by Steven Moore
Like Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, much of Siebenkäs reads like a mid-19th-century novel—something by George Meredith, say—not a late-18th-century one, which is probably why it wasn’t as popular as Hesperus. (Coincidentally, both Goethe and Richter gave the name Natalie to their protagonists’ ideal love.) Timothy Casey speculates its bourgeois realism is what made it “one of his least acceptable works to his contemporaries, with dubious morality regarding marriage and, still worse, money” (Jean Paul: A Reader, 19). Middling-class readers probably took exception to being mocked in the persons of small-minded Lenette and her second husband, and probably had as much trouble following the satirical/philosophical conversations of Siebenkäs and the eccentric Leibgeber as Lenette did. This “genuine thorn-piece,” as the subtitle dubs it, raised too many prickly questions about matters readers did not expect to encounter in a novel at that time. Modern readers, more accustomed to being pricked than coddled by novels, would undoubtedly join me in finding it to be Richter’s most stimulating fiction, the most deserving of a new edition. In Thomas Bernhard’s last novel, Extinction (1986), Siebenkäs is one of the few German novels the protagonist gives to his Italian pupil to study, regarding it as a revolutionary work that will “alienat[e] him from his parents and their ideas” as it did from his own (104).
In one of the mid-book prefaces in Siebenkäs (dated 5 June 1796), archly pretending that novel was written by someone else, Jean Paul acknowledges its limited scope:
Happy as the author would have been to have thundered, stormed, and poured in it, there was of course no room in a parish advocate’s lodgings for Rhine cataracts, thunderstorms, tropical hurricanes (of tropes) or waterspouts, and he has had to reserve his more terrific tornadoes for a future work. I have his permission to mention the name of this future work; it is the Titan. In this work he means to be an absolute Hecla137 and shatter the ice of his country (and himself into the bargain) to pieces; like the volcanoes in Iceland, he will spout up a column of boiling water four feet in diameter to a height of eighty-nine or ninety feet in the air, and that at such a temperature that when this wet fire pillar falls down again and flows into the book shops, it will still be warm enough to boil eggs or their mother soft.
Titan (1800–3) is Richter’s longest, most ambitious novel. He worked on it throughout the 1790s, during and between his other novels, and intended it to be not only his last novel of the 18th century but his most titanic effort (one meaning of the title), “a book as large as the world, which would be the world itself” (11). The main text is 1,043 pages long in Charles T. Brooks’s translation (“almost flawless” in one critic’s estimation [Berger, 164]), and consists of 35 long chapters called “jubilees” subdivided into 147 subsections called “cycles.”138 Typically, the “Introductory Programme to Titan” appears not upfront but at the end of cycle 9 (during which we learn that Jean Paul, once again, is working up his “biography” from materials supplied to him from someone else). The digressions and arabesques that usually adorn a Richter novel were published separately in the two-volume Comic Appendix to Titan (1800–1801), which itself had an appendix, the Clavis Fichtiana (1800), written by one of the characters in Titan. Jean Paul even suggests reviews of the novel should be considered comic appendices to Titan!
Richter explores the problematic nature of ambition and identity among several “titanic” characters “longing for heights” (12): high hopes, heightened emotions, and high stations. (Images of giganticism dominate the novel.) Twenty years before Titan begins, an ambitious Spaniard named Gaspard de Cesara, thwarted in his ambition to marry into German nobility, agreed to a proposal by the princess of Hohenfliess to raise her son Albano as though he were his own, thereby protecting him from the machinations of the rival principality of Haarhaar. Gaspard’s plan is to have Albano eventually marry his own daughter Linda and thereby achieve his royal ambition. The bulk of the novel takes place after Albano’s 21st birthday in the early 1790s: now a man, he is uncertain what to do with his own titanic ambitions, and toys with the idea of going off to fight in the French Revolution. He is attached to the court of Hohenfliess without knowing he is the heir to the throne (currently occupied by his ailing older brother Luigi) and is surrounded by other larger-than-life characters: Charles Roquairol, a “suicidal madcap” who at age 13 had played Werther in a dramatic adaption of Goethe’s novel and shot himself on stage (he survived, but will successfully stage a similar suicide later in the novel); Albano’s two tutors, an architect named Dian and an antic, “electric-sparkling” character named Schoppe; and a saintly girl named Liana, daughter of the prime minister and Roquairol’s sister. Albano falls in love with her, and she reciprocates until she learns his true identity and decides she’s not good enough for a future prince. She conveniently dies, after which Albano travels to Italy and reencounters Linda—a proud, stately woman—and falls in love with her. (He learns she’s not his real sister, but not the rest of the secret of his birth.) Jealous of them both after they return to Germany, Roquairol seduces Linda by impersonating Albano one night, then kills himself the following night during a play he wrote that dramatizes the seduction. (The author compares it to the play within Hamlet, beating commentators to the punch.) For all her independence, Linda is such a slave to decorum that she now considers herself Roquairol’s “widow” and withdraws from the scene, leaving it open for the third and final girl Albano falls for, a dead ringer for Liana named Idione (of the royal family of Haarhaar), who is just as saintly as her nunnish predecessor but more practical. At the death of Prince Luigi at the end of the novel, Albano learns of his parentage, and decides that he will focus his previously vague ambitions on becoming a model prince, with Idione as his queen.
Or something like that. It’s difficult to untangle the story—a dozen minor characters complicate things further—because few characters are who they think they are, and/or who they pretend to be, a state of confusion the reader shares much of the time. Jean Paul underscores the instability of identity with false relationships, faux twins, deceptive wax images and portraits, impersonators and ventriloquists, distorting mirrors, phony apparitions, and doppelgängers. Some of these impersonations are staged to keep Albano in the dark—there are supernatural hoaxes straight out of the horror novels of the time—but other instances of identity confusion seem to have philosophical implications. In the most extreme case, that of Albano’s sardonic friend Schoppe, there’s a dramatization of the philosopher Johann Fichte’s theory of the ego whereby Schoppe develops schizophrenia and (apparently) generates his own double: Siebenkäs from Richter’s last novel, who takes Schoppe’s place as Albano’s tutor after he dies. (It is Schoppe/Siebenkäs who writes the Clavis Fichtiana [Key to Fichte], a satire on Fichte’s philosophy and German idealism in general.) Over the course of the novel, Schoppe evolves from a witty Mercutio figure to a frantic Hamlet, his words wild and whirling; he is a great admirer of Swift, whom he follows into madness. Like the other principals, he is a “titan”: “The earth-ball, and all the earthly stuff out of which the fleeting worlds are formed, was indeed far too small and light for thee,” the narrator eulogizes. “For thou soughtest behind, beneath, and beyond life, something higher than life” (139). The Faust theme is evoked here, as well as Voltaire’s recommendation that it may be better just to cultivate one’s garden, which is in a sense what Albano decides at the end.
Like the Titans of Greek mythology, to whom Jean Paul often refers, his principal characters suffer from overly enthusiastic, sometimes self-destructive energies, an unfocused passion for greatness, a yearning for ideals, a Faustian desire to exceed the boundaries of knowledge—unrealistic ideas that Jean Paul blames on other authors: “When Charles [Roquairol] conjured before him tragic storm-clouds from Shakespeare, Goethe, Klinger, Schiller, and life saw itself colossally represented in the poetic magnifying mirror, then did all the sleeping giants of his inner world rise up” (54). His female characters too often have their noses in a hymnal or a romance,
giving them similar unrealistic notions. All of Richter’s titans have difficulty reconciling idealism and imagination with reality; such concepts are fine in works of art (and necessary to produce works of art), but can be dangerous in real life. Later, Roquairol gives Albano advice that doubles as Jean Paul’s judgment on titanic characters (and recalls Wieland’s criticism of enthusiasts):
only lift thy head higher out of the hot waves of the feelings, then wilt thou no longer lose thyself in them, but let them billow on alone. There is a cold, daring spirit in man, which nothing touches at all—not even virtue; for it alone chooses that, and is its creator, not its creature. I once experienced at sea a storm, in which the whole element furiously and jaggedly and foamingly lashed itself into commotion, and flung its waters pell-mell through each other, while overhead the sun looked on in silence;—so be thou! The heart is the storm; self is the heaven. (88)
For a while Albano continues to yearn for big actions, but by the end of the novel he achieves something of the solar equanimity his hotheaded friend failed to find. For this reason, Richter told a friend the title of the novel really should be Anti-Titan.
Compounding the reader’s difficulty with the novel is Jean Paul’s highly figurative language, so metaphoric at times that one is left with only a vague sense of what is happening. There’s much to praise: the style is suitably grandiose, the nature descriptions are stupendous, and there is careful use of musical imagery in his symphonic prose.139 (Albano plays the harpsichord, Liana the glass harmonica, and bold Linda is associated with the trumpet.) Titan often reads like Hölderlin’s Hyperion and seems to answer Schlegel’s call for poetic prose.140 But too often the writing is bloated and blustery, reaching too often for the sublime, more icing than cake. Many of the allusions are obscure, much of the wit is ponderous.141 The novel is quite sentimental at times, ickily so when dealing with religiose maidens like Liana and Idione, and I suspect Richter wrote the main novel for his female readers and saved the more outrageous, satirical stuff for the Comic Appendix, which seems aimed at male readers. About these I can’t say much, for Brooks did not include them in his translation and only a few selections have been translated into English (in the Caseys’s Jean Paul: A Reader, 210–35). Conceptually, a separately published appendix to the novel is intriguing. The first part is a fictitious magazine with 31 essays by characters from Richter’s previous novels (Victor, Dr. Fenk, Siebenkäs) along with many by Jean Paul, and concludes with the preface to Titan.142 The second part of the Comic Appendix, Blackall explains, consists of
“Des Luftschiffers Giannozzo Seebuch” [Giannozzo the Aeronaut’s Seabook (i.e., Logbook)]. This travelogue by a balloonist who levitates above the earth because of his distaste for it is the diary of an idealist who scorns the vanity, hypocrisy, injustice, and folly of the world, exulting in his lonely superiority, only to find one day that he cannot descend, as he has regularly done, and crashing to death in the Swiss mountains. It is “comic” only because of the series of satires that it contains. It is an obverse to the story of Albano, with which it forms a sort of double-novel, a typically romantic form in that each reflects on the other. (The Novels of the German Romantics, 86–87)
And the appendix to this Appendix, as stated earlier, is Schoppe/Siebenkäs’s comic critique of Fichte’s philosophy, which in the novel has driven him mad (see cycle 139).143 Thus the instability of identity that many of Titan’s characters experience is formally mirrored by the relationship between the novel proper and its appendices: is Titan a sentimental education or a philosophical satire? Perhaps Richter couldn’t decide between writing a Tristram Shandy filled with comic interpolations (as in Siebenkäs) or a Wilhelm Meister that would keep the focus on the development of his protagonist, and thus schizophrenically divided his novel in two. Either way, it further complicates this ambitious work.
Indeed, Titan is the most ambitious German novel of the 18th century, but it is not Richter’s most compelling one. It repeats too many character types and situations from his first two novels: Albano is cut from the same noble cloth as Gustav and Victor; the angelic maidens recall Beata and Clotilda; and Jean Paul’s negative view of court life remains unchanged. As in the earlier novels, there is an admirable hermit, a symbolic death-and-resurrection scene, and near-homoerotic expressions of friendship between young men. If this is the first Richter novel you read, it might be more appealing, but if read on the heels of his others, it’s more of the same. (I’m probably suffering from Richter-fatigue: I love his approach to fiction—Heil Richter!—but marching through 3,000 pages of it nonstop is inadvisable.) The author sensed he was asking a lot of his readers: although he cheerfully invites us to “dance along together into the book—into this free ball of the world—I first as leader in the dance, and then the readers as hop-dancers after me” (9), he’s hard to follow. Soon we feel like Albano: “This noble youth trembled at the complicated plot” (52). “But here the history moves in veils!” (80), as it often does due to Jean Paul’s imaginative but often obfuscatory prose, and ultimately the novel resembles Gaspard’s travel account, “which seemed uncommonly acute, fantastical, learned, incredible, and oft really unintelligible” (106). If this is Richter’s metafictional evaluation of Titan, most of his critics agree.
Richter continued to write a few more idiosyncratic novels—one of them, Army Chaplain Schmelzle’s Journey to Flaetz (1809), features randomly numbered footnotes that have no apparent relation to the main text—but he peaked with Titan, which, for all its shortcomings, represents the pinnacle of progress German novelists had reached by the end of the 18th century: for roughly the first two-thirds of the century, the French and English dominated the genre, but during the last third, no one in the world produced a more impressive body of fiction than the Germans.
LATIN FICTION
Even though the novel is almost by definition a vernacular genre, there were those in the early modern period who decided to write not in their native tongues but in the lingua franca of the educated classes: what is now called Neo-Latin. Since the only two extant Latin novels from Roman times—Petronius’s Satyricon (c. 60) and Apuleius’s Golden Ass (c. 160)—were erudite satires, those of a satirical bent felt it was appropriate to write in Latin, especially with more recent examples such as Alberti’s Momus (1450), Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (1508), and More’s Utopia (1516) on their bookshelves. A few fiction writers chose Latin because they didn’t want to attract too much attention, especially those producing heretical or pornographic works, or because they felt their writings were too subtle for “the less instructed portion of the community,” as one of them put it.144 Ironically, some chose Latin in a bid for permanence and universality by using a language that had been in use for over 2,000 years and familiar to almost every well-educated person in the western hemisphere, unaware that very choice would lead them not to Parnassus but to oblivion.
For example, had Scotsman John Barclay (1582–1621) written in English instead of Latin, he would probably be regarded as one of the most important English novelists of the 17th century, and his two novels possibly available today as Penguin Classics instead of as prohibitively expensive scholarly editions published in Holland. His first novel, written in his early twenties, acknowledges its model in its title: Euphormio’s Satyricon (Euphormionis Lusinini Satyricon, 1605–7). Like Petronius’s novel, it is a satire of contemporary society, though Barclay complicates his Satyricon by adding a layer of allegory. The first-person story of a young man who leaves his utopian country of Lusinia to see the world, only to be fleeced by sharpers and lawyers, made a slave, recruited by religious leaders, and outraged at the corruption he sees in such places as Ilium, Alexandria, and Thebes, seems to be taking place during the classical era. (If taken literally, one reference would set the novel in the late 2nd century bce, while another would place it near the end of the 1st century ce.) However, Barclay’s earliest readers easily saw through this veil and recognized his satirical targets as the Jesuits of French Lor
raine (where Barclay was educated), various kings and aristocrats at the courts of Europe, the current pope, and the Puritans of “Scolimorrhodia” (Scotland + England). Using allegory to defamiliarize these familiar figures and current events, Barclay revealed them in a new, unflattering light. Some early critics were quick to supply a “key” to the novel, making Euphormio’s Satyricon the first deliberate roman à clef in literature.