by Steven Moore
Throughout the novella, Tediato displays all the characteristics of what would become the romantic hero: he is tired of life (his name is derived from the Spanish word for “tedium”), alienated from his family and friends, contemptuous of society’s obsession with money, filled with “an inner torment capable, by itself, of filling me with horrors” (73), sick with melancholy, and reverent of nature. (At the end of the first night, Tediato notes, “Some bells in the neighboring temples have already greeted the Creator with their morning peals. But no doubt the birds in the trees did so earlier with a more natural, more innocent, and, therefore, more worthy music” [54].)58 Tediato resists supernaturalism, but his choice of suicide to assuage his lost love and to end his inner torment would be followed by the protagonists of other romantic novels published over the next 30 years such as Goethe’s Werther, Brown’s Power of Sympathy, Foscolo’s Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, Chateaubriand’s René, and Senancour’s Oberman.
Fluent in several languages, Cadalso turned to Edward Young’s long, death-haunted poem Night Thoughts (1742–46) for consolation (and for the name Lorenzo) after a beautiful 24-year-old actress died in his arms in 1771. Borrowing the inky trappings of the English “graveyard school” of poetry and elements from the nascent Gothic novel, Cadalso dresses his hero in black, brings him out only at night—“Welcome, night, mother of crimes, destroyer of beauty, image of the chaos from which we issue!” (58–59)—and even wanted to print his novella on black paper with yellow lettering. But more interesting than the Goth atmosphere of Lugubrious Nights is Caldoso’s almost stream-of-consciousness rendition of Tediato’s distracted thoughts, registering the self-absorption of the true Romantic, the theatricality and self-aggrandizement of the sensitive individual who assumes “the heavens also conspire against my peace” (39), and the self-pity of the broken-hearted who, as the romantic Keats put it, is “half in love with easeful death.” (Caldoso himself snapped out of his depression, wrote other novels and poems, and lived an active soldier’s life until dying in battle.59) Tediato pays more attention to his sensations of things than to the things themselves, morbidly fascinated by the way his mind works. It’s an example of the inward turn the novel was taking by that time, away from the concerns of society to those of the individual.
Lugubrious Nights “became one of the most popular and influential works of fiction produced during the Enlightenment,” notes one specialist of the period;60 it is yet another example of the enormous influence Spanish novels had on those of Europe and England. Without Spain’s elaborate satires (Don Quixote, The Master Critic, Friar Gerund), its realistic picaresques (from Lazarillo through Estebanillo González), its female protagonists and feminist rewrites (Justina, The Disenchantments of Love), and its experiments in historical (The Civil Wars of Granada) and dramatic form (Dorotea, Lugubrious Nights), the European novel might have taken longer to assume its modern forms. Finally, Spanish novelists contributed to the Enlightenment with their call for desengaño, bravely discarding the illusions that had held Spain and the rest of Europe in thrall for too long: the medieval worldview, the supremacy of religion, the superiority of aristocrats, the inferiority of women, and other plot holes in the master narrative of Western culture—all that with the Inquisition breathing down their necks. ¡Bravo!
GERMAN FICTION
Not until 1668 would a Teutonic Don Quixote appear, that is, an ür-text for German fiction that would set the tone for later novels, like that E-flat pedalpoint that germinates Wagner’s Rhinegold. The last of the major European countries to unite, the land of Gutenberg was the last to begin contributing to the treasure-hoard of fiction, partly because of cultural resistance. “Novels were considered a corrupting, deceiving influence on the reader’s morals,” writes Hans Wagener in the preface to his German Baroque Novel. “Responsible libraries did not collect them, scholars took no notice of them, scholarly magazines refused to review them, and preachers warned against them.” A few German protonovels had appeared in the 16th century, too few to warrant their own section in my previous volume, but worth a quick look before we get underway.
The earliest seems to be Fortunatus, published anonymously in 1509 by Johannes Heybler of Augsburg, who may also have been its author. With one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in the emerging capitalist economy of the Renaissance, Fortunatus is a simple but effective novel about the corrupting influence of money. The theme of fiscal responsibility is announced on the first page, where we are introduced to a rich kid who, unmindful “of how his parents had saved and increased their money,” quickly blows through his inheritance.61 He marries and settles down but remains financially insolvent; eventually his 18-year-old son Fortunatus leaves their home in Cyprus to make his fortune and has a rough time of it (including a threat of castration) until he meets the goddess of fortune in a forest in Brittany. Up to this point the novel had been roughly realistic, but it regresses to medieval folklore as Dame Fortune offers him the choice of a gift: either wisdom, riches, strength, health, beauty, or longevity. The greedy Cypriot chooses riches and is given a magic purse that will always provide wealth for him and his offspring. From then on, it’s mo’ money mo’ problems as this nouveau riche with an unlimited credit card indulges in conspicuous consumption and is predictably preyed upon by some, resented by others, and sucked dry by gold-diggers and false friends. As he tours 15th-century Europe—including Transylvania “where Vlad Dracul rules” (7)—he sometimes regrets not choosing wisdom over riches, but he manages to succeed well enough to return to Cyprus with purse intact. Throwing around more money, Fortunatus attracts an aristocratic bride and produces two sons, the younger of whom is given the purse for his own adventures in financial mismanagement. He also possesses a magic hat his father stole from the sultan of Egypt, which—like Siegfried’s Tarnhelm in Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods—allows him to transport himself anywhere instantly. He loses and recovers both several times during an ongoing relationship with the daughter of the king of England (the novel ranges all over the known world), but both are eventually stolen or destroyed. After he is killed by thieves and his brother dies of grief, the magic items lose their power, causing the thieves to kill each other in suspicion.
The author adapted a number of medieval folk tales to examine people’s relationship to money in the emerging mercantile culture and the tensions that were rising between old money and new. With his unlimited capital, Fortunatus disrupts traditional markets by recklessly “undercutting and overpaying” (10), nearly causes a war between Egypt and Cyprus after his hostile takeover of the magic hat, and shows how the greedy rich get richer while the generous poor get poorer. A cross between medieval fable and modern business novel, Fortunatus is a crude but perceptive look at how money changes everything, rarely for the better.
Even cruder but more famous is Till Eulenspiegel (1510–11), a “picaresque demi-novel” (as translator Paul Oppenheimer calls it) about a vagabond trickster, usually attributed to Hermann Bote of Brunswick (ca. 1467–1520). It’s a cradle-to-grave narrative with some evidence of dramatic organization—the author took about 40 percent of the episodes from traditional anecdotes of this 14th-century buffoon, and invented the rest—and projects a consistent moral view against dishonesty and hypocrisy, but it’s essentially just a jestbook of Eulenspiegel’s japes and capers. Like the medieval Solomon and Marcolf (see p. 241 of my previous volume), some of the jests are based on taking someone’s words more seriously than intended, as in this short, typical episode:
Eulenspiegel could not suppress his clownish nature when he arrived at Erfurt, where he soon became well known among both citizens and students. Once he went to the butchers’ stalls because meat was on sale. A butcher immediately told him that he ought to get something to take home with him.
Eulenspiegel said, “What should I take with me?”
The Butcher said, “A roast.”
Eulenspiegel said, “All right.” He grabbed a roast by one end and left with it.
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bsp; The butcher ran after him, saying, “Not like this! You’ve got to pay for the roast.”
Eulenspiegel said, “You said nothing to me about paying. You spoke instead about whether I wouldn’t like to take something with me.” The man had pointed out the roast so he might take it home with him. This Eulenspiegel could prove with his neighbors, who were standing nearby.
The other butchers came over and—out of malice—said yes, that was true. The other butchers disliked him, for whenever customers approached them and tried to buy something, this butcher called them over to him and lured them away. So they declared absolutely that Eulenspiegel should keep the roast. While this butcher argued with them, Eulenspiegel stuck the roast under his coat and went off with it—leaving them to settle things among themselves as best they could. (chap. 59)
There’s a strong scatological stink to the novel—one chapter is entitled “How Eulenspiegel Shitted in the Baths at Hanover”—disinfected for the children’s versions most Germans still grow up on; in fact, “Eulenspiegel”—usually translated “Owlglass” (“glass” as in “mirror,” so a “wise mirror” reflecting reality)—may have come from the Low German ul’n Speghel, meaning “Asswipe,” as we say in low American. In his excellent introduction, Oppenheimer praises the novel’s “impudent glory,” its lucid view of “ordinary life in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” and its exposure of “human gullibility, superstitious fears, and naive frailties,” but Till Eulenspiegel’s merry pranks aren’t enough to make it an aesthetically satisfying novel.
In her History of the German Novel, the late Hildegard Emmel passes over these two early works and nominates Jörg Wickram (c. 1505–before 1562) as the first German novelist. Of his five novels, the most highly regarded, and the only one available in English, is The Golden Thread (Der Goldfaden, 1557). Like Fortunatus, this formulaic tale of a shepherd’s son named Lewfried who works his way up to knighthood and marriage with a count’s daughter has one foot in the Middle Ages—folk motifs, a lion who follows Lewfried around like a dog, a ghost—and one in the Renaissance, dramatizing the weakening of class distinctions and the bourgeois ambitions of 16th-century burghers. The courtly atmosphere is occasionally punctuated by realistic social criticism: “Anyone who holds an office, a charge, or a function,” Lewfried’s father complains, “and who tries to be fair to all, will be cheated by base and false people. . . . But should a steward be tough, severe, and businesslike, and should he claim in due time what belongs by rights to his master, everyone chides him and calls him a dog, a tyrant, and a madcap” (chap. 15). The title refers to a test of fidelity by the count’s daughter: she gives Lewfried a negligible golden thread and tells him to save it until she calls for it, so he slits his chest open above the heart and sews it under his skin, and then reopens the wound in front of her when she wants it back. (She’s impressed.) One unique feature of The Golden Thread is the presence of a female jester, the only one known to the translator during this period. When not entertaining the court, this jestrix roams “from one end of the city to the other, . . . flirting with the apprentices” (chap. 32). The novel has an antique charm, like a Renaissance madrigal—in fact a few song lyrics are included—but it can’t be called great literature. How German is it? Not very, for most of the novel takes place in Portugal, for no discernible reason.
Were an English translation available, I would gush for several pages over the Geschichtklitterung of the Alsatian satirist Johann Fischart (1546–91), the Finnegans Wake of Renaissance Germany. A free adaptation of book 1 of Rabelais’s Gargantua (1534), Fischart expanded the Frenchman’s 150-page tall tale of the birth and education of a giant to three times its size in a series of expanded editions (1575, 1582, 1590). Although the novel reflects, through the funhouse mirror of farce, changing attitudes toward culture, sexuality, education, religion, gender, and class attitudes, Fischart’s Affentheurlich Naupengeheurliche Geschichtklitterung—which one critic freely translates “Adventurous Whimsicallyvast Storyscribble”—is a carnival of linguistic subversion and innovation, a word-hoard of onomatopoeia, multilingual puns, slang and dialect, alliteration and rhyme, etymological in-jokes, oxymorons, double entendres, neologisms, pattern poems, and paratactic word-associations, as evident from the rest of its title page:
Of the Deeds and Councils of the—a Short Long Time Ago and Any Time—Fully and Properly Boasted Heroes and Lords Grandgousier, Gargantua and Those of the Simplethirsty, Thoroughlythirstpanting Prince Pantagruel from Thirstworlds, King in Utopia, Anyworld, Nullhold and Nowherempire, Sultan of the New Canaries, Foamlapland, Dipsoder, Thirstling and Odysseyislands: Also Grand Prince in Darkstall and New bel Mistandfogland, Hereditary Governor of Nihilburg and Underlord of Nulliby, Nulston and Nowherehome.
Designed in French at Some Time or Other by M. François Rabelais, Now However, Metaterribly and Hilariously Poured from Above into a German Mold, Approximately as the Lousy Are Loused, More or Less Translated into Our Mother Babble. Also for This Printing Placed on the Anvil Once More, and There Buffooned, Smithied and Hammered with Such Panthirsty Mythologies or Pleasant SecretsThat Nothing Except the Iron Is Missing.62
Like Rabelais, Fischart mocks the conventions of scholarly works with this elaborate title page, along with a profusion of preliminaries (dedication, prologue, introduction, postface), goofy chapter titles, footnotes, erudite allusions, lists, and so forth. This fascinating farce fell out of favor in the mid-17th century, but was rediscovered by novelist Jean Paul Richter at the end of the 18th and had a huge influence on his own maximalist style: he quotes a passage from it that could come straight from one of his own eccentric novels:
Her little cheeks bloomed with roses, and illuminated more brightly the circumfluent air with their reflection like a rainbow, like women coming out of a bath in pictures of the ancients; through her swan-white throat tube one might see the red wine slip as through a Moorish glass; she had a truly alabaster little gullet, a porphyry skin, through which all the veins appeared, like the white and black little stones in a clear little fountain; apple-round and sweetly hard breasts of marble, true apples of Paradise and alabaster balls, finely decorated near her heart and nicely elevated, not too high like the Swiss and Cologner, not too low like the Dutch, but like the French, etc. (School for Aesthetics, 102n)
Despite some intermittent critical work on him in the 19th and 20th centuries, Fischart has slipped back into obscurity—where those who dismiss him as a word-drunk feel he belongs—largely due to his dense style, which even specialists have trouble with. But some recognize him as an important link between linguistic innovators of the Renaissance like Colonna and Rabelais and modern ones like James Joyce and Germany’s own Arno Schmidt. Even though the Geschichtklitterung has a reputation for untranslatability (despite the extracts I’ve quoted), I hope some myriad-minded polylinguist will give it a shot someday.
Near the end of the 17th century, the raw materials were available for a novel that could have become Germany’s Don Quixote had there been a novelist worthy of the task. A rogue scholar named Jörg Faustus (1466–1538?), who abandoned theology for science, medicine, and the occult, attracted suspicion and wild rumors even before his mysterious death, and considerably more afterward. Devil-obsessed Martin Luther, no friend of science and learning, accused him of necromancy, and within decades a legion of nefarious anecdotes were circulating about this boastful polymath. Responding to public fascination, an anonymous author published in 1587 a short novel entitled The History of Dr. Johann Faustus (Historia von D. Johann Fausten), but unfortunately it’s an artless compilation of anecdotes and heretical hearsay about the good doctor, intended primarily to warn the Protestant reader against straying from the straight and narrow. (It was brought out by a religious publishing house.) The translator of the English edition, identified only by his initials P. F. (possibly Paul Fairfax), improved it somewhat; in his superb critical edition of The English Faust Book, John Henry Jones writes that the translator “possessed three qualities
notably lacking in the German author: a flair for pungent expression, a vivid visual imagination and a taste for ironic humour; in combination they served to exalt the humble Faust book to a work of considerable art.”63 But P. F. stuck with the religious theme; Christopher Marlowe read his translation and immediately saw the profound implications of the Faust story, which soars for the first time in his mighty lines. It would be two centuries before a German author gave the theme the treatment it deserved, albeit also in dramatic rather than fictional form. Weh! as the Rhinemaidens lament.
“Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”
When Germans began writing novels in earnest in the 17th century, they (like Wickram) turned their backs on local materials and looked abroad for inspiration, especially to France. This was not an inspired choice, for most French novels of that century have not aged well, and unlike them, the German novels they inspired were never translated into English and hence never achieved much recognition abroad. A few German authors picked up on the French fad for pastoral novels in the late 16th/early 17th centuries just as the fad was fading, such as the notable poet Martin Opitz’s petite Schäfferey von der Nimfen Hercinie (The Idyll of the Nymph Hercinie, 1630), the anonymous Amoena und Amandus (1632), Philipp von Zesen’s Die adriatische Rosemund (The Adriatic Rosemund, 1645)—which Emmel calls “the first original German novel since Wickram” (9)—and a later one by Johann Thomas entitled Damon und Lisille (1663). In France, the pastoral novel was superseded by the supersized “heroic novel,” vast, multivolume works of romance and adventure set in the distant past, featuring privileged mortals dashing from one heroic exploit to the next, usually concluding with multiple weddings (see pp. 192–217 below). Again adopting the fad just as it became passé in France, such novelists as Andreas Heinrich Buchholtz (Herkules und Valiska (1659–60) and Heinrich Anselm von Ziegler und Kliphausen (Die asiatische Banise, 1689) produced huge historical romances, but not nearly as huge as Anton Ulrich von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel’s two dinosaurs, Die durchleuchtete Syrerin Aramena (The Illustrious Syrian Aramena, 1669–73) and Die römische Octavia (The Roman Octavia, 1677–1707), weighing in at 4,000 and 7,000 pages respectively, and featuring hundreds of characters threading their way through labyrinthine plots. They were still popular in Goethe’s day; his religiose “Beautiful Soul” in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is especially fond of Buchholtz’s Herkules and Anton Ulrich’s Octavia.