The Novel

by Steven Moore

  93 See McKnight’s monograph on this and Wezel’s other novels. He quotes with guarded approval another critic’s contention that Wezel’s Hermann und Ulrike (1780) “is the best novel to come out of Germany in the 18th century” (254), which makes one wonder why it too has never been translated.

  94 He plays the same tricks on her—pretending to help a needy family and interrupting her mail—that Valmont plays on Madame de Tourval in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons (1782). A French translation of the wildly popular Sternheim appeared in 1776 and is considered by some critics to have been an influence on Laclos’s more famous novel.

  95 Letter of June 1774, quoted by Swales in his slim but perceptive book on Werther (88). The critical literature on Werther is enormous, but Duncan breaks it down with admirable concision in Goethe’s Werther and the Critics.

  96 Note to letter dated 16 June 1771 (and hereafter cited by date), from Rose’s translation of the original 1774 version. Virtually all current English translations are from Goethe’s revised version of 1787, but I prefer the more intense original: that’s the one that caused a big sensation. In fact, in the original version Werther argues “an author must necessarily spoil his book when he alters the story for a second edition, however much it may be improved from the artistic point of view” (15 August 1771), a passage Goethe retained for the revised edition!

  97 Schweitzer suggests Wilhelm is the editor, which makes sense: he not only received most of the letters, but is better qualified than anyone to imagine his friend’s state of mind during his final days.

  98 In 1760, a Scottish poet named James Macpherson published a collection of what he claimed were fragments by an ancient Gaelic poet named Ossian. Goethe, among others, was an early fan and translated some of them into German (quoted at length in Werther), but soon lost his taste for them. It was later revealed that Macpherson had forged this material. Although Goethe couldn’t have known that at the time, it was an inspired choice to have Werther identify with Ossian’s forlorn, if spurious, lamentations; as Goethe said in 1829, Werther praises Homer when he’s still sane, and Ossian only after he’s gone insane (paraphrasing Reiss, 35).

  99 Note the repeated use of the word “suffering”: translators argue that The Sufferings of Young Werther would be a more accurate translation of the German title, and would align it—as Werther does himself near the end—with the sufferings (the “passion”) of Christ.

  100 This is cute rather than masochistic, though it should be noted that Werther takes almost erotic delight in learning that when his servant requested Albert’s pistols for Werther’s suicide, it was Lotte who handed him the weapons.

  101 I inexplicably left Werther out of my genealogy of Christ figures in volume 1 (115). Mea culpa.

  102 Conversations with Eckermann, 2 January 1824.

  103 During a low period in his life, in love with another man’s wife, Wallace “called himself Sorrowful Werther” (Max, 147).

  104 See Schiffman’s “A Concert of Werthers” for the wide array of novels Werther inspired in the late 18th-early 19th centuries. Thomas Harrington, the protagonist of arguably the first American novel—Brown’s Power of Sympathy (1789)—leaves a copy of Werther alongside his suicide note, just as Werther did with Lessing’s play.

  105 A copy of the unfinished manuscript turned up in 1910, and is available in an English translation by John R. Russell.

  106 Book 1, chap. 17 in Blackall’s translation. He is also the author of the excellent Goethe and the Novel.

  107 Mignon broke Thomas Carlyle’s heart. In his otherwise pugnacious preface to his 1824 translation, he laments: “This mysterious child, at first neglected by the reader, gradually forced on his attention, at length overpowers him with an emotion more deep and thrilling than any poet since the days of Shakespeare has succeeded in producing. The daughter of enthusiasm, rapture, passion, and despair, she is of the earth, but not earthly. When she glides before us through the light mazes of her fairy dance, or twangs her cithern to the notes of her homesick verses, or whirls her tambourine and hurries round us like an antique Maenad, we could almost fancy her a spirit; so pure is she, so full of fervour, so disengaged from the clay of this world. And when all the fearful particulars of her story are at length laid together, and we behold in connected order the image of her hapless existence, there is, in those dim recollections, those feelings so simple, so impassioned and unspeakable, consuming the closely-shrouded, woe-struck, yet ethereal spirit of the poor creature, something which searches into the inmost recesses of the soul. It is not tears which her fate calls forth; but a feeling far too deep for tears. The very fire of heaven seems miserably quenched among the obstructions of this earth. Her little heart, so noble and so helpless, perishes before the smallest of its many beauties is unfolded; and all its loves, and thoughts, and longings, do but add another pang to death, and sink to silence utter and eternal. It is as if the gloomy porch of Dis, and his pale kingdoms, were realized and set before us, and we heard the ineffectual wail of infants reverberating from within their prison-walls forever” (xv–xvi). She inspired an opera by Ambroise Thomas later in the 19th century.

  108 Since this unusual novel didn’t appear until 1829, I decided not to discuss it and Goethe’s other 19th-century novels (Elective Affinities, Novella).

  109 Gerner lists 458 of these things published between 1792 and 1805, none of them read anymore.

  110 German refugees troop across the opening pages of Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea (1797), a novella-length narrative poem that he called an “epic,” even though it is probably better thought of as a verse-novel. To make that case, however, would entail a digression into Goethe’s concept of a modern epic—which, as Blackall points out in his Goethe and the Novel (107), applies as much to the novel as the epic—so I’ll let someone else make the case. A fine translation of Hermann and Dorothea can be found in Goethe’s Verse Plays and Epic (247–307).

  111 Page 9 in Robertson’s translation. Coincidentally an English translation by John R. Russell appeared a year earlier (Camden House, 1996), but Robertson sticks closer to the original’s typography and unconventional punctuation. A dozen years later, both translations of this astounding novel were out of print.

  112 Wary of the dangerous influence of novels like Werther, Moritz defuses it when Anton attends a stage adaptation of Werther: in the climactic suicide scene, Werther’s revolver misfires two times, so the improvising actor kills himself with a bread knife. The narrator remarks: “Hardly can any tragedy ever have come to a more comical end than this one,” but then notes: “This, however, did not cure Reiser of his ambitious fantasies, but rather it reinforced them, because he saw something so imperfect that it needed to be replaced by something perfect” (348). After reading Anton Reiser, Goethe put more aesthetic distance between himself and Werther in the revised version of his novel.

  113 Vol. 1, chap. 23. The German original was published anonymously, but the 1794 English translation was ascribed to a Professor Kramer. Sir Walter Scott admired Naubert’s work, and his historical novel Anne of Geierstein (1829) likewise features the Vehmgericht.

  114 See Syndy Conger’s essay listed in the bibliography. She also notes the influence of The Necromancer on Matthew Lewis’s Monk, Percy Shelley’s Gothic novel St. Irvyne, and (via the Schiller interpolation) on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

  115 Le Tellier, Kindred Spirits, 97.

  116 Peter Will’s clunky translation doesn’t help; another translation, by Joseph Trapp, appeared a year earlier (1796), sensibly titled The Genius, or The Mysterious Adventures of Don Carlos de Grandez, but I decided to stick with Horrid Mysteries because of the Austen angle. Rev. Will, for whom English was a second language, evidently didn’t have the benefit of an English editor either, for no one corrected the Shakespeare allusion in the author’s defense of realism: “One says very little if one compares human life with a romance; it is much more than a fairy tale, or a summer-midnight’s dream” (297).

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17 Le Tellier, Kindred Spirits, 87.

  118 Book 1, letter 12 in Robertson’s online translation, apparently the first in English. Perhaps its celebrations of lust and sensuality blocked it from being translated earlier. Tieck’s other novels from the 1790s have not been translated, so I pass over them with regret, especially “Franz Sternbald’s Wanderings” (1798), a classic portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man novel (Künstlerroman).

  119 In his radio dialog on Tieck, Schmidt’s antagonist interprets Romanticism “as the conscious attempt to find artistic expression—thematically, formally, linguistically—for the conviction that both the world and the life of the individual are unstable” (Radio Dialogs I, 151).

  120 The Novels of the German Romantics, 159, quoting Schlegel’s Literary Notebooks (see his Lucinde and the Fragments, 230). Many of Schlegel’s pronouncements took the form of brief statements published in literary journals.

  121 In one of his fragments, Schlegel issued a challenge that few writers or readers accepted until the 20th century: “If you ever write or read novels for their psychology, then it’s quite illogical and petty to shrink from even the most painstaking and thorough analysis of unnatural pleasure, horrible tortures, revolting infamy, and disgusting physical or mental impotence” (Lucinde and the Fragments, 177).

  122 Both quotations are from his Literary Notebooks, as quoted by Blackall, 28.

  123 From the “Letter about the Novel” section of his Dialogue on Poetry (1799–1800), a critifiction in which five characters meet to discuss literature. Schlegel doesn’t consider the novel a distinct genre, but rather any book that expresses a Romantic attitude, hence his punning remark, “Ein Roman ist ein romantische Buch” (The novel is a Romantic book). In the same “Letter,” Schlegel defines “Romantic” as that “which presents a sentimental theme in a fantastic form,” and by “sentimental” he means not “maudlin and lachrymose” but “that which appeals to us, where feeling prevails, and to be sure not a sensual but a spiritual feeling. The source and soul of all these emotions is love, and the spirit must hover everywhere invisibly visible in romantic poetry” (98–99).

  124 Page 66 in Firchow’s fine translation (1971), the first and only unexpurgated one in English. He adds a good selection of Schlegel’s fragmented aphorisms, his preferred form of criticism.

  125 See The Concept of Irony, 302–16, and then see Donald Barthelme’s take on this conflict in his clever story “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel” (City Life, 1970). In fact Lucinde reads like something Barthelme might have written. Unfortunately, Schlegel anticipated Kierkegaard’s dour way of thinking: he converted to Catholicism, grew old and conservative, and turned his back on free-loving Lucinde, refusing to include it in his complete works of 1823.

  126 Page 114 in Benjamin’s translation, which is considered the best in English. In Greek mythology, Hyperion was one of the Titans; Diotima takes her name from a philosopher in Plato’s Symposium.

  127 Arno Schmidt quotes this part at the end of scene 7 of his supernovel Evening Edged in Gold (1975); Schmidt was as contemptuous of his fellow Germans as Hölderlin was.

  128 Mathilde was based on the love of Novalis’s life, a 12-year-old named Sophie von Kühn, who died of consumption at the age of 15 in 1797. Almost exactly four years later, Novalis died at the age of 28 of the same disease. (Sophie is the name of an allegorical figure in Klingsohr’s fairy tale.) For a dramatization of their relationship, see Penelope Fitzgerald’s overrated novel The Blue Flower (1995).

  129 See Blackall’s Novels of the German Romantics (108–15) for an overview, and Behler (69–114) for a more thorough account (though all the quotations are in German).

  130 Pages 6–7 of Carlyle’s introduction to his translation of Army-Chaplain Schmelze (1827). Richter’s style had an enormous influence on Carlyle’s own, and in fact came to be called Carlylese by English readers, usually disparagingly.

  131 Richter probably had in mind the death and resurrection part of the Masonic initiation ceremony, but the well-read author may have known Lesuire’s novel The French Adventurer (1782), in which priests keep nubile girls underground and scam them into thinking they’ve achieved heaven when brought aboveground for guilt-free sex. See pp. 388–90 below.

  132 End of “Fourth Section” in Brooks’s heroically faithful translation, hereafter cited by “sector” (as Richter calls them). See Richter’s School for Aesthetics for a defense of his style, especially the section entitled “The Need for Learned Wit” (144–47).

  133 The appendix, “Life of the Merry Masterkin Maria Wutz in Auenthal: A Kind of Idyll,” was omitted from Brooks’s translation but can be found in the Caseys’s Jean Paul: A Reader, 83–114. It’s an amazing piece about a village schoolmaster who writes his own versions of famous books he knows only by title. Though rather twee, it’s as challenging as anything Richter wrote; at the end of one long, interrogatory sentence, the narrator remarks, “This question mark may come as a surprise to those readers who have lost track of the paragraphs,” and on the same page speaks slightingly of “the rules of the novel” (103), which, he implies, are there only to be broken.

  134 Dog-post-day 34, hereafter cited thusly.

  135 The reference may be obscure: the late novelist David Markson studied his reviews with Talmudic absorption, appreciating perceptive remarks but more often exasperated at reviewers’ errors and misassumptions. The only essay he wrote during the last 35 years of his life is entitled “Reviewers in Flat Heels: Being a Postface to Several Novels” (1990).

  136 In Alexander Ewing’s translation (note his alternative spelling of the protagonist’s name), hereafter cited by chapter. Like Brooks, he works hard to reproduce Richter’s quirky style. For an appreciation of his linguistic innovations, see Berger’s close reading of a paragraph from Siebenkäs (88–92).

  137 A frequently active volcano in Iceland (usually spelled Hekla); it’s mentioned a few times in Titan (cycles 8, 75).

  138 I will be citing the text by cycle. The final cycle is numbered 146, but Richter accidentally included two cycles numbered 43—unless that was a deliberate Sternean caprice.

  139 Mahler’s first symphony (1889) is loosely based on Titan.

  140 But not according to Schlegel; see his Lucinde and the Fragments (231–33) for a harsh view of Richter, who nevertheless “cannot justly be denied the name of a great poet.” Like most, he considers Siebenkäs to be his best novel.

  141 Richter’s conception of wit—which he once described as “the disguised priest who joins every couple” (School for Aesthetics, 123)—is the subject of an attractively written monograph by Paul Fleming, The Pleasures of Abandonment, a recent attempt to rescue Richter from oblivion.

  142 A translation of the preface can be found in the appendix to Brooks’s translation of Hesperus (2:458–61), which appeared a few years after his Titan.

  143 The Library of Congress catalogues the Clavis Fichtiana as philosophy, not fiction, and no doubt bewilders readers unaware of its provenance.

  144 Ludvig Holberg, quoted on p. xxiv of McNelis’s introduction to the Dane’s Niels Klim.

  145 I’m tempted to make the Hemingwayesque claim that all modern European fiction comes from one book by Heliodorus called An Ethiopian Story; the deeper I delve into literary history, the greater its influence appears. It is rightly included in the popular reference book 1001 Books You Must Read before You Die.

  146 Book 4, chap. 4 in Kingesmill Long’s 1625 translation, which the editors of the splendid, modern bilingual edition of Argenis reprint because it is “excellent . . . vigorous and lively.” Originally, the rare Ben Jonson was commissioned to translate the novel, but he lost his manuscript in a fire in 1623.

  147 The Greek word utopia (ou + topos) usually has a positive connotation—hence the later coinage of dystopia for negative places—yet the word simply means “no (such) place.” A positive utopia would be an eutopia.

  148 For plot summaries of both, see Begley’s appendix to his translati
on of Gott’s Nova Solyma, 2:365–66, 371.

  149 “The Occasion of This Travel,” p. 17 in Wands’s amply annotated edition, hereafter cited by book/chapter.

  150 Page 153 in Thompson’s translation; he says Andreae’s Latin is rather fancy at times, but it doesn’t come through in the translation.

  151 Page 155 in Bruce’s Three Early Modern Utopias, where New Atlantis occupies pp. 146–86. The “old” Atlantis, according to Bacon, is ancient America, whose civilization was wiped out in a divinely ordained flood. He apparently hoped the recently discovered America would come to resemble Bensalem.

  152 Page 16 in Rosen’s annotated translation, hereafter cited by page. This portion of Kepler’s Dream first appeared in English translation in a sci-fi anthology called Beyond Time and Space, edited by August Derleth (NY: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1950).

  153 As I noted in my previous volume, there are some older prototypes, but Kepler was the first to put the science in science fiction.

  154 Page 174 in Blair’s translation (1671), for some reason retitled The Vision of Theodorus Verax—the pseudonym of Clement Walker (d. 1651), an English politician critical of the Long Parliament. Because of the misleading title and the absence of any indication of the book’s origin, it wasn’t until 1967 that a scholar (Charles M. Mish) identified this as a slightly abridged translation of Puteanus’s Comus. For earlier examples of the somnia genre, see the discussions in chap. 3 of my previous volume of Boccaccio’s Corbaccio, Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and Yagel’s Valley of Vision.

  155 See Ralph Singleton’s essay in the bibliography for the relationship between the two works.

  156 Again, see Begley for a summary and evaluation (2:368–71); he makes it sound quite interesting.

  157 Begley’s 1902 translation will be cited by book/chapter. Much of his introduction and extensive commentary argues that the novel, published anonymously, was written by John Milton. It wasn’t until 1910 that Gott’s authorship was established. Patrick devotes a long footnote to detailing the weaknesses of Begley’s Miltonic translation (48), which are more stylistic than substantive.