by Steven Moore
Hölderlin knew Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), who knew Tieck and Schlegel, and who under the pen-name Novalis explored some of the same themes and poetic techniques as Hölderlin in two short novels that were published posthumously by Tieck and Schlegel. The first is The Novices of Sais (Die Lehrlinge zu Sais), which Novalis wrote between 1797 and 1799, then returned to in 1800 with plans to expand it to a full-length “symbolic nature-novel,” which illness prevented. The wisp of a story concerns some nature students gathered around an older teacher at a temple in the ancient Egyptian city of Saïs. Convinced that nature presents a “cipher which we discern written everywhere, in wings, eggshells, clouds and snow, in crystals and in stone formations, on ice-covered waters, on the inside and outside of mountains, of plants, beasts, and men, in the lights of heaven, on scored disks of pitch or glass or in iron filings round a magnet,” these nameless nature-lovers seek the “key to the magic writing, even a grammar” (3). They offer various readings of nature, all stemming from an ecological awareness of the organic, equal relationship between humans and nature (as opposed to the master-slave “dominance” model sanctioned by Genesis 1:28). Some travelers arrive at the temple and offer further interpretations, for “the ways of contemplating nature are innumerable” (31). The teacher welcomes them, and concludes the novella with a speech on the importance of studying nature, not merely for scientific reasons but to unlock the mysteries of the soul.
One of the travelers encourages the others to be “venturesome” in their speculations about nature and to “praise each man who spins a mesh of new fantasy around things” (81, 83), which describes Novalis’ modus operandi. Meshing the Romantic reverence for nature with 18th-century advances in natural science, The Novices also offers a charming fairy tale in the middle, narrated by “a merry youth with roses and ivy on his brow” to a morose novice: this floral fable about how Hyacinth mated with Rose Petal involves gossiping flowers, a singing lizard, and a quest for the goddess Isis. The novella’s combination of fancy, philosophy, and fairy tale is seductive, and its ecological concerns are prophetic, even anticipating James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis.
Novalis’s other, more famous novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (written winter 1799–1800, published 1802) is an enchanting tale, set in the Middle Ages, of the making of a poet. Novalis wrote it not in the spirit of Lucinde and Hyperion but as a counterblast to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which he felt mocked the concept of an artistic vocation. Consequently, there is no conflict or subterfuge in 20-year-old Heinrich’s path to becoming a poet. He has the support of his bourgeois father, who regrets his own youthful rejection of his vocation as a sculptor to become a commercial craftsman instead, successful but unfulfilled. And he has the support of his mother: awaking from a dream of a blue flower, symbol of the ideal, Heinrich travels with her from Eisenach to her hometown of Augsburg, accompanied by merchants who approve of his vocation, give him pointers on becoming a poet, and retell some of the tales and poems they’ve heard from medieval troubadours. In Augsburg, Heinrich meets a minnesinger named Klingsohr, who becomes his mentor, and his blue-flower-faced daughter Mathilde, who rather effortlessly becomes his bride. As a masterclass demonstration of his art, Klingsohr narrates a mythy fairy tale—Novalis’s attempt to outdo the one that concludes Goethe’s Conversations of German Refugees—an astro-mystical parable about love and poetry, by turns erotic and psychedelic, that I won’t even try to summarize. This concludes part 1 of the novel, entitled “Expectations.” Novalis wrote only the first 20 pages of part 2, “The Fulfillment,” which finds Heinrich wandering in “apathetic despair” after the premature death of Mathilde.128 By way of a ghost-girl, he meets a hermit named Sylvester, and they begin a philosophical discussion on the nature of transfiguration (personal and poetic), and there the novel breaks off.
Both a Künstlerroman and a critifiction, Heinrich von Ofterdingen is dominated by discussions of the art of “poesy,” which includes all creative writing, from poetry to fairy tales. While acknowledging the place of inspiration and imagination in a poet’s skill-set, Heinrich’s mentors emphasize the equal importance of craftsmanship and empirical knowledge. (The traveling merchants discuss business practices with Heinrich, and there’s a long digression on mining and metallurgy early on.) “I cannot sufficiently urge you laboriously and diligently to cultivate your intelligence,” Klingsohr tells him, “your natural impulse to know how everything happens and logically and sequentially hangs together. Nothing is more needful for the poet than insight into the nature of every occupation, acquaintance with the means to attain every end, and presence of mind to select the most fitting means according to time and circumstance. Enthusiasm without intelligence is useless and dangerous, and the poet will be capable of few miracles if he himself is astonished by miracles” (1.7).
Novalis performs quite a few miracles himself, such as Gravesian evocations of the noble heritage of poets, back when they were prophets and priests, and their role as historians: “There is more truth in their fairy tales than in learned chronicles” (1.5). Novalis describes what sounds like Wagnerian chromaticism: “Like the patterns of the table, the music changed ceaselessly; and peculiar and difficult as the transitions not infrequently were, still only one simple theme appeared to unite the whole” (1.9; the cast also includes Wagnerian names like Freya and Klingsohr). He offers the novel suggestion that dreams are “a defense against the regularity and routine of life, a playground where the hobbled imagination is freed and revived and where it jumbles together all the pictures of life and interrupts the constant soberness of grown-ups by means of a merry child’s play” (1.1). Especially impressive is the lengthy fifth chapter, where Heinrich and a few of the braver merchants explore a cave and discover a hermit living there, an old crusader named Friederich von Hohenzollern, who discourses on prehistory, cavemen, and Pynchonesque telluro-mysticism. He also shows Heinrich an old book, written in Provençal, that not only prefigures Heinrich’s story but functions as a metafictional version of Novalis’s Heinrich: “As far as I know,” the hermit says, “it is a novel about the wondrous fortunes of a poet, in which poesy is presented and praised in its manifold relations. The conclusion is missing in this manuscript,” he adds, as though Novalis suspected he would not finish his novel.
From the notes Novalis left behind and from Tieck’s account of what he told him, Heinrich was to have three parts, delving further into the philosophical issues that Sylvester raises. Given the abstract, sometimes mystifying nature of Novalis’s writings on the theory of the novel,129 I doubt the finished novel would have been as appealing as part 1; if Schlegel and Hölderlin wanted to elevate the novel to the realm of poetry, Novalis wanted to elevate it beyond that to mystical theology, a questionable goal given the novel’s essentially secular character. (A novel can be anything, but it’s better at some things than others.) Unlike the avant-garde Lucinde and Hyperion, Heinrich is a rearguard action, an attempt to reverse what Schiller called “the disenchantment [literally, de-divinization] of the world” following the Enlightenment, and to re-enchant it through fairy tales and bardic magic. Still, as in Schlegel’s case, it’s a shame we don’t have Novalis’s completed novel, but what we do have is superb, despite its nostalgic yearnings; the spell he casts is hard to resist. If nothing else, Heinrich von Ofterdingen should be required reading for every aspiring poet.
During the last decade of the 18th century, nobody was writing more “venturesome” novels than the Germans. Aside from their Gothic thrillers, there were further novels by veterans like Wieland and Goethe, Tieck’s game-changing transformation of Gothicism to Romanticism, and the startlingly innovative novels by young guns like Schlegel, Hölderlin, and Novalis. And I haven’t even got to the most eccentric and beloved German novelist of the 1790s, a writer Schiller described as “alien, like one who has fallen from the moon.”
I love this guy. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), who in emulation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau p
ublished his work under the name Jean Paul, began his writing career in the early 1780s with satirical squibs like Greenland Lawsuits, “Jokes in Quarto,” “The Year 1886,” Selections from the Devil’s Papers, “Apology for Adultery,” and “The Brewery of My Gastric Juice” before scoring a minor hit with his first novel, The Invisible Lodge (Die unsichtbare Loge, 1793), which was recommended for publication by none other than the author of Anton Reiser. Forget Thümmel, Nicolai, Hippel, and Wezel—what? you’ve forgotten them already? see pp. 92–97—Richter is the true German Sterne, not by way of rank imitation but from a similar desire to adapt the genre of the novel to his own idiosyncratic needs. In his erudite novels and in his nonfiction School for Aesthetics (1804), he displays his familiarity with German fiction from Fortunatus and Fischart up to his contemporaries, and he knew French fiction well, but he was primarily influenced by Sterne and other English novelists like Swift, Fielding, and Richardson. He’s probably the most cosmopolitan novelist of the 18th century.
Thomas Carlyle, one of his earliest British admirers (and translator), warns of the negative first impression Richter’s novels can make on the average reader, beginning with The Invisible Lodge:
Piercing gleams of thought do not escape us; singular truths conveyed in a form as singular; grotesque and often truly ludicrous delineations; pathetic, magnificent, far-sounding passages; effusions full of wit, knowledge, and imagination, but difficult to bring under any rubrick whatever; all the elements, in short, of a glorious intellect, but dashed together in such wild arrangement that their order seems the very ideal of confusion. The style and structure of the book appear alike incomprehensible. The narrative is every now and then suspended to make way for some “Extra-leaf,” some wild digression upon any subject but the one in hand; the language groans with indescribable metaphors and allusions to all things human and divine; flowing onward, not like a river but like an inundation, circling in complex eddies, chafing and gurgling now this way, now that, till the proper current sinks out of view amid the boundless uproar. We close the work with a mingled feeling of astonishment, oppression, and perplexity; and Richter stands before us in brilliant cloudy vagueness, a giant mass of intellect, but without form, beauty, or intelligible purpose.130
The title of his first novel promises yet another Bundesroman, but initially the “secret societies” the narrator cites are facetious ones: a group of kids gathered around a storyteller, a group of adulterers who service an aristocratic woman, even the confederacy of reviewers the author fears will condemn his novel. Only on the final pages are there hints that a secret lodge has been keeping an eye on the novel’s young protagonist, Gustav von Falkenberg. What little story there is concerns his upbringing: per his grandmother’s insistence, his first eight years are spent underground, accompanied only by his tutor—a young Moravian monk called his Genius—and a poodle. At the end of this period, he is led to believe he dies and is resurrected aboveground in “heaven,” with the sun as his visible god.131 This stupendous chapter paints the earth in paradisaical colors and outdoes all the Romantics in its wide-eyed awe of the natural world, an appreciation maintained throughout the novel. As Gustav grows up and moves to the capital city of Scheerau, we meet a few more eccentric characters: Dr. Fenk, a satirical physician who keeps life-size wax dummies in his house; Ottomar, the despairingly idealistic, illegitimate son of a prince who is buried alive and undergoes his own resurrection; Oefel, a courtier who is writing a novel about Gustav and sometimes manipulates him to make for a better story; Beata, a modest, storybook virgin with whom Gustav falls in love; and most important, Jean Paul—as he calls himself (and which I will use to distinguish the narrator from Richter the author)—once Beata’s tutor and now Gustav’s, who is writing the novel as we read it. (It’s significant that the novel begins “In my opinion . . .”: the novel is more about his opinions than Gustav’s life.) Though ostensibly about grooming young Falkenberg for the “invisible lodge” of superior beings like Fenk, Ottomar, and the Moravian Genius, the novel is mostly about Jean Paul’s struggle to write the novel (in competition with Oefel and his own hypochondriacal health scares), his struggle to stay on topic, and the reader’s struggle to keep up with him. Goethe complained that reading Richter gave him “brain cramps.”
That last struggle stems from Richter’s maximalist style, a Black Forest of long-winding sentences overgrown with fanciful imagery, convoluted metaphors, learned wit, quirky asides and digressions, scholarly footnotes, and a tendency to gush, to write “with full rapture of soul.”132 The tone modulates from expository to exultant, bantering, sarcastic (especially regarding politics and court life), whimsical, tender, pedantic, confessional, religiose, blasphemous, and occasionally smutty. (In the context of mating, the author notes “women and oarsmen always turn their back to the shore toward which they are seeking to propel themselves” [1].) The author will casually refer to a group of men and horses as “mammalia,” and drop images like “under the diving-bell of an intense idea . . . we stand panoplied against the whole outer ocean” (33). At times he writes with admirable if goofy specificity: instead of merely stating that people searched the forest for a boy after he lost his hat, Jean Paul declares: “Every toadstool in the woods was trodden flat and every woodpecker scared away in the effort to find a head for the hat” (6). But often the reader has to hold on to his own hat to follow the narrator through tortuous, sometimes torturous paths of imagery, as here after one of Oefel’s schemes for Gustav fails:
Oefel stood there dumbfounded gazing after the floating fragments of his wrecked building-plan. It is true, there was still left him this advantage from it all, that he could work the whole shipwreck into his romance, only, however, the Secretary was gone! He had also, not unreasonably, voted him [Gustav] already in advance to the Secretaryship of the Embassy; for the throne of Scheerau has a ladder leaning against it, with the lowest and the highest rungs of honor, but the steps are so near together that one can place his left foot on the lowest rung and yet reach with his right the highest—once indeed we might almost have created an upper field marshal. Secondly, in courts, as in nature, all things hang and join together, and professors might properly call it the cosmological nexus: every one is at once bearer and burden; thus the iron ruler sticks to the magnet, a little ruler to that, to that a needle, and to that steel-filings. At most only what sits upon the throne and what lies down below under it has nexus enough with the efficient company; so in the French opera only the flying gods and the shuffling beasts are made of Savoyards, all the rest of the regular company. (24)
How the author gets from a metaphorical blueprint to the cast of a French opera is mystifying, but probably follows a line of thought like this one:
Slightly, if at all, did Beata notice the approaches of the reigning actor or acting Regent. Oefel, however, saw it, and anticipated his victory over the exalted rival—who made his approaches to him in no very large snail-line, as was his custom with the Court ladies, who only in youth give away their virtue a la minutta; in old age, on the contrary, drive a larger business with it in grosso. I said just now something about a snail-line because I had in my head a conceit of this kind, that women of the world and the sun, under the appearance of leading the planets in a circle round their rays, in fact hurry them onward in a fine spiral (or snail-line) to their burning surface. (37)
This shows there’s method to those mad metaphors, and presumably there’s one in this passage from a letter by Ottomar, disappointed at life after the promising “morning land” of childhood:
But there is no other other sunny land of the morning to be found on this optical ball than that one which all our steps can neither remove nor reach. Ah, ye joys of earth, none of you can do more than satisfy the breast with sighs and the eye with water, and into the poor heart, which opens under your heaven, ye only pour one more wave of blood! And yet these two or three wretched pleasures lame us as poisonous flowers do children who play with them, in arms and limb. Only let there
be no music, that mocker of our wishes; do not, at her call, all the fibres of my heart fly asunder and stretch themselves out like so many sucking polypus’s arms and tremble with longing and seek to embrace—whom? what? . . . . . An unseen something waiting in other worlds. I often think perhaps it is, after all, nothing; perhaps, after death, all goes on just as now, and thy longings will reach forward out of one heaven toward another—and then I crush under this fantastic nonsense the strings of my harpsichord, as if I would bring a fountain out of them, as if it were not enough that the pressure of this yearning untunes and snaps the thin strings of my inner musical system. (25, author’s five-pointed ellipsis)
At times, The Invisible Lodge reads like “fantastic nonsense,” a fantasia on several themes played on the double-manual harpsichord to which Jean Paul compares his writing in the first sector. The performance is lightened by Jean Paul’s playful attitude toward the conventions of fiction. He not only calls chapters “sectors,” but after a while begins naming them after church days (Trinity, Epiphany) since he writes only on Sundays, and near the end begins calling them “joys.” The subtitles are cryptically amusing: the “Thirty-sixth, or II Advent, Section” announces “Conic Sections of the Bodies of Eminent Persons.—Birthday-Drama.—Rendezvous (or, as Campe Expresses It, ‘Make Your Appearance’) in the Looking-glass.” As Carlyle noted, there are digressions (“Extra Leafs”) on a variety of topics, dream sequences that meld into waking reality, and at one point, after Jean Paul moves in with a schoolmaster named Sebastian Wutz, he explains in a footnote that the story of Wutz’s father is told in an appendix, which he wants us to read before continuing with the main text.133 When Jean Paul takes ill, the novel dwindles to a series of one-paragraph sectors, the plot of the novel abandoned for months as he reports once a week on his various self-diagnoses (suspecting there’s a lizard in his stomach, etc.), recovering upon seeing the word heureusement (luckily) written in the snow, the sign that Dr. Fenk has arrived. Formally, The Invisible Lodge isn’t quite as eccentric as Tristram Shandy, though for sheer rhetorical fancy it gives it a run for its money, and, like Sterne (who is mentioned at one point), Richter delights in laying bare the devices of fiction, teasing and taunting his reader as he goes along. Novalis thought the novel “extraordinary,” but perhaps expresses second thoughts when his Kingsohr advices, “Only a clown makes language leap through hoops, never a poet” (18). But ringmaster Richter has no qualms about doing so and stages an impressive, Cirque du Soleil of a novel, at once weird and whimsical, which he abandoned after more than 400 pages for a bigger, even more impressive “Pantheon-Pandemonium” show.