by Steven Moore
What fairy or enchanted palace can be more chimerical than that glorious renown which the greatest men agree to have been the aim of their most splendid enterprises? Did not Alexander . . . pursue a chimera as unreal as that which made Don Sylvio run after a blue butterfly in order to disenchant it? To any spectator, who coolly considers the actions of men, the former must appear as great a madman as the latter; at least the latter hath this advantage over the other, that his chimera injured no one, while that of Asia’s conqueror laid waste half the world. (1.12)
For most of Wieland’s readers, the fairy world obviously exists “only in our imagination”; Wieland encourages his readers to consider less obvious examples of beliefs that “have no reality in themselves” but that they swear by. “Wieland, in fact,” writes John McCarthy, “attempts to show how everyone perceives the external world more or less prejudicially and fashions, on the basis of his own particular bias, an internal reality which can diverge radically from the external one” (60). That is, we all believe in fairies of one sort or another.
One such bias, Wieland insinuates as slyly as Cervantes did, is religion. The Spanish narrator distances himself from his story by admitting “that we ourselves have as little faith in all that Don Sylvio has been telling Pedrillo, as we have in the visions of our countrywoman, Mary d’Agreda, or the tale of the Red Cap, or any other tale with which our good nurses formerly fed us from the very cradle” (1.12). Here the narrator equates the visionary writings of a 17th-century Spanish mystic, considered “real” even today by some Catholics, with the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, and later takes another poke at religious belief when Felicia comes across Sylvio asleep and tells her companion “if a Carmelite sister was in our place, and had found him at the foot of this rose-bush, as we have, she’d at least have taken him for a little Saint John the Baptist, unless, indeed, she supposed him a little angel” (3.9). Near the end, when Gabriel tries to break the spell fairy tales have on Sylvio, he explains that authors are as subject to egotistic delusions as anyone else:
How should we be able to know, whether an author, who existed three thousand years ago, and whose history no less than his character is equally unknown to us, had even a wish or desire to tell us the truth? and supposing he had, might he not be a very credulous creature himself? Might he not have set himself to work upon very vile materials? and might he not have been egregiously deceived either by his own prejudices, or by false intelligence? Or, even supposing him personally clear from all this, yet may not his history, written two or three thousand years ago—what by lapse of time, or the negligence of transcribers—have been altered, interpolated, or enlarged by suppositious emendations? (6.3)
“Two or three thousand years ago” is when the Bible was written, as the erudite Wieland knew, and he couldn’t be plainer on how much faith we should place in a text that has more in common with fairy tales than reliable history.
Wieland plants this seed of doubt upfront in the “Supplement of the Editor, but Through a Mistake of the Transcriber Converted into a Preface,” a Cervantine explanation of how Don Sylvio came to be published. Allegedly written by Don Ramiro de Z***, “formerly secretary of the embassy to a celebrated Spanish minister who was in high reputation at a German court,” the manuscript came to the editor/publisher in a German translation, which he and his wife found hilarious, especially the episodes featuring Pedrillo. Then a dour Jansenist gets a look at it and denounces its contents as “so many allegories or parables, the latent end and aim of which tended to nothing less than the overthrow of the faith” (vii). This reaction is offset by that of a liberal priest, who reads the manuscript at the editor’s request and suggests “the author had no other design than to divert himself and his readers,” and who by ridiculing credulity and superstition “would rather be doing a service than an injury to religion, and it would be so much more unjust to blame him for taking such a liberty as the Holy Fathers themselves had made use of no other weapons than exquisite raillery and a pointed irony against the reigning superstition and idolatry of their times” (viii–ix). This is the smug attitude some educated people take toward religion, admiring its “spiritual truths” while dismissing its supernatural trappings, but either way the reader is alerted that there’s more to this novel than the quixotic adventures of a silly teenager, and that there’s more than one way to read a novel. Again, Wieland warns us, we should not mistake our subjective opinion with objective fact until we’ve done our homework. And it’s certainly OK to model one’s behavior on that of characters in fiction (or scripture), as long as one recognizes them as fictions. Eugenio’s girlfriend, later revealed to be Sylvio’s long-lost sister—Wieland knowingly exploits all the clichés of romantic fiction—is conscious of the distinction, as her addled brother is not, when during the narration of her life story she admits, “My imagination presented to me a number of adventures which I had met with in old romances, and my little vanity found itself flattered by the idea that, possibly, I too might become a heroine in romance” (5.12).
A fiction about reading fiction, Don Sylvio is rife with references to other fictions. Don Quixote is cited several times in homage, and the Spanish characters and settings are derived from Lesage’s once-popular Gil Blas (which we’ll discuss later, along with the titles mentioned below). He alludes to Shakespeare (whom he translated into German), Lucian’s True Story, the fairy tales of Madame d’Aulnoy (especially “The White Cat”), Anthony Hamilton’s Four Facardins, and Crébillon’s Skimmer, a mock fairy tale more outlandish and titillating than “The History of Biribinker,” which I found a little too long and labored. The novel is highly aware of itself as a fiction: the narrator frequently comments on his narrative, and after the recitation of “Biribinker” all the characters critique it and the nature of fiction for several pages. Wieland displays the same metafictional self-consciousness as Fielding and Sterne, the two novelist after Cervantes who exerted the greatest influence on Don Sylvio. You’ll note that most of the above are comic novels, and at one point in Don Sylvio Wieland offers a splendid defense of this comic mode against serious nonfiction by asking
Whether the public good, as well as booksellers’ profit (which ’tis well known, is so considerable a branch of commerce in Europe), would not turn to better account if, instead of that quantity of vile productions in morality, great or small, which their tedious authors pour in upon the world under pompous titles, and which at bottom are nothing more than trite observations, lame thoughts, badly compiled and ill-digested, cold declamations, etc.—whether, I say, if instead of those we were to produce every six months some dozen books in the taste of the Roman Comique, the Bachelor of Salamanca, or the Foundling; nay, or even in the taste of Candide, Gargantua and Pantagruel;80 books in which truth is spoken laughingly; books which tear off the false mask from stupidity, fanaticism, and rascality; books which exhibit mankind in their true light and just proportion, with their passions and follies about them, and without the least addition or diminution; books which remove from the actions of men that varnish wherewith they are so ingenious to cover them, while at the same time they are all the offspring of pride, private views, and a voluntary self-delusion; books, in short, which instruct and correct their readers so much the more successfully, as they seem to be intended merely for amusement; (5.1)
Novels were still held in disrepute by many at this time, especially in Germany, and especially comic novels—one more prejudice that Wieland hoped to dispel with Don Sylvio, which deserves to be included on the shelf of the greatest comic novels of the 18th century.
Though first to be published, Don Sylvio was not the first novel Wieland wrote. In 1760 he began writing a novel set in ancient Greece, but in 1763 took a break and knocked out Don Sylvio in six months, and only later finished the novel published as The History of Agathon (Die Geschichte des Agathon, 1766–67). Though longer, more serious, and more ambitious than Don Sylvio, this novel dramatizes the same theme—the distorting effects of Schwärmerei—and
takes the same form, that is, an older manuscript edited by a modern German publisher. In Don Sylvio, Wieland took aim at the easy target of those who believe in fairy tales; in Agathon, he goes after bigger game: those who believe in philosophical ideals and religion.
Set in the 4th century BCE, this classic bildungsroman concerns a handsome young man named Agathon whose lofty notions of philosophy, love, politics, and virtue repeatedly clash against the realities of the mundane world. Sent by his father to the shrine at Delphi to be indoctrinated, Agathon falls under the spell of Platonic mysticism to the point where he believes he can communicate with the gods, a spell unbroken even after he learns that his priestly mentor has been tricking him in order to seduce the beautiful dreamer. There Agathon meets a young girl named Psyche, equally befuddled by religion, and both resist physical expressions of love to wander in the mazes of philosophical speculation before she is whisked away by a jealous priestess. Now about 18, Agathon goes to Athens and launches an unplanned political career, once again learning that Platonic ideals don’t work in the real world. Leaving Athens in disgust, he stumbles upon a bacchanal in the woods, whose naked participants invite him to join them, but to his priggish relief they are all captured by Sicilian pirates and taken to Smyrna (in Turkey). There he is sold to a retired sophist living in luxury named Hippias, who argues that his pragmatic, hedonistic view of the world is more justifiable than Agathon’s impractical idealism, which the young man still stubbornly espouses. When Agathon’s spiritual notion of love doesn’t melt from the heat of his dancing girls, Hippias sends Agathon to an elegant, older woman named Danae, a gorgeous hetaera with whom Agathon finds spiritual and sensual fulfillment. (She too falls in love for the first time.) But when Agathon learns of Danae’s history, he snootily abandons her, hops a ship, and winds up in Syracuse (in Sicily) and gets involved in politics again (succeeding Plato, who failed to establish his theoretical republic there), and again sees his ideals trounced. He finally finds some equanimity at the court of Archytas of Tarentum (in Italy), a virtuous but pragmatic man. There Agathon reunites first with Psyche, who turns out to be his long-lost sister, and then with Danae, who had conveniently moved to Tarentum after he dumped her two years earlier to forget her sorrows and atone for her sensual life. Overjoyed to see one another—Agathon had already realized he was foolish to leave her—Danae agrees to be Agathon’s friend but not his lover, to his disappointment, and on that ambiguous note the novel ends.
But the story doesn’t unfold in linear fashion. The novel opens in medias res as Agathon stumbles upon that bacchanal, which offers a blatant example of subjective enthusiasm. “In the intoxication in which their senses were then lost,” the maenads mistake handsome Agathon for Bacchus; his appearance gives “such a turn to their heated imagination that as they believed the god was before them, they easily supplied what was wanting to complete their idea of him” (1.2). The scene also introduces a stark contrast between Agathon’s spirituality and the world’s sensuality, the first instance of what Wieland’s English translator chides as “too alluring a picture of the most seducing, though indeed the most excusable of all human foibles”—that is, sexual allure.81 Not until he becomes Hippias’s slave do we learn of Agathon’s background, and some plot elements—like Psyche’s story—are withheld until near the end. The novel is narrated dramatically rather than chronologically, not a great innovation—some of Shakespeare’s plays, which Wieland was translating at this time, work the same way—but different enough from most novels of the period to signal Wieland’s playful approach to the genre.
For despite the seriousness of the theme—the danger of substituting your “ideas in the place of reality” (8.6)—Wieland has fun with the conventions of fiction. First there’s the ancient-manuscript ploy: he pretends he is translating a Greek manuscript written by a contemporary of Alciphon (3rd cent. ce)—which in turn is allegedly based on Agathon’s journal—and claims “he never thought of writing a novel,” insisting that Agathon “is no novel, nor ought to be one” (11.1). He admits some portions are hard to believe—the chapter where pure-minded Agathon ignores “the lascivious motions” of Hippias’s dancing girls is entitled “Which May Induce Some Persons to Suspect That This History Is a Fiction” (1.40)—but the narrator maintains the pretense with tongue firmly in cheek, even pretending to envy the “romance writer” for having “the whole boundless world of possibilities displayed before him for his free use” (5.8). Addressing the material as a historian—and indeed Agathon, Hippias, Archytas, and many other characters in the novel are historical figures—the narrator criticizes the Greek author for concluding his work like a novel “with discoveries, renewal of acquaintance, lucky recovery of lost friends, and a few marriages” like an old-fashioned romance (11.1), a genre our narrator mocks yet imitates. During Agathon’s sea voyage to Smyrna, the narrator winks, “The winds, for several days, were as calm as if they had conspired to afford us no opportunity of describing either a tempest or a shipwreck” (1.11), staples of romantic adventure novels, yet after he includes a shipwreck near the end of the novel, he tells his readers they have no reason to complain “for it is, as far as we know, the first in this history” (11.3). When Agathon recognizes Psyche near the end, the sarcastic narrator notes “what a fine opportunity this little incident gives us for pathetic descriptions and tragical scenes—What a situation!” (11.3); the chapter in which Agathon reunites with Danae is entitled “Something Which without a Spirit of Divination May Be Foreseen.” Agathon is a critique of conventional novels even as it appropriates many of its clichés, an effort on Wieland’s part to wean readers away from such predictable stuff and steer them toward the more innovative, daring novelists he alludes to throughout the novel, such as Cervantes, Hamilton, Lesage, Montesquieu, Crébillon, Mouhy, Galli de Bibiena, Fielding, Diderot, Rousseau, and Richardson.82
The purpose of all these allusions and metafictional asides is to remind the reader of the fictionality of fiction, which may seem obvious to us but was still a lesson to be learned by 18th-century readers, like those who wrote to Gellert to ask where they could contact his Swedish countess. Throughout Agathon Wieland invites the reader to participate in his fiction, both to expose the novelistic clichés they should be tired of by then, and to encourage them to analyze fiction on their own without waiting for the author to explain it to them. “Attentive readers,” he says hopefully at one point in reference to a character’s change of heart, “who have any knowledge of the human heart, will already have discovered the reasons of it in the former part of the narrative” (9.4)—that’s the sort of reader he wants. Elsewhere, when Agathon visits Danae’s summer home for the first time, the narrator halts at the threshold to say, “We decline giving the description of this seat that the reader may have the satisfaction of representing it to himself, as well laid out, as magnificent, and as agreeable as he pleases. All we shall say of it is that anyone whose imagination wants to be helped out must read the 16th canto of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered in order to form an adequate idea of the place this Grecian Armida had chosen as the theatre of action on which she hoped to triumph over our hero” (5.4). After Agathon reenters politics in Syracuse, the narrator takes “a little pause to allow the reader time to consider what he may have to say to himself at this instant in favour or prejudice of our hero” (9.5). When the Greek author turns novelistic near the end, the narrator steps aside: “It remains with our readers to give him what credit they please on this score; we on our parts do not concern ourselves with the matter” (11.1). Even the ambiguous ending is for the reader’s benefit: “It would be an easy matter for us to explain this miraculous affair to our readers, but we leave it to them to conjecture what [Agathon] did—or to determine what he ought to have done” (11.4). These authorial interventions invite the reader to read critically rather than passively, and draw attention to the shopworn devices conventional novelists use in the hope the reader will develop a taste for unconventional novels like Agathon.
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nbsp; The English translator, smart enough to compare these authorial intrusions to those in Tristram Shandy, complains of all the modern references (to politics and philosophy as well as to modern novels) and wishes Wieland had confined himself to his ancient Greek setting, missing the point that Wieland is more bent on deconstructing modern Europe than reconstructing ancient history. By mocking his Greek characters’ devotion to their gods, he can imply that his European contemporaries’ devotion to their god is no less ludicrous simply by using the plural rather than the singular: “all the notions we had of the Gods were only the inventions of artful men, calculated to impose upon women, and upon the credulity of youth” (7.2). He can likewise criticize ancient Greek metaphysical and political beliefs still held by Europeans of his time. When his characters argue about the best form of government—and there are many such discussions in the novel—Wieland is talking more about his Germany than Agathon’s Greece. (There’s an autobiographical element as well: like Agathon, young Wieland went through a religious, metaphysical phase and wrote a lot of spiritual verse before wising up in his 30s, reading wider, and developing a more mature, worldly outlook.) And when he repeatedly warns readers of the dangers of subjectivity, of allowing one’s personal feelings, fancies, and prejudices to blind oneself to the true nature of the empirical world, he speaks to us as much as to his 18th-century readers. Wieland was especially concerned with young readers, whom he addresses occasionally in the novel, knowing that their susceptibility to quixotic ideals (romantic/political/religious) can often lead to dangerous delusions, destructive actions, or, as in his case, to a wasted youth. Young Germans at that time should have followed worldly Agathon rather than suicidal Werther, published a few years later.