings Hoffmann himself into the narrative by having the student take lodgings in the house where the author once lived. Die tödlichen Träume thus constitutes a precursor to a later subgenre of adaptations in which the work’s author interacts directly or comments on the narrative within the larger context of the film, for example Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein made in 1994. In his 1995 adaptation of Das Fräulein von Scuderi, Eugen York de-emphasizes the darkly demonic aspect by changing Hoffmann’s original flashback structure to a linear narrative, thus displacing interest from the criminal, whose identity is known, to the question of whether the detective can solve the crime. The problem of the artist’s dilemma, largely obscured in York’s film, comes, by contrast, into center 2.

»Caserini adaptierte diesen Stoff, weil er ihm die Gelegenheit bot, das prachtvolle Paris Ludwigs XIV. im Film nachzubilden« (Ringel 1995, 86).

3.

»Die expressionistischen Filmemacher sahen in ETA Hoffmann einen Vorläufer ihrer Kunstauffassung« (ibid., 86).

4.

»um die geglückte Entwicklung zu gelungenem Künstlertum ins Zentrum zu stellen« (ibid., 89).

5. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Nach frühen Adaptionen in Frankreich und Italien bleibt die Hoffmann-Rezeption außerdem hauptsächlich auf den deutschsprachigen Raum begrenzt« (ibid., 88).

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focus in Edgar Reitz’s Cardillac (1968) — bringing Reitz’s version closer to Hoffmann’s original interest in the conflicted artist. Less successful is Lutz Büscher’s 1975 representation of the story as an intimate chamber-drama, which effectively undercuts any pretension to the darkly demonic, mysterious, or inexplicable — that elusive element so important to Hoffmann’s tale. Other than three film versions of Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs, 1815/16) and two of Nußknacker und Mausekönig (Nutcracker and Mouse King, 1816), the only other Hoffmann work to be adapted, to my knowledge, has been Der Sandmann. Although various Hoffmann stories, including Der Sandmann, were repeatedly raided for their motifs — summarized by Lotte Eisner as: the living automaton, the lost reflection, the doppelgänger/split personality, and the somnambulist — film versions of Der Sandmann as a complete story date to the 1980s and 1990s (Eisner 1973). Dagmar Damek’s Der Sandmann (1983), her tenth made-for-television film, exhibits, perhaps because of its intended venue, a high degree of fidelity to the Hoffmann narrative. Of more interest to Stefan Ringel, who omits Damek’s film from his survey, is the version made by Eckhart Schmidt a decade later. Having made Fouqué’s Undine into a film in 1991, Schmidt, who both directed and wrote the script for Der Sandmann, returned to Romantic themes. The resulting work is less an adaptation per se than a borrowing or analogy. Schmidt’s story evinces numerous alterations: events transpire in current time on Lake Garda, Italy, instead of in the nineteenth century and in Germany; Nathaniel is renamed Daniel; Clara is present as a balancing force during »Daniel’s« interactions with Olimpia; the obsessive relationship is consummated; Coppola is revealed as Daniel’s father; and Daniel does not succumb in the end. In addition to these factual alterations, Schmidt is concerned less with the Sandman motif (based on the nursemaid’s tale) than with the clash between nature and culture, the latter represented by the automaton Olimpia whose innards he dismantles. In direct contrast to this stands Paul Berry’s 1993 animated film, which, concentrating on the nursemaid’s story and disregarding the Olimpia story, returns to Hoffmann’s willful blurring of reality and imagination. Berry’s dreaming protagonist never wakes up to return to reality, and the events are never revealed to be a mere dream. Paul Berry’s Sandman is not the only animated film of a Hoffmann work, perhaps indicative of a future direction in the popularizing of Romantic works: in 1990 Canadian director Paul Schibli made The Nutcracker Prince based on Hoffmann’s fairy tale. Ringel evaluates the film’s technical level as considerably inferior to Disney standards and suggests that the film’s relative lack of commercial success was foreseeable (Ringel 1995, 93). An appropriation of the literary raw material even freer than Schmidt’s — one hesitates even to call it an adaptation — is Stan Douglas’s 1994 film installation, Der Sandmann, now owned by the Guggenheim Museum; in the museum’s description, it is comprised of a somewhat unlikely sounding amalgamation of disparate sources (Spector 1994, 1). And finally there is director David Lynch’s 1986 Blue Velvet, which must be seen as an analogy or as a development from hypotext to hypertext, in which the latter undergoes updating and re-culturalization whilst simultaneously constituting a commentary, if not an outright critique, of the Urtext. Whereas the film adaptations of the Expressionist era represented the darkly demonic subtext of Hoffmann’s works, and later adaptations focused increasingly on psychological explanations of the uncanny, Blue Velvet, true to the ambiguity inherent in many Hoffmann texts, re-unites the two strands, privileging neither. Like Eckhart Schmidt, David Lynch both directed and wrote the script for this film. Also like Schmidt, Lynch relocates the

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story both spatially (to America) and temporally (to the 1980s), and he radically alters the basic narrative events. Unlike Schmidt, however, Lynch retains none of the exterior markers of the hypotext: neither the title nor the characters’ names, neither the Sandmann fairy tale nor the automaton motif. Kuzniar concludes that »Hoffmann […] announces the dual themes Freud developed, dismemberment and blindness; but he does so from a perspective that Freud does not acknowledge, the disparity between eye and ear« (Kuzniar 1989, 11). Blue Velvet explicitly cites the aural when Jeffrey discovers a severed ear. David Lynch said in a 1987 interview: »It had to be an ear because it’s an opening. An ear is wide and you can go down into it. It goes somewhere vast« (Bouzereau 1987, 1). At the end of the film, Lynch uses the ear metaphor to parallel Hoffmann’s blending of reality and the imagination: »It is only with the extreme closeup and reverse tracking shot out of the sleeping Jeffrey’s ear that Lynch clearly suggests that the entire film can be seen as a mirror of Jeffrey’s unconscious« (Lindroth 1990, 166). Mirroring Hoffmann, Lynch professes a keen interest in the irrational, the subconscious, and the uncanny, saying in an interview in Die Tageszeitung: »I love all mysteries, the unknown. I love to go into dark areas, because I don’t know what is there. I like the idea of a surface and I like the idea that this surface is hiding something underneath« (Lynch 1987, 1). From this brief survey of film versions of Der Sandmann, one may conclude that the film that diverges most widely from narrative and structural elements of Hoffmann’s tale nonetheless best approximates and communicates the author’s underlying preoccupations, both explicit and implicit: »Like Hoffmann, Lynch questions the nature of reality and suggests that we can trust neither our eyes nor ears« (Kuzniar 1989, 14). In addition to E.T.A. Hoffmann, only a few other German writers of the Romantic era have had their works made into films: Goethe, Kleist, Achim von Arnim, and Eichendorff, and for the latter two, there are screen versions of only a single work each. Werner Herzog’s Lebenszeichen (Signs of Life, 1968), based on Achim von Arnim’s Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau (The Mad Invalid of Fort Ratonneau, 1818), is interesting in part due to the director’s reputation in the New German Cinema. Rather than adapting Arnim’s story, Herzog uses the raw material in his larger cinematic agenda of questioning the trustworthiness of verbal language. In this example of »analogy« or borrowing, Herzog’s first feature-length film loosely follows the plot of Der tolle Invalide. Citing Herzog’s »preoccupation with the inward-turning imagination«, Brigitte Peucker writes, »the theme of madness is closely and unflinchingly connected with the theme of imagination. Repeatedly, Herzog has portrayed the negative side — the ›night side‹ — of the Romantic imagination; Francoeur and Stroszek, his counterpart in Signs of Life, are figures of negative Romanticism, but in Herzog this negativity is never redeemed or rationalized« (Peucker 1986, 220). Of Eichendorff ’s writings, only Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Good-For-Nothing, 1826) has been made into a film, once by an East German director, Celino Bleiweiss (1973), and then by West German co-directors Bernhard Sinkel and Alf Brustellin (1978), which is a pattern to be observed in other literary adaptations, that is, East and West German adaptations of a work made in close temporal proximity to one another. Both films received little critical recognition when they initially appeared and have received similarly little scholarly attention since.

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2.2 Heinrich von Kleist By contrast, works by Heinrich von Kleist have generated considerable interest in the world of film adaptation. According to Klaus Kanzog’s 1981 bibliography Heinrich von Kleist und der Film, twenty-seven adaptations of his works had been made up to that time, five films about Kleist himself, and an additional ten film projects (Kanzog 1981, 142–172). Since then, additional adaptations and films on Kleist have been added to this inventory. His plays were among the early sound film adaptations, for example Amphitryon (1935) and Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug, 1937), both co-directed by Reinhold Schünzel and Gustav Ucicky. And it was his plays, above all, that continued in the fifties and sixties to be adapted as period or costume films. Those works usually considered more romantic, his novellas, were (re)discovered by film adapters from the late 1960s. Films of some of Kleist’s best-known novellas produced provocative results in this period: Der Findling (The Foundling, 1811; George Moorse’s Der Findling, 1967); Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (The Engagement in St. Domingo, 1811; Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s San Domingo, 1970); Das Erdbeben in Chili (The Earthquake in Chile, 1806; Helma SandersBrahms’s Das Erdbeben in Chili, 1975); Die Marquise von O… (The Marchioness of O…, 1808; Eric Rohmer’s Die Marquise von O…, 1976); and Michael Kohlhaas (1810; Volker Schlöndorff ’s Michael Kohlhaas — Der Rebell, 1979). Equally challenging cinematically are Hans Neuenfels’s two films Heinrich Penthesilea von Kleist: Träume über eine Inszenierung (Heinrich Penthe­ silea von Kleist: Dreams about a Production, 1983) and Familie oder Schroffenstein (Family or Schroffenstein, 1984), as well as Helma Sanders-Brahms’s multi-genre biographical film Heinrich (1976–77). Except for Eric Rohmer’s Die Marquise von O…, which exhibits an exceptionally high degree of fidelity to Kleist’s text, all of these films take liberties, most of them by actualizing (updating) and re-culturalizing the literary material. Moorse for example relocates the narrative of Der Findling in the present as does Syberberg in his San Domingo, which ChristianAlbrecht Gollub has called a »rocker feature film« (»���������������������������������������� Rocker-Spielfilm������������������������ «, Gollub 1984, 34). Although Moorse largely retains the narrative elements of the story as events, he radically alters their connectedness by changing the underlying motivations. Irmela Schneider, in her essay on Kleist screen adaptations, summarizes this procedure: »The fate of the people is determined by their materiality. The intent is ultimately a critique of capitalism. Kleist’s work is reinterpreted according to contemporary standards and is in this way updated«.6 Rather than recast the entire narrative in the present like Moorse and Syberberg, Volker Schlöndorff merely frames his 1969 Michael Kohlhaas — Der Rebell with a contemporary reference: »On European prints of the film, the credits appear over newsreel footage of student demonstrations in four countries around the world« (Moeller/Lellis 2002, 49). This is obviously a shorthand attempt to extrapolate a new reading from the original Michael Kohlhaas material and its Kleistian re-working — one that is both contemporary and international. The director also tips his hat as to his political focus extra-textually by adding »der Rebell« to the film’s title. The film version of the Kohlhaas 6. ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Das Schicksal der Personen wird determiniert durch ihr Besitzdenken. Die Intention ist letztlich Kapitalismuskritik. Das Werk von Kleist wird nach zeitgenössischen Maßstäben umgedeutet und auf diese Weise aktualisiert« (Schneider 1989, 101).

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narrative per se is — in contrast to expectations raised by the title and framing material — a fairly literal representation in period costume. But, in addition to the opening documentary footage, Schlöndorff locates various contemporary »markers« throughout the film — such as rock music heard during the burning of Wittenberg and non-diegetic sounds (like a train) when Kohlhaas is in prison — to maintain the subtle montage effect. Another updating of the Michael Kohlhaas material which is so radical as to constitute an entirely new work is E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel Ragtime, which embeds the rewritten Kohlhaas story in a second narrative line and adds other subplots. To Kleist’s original social commentary and critique are added the issues of feminism, racism, industrialization, and anarchism. The horse trader Michael Kohlhaas becomes Negro pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr.; the two black horses become a new Model T Ford; Reformation Germany becomes turn-of-the-century America; Saxony becomes New York; and Martin Luther becomes Booker T. Washington. The subsequent screen adaptation of Ragtime in 1981 by Milos Forman helped popularize the book, already a best-seller, although many viewers, as well as readers, missed the connection to Kleist’s novella. Forman, due to the cinematic necessity of compression, omits or de-emphasizes several of Doctorow’s secondary narrative lines, for example those concerning Houdini, the Jewish immigrant family, Evelyn Nesbit and Harry Thaw, and the J.P. Morgan/Henry Ford relationship, thus moving the film’s narrative structure closer again to Kleist’s original text. But both novel and film retain the original novella’s social critique and revolutionary potential, which is true of Kleistian adaptations in general, although not all examples are equally transparent. Internationally, Die Marquise von O… by French director Eric Rohmer (i.e. Jean-MarieMaurice Scherer) is probably the best known of the Kleistian adaptations, due perhaps in part to the accessibility of the film on video. It also differs from the others under discussion because of its uncritical fidelity to the original story. The only significant deviation from the text is the cinematic representation of Kleist’s celebrated dash, a stand-in for the Marquise’s rape. Here Rohmer introduces a new narrative element: a sleeping potion is administered to the distraught Marquise; this coupled with a shot-reverse-shot of the Russian count in the doorway gazing at the provocatively reclining Marquise, effectively removes any doubt about what occurs during Kleist’s famous dash. »Both story and film«, one critic has noted, »make it abundantly clear at the outset (through a number of pointedly unsubtle hints) that it is the count alone who is responsible for the marquise’s dilemma. The real problem — and the film’s rich humor hinges upon this — is why the marquise and her family take so long to realize what has been made plain to the audience almost all along« (Spiegel 1981, 324). Rohmer, more interested in the discourse than the story, has commented that Kleist wrote his novella almost in the form of a film script (Rohmer 1976, 37). Rohmer uses various cinematic devices to translate elements of Kleist’s prose into visual equivalents: title cards, fade-outs between scenes, anonymous voice-overs, and color symbolism. But nothing detracts from the primacy of the spoken word. In contrast to many of his contemporaries in filmmaking (Rohmer is approximately ten years older than most of the cinéastes of the French New Wave), Rohmer declined to relocate Kleist’s narrative to the present, commenting: »In that regard, what interests us first of all is to

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illuminate the direct relationship existing between a story and its age«.7 Exactly the opposite could be maintained of Helma Sanders-Brahms’s film version of Kleist’s Das Erdbeben in Chili, made the year before Rohmer’s Die Marquise von O…. Of the three temporal frames involved — the time of the events (circa 1647), the time when Kleist wrote the novella (1806), and the time when Sanders-Brahms made the film adaptation (1974–75) — the filmmaker chooses to eliminate the stage that represents Kleist’s narrative filter or »optique«: nineteenth-century Prussia (see Hickethier 1993, 143). Both this perspective and Kleist’s novella as source are reduced to voice-overs that open and close the film with the first and last sentences of Kleist’s work. The director also changes the narrative’s basic structure, removing the flashbacks and transforming them into parallel plot lines that finally intersect, together with other narrative elements. Whereas Kleist introduces his characters as they become necessary to the story, the film creates new episodes, pre-stories, as it were, that locate them socially and temperamentally. All of these changes serve Sanders-Brahms’s interest of politicizing the context of the earthquake narrative more sharply than Kleist did. In doing this, the director erases the uncanny aspect of Kleist’s tale and replaces it with a socio-political explanation. Don Fernando is no longer a »divine hero« but now »a coolly calculating businessman, shaped by a bourgeois business mentality«.8 Chile, in Kleist’s narrative, remains intentionally non-specific, thus inviting analogies with various European societies, but not so in the film (Hickethier 1993, 149). SandersBrahms also augments Kleist’s ending — rendering it less sanguine — in a veiled reference to the surviving child’s economic value as inheritor of its deceased parents’ wealth. Like Eric Rohmer, who developed a personal connection to Kleist during preparations for Die Marquise von O…, Sanders-Brahms became so enthralled with Kleist while making Das Erdbeben in Chili that she made a biographical film, Heinrich, based upon Kleist’s letters, documents and literary works the following year (1976). Sanders-Brahms seems to have transferred some of the images she already had in mind prior to shooting Das Erdbeben onto the later biographical film. In a description of the film’s production, she wrote: »I came to Spain with pictures of Caspar David Friedrich in my head, with Kleist, Kleist, Kleist, Prussia, a death wish, Rousseau, Kant«.9 Her use of only Kleist’s first name as the title of the film — marginalizing both his family connection and social status as a member of the nobility — reflects the intimate attachment she developed to the author. Like Sanders-Brahms’s Heinrich, the titles of both of Hans Neuenfels’s films already reveal much about his cinematic project and his relationship to both Kleist and his works. By inserting »or« between the words »Familie« and »Schroffenstein« in the title of Kleist’s first drama, Die Familie Schroffenstein (The Schroffenstein Family, 1803), Neuenfels problematizes the concept of family when faced with the reality of the Schroffensteins. His Heinrich Penthesilea von Kleist mixes biography with literature like Sanders-Brahm’s Heinrich and brings the author into direct interaction with the film version of Penthesilea. The second part of the film’s title, Träume 7. ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Demgegenüber interessiert uns in erster Linie die direkte existierende Beziehung zwischen einer Geschichte und dem Zeitalter zu durchleuchten« (Rohmer 1976, 37). 8.

»ein vom bürgerlichen Kaufmannsdenken geprägter, kühler Geschäftsmann« (Hickethier 1993, 148).

9. ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� »Ich kam nach Spanien mit Bildern von Caspar David Friedrich im Kopf, mit Kleist, Kleist, Kleist, Preußen, Todessehnsucht, Rousseau, Kant« (cited in Hickethier 1993, 143).

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über eine Inszenierung (Dreams About a Production), indicates the strong metatextual aspect of the film, in which the filmmaker himself plays an important role. In this radical approach to adapting a Kleistian work, Neuenfels refuses to separate author from play from staging-of-theplay from film version-of-the-staging-of-the-play, insisting even on their inseparability. This extends to the viewers of the film as well, who complete the projects, as one critic notes: »The reception of Kleist’s work leads to the staging of one’s own life. It is no longer the work that is made into a film, rather, those who engage with the work are drawn into the work, and become fiction and symbol«.10 2.3 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Of those works by Goethe that are usually considered Romantic, the drama Götz von Berlichingen (1773), the epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther, 1774; 1787), the novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809), and surprisingly, his poem »Der Erlkönig« (The Erl-King, 1782) have been made into films. The last was adapted only very loosely from the original — merely the basic plot line — in 1914 under the title Erlkönigs Töchter (The Erl-King’s Daughters) directed by Stellan Rye, who later made the popular Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague). A 1996 film version of Die Wahlverwandtschaften by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani presents a surprising dissonance. On the surface, the film appears to be a costume drama merely »transposed« — with a high degree of fidelity — from the original. But a strong undercurrent pulls the film in a different direction. The illicit passions, particularly between Eduardo (Eduard) and Ottilie have been visually eroticized so that the film offers several un-Goethean graphic sex scenes. This new explicitness ascribes increased intensity to the »elective affinities« relationships and at the same time perhaps criticizes Goethe’s reticence in communicating the passion lurking just below the surface of this text. That Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther has been the object of numerous film adaptations will not come as a surprise given the quantity of rewrites the material has also undergone. The book’s popularity at the time of its publication and the continuing fascination with the narrative and characters since then can be attributed to the compelling autobiographical context as well as to the display of passionate feeling that rarely fails to engage readers. As further testimony to the underlying story’s appeal, a number of the literary rewrites have also been adapted for the screen in their own right. One of the earliest film versions of Goethe’s Werther was the French Le roman de Werther made in 1938 and directed by the experienced and well-known filmmaker Max Ophüls. The first German film version did not occur until a decade later with Karl Heinz Stroux’s Begegnung mit Werther (Encounter with Werther, 1949). Three literary re-workings of Werther and the subsequent film version of each took place in the years that elapsed before the next attempt to (re)film Goethe’s version. In 1914, Natsume Sōseki wrote Kokoro (Heart, or The Heart of Things) based on motifs if not actual narrative elements from Goethe’s Werther, followed by the film version of Kokoro, also in Japan, by director Kon 10.

»Die Rezeption von Kleists Werk führt zur Inszenierung des eigenen Lebens. Nicht mehr das Werk wird verfilmt, sondern diejenigen, die sich auf das Werk einlassen, werden in dieses Werk hineingezogen, werden Fiktion und Zeichen« (Schneider 1989, 113).

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Ichikawa in 1955. Although Sōseki’s novel was translated into English in 1957, knowledge of both novel and film has been confined primarily to Japan. Sōseki’s appropriation was followed by the infinitely better known Thomas Mann work Lotte in Weimar (The Beloved Returns) in 1939 and its subsequent East German film version in 1975 by Egon Günther. Over thirty years later, again in East Germany, Ulrich Plenzdorf ’s rewrite, Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The ������������� New Sufferings of Young W.) appeared as a play, radio play, and novel (1972–73). Eberhard Itzenplitz’s film version of the work followed relatively quickly in 1975–76. In 1976 Egon Günther, who has since become associated with Goethe and his works through three films, made a new version of the original Goethe novel. This East German production was followed by a 1981 West German/ Austrian/Swiss co-production directed by Thomas Koerfer entitled Die Leidenschaftlichen (The Passionate Ones). And finally, to conclude this initial overview, Egon Günther returned in 1999 to the Goethe material in the biographical film Die Braut (The Bride), which focuses on the triangle of Goethe, Christiane Vulpius, and Charlotte von Stein. The differences between the East German and West German film versions of Werther are quite profound. Like Eric Rohmer, Egon Günther comes from a literary background and by 1975 when he made his Werther film, he had written numerous novels and screenplays and had already made a number of literary adaptations into films. Günther’s Werther followed by one year his film version of Mann’s Lotte in Weimar (1974–75); he identified an inner connection between the two works, but, like Helma Sanders-Brahms’s immersion in Kleist, he also »seemed to have found an entirely more personal connection to this material; he touched on a familiar topic again: a human being registers his departure«.11 Whereas the novel focuses on unrequited love as the basis for the suicide, for Egon Günther, who not only emphasizes Werther’s alienation, but also the impossibility of social mobility and the gruesome behavior of the nobility toward him, it is the entire situation that leads to suicide (»das Ganze«, Pflaum 1977, 132). From a cinematic point of view, Günther makes important changes. First, he alters the structure much the same way Ulrich Plenzdorf does in his rewrite Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., which opens with the protagonist’s death and then proceeds to reconstruct his life. Although audiences typically are more open to omissions than additions in adapted films, Günther adds scenes that form »key sequences« (»��������������������������������������������������������������������� Schlüsselsequenzen��������������������������������������������������� «, Thurm 1976, 13). While the film looks like a period film superficially, the director undercuts the genre — we are reminded that these are actors in front of a camera — by introducing small anachronisms such as Lotte’s bobbed hair. Like the East German film, the West German/Austrian/Swiss co-production that followed in 1981, Die Leidenschaftlichen (The Passionate Ones), also exhibits the external characteristics of a period film. But the director and screenplay co-writer Thomas Koerfer (with Hans Christoph Buch), reflecting the approach of several other films in the 1970s and 1980s such as Neuenfels’s Heinrich Penthesilea von Kleist and Sanders-Brahms’s Heinrich, collapses biography and literary work, introducing the author as a »character« in the narrative. Koerfer adds another framing device to his film, an object rather than a person, which he uses throughout the film to symbolize the illusion from which Werther suffers: when Werther/Goethe arrives in Wetzlar, he comes into possession of a laterna magica that includes an image of Lotte, among 11.

»Günther scheint zu diesem Stoff auch eine weitaus persönlichere Beziehung gefunden zu haben; ein ihm vertrautes Thema klingt wieder an: ein Mensch reicht seinen Abschied ein« (Pflaum 1977, 132).

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others. This light show anticipates the narrative development, thus undercutting — like Egon Günther’s film — the suspense of an unknown ending. Koerfer highlights the Goethe/Werther parallel by having the same actor play both roles, the biographical and the literary. In Egon Günther’s first »Goethe« film, Lotte in Weimar (1974–75), several layers of hypertext are built upon the hypotext of Goethe’s Werther: Thomas Mann rewrote but also expanded the Werther material in 1939, again merging Goethe’s biography with elements of the fictionalized Werther, and Günther’s film, made thirty-five years later, adds yet another context and perspective. If in his novel Mann demythologizes Goethe as the great man, Günther’s camera similarly exposes negative aspects of the Goethe cult of personality and reveals the other characters and Weimar itself as unexceptional. Mann’s novel reflects a late 1930s perspective and the National Socialist context in which it was written, including a veiled reference to the Kristallnacht (Crystal Night). In a similar manner, Günther’s film reflects the 1970s in East Germany, a perspective made explicit in the opening credits when automobiles, rather than coaches, are shown against the backdrop of Weimar, although the film is a period drama in other aspects. Also revelatory are Günther’s emphasis »on Goethe the person, not Goethe the artist« (Mahoney 1986, 249), his centering of the film on Lotte Kestner instead of the great man (Schiller 1975, 4,7), and his interest in (and censoring of) the cult of personality rather than sharing Mann’s equally strong interest in the relationship of art and reality and the »workings of Goethe’s creative mind« (Mahoney 1986, 249). The film’s critique is sharper than the novel’s, which tends more to gentle irony, and whereas Mann’s novel concludes on a positive note, Günther’s film closes with a disconsolate Lotte in the coach, completely disillusioned by her encounter with Goethe. The final example of a rewrite and subsequent film version of the Goethe material stems from an East German as well: author and screenwriter Ulrich Plenzdorf. His work Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. — a prime example of second-generation Romantic irony, here in the guise of parody — began its peripatetic journey as a screenplay (1969), but was produced first in the theater (1972) — DEFA, the East German film production company rejected the screenplay — and was subsequently published as a book (1973). This trajectory also included a radio play (1974) and finally the made-for-television film directed by Eberhard������������������������ �������������������������������� Itzenplitz in 1976. Although television films are often considered inferior to cinematic films because of the inherent limitations and restrictions, in the case of Die neuen Leiden, television’s technological advances, specifically the blue-box-process, permitted new dramatic possibilities for the Werther figure, in this case, Edgar Wibeau, who repeatedly comments on events from beyond-the-grave. The film maintains the structure of Plenzdorf ’s text, which, like Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… begins in medias res with a newspaper announcement and reconstructs the story through flashbacks, triggered by Edgar Wibeau’s father who is investigating his son’s untimely death. Edgar’s running commentary as well as the introduction of several of the Goethean Werther quotations on placards recall elements of Brechtian epic theater practice and serve to break the viewer’s identification with the action. Objects of Plenzdorf ’s critique that resonate with Goethe’s original text are the hypocrisy and pretense of society, its restrictions, enforced conformity, and denial of individuality, freedom, and privacy. These represent not only thematic citations of the hypotext by the centuries-later hypertext, but also a reviving through re-culturalization of elements germane to the Romantic world view.

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The film versions of German Romantic works, with the rare exception of a few films like Rohmer’s Marquise of O…, constitute hypertexts that in some manner transform the original hypotext and thus invite the viewing audience both to frame the film more broadly and revisit the original. This critical intersection of the two works proves to be mutually elucidating. While these observations would pertain to film versions of Romantic works in France and Great Britain as well, important differences emerge. Since Romantic expression found an outlet in poetry in the latter two countries even more than in Germany, the film versions of Romantic prose works were limited and form a narrow profile: most of these works were written rather late in the Romantic movement — in the 1830s and 1840s — and the Gothic and historical novels were the prevalent genres transferred to the screen. 3.

France

The story of cinematic adaptations of Romantic works in France holds some surprises. One might expect, based on strong narrative lines and characterization, that the works of writers like George Sand and Stendhal would have proved attractive to screenwriters, but this turns out not to have been the case. Several films have been made about Sand, especially focusing on her unorthodox life and multiple relationships with figures of the day (Chopin, Musset, Delacroix), but her works have not been targeted for adaptation. Stendhal’s novels have received little attention as well, with the greatest interest coming from Italian directors. On the other end of the scale of surprises, we find film versions — albeit not in quantity — of seemingly »unadaptable« works by writers such as Benjamin Constant (Adolphe, 1816), Alphonse de Lamartine (Jocelyn, an epic poem, 1836), and Gérard de Nerval (Main de gloire [Hand of Glory, 1832]). Overall, it is Victor Hugo and Prosper Mérimée whose works have been most frequently adapted for the screen, although in the latter case, it has been a single — and most singular — work. 3.1 Alfred de Musset Alfred de Musset’s works have been adapted quite often for a writer who is known as much for his poetry as his plays, and almost not at all for his prose. Most of the films were made in France, many in the 1930s and 1940s, and there is but one film version per work. An exception to this peripheralizing tendency with regard to Musset’s oeuvre is Jean Renoir’s 1939 La règle du jeu (Rules of the Game), based on Musset’s 1833 tragedy Les caprices de Marianne (The Moods of Marianne) and now considered a film classic (far eclipsing Musset’s play). Renoir, the son of painter Pierre Auguste Renoir, broadened Musset’s critique of the aristocracy’s morals and his parody of the lovelorn Wertherian hero, by creating a second lower-class love triangle in the film. On the eve of World War II, Renoir made his hero a pilot, and used him to question concepts of heroism, which elicited hostility from cinema audiences in 1939. By making the marquis, Robert La Chesnay, Jewish, creating a game warden with a German name, Schumacher, who behaves brutishly and ultimately commits murder, and by making the marquis’ wife, Christine, an étrangère, whose father is a Viennese orchestra conductor, Renoir updates Musset’s social critique of a hundred years earlier to draw an analogy — much like the East

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German Ulrich Plenzdorf with his Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. — with the situation of France in 1939. That he read the situation correctly is demonstrated by his forced emigration from France to the United States less than a year after the film’s release. At the same time that Renoir re-culturalizes Musset’s material with an updated political critique, he also parodies the vacuity of the upper-class infatuations by adding the farcical lower-class parallel that physically demonstrates (chase scenes, etc.) the underlying inanity of their behavior. The parody of the Romantic hero in the overdrawn portrait of Coelio in Musset’s play has been largely neutralized in Renoir’s film. André Jurieu’s (the new Coelio’s) forbidden love for Christine is, in fact, requited, and he constitutes on the whole a rather level-headed suitor, who remains unwilling to transgress social norms. 3.2 Victor Hugo In France, the Romantic writer whose work has inspired the most film versions has to be Victor Hugo, hailed by some as the father of French Romanticism. Although a number of his works have been adapted for the screen, the two novels Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831) and Les misérables (The Wretched, 1862) have been the most consistently and most internationally adapted. Just as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tales were popularized in part through Offenbach’s opera, so too, musicals of Hugo’s novels have provided his plots and characters with contemporary currency. Since Hugo’s novels are voluminous, they necessarily undergo selection, deletion, and collapsing (of events and characters) when being condensed or compressed into a 100-minute film. One critic has given an interesting comparative analysis of four different film versions of Notre-Dame de Paris, which she links to the socio-political frameworks within which they were made: Worsley’s 1923 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Dieterle’s 1939 film of the same title, Delannoy’s 1956 Notre-Dame de Paris, and Trousdale/Wise’s 1996 animation The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Killick 2002). The differences are profound and immediate: the four films center their narratives on different characters, the first two on the bell-ringer Quasimodo (»partly formed«), the third on the gypsy dancer Esmeralda, and the cartoon version on Quasimodo and Esmeralda equally. The first two films, fearing Church censorship, changed Claude Frollo into a good priest and foisted his original evilness off on Jehan the brother, who in the Dieterle version holds the title of Minister of Justice. The archdeacon of Notre Dame is sanitized in all films except Delannoy’s, which exhibits the greatest fidelity of plot and characterization to Hugo’s novel. Delannoy wanted to reclaim Notre-Dame de Paris for the French; his film in its literalness is successful in the same way as Rohmer’s Marquise of O…. Rachel Killick in »Notre-Dame de Paris as Cinema« raises two points of criticism of the French film: first, that its bright technicolor militates against the good/evil ambiguity of the earlier black-and-white films’ chiaroscuro effects; and second, that it uni-dimensionally flattens the Esmeralda figure, famously played by Gina Lollobrigida, into a sensual seductress. This kind of character reduction or simplification is performed on Phoebus and Frollo as well. Phoebus, in all of the films except Delannoy’s, where he is allowed to be as transparently mediocre as in Hugo’s novel, is made into a knight in shining armor — a role that is particularly egregious in the Disney animation. Frollo, in this latter version, is ironically the Minister of Justice, and the archdeacon of Notre Dame is merely an ineffectual and peripheral

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figure. With novels as complex as Notre-Dame de Paris, adaptational simplification is inevitable — many characters and subplots are missing in most of the films. Esmeralda’s mother, »La Sachette«, tends to disappear, although the goat Djali stays. Pierre Gringoire, the dramatist and Hugo’s alter ego, tends to be removed as well, or may be collapsed into the Clopin figure, leader of the truands, as in the Disney version. Fidelity issues aside, one may wonder about the essence of Hugo’s novel. The importance of the cathedral and its role in the story — almost as if a character — is maintained in all the film versions, but with particular accuracy and attention through computer wizardry in the Disney animation. Related to the theme of the cathedral as testimony to history is Hugo’s emphasis on the power of the written word and the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the setting of the story. This is maintained only in the 1939 film version by Dieterle. Hugo’s social critique meets with a similar fate in most of the versions where the issues of »capital punishment, the operation of the judiciary, religious intolerance and malpractice, social exclusion, [and] the impeding of freedom of expression and freedom of the press« are largely expunged (Killick 2002, 42). While many Romantic aspects of Hugo’s novel were either downplayed or removed in many film versions — particularly the psychological complexity of Frollo and the sense of the forbidden Other — most of the films do retain Hugo’s exposé of the dual play between the body and inner self as well as his use of couleur locale and fascination with the Middle Ages as a revolutionary era. 3.3 Prosper Mérimée Although Prosper Mérimée enjoyed nowhere near the public stature of Hugo and was less prolific as a writer, one of his works has been staged and made into movies so often as to propel Mérimée into Hugo’s ranks, at least in terms of adaptation. Like Hugo’s works and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s works before him, Mérimée’s Carmen (1845) derives its ongoing fame and multiple film versions from its popularization — in this case through Georges Bizet’s opéra-comique version, first performed in 1875. Like Hoffmann’s infatuation with »exotic« Italy and Hugo’s exploration of exoticism through the »gypsy« Esmeralda (who turns out not to be a gypsy), Carmen centers around an exotic/erotic Other, the eponymous protagonist. The cry for personal freedom emanating from the novella, above all other themes, mirrors the French revolutionary appeal for liberté as well as the firm insistence upon individual autonomy found in numerous Romantic works. That the strong-willed, independent protagonist was not only a woman but also a gypsy and a criminal, and that the story occurred in Spain made her to a Frenchman in 1848 trebly exotic and revolutionary, and even menacing. To circumscribe and contain her threatening potential, Bizet created a polarity by introducing the virtuous Micaela figure, which excises much of the ambiguity from Carmen, moving her ineluctably from the realm of the virginal to that of evil. Supplanting the novella in popular awareness, the operatic Carmen and especially its music gained such renown (who cannot hum the habañera or the seguidilla?) that it became a factor in numerous film versions. From 1910, Carmen has been adapted for the screen in almost every decade, in a variety of countries, and in different languages, including an amazing four film versions clustered around the years 1983–84: Brook’s La tragédie de Carmen, a drastically condensed, revised Bizet; Saura’s

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flamenco Carmen; Rosi’s »realistic« film version of Bizet’s opera; and Jean-Luc Godard’s Prénom Carmen (First Name Carmen). Various sources claim that »there were 16 film versions of Carmen by 1948«, »52 known film adaptations« by 2002, and that Carmen »according to the Internet Movie Database, has been filmed 57 times« (Graf 1951, 210; Hays 2002, 1; Anderson 2002, 1). Whatever the final tally, one can agree that the story — with and without Bizet’s opera — has not only retained an extraordinary vigor over the past one hundred fifty years, but also enjoys current validity and relevance, as witnessed by the production of two new films in 2001: Carmen: A Hip Hopera, an American rap version, and Karmen Geï, a Senegalese musical drama. The film versions of Carmen vary as widely as those of Hugo’s similarly popular NotreDame de Paris, discussed earlier. Most of them can be seen as re-reading either the original Mérimée, or more likely Bizet’s operatic version, or, notably both at the same time, as in Carlos Saura’s flamenco dance interpretation. Few, if any, of the film versions depart far enough from the original events and characters so as to constitute mere analogies; the one exception, poised at the boundary line between adaptation and mere inspiration, would be Jean-Luc Godard’s updated, re-culturalized, and critical reading in Prénom Carmen. Of the four films made in 1983–84, Francesco Rosi, otherwise known in cinematic circles for his political films, adheres most closely to Bizet’s opera; yet he innovatively films on location instead of in an opera house, thus deliberately blurring the lines between reality and theatrical convention. His film opens with a blood-splattering coup de grâce, delivered to a suffering bull at the end of a bullfight, foreshadowing the violence to come, as well as Carmen’s brutal murder. Given his fidelity to Bizet, Rosi manages to raise a surprising number of questions on class, ethnicity, religion, alienation, sexuality, and above all gender discrimination. In this critical gesture he anticipates Carlos Saura’s Spanish reclamation of Carmen from its French appropriation and falsification in the »un-Spanish« operatic art form. In protest of this misappropriation, the director (Antonio Gades) of the flamenco dance troupe rehearsing a performance of Carmen returns to the original Mérimée text which he cites, alternating with Bizet, throughout the film. The frame/tale construction and dual narrators of Mérimée’s novel are reproduced in Antonio Gades’s dual roles as creator/director of the flamenco Carmen production and as the lead male actor/dancer, José. »This ironic construction«, one critic has observed, »enables Saura to interrogate the problematic issue of Antonio’s Spanishness, bound up as it is in the colonizing aesthetics of foreign perceptions of Spain« (D’Lugo 1991, 205). The tensions between France and (exotic) Spain, between opera and flamenco, between spoken word and body language are emphasized in the imbrication of two narrative levels throughout the film. Godard’s treatment of the subject in Prénom Carmen is considerably more outré than Saura’s. Departing from the plot and using Beethoven instead of Bizet, Godard’s explicit defamiliarizing both narratively and musically invites a reconsideration of the core meanings of Mérimée and Bizet. The two 2001 film versions of Carmen similarly defamiliarize both the novella and the opera, but simultaneously pursue the issue of identity at the heart of both works. Looking back to Preminger’s 1954 Carmen Jones with its African-American cast, both Carmen: A Hip Hopera and Karmen Geï tap into Carmen’s essential ethnic/racial Otherness. In Mérimée’s story, the French narrator guesses that Carmen is Andalusian, Moorish (Arabic), or Jewish before he learns that she is a gypsy. Building on Carmen’s exotic Oriental otherness and Andalusia’s

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proximity to Northern Africa and its Moorish heritage, the two new Carmens look implicitly or explicitly to the figure’s mythic African roots. Robert Townsend’s rap version of Carmen once again marries words with music, as in Bizet, thus popularizing the Carmen motif in the same way as Bizet’s original opéra-comique did, or as animated films have done for other stories. The rap lyrics with their strong end rhymes re-create some of the lyricism of the opera, despite the grittiness of the re-culturalized plot and characters. Karmen Geï similarly capitalizes on authentic musicians and dancers in both actualizing and re-culturalizing the Carmen story. Although Carmen: A Hip Hopera kept several musical citations of Bizet — most notably a hip hop version of the seguidilla in the seduction scene — Karmen Geï follows Godard’s lead in jettisoning Bizet’s score entirely. »Instead, he creates a wonderful blend of jazz, rhythmic African percussion, pop music and rap«, as one critic has noted. »There’s dialogue rather than opera, so that Karmen Geï is actually an African musical« (Garcia 2003, 1). Like Francesco Rosi’s and Robert Townsend’s Carmens, Karmen Geï shifts its narrative and visual focus to the vibrancy, sensuality, and joie de vivre of the Carmen figure. In this regard, the Senegalese film surpasses its predecessors. Like the Carmens of Rosi and Townsend, the Senegalese Karmen opposes and thwarts authority on behalf of her outsider community — not merely to further a personal agenda. In respect to the underlying Romantic questions of nature vs. culture, individual vs. society, reason vs. emotion, the quotidian vs. the exotic/erotic, and the self vs. the Other, the newest film versions of Carmen are equally iconoclastic in their approaches to these intersections as earlier versions. Like Godard’s striking defamiliarizations, these films provide a critical, metatextual reading of the Carmen myth that urges us toward a re-reading of both Mérimée and Bizet. 4.

England

British Romanticism, unlike the movement in France, provides few cinematic surprises, although one might wonder at the film version of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821/22; film 1962) in the same way that the film version of Musset’s La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (Confessions of a Child of the Century, 1836; film 1986) was unexpected, although, coincidentally, Musset translated De Quincey’s Confessions. British Romanticism did not dovetail with early cinematic interests as was the case with German Romantic works and Expressionism. One reason for this is that early Romanticism in England, around the turn of the century, centered on poetry. In the middle phase, around 1820, only Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) and the novels of Sir Walter Scott, published from around 1814 to 1825, provided material for future cinéastes. The further we move past 1830, the more contentious will be the categorization of Romantic works. I include here the Gothic romances of Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847) and Jane Eyre (1847), which picked up on an earlier Gothic strain (Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis) and refocused it on a love narrative. Some may question whether these works are either Gothic or Romantic, but I would argue that, while they do not constitute the purest of examples, they evince sufficient hallmarks to consider them within these parameters. Their film histories, based on no extraneous popularizing devices (operas, musicals, ballets, animations), reflect the same level of cinematic interest,

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even fascination, associated with a number of other core Romantic texts, e.g. Die Leiden des jungen Werther, Carmen, Der Sandmann, and Notre-Dame de Paris. What these works share is, first, the presence of an all-consuming, life-altering passion, and second, some manner of confrontation with the Other, either psychologically, emotionally, physically, or supernaturally. The most compelling English Romantic works, and those that have most often been made into movies, have at their center this dual core. Thus, as in France, it has been both the historical novel and the new genre of the Gothic novel from the later years of the movement that have primarily provided fodder for the Romantic film gristmill. 4.1 Mary Shelley In reviewing the film versions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, which originally appeared in 1818, we are immediately drawn to an »architextual« analysis. In adaptations on stage, including »at least nine different plays while Mary was still alive« (Friedman 1981, 53), and, later, a myriad of film versions, the subtitle disappears, never to reappear. With it unfortunately also goes much of the ambiguity and complexity of the original work. One exception, mentioned by Lester Friedman, is a »loosely related parody« entitled »Frank in Steam or the Modern Promise to Pay« from 1833 (ibid.). The various titles, most of which include the name Frankenstein, such as Son of …, The Curse of …., The Horror of …., rivet attention on the doctor and suggest that he »has somehow transgressed God’s moral and natural laws by attempting to create life from dead matter« (ibid., 53 f.). Later films not only misread Shelley’s original intention but also transfer interest from the figure of the disturbed scientist to his creation. In time, especially in popular understanding, the name Frankenstein even came to designate the monster rather than the doctor. This is reflected in film titles such as Bride of Frankenstein, in which the »bride« is created for the monster not the doctor. The first adaptations were silent films made in the 1900s, Frankenstein (1910) and Life without Soul (1915), but Shelley’s monster received its »definitive incarnation«, as Martin Tropp writes, in James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein and its sequel Bride of Frankenstein four years later (Tropp 1999, 25). Tropp notes that of the best Frankenstein films, »each engendered its own progeny, taking the myth of Frankenstein on two very different paths that set the pattern for Frankenstein films for the next fifty years« (ibid.), perpetuating the themes of »the Monster as a dangerous and neglected child« whose plight is exacerbated by »the populace […] blighted by ignorance and hatred« and »science as Promethean overreaching, the reflection of ego gone mad« (ibid., 25 f.). In Mary Shelley’s original, the monster, both articulate and sentient, reproaches Victor Frankenstein for creating and then rejecting him. In almost all of the films, by contrast, the monster is mute, which reduces his psychological complexity and precludes the possibility of a meaningful relationship between creator and creation. The result of this reductionism is a vast number of Frankenstein »adaptations« that are mere horror or monster films — many of them earning the designation »bomb« in popular film guides (see Maltin 2002). Many of them deviate so far from the Shelley text that they pass beyond the category of even the freest adaptations.

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In the cinematic adaptations, the two competing narratives have been differently weighted: in some versions the monster-as-pure-evil takes precedence, while in others it is the scientistgone-mad. A third interpretive strand grows out of the two early films directed by James Whale. As Martin Tropp relates, Whale was a British soldier and POW in World War I, and the horrors of this experience are incorporated into his reading of Shelley’s novel. Rather than seeing an individual scientist gone mad, he conceives of science itself as having run amok. »Mary Shelley’s fear of science finding the principle of life became the reality of science dedicated to the new technology of death. The creation of the Monster is, then, seen in the light of what science created and mankind suffered in the horror of the Great War« (Tropp 1999, 28). Whale is one of the few directors to retain the original Promethean fire imagery from Shelley as well as its ambiguous potential for both good and evil. Whale’s adaptation is successful because he retains crucial tensions from the Shelley original: specifically, the monster’s power derives from »a carefully maintained balance between sympathy and horror« and the scientist and Monster are tied together in creation and destruction« (ibid., 33, 36). If Whale’s first film raised specters of World War I, its sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, ominously foreshadows World War II. Whale introduces not only a mad doctor but a power-mad doctor — by the name of Pretorious — in a likely allusion to Hitler who had been in power for two years (ibid., 40). As with those elaborate parodies that embed the original texts in a critical framework — Plenzdorf ’s rewrite of Werther, Doctorow’s updating of Michael Kohlhaas, and Saura’s dual re-working of Mérimée/Bizet’s Carmen — it is the parodies of Shelley’s Frankenstein that, strangely enough, seem to have kept alive the complex essence of the original work. Like Carlos Saura’s Carmen film which plays off of two originating works, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) clearly cites both Shelley and various prior film versions. Although it is less profound and less directly connected to Shelley than Mel Brooks’s parodic Young Frankenstein (1974), it does make explicit the homosexual subtext in Shelley and especially in the Whale films. As a camp classic, it has served to popularize the myth and thus assure its survival just as animated or hip hop films have done for other classic tales. Another comedic spin-off, Mel Brooks’s parody/ fairy tale manages to combine most of Mary Shelley’s main themes with satiric remakes of the most famous scenes from Whale’s films. 4.2 Emily Brontë Those characteristics of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and her sister’s Jane Eyre that lead one to consider them Romantic are the same ones that make the novels attractive to filmmakers: the role of (wild) nature, primal oppositions (life/death, love/hate, light/dark), passionate emotions, and supernatural occurrences. Wuthering Heights’s strong plot lines have attracted adapters since the first silent version made in Britain in 1920 — now apparently lost (Haire-Sargeant 1999, 170). The earliest sound film dates to 1939 in an American version directed by William Wyler and produced by Samuel Goldwyn, who meddled in the making of the film, and — infamously — changed the ending (Mills 1996, 421). Although Wuthering Heights was adapted for the screen in various British and American versions as well as French, Mexican, and Japanese, many critics argue that Wyler’s 1939 version, albeit not perfect, has not been surpassed. As we saw earlier with multi-layered narrative works such as Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann or Shelley’s

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Frankenstein, films often must reduce the sheer volume of the original by eliminating narrative strands. This has been the solution employed in the case of Wuthering Heights by directors such as Wyler or later by Buñuel, Fuest, and Yoshida, all of whom simply eliminate the story of the second generation. Several of the films also eliminate Brontë’s double narrative framework (Mr. Lockwood, Ellen Dean), which has occurred with adaptations of other framed works such as Carmen. An exception to this reductionist trend would be attempts in more recent films such as the 1992 version directed by Peter Kosminsky, to add back not only both narrators but also the author herself. The inclusion of the author as a character was attempted by Thomas Koerfer in his 1981 Die Leidenschaftlichen, in which the aged Goethe appears as a narrator, and was picked up again in the 1990s by both Kosminsky in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1992, featuring Sinéad O’Connor as Emily Brontë) and by Kenneth Branagh in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). Besides reducing the number of plots and eliminating the narrators, films of Wuthering Heights have had to confront the innate complexity of Heathcliff who is admittedly brutal, sadistic, and vengeful, but also tortured, wronged, passionate, and a child of nature. Lin HaireSargeant summarizes the cinematic responses to this conundrum thus: »Historically, the films of Wuthering Heights have met this challenge in two ways: either by changing the story so that Heathcliff ’s evil deeds are lessened or mitigated, or straight on, as Emily Brontë does, directing the reader/viewer to absorb the totality of Heathcliff ’s evil and good within his human situation« (167). Reminiscent of E.T.A. Hoffmann, William Wyler’s is a film of windows and doors, of interiors and exteriors, but also of mirrors, which function as windows on the soul (Harrington, 81). Buñuel excises not only the second generation and both framing narrators, he also omits Heathcliff and Cathy’s shared childhood and begins his narrative with Heathcliff ’s reappearance. Other alterations include changing the ending, ennobling Heathcliff (Alejandro), and demonizing Edgar Linton (Eduardo). Most important is a relocation — a re-culturalization — of Wuthering Heights from the moors of Yorkshire to the desert of Mexico, with all the attendant changes in couleur locale that this shift entailed. In an essay on »l’amour fou« Anthony Fragola suggests that Buñuel adheres more closely to »Brontë’s non-Christian view« of the love relationship (Fragola 1994, 51). That is, mad or madly passionate love of the kind represented by Brontë and by Buñuel can simply not be experienced in this world, and is therefore inextricably related to death. But Buñuel arrives at this death in a manner significantly different from Brontë’s: following Catalina’s death in childbirth, her body is placed in an underground crypt, to which Alejandro pays a nocturnal visit — reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet. Seeing a vision of Catalina in a brilliant light, Alejandro turns to the source, which morphs into the blinding white flash of a gun going off as Ricardo shoots him. Unlike the transcendent ending of Wyler’s film, Buñuel’s version ends with Alejandro’s corpse draped over the coffin, emphasized by the word »FIN« on the screen. As if this were not final enough, Catalina died giving birth to a son, not a daughter, so Buñuel shuts the door on hope and reconciliation between the families in the next generation as well. Whereas Buñuel emphasized the violent and demonic undercurrent in Brontë’s novel, Robert Fuest, nearly two decades later, privileges the love relationship; but, unlike Wyler, he emphasizes the sexual/physical aspect of it rather than the spiritual one. While the constant movement

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associated with Heathcliff and Catherine mirrors the novel, the motion becomes a substitute for feeling and tenderness. Fuest’s film emphasizes the brutal side of Heathcliff just as Buñuel’s did, but, unlike Buñuel, Fuest ties it to sexuality. Thus, Heathcliff becomes a woman beater and »knocks [Cathy] to the ground before having sex with her«, which Lin Haire-Sargeant sees as a willful misunderstanding of Brontë (Haire-Sargeant 1999, 181). Whereas earlier films seemed obliged to choose between either a victimized or an evil Heathcliff, the 1978 BBC made-for-television version had the luxury — nearly five hours worth — of developing Heathcliff ’s character in all its complexity. The five-part film also permitted less cutting than in earlier films, and thus the final product evinces one of the highest degrees of fidelity to Brontë’s novel. A Japanese film version of Wuthering Heights in 1988 brings us face to face with the unique difficulties of translating or transposing between East and West. John Collick notes that »foreign adaptations« are automatically assumed to provide less accurate hypertextual readings of the base hypotext than native adaptations. Buñuel, when faced with a similar difficulty, chose to completely re-culturalize the Brontë work, keeping only the narrative elements from eight chapters of the novel. Yoshishige Yoshida, the director of Arashi ga oka, not only relocated the narrative to Japan, but he also set it in the late fifteenth century — perhaps unwittingly tapping into the Romantic interest in medieval times, but also because this was a time of revolutionary fomentation in Japan. Arashi ga oka, a direct translation of »wuthering/blowing/stormy heights or cliffs«, was the title of the Japanese print, contrasted with Onimaru in the international print, »Onimaru« (Oni = demon) being the name of the Heathcliff figure. The director, Yoshida, said that he made the film in part »to challenge what he saw as the romanticism of the Hollywood version« (Collick 1993, 40). Thus Yoshida aligns his interpretation more with that of Buñuel than with Wyler’s. In Japanese culture, based strongly on group identities, it is the figure of the (rebellious) individual that carries the Romantic iconoclastic potential. In a closed society, outsiders represent a similar threat. And in a culture that traditionally separated men and women into contiguous but unequal spheres, sexually independent women would figure as a disturbingly transgressive phenomenon. These Romantic themes conjoin in Arashi ga oka in much the same way as in Carmen with its sensual, independent, outsider protagonist. Although Yoshida’s film strays far from the Brontëan hypotext in terms of setting, characters, and events, it reflects many of the work’s central concerns. A British film version of Wuthering Heights, mentioned briefly earlier, was made in 1992 under the direction of Peter Kosminsky, bearing the title Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Kosminsky’s film is heir to Buñuel’s, but he takes the violence and brutality of that film (echoed in the Japanese film as well) and supersedes it by squeezing the emotion out of the violence, thus reducing it from passion to sadism. Unlike most of the directors who preceded him, Kosminsky includes the story of the second generation. The sexual subcurrents of Brontë’s text still surface, but within a subtler frame of reference than in films like Robert Fuest’s. Importantly, Lin Haire-Sargeant shows that film versions like Kosminsky’s that are radically updated and reculturalized have not necessarily jettisoned everything which originally made them Romantic (Haire-Sargeant 1999, 190). Certainly a probing of, as well as a yearning for, the darkness and all that it harbors, both good and bad, is a central tenet of numerous Romantic texts — and one that still resonates today, whether textually or cinematically.

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4.3 Charlotte Brontë Unlike Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights with its dual narrators and complex, multi-generational plot that sent screenwriters straight to the cutting board, the main difficulty with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is its strong, first-person narrative voice. This problem has been addressed variously, but often by incorporating elements of voice-over. Both novels, published in 1847, have been continuously adapted for the screen, but it is Jane Eyre that was first exploited as a source text. It underwent four American silent adaptations in 1910, 1914, 1915, and 1921, while the first film version of Wuthering Heights came in 1920. The first sound film of Jane Eyre was made in the United States in 1934 and was notable for starring Colin Clive as the irascible Edward Rochester — a role he played in between his stints as Dr. Frankenstein in James Whale’s two films. Orson Welles was the next actor to attempt Rochester, in the 1944 version directed by Robert Stevenson; this was not an effort appreciated in all quarters. Not only is the screen appropriated by Welles, but the narrative perspective has become male as well, beginning a trend of male screenwriters/interpreters of Brontë’s novel that was, with one exception, not interrupted until the 1997 version which had a female scriptwriter (Kay Mellor). In her essay on Stevenson’s 1944 adaptation, Elizabeth Atkins demonstrates that the screenwriters undercut Jane’s independence in a variety of ways that sabotage the feminist message. Kate Ellis and E. Ann Kaplan fault both the Stevenson and Mann films with trying to »liquidate Brontë’s ambivalence toward patriarchy« (Ellis/Kaplan 1999, 195). Robert Young, director of the 1997 film, noted in an interview that not only did his film have the first female screenwriter, but it was also the first to cast Jane in accordance with her age in the novel, eighteen (although the first part of his comment was true of the sixty years preceding his film, he was apparently unaware that Adele Comandini was the screenwriter for the 1934 adaptation, directed by Christy Cabanne). The more recent film versions of Jane Eyre also reinstate Jane’s independent nature and the psychological complexity of both Jane and Rochester, whom Roger Ebert calls »two troubled, wounded people« (Ebert 1996, 2). Despite the valid criticisms of Robert Stevenson’s 1944 film, it does enjoy one advantage cinematically over later versions. As Kate Ellis and E. Ann Kaplan have shown, »the dominance of film noir as a film form in the postwar period enabled Stevenson to re-create quite effectively some of the Gothic aspects of the novel: film noir looked back to expressionism, which in turn drew on the Gothic revival and Romanticism for its themes and styles, so that the line from Brontë’s novel to 1940s film aesthetics was reasonably direct (Ellis/Kaplan 1999, 198 f.). Thus the film versions of Jane Eyre seem to split into two groups: those that are faithful to Brontë’s heroine, »whose spirituality is not dictated by the bonds of social status« (Atkins 1993, 58), and those that adhere to the conventions of the Gothic romance, effectively conveying the mysterious, shadowy, »Gothic« world of seeming and being, but also the ultimately formulaic heterosexual love relationship, in which Jane is inferior to Rochester. Like Goethe’s Werther, re-worked by Ulrich Plenzdorf, and Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, embedded by Doctorow in Ragtime, the characters and events of Jane Eyre were appropriated for a »prequel« in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966. Based in part on personal experience growing up in Dominica with a Welsh-born father and a Dominican Creole mother, Rhys creates a life for »mad« Bertha Mason, a life prior to her incarceration as Rochester’s

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insane wife in Jane Eyre. Rhys’s revisionist text protests the colonialist mentalities that make Antoinette (arbitrarily renamed »Bertha« by Rochester) mad. English Gothic mystery is transformed into Caribbean voodoo, and the young Rochester is portrayed unflatteringly as a colonialist and patriarchal oppressor. Rhys in her novel created an analogy to Jane Eyre by teasing out the palimpsestic text between the lines; in that this subtext deals with permutations of the Other and subjective identity, it perpetuates themes that were of concern to many Romantic writers. The film successfully continues the investigation. One commentator urged people to see the film, saying, »it will certainly get you to thinking about colonialism, dominance and subordination, subjectivity and identity, [and] what it is like to be utterly the Other« (McAlister 1993, 2). Thus a number of core Romantic topics from the late eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century have been recycled, reformulated, and re-culturalized, but are essentially still relevant and, through both literary rewrites and cinematic adaptations, are very much in the public realm. Together Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea incorporate many of what have proven to be the most pressing twentieth-century issues, such as feminism, racism, nationalism, and colonialism; thus they sound a particularly contemporary note in the discussion of Romanticism’s legacy. 5.

Conclusion

As we have seen, a surprisingly large number of Romantic works have been made into films over the past hundred years. This sustained attractiveness of Romantic works to cinéastes derives from both thematic and structural roots. In general, short stories and novellas are easier to adapt than lengthier novels with multiple plot strands and complex character development. In cases where Romantic novels have been adapted, they have either undergone rigorous cutting or resulted in multi-reel mini-series. Thematic concerns of many Romantic works also dovetailed with the interests of early filmmakers, especially noticeable in the appropriation of Romantic motifs in both Expressionism and film noir. Early filmmakers turned to literary sources for their subject matter as a way of culturally legitimizing the new medium of film as an art form. By the turn of the century Romantic works had been sufficiently canonized to serve this function. Of course not all Romantic works have been made into films an equal amount of times; those singled out for multiple screen adaptations have in general been those that centered on compelling stories: an all-absorbing passion and/or the exploration, in some form, of the Other. In regard to the art of cinematic adaptation, it appears to be those interpretations that fall halfway between absolute fidelity to and nearly complete freedom from the original that have been most successful. Films that comment on, critically reshape, or even parody the Urtext have proven to be the most dynamic and engaging. Certainly cinematic adaptations of Romantic works have helped to popularize and thus assure the survival of not only the original stories themselves but also their underlying essence. These film versions have, in some cases, revealed as much about the cultural values of the times in which they were made as about their Romantic sources. Much of Romantic literature, composed in the shadow of the French Revolution and in an era of social upheaval generally, would seem especially burdened by a »social and cultural responsibility« as suggested by film theorist Peter Reynolds (Reynolds 1993, 11). The great extent

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to which the revolutionary and iconoclastic potential of the original works is retained in the adaptations proves to be a common element that binds the various works and films together and ensures both their survival and their continuing relevance. Bibliography Anderson, Jeffrey M. 2002. »Dude, where’s my Karmen? [Review of Karmen Geï]«. The San Francisco Examiner. August 2. Atkins, Elizabeth. 1993. »Jane Eyre Transformed«. Literature/Film Quarterly. 21.1: 54–60. Bouzereau, Laurent. 1987. »Blue Velvet: An Interview with David Lynch«. Cineaste. 3. www.geocities. com/~mikehartmann/intb vcineas.html (28.3.2001). Collick, John. 1993. »Dismembering Devils: The Demonology of Arashi ga oka (1988) and Wuthering Heights (1939)«. Novel Images: Literature in Performance. Ed. by Peter Reynolds. London, New York: Routledge. Costello, Tom (ed.). 1994. International Guide to Literature on Film. London: Bowker-Saur. D’Lugo, Marvin. 1991. The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing. Princeton: Princeton UP. Doctorow, Edgar Lawrence. 1974. Ragtime. New York: Plume (Penguin). Ebert, Roger. 1986. »Review of Blue Velvet«. Chicago Sun Times. 28 September. ———. 1996. [Review of Jane Eyre (1996. Dir. Franco Zeffirelli)]. Chicago Sun Times. April 12. Eisner, Lotte. 1965. L’Ecran Démoniaque. Paris: Le Terrain Vague [first published in France in 1952]. ———. 1969. The Haunted Screen. Transl. by Roger Greaves. Berkeley: California UP. Ellis, Kate and Kaplan, E. Ann. 1999. »Feminism in Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Its Film Versions«. Nineteenth-Century Women at the Movies: Adapting Classic Women’s Fiction to Film. Ed. by Barbara Lupack. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP. 192–206 [Repr. with new postscript: »Feminism in Brontë’s Novel and Its Film Versions«. The English Novel and the Movies. 1981. Ed. by Michael Klein and Gillian Parker. New York: Frederick Ungar. 83–94]. Fragola, Anthony. 1994. »Buñuel’s Re-vision of Wuthering Heights: The Triumph of L’amour fou over Hollywood Romanticism«. Literature/Film Quarterly. 22.1: 50–56. Friedman, Lester D. 1981. »The Blasted Tree«. The English Novel and the Movies. Ed. by Michael Klein and Gillian Parker. New York: Frederick Ungar. 52–66. Garcia, Maria. 2003. »[Review of] Karmen Geï«. Film Journal International. 13 March. Gast, Wolfgang (ed.). 1993. Literatur Verfilmung. Bamberg: Buchner. ———, Hickethier, Knut, and Vollmers, Burkard. 1993. »Die neuen Leiden des jungen W.«. Literatur Verfilmung. Ed. by Wolfgang Gast. Bamberg: Buchner. 172–177. Gollub, Christian-Albrecht. 1984. »Deutschland verfilmt: Literatur und Leinwand 1880–1980«. Film und Literatur: Literarische Texte und der neue deutsche Film. Ed. by Sigrid Bauschinger et al. Bern: Francke. 18–49. Graf, Herbert. 1951. Opera for the People. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP. Haire-Sargeant, Lin. 1999. »Sympathy for the Devil: The Problem of Heathcliff in Film Versions of Wuthering Heights«. Nineteenth-Century Women at the Movies: Adapting Classical Women’s Fiction to Film. Ed. by Barbara Lupack. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP. Harrington, John. 1981. »Wyler as Auteur: Wuthering Heights«. The English Novel and the Movies. Ed. by Michael Klein and Gillian Parker. New York: Ungar. 67–82. Hays, Matthew. 2002. »[Review of] Karmen Geï«. The Globe and Mail. 25 May. Hickethier, Knut. 1993. »Das Erdbeben in Chili: Literatur als Film — verfilmte Literatur«. Literatur Verfilmung. Ed. by Wolfgang Gast. Bamberg: Buchner. 142–158. Kanzog, Klaus (ed.). 1981. Erzählstrukturen − Filmstrukturen: Erzählungen Heinrich von Kleists und ihre filmische Realisation. Berlin: E. Schmidt. Killick, Rachel. 2002. »Notre-Dame de Paris as Cinema: From Myth to Commodity«. Victor Hugo, romancier de l’abîme: New Studies on Hugo’s Novels. Ed. by J.A. Hiddleston. Oxford: Oxford UP. 41–62.

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Kracauer, Siegfried. 1947. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Prince­ ton UP. Kuzniar, Alice. 1989. »Ears Looking at You: E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet«. South Atlantic Review. 54: 7–21. Lindroth, James. 1990. »Down the Yellow-Brick Road: Two Dorothys and the Journey of Initiation in Dream and Nightmare«. Literature/Film Quarterly. 18.3: 160–166. Lynch, David. 1987. »Interview«. Die Tageszeitung. February 12. Mahoney, Dennis F. 1986. »A Recast Goethe: Günther’s Lotte in Weimar (1975)«. German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations. Ed. by Eric Rentschler. New York: Methuen. 246–259. Maltin, Leonard (ed.). 2002. Movie & Video Guide, 2003 Edition. New York: New American Library. McAlister, Linda Lopez. 1993. »Wide Sargasso Sea: A Film Review«. The Women’s Show«. WMNF-FM, Tampa. www.mith2.umd.edu/Womens Studies/FilmReviews/W/wide-sargasso-sea-mcalister (31.3.2003). Mills, Pamela. 1996. »Wyler’s Version of Brontë’s Storms in Wuthering Heights«. Literature/Film Quarterly. 24.4: 414–422. Moeller, Hans-Bernhard and Lellis, George. 2002. Volker Schlöndorff ’s Cinema: Adaptation, Politics, and the »Movie-Appropriate«. Carbondale, Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP. Peucker, Brigitte. 1986. »The Invalidation of Arnim: Herzog’s Signs of Life (1968)«. German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations. Ed. by Eric Rentschler. New York, London: Methuen. 217–230. Pflaum, Hans Günther. 1977. »Egon Günther: Bekenntnis zu Gefühlen«. Film in der DDR. Ed. by Heiko R. Blum. München: Carl Hanser (Reihe Film 13). 115–134. Reynolds, Peter (ed.). 1993. Novel Images: Literature in Performance. London, New York: Routledge. Ringel, Stefan. 1995. »E.T.A. Hoffmanns Werke im Film«. E.T.A. Hoffmann Jahrbuch. 3: 84–94. Rohmer, Eric. 1976. »Die Marquise von O…: Bemerkungen zur Inszenierung«. Filmkritik. 20.1: 37–41. Schiller, Dieter. 1975. »Charlotte contra Goethekult«. Film und Fernsehen. 6: 2–8. Schlüpmann, Heide. 1986. »The First German Art Film: Rye’s The Student of Prague (1913)«. German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations. Ed. by Eric Rentschler. New York, London: Methuen. 9–24. Schneider, Irmela. 1989. »Aktualität im historischen Gewand: Zu Filmen nach Werken von Heinrich von Kleist«. Literaturverfilmungen. Ed. by Franz-Josef Albersmeier and Volker Roloff. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. 99–121. Sōseki, Natsume. 1957. Kokoro. Transl. by Edwin McClellan. Washington, DC: Regnery. Spiegel, Alan. 1981. »The Cinematic Text: Rohmer’s The Marquise of O… (1976) from the Story by Heinrich von Kleist«. Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation. Ed. by Andrew Horton and Joan Magretta. New York: Ungar. 313–328. Thurm, Brigitte. 1976. »Werthers Leiden an seiner Zeit: Zu Egon Günthers Film nach Goethes Briefroman«. Film und Fernsehen. 8: 12–15. Tropp, Martin. 1999. »Re-Creating the Monster: Frankenstein and Film«. Nineteenth-Century Women at the Movies: Adapting Classical Women’s Fiction to Film. Ed. by Barbara Lupack. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP. Welch, Jeffrey Egan. 1981. Literature and Film: An Annotated Bibliography, 1900–1977. New York: Garland.

Filmography Ludwig Joachim (Achim) von Arnim Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau (The Mad Invalid of Fort Ratonneau, 1818) Lebenszeichen [Signs of Life]. 1968. Dir. Werner Herzog. W. Germany Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847) Jane Eyre. 1910. Dir. Theodore Marston. US

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Jane Eyre. 1914. Dir. Martin Faust. US Jane Eyre. 1915. Biograph. Jane Eyre. 1921. Dir. Hugo Ballin. US Jane Eyre. 1934. Dir. Christy Cabanne. US Jane Eyre. 1944. Dir. Robert Stevenson. US Jane Eyre. 1956. Dir. Campbell Logue. US Jane Eyre. 1961. Dir. Marc Daniels. US [TV] Jane Eyre. 1963. Dir. Rex Tucker. GB Jane Eyre. 1971. Dir. Delbert Mann. GB [US: TV] Jane Eyre. 1973. Dir. Joan Craft. GB Jane Eyre. 1983. Dir. Julian Aymes. GB [TV] Jane Eyre. 1996. Dir. Franco Zeffirelli. Fr/It/US/GB Jane Eyre [aka Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre]. 1997. Dir. Robert Young GB/US [TV] Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847) Wuthering Heights. 1920. Dir. A.V. Bramble. GB Wuthering Heights. 1939. Dir. William Wyler. US Abismos de Pasión: Cumbres Borrascosas. 1954. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Mexico. Wuthering Heights. 1970. Dir. Robert Fuest. GB Wuthering Heights. 1978. Dir. Peter Hammond. GB [TV] Hurlevent. 1985. Dir. Jacques Rivette. France Arashi ga oka [aka Onimaru]. 1988. Dir. Yoshishige Yoshida. Japan Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. 1992. Dir. Peter Kosminsky. GB [US: TV] Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebeque Adolphe (1816) Adolphe, ou l’âge tendre [Adolphe, or Tender Years]. 1968. Dir. Bernard T. Michel. Fr Thomas De Quincey Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822) Confessions of an Opium Eater [aka Evils of Chinatown]. 1962. Dir. Albert Zugsmith. US Edgar Lawrence Doctorow Ragtime (1975) [embedded rewrite of Heinrich v. Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas] Ragtime. 1981. Dir. Milos Forman. US Joseph von Eichendorff Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Good-for-Nothing, 1826) Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts. 1973. Dir. Celino Bleiweiss. E. Germany Taugenichts. 1978. Dirs. Bernhard Sinkel, Alf Brustellin. W. Germany Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Der Erlkönig (The Erlking, 1782) Erlkönigs Töchter [Erlking’s Daughters]. 1914. Dir. Stellan Rye. Germany Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (Götz of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, 1773) Götz von Berlichingen. 1955. Dirs. Alfred Stöger, Josef Gielen. Austria Götz von Berlichingen. 1979. Dir. Wolfgang Liebeneiner. Ger/Yugo Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther, 1774, 1787) Le roman de Werther [The Novel of Werther]. 1938. Dir. Max Ophuls. France Begegnung mit Werther [Encounter with Werther]. 1949. Karl Heinz Stroux. Germany Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. 1976. Dir. Egon Günther. East Germany Die Leidenschaftlichen [The Passionate Ones]. 1981. Dir. Thomas Koerfer. Ger/Aust/Switz

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Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809) Le Affinità Elettive [aka Wahlverwandtschaften]. 1996. Dirs. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Italy/France Die Braut [The Bride]. 1999. Dir. Egon Günther. Germany E.T.A. Hoffmann Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs, 1815–16) Elixiere des Teufels. 1922. Dir. Eugen Burg. Germany Die Elixiere des Teufels. 1973. Dir. Ralf Kirsten. E. Germany Die Elixiere des Teufels. 1976. Dir. Manfred Purzer. W. Germany Das Fräulein von Scuderi (Mademoiselle de Scudéry, 1819) Das Fräulein von Scuderi. 1911. Dir. Mario Caserini. Italy Der Besessene [The Obsessed One]. 1919. Dir. Karl Frey. Germany Juwelen [Jewels]. 1930. Dir. Hans Brückner. Austria Die tödlichen Träume [The Deadly Dreams; aka Liebestraum; Dream of Love]. 1951. Dir. Paul Martin. W. Germany Das Fräulein von Scudéri [aka Die Schätze des Teufels; Treasures of the Devil]. 1955. Dir. Eugen York. Ger/Swe Cardillac. 1968. Dir. Edgar Reitz. W. Germany Das Fräulein von Scuderi. 1975. Dir. Lutz Büscher. W. Germany [TV] Nußknacker und Mausekönig (Nutcracker and Mouse-king, 1816) Nutcracker Fantasy. 1979. Dir. Takeo Nakamura. US/Japan Der Nußknacker-Prinz. 1990. Dir. Paul Schibli. Canada [animation] Der Sandmann (The Sandman, 1816) Coppélia ou la poupée animée [Coppelia or the Animated Doll]. 1900. Dir. Georges Méliès. France [motif] La poupée vivante [The Living Doll]. 1909. Dir. Georges Méliès. France [motif] Die Puppe [The Doll]. 1919. Dir. Ernst Lubitsch. Germany [motif] Der Sandmann. 1983. Dir. Dagmar Damek. W. Germany Blue Velvet. 1986. Dir. David Lynch. US Der Sandmann. 1993. Dir. Eckhart Schmidt. Germany The Sandman. 1993. Dir. Paul Berry. US [animation] Der Sandmann. 1994. Dir. Stan Douglas. US [film installation] Die Geschichte vom verlorenen Spiegelbilde (The Story of the Lost Reflection, 1815) Der Student von Prag [The Student of Prague]. 1913. Dir. Stellan Rye. Germany [mixed motifs: Hoffmann’s The Story of the Lost Reflection, Poe’s William Wilson, Goethe’s Faust]; script by Hanns Heinz Ewers Der Student von Prag. 1926. Dir. Henrik Galeen. Germany Der Student von Prag. 1935. Dir. Arthur Robison. Germany Victor Hugo L’homme qui rit (The Laughing Man, aka By Order of the King, 1869) L’uomo che ride [Fr: L’homme qui rit; The Man with the Golden Mask] 1965. Dir. Sergio Corbucci. Italy/France Lucrèce Borgia (1833) Lucrèce Borgia. 1935. Dir. Abel Gance. France Lucrezia Borgia. 1940. Dir. Hans Heinrich. Italy Lucrecia Borgia. 1947. Dir. Luis Bayón Herrera. Argentina Le notti di Lucrezia Borgia [aka Lucrèce Borgia. Nights of Temptation]. 1959.Dir. Sergio Grieco. Italy/France Lucrèce Borgia. [aka Lucrèce Borgia, l’amante del diavolo (Lucrèce Borgia, the Devil’s Lover)] 1968. Dir. Osvaldo Civirani. Italy/Austria Les Misérables (The Miserable Ones, 1862) Les misérables. [aka Jean Valjean]. 1909. Dir. J. Stuart Blackton. US Les misérables. 1911. Dir. Albert Capellani. France Jan Barujan [Jean Valjean]. 1931. Dir. Tomu Uchida. Japan Les misérables. 1934. Dir. Raymond Bernard. France

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Les misérables. 1935. Dir. Richard Boleslawski. US Gavrosh. 1937. Dir. Tatiana Lukashevich. USSR Los miserables. 1944. Dir. Fernando A. Rivero. Mexico El Bouassa. [aka Les misérables]. 1944. Dir. Kamal Selim. Egypt I miserabili. 1947. Dir. Lewis Milestone. US Re-Mizeraburu. 1950. Dirs. Daisuke Ito, Masahiro Makino. Japan Ezhai padum padu. 1950. Dir. K. Ramnath. India (Tam) Les misérables. 1952. Dir. Riccardo Freda. Italy Les misérables. 1958. Dir. Jean-Paul le Chanois. France/Italy Les misérables. 1978. Dir. Glenn Jordan. GB [TV] Les misérables. 1982. Dir. Robert Hossein. France Les misérables. 1995. Dir. Claude Lelouch. France Les misérables. 1998. Dir. Bille August. US Les misérables. 2000. Dir. Josée Dayan. Fr/It/Sp/Ger/US. [aka Les Misérables − Gefangene des Schicksals (Prisoners of Destiny). Germany [mini]] Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1831) Esmeralda. 1905. Dir. Alice Guy. France Notre Dame de Paris. 1911. Dir. Albert Capellani. France The Darling of Paris. 1916. Dir. James Gordon Edwards. US The Hunchback of Notre Dame. 1923. Dir. Wallace Worsley. US Notre-Dame de Paris. 1931. Dir. Jean Epstein. France The Hunchback of Notre Dame. 1939. Dir. William Dieterle. US Notre-Dame de Paris. 1956. Dir. Jean Delannoy. France/Italy The Hunchback of Notre Dame. 1982. Dir. Michael Tuchner. US [TV; remade 1997, TV] The Hunchback of Notre Dame. 1996. Dirs. Gary Trousdale/Kirk Wise. US [animation] Notre-Dame de Paris. 1999. Dir. Gilles Amado. France Quasimodo d’El Paris. 1999. Dir. Patrick Timsit. France Ruy Blas (1838) Ruy Blas. 1948. Dir. Pierre Billon. France. Les travailleurs de la mer (Toilers of the Sea, 1866) Toilers of the Sea. 1936. Dirs. Selwyn Jepson & Ted Fox. GB. Sea Devils. 1953. Dir. Raoul Walsh. GB. Heinrich von Kleist Heinrich. 1976–77. Dir. Helma Sanders-Brahms. W. Germany Das Erdbeben in Chili (The Earthquake in Chile, 1806) Das Erdbeben in Chili. 1975. Dir. Helma Sanders-Brahms. W. Germany [TV]. Die Familie Schroffenstein (The Family Schroffenstein, 1803) Familie oder Schroffenstein. 1983. Dir. Hans Neuenfels. W. Germany. Der Findling (The Foundling, 1811) Der Findling. 1967. Dir. George Moorse. W. Germany Die Marquise von O… (The Marchioness of O…, 1810) Die Marquise von O… [Fr: La marquise d’O]. 1976. Dir. Eric Rohmer. W.Ger/Fr Die Marquise von O… 1989. Dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. W. Germany Michael Kohlhaas (1810) Michael Kohlhaas — der Rebell. 1979. Dir. Volker Schlöndorff. W.Germany Michael Kohlhaas. 1981. Dir. Wolf Vollmar. W. Germany [TV] Penthesilea (1808) Heinrich Penthesilea von Kleist. Träumereien über eine Inszenierung [Heinrich Penthesilea von Kleist. Dreams about a Production]. 1983. Dir. Hans Neuenfels. W. Germany

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Penthesilea. 1988. Dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. W. Germany/France/Austria [TV] Die Verlobung von St. Domingo (The Engagement in Santo Domingo, 1811) San Domingo. 1970. Dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. W. Germany Alphonse de Lamartine Jocelyn (1836) Jocelyn. 1933. Dir. Pierre Guerlais. France Jocelyn. 1952. Dir. Jacques de Casembroot. France Thomas Mann Lotte in Weimar (US: The Beloved Returns, 1939) Lotte in Weimar. 1974–75. Dir. Egon Günther. E. Germany Prosper Mérimée Carmen (1848) Carmen. 1910. Pathé. France Carmen. 1910. Edison. US Carmen. 1915. Dir. Cecil B. De Mille. US Gypsy Blood. 1918. Dir. Ernst Lubitsch. Germany [1921 US] The Loves of Carmen. 1927. Fox. US Gipsy Blood [US: Carmen]. 1931. Dir. Cecil Lewis. GB Andalusische Nächte [Andalusian Nights]. 1938. Dir. Herbert Maisch. Ger/Spain Carmen. 1943. Dir. Luis César Amadori. Arg Carmen. 1945. Dir. Christian-Jacque. Fr/It The Loves of Carmen. 1948. Dir. Charles Vidor. US Carmen probita [Spain: Siempre Carmen, Carmen Forever]. 1952. Dirs. Giuseppe M. Scotese, Alejandro Perla. It/Sp Carmen Jones. 1954. Dir. Otto Preminger. US [musical] Carmen de la Ronda [aka La Carmen de Grenada]. 1959. Dir. Tulio Demicheli. Spain Carmen de Trastevere. 1962. Dir. Carmine Gallone. It/Fr Carmen Baby. 1967. Dir. Radley Metzger. US/Holland L’uomo, l’orgoglio, la vendetta [Man, Pride, Revenge. Ger: Mit Django kam der Tod (With Django Came Death)]. 1968. Dir Luigi Bazzoni. It/Ger La tragédie de Carmen. 1983. Dir. Peter Brook. France [musical play based on Bizet] Carmen. 1983. Dir. Carlos Saura. Spain Carmen. 1983. Dir. Francesco Rosi. Fr/It [film of Bizet’s opera] Prénom Carmen [First Name Carmen]. 1984. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. France Carmen: A Hip Hopera. 2001. Dir. Robert Townsend. US Karmen Geï. 2001. Dir. Joseph Gaï Ramaka. Senegal Alfred de Musset Les caprices de Marianne (The Moods of Marianne, 1834) La règle du jeu [Rules of the game]. 1939. Dir. Jean Renoir. France La confession d’un enfant du siècle (Confession of a Child of the Age, 1836) Spowiedz dzieciecia w eku. 1986. Dir. Marek Nowicki. Poland Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée (A Door Should be Kept either Open or Shut, 1848) Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée. 1949. Dir Louis Cuny. France La mouche (1854) Das Schönheitsfleckchen [The Beauty Mark]. 1936. Dir. Rolf. Hansen. Germany On ne badine pas avec l’amour (Do Not Trifle With Love, 1834) On ne badine pas avec l’amour. 1961. Dir. Jean Desailly. France

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Natsume Sōseki Kokoro (The Deep Heart’s Core, 1914) [free adaptation of Goethe’s Werther] Kokoro. 1955. Dir. Kon Ichikawa. Japan Gérard de Nerval La main de gloire (Hand of Glory, 1832) La main du diable [Hand of the Devil; aka Carnival of Sinners]. 1942. Dir. Maurice Tourneur. France Ulrich Plenzdorf Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The New Sufferings of Young W., 1972/73) Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. 1975. Dir. Eberhard Itzenplitz. W. Germany [TV] Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea [prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, 1966] Wide Sargasso Sea. 1993. Dir. John Duigan. US/Australia George Sand A Song to Remember. 1945. Dir. Charles Vidor. US [biogr. Chopin, w/ G. Sand] Impromptu. 1991. Dir. James Lapine. US [re: Sand, Chopin, Musset, Delacroix et al.] Sir Walter Scott The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) The Bride of Lammermoor. 1909. Dir. J. Stuart Blackton. US The Heart of Midlothian (1818) The Heart of Midlothian. 1914. Dir. Frank Wilson. GB A Woman’s Triumph. 1914. Dir J. Searle Dawley. US Ivanhoe (1819) Ivanhoe. 1913. Dir. Herbert Brenon. US Rebecca the Jewess. 1913. Dirs. Walter and Frederick Melville. US Ivanhoe. 1952. Dir. Richard Thorpe. US Le revanche d’Ivanhoe [The Revenge of Ivanhoe; It: La rivincita di Ivanhoe]. 1965. Dir. Amerigo Anton (Tanio Boccia). Fr/It Ivanhoe. 1982. Douglas Camfield. US Quentin Durward (1823) Adventures of Quentin Durward. 1955. Dir. Richard Thorpe. US Rob Roy (1818) Rob Roy. 1911. Dir. Arthur Vivian. US Rob Roy. 1913. Éclair. France Rob Roy. 1922. Dir. W.P. Kellino. GB Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue. 1954. Dir. Harold French. US Rob Roy. 1995. Dir. Michael Caton-Jones. US/Scotland The Talisman (1825) King Richard and the Crusaders. 1954. Dir. David Butler. US Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) Frankenstein. 1910. Dir. J. Searle Dawley. US Life Without Soul. 1915. Dir. Joseph W. Smiley. US Frankenstein. 1931. Dir. James Whale. US Bride of Frankenstein. 1935. Dir. James Whale. US Son of Frankenstein. 1939. Dir. Rowland V. Lee. US The Ghost of Frankenstein. 1942. Dir. Erle C. Kenton. US Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. 1943. Dir. Roy Williams. US

Rewrites and remakes The Curse of Frankenstein. 1957. Dir. Terence Fisher. GB Revenge of Frankenstein. 1958. Dir. Terence Fisher. GB Frankenstein — 1970. 1958. Dir. Howard W. Koch. US Frankenstein’s Daughter. 1959. Dir. Richard Cunha. US Evil of Frankenstein. 1964. Dir. Freddie Francis. GB Frankenstein Conquers the World. 1965. Dir. Ishiro Honda. Japan Frankenstein Created Woman. 1967. Dir. Terence Fisher. GB Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed! 1969. Dir. Terence Fisher. GB The Horror of Frankenstein. 1970. Dir. Jimmy Sangster. GB Frankenstein: the True Story. 1973. Dir. Jack Smight. US [TV] Young Frankenstein. 1974. Dir. Mel Brooks. US [parody] Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. 1974. Dir. Terence Fisher. GB Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein [aka Flesh for Frankenstein]. 1974. Dir. Paul Morrissey. US/Italy/France The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 1975. Dir. Jim Sharman. GB Victor Frankenstein. [aka Terror of Frankenstein] 1977. Dir. Calvin Floyd. Sweden/Ireland The Bride. 1985. Dir. Franc Roddam, GB [remake of Bride of Frankenstein, 1935] Frankenstein Unbound. 1990. Dir. Roger Corman. US Frankenstein. 1993. Dir. David Wickes. US [TV] Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 1994. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. US Stendhal La chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839) La chartreuse de Parme. 1947. Christian-Jacque. Fr/It Prima della rivoluzione [Before the Revolution]. 1964. Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci. Italy Le rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) Il corriere del re. 1950. Dir. Gennaro Righelli. Italy Le rouge et le noir. 1954. Dir. Claude Autant-Lara. France/Italy

693

Conclusion

Bernard Dieterle, Manfred Engel, Gerald Gillespie By its very nature, this work must consist of a series of deliberately overlapping studies, and yet it is constrained to remain only a partial cross-section of what might ideally be represented. »Our« collective look at prose fiction, one of the largest fields of Romantic creativity, is a selective tour d’horizon; we hope it will entice readers to consult the other four volumes in the Romanticism sub-series to which ours is related. Some of the reasons for shaping this book as it now stands are explicit in the Introduction; others we trust are implicit in the outcome, in the actual findings and in the way the chapters reveal larger patterns of relationship. We began from the explicit realization that this act of stock-taking, if it truly attempted to be consciously »historical«, should consider the reception of Romanticism and some of the longer-term repercussions of Romanticism. This has meant dealing with an evolving channel of awareness. To focus on only a few select decades or moments in the »past«, while ignoring our own present moment of retrospection, would invite the danger of seeing that literary »past« and the evolving channel of awareness in a severe mode of intellectual isolation. The book in its aggregate would have been far less sensitive to those omissions, exaggerations, distortions, misprisions, and re-instantiations involving the unacknowledged cultural filters of later moments down to our own. Now, in the light of some of the findings gathered here in this volume, we are pleased that certain implicit aspects of the cultural legacy have acquired a clearer profile. Therefore our Conclusion can well begin with a brief anticipation of our sense of what Part III is about. Part III brings out rather forcefully why the literary super-system’s complicated passage through a major cultural watershed — the time of various »post«-isms (postmodernism, poststructuralism, etc.) in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s — in itself virtually necessitated that comparatists thoroughly »rewrite« the story of Romanticism. We shall return to that matter, among others, as we review each part of the volume and attempt to assess what has been accomplished and what should yet be done to complement our work. But our governing attitude bears repeating: Rewriting literary history with consciousness of today’s critical context does not mean the necessity of subservience. We reject the idea of any supposed obligation to kowtow to a set of contemporary fashions at the turn from the twentieth into the twenty-first century, and to perform some replication of these in this book’s chapters, when the primary aim here is to demonstrate discourses that once claimed or now, by indirection of cultural flows, again lay claim to the status of being contemporary. Our editorial team anticipated obvious problems that would arise in developing Part I. There would be inevitable gaps because certain themes and motifs once important to Romantic authors might not attract sufficient critical interest today. A more serious challenge was posed by the fact that so many themes run through several centuries and open out into a variety of literary constellations and genres. Therefore the book’s task and its natural economy required

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identifying themes in specific relation to Romantic storytelling. We looked for treatments of thematic clusters when they were characteristic of Romantic works and, ideally, when there was also some significant sharing across cultural boundaries and not merely a concentration of the phenomena in one cultural environment. As we anticipated, many chapters tie onto each other at certain nodular points so as to form an enormous web of referenced texts. Thereby, we trust, a fuller sense of Romantic culture has emerged. In addition, in terms of the ongoing reception of Romanticism, we deemed it worthwhile to take notice of how some traits seem to resurface persistently down to our times. And in general, our advice in the Preface deserves attention: Because the overwhelming majority of chapters cross the boundaries of several language streams, the Index of names and titles is an important resource. For example, a number of chapters lace together phenomena in the Slavic and Scandinavian countries and relate them to western and/or southern European writing; while other chapters reach into the New World and see its literatures in relation to those of Europe. Some chapters draw together types of narrative in order to highlight their closest cousins in prose, while others examine the relations and distinctions of writing history and romance, or the generic characteristics informing Romantic as against Realist or Naturalist »fiction«. Some chapters concentrate on the »golden triangle« of Romanticism — Britain, France, and Germany — but a variety of chapters concentrating on other territories reference certain authors from the triangle because of their relevance when seen under specific different optics. Besides reading within each chapter for its own value, students of Romanticism can profitably read across the chapters in Part I and explore at least five larger thematic configurations. (And it stands to reason that many of these same themes make a renewed appearance in Part II or Part III in connection with either generic or discursive considerations or the story of literary reception.) Maertz, Szegedy-Maszák, and Albert examine the concept of the artist as a key figure and the literary, pictorial, and musical arts as a prime human realm and a key subject in fiction. Maertz, Dieterle, and Lorant elaborate basic roles and protagonist types associated with Romantic experience. A wealth of aspects of the subjectivist revolution, Romantic psychology, and the age’s altered sensibility are brought to the fore by Schmitz-Emans, Grabovszki, Andermatt, and Klinkert/Willms (and again by Garber in Part IIB). Of course, when addressing such a massive cluster of topics as ideas about nature, chapters must inevitably be selective. Thus Slavicists, for example, would likely wish to extend attention to the »discovery« of the Caucuses or of other dramatic or exotic territories as Romantic landscapes in Russian literature, not included in Graeber or Giacomoni. Similarly, because the topics »children« and »women« are so vast, specialists in particular literatures might well hope for certain expansions by Kümmerling-Meibauer and Klinkert/Willms — for example, commentary on the relative importance of influences on Blake, the deeper poetic character of Goethe’s Mignon, and the actual striking differences in the status of women writers from one language block to another. Graeber, Andermatt, and Giacomoni take up a diverse range of ways that Romantics related to nature, defined the boundary between life and material reality, and reconstituted a sense of cosmic order. Hoffmeister (Part I), Halse (Part IIA), and Nemoianu (Part IIB) focus in distinct ways on the Romantic response to epochal crisis in the Revolutionary period and the development of literary modes to interpret history.

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Two enormous thematic clusters are not represented in any concentrated way in Part I of the volume, although our contributors certainly offer numerous points onto which appropriate chapters might attach dedicated to these areas. One area is the vast realm of religious and spiritual expression; this might be studied in its own right or might be combined with a study of anti-religious impulses and deliberate moves to promote a secular as against religious vision. On the role of religious thought and feeling — an enormous subject matter we have treated here only incidentally — readers should consult Part VIII, »Intimations of Transcendence«, of the companion volume Nonfictional Romantic Prose: Expanding Borders. The other huge realm encompasses literature which tries to define nationhood or to advocate the cause of specific peoples and their claim to enjoy their own natural community of interests and to have a place in history. There are numerous chapters in Nonfictional Romantic Prose that deal with theories of national literature and language and the role of Romanticism in promoting nationalism. While a hypothetical distinct chapter in Romantic Prose Fiction could dwell on nationalist sentiments in western parts of Europe, it would be even more useful (in the current circumstances of Comparative Literature at the start of the third millennium of the Common Era) if it concentrated on northern and eastern parts of Europe and on New World cases. That being said, we want to stress that aspects of cultural identity formation do indeed appear across our entire volume, in several connections, in the chapters by Bernauer, Paatz, Nemoianu, Isbell, Halse, and Smoot. As explained in the Introduction, in general our volume has ceded any more extensive work on the literatures of East and Southeast Europe to a separate project in the CHLEL series. Also, our approach has deliberately subordinated the story of the formation of national identities insofar as the chapters of Romantic Prose Fiction tend to highlight traits that appear in a variety of language streams and geo-cultural centers, rather than to disaggregate them and to repeat the various local clichés of identity. If we had looked at the importance of the desire to assert identity, insofar as it might have given great strength to crucial masterpieces of particular peoples, many of the features that we regard more generally as Romantic themes, structures, and discourses would of course have acquired a distinct local character. But we consciously elected to see these features in a broader context. For a sense of the historical flow in cultures of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, appreciated in a comparative literature context, readers can consult the works of such scholars as György Vajda, Milan Dimić, Zoran Konstantinovic, Fridrun Rinner, and Donald Fanger. To a considerable extent, the chapters in the two sections of Part II, »Paradigms of Romantic Fiction«, supplement the thematic approach of Part I and cover a good deal of what we have just identified as desiderata deserving of amplification. And it is to be expected that important aspects of discourse, too, are bound to return as part of the story of dissemination and reception in Part III. For example, Paatz (Part IIB) and Talvet (Part III) contextualize Romantic writing in Latin America in the framework of the evolved Euro-American super-system, while appreciating Romantic themes especially insofar as they become rooted in New World experiences. The overarching mandate for Part II has been to examine text types and structural features which exhibit deep discursive impulses or shaping »mentalities« in Romantic fiction. Thus section A, in gathering pertinent generic types, naturally provides readers with another set of descriptive and conceptual loops »feeding-back« to materials broached in thematic terms in Part I. The story forms exposited by Van Gorp and Steigerwald clearly relate in important respects to

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the thematic universe of psychological and cosmological insights exposited by Schmitz-Emans, Grabovszki, and Andermatt. Engel’s linking and differentiating of the Bildungsroman as one of the primary Romantic narrative structures deepens and broadens for us our introduction to the thematics of the artist in Maertz, Szegedy-Maszák, Albert, and Klinkert/Willms. Moreover, by identifying the discursive power of Romantic ideas of »Bildung« (formation, shaping, education) as a common core informing both novels and long verse narratives, Engel complements the findings of Isbell on the relationship between novel and romance. Gillespie’s account of the Romantic detective once again ties onto the earlier chapters on Romantic psychology and science, and adds a new lead figure to the »team« of Romantic protagonists (Maertz’s artists, Dieterle’s Wertherian and Byronic types, Lorant’s wanderers, and more). Bernauer’s account of the Romantic approach to history, in relationship to recurrent attempts to create a »realist« code, links up with the topic of science from another angle. Simultaneously, his chapter offers another register of cases which exhibit a long-term dialectic between »romance« and (the modern) »novel«, as this was played out further in works by the successors to Romanticism. Smoot (Part III), for example, pays special attention to this dialectic with regard to American literature. Thus Bernauer’s chapter anticipates the broad examination by Isbell, in Part IIB, of the bridges between prose and verse narration erected in Romantic thought and practice. Halse demonstrates the longevity of a literary mode, the idyll, as well as its co-presence at the heart of Romanticism in verse and prose expressions. Guerrero-Strachan’s chapter on formalistic and theoretical definitions of Romantic narrative types — types elsewhere observed in the geocultural and chronological flow — serves as a kind of preface to the often more abstractly framed analyses in section B of Part II. Once again, clearly, section B executes another set of important loops reconnecting and adding to earlier thematic and generic discriminations. The chapters by Spiridon, Ceserani/ Zanotti, Rossbach, and Figueira are tours de force examining cardinal Romantic discursive tendencies as evidence of deep structuring forces in European culture. Both Spiridon and Ce­ se­ra­ni/Zanotti — whose contributions expand upon elements seen thematically in SchmitzEmans, and Grabovszki (Part I) and again in discursive terms in Garber (Part IIB) — revisit the phenomena of dialectic tensions and of doubling in Romantic writing and discover roots for new kinds of »voice« and critical thought which will increasingly influence the Euro-American world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their chapters unearth potential challenges to older ideas of order, challenges buried in Romantic fears and speculations. By outlining the ways Romantics began to accept myth as a key to understanding human behavior and belief systems, Figueira’s chapter is an essential correlative to Nemoianu’s on the themes in Romantic historical vision, and to Schmitz-Emans’s and Rossbach’s chapters (Part I) on Romantic venturing into the »interior« of individual and collective consciousness. Taken together, the chapters of Part II expand in several instances on the thematics of concern over the status of the individual subject which Part I broaches in illustrative cases, such as the international literary success of the Werther story traced by Dieterle and the spectacle of the »wanderer«, the outsider-quester, treated by Lorant. The Faust complex is one of the more conspicuous examples of a major topic for which our volume lacks a separate chapter. There was no reluctance to grant space to a lead figure who takes on a new importance and a new lease of life in Romanticism, although (like other

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favorites such as Hamlet, Quixote, and Don Juan) he is inherited from the late Renaissance. But he makes his scattered appearances across the volume always in relation to other topics. Of course, because the Faust, Hamlet, and Don Juan subject matters were predominantly stamped by their early emergence in great dramas, they have enjoyed extensive treatment in volume two, Romantic Drama, of the Romanticism sub-series of CHLEL. We hope readers will consult volume two also for leads to prose works that take up these modern mythologems. It could be useful to have a separate chapter or chapters on the fundamental cosmological and psychological model crafted by the Romantics (especially German thinkers) in the first decades of the nineteenth century and its absorption in literary works, since this model underpins so much of nineteenth-century thought and is still influencing our contemporary world (via Marx, Freud, et al.). Such a supplementary chapter would intersect with that on the »night side« of Romanticism by Schmitz-Emans, who invokes the importance of these »scientific« paradigms. Readers are urged to consult Part VII, »Intersections: Scientific and Artistic Discourses in the Romantic Age«, in Nonfictional Romantic Prose for further treatment of these important areas. The purpose of Part III of Romantic Prose Fiction is threefold. All chapters are meant to show various stages and kinds of reception (which includes active rejection) of Romanticism; some are to show re-instantiations of Romantic modes; some are to illustrate late moments in the flowering of Romantic modes outside the primary original territories of their appearance, or the natural limits against which Romanticism would sometimes push with no or little success. Of course, these categories may sometimes converge. Sondrup’s expansive treatment of flamboyant Romantic irony in Swedish literature, long after its first appearances in Germany, and Takayuki’s examination of the struggle to assert Romantic principles, which arrived in Meiji Japan bundled with later rival European literary modes, belong to the third category. In the case of the idyll, Halse (Part IIA) shows the tenacity of a literary mode, and how its elements, already prominent in eighteenth-century writing (and with a distinguished pedigree rooted in antiquity), could undergo first a Romantic metamorphosis, then flow on into a Realist phase. His findings are a revealing and corroborative addition to Nemoianu’s famous study (1985) of Biedermeier culture in Europe (including its Victorian features) as the important stage of late Romanticism in the mid-nineteenth century. Smoot treats a basic phenomenon of the giant Euro-American literary system: how the attempts to counter or banish a powerful movement »paradoxically« may help keep it going and how successor moments often co-opt cultural elements and redefine and redeploy them. Like Smoot, Chaves moves effortlessly between Europe and the New World as territories of a super-system and chronicles the widespread symbiosis between spiritualism and the Symbolist brand of Neo-Romanticism at the turn of the century. Black broadens the story of the triumphant return of Romanticism first via Symbolism and then again in many features of Modernism — in fact, he demonstrates that, if we subtract Romanticism from ››actual‹‹ cultural history, an enormous range of twentieth-century art becomes unthinkable. Here we witness the counter-attack, as it were, on the intervening nineteenth-century attack against Romanticism. It goes without saying that even a wide-ranging chapter like Black’s can be supplemented since it deals with a rich subject matter — for example, we might take note of Scandinavian Symbolists or of the multi-stranded reception of Novalis in Russian Symbolism. Aldridge expands the

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historical framework daringly so as to rethink certain Romantic habits of narrative playfulness along a trajectory all the way from the Baroque to Postmodernism. Thus we gain an insight into Romantic irony as a particular moment and kind of ludic expression in a long string of recurrent ludic moments in European literature — a string in which Sterne doubtlessly constitutes the most important connecting knot and one highly appreciated by the Romantics. Closing the volume, Martin explores a rich set of formal relationships and issues that spring from the tension inherent in film, which on the one hand embodies the Romantic demand for a realm of imaginative freedom, yet on the other seems capable of »de-romanticizing« our world (while »paradoxically« this capacity is unmasked as a direct descendant of Romantic irony). Martin concentrates on film versions of Romantic works in order to sharpen our appreciation of just how close we still are in so many ways to the Romantic mind and its expression in Romantic narration. This is true not just in regard to theoretical insights (for example, about dream structures and the imagination), but holds also on the plane of popular culture, in the appeal of »non-realistic« story types. Some readers may wrongly infer that the volume Romantic Prose Fiction contains a tacit lesson or doctrine. For example, they may suspect our purpose is to assert that the literary expression of the experience of national identity, however real it was to people in the Romantic heyday, is of relatively little importance today, some two centuries later, or even may be considered an illusory construct. But that is certainly not our aim. Rather, we have been concerned to explore strands of literary experience that often were common on a larger regional scale. Readers acculturated in a particular territory, with a vision of what are its own containing boundaries and openings to the far reaches of the globe, often accepted what was the shared European experience as being an integral part of their own local world. Highly developed countries prided themselves as being good models of the best of what Europe represented, and others aspired to belong to such a club. We leave it to other scholars to identify in each case the particular set of key elements that went into making the specific local cultures which at various times were constituted under various political jurisdictions. Romanticism obviously contributed importantly to national self-fashionings. However, in many instances, the current populations of certain »nations« look back at the impact of such forces from a rather recent modern vantage point. The retrospection may involve interpreting an important moment of consolidation or restoration. Sometimes this crucial intersection for culture-defining retrospection is deemed to be situated in early or late Romanticism (as in the cases of the United States of America, Mexico, Greece, Belgium, and most Latin American states), or in the post-Romantic later nineteenth century (as in the cases of Italy, Germany, Canada, and Norway). But in other instances, the significant moment of (re-)founding is situated as recently as after World War I (as in the cases of Poland, the Baltic states, and countries previously incorporated under the Austro-Hungarian empire), or even after World War II (as in the cases of Ukraine and Bielorussia). Part III does not attempt to override or suppress anything of the complicated political and social evolution that was shaping the huge array of different European and Euro-American »nation states« which have claimed a place in history during the Romantic age or not long afterwards. We do not argue for or against the national self-understandings of various populations, or for or against demurrals on the part of minority factions within such populations. Rather, Part III presents in outline several attempts, occurring at several later junctures in history, when

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artists and cultural leaders in a number of political jurisdictions tried to re-mobilize Romantic impulses or to understand or oppose them. We assume that, several decades from now, future studies of Romanticism will be in a position to discern further cultural junctures and objectives which reflect new stages in the reception (or perhaps in the distinct waning) of Romanticism; just as Romanticism internalized in its own range of expression many traits from its more immediate antecedents, and borrowed extensively from the older European past. Today we may legitimately consider acts of »reception« on the part of Romantics in the heyday of Romanticism to be essential parts of the story; and by the same token, we may legitimately close our work by thinking about Romanticism as a shape-shifting heritage.

Comparative History of Literature in European Languages Romanticism Series

Contents I. Romantic Irony Ed. Frederick Garber Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1988 ISBN 963 05 4844 5 Henry Remak: General Preface Frederick Garber: Editor’s Preface

5 7

Tradition and Background Lowry Nelson, Jr.: Romantic Irony and Cervantes Frederick Garber: Sterne: Arabesques and Fictionality

15 33

National Manifestations Ernst Behler: The Theory of Irony in German Romanticism Raymond Immerwahr: The Practice of Irony in Early German Romanticism René Bourgeois: Modes of Romantic Irony in Nineteenth-Century France Maria de Lourdes Ferraz, Jacinto do Prado Coelho: The Ironic Récit in Portuguese Romanticism Anthony Thorlby: Imagination and Irony in English Romantic Poetry Wim Van den Berg, Joost Kloek: Thorbecke and the Resistance to Irony in the Netherlands George Bisztray: Romantic Irony in Scandinavian Literature Vera Calin: Irony and World-Creation in the Work of Mihai Eminescu Mihály Szegedy-Maszák: Romantic Irony in Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Literature Edward Możejko, Milan V. Dimić: Romantic Irony in Polish Literature and Criticism Roman S. Struc: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol: Ironic Modes in Russian Romanticism Milan Dimić: Romantic Irony and the Southern Slavs G.R. Thompson: The Development of Romantic Irony in the United States

43 82 97 121 131 156 178 188 202 225 241 250 267

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Syntheses Lilian Furst: Romantic Irony and Narrative Stance Jean-Pierre Barricelli: Musical Forms of Romantic Irony Gerald Gillespie: Romantic Irony and the Grotesque Gerald Gillespie: Romantic Irony in Modern Anti-Theater Frederick Garber: Coda: Ironies, Domestic and Cosmopolitan Bibliography Index

293 310 322 343 358 383 385

II. Romantic Drama Ed. Gerald Gillespie Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994 ISBN 90 272 3441 8 Introduction

ix

Part One: Renewal and Innovation Lilian R. Furst: Shakespeare and the Formation of Romantic Drama in Germany and France Douglas Hilt: The Reception of the Spanish Theatre in European Romanticism Manfred Schmeling: »Theater in the Theater« and »World Theater«: Play Thematics and the Breakthrough of Romantic Drama Frederick Burwick: Illusion and Romantic Drama W.D. Howarth: Assimilation and Adaptation of Existing Forms in Drama of the Romantic Period

3 17 35 59 81

Part Two: Themes, Styles, Structures André Lefevere: Shakespeare Refracted: Writer, Audience, and Rewriter in French and German Romantic Translations Miroslav J. Hanak, Nadežda Andreeva-Popova: Folklore and Romantic Drama Marvin Carlson: Nationalism and the Romantic Drama in Europe Jeffrey N. Cox: Romantic Redefinitions of the Tragic Gerhart Hoffmeister: The Romantic Tragedy of Fate Gloria Flaherty †: Empathy and Distance: German Romantic Theories of Acting Reconsidered Ulrich Weisstein: What is Romantic Opera? — Toward a Musico-Literary Definition

101 115 139 153 167 181 209

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Part Three: Affinity, Dissemination, Reception Marvin Carlson: The Italian Romantic Drama in Its European Context John Dowling: Romantic Drama in the Hispanic World: The Picturesque Mode Harold B. Segel: Polish Romantic Drama in Perspective Alexander Gershkovich: Russian Romantic Drama: The Case of Griboedov Hana Voisine-Jechova: Romanticism in Genres of Drama in Bohemia Mihály Szegedy-Maszák: Romantic Drama in Hungary George Bisztray: Romantic Trends in Scandinavian Drama Richard Plant: From Dark into Light: Nineteenth-Century Romantic Drama in English-Canada Dinnah Pladott: Nineteenth-Century American Drama: A Romantic Quest Emilio Carilla: The Romantic Theater in Hispanic America

233 249 259 273 287 297 317 329 343 359

Part Four: The Romantic Legacy Gerald Gillespie: Classic Vision in the Romantic Age: Goethe’s Reconstitution of European Drama in Faust II Virgil Nemoianu: Romantic Irony and Biedermeier Tragicomedy Martin Esslin: Romantic Cosmic Drama Gerald Gillespie: The Past Is Prologue: The Romantic Heritage in Dramatic Literature Bibliography Index

379 399 413 429 465 489

III. Romantic Poetry Ed. Angela Esterhammer Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002 ISBN 978–1588111128 Angela Esterhammer: Introduction

vii

Part One: The Evolution of Sensibility and Representation Lilian R. Furst: Autumn in the Romantic Lyric: An Exemplary Case of Paradigm Shift Frederick Burwick: Reflection as Mimetic Trope Maria Cieśla-Korytowska: On Romantic Cognition Mihály Szegedy-Maszák: Vörösmarty and the Poetic Fragment in Hungarian Romanticism

3 23 39 55

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Romanticism Series

John M. Baker, Jr.: Loss and Expectation: Temporal Entwinement as Figure and Theme in Novalis, Wordsworth, Nerval, and Leopardi Kari Lokke: Poetry as Self-Consumption: Women Writers and Their Audiences in British and German Romanticism

63 91

Part Two: The Evolution of Genre Ernst Behler: Lyric Poetry in the Early Romantic Theory of the Schlegel Brothers Angela Esterhammer: The Romantic Ode: History, Language, Performance Irena Nikolova: The European Romantic Epic and the History of a Genre Ian Balfour: The Sublime Sonnet in European Romanticism Patrick Vincent: Elegiac Muses: Romantic Women Poets and the Elegy

115 143 163 181 197

Part Three: Romantic Poetry and National Projects George Bisztray: Awakening Peripheries: The Romantic Redefinition of Myth and Folklore Virgil Nemoianu: »National Poets« in the Romantic Age: Emergence and Importance Monica Spiridon: Romanian Poetry and the Great Romantic Narrative about the Mission of the Poet Gregory Jusdanis: Greek Romanticism: A Cosmopolitan Discourse Donald L. Shaw: Time and History in Spanish Romantic Poetry Michael Gassenmeier, Jens Martin Gurr: The Experience of the City in British Romantic Poetry Julia M. Wright: »Sons of Song«: Irish Literature in the Age of Nationalism D.M.R. Bentley: Near the Rapids: Thomas Moore in Canada Frederick Garber: Address and Its Dialectics in American Romantic Poetry Gwen Kirkpatrick: Romantic Poetry in Latin America

225 249 257 269 287 305 333 355 373 401

Part Four: Interpretations, Re-creations, and Performances of Romantic Poetry Geraldine Friedman: Baudelaire’s Re-reading of Romanticism: Theorizing Commodities / The Commodification of Theory Thomas Pfau: Nachtigallenwahnsinn and Rabbinismus: Heine’s Literary Provocation to German-Jewish Cultural Identity Susanne Schmid: Reception as Performance: The Case of Shelley in Germany Stanley Corngold: Implications of an Influence: On Hölderlin’s Reception of Rousseau John Neubauer: Organicist Poetics as Romantic Heritage? Susan Kirkpatrick: The Uses of Romantic Poetry: Feminine Subjects in Modern Spanish Culture Index of Names Index of Titles

419 443 461 473 491 509 525 531

Contents

707

IV. Nonfictional Romantic Prose: Expanding Borders Ed. Steven P. Sondrup and Virgil Nemoianu, in collaboration with Gerald Gillespie Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994 ISBN 978–1588114525 Preface

vii

Part One: General Introduction Virgil Nemoianu

1

Part Two: Romantic Theoretical and Critical Writing Monika Schmitz-Emans: Theories of Romanticism: The First Two Hundred Years John Isbell: Romantic Disavowals of Romanticism, 1800–1830 Gerhart Hoffmeister: Hegel and Hegelianism in European Romanticism Manfred Engel, Jürgen Lehmann: The Aesthetics of German Idealism and Its Reception in European Romanticism Mary Anne Perkins: Romantic Theories of National Literature and Language in Germany, England, and France Carolyn Buckley-Fletcher: Sir Walter Scott and the Beginnings of Ethnology

13 37 57 69 97 107

Part Three: Expansions in Time Michael Gassenmeier, Jens Martin Gurr: Burke’s Conservatism and Its Echoes on the Continent and in the United States Steven P. Sondrup: Distorted Echoes: The Mythologies of Nordic Nationalism

117 141

Part Four: Expansions in Space Mircea Anghelescu: Romantic Travel Narratives Joselyn M. Almeida: Romanticism and Nonfictional Prose in Spanish America, 1780–1850

165 181

Part Five: Expansions of the Self Frederick Garber: Allegories of Address: The Poetics of the Romantic Diary Eugene Stelzig: The Romantic Subject in Autobiography Carol Strauss Sotiropoulos, Margaret R. Higonnet: Educating for Women’s Future: Thinking New Forms

197 223 241

708

Romanticism Series

Part Six: Generic Expansions Frederick Garber: The Romantic Familiar Essay John Boening: The Unending Conversation: The Role of Periodicals in England and on the Continent during the Romantic Age Madison U. Sowell: Almanacs and Romantic Nonfictional Prose Monica Spiridon: The Romantic Pamphlet: Stylistic and Thematic Impurity of a Double-Edged Genre José Manuel Losada: Costumbrismo in Spanish Literature and Its European Analogues

267 285 303 317 333

Part Seven: Intersections: Scientific and Artistic Discourses in the Romantic Age Alan Richardson: Romanticism, the Unconscious, and the Brain Joel Black: Literary Sources of Romantic Psychology Gerald Gillespie: Romantic Discourse on the Visual Arts Steven P. Sondrup: Aspects of German Romantic Musical Discourse

349 365 377 403

Part Eight: Intimations of Transcendence Virgil Nemoianu: Sacrality as Aesthetic in the Early Nineteenth Century: A Network Approach José Manuel Losada: The Myth of the Fallen Angel: Its Theosophy in Scandinavian, English, and French Literature

423 433

Part Nine: Conclusion: Romanticism as Explosion and Epidemic Virgil Nemoianu Index

467

Index

Anonyma: Alf laila wa-laila (Thousand and One Nights) 125, 186, 309, 326, 327, 506 Cantar de mío Cid (The Lay of the Cid) 623 Historia del Abencerraje y de la hermosa Jarifa (History of Abencerraje and the Beautiful Jarifa) 588 Lazarillo de Tormes 345, 589, 657 Poema del Cid → Cantar de mio Cid Thousand and One Nights → Alf laila wa-laila Acosta de Samper, Soledad (1833–1913) Los piratas de Cartagena (The Pirates of Carthage) 542 Acton, Lord (i.e. John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton; 1834–1902) 534 Addison, Joseph (1672–1719) 108, 250, 370, 657 »The Pleasures of Imagination« 425 Aesop (Aísōpos; 6th century BC) Mýthoi (Mython synagogue, Corpus Fabularum Aesopicarum; Fables) 652 Afanasiev (Afanas’ev, Afanasyev), Aleksandr (1826–1871) Narodnye russkie skazki (Russian Fairy Tales) 190 Agrippa von Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius (1486–1535) 349 Aguirre, Nataniel (1843–1888) Juan de la Rosa, Memorias del último soldado de la independencia (Juan de la Rosa, Memoirs of the Last Soldier of the Independence Movement) 543 Aikin, Anna Laetitia → Barbauld, Anna Laetitia Aikin, John (1747–1822) »On the Pleasure derived from Objects of Terror« 250 »Sir Bertrand: A Fragment« 251

Aimard, Gustave (i.e. Olivier Gloux; 1818–1883) La Mas-horca 549 Rosas 549 Aisopos (Aísōpos) → Aesop Alarcón y Ariza, Pedro Antonio de (1833–1891) »El Clavo: Causa célebre« (The Nail: A Cause Celebre) 360 El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) 560, 562–569 Albert the Great → Albertus Magnus Albertus Magnus (i.e. Albert von Lauingen, c. 1200–1280) 523 Alcott, Louisa May (1832–1888) The Modern Mephistopheles 41 Alemán, Mateo (c. 1547–1614) Guzmán de Alfarache (Guzman of Alfarache) 566 Alexis, Willibald (i.e. Georg Heinrich Wilhelm Häring; 1798–1871) 531 Die Hosen des Herrn von Bredow (Lord von Bredow’s Britches) 316 Walladmor 312 Alfieri, Vittorio (1749–1803) 117, 470 Alighieri, Dante → Dante Alighieri Almeida Garrett → Garrett, João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Almond, David (1951) Skellig 199 Almqvist, Carl Jonas Lovis (Love) (1793–1866) 610–621 Amorina 611 Baron Julius K.* 612, 619 Grimstahamns Nybygge (The Settlement of Grimstahamn) 405 Hinden (The Hind) 612, 617–619 Jagtslottet (The Hunting Lodge) 612, 613 f., 617, 619 Slottskrönikan (The Lodge Chronicle) 612 Törnrosens bok (Book of the Wild Rose) 610–621 Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel (1834–1893) 554 f.

Clemencia o el bien por el mal (Clemencia) 543 El Zarco: Episodio de la vida mexicana 1861–63 (El Zarco the Bandit) 547 Amiel, Henri Frédéric (1821–1881) Fragments du journal intime (Fragments from the Journal Intime of H.-F. Amiel) 471 Ancona, Eligio (1836–1893) El filibustero (The Freebooter) 542 La cruz y la espada (The Cross and the Sword) 542 Los mártires del Anáhuac (The Martyrs of Anáhuac) 541 Andersen, Hans Christian (1805–1875) 191, 194 Billedbog uden billeder (Picture Book without Pictures) 407 f. »Den lilla Idas Blomster« (Little Ida’s Flowers) 194 Eventyr, fortalte for børn (Fairy Tales, Told for Children) 194 »Sneedronningen« (The Snow Queen) 194 Apollinaire, Guillaume (i.e. Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky; 1880–1918) 606 Apuleius, Lucius (c. 125–180) 511, 660 Metamorphoses / Asinus aureus (Metamorphoses or the Golden Ass) 656 f. Arago, Dominique-François-Jean (1786–1853) 130 Arblay, Frances d´ → Burney, Frances Aréstegui, Narciso (1824–1869) 550, 556 El Padre Horán: Escenas de la vida cuzqueña (Father Horán: Scenes of the Life in Cuzco) 545, 551 Arévalo Martínez, Rafael (1884–1975) 622 Ariosto, Ludovico (1474–1533) 54, 307, 496, 497, 498, 503, 505 Aristotle (Aristoteles; 384–322 B.C.) 527 f. Peri Poiètikès (On Poetics) 250 Arnheim, Rudolf (1904–2007) 607 f.

Index

710 Arnim, Bettine (Bettina) von (i.e. Anna Elisabeth von Arnim, née Brentano; 1785–1859) 313 Arnim, Ludwig Achim von (1781–1831) 209–211 Armut, Reichtum, Schuld und Buße der Gräfin Dolores (Poverty, Wealth, Guilt and Atonement of the Countess Dolores) 521 f. Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau (The Mad Invalid of Fort Ratonneau) 521, 668 Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn) 189, 334, 519 Die Kronenwächter (Guardians of the Crown) 312–315, 501, 522 Isabella von Ägypten (Isabella of Egypt) 209 f., 501, 521 Raphael und seine Nachbarinnen (Raphael and His Female Neighbours) 210 f. Arnold, Matthew (1822–1888) 643 Arouet, François-Marie → Voltaire Asbjørnsen, Peter Christen (1812–1885) 190 Norske Folkeeventyr (Norwegian Folktales) 190 Assis, Joaquim María Machado de → Machado de Assis Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, baronne d’ (1650–1705) Contes de fées (Fairy Tales) 327 Austen, Jane (1775–1817) 229, 259, 286, 408, 497, 504 Northanger Abbey 255, 256, 502 Pride and Prejudice 213 Sense and Sensibility 232, 234, 236, 240, 242, 244 Baader, Franz Xaver von (1765–1841) 142 Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685–1750) 69, 72, 78 f. Goldberg-Variationen (Goldberg Variations) 55 Bachofen, Johann Jakob (1815–1887) 517 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895–1975) 421 f., 435 Bălcescu, Nicolae (1819–1852) Istoria românilor sub Mihai Vodă Viteazul (Romanian History in the Age of Prince Michael the Brave) 533 Balmes, Jaime (1810–1848) 529

Balzac, Honoré de (1799–1850) 69 f., 75–78, 100, 103–105, 123, 148, 317, 401, 464, 497, 545, 547, 575, 578, 585 Annette et le criminel (Annette and the Criminal) 132 Études philosophiques (Philosophic Studies) 62, 76, 135 Gambara 61, 69, 72, 75, 77, 85 Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions) 290 La comédie humaine (Human Comedy) 62, 508, 612 La cousine Bette 508 La fille aux yeux d’or (The Girl with Gold Eyes) 507 La peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin) 135, 338, 507 La recherche de l’absolu (The Quest for the Absolute) 523 Le centenaire ou les deux Beringheld (The Centenarian, or the Two Beringhelds) 128–131, 135 Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece) 56, 61–63, 71, 75, 77, 462 Le colonel Chabert 137, 508 L’élixir de longue vie (The Elixir of Life) 135 Le lys dans la vallée (The Lily in the Valley) 104 Le Père Goriot (Father Goriot) 355 Les chouans (The Royalist Insurgents) 531 Les paysans (The Peasants) 104 Louis Lambert 283 Massimilla Doni 75 Melmoth réconcilié (Melmoth Reconciled) 135–137, 508 Romans et contes philosophiques (Novels and Philosophic Tales) 62 Séraphita 523 Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (The Splendour and Misery of the Courtesans) 238, 290 Barabás, Miklós (1810–1898) 63 Barante, Prosper Brugière baron de (1782–1866) Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne (History of the Dukes of Burgundy) 533

Barbauld, Anna Laetitia (née Aikin; 1743–1825) »On the Pleasure derived from Objects of Terror« 250 »Sir Bertrand« 251 Barclay, John (1582–1621) 303 Barginet, Alexandre-Pierre (1798–1843) 531 Baroja y Nessi, Pío (1872–1956) 578 Barrett, Eaton Stannard (1786–1820) The Heroine 259 f. Barthélemy, Jean-Jacques (1716–1795) Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (Voyage of Young Anarcharsis in Greece) 506 Barthes, Roland (1915–1980) Fragments d’un discours amoureux (A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments) 24, 38 Bartram, William (1739–1823) 582 f. Bastida, Gustavo Adolfo Dominguez → Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo Baudelaire, Charles (1821–1867) xvii, 336, 429, 430 473, 488 f., 497, 585, 599 »L’école païenne« (The Pagan School) 598 Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) 597 Les paradis artificiels / Opium et haschisch (Artificial Paradises) 489 Le spleen de Paris 597 »Rêve Parisien« (Parisian Dream) 488, 489 Beaconsfield → Disraeli Beckett, Samuel (1906–1989) 602, 606 Beckford, William (1760–1844) Vathek: An Arabian Tale 254, 334, 502, 506, 523 Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo (i.e. Gustavo Adolfo Dominguez Bastida; 1836–1870) 377 f. La corza blanca (The White Roe) 378 Los ojos verdes (Green Eyes) 378 El caudillo de las manos rojas (The Leader with Red Hands) 377 f. El Miserere (The Miserere) 80 f., 378 El monte de las ánimas (The Mountain of the Souls) 378

Index El rayo de luna (The Moonbeam) 377 f. Leyendas (Legends) 378 Maese Pérez el organista (Master Pérez, the Organist) 80 f. Beer, Jakob Meyer → Meyerbeer Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770–1827) 74, 77, 497 Behn, Aphra (c. 1640–1689) 504 Bellin de La Liborlière, LouiseFrançoise-Marie (1774–1847) La nuit anglaise (The English Night) 259 f. Bellini, Vincenzo (1801–1835) 81, 85 La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalking Girl) 82 Norma 83 Bello, Andrés (1781–1865) 538, 548, 552 Belloc, Hilaire (1870–1953) 534 Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940) 597 »Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit« (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) 607 f. Berchet, Giovanni (1783–1851) Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figliuolo (Grisostomo’s Semiserious Letter) 510 Berkeley, George (1685–1753) 502 Berlin, Isaiah (1909–1997) 602, 603, 605, 606 Berlioz, Louis-Hector (1803–1869) 81, 84 f. Benvenuto Cellini 85 Harold en Italie (Harold in Italy) 85 La damnation de Faust (The Damnation of Faust) 84 f. Lélio, ou le retour à la vie (Lélio, or The Return to Life) 84 Les Troyens (The Trojans) 84 f. Symphonie fantastique 85 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, JacquesHenri (1737–1814) 544 Etudes de la nature (Studies on Nature) 88, 91 La chaumière indienne (The Indian Cottage) 506 Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia) 88, 506 Berry, Paul (1961–2001) The Sandman 667 Besant, Annie (1847–1933) 626, 630

711 Beskow, Elsa (1874–1953) Puttes äventyr i blåbärsskogen (Little Hans in the Blueberry Wood) 199 Beyle, Marie Henri → Stendhal Bierce, Ambrose Gwinnett (c. 1842–1914) 148 Bilbao, Manuel (1828–1895) El Inquisidor Mayor: Historia de unos amores (The Grand Inquisitor: History of Some Love Affairs) 542 Bitzius, Albert → Gotthelf, Jeremias Bizet, Georges (i.e. Alexandre-CésarLéopold; 1838–1875) Carmen 677–679 Björnson, Björnstjerne (1832–1910) 584, 594 Blake, William (1757–1827) 42 f., 144, 185, 505, 598, 600, 696 »Holy Thursday« 185 Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion 505 »Laughing Song« 185 Milton 505 Songs of Experience 185 Songs of Innocence 185 »The Echoing Green« 185 Vala, or the Four Zoas 505 Blanckenburg (Blankenburg), Christian Friedrich von (1744–1796) Versuch űber den Roman (Essay on the Novel) 266 Blasco Ibáñez, Vicente (1867–1928) 577 f. Blavatsky, Helena P. (1831–1891) 624, 627, 628, 634, 637 Isis Unveiled 624, 630, 636 »Stanzas of Dzyan« 636 The Secret Doctrine 624, 630, 636 Blei, Franz (1871–1942) 305 Bleiweiss, Celino (1938) Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Good-ForNothing) 668 Blest Gana, Alberto (1830–1920) 547, 554 El primer amor (The First Love) 544 La aritmética en el amor (Arithmetics and Love) 554 Martín Rivas 545, 552, 554, 556 Bloem, Walter (1868–1951) 606

Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–1375) 6, 307, 496 Il Decamerone (The Decameron) 366 f., 612 Bodmer, Johann Jakob (1698–1783) 300, 325 Böhl de Faber, Cecilia → Fernán Caballero Böhl de Faber, Juan Nicolás (1770–1836) 538, 576, 578 Boiardo, Matteo Maria (c. 1441–1494) 503 Bonald, Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise Vicomte de (1754–1840) 529 Bonaparte, Napoléon → Napoléon I Bonaventura → Klingemann, Ernst August Friedrich Boncourt, Louis Charles Adélaïde de Chamisso de → Chamisso, Adelbert von Borel, Pétrus (i.e. Joseph-Pierre Borel d`Hauterive; 1809–1859) Champavert: Contes immoraux (Champavert) 501 Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986) 362, 622, 625, 640 Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) 640 Börne, Ludwig (1786–1837) Briefe aus Paris (Letters from Paris) 406 Bosboom-Toussaint, Anna Louisa Geertruida (1812–1886) Het Huis Lauernesse (The Lauernesse House) 512 Bosco, Henri (1888–1976) 199 Bossuet, Jaques Bénigne (1627–1704) 529 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth (1837–1915) Lady Audley’s Secret 359 f. Branagh, Kenneth (1960) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 666, 682 Breitinger, Johann Jakob (1701–1776) 300, 326 Bremer, Fredrika (1801–1865) 409 Teckningar ur Hvardagslifvet (Sketches of Everyday Life) 407 Brentano, Clemens (1778–1842) 191, 205–207, 209, 596 Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn) 189, 519

Index

712 Die Chronica des fahrenden Schülers (Chronicles of the Travelling Pupil) 484 »Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl« (Story of Good Kasperl and Beautiful Annerl) 72, 501, 521, 522 Gockel, Hinkel, Gakeleja (Rooster, Hen and Little Cluck) 191 f. Godwi oder Das steinerne Bild der Mutter (Godwi, or the Stone Image of the Mother) 146, 205–207, 210, 242 f., 246, 395 f., 501 Italienische Märchen (Italian Fairy-tales) 334 Die Rheinmärchen (Rhine Fairytales) 334 Breton, André (1896–1966) 23, 596, 597 Brodziński, Kazimierz (1791–1835) 23, 36 Brontë, Anne (1820–1849) 504 Agnes Grey 285 Brontë, Charlotte (1816–1855) 504 Jane Eyre: An Autobiography 285–287, 504, 664, 679, 684 f. Brontë, Emily Jane (1818–1848) 504 Wuthering Heights 285 f., 502, 504, 679, 681–683, 684 Brook, Peter (1925) La tragédie de Carmen 677 Brooks, Mel (i.e. Melvin Kaminski; 1926) Young Frankenstein 681 Brown, Charles Brockden (1771–1810) Wieland or the Transformation 256 Browning, Robert (1812–1889) 534 Brustellin, Alf (1940–1981) Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Good-ForNothing) 668 Buch, Hans Christoph (1944) 673 f. Büchner, Georg (1813–1837) 602 Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death) 468 Lenz 468 Woyzeck 468 Buckle, Henry Thomas (1821–1862) 534 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc (1707–1788) 567

Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanasievich (1891–1940) Master i Margarita (Master and Margarita) 440 Bull, Hans (1739–1783) »Om Landmandens Lyksalighed ved Friheds og Eiendoms Nydelse« (Concerning the Happiness of the Peasant on Enjoying Freedom and Property) 390, 393 Bulwer, Edward George, First Lord Lytton → Bulwer-Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George (1803–1873) 473, 503 Buñuel, Luis (1900–1983) Abismos de pasión (Wuthering Heights) 682 f. Buonaparte, Napoelone di → Napoléon I Bürger, Gottfried August (1747–1794) 281, 501 »Lenore« 37 Burke, Edmund (1729–1797) 127, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful 10, 107 f., 122, 250 f. Reflections on the Revolution in France 10 Burnet, Thomas (1635–1715) 108 Burney, Frances (i.e. Frances d’Arblay) (1752–1840) 504 Burton, Robert (1577–1640) 472 Büscher, Lutz (dates unknown) Das Fräulein von Scuderi (Mademoiselle de Scudéry) 666 f. Byron, George Gordon Noël, Lord (1788–1824) 28, 36, 42, 260, 433, 463, 464, 471, 481, 503 f., 511, 543, 568, 569, 601, 621, 655 Beppo: A Venetian Story 503 Cain: A Mystery 126 f., 483 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt 26, 33, 35 f., 37, 41, 189, 496 f., 503, 568, 618 Detached Thoughts 471 Don Juan 35, 463, 503, 504 »English Bards and Scotch Reviewers« 438 Manfred: A Dramatic Poem 35, 503, 561 Mazeppa 503 f. The Corsair: A Tale 503

The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale 131, 503 Cabanne, Christy (1888–1950) Jane Eyre 684 Cagliostro, Alessandro di (i.e. Giuseppe Balsamo; 1743–1795) 122 Caithness, Lady Marie, Duchess of Pomar (1842–1895) 628 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro (1600–1681) 377 La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream) 571 Calvino, Italo (1923–1985) 596 Campbell, Thomas (1777–1844) Gertrude of Wyoming or the Pennsylvanian Cottage 505 Cané, Miguel (1812–1863) 548 Esther 544 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da (1573–1610) 147 Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881) 41, 44 f., 500 Life of Schiller 280 Past and Present 42 Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh 31, 280 f., 476, 483 The French Revolution: A History 10, 11, 531, 533 f. Wotton Reinfred 45, 47 f. Carpentier, Alejo (1904–1980) Concierto barroco (Baroque Concert) 448 Carroll, Lewis (i.e. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson; 1832–1898) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 199, 485 Carus, Carl Gustav (1789–1869) 142 Casal, Julián del (1863–1893) 635 Casanova de Seingalt, Giacomo Girolamo (1725–1798) 122 Caserini, Mario (1874–1920) Mademoiselle de Scudéry 666 Castera, Pedro (1838–1906) Carmen 544 Castro, Jorge (dates unkown) 630 Castro, Mariano José de Larra y Sánchez de → Larra, Mariano José de Castro Madriz, José María (1818–1892) 630 Cauvain, Henry (1847–1899) 360 Cazotte, Jacques (1719–1792) 337 Le Diable amoureux (The Devil in Love) 329 f.

Index Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de (1547–1616) 6, 367, 376, 449, 459, 496, 497, 498, 564, 566, 621, 656, 662 El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (Don Quixote) 156, 360, 443, 505, 591, 612, 623, 699 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart (1855–1927) 525 Chamfort, Sébastien-Roch Nicolas (1741–1794) 457 Chamisso, Adelbert von (i.e. Louis Charles Adélaïde de Chamisso de Boncourt; 1781–1838) »Adelberts Fabel« (Adelbert’s Fable) 521 Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story) 125 f., 175, 180 f., 244, 245, 500, 521 Champfleury (Fleury) (i.e. JulesFrançois-Félix Husson; 1821–1889) 122 Chase, Richard (1904–1988) The Jack Tales 190 Chateaubriand, François René, Vicomte de (1768–1848) 28, 433, 538, 662 Atala 91–93, 177 f., 180 f., 507, 544, 546, 582 Le génie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity) 33 Les martyrs ou Le triomphe de la religion chrétienne (The Martyrs, or The Triumph of Christian Religion) 507, 531 Les Natchez (The Natchez) 33 Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Memoirs beyond the Tomb) 535 René 26, 32 f., 34, 35, 37, 246, 507, 582 Chatterton, Thomas (1752–1770) 511 Chaucer, Geoffrey (c. 1340–1400) The Canterbury Tales 612 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1860–1904) 161, 593 »Cherni monakh« (The Black Monk) 162 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai (1828–1829) Chto delat’? (What Is to Be Done?) 42 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (1874–1936) 534

713 Chopin, Frédéric François (Fryderyk Franciszek) (1810–1849) 79, 85, 675 Cimarosa, Domenico (1749–1801) Il matrimonio segreto (The Secret Marriage) 54 Cisneros, Luis Benjamín (1837–1904) 551 Julia, o Escenas de la vida en Lima 544, 551 f. Clarín (i.e. Leopoldo E. García-Alas Ureña; 1852–1901) 575 Cleland, John (1710–1789) 257 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne → Twain, Mark Cobbett, William (1763–1835) Rural Rides 406 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834) 42, 43, 257, 160, 278, 473 Biographia Literaria 472 »Christabel« 505 »Church and State« 42 »Kubla Khan« 41, 427–429, 432, 461 f., 488, 489, 602 Lyrical Ballads 598 »The Rime of the Ancient Mariner« 41, 278, 416, 505 Collins, William Wilkie (1824–1889) 11 The Moonstone 360 Comandini, Adele (1898–1987) Jane Eyre 684 Combe, William (1741–1823) Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque 505 Compagnoni, Giuseppe (1754–1833) Le veglie di Tasso (The Night Thoughts of Torquato Tasso) 469 f. Conscience, Hendrik (1812–1883) De leeuw van Vlaanderen (The Lion of Flanders) 512 Constant de Rebecque, Henri Benjamin → Constant, Benjamin Constant, Alphonse Louis → Lévi, Eliphas Constant, Benjamin (i.e. Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque; 1767–1830) 29 Adolphe 230, 234, 240, 675 Contessa, Carl Wilhelm (i.e. Carl Wilhelm Salice-Contessa; 1777–1825) Kinder-Mährchen (Fairy Tales for Children) 191

Cooper, James Fenimore (1789–1851) 92, 300, 310 f., 433, 497, 513, 524, 530 f., 542, 543, 569 f., 572 Autobiography of a PocketHandkerchief 658 Leatherstocking Tales 103, 310 f., 513, 524, 531 Satanstoe; or The Littlepage Manuscripts: A Tale of the Colony 310 f. The Deerslayer; or, The First Warpath 103, 311, 513, 524 The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 513 The Littlepage Manuscripts → Satanstoe; The Chainbearers; The Redskins The Pathfinder; or, The Inland Sea 103 The Pioneers; or, The Sources of the Susquehanna 310, 513, 524 The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin: Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts 310 The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground 310, 569 The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish 311, 546 Corneille, Pierre (1606–1684) 527 Cornelius, Peter (1824–1874) 45 Correggio, Antonio Allegri (1489–1534) 148 Cortázar, Julio (1914–1984) 622, 625 Rayuela (Hopscotch) 446 Cottin, Sophie (1773–1807) Mathilde 507 Courtenay, Baudoin de (1845–1929) 529 Courtils de Sandras, Gatien de (1644–1712) Mémoires de Monsieur d’Artagnan (Memoirs of Monsieur D’Artagnan) 317 Cousin, Victor (1792–1867) 538 Couto Castillo, Bernardo (1879–1901) 622 Coventry, Francis (c. 1725–1754) Pompey the Little 657 Crabbe, George (1754–1832) 401, 405 f., 505 Tales of the Hall 505 The Borough 505 The Village 383, 389, 393, 406 Crane, Stephen (1871–1900) Maggie: A Girl of the Streets 581

Index

714 The Open Boat 581 Crébillon, Claude-Prosper Jolyot de (1707–1777) Le Sofa (The Sofa) 658 Creuzer, Georg Friedrich (1771–1858) Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker (Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancients) 281 Cuéllar, José Tomás de (1830–1894) Linterna mágica (The Magic Lantern) 545 Cuvier, Georges Léopold (1769–1832) 528 f. Dahn, Felix (1834–1912) 316 Dalberg-Acton, John Emerich Edward → Acton, Lord Damek, Dagmar (1944) Der Sandmann (The Sandman) 350 f., 667 D’Annunzio, Gabriele (1863–1938) 602, 606 Notturno 602 Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) La vita nuova (The New Life) 510 Darío, Rubén (i.e. Félix Rubén García Sarmiento; 1867–1916) 622, 623, 625, 626, 629–633, 634, 635, 636, 639 Autobiografía (Autobiography) 629, 631 Azul (Blue) 626, 633 Cantos de vida y esperanza (Songs of Life and Hope) 626 »El caso de la señorita Amelia« (The Case of Miss Amelia) 631 f. »Huitzilopoxtli« 632, 638 »La larva« (The Larva / Ghostly Apparition) 629 f. Prosas profanas (Profane Prose) 626 Darwin, Charles Robert (1809–1882) 529 Darwin, Erasmus (1731–1802) 528 f. Daudet, Alphonse (1840–1897) Le petit Chose: Histoire d’un enfant (Little Thing: Story of a Child) 196 David, Jacques Louis (1748–1825) 61 Davy, Humphry (1778–1829) »A Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry« 130 Elements of Chemical Philosophy 130

Defoe (Foe), Daniel (c. 1660–1731) 297, 496, 497, 566, 567, 610 »A true Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal« 364 The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner 185, 453 Delacroix, Ferdinand Victor Eugène (1798–1863) 534 f., 675 Delannoy, Jean (1908) Notre-Dame de Paris 676 f. Delgado, Rafael (1853–1914) Angelina 544 Delicado, Francisco (c. 1480–1533) Retrato de la Lozana andaluza (Portrait of Lozana: The Lusty Andalusian Woman) 345 Delille, Jacques (1738–1813) 32 Delmonte, Domingo (1804–1854) 546 Dennis, John (1657–1734) 108 De Quincey, Thomas (1785–1859) 146, 312, 473, 605 Confessions of an English OpiumEater 159, 173, 176, 284 f., 488 f., 504, 679 »Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts« 345 Suspira de Profundis: Being a Sequel to the »Confessions of an English Opium-Eater« 176 Díaz Castro, Eugenio (1803/4–1865) Manuela 545 Díaz Covarrubias, Juan (1837–1859) 554 Gil Gómez el insurgente o la hija del médico (Gil Gómez the Insurgent, or The Doctor’s Daughter) 543 La clase media (The Middle Class) 545, 554 Díaz-Pérez, Viriato (1875–1958) 635 Dicenta, Joaquín (1863–1917) El suicidio de Werther (The Suicide of Werther) 24 Dickens, Charles (1812–1870) 497, 500, 501, 543, 563 f., 585 A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas 504 f. A Tale of Two Cities 10–14, 17–19, 173 f., 179, 504, 531 Barnaby Rudge 504 Bleak House 360, 500, 504 f., 564 David Copperfield → The Personal History …

Great Expectations 291, 505 Hard Times 564 Little Dorrit 564 The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observations of David Copperfield, the Younger 291 The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club 504, 564 Diderot, Denis (1713–1784) xvii, 98, 591, 621, 656 Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and His Master) 348, 459, 660 Le neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew) 69, 73 f., 77 Les bijoux indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels) 658, 660 Dieterle, William (1893–1972) The Hunchback of Notre Dame 676 f. Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911) 263, 535 f. Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Poetry and Experience) 263 Das Leben Schleiermachers (The Life of Schleiermacher) 263 Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield (1804–1881) 503 Doctorow, Edgar Lawrence (1931) Ragtime 670 Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge → Carroll, Lewis D’Olivet, Antoine Fabre (1767–1825) 638 Donizetti, Gaetano (1797–1848) 81, 85 Lucia di Lammermoor 54, 82, 83 Dostoevskii (Dostoyevsky), Fedor (Fyodor) Mikhailovich (1821–1881) 199, 511, 593 f. Bratia Karamasovy (The Brothers Karamazov) 172 Dvoinik (The Double) 144, 171 f., 179 Prestuplenie i nakazanie (Crime and punishment) 41 Zapiski iz mertvogo doma (Memoirs from the House of the Dead) 41 f., 593 Zapiski iz podpol’ia (Notes from Underground) 469 Douglas, Stan (1960) Der Sandmann 667 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (1859–1930) 354, 359, 360, 627

Index »A Study in Scarlet« 354 »The Sign of Four« 354 Drake, Sir Francis (c. 1540–1596) 657 Dreiser, Theodore (1871–1945) 575 An American Tragedy 582 Sister Carrie 581 f. Drost, Aarnout (1810–1834) Hermingard van de Eikenterpen (Hermingard of Eikenterpen) 512 Droste-Hülshoff, Annette Freiin von (1797–1848) Die Judenbuche (The Jew’s Beech Tree) 521 Ducasse, Isidore Lucien → Lautréamont, Comte de Dudevant Dupin, ArmandoneAurore-Lucile → Sand, George Dumas père, Alexandre (i.e. Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie; 1802–1870) 538, 542, 556 La Reine Margot (Queen Margot) 508 Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte-Cristo) 508 f. Les trois mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers) 317, 508 f. L’histoire d’un casse-noisette (The Story of a Nutcracker) 195 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich (1921–1990) 602 Duyse, Prudens van (1804–1859) 512 Echeverría, Esteban (1805–1851) 548 f. El matadero (The Slaughterhouse) 378, 549 Elvira, o la novia del Plata (Elvira or the Sweetheart of the River Plata) 512 Edgeworth, Maria (1767–1849) 369, 504 Castle Rackrent, an Hibernian Tale Taken from Fact, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires before the Year 1782 369, 504 »Ennui« 369 »Irish Tales« 369 Tales of Fashionable Life 369 »The Absentee« 369 The Parent’s Assistant; or, Stories for Children 369 Edison, Thomas Alva (1847–1931) 221–223 Eichendorff, Joseph, Freiherr von (1788–1857) xvii, 8–10, 69, 177–179, 209

715 Ahnung und Gegenwart (Presentiment and Presence) 8, 95 f., 521, 522 Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Good-forNothing) 8, 180 f., 398, 501, 668 Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue) 8, 214–216, 521 Das Schloss Dürande (Castle Dürande) 8–10, 17–19, 146 Eine Meerfahrt (A Voyage on the High Seas) 179, 180 f. El Solitario → Estébanez Calderón, Serafin Eliot, George (i.e. Mary Ann Evans; 1819–1880) Middlemarch 41 Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888–1965) 597, 662 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–1882) 44, 280, 358 »Self-Reliance« 583 Encausse, Gérard –> Papus Ende, Michael (1929–1995) Die unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story) 199 Eötvös, József (1813–1871) Magyarország 1514-ben (Hungary in 1514) 318 Ernst, Paul (1866–1933) Das Kaiserbuch (The Book of Emperors) 527 Ershov, Petr (1815–1869) 190 Konek-gorbunek (The Little Hunchbacked Horse) 190 Eschenmayer, Adam Karl August von (1768–1852)142 Espronceda y Delgado, José de (1808–1842) 543 El diablo mundo (The Devil World) 512 El estudiante de Salamanca (The Student of Salamanca) 512 Estébanez Calderón, Serafín (»El Solitario«; 1799–1867) 540 Evans, Mary Ann → Eliot, George Ewers, Hanns Heinz (1871–1943) Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) 665 Falla, Manuel de (1876–1946) El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) 560 Fernán Caballero (i.e. Cecilia Böhl de Faber y Larrea; 1796–1876) 364, 376, 377, 560, 576, 584, 589 f.

Cuentos, oraciones, adivinanzas y refranes populares infantiles (Tales, Prayers, Riddles and Popular Children’s Proverbs) 189 Cuentos y poesías populares andaluzas (Tales and Poems from Andalusia) 377 La Gaviota (The Seagull) 560, 570, 577–579, 589 f. Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín (1776–1827) El periquillo sarniento (The Mangy Parrot) 544, 549, 562–569 La Quijota y su prima (Quijota and Her Cousin) 566 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814) 46, 152, 155, 246, 276, 500, 520, 525, 598, 602, 606, 611 Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge) 44, 478, 617 Fielding, Henry (1707–1754) 251, 297, 496, 498, 610 The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews 501 The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling 265, 299, 501 Flaubert, Gustave (1821–1880) 76, 633, 645 Bouvard et Pécuchet (Bouvard and Pécuchet) 507 L’éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education) 27, 290, 291 Madame Bovary 54, 77 f., 236, 585 f. Trois Contes (Three Stories) 586 »Un Cœur Simple« (A Simple Heart) 585 f. Fleury → Champfleury Foe, Daniel → Defoe, Daniel Forman, Miloš (i.e. Jan Tomás Forman; 1932) Ragtime 670 Forrester, Andrew (no record of his existence; name may be a pseud.) The Female Detective 360 Forster, Georg (1754–1794) 306 Voyage Round the World 300 Foscolo, Ugo (Niccolò) (1778–1827) 32, 116–119

Index

716 Hypercalypseos liber singularis (Hypercalypseos, a Singular Book) 510 Le Grazie (The Graces) 462 Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis) 26, 27–29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 96–98, 116–119, 229, 230, 234, 237, 243, 455, 470, 509, 537 Viaggio sentimentale di Yorick lungo la Francia e l’Italia (Yorick’s Sentimental Journey) 510 Fouqué, Caroline de la Motte (1775–1831) 191, 519 Magie der Natur: Eine Revolutionsgeschichte (Nature’s Magic: A Story of Revolution) 5, 18 f. Fouqué, Friedrich de la Motte (1777–1843) Der Zauberring (The Magic Ring) 312 Undine 417, 432, 500 Fourier, Charles (1772–1837) 583 Fowles, John (1926) The Ebony Tower 440 Franzén, Frans Mikael (1772–1847) 399 »Emili, eller en afton i Lappland« (Emili, or an Evening in Lappland) 399 Freneau, Philip Morin (1752–1832) 582 Frey, Karl (dates unknown) Der Besessene (The Obsesssed One) 666 Freytag, Gustav (1816–1895) 264, 316 Friedrich, Caspar David (1774–1840) 671 »Kreidefelsen auf Rügen« (Chalk Cliffs on Rügen) 492 f. »Wrack im Eismeer« (Wreck in the Polar Ice) 349 Froissart, Jean (c. 1337-c. 1405) 307 Froude, James Anthony (1818–1894) 534 Fuentes, Carlos (1928) 661–663 Cristóbal nonato (Christopher Unborn) 660, 661–666 Fuller, (Sarah) Margaret (1810–1850) 44 Furcy-Guesdon, Alex → Mortonval Futabatei Shimei (i.e. Hasegawa Tatsunosuke; 1864–1909) 650

Ukigumo (The Drifting Clouds) 647, 650 Gaarder, Jostein (1952) Sofies verden (Sofie’s World) 199 Gaboriau, Émile (1835–1873) Monsieur Lecoq 361 »Le petit vieux des Batignolles« (The Little Old Man of Batignolles) 361 Gades, Antonio (1936–2004) 678 Galeen, Henrik (i.e. Heinrich Wiesenberg; 1881–1949) 665 Galiano, Juan Valera y Alcalá → Valera, Juan Galland, Antoine (1646–1715) 309, 327 Galván, Manuel de Jesús (1834–1910) Enriquillo 542, 546 García Ayuso, Francisco (1835–1897) El estudio de la filología en su relación con el sánscrito (Philology in its Relation to Sanskrit) 628 García Márquez, Gabriel (1928) 575, 640 El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch) 568 García Sarmiento → Darío Garland, Hamlin (1860–1940) »The Return of a Private« 592 f. Garrett, João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida (1799–1854) 662 Camões 512 Dona Branca 512 Romanceiro 512 Viagens na minha terra (Travels in My Land) 660 Gaskell, Elizabeth (1810–1865) 408 Gautier, Théophile (1811–1872) 62 f., 148, 374, 501, 627, 633 Albertus ou L’âme et le péché: Légende théologique (Albertus, or the Soul and Sin: Theological Legend) 509 Arria Marcella 337 f. Émaux et camées (Enamels and Cameos) 509 Jettatura 160 La comédie de la mort (The Comedy of Death) 509 La morte amoureuse (Amorous Death) 338 f. Le Capitaine Fracasse (Captain Fracasse) 323 Mademoiselle de Maupin 508, 598 f., 603

Gelabert y Gordiola, Juan (dates unknown) Manual de lengua sánscrita (A Manual of Written Sanskrit) 628 Gelée, Claude → Lorrain, Claude Genlis, Caroline-StéphanieFélicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin, Marquise de Sillery, Comtesse de (1746–1830) 260 Mademoiselle de Clermont 507 Gerstäcker, Friedrich (1816–1872) 310 Geßner, Salomon (1730–1788) 384, 388, 390, 393, 395, 400 Idyllen (Idylls) 384, 388 Neue Idyllen (New Idylls) 384, 388 Gibbons, Edward (1737–1794) History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 299 Gide, André (1869–1951) 597 Les Cahiers d’André Walter (The Diaries of André Walter) 24, 34 Gil y Carrasco, Enrique (1815–1846) 531 Gilpin, William (1724–1804) »On Picturesque Beauty« 250 Girardin, René-Louis de (1735–1808) 88 Glinka, Mikhail (1804–1857) 83 Gloux, Olivier → Aimard, Gustave Gluck, Christoph Willibald (1714–1787) Iphigénie en Aulide (Iphigenia in Aulis) 54 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de (1816–1882) 525 Godard, Jean-Luc (1930) Prénom Carmen (First Name Carmen) 678 Godwin, William (1756–1836) 41, 48, 234, 279 Imogen: A Pastorial Romance From the Ancient British 502 St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century 41 f., 48 f., 502, 523 Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams 254, 348 f., 502 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832) 5–8, 110–113, 116, 117, 281, 365, 367, 377, 463, 473, 498, 559, 596, 598, 610, 672–675 »Der Erlkönig« (The Erl-King) 672

Index Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) 25, 393 »Die Braut von Corinth« 132 Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sufferings of Young Werther) 22–39, 38, 41 f., 44, 96, 110–112, 240, 268 f., 291, 386, 394 f., 398, 417–423, 470, 499, 501, 544, 547, 572 f., 664, 672 f., 680 Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities) 242, 473, 499, 672 Faust I 127, 499, 665, 698 f. Faust II 204, 473, 499, 665, 698 f. Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Fist) 31, 443, 672 Herrmann und Dorothea (Herrmann and Dorothea) 318, 393, 394, 400, 499, 510 »Märchen« (Fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily) 332 Novelle (Novella) 7, 17–19, 366, 473 Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Refugees) 6, 17–19, 19, 332, 365 f., 521 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years) 6 f., 26, 44–51, 112, 123 f., 187, 196, 198, 242, 263, 264, 268–273, 274, 277, 280, 290, 308, 313, 331, 458 f., 466, 499, 597, 696 Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung (Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Calling) 268 f. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, oder die Entsagenden (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeymanship, or the Renunciants) 112 f., 124, 268, 273, 280 Winkelmann und sein Jahrhundert (Winckelmann and his Century) 273 Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich (1809–1852) 161, 229, 234, 236, 242, 243, 341, 375, 380, 445, 450, 511 f., Arabeski (Arabesques) 380 Mertvye dushi (Dead Souls) 511 f., 593 Mirgorod 380

717 »Nevskii prospekt« (Nevsky Prospect) 234, 239, 243, 380 »Nos« (The Nose) 174, 180 f., 380, 339 f., 439, 511 »Portret« (The Portrait) 239, 244, 380, 511 »Povest’ o tom, kak possorilsia Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem« (Story of the Quarrel between Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich) 380 »Shinel’« (The Overcoat) 380, 339 f., 511 »Starosvetskie pomeshchiki« (Old-World Landowners) 243, 380 »Strashnaia mest’« (The Terrible Vengeance) 511 Taras Bulba 380 »Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan’ki« (Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka) 380 »Vii« (The Vii) 243 Zakoldovannoe mesto (The Enchanted Place) 162 »Zapiski sumasshedshego« (The Diary of a Madman) 380, 471 Goldoni, Carlo (1707–1793) 328 Goldsmith, Oliver (1728–1774) 401, 405 »The Deserted Village« 389, 393, 406 The Vicar of Wakefield 388, 389, 395, 553 Goldwyn, Samuel (i.e. Schmuel Gelbfisz; c. 1882–1974) 681 Gómez Carrillo, Enrique (i.e. Enrique Gómez Tible; 1873–1927) 635 Gómez de Avellaneda y Artega, Gertrudis → Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis (i.e. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Artega; 1814–1873) 560, 561, 572, 575 Guatimozín 541, 546 Sab 546 f., 560, 561, 567, 569–573, 576 Gómez Tible, Enrique → Gómez Carrillo, Enrique Görres, Johann Joseph (1776–1848) 514, 517 f., 522 Gorriti, Juana Manuela (1819–1892) 550, 551

La quena (The Indian Flute) 546 Gotō Chūgai (1866–1938) 652 Gotthelf, Jeremias (i.e. Albert Bitzius; 1797–1854) 409 Gottsched, Johann Christoph (1700–1762) 300, 326, 388 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de (1746–1828) 560 Gozzi, Carlo (1720–1806) 336 Fiabe teatrali (Fables for the Theatre) 327 f. Turandot 328 Graffigny, Françoise d’Issembourg d’Happoncourt de (1695–1758) 507 Grant, Anne → Laggan, Anne Grant of Grass, Günter (1927) Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) 438 Gray, Thomas (1716–1771) 250 Greene, Graham (1904–1991) Monsignor Quixote 449 Grillparzer, Franz (1791–1872) 69 Der arme Spielmann (The Poor Minstrel) 69 f. Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Karl (1785–1863) 325, 328, 365, 377, 514, 517, 519 Kinder‑ und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) 189–191, 334 Grimm, Wilhelm Karl (1786–1859) 325, 328, 365, 377, 514, 517, 519 Kinder‑ und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) 189–191, 334 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jacob Christoph (Christoffel) von (1621/22–1676) Der abentheurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (The Adventurous Simplicissimus) 566, 657 Grundtvig, Svend (1824–1883) Danske Folkeæventyr (Danish Fairy Tales) 189 Guaita, Stanislas de (1861–1897) 627 Guizot, François (1787–1874) 529 Histoire de la révolution d’Angleterre (History of the English Revolution) 533 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps (Memoirs to Serve toward the History of My Times) 535 Günther, Egon (1927)

Index

718 Die Braut (The Bride) 673 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers 673 Lotte in Weimar (The Beloved Returns) 24, 673, 674 Gutiérrez, Juan María (1809–1878) 548 El Capitán de Patricios (The Captain of Patricios) 543 Gyllembourg(-Ehrensvärd), Thomasine Christine (1773–1856) 409 En Hverdagshistorie (An Everyday Story) 407 Haller, Albrecht von (1708–1777) Die Alpen (The Alps) 388 Hamilton, Elizabeth (1756?-1816) The Cottagers of Glenburni 306 Hamsun, Knut (i.e. Knut Pedersen; 1859–1952) 51 Mysterier (Mysteries) 361 Sult (Hunger) 41 f. Hanka, Václav (1791–1861) 511 Hansen, Maurits Christopher (1794–1842) »Lille Alvilde« (Little Alvilde) 191, 408 Norsk Idyllekrands (Norwegian Idyllic Garland) 401, 408 Hardenberg, Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von → Novalis Häring, Georg Heinrich Wilhelm → Alexis, Willibald Hauch, Johannes Carsten (1790–1872) 510 Hauff, Wilhelm (1802–1827) 191, 316 f., 409 »Die Geschichte von dem kleinen Muck« (The Little Muck) 198 Der Scheikh von Alessandria und seine Sclaven (The Sheik of Alexandria and his Slaves) 198 »Der Zwerg Nase« (Dwarf LongNose) 198 Lichtenstein 315 Hauterive, Joseph-Pierre Borel d` → Borel, Pétrus Hawkesworth, John (1715–1773) 657 f. Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–1864) 199, 256, 364, 371 f., 379, 513, 523 f., 524, 592 »Egotism; or, the Bosom Serpent« 523 »Ethan Brand« 372, 524

»Feathertop« 372 Mosses from an Old Manse 371 Provincial Tales 371 Rappaccini’s Daughter 372 Seven Tales of My Native Land 371 »Sights from a Steeple« 372 »The Ambitious Guest« 523 »The Artist and the Beautiful« 523 »The Birthmark« 372, 523 The Blithedale Romance 513 »The Christmas Banquet« 523 »The Gentle Boy« 372 »The Man of Adamant« 523 The Marble Faun, or, The Romance of Monte Beni 41, 513 »The Procession of Life« 372 The Scarlet Letter: A Romance 371, 417, 513, 524, 592 The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales 371 The Story Teller 371 Twice-Told Tales 371 »Young Goodman Brown« 592 Haydon, Benjamin Robert (1786–1846) 534 f. Haywood, Eliza (c. 1693–1756) 504 Hazlitt, William (1778–1830) 1 Liber Amoris: or, The New Pygmalion 504 Hearn, Lafcadio (1850–1904) 646, 651 Two Years in the West Indies 651 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831) 1, 19, 299, 482, 526, 538 Heiberg, Johan Ludvig (1791–1860) 409 Heine, Heinrich (1797–1856) 1, 37, 69, 82, 85, 281, 378, 620 »Briefe aus Berlin« (Letters from Berlin) → Reisebilder Elementargeister (Elementary Spirits) 521 Florentinische Nächte (Florentine Nights) 71 Reisebilder (Travel Pictures) 336, 406, 470 Heinse, (Johann Jakob) Wilhelm (1746–1803) Ardinghello oder die glückseeligen Inseln (Ardinghello, or the Blissful Isles) 204 f., 521 Hildegard von Hohenthal 72 Helvétius, Claude Adrien (1715–1771) De l’esprit (On Mind) 3

Hemans, Felicia Dorothea Browne (1793–1835) Modern Greece: A Poem 506 The Abencerrage 506 The Forest Sanctuary 506 Hemingway, Ernest (1899–1961) 569 Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803) 188 f., 300, 328, 334, 517, 529, 538, 559 Iduna oder der Apfel der Verjüngung (Iduna, or the Apple of Rejuvenation) 186 Palmblätter: Erlesene morgenländische Erzählungen für die Jugend (Palm Leaves: Selected Oriental Tales) 186 Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (Voices of Peoples in Songs) 517 Über die Würkung der Dichtkunst auf die Sitten der Völker in Alten und Neuen Zeiten (On the Effect of Poetry on the Customs of the Peoples in Ancient and Modern Times) 328 Volkslieder (Folksongs) 328 Heredia y Heredia, José María (1803–1839) 572 Hernández, Felisberto (1902–1963) 625 Hernández, José (1834–1886) El gaucho Martín Fierro (Martin Fierro) 512 Hertz, Henrik (1797/98–1870) 409 Herzog, Werner (1942) Lebenszeichen (Signs of Life) 668 Hesse, Hermann (1877–1962) 199 Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game) 655 Hildreth, Richard (1807–1865) The Slave: or Memoirs of Archy Moore 574 Hitzig, Julius Eduard (1780–1849) Aus Hoffmann’s Leben und Nachlass (From Hoffmann’s Life and Legacy) 296, 334 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus (1776–1822) 54–56, 69, 76 f., 80, 140, 146, 148, 153 f., 168, 170 f., 191, 209, 211–214, 218, 229, 254, 256, 260, 281, 296 f., 323, 327, 328, 329, 332, 336 f., 340, 361, 364, 365, 368 f., 374, 450, 461, 467, 482, 485–491, 501, 578, 596, 602, 605, 612, 621, 660 f., 665–669, 682

Index »Das Fräulein von Scuderi« (Mademoiselle de Scudéry) 41, 174 f., 351–353, 666 f. »Das fremde Kind« (The Strange Child) 184, 191, 196–198 »Das öde Haus« (The Deserted House) 333 »Der Artushof« (King Arthur’s Court) 61, 234, 239, 244 f. »Der Baron von B.« (The Baron of B.) 61 »Der Dichter und der Komponist« (The Poet and the Composer) 82 »Der Goldne Topf« (The Golden Pot) 212, 234, 239, 243, 244, 329, 332 f., 336, 397 f., 420, 426–430, 520, 521 »Der Musikfeind« (The Enemy of Music) 55 Der Sandmann (The Sandman) 144, 212–214, 221, 234, 239, 289, 500, 521, 524, 664, 665, 667 f., 680, 681 f. »Die Abenteuer der Sylvesternacht« (New Year’s Eve Adventures) 126, 485, 489 »Die Automate« (The Automaton) 211 f., 368 Die Bergwerke zu Falun (The Mines of Falun) 243, 524 »Die Brautwahl« (Bride Selection) 333 Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs) 61, 163 f., 170 f., 172, 180 f., 243, 244, 330, 476, 486, 493, 667 »Die Fermate« (The Fermata) 61 »Die Geschichte vom verlornen Spiegelbilde« (The Story of the Lost Mirror Image) 126, 665 Die Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern (Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, along with a Fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler in Stray Printer’s Sheets) 2, 41, 70, 74 f., 143, 144, 284, 288, 289, 438, 442 f., 445, 446, 465 f., 469, 485, 500, 660 f., 662

719 Die Serapions-Brüder (The Serapion Brotherhood) 61, 153, 161 f., 193, 296, 368, 481 f., 486–488, 521 Doge und Dogaressa (Doge and Dogaressa) 500 »Don Juan« 54 f., 500 »Gedanken über den hohen Wert der Musik« 55 f. »Höchst zerstreute Gedanken« (Highly Random Thoughts) 47, 486 »Johannes Kreislers, des Kappellmeisters, musikalische Leiden« (The Musical Sorrows of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler) 55, 448 »Klein Zaches genannt Zinnober« (Little Zaches) 336 Kreisleriana 55 f., 74 »Kreislers musikalisch-poetischer Klub« (Kreisler’s Musico-Poetic Club) 74 »Meister Floh« (Master Flea) 336, 660 Nachtstücke (Night-Pieces) 147 f., 150, 296, 485 »Nußknacker und Mausekönig« (Nutcracker and Mouse King) 184, 192–196, 396, 500, 667 Phantasiestücke in Callots Manier (Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner) 336 f., 368, 379, 485 Prinzessin Brambilla (Princess Brambilla) 179, 335 f., 483 »Rat Krespel« (Counselor Krespel) 41, 69 f., 500, 524 »Rezension zur 5. Sinfonie« (Review of the 5th Symphony) 74, 78 »Ritter Gluck« (Chevalier Gluck) 54 f., 73, 143, 144, 153, 160 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von (1874–1929) 71, 76, 305 Hogarth, William (1697–1764) »A Rake’s Progress« 141 Hogg, James (1770–1835) The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 502 Hohenheim, Theophrastus Bombastus (Philippus Aureolus) von → Paracelsus Hölderlin, (Johann Christian) Friedrich (1770–1843) 70, 144

Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechenland (Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece) 2, 4, 72, 244, 397, 500 Holmberg, Eduardo Ladislao (1852–1937) 361 »El ruiseñor y el artista« (The Nightingale and the Artist) 361 Horacio Kalibang o los autómatas (Horacio Kalibang, or the Automatons) 361 La bolsa de huesos (The Bag of Bones) 361 f. La pipa de Hoffmann (Hoffmann’s Pipe) 362 Homer (2nd half 8th cent B.C.) 32 Ilias (Iliad) 204, 321, 388 Odýsseia (Odyssey) 388 Hostos y Bonilla, Eugenio María de (1839–1903) La peregrinación de Bayoán (The Peregrination of Bayoán) 544 Huber, Maria Therese (1764–1829) Die Familie Seldorf: Eine Erzählung aus der Französischen Revolution (The Seldorf Family: A Tale from the French Revolution) 5, 18 f. Hugo, Victor (1802–1885) xvii, 199, 450, 498, 533, 538, 561, 563 f., 567, 570, 627, 633, 676 f. Bug-Jargal 507, 546, 572 Han d’Islande (Han of Iceland) 502, 507 Légende des siècles (Legend of the Ages) 14 Les misérables (The Wretched) 14, 355, 676 f. Marion de Lorme 568 Notre-Dame de Paris: 1482 (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) 2, 53, 63–67, 322 f., 345, 417, 436 f., 444, 446 f., 448, 507, 531, 676 f., 680 Quatre-vingt-treize (Seventeen Ninety-Three) 14–17, 17–19, 562 Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1767–1835) 247, 300 Hummel, Johann Erdmann (1769–1852) »Die Fermate« (The Fermata) 61 Hurd, Richard (1720–1808) 249 Husson, Jules-François-Félix → Champfleury (Fleury)

Index

720 Huysmans, Joris-Karl (1848–1907) 598, 604 A rebours (Against Nature) 599 f., 603 Hyltén-Cavallius, Gunnar Olof (1818–1889) Svenska folksagor och äfventyr (Swedish Folk Legends and Adventures) 189 Ibsen, Henrik (1828–1906) 584, 602 Ihara Saikaku (Ibara Saikaku) (i.e. Hirayama Togō; 1642–1693) 647 Immermann, Karl Leberecht (1796–1840) Die Epigonen (The Epigones) 531 Ingemann, Bernhard Severin (1789–1862) 510 Ionesco, Eugène (1912–1994) 602 Ireland, William Henry (1777–1835) 259 Irving, Washington (1783–1859) 364, 370 f., 372 Bracebridge Hall 370 »Rip van Winkle: A Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker« 370 f., 513 Tales of a Traveller 370 Tales of the Alhambra 370, 513 »The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Found Among the Papers of the Late Diedrich Knickerbocker« 370 f., 513 The Sketch Book 370 »The Spectre Bridegroom« 370 Isaacs, Jorge (1837–1895) María 93, 544, 547 Isarn, Samuel (1630–1672) Le Louis d’or à Mademoiselle Scudéry (Mademoiselle Scudery’s Golden Coin) 657 Itzenplitz, Eberhard (1926) Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The New Sufferings of Young W.) 24, 673, 674 Ivanov, Viacheslav (1866–1949) 51 Iwaya, Sazanami (1870–1933) Nihon Mukashibanashi (Old Tales of Japan) 190 Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939) 644, 645 f., 647, 648 f., 652 f. Bakeichō 652 Chumoncho (The Order Book) 646 Gaisenmatsuri (The Triumphal Festival) 652

Kechō (Monstrous Bird) 652 Kōya hijiri (The Saint of Mt. Koya) 648, 652 »Romanchikku to shizenshugi« (The Romantic and Naturalism) 652 f. »Yo no taido« (My Attitude) 649, 653 Yushima mōde (Worship at Yushima) 652 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich (1743–1819) 611 Jacobowski, Ludwig (1868–1900) Werther der Jude (Werther the Jew) 24 Jacobs, Joseph (1854–1916) English Fairy Tales 189 Jacobsen, Jens Peter (1847–1885) Niels Lyhne 41 f. James, Henry (1843–1916) 61, 199 The Figure in the Carpet 58 »The Real Thing« 56 James, William (1842–1910) Principles of Psychology 583 The Will to Believe and Other Essays 583 Jansson, Tove (1914–2001) Muminböckerna (Moominbooks) 199 Jarry, Alfred (1873–1907) 602, 606 Jean Paul (i.e. Johann Paul Friedrich Richter: 1763–1825) 69, 75, 148, 155–157, 168, 169 f., 179, 187, 204, 280, 341, 398, 459 f., 498, 501, 621 Blumen‑ Frucht‑ und Dornenstücke oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten F.St. Siebenkäs im Reichsmarktflecken Kuhschnappel (The Marriage, Death and Wedding of the Poverty Lawyer Sevencheese) 2, 157, 169 f., 173, 229, 244, 500 »Clavis Fichtiana seu Leibgeberiana« (The Fichtean Key) 144, 155 Der Komet oder Nikolaus Marggraf: Eine komische Geschichte (The Comet) 144, 156 f. Des Feldpredigers Schmelzle Reise nach Flätz (The Field Preacher Schmelzle’s Trip to Flätz) 500

Die unsichtbare Loge: Eine Biographie (The Invisible Lodge) 169 f., 500 Flegeljahre: Eine Biographie (The Awkward Years) 157, 170, 173, 456, 466 f. Hesperus oder 45 Hundsposttage: Eine Biographie (Hesperus or 45 Dogpostdays) 169, 500, 520 Leben des Quintus Fixlein, aus fünfzehn Zettelkästen gezogen (Quintus Fixlein) 398 Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterlein Maria Wuz in Auenthal: Eine Art Idylle (Life of the Contented Schoolmaster Wuz: A Sort of Idyll) 398, 500 Levana oder Erziehungslehre (Levana, or Doctrine of Education) 187 Kleine Nachschule zur ästhetischen Vorschule (Little Post-School to the Aesthetic Pre-School) 483 Siebenkäs → Blumen-, Frucht‑ und Dornenstücke … Teufelspapiere (Devil’s Papers) 500 Titan 144, 237, 240, 243, 500 »Über die natürliche Magie der Einbildungskraft« (On the Natural Magic of the Imagination) 145 Vorschule der Ästhetik (PreSchool of Aesthetics) 331, 333, 358, 482 f. Johnson, Samuel (1709–1784) 296 Johnstone, Charles (c. 1719–1800) Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea 657 Jókai, Mór (i.e. Móric Jókay; 1825–1904) A cigánybáró / Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron) 318 Erdély Aranykora (The Golden Age of Transylvania) 318 Jósika, Miklós (1794–1865) Abafi 511 Joyce, James (1882–1941) 597, 655 Judge, William Quan (1851–1896) 628 Kafka, Franz (1883–1924) 341, 412, 597 Kanne, Johann Arnold (1773–1824) 517 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804) 1, 273, 281, 477 f., 502, 597 f., 671

Index Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Observations on the Sentiment of the Beautiful and the Sublime) 250 Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) 477 f. Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgement) 108, 611 »Versuch über die Krankheiten des Kopfes« (Essay on Mental Diseases) 141 f. Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1766–1826) 161, 229, 380 Bednaia Liza (Poor Liza) 230, 234, 240, 242, 243, 244 Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo (History of the Russian State) 533 Kardec, Allan (i.e. Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail; 1804–1869) 627, 638 Kaschnitz(-Weinberg), Marie Luise (von) (1901–1974) 199 Kästner, Erich (1899–1974) Der 35. Mai oder Konrad reitet in die Südsee (The 35th May, or Konrad rides to the South Sea) 193 Katona, József (1791–1830) Bánk Bán (Governor Bánk) 318 Keats, John (1795–1821) 42, 43, 481, 506, 603 Endymion: A Poetic Romance 278, 462, 477, 505 Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil: A Story from Boccaccio 477, 505 »La Belle Dame sans Merci« 505 Hyperion: A Fragment 278, 461, 462, 505 The Eve of St. Agnes 260, 477, 505 Keller, Gottfried (1819–1890) 43, 199, 264 Das Fähnlein der sieben Aufrechten (The Banner of the Upright Seven) 403 Der grüne Heinrich (Green Henry) 41, 291 Die drei gerechten Kammacher (The Three Righteous Combmakers) 403 Die Leute von Seldwyla (The People of Seldwyla) 403

721 Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (A Village Romeo and Juliet) 403 Kemény, Zsigmond, Baron (1814–1875) Pál Gyulai 56 f., 59 Khudiakov, Ivan (1842–1876) 190 Kielmeyer, Carl Friedrich (1765–1844) 142 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye (1813–1855) Enten-Eller (Either/Or) 53 Kisfaludy, Károly (1788–1830) 511 Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–1894) 644 f., 647 »Current Trends in Contemporary Literature« 643 Shukkonkyō (The Magic Mirror) 646 Kleist, (Bernd) Heinrich (Wilhelm) von (1777–1811) 69, 80, 366, 367 f., 501, 570, 578, 601, 669–672, 674 Amphitryon 669 Das Erdbeben in Chili (The Earthquake in Chile) 232, 233, 244, 669, 671 Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (Cathy of Heilbronn) 143 Der Findling (The Foundling) 669 Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug) 669 Die Familie Schroffenstein (The Schroffenstein Family) 669, 671 Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik (St Cecilia, or the Power of Music) 72 Die Marquise von O… (The Marchioness of O…) 143, 232, 233, 234, 236, 242, 522, 669 f., 670 f. Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (The Engagement in St. Domingo) 234, 232, 242, 669 Michael Kohlhaas 664, 669 f. Klingemann, Ernst August Friedrich (1777–1831) Die Nachtwachen: Von Bonaventura (The Night Watches of Bonaventura) 140 f., 146 f., 155, 158, 465, 469 f., 500 Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian (1752–1831) Geschichte eines Teutschen der neusten Zeit (History of a

German of the Most Recent Past) 2–4, 17–19 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb (1724–1803) 31 f., 32, 281, 393 »Die Frühlingsfeier« (The Festival of Spring) 391 Der Messias (The Messiah) 391, 501 Knight, Sarah Kemble (1666–1727) 582 Koch, Erduin Julius (1764–1834) 300 Kōda Rohan (i.e. Kōda Shigeyuki; 1867–1947) 647, 651 Amaustu nami → Sora utsu nami Fūryū mijin zō (Minute Storehouse of Life) 651 Sora utsu nami (Waves Striking the Sky) 651 Taidokuro (Encounter with a Skull) 648 Kōda Shigeyuki → Kōda Rohan Koerfer, Thomas Eric (1944) 673 f. Die Leidenschaftlichen (The Passionate Ones) 673 f., 682 Kollár, Ján (1793–1852) Slávy dcera (The Daughter of Sláva) 511 Kon Ichikawa (1915) Kokoro (The Deep Heart’s Core) 672 f. Koreff, David Ferdinand (1783–1851) 296 Kornmann, Heinrich (c. 1570/80–1627) Mons Veneris 205 Korzeniowski, Józef Teodor Konrad → Conrad, Joseph Kosminsky, Peter (1956) Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights 230, 682, 683 Kostrowitzky, Wilhelm Apollinaris de → Apollinaire, Guillaume Kraft, Jens Edvard (1784–1853) »Topografisk-statistisk beskrivelse over Norge« (Topographical Statistical Description of the Kingdom of Norway) 403 Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhold (1803–1882) Eestirahwa Enemuistesed jutud (Old Tales of the Estonian People) 189 Kalevipoeg 510

Index

722 Krüdener, Barbara Juliane Freiin von (1764–1824) Valérie ou Lettres de Gustave de Linar à Ernest de G… 31 f., 36, 38 Kuzmin, Mikhail Alekseevich (1875–1936) 305 La Fayette, Marie Madelaine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de (1634–1693) 497, 563 La Motte Fouqué, Friedrich de → Fouqué, Friedrich de la Motte Labrunie, Gérard → Nerval, Gérard de Laclos, Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de (1741–1803) Les liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) 30, 246 Lafontaine, August Heinrich Julius (1758–1831) 498 Klara du Plessis und Klairant: Eine Familiengeschichte französischer Emigrierten (Klara du Plessis and Klairant: A Family Story of French Emigrés) 5 Lafragua, José María (1813–1875) Netzula 546 Laggan, Anne Grant of (1755–1838) Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders of Scotland 306 Lamartine, Alphonse de (1790–1869) 148 Dernier chant de pèlerinage d’Harold (The Last Song of Harold’s Pilgrimage) 509 Graziella 507 Historie des Girondins (History of the Girdondists) 535 Jocelyn 509, 675 La chute d’un ange: Épisode (An Angel’s Fall) 509 Méditations poétiques (Poetic Meditations) 561 Raphaël: Pages de la vingtième année (Raphael at Twenty) 507 Lamb, Charles (1775–1834) »Dream Children: A Reverie« 198 »The Child Angel: a Dream« 198 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (1802–1838) The Improvisatrice 506 Landor, Walter Savage (1775–1864) Gebir 505 f. Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen 534

Lanier, Sidney (1842–1881) 303, 584 Larra, Mariano José de (i.e. Mariano José de Larra y Sánchez de Castro; 1809–1837) 540, 554, 570 El doncel de don Enrique el Doliente: Historia caballeresca del siglo XV (Don Enrique the Sorrowful’s Page: A Chivalric Story of the Fifteenth Century) 318, 560, 569–573 Larrea y Aherán, Francisca (1775–1838) 576 Las Casas, Bartolomé de (1474–1566) Historia de las Indias (History of the Indies) 542 Lastarria, José Victorino (1817–1888) El mendigo (The Beggar) 379 Lautréamont, Comte de (i.e. Isidore Lucien Ducasse; 1846–1870) 603, 606 Les Chants de Maldoror (Maldoror) 601 f. Leadbeater, Charles Webster (1847–1934) 626 Lecky, William Edward Hartpole (1838–1903) 534 Ledeganck, Karel Lodewijk (1805–1847) 512 Lee, Sophia (1750–1824) 256 The Recess 252 Lennox, Charlotte (1729/30–1804) 504 Leonard y Bertholet, José (dates unknown) 630 Leopardi, Giacomo (1798–1837) 28, 463, 471 »L’infinito« (The Infinite) 456 Operette morali (Short Moral Tales) 472 Leprince de Beaumont, Jeanne-Marie (1711–1780) 327 Lermontov, Mikhail Iurievich (1814–1841) 161, 593 Demon: Vostochnaia povest’ó (The Demon: An Eastern Story) 462 f., 512 Geroi nashego (A Hero of Our Time) 99 f., 229, 234, 236, 240 f., 242, 244, 380, 245, 512 Shtoss (Novella) 162 Vadim 243 Leroux, Pierre Henri (1798–1871) 538 Lesage, Alain-René (1668–1747) 566 Le diable boiteux (The Devil upon Two Sticks) 330, 658

Leskov, Nikolai (1831–1895) 161 Lévi, Eliphas (i.e. Alphonse Louis Constant; 1810–1875) 627 Levi, Primo (1919–1987) 509 Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775–1818) The Monk: A Romance 127, 170, 243, 252, 256, 257 f., 502, 679 Lewis, Sinclair (1885–1951) 575 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (1742–1799) 141 Lindgren, Astrid (1907–2002) Mio min Mio (Mio, my Mio) 199 Pippi Långstrump (Pippi Longstocking) 199 Liszt, Franz (1811–1886) 79, 85 Locke, John (1632–1704) 184 Some Thoughts Concerning Education 184 London, Jack (i.e. John Griffith) (1876–1916) Call of the Wild 581 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807–1882) 584 The Song of Hiawatha 512 López, Vicente Fidel (1815–1903) 548 La novia del hereje (The Bride of the Heretic) 542, 553 Lorrain, Claude (i.e. Claude Gelée; 1600–1682) 148 Lortzing, Albert (1801–1851) 81 Lotman, Iurii (Jüri) Mikhailovich (1922–1993) 559 f. Lucian (c. 120–180 AD) Dialogues 472 Lugones, Leopoldo (1874–1938) 622, 625, 631, 635–637, 639 Cuentos fatales (Fatal Stories) 637 El ángel de la sombra (The Angel of the Dark) 634, 636 f. »El puñal« (The Dagger) 637 Las fuerzas extrañas (The Strange Forces) 636, 637 »Los ojos de la reina« (The Queen’s Eyes) 637 Lukács, Georg (György Szegedy von; 1885–1971) Der historische Roman (The Historical Novel) 297–299, 320 Theorie des Romans (The Theory of the Novel) 264 Luther, Martin (1483–1546) 457, 670 Lynch, David (1946) Blue Velvet 667 f. Lytton-Bulwer, Edward George → Bulwer, Edward George

Index Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1800–1859) 534 The History of England 534 Mácha, Karel Hynek (1810–1836) Máj (May) 511 Machado de Assis, Joaquim María (1839–1908) 662 Mémorias Pósthumas de Brás Cubas (Posthumous Memorials of Bras Cubas) 660 Mackenzie, Henry (1745–1831) 430 Macpherson, James (1736–1796) 26, 31, 32, 123, 309, 511 Fingal 470 Fragments of Ancient Poetry 470 Songs of Ossian, Son of Fingal 122, 304, 308, 393 Madame de Staël → Staël-Holstein, Germaine Necker, Baronne de Madero, Francisco Indalecio (1873–1913) 632, 638 Maeterlinck, Maurice (1862–1949) 627 Magariños Cervantes, Alejandro (1825–1893) Caramurú 552 Maistre, Xavier de (1763–1852) Expédition nocturne autour de ma chambre (A Nocturnal Expedition Around my Room) 471 Voyage autour de ma chambre (Journey Around my Room) 471, 660 Mallarmé, Stéphane (i.e. Étienne Mallarmé; 1842–1898) 596, 597, 599, 601 Malmesbury, William of (c. 1080/1095 — c. 1143) 205 Manley, Mary de La Rivière (1663–1724) 504 Mann, Delbert (1920) Jane Eyre 684 Mann, Heinrich (1871–1950) 76 Mann, Thomas (1875–1955) 51, 199, 597 Buddenbrooks 41 Der Erwählte (The Holy Sinner) 439 Doktor Faustus (Doctor Faustus) 439 Joseph und seine Brüder (Joseph and his Brothers) 439, 449 Lotte in Weimar (The Beloved Returns) 673, 674

723 Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) 41 »Tonio Kröger« 41 f. »Wälsungenblut« (The Blood of the Valsungs) 449 Mansilla de García, Eduarda (1838–1892) El médico de San Luis (The Doctor of San Luis) 553 Manso de Noronha, Juana (1819–1875) 556 Los misterios del Plata: Episodios históricos de la época de Rosas (The Mysteries of the Plata: Historical Episodes of the Rosas Epoch) 549 f. Manzoni, Alessandro (1785–1873) 28, 497, 531, 574 »Del romanzo storico« (On the Historical Novel) 320 f., 510 I promessi sposi: storia milanese del secolo XVII scoperta e rifatta (The Betrothed) 101 f., 229, 320 f., 509 f. Marie de France (c. 1135–1200) »Éliduc« 440 Marlowe, Christopher (1564–1593) 250, 349 Mármol, José (1817–1871) 550, 560, 561, 575 Amalia 545, 549, 556, 560, 561 f., 562–569, 573 »A Rosas, el 25 de Mayo de 1843« (To Rosas, the 25th of May) 568 Cantos del peregrino (Songs of the Pilgrim) / El Peregrino (The Pilgrim) 512, 568 Martin, Paul (1899–1967) Die tödlichen Träume (Deadly Dreams) 666 Marx, Karl (1818–1883) 298, 526, 533 Masaccio (1401–1428) 66 Masaoka Shiki (Tsunenori) (1867–1902) 644 Massenet, Jules Emile Frédéric (1842–1912) Werther 24, 38 Mather, Cotton (1663–1728) 582 Mathias, Thomas James (c. 1754–1835) The Pursuits of Literature 257 Matto de Turner, Clorinda (1854–1909) 551 Maturin, Charles Robert (1780–1824) 123

Melmoth the Wanderer 127–130, 131, 252, 254, 256, 502 Maupassant, Guy de (1850–1893) 339 Mažuranić, Ivan (1814–1890) Smrt Smail-age Čengića (The Death of Smail-Aga Čengić) 510 f. Medici, Caterina de (1519–1589) 61 Méliès, Marie Georges Jean (1861–1938) Coppélia ou la poupée animée (The Animated Doll) 664, 665 La poupée vivante (The Living Doll) 665 Mellor, Kay (1950) Jane Eyre 684 Melville, Herman (1819–1891) 379, 524, 592 Billy Budd, Sailor 283 Mardi: and a Voyage Thither 524 Moby Dick; or, The Whale 284, 472, 524, 592 »The Bell Tower« 524 The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade 357–359 Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life during a Four Months’ Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas 524 Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix (1809–1847) 72, 85 Lieder ohne Worte (Songs Without Words) 407, 497 Mera, Juan León (1832–1894) Cumandá o Un drama entre salvajes (Cumandá, or A Drama amongst Savages) 92 f., 542, 546, 550 Mérimée, Prosper (1805–1870) 317, 375 f., 501, 578, 585 Carmen 376, 507, 578 f., 664, 677–679, 680 Colomba 376, 579 Djoûmane 376 La Jacquerie: Scènes féodales (The Jacquerie: Feudal Scenes) 535 La Vénus d´Ille (Venus of Ille) 57 f., 216–218, 338, 376, 507 Les âmes du Purgatoire (The Souls in Purgatory) 376 Lokis: Le manuscrit du professeur Wittembach (Lokis) 376, 507 Mateo Falcone 374 Vision de Charles XI (Vision of Charles XI) 376

Index

724 1572: Chronique du règne de Charles IX (1572: Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX) 507 Mesmer, Franz Anton (1734–1815) 122 Mesonero Romanos, Ramón de (1803–1882) 377, 540 Metastasio, Pietro (i.e. Pietro Antonio Domenico Bonaventura Trapassi; 1698–1782) 572 Meyerbeer, Giacomo (i.e. Jakob Meyer Beer; 1791–1864) 84 f. Die Hugenotten (The Huguenots) 84 f. Robert le diable (Robert the Devil) 84 Michelet, Jules (1798–1874) La mer (The Sea) 533 La montagne (The Mountain) 533 L’oiseau (The Bird) 533 Ma jeunesse (My Youth) 196 Mémorial (Memorial) 196 Mickiewicz, Adam (1798–1855) 23, 28 Dziady (The Forefathers) 36 f. Pan Tadeusz, czyli Ostatni zajazd na Litwie (Pan Tadeusz, or the Last Aristocratic Feud in Lithuania) 318, 503, 510, 531 »Romantycznoćś« (Romanticism) 37 »Upiór« (The Ghost) 36 Millais, John (1829–1896) 401 Milton, John (1608–1674) 123, 278, 307, 359 Paradise Lost 130, 326 Mitford, Mary Russell (1787–1855) 406, 408 Our Village 401–403, 406 The First Primrose 401 The Old House at Aberleigh 402 »Violeting« 402 Mitre, Bartolomé (1821–1906) 556 Soledad 543, 552 Moe, Jørgen Engebretsen (1813–1882) 190 Den flydende ø (The Flying Island) 195 I brønden og i kjærnet (In the Well and in the Lake) 195 Molesworth, Mary Louisa (1839–1921) The Cuckoo Clock 195 Molière (i.e. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin; 1622–1673) 591 Molinos, Miguel de (1628–1696) 635 Møller, Poul Martin (1794–1838)

»Statistical Description of the Recruiting House in ØlsebyMagle« 403 Mommsen, Theodor (1817–1903) 532 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de (1533–1592) 567 Montemayor, Jorge de (1520–1561) La Diana 588 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Sécondat, Baron de la Brède et de (1689–1755) 572 Considérations sur les causes de la décadence de l’Empire Romain (Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire) 299 Monti, Vincenzo (1754–1828) 509 Moore, Thomas (1779–1852) Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance 506 Moorse, George (1936–1999) Der Findling (The Foundling) 669 Mora, José Joaquín de (1783–1864) 538, 578 Morgenstern, Johann Karl Simon von (1770–1852) 263 Mori Ōgai (i.e. Mori Rintarō; 1862–1922) 649 f. Fumidzukai (The Courier) 649 f. Maihime (The Dancer) 649 Utakata no ki (Foam on the Waves) 649 Mori Rintarō → Mori Ōgai Mörike, Eduard (1804–1875) 400 Idylle vom Bodensee (The Idyll of Lake Constance) 400 Maler Nolten (Painter Nolten) 69, 71 Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag (Mozart on his Journey to Prague) 79, 403 f. Moritz, Karl Philipp (1756–1793) 45 Anton Reiser: Ein psychologischer Roman (Anton Reiser: A Psychological Novel) 183, 263, 268 Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (Magazine of Empirical Psychology) 145 f., 183 Mörk, Jacob Henrik (1714–1763) Adalriks och Giöthildas Äfventyr (The Adventure of Adalrik and Giöthilda) 610

Mortonval (i.e. Alex Furcy-Guesdon; 1798–1854) 531 Motley, John (1814–1877) 643 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756–1791) Don Giovanni 80 Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) 80, 445 Müller, Adam Heinrich (1779–1829) Vorlesungen über die deutsche Wissenschaft und Literatur (Lectures on German Science and Literature) 183 Müller, Friedrich (Maler Müller) (1749–1825) 390–393, 394 »Adams erstes Erwachen und erste seelige Nächte« (Adam’s First Awakening and the First Blessed Nights) 390 f., 393 »Bacchidon und Milon« (Bacchidon and Milon) 390 »Das Nußkernen« (The NutCracking) 390, 392 f. »Der Faun« (The Faun) 390 f., 393 »Der Satyr Mopsus« (Mopsus the Satyr) 390 »Die Schaafschur« (The SheepShearing) 383, 390, 391–393 »Ulrich von Coßheim: Eine deutsche Idylle« (Ulrich von Coßheim: A German Idyll) 390 Müller, Friedrich Max (Max Müller) (1823–1900) 525 Müller, (Johann Ludwig) Wilhelm (1794–1827) 126 Die schöne Müllerin (The Fair Miller-Maid) 36 »Gute Nacht« (Good Night) 36 Winterreise (Winter Journey) 36 Müllner, Adolf (1774–1829) Der Kaliber (The Caliber) 354 f. Munch, Edvard (1863–1944) 51 Münsterberg, Hugo (1863–1916) 606 Musäus, Johann Karl August (1735–87) 330 Volksmährchen der Deutschen (Fairy-tales of the Germans) 297, 328 f., 333 Musil, Robert, Edler von (1880–1942) 199 Musset, Alfred de (1810–1857) 85, 568, 569, 675 f. Histoire d’un merle blanc (Story of a White Blackbird) 507

Index La confession d’un enfant du siècle (Confessions of a Child of His Time) 289, 507, 679 »La nuit de décembre« (The Night of December) 665 Les caprices de Marianne (The Moods of Marianne) 675 f. Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet (Letters of Dupuis and Cotonet) 507 Lorenzaccio 535 On ne badine pas avec l’amour (Don’t Joke about Love) 691 Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich (1899–1977) 596 Napoléon I (i.e. Napoleone Buonaparte; 1769–1821) 22, 26, 27 f., 29, 82, 123, 125, 128, 129, 235, 289, 297, 509, 510, 512, 522, 584 Natsume Kinnosuke → Natsume Sōseki Natsume Sōseki (i.e. Natsume Kinnosuke; 1867–1916) 649, 650 Kokoro (The Heart of Things) 672 f. Wagahai wa neko dearu (I Am a Cat) 661, 662 Yōkyo shū (Drifting in Space) 650 Němcová, Božena (1820–1862) 229, 244 Nerval, Gérard de (i.e. Gérard Labrunie; 1808–1855) 146, 148, 330, 633 Aurélia, ou Le rêve de la vie (Aurelia, or The Dream of Life) 149 f., 176, 180 f., 281–283, 339, 374, 489 f., 523 Contes et facéties (Short Stories and Sketches) 374 La main de gloire (Hand of Glory) 675 Les faux saulniers (The Salt Smugglers) 374 Les filles du feu (Daughters of the Fire) 289, 374 Octavie 523 Sylvie: Souvenirs du Valois (Sylvie: Remembrances from the Valois) 23, 59 f., 289, 508, 523 Nervo, Amado (1870–1919) 622, 625, 634, 637–639 »Amnesia« (Amnesia) 639

725 »El castillo de lo inconsciente« (The Castle of the Unconscious) 639 El donador de almas (The Giver of Souls) 639 »El sexto sentido« (The Sixth Sense) 639 »Fotografía espírita« (Spirit Photo) 638 »La cuestion religiosa« (The Religious Question) 638 »Las Casas« (Las Casas) 639 »Los espíritus que tocan« (The Spirits That Touch) 638 »Los esquifes« (The Skiffs) 639 »Mencía« (Mencía) 639 »Noches macabras« (Macabre Nights) 638 Nesbit, Edith (1858–1924) Five Children and It 199 The Story of the Treasure Seekers 199 Nestroy, Johann Nepomuk (1801–1862) 409 Neuenfels, Hans (1941) Familie oder Schroffenstein (Family or Schroffenstein) 669, 671 Heinrich Penthesilea von Kleist: Träume über eine Inszenierung (Heinrich Penthesilea von Kleist: Dreams about a Production) 669, 671 f., 673 Nieto, Juan José (1804–1866) Yngermina, o La hija de Calamar: Novela histórica, o Recuerdos de la Conquista, 1533–1537 (Yngermina, or The Daughter of Calamar: Historical Novel, or Memoirs of the Conquest, 1533–1537) 541 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900) 50 f., 71, 165, 273, 596, 598 Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) 42 Nodier, Charles (1780–1844) 260, 330, 374, 375 »Du fantastique en literature« (About the Fantastic in Literature) 337 »Histoire d’Hélène Gillet« (Story of Hélène Gillet) 375 »Le bibliomane ou le nouveau Cardillac« (The Bibliomaniac, or the New Cardillac) 353 f.

Le peintre de Salzburg (The Painter of Salzburg) 30 Le vampire (The Vampire) 134 f. Smarra, ou Les demons de la nuit: Songes romantiques (Smarra, or The Demons of the Night) 339, 375, 489, 507 Trilby 329, 337 Norris, Frank (i.e. Benjamin Franklin Norris; 1870–1902) McTeague 581 Novalis (i.e. Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg; 1772–1801) xvii, 42, 115, 184, 187, 188 f., 314, 327, 332, 352, 446, 448, 450, 457, 459, 461, 466, 467 f., 479 f., 597, 598, 646, 699 »Die Christenheit oder Europa« (Christianity, or Europe) 42 Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (The Disciples of Sais) 196, 477, 479, 520 Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Henry von Ofterdingen) 23, 41 f., 46 f., 48, 95, 123, 124 f., 273–276, 283, 312, 313, 396, 436, 440, 444 f., 448, 467, 476 f., 479 f., 481, 499, 520 f., 522, 600 Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night) 520 O’Brien, Richard (i.e. Richard Timothy Smith; 1942) The Rocky Horror Picture Show 681 Ockenfuß, Lorenz → Oken, Lorenz Odoevskii, Vladimir Fedorovich (1804–1869) 69, 78 f. Nasmeshka mertvetsa (The Dead Man’s Sneer) 232, 239 Russkie Nochi (Russian Nights) 78 f., 160 f., 482 Salamandra (The Salamander) 161 f. Sil’fida (The Sylphid) 239, 244 Oehlenschläger, Adam Gottlob (1779–1850) 190 Vaulundurs Saga 510 Offenbach, Jacques (1819–1880) Les contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) 666 Oken, Lorenz (i.e. Lorenz Ockenfuß; 1779–1851) 142 Olcott, Henry S. (1832–1907) 627, 628, 630

Index

726 Ophüls, Max (i.e. Max Oppenheimer; 1902–1957) 38 Le roman de Werther (The Novel of Werther) 24, 672 Oppenheimer, Max → Ophüls, Max Orrego de Uribe, Rosario (1834–1879) Alberto el jugador (Albert the Player) 553 Ossian → Macpherson Overbeck, Johann Friedrich (1789–1869) 45 Ovid → Ovidius Ovidius Naso, Publius (c. 43 B.C.-18 AD) 657 Metamorphoseon Libri (Metamorphoses) 204, 205 Remedia amoris (The Cure for Love) 443 Ozaki Kōyō (1867–1903) 647, 652 Palacký, František (1798–1876) Geschichte von Böhmen (History of Bohemia) 533 Paladino, Eusapia (1854–1918) 631 Palma, Clemente (1872–1946) 622 Palma, Ricardo (i.e. Manuel Ricardo Palma; 1833–1919) Tradiciones peruanas (Peruvian Traditions) 540 Papus (i.e. Gérard Encausse; 1865–1916) 627, 631 Paracelsus (i.e. Theophrastus Bombastus [Philippus Aureolus] von Hohenheim; 1493/94–1541) 130, 631 Pardo Bazán, Emilia (1851–1921) 584, 589, 590 f., 623, 634 »La cuestión palpitante« (The Burning Question) 590 La madre naturaleza (Mother Nature) 591 Los Pazos de Ulloa (The Pazos of Ulloa) 591 Parini, Giuseppe (1729–1799) 116 Pater, Walter (1839–1894) 51, 55, 602 Paula Roser, Franz de (1779–1830) Schreckensnacht am Kreuzwege (Night of Horror at the Crossroads) 82 Pavlova, Karolina Karlovna (1807–1893) Dvoinaia zhizn’ (A Double Life) 230, 231, 236 Payno, Manuel (1810–1894) El fistol del diablo (The Devil’s Tiepin) 545

Los bandidos de Río Frío (The Bandits of Río Frío) 545 Paz, Octavio (1914–1998) 639, 641 Los hijos del limo (Children of the Mire) 622, 626 Peacock, Thomas Love (1785–1866) Nightmare Abbey 502 Pedersen, Knut → Hamsun, Knut Peirce, Charles Sanders Santiago (1839–1914) 352, 357 Péladan, Joséphin (i.e. Joseph Péladan; 1859–1918) 627 Pellico, Silvio (1789–1854) Le mie prigioni (My Prisons) 509 Percy, Thomas (1729–1811) 250, 514 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry 122 Pereda, José María de (1833–1906) 589 Pérez Galdós, Benito (1843–1920) 565, 577, 588 f., 623 Fortunata y Jacinta, dos historias de casadas (Fortunata and Jacinta) 588 La desheredada (The Disinherited) 574 La sombra (The Shadow) 360, 588 f. Pepita Jiménez 589, 590 Perrault, Charles (1628–1703) 375 Contes de ma mère l’oye (Tales of Mother Goose) 326 Pestalozzi, Johannes Heinrich (1746–1827) 185 f. Petrarca (Petrarch), Francesco (i.e. Francesco Pietro; 1304–1374) 108, 116, 498 Petrović-Njegoš, (Prince) Petar II (1813–1851) Gorski vijenac (The Mountain Wreath) 510 Pforr, Franz (1788–1812) 45 Pietro, Franceso → Petrarca, Franceso Pinel, Philippe (1745–1826) 140 Piñera, Virgilio (1912–1979) 625 Pirandello, Luigi (1867–1936) 587, 602, 605, 606 Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio) 607 Platner, Ernst (1744–1818) Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise (Anthropology for Doctors and Philosophers) 266

Plato (Platon; 427–347 B.C.) 142, 528 Plenzdorf, Ulrich (1934) Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The New Sufferings of Young W.) 38, 673, 674, 676 Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–1849) 146, 148, 158–160, 254, 256, 260, 340, 345, 355–357, 361, 362, 368, 372–379, 379 f., 415, 425, 430–434, 472 f., 488, 491 f., 493, 501, 514, 578, 622 »A Descent into the Maelstrom« 493 Eureka: A Prose Poem 278 »Landor’s Cottage« 430 »Ligeia« 175, 180 f., 373, 430, 431–434, 491 f. »Mesmeric Revelation« 168 »Philosophy of Composition« 372, 461 »Shadow — A Fable« 473 »Silence — A Parable« 472 f. Tales 373 Tales of Mystery and Imagination 158–160 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque 175, 340, 373 »The Angel of the Odd« 473 »The Assignation« 430 »The Black Cat« 158 f., 373 »The Cask of Amontillado« 159, 514 »The Colloquy of Monos and Una« 472 »The Domain of Arnheim« 430 »The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar« 168 »The Fall of the House of Usher« 160, 340, 373 f., 430, 488, 491 The Gold Bug 340, 356 f. »The Imp of the Perverse« 493 »The Island of the Fay« 473 »The Man of the Crowd« 473 »The Masque of the Red Death« 340 »The Murders in the Rue Morgue« 173, 351, 356, 373 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket 287 f., 420 »The Oval Portrait« 56, 430 »The Purloined Letter« 355 f., 373 »The Tell-Tale Heart« 159, 492 »The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall« 373 »Twice-Told Tales« 373

Index »William Wilson« 159 f., 164, 172, 180 f., 665 Pogorelskii, Antonii (1777–1836) Chernaia kuritsa, ili podzemnye zhiteli (The Black Hen, or the Underground People) 194 f. Pohl, Peter (1940) Janne min vän (Johnny, My Friend) 199 Polidori, John William (1795–1821) »The Vampyre: A Tale« 132–134 Ponge, Francis (1899–1988) 597 Ponson du Terrail, Pierre-Alexis Vicomte de (1829–1871) 556 Pope, Alexander (1688–1744) Essay on Man 478 Pastorals 388 Porbus, Franz (1570–1622) 61 Potebnia, Aleksandr Afanasievich (1835–1891) 529 Potocki, Jan Graf (1761–1815) Le manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (Manuscript Found At Saragossa) 476 Pound, Ezra (1885–1972) 597 Poussin, Nicolas (1594–1665) 447 f. Preminger, Otto Ludwig (1905–1986) Carmen Jones 678 Prévost d’Exiles, Antoine-François (Abbé Prévost; 1697–1763) 591, 610 Proust, Marcel (1871–1922) 597 A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) 59 f. Pastiches et mélanges (Pastiches and Occasional Pieces) 447 Publius Virgilius Maro → Virgil Pullman, Philip (1946) His Dark Materials 199 Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1799–1837) 23, 28, 190, 231–233, 245, 319 f., 375, 593, 596 Arap Petra Velikogo (The Moor of Peter the Great) 233 Dubrovskii 232, 236, 242 Egipetskie nochi (Egyptian Nights) 462 Evgenii Onegin (Eugene Onegin) 37 f., 189, 229, 232, 236, 237, 240, 244, 245, 463, 496 f., 511, 593 Istoriia Pugacheva (History of Pugachev) 319 »Istoriia sela Goriukhina« (History of the Village of Goriukhino) 511

727 Kapitanskaia dochka (The Captain’s Daughter) 231 f., 236, 319 f., 531 »Metel’« (The Blizzard) 232 f., 236 Pikovaia Dama (The Queen of Spades) 161, 511 Povesti pokoinogo Ivan Petrovicha Belkina (Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin) 380 Ruslan i Liudmila (Ruslan and Ludmilla) 511 »Skazka o rybake i rybke« (The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish) 190 »Skazka o tsare Saltane« (The Tale of Tsar Saltan) 190 »Skaza o zolotom petushke« (The Tale of the Golden Cockerel) 190 »Stantsionnyi smotritel’« (The Stationmaster) 232, 234 »Vystrel« (The Shot) 511 Pynchon, Thomas (1937) The Crying of Lot 49 440 V 604 Quinet, Edgar (1803–1875) 533 Quiroga, Horacio (1878–1937) 622, 625 Rabelais, François (c. 1494–1553) 472, 496, 590, 591, 655 Racine, Jean (1639–1699) 32, 527 Radcliffe, Ann (1764–1823) 254, 255, 256, 415, 416, 504, 679 The Castle of Athlin and Dunbayn: A Highland Story 304 The Italian, or The Confessional of the Black Penitents 93 f., 252, 257 The Mysteries of Udolpho 243, 252, 257, 259, 260, 423–426, 502 The Romance of the Forest 243, 252 Radvanyi, Netty → Seghers, Anna Raimund, Ferdinand (i.e. Ferdinand Jakob Raimann; 1790–1836) 409 Ramaka, Joseph Gaï (1952) Karmen Geï 678 f. Rambach, Friedrich Eberhard (i.e. Ottokar Sturm; 1767–1826) Die eiserne Maske: Eine schottische Geschichte (The Iron Mask: A Scottish Story) 304 Ranke, Leopold von (1795–1886) 532 Raphael (i.e. Raphael Santi or Sanzio; 1483–1520) 66, 210 Raumer, Friedrich von (1781–1873)

Geschichte der Hohenstaufen und ihrer Zeit (History of the Hohenstaufens and Their Time) 533 Raupach, Ernst Benjamin (1784–1852) 533 Reeve, Clara (1729–1807) 256, 309, 501 f. The Champion of the Virtue: A Gothic Story 302 The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story 251, 302, 502 The Progress of Romance Through Times, Countries and Manners 302, 502 Reil, Johann Christian (1759–1813) 140 Reitz, Edgar (1932) Cardillac 666 f. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669) 64, 147, 447 Night Watch 54 Renoir, Jean (1894–1979) La règle du jeu (Rules of the Game) 675 f. Reyes, Alfonso (1889–1959) 639 Rhys, Jean (i.e. Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams; 1890–1979) Wide Sargasso Sea 684 f. Richardson, Samuel (1689–1761) 251, 496, 499, 610 Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady 423 Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded 25 Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich → Jean Paul Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875–1926) 597 Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) 34 Rimbaud, Jean Nicolas Arthur (1854–1891) 165 »Lettres du voyant« (Letters of a Seer) 491, 493 Ríofrío, Miguel (1822–1879) 556 La Emancipada (The Emancipated One) 550 f. Ritter, Johann Wilhelm (1776–1810) 142, 481 Riva Palacio, Vicente (1832–1896) Los piratas del golfo (The Pirates of the Gulf) 542 Monja, casada, virgen y martir (Nun, Wife, Virgin, and Martyr) 542

Index

728 Rivail, Hippolyte Denizard Léon → Kardec, Allan Rivas, Ángel de Saavedra y Ramírez, Duque de (1791–1865) El moro expósito (The Exposed Moor) 512 Roa Bárcena, José María (1827–1908) Lanchitas 379 Robison, Arthur (1888–1935) 665 Rogers, Samuel (1763–1855) 505 Rohmer, Eric (1920) 673 Die Marquise von O… (The Marchioness of O…) 229, 669, 670 f., 675, 676 Rojas, Fernando de (c. 1475–1541) La Celestina 591 Romero, Silvio (1851–1914) Contos populares do Brasil (Brazilian Folk Tales) 189 Rosas, Juan Manuel de (1793–1877) 379, 548, 564, 567–569 Roscoe, William (1753–1831) The Butterfly’s Ball 191 f. Rosi, Francesco (1922) Carmen 678 f. Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio (1792–1868) 77, 85, 497 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–1778) 3 f., 28, 90 f., 98, 108–110, 115, 188, 227–229, 247, 311, 388, 470, 499, 592, 671 Discours sur l’origine et les fondemens de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality) 227 Du contrat social ou principes du droit politique (On the Social Contract) 227 Émile et Sophie 228 Émile, ou de l’éducation (Emil, or on Education) 3, 184 f., 227 f., 566 Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse: Lettres de deux amans, habitans d’une petite ville au pied des Alpes (Julie, or The New Heloise) 25, 26, 29, 108–110, 227, 246, 506, 572 Les confessions (The Confessions) 183, 506 Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Reveries of a Solitary Walker) 88, 117

Runeberg, Johan Ludvig (1804–1877) 399 f., 403 Elgskyttarne (The Elk Hunters) 399, 403 Hannah 399 Julqvällen (Christmas Eve) 399 f. Rushdie, Salman (1947) The Satanic Verses 662 Ruskin, John (1819–1900) 191, 447 The King of the Golden River 198 Rydberg, Victor (1828–1895) Lille Viggs äventyr på julafton (Little Vigg’s Adventures on Christmas Eve) 195 Rye, Stellan (1880–1914) Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) 665, 672 Erlkönigs Töchter (The Erl-King’s Daughters) 672 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold Ritter von (1836–1895) 598 Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de (1740–1814) 506, 606 »Idée sur les romans« (Idea about Novels) 251 Saganoya Omuro (1863–1947) 644, 650 f., 652 Ajikinashi (The Dreary World) 650 Hakumei no suzuko (A Miserable Girl, Suzuko) 650 Hatsukoi (First Love) 651 Kusare tamago (A Rotten Egg) 651 Nozue no kiku (Wild Chrysanthemum) 651 Ruten (Vagrancy) 651 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin (1804–1869) 26, 534 Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (Joseph Delorme) 508 Volupté (Delight) 508 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de (1900–1944) 199 Le petit prince (The Little Prince) 199 Saint-Hilaire, Étienne Geoffroy de (1772–1844) 528 f. Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Alexandre (1842–1909) 638 Salice-Contessa, Carl Wilhelm → Contessa, Carl Wilhelm Salinger, Jerome David (1919) 199

Sand, George (i.e. Amandine Aurore-Lucile Dupin de Francueil; 1804–1876) 191, 545, 547, 576, 675 Consuelo 76, 79 Histoire du véritable Gribouille (Story of the True Gribouille) 198 Indiana 508, 543, 552, 572 La mare au diable (The Devil’s Pool) 508 La petite Fadette (Little Fadette) 508 Lélia 508 Les maîtres sonneurs (The Master Pipers) 508 Mauprat 508 Une conspiration en 1537 (A Conspiracy) 535 Sanders-Brahms, Helma (1940) 673 Das Erdbeben in Chili 669, 671 Heinrich 669, 671, 673 Sanguinetti, Eduardo (1930) Il gioco dell’occa (The Dice Game) 445 Santi / Sanzio, Raffaello → Raphael Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino (1811–1888) 538, 548 Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (Facundo, or Civilization and Barbarism) 552 Sarmiento, Félix Rubén García → Darío, Rubén Saura, Carlos (1932) Carmen 677 f., 681 Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857–1913) 529 Savigny, Friedrich Karl von (1779–1861) 517 Scheffel, Joseph Victor von (1826–1886) Ekkehard: Eine Geschichte aus dem 10. Jahrhundert 315 f. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854) 115, 142, 482, 517, 520, 522, 598, 611, 625 Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur 478 f. Philosophie der Kunst (Philosophy of Art) 518 System des transcendentalen Idealismus 478 Schibli, Paul (dates unknown) The Nutcracker Prince 667

Index Schiller, Friedrich von (1759–1805) 46, 47, 83, 187, 280, 281, 328, 597 f., 605, 611 Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man) 457 f. Der Geisterseher: Aus den Papieren des Grafen O (The Ghost-Seer) 499 Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans) 501 Die Räuber (The Robbers) 31, 36, 601 Don Carlos 83 Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love) 391 Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry) 185 f., 498 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von (1767–1845) 29, 46, 123, 146, 148, 519, 559, 597 Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur (Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature) 22 Schlegel, Dorothea von (1763–1839) Florentin 237 f. Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772–1829) xvii, 1, 42, 44, 45, 46, 56, 205, 244, 277, 314, 457–461, 463 f., 470, 479, 480 f., 482 f., 510, 522, 525, 559, 597, 603, 605, 606, 613, 617 »Brief über den Roman« (Letter on the Novel) 459 f., 496, 497, 498–500 Gespräch über die Poesie (Conversation about Poetry) 459, 460, 498, 518 f. Lucinde: Ein Roman (Lucinde: A Novel) 2, 237, 238, 244, 280, 464, 465, 466, 472, 481, 500 »Nachricht von den poetischen Werken des Johannes Boccaccio« (Notice about Boccaccio’s Poetic Works) 366 »Rede über die Mythologie« (Discourse on Mythology) 460, 518 f. Über die Sprache und die Weisheit der Indier (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians) 519 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst (1768–1834) 457, 518, 611 Schlöndorff, Volker (1939)

729 Michael Kohlhaas — Der Rebell (Michael Holhaas — The Rebell) 669 f. Schmidt, Eckhart (1938) Der Sandmann (The Sandman) 143, 144, 150 f., 158, 368, 667 f. Undine 667 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860) 49, 71, 142, 514, 584, 606 Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel (1739–1791) 127 Schubert, Franz (1797–1828) 36, 81 »Der Ewige Jude« (The Eternal Jew; Text by Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Müller) 126 Fierrabras 82 Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich (1780–1860) 142, 146 Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Aspects of the Nightside of Science) 139 f., 520 Die Symbolik des Traumes (Symbolism of Dreams) 491 Geschichte der Seele (History of the Soul) 139 Schumann, Robert (1810–1856) 72, 81, 456 Schünzel, Reinhold (1888–1954) Amphitryon 669 Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug) 669 Schuré, Edouard (1841–1929) 638 Schwab, Gustav (1792–1850) 315 Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832) 60, 77, 83, 104, 260, 296–299, 300, 301 f., 305 f., 305–310, 311, 315, 316–318, 329, 337, 369, 416, 440, 441 f., 443 f., 446, 447 f., 448 f., 450, 486, 497, 500, 502, 509 f., 511, 512, 513, 514, 530–532, 538, 541–543, 569 f., 574, 679 A Legend of Montrose 369 Castle Dangerous 369 Chronicles of the Canongate 369 Count Robert of Paris 369 »Essay on Romance« 497 Guy Mannering 310, 572 Harold the Dauntless 503 Ivanhoe 305, 308–310, 315, 502, 510, 572 Kenilworth 571 Old Mortality 369 »Old Play« 502

»On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition: and Particularly on the Works of Ernest Theodore William Hoffmann« 296, 368 Redgauntlet 369, 503, 532 Rob Roy 442, 532 Tales of My Landlord 369 The Antiquary 310 The Black Dwarf 369 The Bride of Lammermoor 369 The Doom of Devorgoil, a MeloDrama, by Daniel Terry, Actor 444 The Heart of Midlothian 369 »The Highland Widow« 369 The House of Aspen 443 The Lay of the Last Minstrel 503 The Pirate 131 »The Two Drovers« 369, 379 f. »Wandering Willie’s Tale« 369 Waverley or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since 2, 100 f., 102, 255, 301, 305–309, 310, 312, 315, 316–318, 319 f., 437 f., 441 f., 449, 502, 503, 527, 530, 532 Scudéry, Madeleine de (1607–1701) 497 Sealsfield, Charles (i.e. Karl Anton Postl; 1793–1864) 310 Seghers, Anna (i.e. Netty Radvanyi; 1900–1983) Die Reisebegegnung (The Meeting on a Trip) 341 Ségur, Sophie Rostopchine Comtesse de (1799–1874) Nouveaux contes de fées (New Fairy Tales) 190 Senancour, Étienne Pivert de (1770–1846) Obermann 33, 37, 98 f., 239, 246 Rêveries de la nature primitive de l’homme (Reveries on the Primordial Nature of Man) 88 Sendak, Maurice (1928) Outside Over There 199 Seneca (i.e. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, c. 4 B.C.–65 A.D.) 250 Shakespeare, William (c. 1564–1616) 26, 123, 124, 127, 133, 250, 307, 328, 447, 496, 498, 621, 645 As You Like It 445 Hamlet 270, 359, 699 Macbeth 83, 572 Othello 83

Index

730 Romeo and Juliet 449 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797–1851) 41, 42, 43, 119 f., 123, 168, 260, 369 f., 504 Alastor 278 Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus 36, 41, 48 f., 119 f., 130, 171, 172 f., 179, 180 f., 223, 218–220, 239, 240, 245, 256, 260, 349 f., 353, 484, 493, 502, 523, 527, 604, 679, 680 f., 682 »Roger Dodsworth« 370 The Last Man 504 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822) 41, 456, 481, 506 »Hellas« 126 Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama 505 Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem 126 The Revolt of Islam: A Poem 505 The Wandering Jew; or, the Victim of the Eternal Avenger 126 Shevchenko, Taras (1814–1861) 510 Shimazaki Haruki → Shimazaki Tōson Shimazaki Tōson (i.e. Shimazaki Haruki; 1872–1943) 645, 647, 649 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554–1586) 527 f. Sierra O’Reilly, Justo (1814–1861) La hija del judío (The Daughter of the Jew) 542 Sinkel, Bernhard (1940) Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Good-forNothing) 668 Smart, Christopher (1722–1771) 470 Smetana, Bedrich (Friedrich) (1824–1884) 83 Smith, Charlotte (1749–1806) 256, 504 Emmeline; or: The Orphan of the Castle 252 Smithson, Harriet (1800–1854) 85 Smollett, Tobias George (c. 1721–1771) 566 Adventures of an Atom 658 Solomos, Dionisios (1798–1857) 510 Sōseki → Natsume Sōseki Soto-Hall, Máximo (1871–1944) 630 Southey, Robert (1774–1843) 471 Thalaba the Destroyer 506 The Curse of Kehama 506 Spectroruini → Bellin de La Liborlière

Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903) 644 The Philosophy of Style 644 Spengler, Oswald (1880–1936) 526 Spiess, Christian Heinrich (1755–1799) Das Petermännchen: Geistergeschichte aus dem 13. Jahrhundert (Little Peterkin: A Ghoststory from the Thirteenth Century) 304 Spitteler, Carl (1845–1924) Olympischer Frühling (Olympian Spring) 527 Staël-Holstein, Germaine Necker, Baronne de (Madame de Staël; 1766–1817) 28, 38, 125 f., 559 Corinne, ou l’Italie (Corinne, or Italy) 41 f., 44, 99, 230, 234 f., 244, 246, 506, 507 De l’Allemagne (On Germany) 2, 22, 23, 31, 36, 44, 76, 538 Delphine 29 f., 507 Steele, Sir Richard (1672–1729) 370 Steffens, Henrik (1773–1845) 115 Stein, Charlotte von (1742–1827) 673 Stein, Heinrich Friedrich Karl Reichsfreiherr vom und zum (1757–1831) 597 Stendhal (i.e. Marie-Henri Beyle; 1783–1842) 2, 76, 77, 455, 463, 545, 578, 585, 675 De l’amour (On Love) 23, 26 La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) 466, 467, 508 Le rouge et le noir: Chronique du XIXe siècle (The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the XIXth Century) 54, 235 f., 246, 289, 420, 466, 502, 508, 552, 585 Vanina Vanini 374 Vie de Henry Brulard (Life of Henry Brulard) 471 f. Stephens, George (1813–1895) 189 Sterne, Laurence (1713–1768) 37, 75, 374, 435, 455, 456 f., 459, 472, 621, 655 f., 661, 700 A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 388, 459, 470 f., 510, 656 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 280, 457, 464–466, 655 f., 658, 659 f., 661, 662 f. Stevenson, Robert (1905–1986)

Jane Eyre 288, 684 Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–1894) The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses 531 The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde 164 f., 339 Stifter, Adalbert (1805–1868) 71, 199, 264, 402 f., 409 »Bergkristall« (Rock Crystal) 402 f. »Brigitta« 403 Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer) 291, 403 Witiko 310, 531 »Zwei Schwestern« (Two Sisters) 403 Stoker, Bram (Abraham) (1847–1912) Dracula 25, 135, 260, 469 Storm, Theodor (1817–1888) 334 Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811–1896) Uncle Tom’s Cabin 546, 572 Strauss, Richard (1864–1949) 76 Strindberg, August (1849–1912) 199, 584, 602 Ett Drömspel (A Dream play) 602 Stroux, Karl Heinz (1908–1985) Begegnung mit Werther (Encounter with Werther) 672 Sturm, Ottokar → Rambach, Friedrich Eberhard Suárez y Romero, Anselmo (1818–1878) Francisco 546 Sue, Eugène (i.e. Marie-Joseph Sue; 1804–1857) 542, 545, 552, 556 Le juif errant (The Wandering Jew) 132, 551 Les mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris) 360, 549 f. Sully, Thomas (1783–1872) 56 Suppé, Franz von (1819–1895) Der Juwelier oder der Festmarkt auf Kronborg (The Jeweler, or the Market Fair at Kronborg) 82 Surr, Thomas S. (1770–1847) Richmond: or, Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Officer 345 Suskov (Sushkov), Mikhail Vasilievich (1775–1792) 24 Sutsos, Panagiotis (1806–1868) O Leandros 35 Swedenborg (Swedberg), Emanuel (1688–1772) 31 f., 611 Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745) 498, 655 A Tale of a Tub 141

Index Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen (1935) San Domingo 669 Takayama Chogyū (1871–1904) 647, 652 Tasso, Torquato (1544–1595) 307, 498, 503 Tatsunosuke, Hasegawa → Futabatei, Shimei Taviani, Paolo (1931) and Vittorio (1929) Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities) 229, 672 Tayama Katai (i.e. Tayama Rokuya; 1872–1930) 652, 653 Tayama Rokuya → Tayama Katai Tegnér, Esaias (1782–1846) Frithiofs Saga (Frithiof ’s Saga) 399, 510 Kronbruden (The Crown Bride) 399 Nattvardsbarnen (The Children of the Lord’s Supper) 399 Teniers, David (1610–1690) 401, 590 Tennyson, Alfred Lord (1809–1892) »Audley Court« 404 »Dora« 404 »Edwin Morris« 404 English Idyls, and Other Poems 404 »The Epic« 404 »The Gardener’s Daughter« 404 »The Princess: A Medley« 404 Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811–1863) 503 The History of Pendennis, His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy 531 The Luck of Barry Lyndon: a Romance of the Last Century 345 The Rose and the Ring 199 Theocritus (310–250 B.C.) 385, 388 Thierry, Jacques Nicolas Augustin (1795–1856) 532 f. Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands (History of the Conquest of England by the Normans) 532 f. Récits des temps mérovingiens (Narratives from Merovingian Times) 532 f. Thoreau, Henry David (1817–1862) 583 Tieck, Ludwig (1773–1853) 114–116, 190, 191, 209, 212, 256, 300, 304,

731 328, 352, 361, 364, 365, 366, 367 f., 457, 598, 602, 605, 606, 612, 620, 621 Der Blonde Eckbert (Eckbert the Fair) 81, 114 f., 144, 152 f., 329, 331 f., 333, 347, 367, 395, 520 f. Der gestiefelte Kater: Ein Kindermärchen in drei Akten (Puss-in-Boots) 333, 500 Der Mondsüchtige (The Sleepwalker) 367 Der Runenberg (Rune Mountain) 95, 114, 115 f., 207–209, 212, 367, 476, 481 Dichterleben (Poets’ Lives) 500 Die Elfen (The Elves) 196, 395, 396 Die Gemälde (The Paintings) 367 Die Gesellschaft auf dem Lande (Party in the Country) 521 Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen: Eine altdeutsche Geschichte (Franz Sternbald’s Ramblings: An Ancient German Story) 70, 94 f., 300, 466 f., 476, 499 f. Geschichte des Herrn William Lovell (History of Mr William Lovell) 268 Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar) 41, 45 f., 69 f., 144, 300, 500 Leben und Tod des heiligen Genoveva: Ein Trauerspiel (Life and Death of Saint Genevieve) 500, 522 Liebeszauber (The Love-Charm) 332 Minnelieder aus dem Schwäbischen Zeitalter (Lovesongs from the Swabian Epoch) 300 Phantasien über die Kunst für Freunde der Kunst (Fantasies About Art for Friends of Art) 484 Phantasus 115, 367, 395, 476 Vittoria Accorombona: Ein Roman (Vittoria Accorombona: A Novel) 500, 521 Volksmärchen von Peter Lebrecht (Folk-tales) 333 Tighe, Mary (1772–1810) Psyche; or, The Legend of Love 506

Togō, Hirayama → Ihara Saikaku (Ibara Saikaku) Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevich (1828–1910) 51, 199, 471, 575, 593 f. Anna Karenina 594 Kazaki (The Cossacks) 594 Sevastopol’skie rasskazy (Sevastopol Sketches) 594 Voina i mir (War and Peace) 2, 585 Topelius, Zachris (1818–1898) 191 f. Läsning för Barn (Reading Matter for Children) 194 Sagor (Fairy Tales) 194 Törngren, Anders (1713–1779) Adalriks och Giöthildas Äfventyr (The Adventure of Adalrik and Giöthilda) 610 Tour, Georges de la (1593–1652) 148 Tournier, Michel (1924) Vendredi ou la vie sauvage (Friday and Robinson, Life on Speranza Island) 199 Townsend, Robert (1961) Carmen: A Hip Hopera 678 f. Trapassi, Pietro Antonio Domenico Bonaventura → Metastasio, Pietro Treviranus, Gottfried Reinhold (1776–1837) 142 Trollope, Frances (Fanny) (1780–1863) 408 Trousdale, Gary (1960) The Hunchback of Notre Dame 676 Troxler, Ignaz Paul Vitalis (1780–1866) 142 Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935) 645, 647 Shōsetsu shinzui (Essence of Novels) 643 f., 650 Tōsei shosei katagi (The Characters of the Contemporary Students) 643, 645, 648 Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich (1818–1883) 161, 375, 593, 651 »Strannaia istoriia« (Strange Story) 162 Turner, Joseph Mallord William (1775–1851) 61, 62 f. Turner, Victor (1920–1983) 414 Twain, Mark (i.e Samuel Langhorne Clemens; 1835–1910) 580 f., 584, 585 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 291, 580 f., 584, 588, 589, 592

Index

732 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 580 f., 584 Úbeda, Francisco López de (16th/17th century) La pícara Justina (Justina) 361 Ucicky, Gustav (1899–1961) Amphitryon 669 Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug) 669 Uhland, Ludwig (1787–1862) 315 Unamuno, Miguel de (1864–1936) 577, 579 Undset, Sigrid (1882–1949) 199 Ureña, Leopoldo E. Garcìa-Alas → Clarín Valera, Juan (i.e. Juan Valera y Alcalá Galiano; 1824–1905) 577, 622, 623, 631, 633–635 Leyendas del Antiguo Oriente (Legends of the Old Orient) 633 Morsamor 623, 634 f. Valle-Inclán, Ramón María del (1866–1936) 623 La lámpara maravillosa (The Wonderful Lamp) 628 Tirano Banderas (Banderas the Tyrant) 568 Van Gogh, Vincent (1853–1890) 165 Varela, Félix (1787–1853) Jicoténcal 541 Vega (Carpio), Lope de (1562–1635) 566, 572 Veit, Phillip (1793–1877) 45 Vélez de Guevara y Dueñas, Luis (1579–1644) El diablo cojuelo (The Lame Devil) 658, 662 Verdi, Giuseppe (1813–1901) 83, 304, 497 Verga, Giovanni (1840–1922) 586 f., 594 I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree) 587 »L’Amante di Gramigna« (The Lover of Gramigna) 587 Vergil → Virgil Verlaine, Paul (1844–1896) 497 Verne, Jules Gabriel (1828–1905) 349 Vidocq, François-Eugène (1775–1857) Mémoires (Memoirs) 345, 355 Vigny, Alfred de (1797–1863) 100, 317 f. Cinq-Mars ou une conjuration sous Louis XIII (Cinq-Mars) 102, 317, 323, 507, 531, 568, 572

Daphné: Deuxième consultation du Docteur Noir (First Consultation of Dr Noir) 507, 523 Journal d’un poète (Poet’s Diary) 102 Servitude et grandeur militaires (Military Servitude and Grandeur) 507 Stello (Première consultation du Docteur Noir [First consultation of Dr Noir]) 507, 523 Vilde, Eduard (i.e. E. Wilde; 1865–1933) 575 Villaverde, Cirilio (1812–1894) 562 Cecilia Valdés o La loma del ángel (Cecilia Valdés, or Angel’s Hill) 545, 546, 549, 556, 560, 561, 562, 567, 574–576, 577 Villemain, François (1790–1859) 533 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, PhilippeAuguste, Comte de (1838–1889) 596 L’Ève future (Tomorrow’s Eve) 218, 220–223, 339 Virgil / Vergil (Publius Virgilius Maro; 70–19 B.C.) 385, 388 Aeneis (Aeneid) 85 Vitet, Ludovic (1802–1873) 531 La Mort de Henri III (The Death of Henry III) 535 Les Barricades (The Barricades) 535 Vivaldi, Antonio Lucio (1678–1741) Montezuma 448 Voltaire (i.e. François-Marie Arouet; 1694–1778) 529, 610, 655 f., 662 Candide ou L’optimisme (Candide, or Optimism) 31, 659 Le siècle de Louis XIV (The Century of Louis XIV) 299 Vörösmarty, Mihály (1800–1855) Zalán futása (Zalan’s Flight) 511 Voß, Johann Heinrich (1751–1826) 388 f., 393 f., 398 »Der siebzigste Geburtstag« (The Seventieth Birthday) 388, 389, 399 »Die Erleichterten« (The Unburdened) 389 »Die Freigelassenen« (The Freedmen) 388 f. »Die Leibeigenen« (The Villeins) 388 f., 393

Luise: Ein ländliches Gedicht (Luise) 388, 389, 393 f., 499 Vulpius, Christian August (1762–1827) Rinaldo Rinaldini 255 Vulpius, Christiane (1765–1816) 673 Wächter, Leonhard → Weber, Veit Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich (1773–1798) 300 »Brief Joseph Berglingers« (Joseph Berglinger’s Letter) 78, 484 Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar) 41, 45 f., 69 f., 144, 300, 500 Phantasien über die Kunst für Freunde der Kunst (Fantasies about Art for Friends of Art) 300, 484 Wagner, Richard (1813–1883) xvii, 45, 51, 71, 81, 82 f., 84 Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) 41, 82, 131 Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) 45 Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) 449 Lohengrin 82 Parsifal 45 Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg (Tannhauser and the Singing Contest on the Wartburg) 82 Tristan und Isolde (Tristan and Isolde) 45 Walpole, Horace (1717–1797) 297, 679 The Castle of Otranto 251 f., 256, 259, 298, 301–304, 412–417, 422, 423, 433, 502 Warton 514 Watteau, Jean-Antoine (1684–1721) »L’embarquement pour Cythère« (Embarkation for Cytherea) 59 f. »Le pèlerinage à l’Isle de Cythère« (Pilgrimage to the Island of Cytherea) 59 f. Weber, Carl Maria von (1786–1826) 81 Der Freischütz (The Marksman) 82 Weber, Veit (i.e. Leonhard Wächter; 1762–1837) Sagen der Vorzeit (Songs of Olden Times) 312 Wedekind, Frank (1864–1918) 76

Index Wells, Herbert George (1866–1946) 349 Wergeland, Henrik (1808–1845) 190 Whale, James (1889–1957) Frankenstein 680 f., 684 The Bride of Frankenstein 680 f., 684 Wharton, Edith (1862–1937) The House of Mirth 604 Whittier, John Greenleaf (1807–1892) 584 Wieland, Christoph Martin (1733–1813) 305, 330, 366 Das Märchen vom Prinzen Biribinker (The Fairy-tale of Prince Biribinker) 327 Don Sylvio von Rosalva (Don Sylvio of Rosalva) 327 Dschinnistan 327 Geschichte des Agathon (The History of Agathon) 263, 268 Oberon 327 Wilde, E. → Vilde, Eduard Wilde, Oscar (i.e. Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde; 1854–1900) 51, 597, 598, 603 f., 605, 606 An Ideal Husband 605 The Importance of Being Earnest 605 The Picture of Dorian Gray 56, 511, 603 f. Wilder, Thornton (1897–1975) 602 Williams, Ella Gwendolyn Rees → Rhys, Jean

733 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim (1717–1768) 397 Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of Ancient Art) 299 f. Windischmann, Karl Joseph Hieronymus (1775–1839) 142 Wise, Kirk (1963) The Hunchback of Notre Dame 676 Wolf, Hugo (1860–1903) Der Corregidor 560 Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759–1797) 504 The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria: A Fragment 504 Woolf, Virginia (1882–1941) 199 Wordsworth, William (1770–1850) 42, 43, 62, 188, 278, 597 »Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood« 188 Lyrical Ballads 498, 598 The Excursion 505 »The Idiot Boy« 505 The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind 10, 188, 278–280, 505 The Recluse 278, 462 »The Ruined Cottage« 505 Worsley, Wallace (1878–1944) The Hunchback of Notre Dame 676 Wyler, William (1902–1981) Sturmhöhe (Wuthering Heights) 681 f., 683

Xifré y Hamer, José (?-1920) 628 Yáñez, Agustín (1904–1980) 591 f. Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939) 628, 641 York, Eugen (1912–1991) Das Fräulein von Scuderi (Mademoiselle de Scudéry) 666 f. Yoshishige Yoshida (1933) Arashi ga oka (Wuthering Heights) 683 Young, Edward (1683–1765) 250 The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality 469 Young, Robert (1933) Jane Eyre 684 Yourcenar, Marguerite (1903–1987) Denier du rêve (Dream Penny) 658 Zagoskin, Mikhail Nikolaevich (1789–1852) Iurii Miloslavskii / Juri Miloslavski 319 Zetlitz, Jens (1761–1821) 409 Zola, Émile (i.e. Edouard Charles Antoine Zola; 1840–1902) 586, 587, 590 f., 593, 596, 599, 601, 644, 645 Germinal 586 L’Assommoir 586, 590 »Le roman expérimental« (The Experimental Novel) 588 Zorrílla y Moral, José (1817–1893) 377

In the series Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication:

XXIII Gillespie, Gerald, Manfred Engel and Bernard Dieterle (eds.): Romantic Prose Fiction. xxi, 733 pp. XXII Cornis-Pope, Marcel and John Neubauer (eds.): History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume III: The making and remaking of literary institutions. 2007. xiv, 522 pp. [Subseries on Literary Cultures 3] XXI Eysteinsson, Astradur and Vivian Liska (eds.): Modernism. With the assistance of Anke Brouwers, Vanessa Joosen, Nathan Van Camp, Dirk Van Hulle, Katrien Vloeberghs and Björn Thor Vilhjálmsson. 2007. xii, 1043 pp. (2 vols.). XX Cornis-Pope, Marcel and John Neubauer (eds.): History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume II. 2006. xiv, 512 pp. [Subseries on Literary Cultures 2] XIX Cornis-Pope, Marcel and John Neubauer (eds.): History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume I. 2004. xx, 648 pp. [Subseries on Literary Cultures 1] XVIII Sondrup, Steven P. and Virgil Nemoianu (eds.): Nonfictional Romantic Prose. Expanding borders. In collaboration with Gerald Gillespie. 2004. viii, 477 pp. XVII Esterhammer, Angela (ed.): Romantic Poetry. 2002. xii, 537 pp. XVI Knabe, Peter-Eckhard, Roland Mortier and François Moureau (eds.): L'Aube de la Modernité 16801760. 2002. viii, 554 pp. XV Arnold, A. James (ed.): A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 2: English- and Dutch-speaking regions. 2001. x, 672 pp. XIV Glaser, Horst Albert and György M. Vajda † (eds.): Die Wende von der Aufklärung zur Romantik 1760– 1820. Epoche im Überblick. 2001. x, 760 pp. XIII Klaniczay, Tibor, Eva Kushner and Paul Chavy (eds.): L'Époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600). Tome IV: Crises et essors nouveaux (1560–1610). 2000. xiv, 817 pp. XII Arnold, A. James (ed.): A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 3: Cross-Cultural Studies. 1997. xviii, 398 pp. XI Bertens, Hans and Douwe W. Fokkema (eds.): International Postmodernism. Theory and literary practice. 1997. xvi, 581 pp. X Arnold, A. James, Julio Rodriguez-Luis and J. Michael Dash (eds.): A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Volume 1: Hispanic and Francophone Regions. 1994. xviii, 579 pp. IX Gillespie, Gerald (ed.): Romantic Drama. 1993. xvi, 516 pp. VIII Garber, Frederick (ed.): Romantic Irony. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest, 1988. 395 pp. VII Klaniczay, Tibor, Eva Kushner et André Stegmann (dir.): L'Époque de la Renaissance (1400–1600). Volume 1: L'avènement de l'esprit nouveau (1400–1480). (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest594 pp. Expected Out of print VI:2 European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Volume 2. 1986. VI:1 European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Volume 1. 1986. V Weisgerber, Jean (dir.): Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Volume II: Théorie. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest, 1986. 704 pp. IV Weisgerber, Jean (dir.): Les Avant-gardes littéraires au XXe siècle. Volume I: Histoire. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest, 1986. 622 pp. III Vajda, György M. † (dir.): Le Tournant du siècle des lumières 1760–1820. Les genres en vers des lumières au romantisme. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest, 1982. 684 pp. II Balakian, Anna (ed.): The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest, 1984. 732 pp. I Weisstein, Ulrich (ed.): Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon. (Akadémiai Kiadó) Budapest Expected Out of print

The series incorporates a subseries on Literary Cultures I.

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume I (Vol. XIX in the main series) Volume II (Vol. XX in the main series) Volume III (Vol. XXII in the main series) Volume IV n.y.p. (Eds. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer)

II.

Comparative Histories of Nordic Literary Cultures n.y.p.

III. Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula n.y.p.