by Steven Moore
The History of Agathon is the most sophisticated German novel of its time: it is psychologically acute, bracingly brainy, formally inventive, metafictionally aware, sensibly sensual, urbanely witty, cheerfully cynical, and engagingly profound. It’s a perfect marriage of form and content, for the narrator displays the same skeptical but understanding attitude toward his material as Agathon comes to display toward the world. Predictably, this unconventional, unidealistic novel received some harsh criticism—it was banned in Zürich and Vienna—which the great critic Lessing said was because Germany wasn’t ready yet for such a novel. He argued that Agathon “is indisputably one of the finest works of our century but seems to have been written much too early for the German reading public. In France and England it would have caused the greatest stir, the author’s name would be in all the papers. But Germany? We have it, and that is enough,” adding, “It is the first and only novel for the thinking person and in the classical style.”83 And a few years later, when Friedrich von Blankenburg wrote the first German study of fiction, Versuch über den Roman (1774), he proposed Agathon as an ideal model.
The influence of Sterne that Wieland’s translator detected is even more pronounced in his next novel, a dazzling tour de force entitled Socrates out of His Senses, or Dialogues of Diogenes of Sinope (Socrates Mainomenos, oder die Dialogen des Diogenes von Sinope, 1770). It has the same 4th-century bce Greek setting as Agathon, and a similar setup: in the preface the editor explains how he came across a neglected manuscript in the library of some aggressively antiintellectual monks, a Latin translation of an Arabic translation of a Greek manuscript—again from the time of Alciphon (3rd cent. ce)—allegedly based on the journal of the famous Greek philosopher who lived in a tub, eschewed material comforts, and who pushed Socrates’ preference for simple living and blunt honesty to such an extreme that Plato called him “Socrates gone mad.” (The historical Diogenes left no writings behind; everything we know about him is anecdotal.) Delighted by his discovery of this manuscript, and convinced that the unconventional Diogenes has been given a bad rap by conventional-minded people over the centuries, the editor translates the work to show that Diogenes was not an eccentric weirdo but a brilliant social critic who walked the talk.
Wieland assumed an unconventional character would probably express himself in an unconventional form, so Diogenes (as critics prefer to call it) is a nonlinear, Shandyesque assortment of anecdotes, digressions, and improvised lectures in 38 mostly short sections, written in a dashing style that can be best conveyed by quoting its opening paragraph:
How it came into my head to write my adventures, my observations, my sentiments, my opinions, my dreams, my follies—your follies, and—the wisdom I learnt perhaps from both, I would first acquaint you, had I but paper, whereon to write.—But paper might be dispensed with, had we but wax table[t]s, bark of trees, or skins, or palm leaves,—and in default of these, iron plates, marble, ivory or brick might serve the turn; for all these different materials were formerly used for writing when people were more solicitous to write durably than to write much.—But unfortunately I am destitute of all these materials; and were I in possession of them, they would be useless to me, having neither pen nor type, nor any other convenient instrument except this little piece of chalk.—It is a bad business!—But what should I do if none of all these things existed in the world? The shortest way would be not to write at all: but write I will, ’tis resolved. ― What! write in the sand? ― It might do; I know some two or three hundred old and young writers to whom, since they are determined to write, like myself, or since perhaps they are obliged to write, I would by all means recommend this method; but after all it has its inconveniences.—Blockhead! to consider one moment on it and not to see that my tub is spacious enough to contain a whole Iliad, provided my hand were small enough.—I will write on my tub.—Its sides too are so naked, without sculpture, without gilding, without tapestry, without pictures; indeed too naked!—Am I an inferior artist to the worm, from whose entrails are spun those webs wherewith our modern Argonauts hang their halls?—The worm spins herself her own house, and I envy her skill; that is more than I can do. However I can hang my own house with a tapestry spun out of my brains; and that I will do, at least as long as this piece of chalk lasts.84
An admirer gives him a notebook as an alternative to writing his tale on a tub, which Diogenes fills with anecdotes from his life that illustrate his philosophy, written in the manner historians ascribe to him: bluntly rude, savagely witty, sarcastically parodic, unabashedly smutty, and eminently sensible. A few sections (as in Tristram Shandy) are only a sentence long, like this one where Diogenes breaks off his narrative apparently to masturbate, something the philosopher was known to be shameless about: “Give me leave to abandon myself to a sensation that makes me happy,—and in the mean time read once more the three foregoing sections, if you please,—and as slowly or quickly as you please.—” (10). Other sections, especially in the less playful second half of the novel, contain spirited lectures, one a stinging parody of speculative philosophy concerning the man in the moon, culminating in the 10-part section 38, Diogenes’ earthy alternative to Plato’s idealistic republic. Also included is the famous anecdote about Alexander the Great’s visit to Diogenes, who so impressed him that he claimed, “I assure you, were I not Alexander I would be Diogenes!” (36).
Like Yorick in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey—which Diogenes more closely resembles than Tristram Shandy—Diogenes has a weakness for the ladies that alternates between sentimental and salacious; contemptuous of conventional notions of decency and propriety, his candid (but not coarse) remarks about attractive women—whose clothes are always falling away to reveal their charms—and about sexuality in general further illustrate his preference for straight talk, though he tells one sweetly sentimental story of a girl he met when younger that still brings a tear to the 50-year-old philosopher’s eye. Wieland’s ongoing concern with the danger of subjectivity is cleverly dramatized in one such instance when Diogenes throws off his mantle (his only covering) to rescue a drowning woman, then (still naked) takes her behind a bush so she can dry off her clothes. This innocent, heroic action is distorted as it becomes the talk of the town, each person insisting on his or her interpretation, usually negative, based on hearsay and preconceived notions of decency rather than on observable fact.
Wieland was well acquainted with Enlightenment writers, and in Diogenes he joins them (especially Rousseau, whom the fictitious editor cites in his preface) in proposing a new social contract based on Diogenes’ cosmopolitan individuality. He probably didn’t believe anyone would sign the contract—Diogenes is too radical, too honest for most people to emulate—but he obviously had fun venting his views in Diogenes of Sinope, and its freewheeling style and nonconformist ideas make it his most appealing novel. Like Swift looking back at his equally outrageous Tale of a Tub, “Years later the author supposedly said: ‘This Diogenes is one of my best works. I don’t know if I ever wrote anything better in prose’ ” (McCarthy, 95).
The lack of English translations forces me to pass over two other novels from Wieland’s middle period: Der goldene Spiegel (1772, The Golden Mirror)—“a political novel with progressive tendencies,” according to McCarthy (12)—and its sequel, Geschichte des Philosophen Danischmend (The Story of Danischmend the Philosopher, 1775), a utopian novel set in India. The latter sounds especially interesting because it contains humorous footnotes “attributed to a host of historical and fictional figures, among them Pliny, Epictetus, Hume, Tristram Shandy,” and Pope’s Martinus Scriblerus (Shookman, 106).
The only novel by Wieland honored with a modern translation is his most popular novel, History of the Abderites (Geschichte der Abderiten, serialized 1774–80). This too is set in ancient Greece—Abdera was a Thracian city proverbial for the stupidity of its citizens—and attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of the philosopher Democritus (c. 460–c. 370 bce) as Wieland did with Diogenes in the previous novel: both
kindred spirits he identified with. Democritus shared Wieland’s concern with the dangers of subjectivity, since perception “reveals merely how things seem to us, as opposed to how they really are,” and practiced the “enlightened hedonism” that Wieland felt was the best way to live.85 But History of the Abderites lacks the expressive form Wieland gave his earlier novels: it’s merely an anecdotal, episodic account of the comic conflicts between intelligent, cosmopolitan Democritus and the stupid, provincial Abderites, harping upon their smug closed-mindedness, credulity, tastelessness, conformity, and antiintellectual prejudices. As Wieland’s young friend Schiller sighed in his play about Joan of Arc, “With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain,” and there’s no hope here (as there was with Don Sylvio and Agathon) for improvement: like the poor, the stupid are with us always.
Wieland abandons Democritus after two sections to dramatize a visit by the playwright Euripides to Abdera, whereby Wieland expresses his views on drama, then abandons him too for an increasingly silly lawsuit between two Abderites, and concludes with a satire on religious fanaticism. But it’s all too easy, just a series of potshots at stupidity and too obviously inspired by Wieland’s own encounters with the stupid. In a mock “key” that he added when the serialized novel was published in book form in 1781, Wieland says of the ancient Abderites: “They still continue living and being active, although the original place where they used to live has long ago disappeared from the earth. They are an indestructible, immortal tribe. Without their having a firm abode anywhere, they are found everywhere” (305). The novel is the clearest exposition of Wieland’s characteristic themes, but the least artistic. There are a few references to Sterne,86 a few addresses to the reader, and an impressive display of Wieland’s erudition, but History of the Abderites lacks the aesthetic ingenuity of his earlier novels. It was written in installments over a six-year period, and Wieland’s creative energy seems to have been diverted to other projects—among other things, he was writing many verse-narratives at this time, culminating in the great Oberon (1780), which had an enormous influence on English Romantics. The novels Wieland wrote later in his career don’t sound much better, with one untranslated exception.87 But his first three fictions are great achievements that brought the German novel up to speed with its continental and English counterparts, and they deserve, like his favored Greek philosophers, to be rehabilitated.
Sterne’s influence is even more obvious in The Life and Opinions of Master Sebaldus Nothanker (Das Leben und die Meinungen des Herrn Magister Sebaldus Nothanker, 1773–76) by a bookseller and publisher named Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811). He had noticed the popularity of a charming novella by Moritz August von Thümmel (1732–1817) entitled Wilhelmine, which had been published in 1764. Subtitled “A Comic Poem in Prose” and reminiscent of (if not modeled after) Pope’s “Rape of the Lock,” it treats in mock-epic terms the marriage of a village pastor to a local girl named Wilhelmine, who has returned from four years’ service as a chambermaid to an aristocratic lady. Thümmel takes rococo delight in recounting Pastor Sebaldus’s bumbling but successful marriage to the girl he had been pining for during her absence, a bouncing beauty—much is made of her exposed, heaving bosom, into whose crevice she keeps losing things—whose motives for marriage are not entirely clear, aside from being fed up with the inanity and corruption of court life. Thümmel has as much fun with epic conventions, social satire, and sexual innuendo as Pope did. Eager on the eve of his wedding to consummate his long unrequited love for Wilhelmine, Sebaldus goes to sleep: “Soon he was dreaming that his intoxicated soul was lifting itself above the sun and greeting unfamiliar regions. Then he believed he was plunging into a bottomless abyss; he screamed, struggled, bumped his restless head, and woke in a sudden fright. Thus does a merry rocket fly up into the dark in a whirlwind night, throw off friendly sparks, and races beneath the clouds; soon thereafter it sinks—is sinking now—and, ending its brief activity, explodes into a ridiculous bang” (canto 2). Sebaldus gets a glimpse of his bride’s “unfamiliar regions” when she descends from a coach in her citified wedding finery: “With majestic dignity the engaging Wilhelmine now climbed down from her velvet seat and then at the same time her small, extended foot revealed itself for a few moments to the enraptured bridegroom up to the level of the silk garter, upon which in silver points was embroidered a tender verse from Voltaire.—Oh, to where does a French poet not know how to steal! Just admit it, you Germans, none of your great geniuses has risen so high” (canto 5). There is also a sobering warning for the informed individual who is tempted to oppose the uninformed masses:
When a false, unreliable clock on the city hall controls the judgment of the citizens, it often deceives our true perception of time and its use, for here, where everyone follows a common mistake which is spread by a droning bell and pays no heed to the distant sun, what good is it to the confident astronomer that he alone is guided by its commands, and laughs at the city’s delusion, and measures his hours according to nature? With all his calendars he will soon be missing his midday meal, the visit to his beloved, and the closing of the city gate. (canto 5)
Nicolai decided this worldly novella deserved a novel-length sequel.
An active promoter of Enlightenment values, Nicolai wrote Sebaldus Nothanker to satirize religious orthodoxy and intolerance. Noting in the preface that most novelists abandon their protagonists on their wedding day and thus neglect the more interesting story of their married lives, Nicolai’s narrator—a historian who insists that, unlike Thümmel, he’s writing “veritable history” rather than “a delectable romance”—begins with the difficulty sophisticated Wilhelmine has adjusting to country life and how she takes control of her marriage at the cost of “but a few caresses.”88 Starting a family (one son, two daughters) and keeping up with the latest books—sent to her from a bookseller named Hieronymus, who plays a recurring role in the novel—Wilhelmine is carried away by a patriotic treatise by Thomas Abbt entitled Death for the Fatherland (1761) that tried to con citizens into sacrificing their lives to the power-hungry politicians who start wars: in this case, the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). At her encouragement, her ’whipped husband reluctantly delivers a sermon on the topic, with devastating results: their son goes off to join the war, and Sebaldus loses his pastorship. (Disturbed by his tolerant, ecumenical religious views, his intolerant religious superiors have been waiting for an excuse to get rid of him.) Thereafter, it’s one hardship after another: the family is thrown out on the streets, Wilhelmine and one of her daughters die, the other daughter (Mariane) is forced into a deadening career as a governess/lady’s companion, and Sebaldus drifts across Germany and Holland working as a tutor or proofreader. Invariably his heterodox views clash with the orthodox theologians he keeps encountering: Lutherans, Moravians, pietists, Dutch Collegiates, virtually every loony sect on the loose in Germany and the Netherlands at the time, each cult believing it alone holds the key to the “symbolical books” of the Bible. The novel alternates between Sebaldus’s picaresque adventures and Mariane’s romantic entanglements until a series of wild coincidences reunites them near the end (along with the missing son) and, thanks to winning a lottery, Sebaldus retires to an estate and Mariane marries a Don Sylvio-type aristocrat.
The Life and Opinions of Sebaldus Nothanker is included by literary historians with other German novels that were influenced by The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67), and in addition to its title Nicolai’s work does indeed share a few features with Sterne’s revolutionary novel. “Every man has his hobby-horse,” the narrator notes (echoing Sterne), which in Sebaldus’s case is his obsession with the book of Revelations, on which he writes a huge commentary throughout the novel, convinced it foretells the history of France. Like Tristram Shandy, Sebaldus Nothanker has some scholarly footnotes and indulges in learned wit at the expense of theologians and their writings, beginning with Sebaldus himself, who, when he’s not astride his hobbyhorse, is a generous, fair-minded individual (
though closer to Fielding’s Parson Adams than Sterne’s Yorick). Listening to his straightforward sermons,
who would suppose that this was the man of profound, recondite erudition, who had thoroughly studied all the commentaries upon the prophetical writings; who knew all the ancient and modern predictions, together with their accomplishment and non-accomplishment, to a hair; who could adjust and fit together, with the utmost nicety and ease, prototypes and antitypes; who had not passed over a single opinion of the mystics and Gnostics; who had at his fingers’ ends hieroglyphics, numerical characters, prophetical weeks and cycles, the varying hours of the nychthemeron, biblical histories, and prophetical dreams, together with the whole Cabala, and the book Raya Mehemna; and who from these rich materials, with the aid of the Crusian philosophy (which, sharpened to a finer point than that of the finest needle, can analyze the simplest ideas, and even cleave asunder the two sides of a monad) had wove together from the Apocalypse such an ingenious web of prophecies that the irrefragable Hypomnemata of Prophetical Theology by Crusius, Bengel’s incontrovertible Explication of the Apocalyptic Prophecies, Don Isaac Abarbanel’s Mashmi’a Yeshu’ah, and Michaelis’s irrefutable Explanation of the Seventy Weeks (whatever praise they may be entitled to on the score of truth and accuracy) certainly can not be put in competition with it for novelty, subtlety, and ingenious explanation of the most obscure images and symbols? (1.1)
A “man of profound, recondite erudition” himself—aided by his insider knowledge as a bookseller with access to publishers’ catalogues (discussed at one point in the novel)—Nicolai fills his novels with erudite displays like this, having Sterne fun with the lunatic extremes of theological exegesis. And like Tristram Shandy, Nicolai delights in digressions, ranging from extended theological disputes between Sebaldus and others to observations on the publishing business.