Is that famous statement really a definition of a literary genre? For it does not look like one. It would be particularly strange for Goethe to telescope a literary definition in this way since all his life, certainly since the first reviews of his Werther, he had defended literature against the attacks of moralizing critics by arguing that literature was art, and art was not to be confused with the people, things or actions that it represented. In he decided to omit the article — for a reason, he said, but he never revealed what it was p.
Space does not permit me to speculate further here. Goethe, Novelle 13 Goethe is plainly talking about the difference between the original and later or derived senses of a word. He is not in the first instance setting out to define a genre but telling Eckermann what a word — the word Novelle — means. Now plainly this exercise in etymology is part of a discussion about literary forms.
To sum up my conclusions in order of probability: Enough of the title: The story starts in the mists of the early morning. It is autumn, probably Michaelmas, in the s in the capital of a small, unnamed German principality lying, like one of the Thuringian duchies, between forested mountains and populous plains. One of the main markets of the year, virtually a fair, is in progress, goods from all quarters are being exchanged, and to entertain the many important guests who have arrived the ruling prince has at last yielded to the urgings of his master of hounds and agreed to take them out hunting.
The young wife, whom the prince has only recently married — hence perhaps his reluctance to go — has to be left behind in the residence in the care of his uncle Prince Friedrich and the handsome young courtier Honorio the name suggests the Goethe, Novelle 15 combination of a true heart with a certain romantic Mediterranean dash. Abandoned for years, it is shown in these drawings as gradually reverting to forest in a titanic but immensely slow struggle between the remnants of human artifice and the ever-renewed and ever-growing powers of nature.
Within a ring of outer stone walls lies the keep and within that, overshadowed by the massive trees which have taken root in the ruins, a circular courtyard to which access has only recently been gained by the excavation of a secret passage. The princess, who has already trained a telescope on this object of her curiosity, is fired by the desire to see the reality of which Uncle Friedrich has shown her the image: Friedrich gives way but again has to caution her, this time against her chosen route to the castle: Friedrich has a claustrophobic aversion to such places, being haunted by his memory of a narrow escape from a hotel in a distant city when the market caught fire during the night.
But the princess has her way again and, accompanied by Friedrich and Honorio, she rides down into the town. This latter point is impressed on the princess by a menagerie of tropical animals surrounded by large, crude, and garish pictures of a lion and a tiger pouncing on a blackamoor. Behind the hoardings the lion is heard to roar. The party emerges from the town and rides slowly up through orchards and 16 Nicholas Boyle meadows to a first viewpoint from which through the tops of the trees they can glimpse the town, with the princely palace, and the fertile country in which it lies.
The ground is now steep, bare and rocky, the horses are tethered and they climb on foot over the difficult terrain to a spot beneath the sheer walls of the old fortress from which, with the aid of the telescope, they can see every detail of the town illuminated by the noontime sunshine of a perfect day. The eerie stillness is broken by a cry from Honorio who has seen flames on the marketplace: Honorio fires at the animal but misses and succeeds only in infuriating it. With Honorio in hot pursuit behind it, it bounds towards the princess. Her horse stumbles and falls on the impossible ground, but a second shot from Honorio kills the tiger just as it reaches them.
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If we pay careful attention to the detail of the narration of this episode, we notice that at no point is any original savagery of mood or intention attributed to the tiger: Honorio, having enraged the animal, virtually drives it on to the princess. The narrator, in order to praise his skill as a huntsman, recalls the accuracy with which he had shot or impaled the dummy of a blackamoor in the palace tiltyard and so in our minds, through the association with the pictures on the menagerie hoardings, Honorio is identified with the pouncing, tigerish image, and the tiger itself is identified with the blackamoor, the shivering victim.
Goethe, Novelle 17 The imagery of impaling, and tilting at the ring, is of course strongly erotic and there follows a highly charged scene between Honorio and the princess. Honorio is kneeling beside the tiger to ensure that it is dead and so, in relation to the princess, is in the posture of a beseeching lover, a posture which social decorum would, as he points out, never otherwise allow him to adopt. By thus claiming to be motivated by the same desire for the higher and broader view which has brought the princess so far up the mountain Honorio, innocently or not, has set her a trap.
His act of heroism, she says, surely shows that that point has now come. Honorio, we are told, cannot quite suppress a pang of disappointment that the princess is so willing to see him leave the court, but the conversation is now interrupted and a new phase in the action begins. Two figures, a woman and a dark-haired boy holding a flute, hurry into view; strangely clad, they are clearly of foreign origin and the keepers of the menagerie.
The ruling prince and the whole hunt now arrive, having turned back on seeing the column of smoke from the fire. The man then launches into another verbal rhapsody similar to that of the woman, and in even more evidently Biblical language, but this time praising the whole order of creation at the summit of which stands the human being, who, as the story of Daniel shows, can tame even lions. The child, who never speaks in prose, then breaks into a song which takes up the theme of Daniel, and he and the man alternate in singing and playing the flute to such effect that all are entranced, the powerful emotions of the last few moments are calmed, the prince and princess stand together as if reconciled, and silence falls.
Then the prince gives his explicit permission for the attempt to capture the lion by the means proposed and he and the princess make their way down the hill and out of the story. The princess therefore has not reached the goal of the excursion on which she set out in the morning — the interior of the ruined castle and its tower — but we as readers now accompany the woman, the child, and the warden up to the gate. There we pass Honorio sitting looking out westwards to the declining sun, into regions which the princess has not seen but which he claimed to her he longed to experience.
Like a prophet, the woman seems to read his mind and tells him, the murderer of her tiger, that, yes, there is much for him to conquer in the world but first he must conquer himself. With these words he too is left behind by the narration. Once inside the outer ring of walls the warden explains that the lion is lying close to the entrance to the secret passage that alone gives groundlevel access to the inner courtyard of the keep.
If the child can lure the beast through the passage into the inner courtyard a gate can be shut behind them and the beast can be kept in safety. The child can then escape if he wishes by means of the stairways which lead through and over the ruined walls. Along these the party make their way to a vantage point overlooking the inner courtyard as if it were an amphitheatre. The Goethe, Novelle 19 child climbs down into the arena and disappears into the secret passage. First, a recollection of the story of St Jerome8 and the lion: So much for the content of Novelle: But first we need to revisit the question of its title, since we can now be a little more precise about why it is called Novelle.
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However there is no doubt that serious theoretical discussions took place on 24 and 25 January There is no independent evidence that Goethe and Eckermann saw each other on the 29th. Eine dokumentarische Chronik 7 — Zurich, , p. Even if Eckermann did borrow from the text of Novelle in order to reconstruct discussions, it is likely that he did so because he felt the conversations justified him. In explanation of this possibly cryptic point, let us turn to the question of structure. In one sense the structure of the plot of Novelle is extremely straightforward: After an opening detour which takes us downhill into the market-place, the lowest point on which we touch, the place of interaction between mountains and plains, every step in the narration is a step upwards, a step towards the goal represented by the tower rising above the innermost courtyard of the old castle, and the story stops when the courtyard is reached.
From the town we move up to the first vantage-point at tree-top level, then to the second under the Goethe, Novelle 21 walls of the old castle, then past the castle-gate where Honorio is left sitting, and finally on into the amphitheatre — the tower, however, remains unclimbed. So far so simple — more or less. The issue becomes more complicated, however, when we ask: For there is no single figure in the story who passes through all these stages and in that sense the story has no central character.
The figures we begin with — the Prince, the Princess, Prince Friedrich, Honorio — peel off one by one and are gradually replaced by a new set, the woman, the warden, and the child, all of whom climb through the last stages — while the inner courtyard itself is trodden only by the child and no one at all surmounts the tower. The only continuous presence, in fact, is our own, as readers: We may take it that considerable importance attaches to the point when the first set of characters gives way to the second: Before we can understand that transition, though, we need to clarify why the first set of characters are climbing towards the summit and what it is they are trying to reach.
From the first mention of it, the distance and inaccessibility of the old castle is emphasized: Clearly the princess is yielding to a disordered ambition in desiring to reach the summit: As a noble but inexperienced woman left on her own, she is in a situation which in many a fairy-tale gives temptation its opportunity: The temptation dealt with in the first part of Novelle is of a particularly deep and subtle kind.
The goal the princess sets out to reach is elaborately presented to us when Friedrich spreads out before her the drawings an artist has made of the old castle and so, by the way, provides us with a clear exposition of the castle topography which we shall need in order to understand the final scenes of the story. In that presentation the boundless view to be had from the tower is almost incidental: Firstly, its inviolate, almost sacred character, untouched and unseen for so long and even now in the care of two very marginal figures in the story: Second, the castle, and particularly its mysterious heart, is represented as the place where nature and art, the natural and the human, merge and either become, or are originally, indistinguishable: It is the place where art and nature meet only because the artist represents it as such in his paintings.
In that, it closely resembles Die Wahlverwandtschaften. The princess allows herself to become the victim of her imagination: As a result she sees the tiger when it appears only through the medium of her fears. And similarly Honorio sees the tiger only through the medium of his own disordered desires — aggression and, fuelling the aggression, lust. The conversation between them, over the dead body of the tiger, preserves Goethe, Novelle 23 almost complete outward propriety but is the concealed expression of desires which could destroy both of them and the prince as well.
That conversation is a lie, in fact, for it completely misrepresents the truth about the events which have just occurred. Honorio assumes that he has just performed a heroic rescue, and the princess — who urges him to plunge his hunting-knife into the animal in case its claws hurt him — accepts that interpretation.
But the truth is that the tiger was neither savage nor fearsome except in so far as the human beings cast it in that role; indeed Honorio virtually made the tiger into the instrument of his predatory feelings towards the princess. When therefore the prince reappears with his followers the scene which confronts him is, we know, completely misleading.
There lies the dead tiger, before his wife, the battle-weary Honorio, and the weeping woman. But we know that it has quite a different meaning. Despite the moments of silence which indicate that all is not yet grasped or under control, and perhaps known not to be so, the initial response of the Prince suggests that he is accepting the superficial, heroic, unashamedly violent interpretation of what he sees before him.
Our story, that is, is still being defined by the terms used by Honorio to deceive himself and the Princess, even if their pretensions are reduced by a comically vulgar parallel with the warden. The transformation into harmony of this discordant mood of deceit and misunderstanding, of misdirected passion and unacknowledged guilt, the disappearance of the language of the hunt and the transition into the final section is achieved by art — that is, music — and by religion.
Lost in the words and the music the listeners become aware of what they have experienced only when it has stopped, and by then the miracle referred to in the song has taken place. The Poet and the Age, 2, pp. There is no need for her to go higher, she renounces any desire she may still have for the boundless view from the topmost tower, and she follows her spouse back down into the valley. At this point a new and final section of the story begins.
We, as readers, continue upwards. Once we have passed Honorio brooding on the great prospect of the future deeds which self-conquest will release him to perform, we are alone with characters to whom we have only recently been introduced. With them we enter the realm of the upper castle, the realm which, by comparison with the lower castle, where the realistic story began, could be called ideal, for it is here that we are allowed to see what the princess thought she was climbing the mountain to find: Then the family chorus spoke and sang in the words of Daniel and Isaiah of the peaceful life together of men and lions, lions and lambs, and that was a symbol, or metaphor, of a healing power in the lives of particular people.
Now the song is sung again, though by the child alone, and this time its metaphors have come true: But it is nothing of the kind. It is not an incident at all — it is not like the ambiguous human story of passion and recovery that has preceded. It is the embodiment of an eternal truth, a myth we might say: Indeed it was because the song contained this ancient and eternal truth, which is now being enacted before us — though not before the figures in the human story — that it was able to have the healing power which to that human audience seemed magical, indeed miraculous.
Through the confrontation with the family of menagerie-keepers and the symbols in which they spoke and sang, that story was revealed as an all-too-familiar and all-too-human story of disordered ambition and was at the same time brought to a conciliatory conclusion for all involved. We, the readers, are privileged, however, on the last pages of the story to be shown a third and very Goethean sense in which it is a Novelle — the sense in which it gives new embodiment to a truth as old as the literary and mythological resources of our culture.
We are shown the source of the redemptive power of art in a redemption that lies beyond art, in a divine intention to frustrate evil and further the good and the beautiful: This revelation may come as a new insight to the individual, but only because it takes time for the individual to learn what the human race has always known. The new, in the deepest sense, is, in these last pages, not some unprecedented incident that bursts upon one, but an ancient truth that one has gradually learnt to discern: Little more than a year before his death, in earthier language than anything we find in the story called Novelle, Goethe wrote to the musician Zelter what must surely count as his last word on that contentious piece of terminology: I hope also it has become clear that such a formula does not imply that the work is self-referential to the point of being trivial or meaningless.
Novelle is the story of a quest for reality — for the ultimate reality which Kant calls ideal. It is the story of an ascent of a mountain, and on the mountain stands a castle, and within the castle there is a meaning, and that meaning none of the characters engaged on the quest is allowed to experience. What differentiates Goethe from later German writers, particularly of the twentieth century, is not that he is unaware of, or indifferent to, the perplexities and incompleteness of human life and the human quest for reality, an incompleteness of which those writers, notably Kafka, have created images powerful enough to count as modern myths.
What makes Goethe different and his story into a landmark, not just in German but in world literature, is this: And without these neither the characters in the story, nor we its readers, would embark on that quest for reality in the first place. Although Kleist avoids using the term Novelle to describe these pieces, they make an important contribution to the development of that genre in the nineteenth-century and beyond. Rather he regards it as defined by the newness of its subjectmatter, its concentration on an extraordinary event or situation, and its ability to make the unique seem a part of our every-day reality.
They are remarkable for their narrative concision and their use of contrasts and paradoxes. They throw the reader straight into an astonishing situation in a matter of sentences, grabbing the attention instantly. A Critical Study London, , p. Ellis, Narration in the German Novelle London, Heinrich von Kleists Nachruhm.
Eine Wirkungsgeschichte in Dokumenten, ed. Instead they are prone to extremes of behaviour, and sudden, seemingly irrational actions. Kleist was denied success during his lifetime. A misfit in a family of Prussian officers, and orphaned in his teens, he had left the army and become an outsider, misunderstood by most of his relatives. Kleist had previously held the Enlightenment view that human reason was eventually capable of achieving absolute knowledge of the world.
The Kantian text shattered this idea, showing him that human perception was inadequate for an understanding of the universe. He constantly struggled to find fulfilment, suffered from periods of depression, and his lack of professional success reduced him to a state of poverty. Their deaths were avidly reported in the press, not just in Germany but also abroad, and were the talk of society for long 3 4 For a good discussion of this event and its consequences, see Robert E. Brown, Heinrich von Kleist: Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas 31 afterwards. By the s and s, when critics such as Wolfgang Menzel — , Heinrich Laube —84 and Georg Gervinius —71 were writing some of the first histories of modern German literature, the verdict had become overwhelmingly positive.
It is Gervinius, however, who provides the greatest accolade, claiming Kleist as the greatest dramatist of the nineteenth century: He was celebrated for his patriotism, and his style was linked to the search for a German identity: Geschichte der deutschen Literatur , Sembdner, Dokumente, p. Die deutsche Literatur , Sembdner, Dokumente, p. Julian Schmidt, Geschichte der deutschen Nationalliteratur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert , quoted in Sembdner, Dokumente, p. Moser, 14 December , Sembdner, Dokumente, p. See for example F. In , a trader, Hans Kohlhase, was on his way to Leipzig taking with him two horses.
Kohlhase, unable to achieve justice through the legal system, waged an illegal feud against Saxony and became an outlaw, even burning down houses in Wittenberg. He managed to escape being arrested by the Saxon authorities for some eight years, but was eventually captured in Berlin, where he was executed in February by being broken on the wheel Diesselhort, p.
He develops the story from his own imagination and raises issues recognisable from his other works as important concerns of his. These include the nature of justice, the relationship between man-made law and what is morally right, and the exploration of extremes of human behaviour. These expectations are not always fulfilled. A chronicler would tend to narrate chronologically in a factual or sober style. It also reveals the outcome of the story at the end of the first paragraph: The introduction of the gypsy woman four-fifths of the way through the story subverts the chronicle mode too, by retrospectively introducing a magical element which requires the re-telling of the story so far according to a different perspective.
The discrepancy between these two accounts may be coincidental, perhaps attributable to 17 18 As, for example, suggested by Brown, op. Anthony Stephens, Heinrich von Kleist: The Dramas and Stories Oxford, , p. Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas 35 the fact that the first part of Kohlhaas was written two years before the second, as mentioned above.
On the other hand, it marks the shift to a section of narrative which is written according to different, less realistic conventions. The involvement of the gypsy woman takes the story a step beyond every-day reality. Coincidence follows coincidence, the most astonishing being the fact that the old woman whom Kunz von Tronka chooses to try and trick Kohlhaas into giving up the lead capsule turns out to be the original gypsy woman herself. The narrator affects embarrassment at this point, realising that this turn of events might require more than the average suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader: It can claim to be reporting the story as it is taken from the sources, and distance itself from them by casting doubt on their veracity.
The narrator is aligned to a certain extent with the reader, who wants to know what really happened but can no longer be certain of the facts at such distance from events. The narrator claims to be drawing on several chronicles, and comparing them to establish the true story, as a historian would. Yet the chronicles contradict each other and so leave the narrator none the wiser.
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It might be supposed that this narrative strategy was the result of uncertainty caused by the appearance of the gypsy woman. However, the narrator adopted the technique of a lack of omniscience earlier in the story too. We never know what happens when Lisabeth goes to Berlin and receives her fatal injuries, for there were no witnesses connected with the Kohlhaas family, and Lisabeth does not regain consciousness 36 Charlotte Woodford long enough to explain: Similarly, when Kohlhaas is in the process of attacking towns in Saxony in the hope of finding Squire Wenzel, a mysterious declaration appears stating that Wenzel was in Dresden.
However, the narrator does not know who wrote it: This narrative style could be the result of a decision to adopt the persona of a chronicler, who is bound by the sources and unable to speculate beyond them.
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For example, it is a similar technique to that of the restricted knowledge feigned by the narrator of Die Marquise von O…, when we are left assuming that Graf F. While the gaps in Michael Kohlhaas are never filled, as they are in Die Marquise or Der Zweikampf, it is not necessary to the plot for the reader to have every detail cleared up. In fact, it increases the dramatic tension of the story to have the narrator tantalise us with mysteries from the past which he claims to be unable to solve.
Importantly too, it highlights how the reader, just like the characters in the stories, is unable fully to understand the workings even of the fictional world. Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas 37 Usually, the reader relies on a narrator for a verdict on the actions of the protagonist. Are we meant to identify with the protagonist?
Or are we meant to recoil from his actions? Initially, we identify closely with him. The narrator soon becomes more distanced, however. Kleist uses a simple conflict between a horse dealer and a minor nobleman to ask questions about the nature of justice in society and the relationship between the individual and the state. Early in the text, we are given an indication that Kohlhaas already perceives the world with a degree of suspicion.
This implies that Kohlhaas was reflecting on human nature, lamenting that there are people who go out of their way to irritate others. Kohlhaas is weighing up the issues before coming to a definite conclusion about his course of action. The injustice suffered is at the forefront of his mind, but he remembers too that his servant may be to blame, in which case he would just have to get over the loss of his horses.
She becomes aware that the world is a complicated place, and that its inhabitants are not polarised into immoral people on the one hand, and virtuous people on the other. Human motivation is complex and hence human behaviour is unpredictable. While the Marquise only realised this at the end of the story, Kohlhaas has some appreciation of the complexity of human nature from the beginning.
Kohlhaas is said to come to a judgement only after much hesitation, and only when he has all the facts in front of him. But although he claims to wait until speaking to Herse to decide whether to take action against Wenzel, his judgement is becoming more and more fixed as he rides home: It is significant, however, that the narrator presents the stories as hearsay, and as readers we cannot be certain if they are true; the narrator avoids an opportunity to be authoritative.
She appears to support her husband in his quest for satisfaction, and yet reminds us of the Christian principle of forgiveness, which might be expected to have some hold over the Lutheran Kohlhaas. Later, the narrator shows us the dissonance between husband and wife when Kohlhaas decides to sell the farm and send his family away.
Lisabeth is visibly shocked to hear him offer their house for sale to a neighbour: As the men talk, she clutches the baby to her and kisses him, and as Kohlhaas explains the speed with which he wants to sell up: Lisabeth is no longer concerned with appearances; it is clear to the neighbour that she is distressed, but Kohlhaas continues in a matter of fact way to sell their livelihood. It highlights how nothing, neither his children nor his wife, is more important for him than attaining justice.
Kohlhaas perceives himself as having been cast out of the community which is the state; Lisabeth recognises, before Kohlhaas utters the words, that this emotion leads him to feel freed of his obligations to his family. By refusing to protect his rights, the state has abandoned Kohlhaas and broken its contract with him. In his eyes, he can therefore legitimately resort to primitive, anti-social violence to protect himself: However, her opposition to Kohlhaas continuing his quest for justice is quite clear.
When he asks her: She does not dare oppose Kohlhaas, but again her gestures betray her real feelings to the reader, if not to her single-minded husband. She seems only ever to have been in favour of Kohlhaas gaining redress by legal means, and provides a counter-model to his fanaticism. Ironically, while Lisabeth tried to make Kohlhaas 42 Charlotte Woodford abandon his mission, her death pushes Kohlhaas over the edge and makes him unable to give it up. In a striking example of narrative concision, it is on the day of the funeral that Kohlhaas receives the letter telling him that his most recent petition has been unsuccessful.
The narrator describes how Kohlhaas pays his last respects to his wife in a series of detailed clauses depicting the actions of the funeral. She tries to tempt Kohlhaas to let the Elector of Saxony free him in return for the lead capsule, so that their children will not be left orphans. Despite receiving the Communion which Luther had at first denied him because of his refusal to forgive Wenzel p. Michael Kohlhaas had a significant influence on later writers of prose fiction, such as E.
Hoffmann, Heine and Kafka, whose works also challenge the reader not just with their content but also with their Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas 43 form. Kohlhaas is executed, but his horses are restored, and his children honoured on his behalf. Not just at second hand through the characters in the story, but in the very act of reading, we experience the loss of absolute certainty which troubled Kleist upon reading Kant. Although Kleist was writing at a time when short prose fiction was the poor relation of established literary genres such as the drama, Michael Kohlhaas certainly deserves its place at the beginning of a distinguished line of major short prose works of the nineteenth century.
Yet the story itself is extremely slight. His actual name, like those of most characters in the story, is never revealed. He sets off aimlessly to seek his fortune, with only his fiddle for company, but his violin-playing attracts the attention of two ladies who employ him as gardener and occasional musician at their castle outside Vienna. Above his head, however, a love-intrigue is going on, and in its course he is whisked off to Italy in a carriage, ending up in Rome. Although he does not understand his role in the slightest, he is being used by the eloping lovers to divert the attention of the disapproving relatives who want to separate them.
Hence the doubly happy ending: Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast London, , pp. His busy father typifies the people whom the Romantics lampooned as Philistines. To the Taugenichts, however, it is always Sunday, the day of rest: His violin seems antithetical to labour. Whenever he plays it on his travels, people throw down their work and start dancing. But the violin also enables him to make a living. The two ladies who hear him playing on the highway immediately offer him employment as a musical servant.
Later, when promoted to be toll-keeper, he has even less to do. In the garden behind his cottage he digs up the vegetables and plants flowers instead, because they are attractive even if unprofitable. Studien zu Eichendorffs Leben und Werk Sigmaringen, , p. His followers went further. Around the Taugenichts was seen as a protohippy who drops out of society. Philistines were only incidentally capitalists: In the song with which he sets out on his travels, the Taugenichts observes how much people miss if they concentrate only on their cares and duties, and concludes: It opens up another, crucial dimension of the story.
Eichendorff, a Roman Catholic, has written a tale full of allegorical overtones. His sober Catholicism has helped him to accomplish the difficult feat of writing a successful Christian allegory which has been enjoyed by a largely secular readership. How has he done it? Admirably explored by G. This certitude appears in narrative form as a complete congruence between the outlook of the protagonist Friedrich and that implied by the narrator.
When Friedrich loftily rebukes Faber a caricature of Goethe for an insufficiently reverential attitude to poetry pp. It illustrates the problems of Christian writing in an age when Christian beliefs receive only minority assent. Heavy and dogmatic writing will win no adherents.
Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts combines humour with an unusual play with perspectives. In contrast to the rigid congruity imposed by Ahnung und Gegenwart, the narrator, the protagonist and the reader of the Taugenichts tale are all at odds. A chance encounter gains him employment; then he is carried off and lodged in an Italian castle as part of an intrigue which he does not understand.
Although as a first-person narrator he appears to be recounting events once they are over, we never learn when, where, why or to whom he is telling them, and he provides no retrospective view which might help the reader to understand events. The only exception is the place where the Taugenichts suddenly exclaims: Knowing little more than the Taugenichts, the reader does not understand the intrigue either.
Even the closing explanations leave some details obscure. For the reader, moreover, the intrigue is not important in its own right, but serves merely as a device to send the Taugenichts on his travels. So neither the protagonist nor the reader is in control of the plot. Yet there is undoubtedly a plot to be understood.
Almost everyone the Taugenichts meets in Rome is somehow involved in the intrigue. Even the Prague students whom he meets on his journey home include the cousin of the castle porter.
Amy Fisher
There is a hidden order, a narrative providence, at work. In both books, the protagonist and the reader are decentred. Neither can grasp what is going on until the end. The Taugenichts tale provides reassurance that despite attacks of fear, loneliness and depression it is possible to find happiness in the world by trusting to divine providence.
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The Taugenichts has no such exalted destiny. He is not a hero, that is, not a person with exceptional gifts who is singled out for a special task. He is an ordinary person: Friedrich and Tamino represent the spiritual man, Papageno and the Taugenichts the natural man, something much closer to the human norm. Amid a desolate landscape, surrounded by the destructive energies of the whirlpool, stands a rock surmounted by a cross.
Here a real phenomenon acquires an allegorical meaning as the destructive aspect of Nature, drawing all life down to death and annihilation. The Cross planted on the rock represents the assurance of eternal life. Despite the unmistakable guidance supplied by Eichendorff in the sentence quoted, this image requires active interpretation by the reader. Its meaning must be sought and found, not merely read off. And, even in prompting the reader, the novelist steps down from his position of authority and becomes instead a mediator. For the meaning he points out to the reader is not an arbitrary construction by the novelist, but is encoded in the natural world as created by God.
It is sometimes claimed that the Romantics roundly rejected allegory in favour of symbolism. Rather, they rejected tedious and contrived allegories, which merely required the translation of abstract qualities into concrete equivalents. Hoffmann mocks such interpretations in Der Sandmann when his snufftaking Professor of Poetry and Eloquence explains away the story of Olimpia by saying: Their provenance is explained by the Prague students who tell the Taugenichts why they are not at their studies: The Romantics took up the ancient conception of the book of Nature.
Everything in nature, from the structure of crystals to the constellations, contained a meaning which might be disclosed at privileged moments. The castle where he works as a gardener is said to be within sight of the towers of Vienna and beside the Danube: Eichendorff has rearranged geography to fit the demands of the imagination, just as he did in Ahnung und Gegenwart, where some characters emigrate to America from a seaport apparently located in South Germany.
Time is even more bewildering. References to actual places and seasons lure us into a fictional structure which is really shaped by a symbolic system. Zur romantischen Zeitstruktur bei Eichendorff Bad Homburg, His spatial world contains two boundaries: What lies between need only be vaguely indicated, for its importance lies in awakening a sensation of yearning. Travelling, in Eichendorff, is an expression of the divine discontent which cannot ultimately be satisfied with anything less than a heavenly destination. Only the Philistines, with their limited imaginations, are content to stay at home.
The Taugenichts himself, as his anonymity suggests, is not a character constructed by the rules of nineteenth-century mimetic realism, but a representative figure. Down on the Farm A Tor. Com Original by Charles Stross series Laundry Files In Charles Stross's novel The Atrocity Archive and its sequels, the "Laundry" is a secret British agency responsible for keeping dark interdimensional entitities from destroying the cosmos and, not incidentally, the human race.
The battles with creatures from beyond time are dangerous; however, it's the subsequent bureaucratic paperwork that actually breaks men's souls. Now, in "Down on the Farm," The Weight of Memories A Tor. With The Three-Body Problem, English-speaking listeners got their first chance to experience the multiple-award-winning and bestselling Three-Body Trilogy by China's most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu.
The Weight of Memories is a Tor. Com Original by Charles Stross series Laundry Files Introduced to readers in the novels The Atrocity Archive and The Jennifer Morgue, the Laundry is a secret British government agency charged with preventing dark interdimensional entities from destroying the human race. Now, in "Overtime," the Laundry is on a skeleton staff for Christmas—leaving one bureaucrat to be all that stands between the world and annihilation by the Thing That Comes Down After the Coup A Tor.
Com Original by John Scalzi series Old Man's War In a universe of harsh interstellar conflict, the practice of interspecies diplomacy—when possible—is important. So being a Colonial Union officer attached to an interplanetary diplomatic mission sometimes means taking a fall. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App.
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