by Steven Moore
In Hesperus, or 45 Dog-Post-Days (Hesperus, oder 45 Hundsposttage, 1795), we learn that Jean Paul has left Scheerau for an island in the Indian Ocean, where one day a Pomeranian dog swims ashore with a gourd around his neck containing family documents and a request from a man named Knef (i.e., Dr. Fenk from the first novel). Impressed by The Invisible Lodge, Knef wants Jean Paul to write a similar novel about a group whose activities he will regularly post to the author by way of the dog Spitz. “Anything nonsensical I seldom decline,” Jean Paul gamely replies via dog-mail, and accepts the project as long as he can expand on the material with his own satirical observations. Just as the chapters in The Invisible Lodge were written only on Sundays, the chapters in Hesperus are written only on dog-post-days when the Pomeranian brings the latest details; on days when the mail is late, the author indulges in digressions and arabesques. A sillier metaphor for the process by which a novelist converts life into fiction is hard to imagine, but the results are impressive. Hesperus was Germany’s best-selling literary novel of 1795, outselling both Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and Tieck’s William Lovell published the same year.
After an eccentric preface, in which the author comments on his notes for the preface (discarding four of the seven requests he intended to make of the reader), Jean Paul introduces a set of characters who are not who they think they are. Victor, the 26-year-old protagonist and court physician to a minor German prince named January, is under the impression he is the son of the English advisor to the prince, Lord Horion, though he is really the son of the court chaplain, a jolly character named Eymann, whose “son” Flamin is actually one of several unknown sons of Prince January, all of whom Horion has kidnapped with republican plans to overthrow the prince. (The novel is set in 1793 amidst the upheavals in next-door France.) Victor and Flamin are the best of friends, but become rivals after falling for the same young woman, a melancholy aristocrat named Clotilda, who is actually Flamin’s unknown sister. All this is upstaged by the primary subject of the novel, namely Victor’s path of self-discovery, aided by his and Clotilda’s mutual teacher (rather, spiritual advisor), an Indian-trained mystic named Emanuel. Victor’s moodswings between rapture and sorrow, Clotilda’s melancholy and devotion, and Emanuel’s visions of eternity are the themes of Jean Paul’s titanic symphony of rhetoric: 950 pages of highly figurative language, bizarre metaphors, bookish diction, obscure allusions, satirical digressions, theological speculations, worldly aphorisms, and metafictional flourishes (there are several references to The Invisible Lodge, which Victor is reading, and the narrator is kidnapped and becomes part of the plot in the final chapter). In American Charles T. Brooks’s 19th-century translation, Hesperus reads as though Whitman and Emerson had decided to collaborate on a novel about relationships, democracy, and transcendence, turning it in the process into a metaphor-making contest.
The shadowy plot is swelled by emotional scenes of operatic passion: tearful farewells, tearful reunions—this is what the Japanese would call a very “wet” novel; Clotilda in particular is rarely seen without her cheeks bedewed with tears—declarations of friendship, noble renunciations, ecstatic descriptions of nature, startling revelations, and intimations of immortality. Here, for example, is the orgasmic description of the rhapsody-in-the-rain moment Victor and Clotilda acknowledge their love for each other:
—Lo, then was the warm cloud emptied into the garden as if it were a whole river of Paradise and on the streams angels playfully floated down, . . . and when bliss could no longer weep and love could no more stammer, and when the birds screamed for joy, and the nightingale warbled through the rains, and when the heavens, weeping for joy, fell with cloud-arms on the earth, aye, then two inspired souls met trembling and rushed breathless on each other with quivering lips and cheek pressed to cheek in glowing, trembling ecstasy,—then at last gushed forth, like life-blood out of the swollen heart, great tears of bliss out of the loving eyes over into the loved ones.—The heart measured the eternity of its heaven with great throbs heavy with bliss,—the whole visible universe, the sun itself had sunk away, and only two souls throbbed against each other alone in the emptied, glimmering immensity, dazzled with the glistening of tears and the splendor of sunshine, stunned with the roar of the heavens and the echo of Philomel, and sustained by God in dying of rapture.134
And that’s a fairly typical passage, not an atypical patch of purple prose. As in The Invisible Lodge, there is a false resurrection scene in which Emanuel believes he has died and gone to heaven, only to find himself praising rapturously the wonders of this world, which Jean Paul wants us to see with eyes anew. The author hits these emotional hot spots regularly, which tends to make reading Hesperus a heavy-going, overly rich experience, like subsisting for a week on nothing but strudel.
Two things save the novel from sentimental overload. First, there is the endless stream of imaginative, sometimes outlandish imagery and erudite asides: after a 23-year-old dies giving birth, “the thin, tender twig broke down under the ripe fruit” (2); as the sun sets, “the sun went, softly as a Penn, toward America” (13); both the author and Victor are sometimes attacked “by the vampires of midnight melancholy” (16); Victor compares a powerful politician, “e.g. Pitt—as a Swiss glacier, on which the clouds and dew that nourish it freeze overhead, which oppresses the low places and, in its alternation between melting and congealing, sends out great torrents below, and out of whose clefts corpses are drifted” (17); the pope is “the spiritual washing-machine of whole continents, and can clean souls in bundles in the year of jubilee” (18); Victor succumbs to “the sorrow, which like a rattlesnake, had watched with distended jaws him and his charmed and writhing approaches, now seized and swallowed him and crushed him to pieces” (25); “This oath which escaped him was magnificent marshmallow-paste and soft ice-cream for the heated court-chaplain” (37); “The speech of his acquaintances, like that of the Chinese, is monosyllabic” (44); contemplating suicide, Victor asks why he should “hold an oar any longer in the slave-ship of life” (44). Unable to hold his ink, Jean Paul relieves himself of every metaphor that occurs to him: reluctant to leave pleasant village life, Victor “was going to be cast out of this softly straying gondola into the slave-ship of the Court,—out of the milk-house of the Parsonage into the princely arsenic-house,—out of the kindergarten of household love into the ice-field of court love” (16). Jean Paul’s prose approaches the density of poetry with its high concentration of figurative writing, recalling both the elaborate conceits of 17th-century metaphysical verse and the nature imagery in early Romantic poetry. (I’m tempted to quote side-by-side Wordsworth’s 1798 poem “A Night-Piece” and a passage from dog-post-day 31 that begins, “But at last the outspread night-piece covered over his hot fever-images,” for the resemblances are remarkable.)
The second thing that offers some relief from the emotional excesses of the novel is the irrepressible narrator. Jean Paul is everywhere in the novel, prefacing each chapter with remarks on his mood, interrupting the narrative with off-topic, “extra-leaf” digressions on a variety of matters, complaining about the narrative materials the dog brings him, addressing the reader to confound expectations, flaunting the fictitiousness of his “biography” (as he calls the novel), launching preemptive strikes against reviewers (with whom he has a Marksonian obsession135), even joining the cast of characters near the end, all so that the reader never forgets that Hesperus is Jean Paul’s imaginative take on certain events, not a reliable account of them. He agrees to tell a story, but in a “New Concordate with the Reader” inserted early on, he informs us he also plans to “let off the motliest fireworks of wit, yes, [so] that chains of philosophical conclusions should hang down in skeins out of my mouth like ribbons from a juggler’s” (6). Jean Paul compared The Invisible Lodge to playing a harpsichord; here, he complains that each new character he must introduce “is a new organ-stop drawn out, which I have to take into my performance” (8), a grander instrument offering a greater number of voices and timb
res. (Better yet is Jean Paul’s later comparison of himself to “Maelzel’s great Panharmonicon” [36, 4th preface], a prototype of the synthesizer.) It’s quite a performance, offering fireworks and ribbons for the intelligentsia, sentiments and ideals for general readers, and despite (or because of) its eccentricity, Hesperus made Richter a star.
Before it appeared, Richter wrote a shorter novel entitled Life of Quintus Fixlein (1796); if Hesperus recalls The Invisible Lodge in many respects, Quintus Fixlein recalls the “idyll” about schoolmaster Wutz appended to the Lodge. Set between 1791 and 1794, the novel recounts the accidental promotion of a village schoolmaster to pastor of his hometown and his marriage to an old sweetheart—yet another sorrowful virgin. (“Quintus” is the title of a fifth-grade teacher, not a personal name.) Jean Paul attends Fixlein’s investiture, befriends him, and with his permission writes his biography based on memorabilia kept in Fixlein’s filing cabinets. (The 15 chapters are called “filing cabinets,” or “letter-boxes” in Carlyle’s old translation, from which I’ll be quoting.) There’s some dramatic tension as Fixlein worries he’ll die at age 32–many of Richter’s characters, and Richter himself, believe they’ll die at a certain time–but otherwise the novel is a quaintly charming idyll set in a Bavarian village: comfort food, no doubt, for its first readers during a decade of political chaos. If The Invisible Lodge is a harpsichord and Hesperus a church organ, Quintus Fixlein is a soothing Æolian harp in a parsonage window.
Aside from a few digressions and footnotes, it is more conventional than Richter’s previous novels, though the style remains the same. Here’s Jean Paul’s legalistic account of a schoolboy prank:
The Quintus related, perhaps with a too pleasurable enjoyment of the recollection, how one of this famishing coro [chorus] invented means of appropriating the Professor’s hens as just tribute, or subsidies. He said (he was a Jurist) they must once for all borrow a legal fiction from the Feudal code and look on the Professor as the soccage tenant, to whom the usufruct of the hen-yard and hen-house belonged, but on themselves as the feudal superiors of the same, to whom accordingly the vassal was bound to pay his feudal dues. And now that the Fiction might follow Nature, continued he—fictio sequitur naturam—it behooved them to lay hold of said Yule-hens by direct personal distraint. But into the courtyard there was no getting. The feudalist therefore prepared a fishing-line, stuck a bread-pill on the hook, and lowered his fishing-tackle, anglerwise, down into the court. In a few seconds the barb stuck in a hen’s throat, and the hen now communicating with its feudal superior, could silently, like ships by Archimedes, be heaved aloft to the hungry air-fishing society, where, according to circumstances, the proper feudal name and title of possession failed not to be awaiting her: for the updrawn fowls were now denominated Christmas-fowls, now Forest-hens, Bailiff-hens, Pentecost and Summer-hens. “I begin,” said the angling lord of the manor, “with taking Rutcher-dues, for so we call the triple and quintuple of the original quit-rent when the vassal, as is the case here, has long neglected payment.” The Professor, like any other prince, observed with sorrow the decreasing population of his hen-yard, for his subjects, like the Hebrews, were dying by enumeration. At last he had the happiness, while reading his lecture—he was just come to the subject of Forest Salt and Coin Regalities—to descry through the window of his auditorium a quit-rent hen suspended, like Ignatius Loyola in prayer or Juno in her punishment, in middle air: he followed the incomprehensible direct ascension of the aeronautic animal, and at last descried at the upper window the attracting artist, the animal-magnetiser, who had drawn his lot for dinner from the hen-yard below. Contrary to all expectations, he terminated this fowling sport sooner than his Lecture on Regalities. (First Letter-Box)
Tom Sawyer it ain’t. For the hanging of a new church bell, Jean Paul attempts to restrain his verbosity and adopt “that simple historical style of the Ancients,” but after two pages he exclaims, “By heaven! the unadorned style is here a thing beyond my power,” and immediately unfurls longer sentences, punctuated by dashes, and raisined with adjectives, poetic flourishes, and words like “metamorphotic” (Twelfth Letter-Box). As in all of Richter’s novels, the teller makes himself more important than the tale, and Quintus Fixlein offers another metafictional example of Richter’s treatment of the novel as a performance space.
Richter brought back all the bells and whistles for his next novel, beginning with its eccentric title: Flower-, Fruit-, and Thorn-Pieces; or, The Married Life, Death, and Wedding of the Advocate of the Poor, Firmian Siebenkäs (A Genuine Thorn-Piece) (Blumen- Frucht- und Dornenstücke; oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten F. St. Siebenkäs, 1796–97). A glance at its 5-page table of contents promises Richter’s most Sternean novel yet (indeed, a character is reading Tristram Shandy in one chapter): after a preface (more a frame tale), the 4-book novel is divided into 25 chapters (thus called, for once), appendices to chapters, further prefaces clumped together (including an all-purpose one offered to other authors), two “flower-pieces” (dream sequences), and a “fruit-piece” (an essayistic letter by Victor from Hesperus). Not noted on the contents pages are other “extra-leaflets” and digressions scattered throughout the 600-page novel.
Nevertheless, Siebenkäs is fairly straightforward, in style as well as content. It features a small-town lawyer and part-time author who marries a simple Lutheran lass named Lenette, then almost immediately realizes he made a mistake. Firmian Siebenkäs (his surname means “Seven Cheeses”—no clue why) is highly educated, unconventional, and scornful of public opinion, while she’s just the opposite. Working out of his garret while Lenette obsesses over household matters, they drive each other crazy in countless little ways; this is not only one of the earliest novels in literary history to depict married life, but one of the first to focus on the little things: the pouting silences, the petty power plays, the mutual misunderstandings, the offenses taken when none were intended—all conveyed with kitchen-sink realism and psychological acumen. Poverty exacerbates the tension, partly the result of an inheritance that Siebenkäs lost due to a technicality exploited by his evil guardian. After a year of this, feeling sorrier for Lenette than for himself, Siebenkäs decides to end it all by faking his death, a scheme arranged by Heinrich Leibgeber, his close friend and doppelgänger (a term coined by Richter), who has arranged for Siebenkäs to take over his own life—they look almost identical—and who has introduced him to an intelligent woman who is better suited to Siebenkäs than Lenette was. (Her name is Natalie; she’s cut from the same noble cloth as Beata and Clotilda, and falls for Siebenkäs rather quickly.) In yet another example of the false death/resurrection topos Richter loved, Siebenkäs “dies” to his old life—a blackly humorous scene—and starts a new one, as does Lenette after she marries a more suitable (i.e., conventional) man. Reluctant to propose to Natalie in case she should discover he is still technically married, miserable Siebenkäs is tempted to end his life for real until he returns to his hometown and learns that Lenette has died in childbirth, discovers Natalie there weeping over Siebenkäs’s grave, then reveals himself and spills the whole story. Like an old-fashioned Hollywood ending—one can almost hear an orchestra rising behind them—Siebenkäs and Natalie declare their undying love for each other.
Siebenkäs may be Richter’s most accessible, most captivating novel for several reasons. It deals with more mundane matters than his earlier, metaphysical ones—scenes from a marriage, encounters with the neighbors, money problems, legal hassles, an exciting shooting match—and dramatizes the common tragedy of allowing petty squabbles to obscure one’s appreciation for others until they’re gone, played out during the novel’s many death scenes, real and faked. Too, Richter reins in his flamboyant style somewhat, cutting back on the gush and complex metaphors without sacrificing his distinctive style. There is careful use of insect imagery throughout, beginning on the second page of chapter 1 with the fanciful statement “Siebenkæs’s butterfly-proboscis, however, found plenty of open h
oney cells in every blue thistle-blossom of his fate,” and concluding in the final chapter as Natalie sets “a mourning-cloak butterfly (disabled by the night dew) down upon her lap.”136 The reader continues to be blindsided by unexpected tropes and witty phrases—of a dandy, “everything about him salted the women of the house into Lottish salt-pillars” (3)—and Jean Paul’s images are scientifically au courant: he is undoubtedly the first (and perhaps last) to compare an angry woman’s eyes to “Volta’s electric condensers” (17). He also seems to have predicted global warming, commenting sarcastically, “Nowadays, when forests are burned to charcoal faster than they grow again, the only thing to be done is to warm the climate a good deal and turn it into a great brooding-oven, kiln, and field-oven, so as to save the trouble, and obviate the necessity, of having stoves in the houses” (20, his italics).
But Richter gives full rein to his fancy in the two “flower-pieces” in the middle of the novel, which originally came at the beginning but were moved in the revised edition of 1817–18. In the first dream, “The Dead Christ Proclaims There Is No God”—it’s difficult to imagine any novelist before Dostoevsky daring to include such an interlude in a novel—Jesus describes the universe without a heavenly father: “The whole spiritual universe is shattered and shivered by the hand of Atheism into innumerable glittering quicksilver globules of individual personalities, running hither and thither at random, coalescing and parting asunder without unity, coherence, or consistency.” Reeling from this nihilistic vision of eternity, the dreamer then offers “A Dream within a Dream,” in which a loveless universe without a father is filled by the universal love of the goddess Mary—both visions affirming the psychological bases of gods and goddesses in idealized parental figures. (As wise Natalie says on the final page of the novel, “eternity is here on earth.”) It’s hard to say whether the “I” who narrates these dreams is Siebenkäs or Jean Paul, who, as usual, is both the author and a participant in the work. The dreams may be Siebenkäs’s rebuttal to Lenette’s suspicion that he is an atheist, which is not true (a nonconformist yes, but not an atheist); or they may be two more chapters in the book he is writing, Selections from the Devil’s Papers—the same book Richter published pseudonymously in 1789. (The novel is set between June 1785 and August 1787.) If the latter, it would be one more metafictional element in the novel, for as in his earlier works, Jean Paul is very much present in the novel, commenting on its progress, never letting the reader forget this is a fiction (that is, a biography, based on materials supplied by Siebenkäs himself), even touting his work in progress, Titan.