Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 87 “Er hatte eine Wasserscheu vor Gespenstergeschichten”: The Ghost Story in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany in the Light of Jean Paul’s Novel Die Unsichtbare Loge
Elisa Leonzio
Abstract (E): Tales of ghost-seeing dominated the period of the Enlightenment, despite scholars’ attempts to explain away such phenomena rationally. In late eighteenth-century Germany, novelists increasingly drew on ghost stories, engaging in forms of self-parody and also demonstrating the lack of creative inspiration provided by a scientifically-explained world. This essay analyses how such ambivalence is reflected in Jean Paul’s first novel, Die Unsichtbare Loge (1793), whose twentieth chapter includes a ghost story which both adopts and undermines typical features of the genre.
Abstract (F): Les récits de fantômes ont joué un rôle clé à l’époque des Lumières, malgré les efforts pour minimiser rationnellement la place et l’impact de ces phénomènes. À la fin du 18e siècle, les romanciers allemands se sont de plus en plus inspirés de ce genre d’histoires, dont le succès a donné lieu à des formes d’auto-parodie tout en montrant le peu d’imagination et d’inspiration offert par un monde en voie d’explication scientifique. Cet article analyse l’ambivalence de la fascination exercée par les histoires de fantômes dans le premier roman de Jean Paul, Die Unsichtbare Loge (1793), dont le vingtième chapitre contient une telle histoire qui simultanément reprend et subvertit les traits typiques du genre.
Keywords: Enlightenment, Ghost, Ghost-story, Irrational, Jean Paul, Uncanny
1. Ghosts between Condemnation and Love
Words such as ghosts and spirits emerged as some of the most popular expressions of the Enlightenment period. Interest in them was shown not only by the unlearned population, but also by educated people, who had, however, begun to consider them increasingly critically. Paradoxically, as attempts at rationalising these phenomena became more determined, so ghost-seeing and fascination with the supernatural became more widespread. As Abbé Fiard states in his work La France trompée par les magiciens et démonolâtres du dix-huitième siècle (1803), the “siècle des lumières” risked becoming the “siècle des ténèbres” (Wilkins 1975, 126). This tendency corresponded firstly to remnants of superstition among the populace and secondly to a need for a spiritual-irrational dimension to life which was not unfamiliar, even to Enlightenment intellectuals
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 88 themselves (Sawicki 1999, 364-396 and Conrad 1999, 397-415). Kant, Mendelssohn, Wieland, Schiller and many other thinkers included ghosts and spirits in their fictional and philosophical works, discussing the metaphysical relevance of these phenomena (Kiefer 2004, 176). Such relevance arose from the fact that the affirmation of the existence or nonexistence of spirits corresponded to the affirmation or denial of the immortality of the soul, thus conditioning the image man had of himself.
Such an inversely proportional relationship between criticism and fascination or need was also to be found in late eighteenth-century poetological and literary discourse: indeed, even though the late Enlightenment had rejected the use of wonder, so typically found in trivial literature (Viering: 1976, 12-22), which frequently resorted to the use of spectral apparitions, ghost tales were increasingly being included in novels. This took place, on the one hand, with an intense sense of critical judgement and self-parody, and on the other, with the more or less explicit aim of demonstrating how a scientifically-explained reality, lacking in magic, was insufficient for poetry.
In this paper, it will be demonstrated how this last position was openly asserted by Jean Paul, one of the most representative and original German authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in his Vorschule der Ästhetik (1804). But before doing so, the essay will analyse how Jean Paul mirrored the ambivalent Enlightenment attitude towards the irrational and supernatural, paying particular regard to the notion of ghost-seeing, as it emerges in his first novel, the Unsichtbare Loge (1793). In the twentieth chapter (Sektor) of the novel, in fact, the author included a ghost story (Gespenstergeschichte) which exemplarily embodied his last attempts to affirm rationalism, before being defeated by the rising tide of Romanticism. The literary models for Jean Paul’s Gespenstergeschichte were the sub-genres of the “novel of the enthusiasm” (Schwärmerroman), which treated religious enthusiasm from a rational perspective (Riedel 1985, 242-244 and Bell 2005, 115), and the “novel of terror and spirits” (Schauer- und Geisterroman), which was developed and became popular in Germany (Huber 2003, 133) thanks to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), translated into German (Schloß Otranto) in 1768, and was established by Schiller’s Der Geisterseher (1787-9).
The Unsichtbare Loge gained great popularity immediately after its publication and made of Jean Paul one of the most famous and popular writers of that time. By contrast, only a few scholars in the last century devoted entire monographs (W. Köpke 1977 and Steppacher 1996) to the Loge, and the number of articles and chapters included in larger studies is surprisingly small, particularly when compared with the current critical success of Jean Paul’s other novels. The only scholar to date to offer a specific analysis of the ghost story in the Loge is Jörg Paulus in his Der Enthusiast und sein Schatten (1998), a work on the enthusiast, one of the most frequent figures in German
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 89 novels at the end of the eighteenth century. After considering authors like Wieland, Jung-Stilling and Musaeus, Paulus turns, in the second chapter of the second section, to Jean Pauls Unsichtbare Loge. Paulus’ interest is focused on the subjective writer whom Jean Paul introduces as the immanent author of the novel, whose name is also Jean Paul and who is charged to write the biography of the protagonist. Byintroducing this author figure, Jean Paul revisits a question faced by Lawrence Sterne in his novel Tristram Shandy: namely, the difficulty of making the character’s mind transparent, of presenting consciousness, of being an omniscient narrator who sees what, realistically, is impossible to see.Jean Paul expands this difficulty to another field, that of the future, which an immanent author cannot know and anticipate. Paulus (1998, 146-178) studies Jean Paul’s strategies (lack of information, ignorance) of letting this uninformed author discover the plot together with the reader, and highlights that these elements are present in the Gespenstergeschichte, adding how, in the case of a ghost story, these also help to create suspense.
My analysis will also consider the technical composition of Jean Paul's ghost story. My aim, however, is to highlight the different meta-narrative levels of meaning within the text.
The first level is a poetological one: Jean Paul has recourse to numerous of creative and rhetorical devices in his composition of the Gespenstergeschichte. But, as will be demonstrated, he does so only outwardly to write an effective and impressive ghost story; his real aim, implemented by means of parody, is to reveal, through the narrative, the metaphorical language of literature, the typical elements of this genre both in content and form, and to put himself and the reader in the position of the critic who discusses and thereby weakens the strength of the text.
This approach shows an explicative tendency which seems to correspond to the Enlightenment rationalist condemnation of the supernatural; however, as will be investigated in the second level of meaning of the Gespenstergeschichte, the gnoseological and anthropological one, the text contains a relevant critique of the rationalistic criticism, revealing the latter to be too strong and reductive. So, on the one hand, faith in ghosts and its trivialization popular literature deserve, in Jean Pauls view, to be parodied and ridiculed, precisely as it occurs in his Gespenstergeschichte; on the other hand, however, the author reflects shrewdly upon the dangerous consequences of an exasperated rationalism: from a gnoseological perspective, the risk of removing all those elements which are not rationally explicable; from an anthropological one, the temptation of rejecting the irrational component of man’s mind and behaviour. This last temptation is even more dangerous, because it opens the way to repression and the social exclusion of anyone who persists in irrational attitudes, instead of trying to solve the riddle posed by supernatural phenomena.
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 90 2. Denying Ghosts, Defending Ghosts
The Unsichtbare Loge describes the infancy and adolescence of Gustav von Falkenberg. The author pays particular attention in this context to different and contrasting pedagogical models which are used experimentally on the young boy. He spends eight years in a cave, being educated in complete isolation on the rules of Pietism; above all, these very early years of his formation render Gustav timid and introverted, inclined towards melancholy and daydreaming. Falkenberg, his father, a knight with Enlightenment ideas, is afraid of the irrational and sentimental drift in his son’s personality and attitude, and is obsessed with the idea that he is too fragile and fearful. Thus, he chooses to correct the tragic outcome of this pietistic education by entrusting his son to Hoppedizel, a “moral teacher” and supporter of utilitarian ethics whose foundations are based on selfishness and playing with appearances, in the art of refined simulation and concealment. This is then followed by years spent at a Military Academy, where Gustav learns lessons about the misuse of power and physical violence, and by time spent at Court, where the young man is even seduced. All this, far from working as an antidote, increases Gustav’s desire for isolation and accentuates his already distinctive fantasy, which becomes a tool for him to flee from an unbearable reality.
The corrective measures chosen by Falkenberg therefore turn out to be wholly inappropriate. In the meantime, however, Jean Paul does not fail to recognise that some of his worries are decidedly substantial: melancholy, daydreaming and the need for solitude are, indeed, strongly anti-social tendencies which the author, in as much as he is entirely a product of the Enlightenment, can only look upon with suspicion.
This dialectical relationship between the defence of rationalism and a recognition of the irrational dimension of mankind reaches its climax in the Gespenstergeschichte, a poetical treatise about the function of literature – whether it is to mirror a disenchanted reality or keep its sense of mystery by fleeing reason – and about the merits and limitations of an outlook based entirely on rationality.
The Gespenstergeschichte contains all the elements and structures which are typical of the genre, from darkness, mysterious noises and unexpected apparitions to the deferral of explanations:
Three days before the arrival of the Professor there was a great ghost-scare in the castle; two days before it still continued; one day before the Captain made arrangements for the detection of the trickery. He had a hydrophobia-like dread of ghost-stories [...] She [the Captain’s wife] had heard at night a three-footed tramp through the corridor, a flash had shot through the key-hole and another clock than hers had struck twelve, and all had flown away. He, therefore, loaded his double-barreled pistols, in order to attack the devil [...] his Gustavus must be with him at the time, for the sake of exercising his courage. The castle-clock struck eleven, nothing came – it struck twelve, still nothing – it struck twelve a second time, without the help of the clock-work; at this moment a hieroglyphic
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 91
racket made its way over the castle-floor, three feet tramped down the many steps and shook the corridor. He, who was seldom courageous in suffering, but always in danger, walked slowly out of the chamber and saw nothing in the long passage but the blown-out house-lantern on the top stair; something came up to him in the darkness – and as he was about to fire at the dumb thing, he cried: “Who’s there?” Suddenly there flashed five paces from him – and here the tetanus of horror sized the nerves of Gustavus – the light of a dark-lantern upon a face which hung in the air, and which said: “Hoppedizel!” It was he; he threw his boot-three away, and no one had anything against it but the Captain, because it could not show his courage, and the Captain’s wife, because she had not shown any. (Jean Paul 1883, 152-153)
[Drei Tage, eh’ der Professor kam, war Gespensterlärm im Schloß; zwei Tage vorher währte er noch fort; einen Tag zuvor machte der Rittmeister Anstalten zur Entdeckung der Schelmerei. Er hatte einen Wasserscheu vor Gespenstergeschichten [...] Sie [Rittmeisterin] hatte nachts ein dreifüßiges Gehen durch den Korridor gehört, ein Blitz war durch ihr Schlüsselloch gefahren, und eine andre Taschenuhr als ihre hatte 12 geschlagen, und alles war verflogen. Er lud also seine Doppelpistolen, um den Teufel [...] anzufallen; sein Gustav mußte mit dabei sein, um mutig zu werden. Die Schloßuhr schlug 11, es kam nichts - sie schlug 12, wieder nichts - sie schlug 12 noch einmal ohne Hülfe des Uhrwerks: jetzo wickelte sich auf dem Schloßboden ein hieroglyphisches Gepolter heran, drei Füße traten die vielen Treppen herab und erschüttern den Korridor. Er, der selten in Leiden, aber immer in Gefahren mutig war, ging langsam aus dem Zimmer und sah im langen Gange nichts als die ausgeblasene Hauslaterne an der Haupttreppe; etwas ging im Finstern auf ihn zu - und indem er auf das stumme Wesen feuern wollte, rief er: “Wer da?” Plötzlich blitzte fünf Schritte von ihm - und hier faßte der Tetanus der Angst Gustavs Nerven - das Licht einer Blendlaterne auf ein Gesicht, das in der Luft hing und das sagte: “Hoppedizel!” Der wars; warf sein Stiefelholz und andern Apparat dieser Farce weg, und niemand hatte etwas darwider als der Rittmeister, weil er seinen Mut nicht beweisen konnte, und die Rittmeisterin, weil sie keinen bewiesen hatte. (Jean Paul 1960, 173-174)]
Falkenberg hates credence in ghosts and ghost stories. So, when strange acoustic and visual phenomena repeatedly occur in his castle, which his terror-stricken wife and son are immediately ready to interpret as the appearance of ghosts, he decides to demonstrate that their fears and beliefs are unfounded, by tracing the phenomena back to completely natural causes.
The end of the episode, when the true identity of the presumed ghost is revealed, would appear to prove him right, dissipating, in one fell swoop, the sense of anxiety and profound fear which the text had been able to generate before an unknown phenomenon. As the reactions of the various participants in the episode are made to seem ridiculous, both those of the spectators who were fooled by such a good-natured farce, and those of the trickster Hoppedizel, who planned the prank and risks being its victim (Falkenberg has a pistol and is ready to use it), so is the form of the ghost story itself ridiculed. Hoppedizel, who had been charged with escorting Gustav to the Scheerau Academy for Cadets, has been Falkenberg’s friend for many years and decides to make fun of his disdain for superstition, which too easily transforms phenomena which are apparently inexplicable but which would be completely natural if only investigated by reason, into proof of the existence of entities from other worlds, that is, ghosts. Thanks to this simple explanation – the ghost is revealed to be Hoppedizel – every event is perfectly justified, thus dissolving the tension which had been created previously.
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 92 The farcical tone of the ending highlights much more clearly, by contrast, the atmosphere of mystery encircling the house, created by a succession of acoustic effects which gradually build to a rising climax, from the footsteps in the corridor and the ticking of a mysterious clock, culminating in a completely inexplicable din. Alongside the acoustic disturbances are other causes of dismay, such as a whole series of visual effects which concentrate on phenomena concerned with light and its opposite, darkness: a flash; a rapid glimmer spied through the keyhole; a lantern which suddenly goes out and one which lights up apparently suspended in thin air, while the object which it belongs remains in the darkness. From this lynchpin, the different disturbances radiate outwards to make up the “hieroglyphisches Gepolter” (“inexplicable din”, literally “hieroglyphic” din). The curious and unexpected lexical conjunction, which via a synaesthetic process condenses visual and acoustic aspects (listening and reading) into a unique image, reveals that, at the basis of the horror story, interests can be identified which go beyond simple genre experimentation and parody, or, more precisely, exploit parody itself in order to develop an epistemological and ethical argument. Indeed, the attribute “hieroglyphic” presupposes a clearly identifiable explanatory model of reality, which conceives of the natural world as a written text, visibly perceivable, and thus “readable”, even if it needs to be deciphered. This is the model promoted by the rationalist Falkenberg, who severely condemns every type of superstition, and who literally goes hunting, armed with a pistol, to find the hidden causes of the apparitions.
Behind this model there is a long tradition, which can be traced back at least to Galileo’s description of the world as the “book of nature written with mathematical terms”. This corresponds to an idea of science that finds its full affirmation in the Enlightenment: with reason and experiments man can discover all the secrets of the natural world and use its force. Moreover, every man has the duty to apply such a method; therefore a person who, like Gustav, lets himself be charmed and/or terrified by every strange phenomenon deserves condemnation.
The same model seems to be adopted by the text at the end of the narrative: indeed, the parody seems to support this argument. Jean Paul therefore pauses to describe, with an analytical approach belonging to Falkenberg himself, the instruments used by Hoppedizel and the tools of his farce, in order to provide an explanation for each phenomenon: the unlit lamp which projects its light against the fool’s face; the boot horn used to give the impression of a third foot; and so on.
When subjected to such an operation of unveiling, with its basic mechanisms taken to pieces, the genre inevitably loses its efficacy, even more so than by its reduction to parody; disassembly, furthermore, is probably the most extreme way in which parody takes form. This can be observed in the following lines, where Jean Paul, in describing Gustav’s reactions in the face of the “ghost”, summarises at the same time, in a single image, the moment where the ghost story is both produced
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 93 and perceived, thus, identifying in both instances the central role played by fantasy as engendering the fear of ghosts:
But in Gustavus’s brain this face, hanging in the air, scratched with the etching-needle a distorted image which his feverish fancies will one they hold up again before his dying eyes. It is not want of courage, but merely intense fancy that create fear of ghosts, and whose has once awakened that in a child so as to terrify him gains nothing, even if afterwards he refutes it again and teaches him that “it was all natural”. [...] The fear of ghosts is an extraordinary meteor of our nature; first, because of its dominion over all peoples; secondly, because it does not come from education [...]. Thirdly, on account of the object: the person who is afraid of ghosts dreads neither pain nor death, but shrinks from the mere presence of a being of an entirely foreign nature. He would be able to look upon an inhabitant of the moon, a resident of a fixed star, as easily as upon a new animal; but there resides in man a dread as if of evils which the earth knows not, of a wholly different world from what revolves around any sun, of things which trench more nearly upon the limits of our personality. (Jean Paul 1883, 152)
[Aber in Gustavs Gehirn riß dieses in der Luft hangende Gesicht mit der Ätznadel ein verzerrtes Bild hinein, das seine Fieberphantasien ihm einmal wieder unter die sterbenden Augen halten werden. Bloß heftige Phantasie, nicht Mangel an Mut schafft die Geisterfurcht; und wer jene einmal in einem Kinde zum Erschrecken aufwiegelte, gewinnt nichts, wenn er sie nachher widerlegt und sie belehrt: “Es war natürlich”. [...] Die Geisterfurcht ist ein außerordentliches Meteor unserer Natur, erstlich wegen ihrer Herrschaft über alle Völker; zweitens weil sie nicht von der Erziehung kommt [...] - Drittens des Gegenstandes wegen: der Geisterfurchtsame erstarret nicht vor Schmerz oder Tod, sondern vor der bloßen Gegenwart eines ganz fremdartigen Wesens; er würde einen Mond-Insassen, einen Fixstern-Residenten so leicht wie ein neues Tier erblicken können, aber in den Menschen wohnt ein Schauer gleichsam vor Übeln, die die Erde nicht kennt, vor einer ganz andern Welt, als um irgendeine Sonne hängt, vor Dingen, die an unser Ich näher grenzen. (Jean Paul 1960, 174-175)]
This description can almost be read as a treatise on the characteristics which every ghost story should possess: the capacity to create a strange atmosphere or transform something close to mankind into something strange or threatening, giving it mysterious and disturbing features which are all the more frightening because their strangeness is accentuated by their original proximity; and, above all, a narrative style which appeals to the irrational parts of the human soul. Furthermore, in describing the impressions generated in the young man by the apparition of the “ghost”, Jean Paul presents, like reflections in a mirror, the impressions generated in his readers, he illustrates them and almost suggests what they should be.
Nevertheless, by further inverting the expected outcome, it turns out to be the actual investigative and trustful approach used by the knight – and apparently by Jean Paul himself, in dismantling the genre of the Gespenstergeschichte – which is ultimately proved wrong, when Gustav’s reaction is contrasted with it, on the basis of his overly passionate whim.
Indeed, despite rational explanations being exhaustive, they end up being wholly ineffective when contrasted with the atavistic fear of mankind in the face of the uncanny. In this respect, Jean Paul appears to anticipate the analysis of Freud, who locates the origin of the uncanny phenomenon
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 94 in the childhood of the individual or in the primitive stages of human history (Freud 19866). The uncanny, according to Jean Paul, existed in mankind since the beginning of time and is situated at the limits of human nature. In this tension between proximity and extraneousness, where the uncanny develops in what is most familiar to mankind, the dialectical movement of the novel develops ad infinitum.
What was intended in the Loge as the parody of a literary genre is also transformed into an opportunity for critical reflection on every sort of mechanistic reductionism and on the resulting dangers to society in general and to literature. The ambition to trace any supernatural event back to its natural basis, which leads Falkenberg to keep his son to himself to teach him to be courageous, and erroneously to identify knightly courage with a rational and prosaic approach to reality, annuls, or at least seeks to annul, the irrational part of mankind. However, such ambition accomplishes quite different results, as Gustav’s case exemplifies: in order to rescue itself from the attack launched by rationalism, fantasy seems to operate with growing intensity and impresses on the young man’s mind indelible images which still pursue him on his death bed. This contradiction is also embodied by Hoppedizel, as Paulus (1998, 168) emphasizes: tricksters and spirits, which the Enlightenment seeks to unveil, have been brought into being by the Enlightenment itself (“Die Betrüger und die Geister, die von der Aufklärung entlarvt werden, sind von dieser Aufklärung selbst ins Leben gerufen worden”).
3. Conclusions
The attention given to the psychology of the visionary, who lets himself be disturbed by an inexplicable apparition, who “sees” it differently from how it is in reality, attributes dignity to a fear which is certainly irrational and emotive, but nevertheless almost inevitable, a fear which has dominated the population from the beginning of time and stems from the fantasy of mankind.
Two different faculties of the mind converge in the word fantasy (Phantasie) as it is used in the Unsichtbare Loge: a perceptive and merely reproductive faculty and a truly productive faculty. Only two years after the publication of the Loge, in his first aesthetic essay, Über die natürliche Magie der Einbildungskraft (1795), Jean Paul introduces for the first time the word Einbildungskraft (imagination) to distinguish the perceptive faculty from the productive one, which is identified with the fantasy. The real distinction, however, is established in the Vorschule der Ästhetik, where Jean Paul devotes different paragraphs to the two faculties. Following Fleming (2006, 30-36), I introduce in the translation the term fantasy, which is closer to the German Phantasie, rather than the term imagination, which the American translator of the Vorschule
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 95 inappropriately uses, making almost incomprehensible the distinction between Einbildungskraft and Phantasie in the English version. The paragraph on the imagination devotes only a few lines to its definition:
Reproductive imagination is the prose of creativity or fantasy. It is only an intensified and more vividly colored memory, which animals also have, for they both dream and fear. Its images are only fallen leaves wafted from the real world; fever, neurasthenia, drinks can so condense and materialize these images that they pass from the inner world into the outer and there stiffen into bodies (Jean Paul 1973, 28)
[Einbildungskraft ist die Prose der Bildungskraft oder Phantasie. Sie ist nichts als eine potenzierte hellfarbigere Erinnerung, welche auch die Tiere haben, weil sie träumen und weil sie fürchten. Ihre Bilder sind nur zugeflogne Abblätterungen von der wirklichen Welt; Fieber, Nervenschwäche, Getränke können diese Bilder so verdicken und beleiben, daß sie aus der innern Welt in die äußere treten und darin zu Leibern erstarren. (Jean Paul 1962, 47)]
Imagination is a faculty which both human beings and animals have: it takes images from the external world and, after modifying them, sends them out again. But this materialisation has nothing in common with real creativity and derives from a kind of auto-suggestion (in the case of fear) or from a temporary suspension of reason (as happens in dreams). The Phantasie of Gustav is still essentially imagination in this sense. It is nevertheless true that it also possesses a rather productive side, as it shapes a new and more comfortable world where the young boy takes refuge.
In the Vorschule Jean Paul further develops the concept of fantasy as a productive faculty, which is at play on two levels: fantasy operates in everyday life, embellishing sensory information, and it also creates art.
But fantasy or creativity is higher; it is the world-soul of the soul and the elemental spirit for the other faculties. […] Whereas the other faculties and experience only tear leaves from the book of nature, fantasy writes all parts into wholes and transforms all parts of the world into worlds. It totalizes everything, even the infinite universe. Hence its poetic optimism, the beauty of the figures who inhabit its realm, and the freedom with which beings move like suns in its ether. (Jean Paul 1973, 28)
[Aber etwas Höheres ist die Phantasie oder Bildungskraft, sie ist die Welt-Seele der Seele und der Elementargeist der übrigen Kräfte [...]. Die Phantasie macht alle Teile zu Ganzen – statt daß die übrigen Kräfte und die Erfahrung aus dem Naturbuche nur Blätter reißen – und alle Weltteile zu Welten, sie totalisieret alles, auch das unendliche All; daher tritt in ihr Reich der poetische Optimismus, die Schönheit der Gestalten, die es bewohnen, und die Freiheit, womit in ihrem Äther die Wesen wie Sonnen gehen. (Jean Paul 1962, 47)]
The idea that only the artist, through fantasy, is able to see the world as a whole, and that each work of art is in itself a whole, is prevalent in eighteenth-century Germany, as is evident, for example, in the work of Sulzer, Blanckenburg and Moritz. Common too is the idea, to which the expression
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 96 “poetic optimism” refers, that poetry, like any other kind of art, has the power to create a better world that counter-balances the real one. Jean Paul, at the beginning of the Vorschule, declares the impossibility of giving a clear definition of poetry, but he adopts several similes to illustrate its meaning: “Poetry is the only second world in this world, or: As singing is to speaking, so poetry is to prose” (Jean Paul 1973, 15; Jean Paul 1962, 30: “die Poesie ist die einzige zweite Welt in der hiesigen; – oder: wie Singen zum Reden, so verhält sich Poesie zur Prose”). These images confirm the compensatory power of poetry and of fantasy as the faculty which produces poetry. Nevertheless, the poetic world which every work of art embodies is as real as reality itself; therefore it contains not only the pleasures, but also all the fears that one feels in the real world.
With this admission Jean Paul recognizes the dark side of fantasy: fantasy not only creates a better world, but also the many frightening impressions generated by an overactive imagination which transforms sensory information into monsters, ghosts, and other figures of the uncanny.
This intimate connection between the creation of the uncanny and the artistic moment in the work of fantasy, that is, the connection between superstition and art, is echoed in the extract from the Unsichtbare Loge cited above. Yet these ideas are expressed much more clearly in the fifth chapter of the Vorschule, which is dedicated to the poetic arts of Romanticism, in paragraph 24, entitled Poesie des Aberglaubens (the poetry of superstition):
The present author for one is glad that he was born several decades ago and spent his youth in a village, so that he was brought up with some superstition. In this memory he now tries to find comfort, when playing angels are replaced in explanations by theories of stomach acids. If he had been educated and refined in a French school and in this century, he would have to experience first trough the poet many romantic feelings which he himself now supplies for the poet. In France there has always been the least superstition and the least poetry. (Jean Paul 1973, 66)
[O wie lieblich! Verfasser dieses ist für seine Person froh, daß er schon mehre Jahrzehende alt und auf einem Dorfe jung gewesen und also in einigem Aberglauben erzogen worden, mit dessen Erinnerung er sich jetzo, da man ihm statt der gedachten spielenden Engel Säuere im Magen untergeschoben, zu behelfen sucht. Wäre er in einer gallischen Erziehungsanstalt und in diesem Säkul sehr gut ausgebildet und verfeinert worden, so müßt’ er manche romantische Gefühle, die er dem Dichter gleich zubringt, erst ihm abfühlen. In Frankreich gab es von jeher am wenigsten Aberglauben und Poesie. (Jean Paul 1962, 95)]
The repression of that ineliminable part of human nature represented by fantasy, which is the only part able to create the conditions necessary for developing both superstition and poetry, is thus seen in extremely negative terms as the ill-omened outcome of an education shaped by rationalism: in the explicit reference to a France seen as poor in poetry and superstition, and also in the image of “Gallic reformatory”, the allusion to French Enlightenment philosophy is more than evident. In suppressing the space available for mystery and the inexplicable, and in reducing everything to a
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 97 mere mechanism, such philosophy ultimately negates all poeticism from the world in the name of an optimistic trust in mankind’s ability to understand and explain every type of phenomenon.
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Jean Paul. “Vorschule der Ästhetik. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Norbert Miller. 10 vol. München: Hanser, 1959-63. Part I, vol. 5: 7-515.
Jean Paul. Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aesthetics. Trans. Margaret H. Hale. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973.
Paulus, Jörg. Der Enthusiast und sein Schatten. Literarische Schwärmer- und Philisterkritik im Roman um 1800. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1998.
Riedel, Wolfgang. Die Anthropologie des jungen Schillers. Zur Ideengeschichte der medizinischen Schriften und der “Philosophischen Briefe”, Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann, 1985.Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 98
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 98 Sawicki, Diethard. “Die Gespenster und ihr Ancien Régime: Geisterglauben als “Nachtseite” der Spätaufklärung”. Aufklärung und Esoterik. Ed. Monika Neugebauer-Wölk. Hamburg: Meiner, 1999. 364-96.
Schiller, Friedrich. “Der Geisterseher”. Sämtliche Werke. 5 vol. München, Hanser, 2004. Vol. 5, 160-82.
Steppacher, Elvira. Körpersprache in Jean Pauls “Unsichtbarer Loge”. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1996.
Viering, Jürgen. Schwärmerische Erwartung bei Wieland im trivialen Geheimnisroman und bei Jean Paul. Köln/Wien: Böhlau, 1976.
Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Walpole Horace. Schloß Otranto. Leipzig, 1768.
Wilkins, Kay S. “Some Aspects of the Irrational in 18th century France”, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. 140 (1975): 107-201.
Elisa Leonzio studied at the University of Turin and in 2008 specialised in Literary Studies and German Literature with a dissertation on Jean Paul. Her research interests include the philosophy, literature and anthropology of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and hermeneutics.
