Among the rash—some would say
rather “welter”—of irredeemably uninspiring youth c*****e-spawned pseudo-genres
of sub-literature that have been visited upon us since the dawn of the
millennium, and that po-faced adults such as the present writer have since been
endlessly adjured by our often more highly academically accredited peers to
admire in the same soul-devouring spirit as that imposed on an auditor of a toddler’s
statistically sub-par feats of monosyllabicity in the presence of his
apotheosizing parents, not the least reprehensible is surely the so-called mash-up
novel. In this writerly analogue to
recreational abortion, the plot, characters, setting, and authorial idiom of
some supposedly classic text are shamelessly interlarded with the corresponding
elements of some avowedly low-prestige counterpart, or, more broadly, with the
conventions of some low-prestige (but real) genre. Many if not most examples of the mash-up
novel are debarred from eliciting any sort of interest from the opposable-thumbed
reader by virtue of what can only strike him as the minuteness of the gap
between high and low, or sometimes even the outright transposition of the two strata. (What’s this title you rouse me from my naked
bed to scan through hastily affixed and consequently lop-sided pince-nez?—Philip
Marlowe Snubs the Munsters 1313 Mockingbird
Lane
With this mention of the old RP I am
brought more or less full circle with Jane Austen (to be precise, I am brought
a little more than a circle-and-a-third of her [for the RP appeared in
1735, 76 years before Sense and Sensibility; i.e., 1.37 times as far
back from our own time as Jane Austen’s first novel]) and hence can at last
get around to explaining why I have been banging on about her, the mash-up
novel, feminine kitsch, compact electronic engines, and quiescent zombiemania
for twenty minutes or so (as the friendly robət
sight-reads) in an essay ostensibly devoted to a work composed in its original
form in the German language by a writer who was 1) a man and 2) not Jane Austen. What I mean to say, then, is that the
present-day reader, or more specifically the most zeitgeistially typical
present-day reader, would perhaps best be served by approaching Ludwig Tieck’s William Lovell as a kind of mash-up novel whose
mashee, like that of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, is a book by Jane
Austen, and whose masheur is something that—unlike zombies—she (the
ZT P-DR) actually is scared s**tless about, namely madness, also
known as insanity, and most usually, in our own time, as mental
illness. In this connexion, I beg
such a reader to reflect on her reaction to that final panel in the RP,
and more specifically to the bemused and amused hauteur of the two
lady-observers. If she is horrified or
disgusted by this hauteur—and I do
not see how any typical native of either the present century or the previous
one could fail to be horrified or disgusted thereby—her disgust or horror will have doubtless emerged in tandem
with a hefty parcel of smugness, a smugness engendered by some long
ago-absorbed PBS or Discovery-channel voiceover-spiel to a pan-and-scan
presentation of this selfsame bit of Hogarthage, a spiel to the effect of “In medieval [sic] times, people believed that mental illness
was caused by demons, and the mentally ill were confined in prisons [sic] like
this one, where members of the aristocracy [sic] showed up to gape and laugh at
them (because demons, like zombies, are inherently funny). Since then, of course, we have learned that
mental illnesses, like cancer and the flu, are caused by minute animalcules known
as viruses (or are they known as genes?), and therefore are certainly
no laughing matter. Accordingly, we now
treat the mentally ill humanely, and house them in climate-controlled hospitals,
in which they can be visited only by members of their immediate family, &c.” The gist of this
spiel is that we do not laugh at crazy people simply because we are more enlightened
than our eighteenth-century forebears.
But I say different. I say that
while enlightenment cannot but be accounted one of the remote efficient causes
of our less mirthful attitude to the mentally ill, the more immediate efficient
cause is self-interested fear, a fear that is fairly new in the world, a
fear with which our great-times-eight grandparents, the non-mad residents of
the eighteenth century, were utterly unfamiliar. Not, contra our friendly voiceover artist,
that very many of them believed that madness was caused by demonic possession,
for that belief had vanished from the mainstream of received opinion about a
hundred years earlier. But in their
eyes, the class of truly mad people was still composed pretty much exclusively
of afflictees of the more extreme forms of what we now call schizophrenia—grouches who ranted incessantly at the thin air, nobodies who
believed themselves to be great potentates, and similar sorts of characters. (Melancholics and hypochondriacs technically
inhabited a kind of limbo between sanity and madness; but when shove greeted
push—when, in other words, noises about restrictions
on personal liberty began to be made—most
afflictees of these conditions were designated as not mad, by both
themselves and their friends.) Any impetus to such behavior was, of course,
quite remote from the experience of Joe Snuffbox or Jane Lapdog, who
accordingly could not have been expected to exclaim, “There but for the grace of God go I!” at the sight of those evincing it. At most and worst they might have exclaimed, “There but for the grace of God I would have gone!”—which hardly packs the same punch. In the matter of describing and explaining their
own psychology, the psychology of non-mad ladies and gentlemen (and yeomen,
rogues, whores, &c.), they were content to make do, in a fetchingly insouciant
attitude expressive of “You got
anything better?”, with a refined and attenuated
version of the old Galenian theory of the humors, modified by such
no-less-dubious (and therefore no obviously better) constructions as Pope’s notion of the ruling passion. The vague but for all that basically
unanimous and century-spanning consensus arising out of this half-baked and half-hearted
theory-mongering may be expressed as follows: that whatever their biological
basis might be, there were clear differences in psychological makeup
among individuals, differences that were innate and effectively permanent. To be sure, one could work around one’s basic psychological disposition, seek to soften its
asperities or shorten its longueurs; but mostly for better and only slightly
for worse, one was stuck with this disposition, such that one could count on
not going to bed as grave and cautious as a parson and waking up as gay and
impulsive as a rake. Whence, naturally,
the neat abstract dichotomies of Jane Austen’s titles
and the assignment of their component abstractions to specific characters. All this received wisdom (and ignorance) has
in the decades and centuries since gone out the window—or, rather, out many different windows, and not in one fell
woosh, but gradually, piecemeal. In the
first place-stroke-few windows, we have learned some specific and none too
reassuring things about certain of the real, severe, proper, old-school forms
of madness: we have learned, for example, that dementia can attack not only the
old but also the middle-aged, that schizophrenia can attack the middle-aged as
well as the young, and that its incidence in the general population is only
slightly lower than that of red hair or green eyes. In the second place-stroke-few windows, we
have witnessed first the manufacture and then the gradual circumfrencial
augmentation of the umbrella of mental illness, which now covers not only the
old-school limbo of hypochondria and melancholia, but also a number of
conditions and behavior patterns that two centuries ago would not have been
regarded as even mildly eccentric, let alone mad. Of course, as I have elsewhere had occasion
to mention, a good deal of the pressure for this expansion has come from below—that is to say from patients rather than doctors, from people
seeking (yes, yes, yes, not unlike [but at the same time not just like]
the eighteenth-century melancholics and hypochondriacs)] to be diagnosed with a
condition by means of which they hope profitably to differentiate themselves
from their peers. But the overall
emotional vector of this expansion, as of the above-mentioned statistical
refinements, has still been one of anxiety, as countless millions who otherwise
would have devoted a thousand times less attention to their mental hygiene than
to their dental hygiene, routinely find themselves posing to themselves such
questions as, “Am I depressed?,” “Ought I
not to be in therapy?,” and “Was that ejaculation of Hail and well met, old fruit!
I thought I just heard coming from the mouth of Jenkins in Auditing an
hallucination, or was he just happy to see me?” To sum up the whole bicentenary
transformation in a nutshell [pun intended, but only vis-à-vis “nut” for “loony” {i.e., not vis-à-vis “nutshell” for “scrotum”}],
mental valetudinarianism has gone from being practically nonexistent to being a
full-fledged equal of physical valetudinarianism. We are expected (“By whom?” you ask? Good but perhaps unanswerable question.) to be
pinging our psycho-sensorium thousands of times a day, ever on the alert for a
sign that the whole goshdamn kit-and-caboodle is about to pack up and that
accordingly we should begin making arrangements for bowing out of the so-called
rat race (mixture of dramaturgical and athletic metaphors noted) without doing
harm to ourselves or our so-called loved ones.
And yet—and this is a very big yet
indeed—we are likewise enjoined (again by whom knows
who) to continue getting and spending and entertaining and joking and flirting
and fan-flicking and eyebrow-arching and lip-curling as blithely as though it
were still 1799.
Whence the collective
psycho-genealogical utility of William Lovell: by showing us how in 1799
(nay, 1794) certain respectable bourgeois subjects were already finding it
impossible to maintain their psychological integrity in the light of the
state-of-the-art philosophy of mind, it suggests how precarious a fortiori
needs must be our own position as producer-consumers, social beings, and
citizens in an ostensibly well-ordered economy-cum-society-cum polity. And exactly how does it go about doing
this? Well, naturally, whatever means a
novel of some 500 closely printed pages makes use of to accomplish the
aforementioned this will take a great deal of time (aforementioned friendly robət-wise), and accordingly require an exegesis of more
than, say, 500 keystrokes. So let me
begin that exegesis by describing the first module of the accomplishment as a
self-contained unit, a unit whose potential efficacy towards that
accomplishment admittedly may strike the reader as negligible, such that he
will simply have to take my word for it that that efficacy will become apparent
over the course of my exegesis of subsequent modules. This first module, roughly coextensive with
all of Book I plus most of Book II (which two books, incidentally, comprise Part
I of my translation), we may designate the Pure Austenian one. In this module the zombie analogues of
psychological disintegration are nowhere to be seen, or at any rate, to be
unequivocally identified as zombies. To
be sure, in this module there are a number of elements that in hindsight will
prove to have been zombies in embryo (mixture of gestative and
putrefactive metaphors noted), but here
we are well within our rights to take them for the sorts of harmless stillborn
freaks of fancy that Miss Austen might have woven into the damask tablecloth of
her narrative in full confidence that they would not disfigure it, let alone
disrupt it. In the first letter we are
presented, via the subjective and limited but by no means “unreliable” medium
of Charles Wilmont, with the first strokes of what by module’s end will be a
complete Theophrastic portrait-gallery of the novel’s central characters. Charles himself, on the evidence of his
ever-recurring ludicrous conceits and digressions, is obviously preeminently a
whimsical, jocular figure; and from his apostrophic description of Mortimer as
one “born to make a single joke out of [his] entire life,” we gather that Mortimer must be some sort of
Charles-on-your-whimsicality-cum-jocularity-enhancing-drug-of-choice. Dovetailing neatly with Charles’s jocularity
is his apparent imperviousness to sentimental entanglements: in Edward Burton’s
nubile sister he espies nothing more tempting than a temporary, makeshift distraction
from his Arcadian boredom. As for our
eponym, young Mr. Lovell: he is presented in this letter as Charles’s perfect
antithesis—passionate, amorous, and utterly humorless. Of Charles’s sister, Amalie, we gather only
that she must be fairly amorous and passionate in her own right, as she has
reciprocated William’s affections; and the same—in a non-sexual, bromantic
register—goes for Edward Burton, whom we know as yet only as William’s “bosom
friend.” In subsequent letters of Books
I and II we learn that William is indeed a dour, passionate youth, heedless of
practicalities, and a poet to boot; that Amalie, though no poet, is like him
amorous, passionate, and heedless of practicalities, at least in the matter of
their coupledom; that Edward is likewise passionate and devoted to William but
also heedful of practicalities in the matter of everything including William’s
and Amalie’s coupledom; that Mortimer is no less whimsical than Charles, but
more prudent; that William’s father Walter is a kind of older-generational
analogue to Edward (i.e., passionate yet prudent); and that Edward’s father
(Christian name unspecified) is prudent and dispassionate to the point of
sociopathy. Forming a sort of Book-IV
outlier to this correspondence are the early letters of Emily Burton, addressed
alternately to Charles and Amalie, wherein she (Emily), in blowing off her
suitor and advising her best friend to ditch her absent lover, shows herself to
be very much her father’s daughter—i.e., an exponent of dispassionate, rational
self-interest. All told, the first
module would make an excellent first third of a novel entitled Sense
[a.k.a. Prudence], Sensibility, and Whimsicality. It apportions all three qualities in satisfyingly
various ratios among individuals of two sexes plus two generations and then
allows the interaction of these individuals to engender a number of plausible
and interesting conflicts, conflicts that we assume will not end tragically
even if they are not resolved—although we surmise that they will be. For the moment, Walter Lovell’s prudence
precludes his assenting to William’s engagement to the (relatively) impecunious
Amalie Wilmont, but we hope that his capacity for sympathy and his first-hand
appreciation of the pleasures and pains of romantic[1] love will at length make
him warm to the prospect of such a match.
We gather from the first letter that Charles Wilmont, for all his lack
of sentimentality, is bound eventually to fall in love with Emily Burton,
because being the paragon of feckless imprudence that he is, he will never take
the fact that “my estate is much too small compared with hers” seriously
as grounds for giving the girl a wide berth; and
when we learn of Emily’s hyper-prudence we can scarcely wonder that his
advances have been met with such a lukewarm reception—but who knows what miracles
Charles may yet work by dint of sheer
persistence? Mortimer, too, we expect to
get hitched and settle down sooner or later (terminal bachelorhood being as
abnormally improvident a state as the abject p***ywhippeddom he so volubly
decries), although gosh only knows with whom, given that both of our female
leads are bespoken…
…And so on. And just when, by the agency of what or whom,
and for what reason, does this Austenian idyll end? The “for what reason” bit of this question is
naturally the hardest one to address—and therefore the most easily shunted
aside for the nonce. But the “when” bit
is scarcely less of a poser. On the one
hand, barely 22/29ths of the way through Book II, our hero reports having
committed an act that would have secured the basest Jane Austen character’s
excision from her first draft, if not from her mental preliminaries thereunto. On the other already-mentioned hand, remnants
of the prelapsarian Austenian mode are to be found as late as Book IV. Clearly it dies a hard and inscrutable death,
this Austenian idyll. So towards
scruting this inscrutable death, let us address the “by what or whom” bit of
the above question—viz., at first, by identifying the entity in the absence of
which or whom William Lovell could never have committed his first, Adamic
transgression. The name of this entity
is Louise Blainville, the French Countess who manages to seduce William and
thereby make him betray—i.e., “cheat on”—Amalie for the first time, and thereby
in turn cause the reader to question for the first time the integrity and
solidity of William’s convictions about romantic love. But of course the countess is not without a
confederate and enabler, a young Italian (man) name of Rosa, who in turn has
been corresponding with a mysterious apparent fellow-Italian name of Andrea
Cosimo, who, whatever his as-yet undivulged intentions may be, is clearly a
fairly ruthless customer, to judge by his menacing reminder “never [to] forget
that for us there is but a single step from suspicion to pursuit and
punishment.” I trust the reader is
beginning to discern a pattern here; that she is discerning that the beginning
of William’s turn to the dark side follows close on the heels of his
falling in with the company of Continental Europeans, and that hence in some
way or other the Continent is to blame for this turn. “But what about these two Eye-Thai’s and one
Frogess’s fellow continental, the Kraut Balder?” What about him? “Well, didn’t he very heatedly counsel
William not to shtup Countess Blainville, and in behalf of Amalie at
that?” Indeed he did, but this by no
means proves that he does not figure among the poopers of William Lovell’s
Austenian mood party. You see, it seems
to me that the most significant change effected by the introduction of the
indigenous Continentals is—at least initially—not so much in William’s behavior
as in the novel’s basic tone and thematic center. Yes, William’s transgression with the
countess is of a rather less trivial nature than jay-walking, especially in one
who has devoted thousands of written words to professions of the exclusivity of
his attachment to another woman. But
divorced from the specific epistolary settings in which it is first reported (viz.
letters nos. 22 [the countess to Rosa ] and 23 [William
to Balder]), it does not strike one as a necessarily or even very probably irredeemable
transgression. Indeed, no sooner (in
letter no. 26) is William relating the Louise Blainville Affair with surprisingly
breezy candor (if not quite frankness) to Edward back in Blighty, than we begin
to feel that this episode was not such a big deal after all, that it was really
just an embarrassing false note in the endless serenade of an otherwise
dedicated Amalie-lover, rather than the first entry in the CV of a career whoremonger. (Cf. Tom Jones’s one-night stand with Mrs.
Waters in the midst of his pursuit of his beloved Sophia) What truly imparts an aura of the sinister
and corruptive to the episode is the language used by the countess in her
briefing of Rosa on it:
The moon shed a romantic light upon
us through the red curtains; the notes deliquesced into the room in faint
accents. You are of course well acquainted with the sensation we feel when
emotions of the highest pitch send us into ethereal and superterrestrial
raptures that are so nearly akin to sensuality; the most illustrious person
fancies himself ennobled; and all the while he is ecstatically sinking down to
his knees before the altar of terrestrial Venus.
Here, the emphasis is not on
the transgression qua betrayal, but on the transgression qua instance of the
sexual act, which is represented as irredeemably (and literally) debasing in
all settings. The truly horrible thing
about William’s transgression is not that it points up his inadequacy as an
ideal of neo-chivalric constancy, but that it offers a case in point for
inculcating the lesson that all high-flown amorous aspirations are ultimately
targeted below the waist—and, by deductive intension, that William’s love for
Amalie itself could never have amounted to anything more noble than a hankering
for the nether regions of “terrestrial Venus.”
In the light of this lesson, there can be no turning back not so much
because William has proved that he cannot be faithful to Amalie as because his fidelity
to her has been eloquently asserted to be based on a property as flimsy and
fungible as balsa wood. Naturally, the
reader wants to demur, based on everything he has learned in high school
English, that one ought never to assume that the opinion of a certain character
is that of the author (or, in more literary-critical high church terms, of the
“text”), and that in this specific case one is especially unwarranted in making
this assumption, in the light of the character in question’s habitual duplicity
and sluttishness. But here Tieck is not
even operating at a level at which the question of the legitimacy of such
assumptions should be posed—i.e., the dramaturgical level, whereat the author
selects the assortment of “masks” he will adopt throughout his performance. Tieck is operating here, rather, at the much
more basic ontological level, whereat the author selects which entities
shall and shall not be admitted into his Dichtungschaft, with all manner
of thoughts figuring among the casting call at least as plentifully as all
manner of characters, and with at least as large a proportion of thoughts as of
characters being sent home at the end of the session. The necessity for this admittedly intuitively
actionable leveling of what in so-called real life is taken to be a far from
trivial distinction—i.e., between thoughts and people—issues from a parallel distinction-leveling
intrinsic to the fictive mode of verbal representation itself, namely the
leveling of the distinction between the indicative and conditional moods. Because a fictive verbal representation is
both fixed in space (I mean here the space of the particular word-stream it
constitutes) and limited in scope (I mean here the scope delimited on the one
side by its title and on the other by the words “THE END”), it does not have
room for the sort of endless and usually ineffectual conjectioneering we take
for granted (perhaps unwisely) in the presumptively unbounded so-called real
world, such that the things that are not thought in it are just as much not
a part of it as are the things that do not happen in it; and, complementarily
and corollarily, the things that are thought in it take on an aura of
actuality whose metaphysical heft, vis-à-vis the reader’s estimation of the
fictive world’s scale of values, is scarcely if at all lighter than that of the
things that do happen in it. (Such that,
it seems to me, to the extent that we read fictive narratives in order to
“escape,” the thing we are escaping to is a world in which our personal
quotidian bugbears are not merely absent but also literally unthinkable.) Thus, while Pride and Prejudice posits
a world in which a young woman could be “undone” in the course of eloping with
her lover, this world is not one in which such “undoing” could even
hypothetically take the form of a Sadean bondage orgy, or indeed any other
specific imaginable form, because no specific form of such “undoing” is
imagined within its pages.
Complementarily and corollarily, because William Lovell depicts
its hero’s actual “undoing” as (not to put too fine a point on it) an act of
cunnilingus in a boudoir with the color scheme of a bordello, its reader is not
at liberty to shrug this undoing off as a limbless, organless, odorless “indiscretion.” What, you may well ask, has all this got to
do with Balder, and with his status as a Continental conformist? Why, everything, inasmuch as his paean to
monogamy is no less vitiated by unwholesome imagery than is the countess’s more
matter-of-fact tribute to promiscuity; such that having read it one finds it
impossible—owing to the aforementioned leveling of the indicative and
conditional moods—to imagine even the happiest denouement to William and
Amalie’s amour in Austenian terms:
I vividly recall the few golden days
of my life, when my entire soul became but a peerless emotion of love, when
every other thought, every other feeling in the world had withered away for me;
I had wandered so deeply astray into the gloomy vault of a romantic grove that
only twilight surrounded me, that no sound from the rest of the world reached
my ears. The whole of nature alluded to my love; every tone proclaimed to me a
salutation from my beloved. She died and like a shower of meteors all of my
bliss came crashing down; it sank as though on the far side of a gloomy and
distant forest; since then nary a glimmer from that time has been reillumined
in my sight.
And never again will a ray
[therefrom] return to me! I sit on the monument of my friend’s tomb, and decline
even to receive alms from the hand of transient circumstance; my misery is my
consolation.
Monogamous fidelity, in Balder’s schema, amounts to a
claustrophobically oppressive pursuit by the beloved (via the ineluctable
emissaries of “nature”) while she lives, and a never-ending vigil in tribute to
her memory after she dies. There is
obviously not much room here for blithe joking,
flirting, fan-flicking, eyebrow-arching, or lip-curling.
So this, then, is the common
bequest of William’s Continental social set—a rhetoric, lexicon, and poetics of
unwholesome extremes; a bequest that is fundamentally irreconcilable
with the whimsical and prudential habituses of these figures’ insular
counterparts, to which it tends to give the lie by its very displacement of these
counterparts in point of epistolary frequency and length. To be sure, while Mortimer remains present in
Paris England Rosa , Lovellian hyper-earnestness begins to seem a
comparatively sane and happy medium, and we are launched under full sail into the
squarely post-Austenian Module II. Like
Module I, this module is governed by a system of abstractions, abstractions
that oppose and complement each other in patterns that recall those of the
earlier system, whence what Miss Austen would term the “easy transition” the
reader makes from the one system to the other.
Balder bears the standard of an ethos committed, as we have already
seen, to monogamous romantic passion; but it is no less unswervingly loyal to
the carte blanche indulgence of the unfettered imagination, to letting one’s
fancy carry one where it will, be the destination ever so inhospitable. In its flightiness, its unrootedness in the
real, this ethos superficially recalls the whimsicality of Charles and
Mortimer. Rosa ,
in stark contrast to Balder, is all for imagination-free submission to the
actualities of human nature (chief among them the libido), be the conduct
eventuating from such submission ever so scandalous or execrable in the eyes of
the world. In its quasi-literal
down-to-earthness, this ethos superficially recalls the prudentiality of the Burtons
And perhaps not coincidentally, it
is an enclosure in the letter delivering this news, the enclosure comprising Walter
Lovell’s deathbed meditations, that marks the beginning of Module III of the
novel, a module distinguished by its depiction of the bleeding over of the
metaphysical continental ethoses of Module II into the thoughts and actions of
the non-eponymous Britain-based personages of Module I, together with an upping
of the metaphysical ante of the ethoses themselves. But before I press on to my explication of
this third module, I really do owe it to the genius of Tieck, and to the
accuracy of the prospective reader of William Lovell’s Romansanschauung,
to point out some of the more salient features of these continental ethoses in
their pristine Module II state. You see,
DGR, in upbraiding William for having mistaken a pair of metaphysical ethoses
for a pair of ethical ones, I would not be understood to impugn the tenability
of these ethoses themselves–or, to be more precise, to argue that Tieck (or
“the text”) impugns this tenability (or, to be more vivid if less precise, to
argue that Module II Tieck remains a Jane Austen manqué even though his novel
has ceased to be centered on Austenesque characters). For in truth, both of these ethoses—the
Balderian and the Rosan–are quite eloquently and cogently presented; indeed,
they are much more eloquently and cogently presented than are any of the
workaday ethical ethoses of Module I, such that even in convicting William of a
gross epistemological error one cannot wholeheartedly convict him of an equally
egregious moral lapse—such that one must concede that as far as Tieck is
concerned William may have merely adopted the right creed for the wrong
reasons, and that Tieck may very well be not so much “of the Devil’s party
without knowing it” as “half of two Devils’ parties while knowing it full well.” The central text of Balder’s ethos, its
scripture if you will, is his long anecdote (Book III, Letter 10) about Wildberg,
the freethinking scoffer at ghosts who himself ended up being haunted by a
ghost, the disembodied skull of a man he had killed in a duel. Balder admits that he, like the rest of
Wildberg’s friends, initially assumed that the ghost was a mere hallucination
induced by guilt. But ever since an
experiment in which the presentation of an actual skull to Wildberg failed to
dispel the apparition, he has had second thoughts: “Despite every effort to
deceive him, my friend Wildberg saw something that we could not see—can we even
know what he saw?” If the apparition of the skull had been a
certifiable chimera, Balder reasons, it would have vanished, or at least seemed
less present, on being juxtaposed with its more demonstrably palpable
counterpart. The fact that it did not
proves, according to his lights, that hallucinations must be granted
epistemological and ontological parity with perceptions of so-called real
objects. It is not that he has been
convinced of the existence of ghosts qua conscious lingering quasi-embodiments
of the deceased, but that he has been convinced that we cannot assume that ghosts
and related phenomena are in any sense derivative of classic,
third-party-falsifiable sensory experience; that they do not constitute real,
self-contained—possibly even autochthonous—entities in their own right. (The whole thing is a bit like the
Linklaterian conceit that our dreaming lives may be as real or more real than
our waking lives, with the difference that it cannot be falsified by the
Hobbesian aperçue that whereas we laugh at our dreams when we are awake, we do
not laugh at our waking experience in our dreams [It cannot be so falsified because
while everyone regularly dreams, few people regularly hallucinate].) What is so striking and disturbing about
Balder’s version of idealism is the ruthlessly positivistic spin he puts on the
more established versions’ familiar tenets and the relentlessly empirical test
to which he puts this spin. He refuses
to gloss over the object of his hankering with Platonic paeans to a realm of
perfect chairs or hippiesh resolutions to “get in touch with my spiritual side”
(wherein the preliminary deposition of everything in an infinitely capacious,
watertight “side” of “me” insures that one will come to no harm via the
in-touch-getting). No: he freely avows
that he wants to be on immediate, prosaic, handshaking or face-slapping terms
with whoever or whatever is out there, wherever “there” is. He sees himself as a sort of “They All
Laughed”-style Columbus , primed for
an arduous but rewarding journey that everybody else would likewise embark on
if only they were sufficiently perceptive and courageous:
In order to save
himself, the terrified human being flings himself back on to the earth,
but few have had the sheer expeditious audacity to undertake the step forward;
with a sonorous clang, their shackles fly to pieces behind them; they plunge
irresistibly forward; in the eyes of mere mortals they are deranged. The
spiritual realm discloses itself to them; they see through the secret laws of
nature; their sensorium lays hold of what has never before been thought; their
indefatigable spirit roots in flaming oceans—they reside on the other side of
mortal nature; they have utterly perished as far as the human race is
concerned, and have moved nearer to divinity; they have completely forgotten
the notion of returning to the earth—and narrow souls with sovereign arrogance
stigmatize their wisdom as insanity, their rapture as madness.
And
shortly (weeks?) after delivering this prospectus, Balder himself takes that
expeditiously audacious step forward, and in consequence does if nothing else
encounter an interesting assortment of characters, including the skeletal (and
yet still carnally ravenous) specters of his father and forefathers and a
strange white-haired old man who seems to have nothing better to do than to take
a leisurely stroll through Balder’s bedroom.
At the very end of this journey (or, at any rate, of the Module II phase
thereof), when the pesky denizens of the meatworld have determined no longer to
leave him in peace (or when the pesky denizens of the spiritual world have
ceased to be willing to come out and play–it is difficult to tell which cause
is more efficient of his flight from the city of Naples into the woods), Balder
casually tosses off an insight that, while bearing no manifest affiliation with
his idealism (I leave the uncovering of the undoubted covert affiliations
therewith as an exercise for the reader), is at least as striking and
disturbing: “You are of course
reading this letter only as a letter from yourself to yourself, and I am not
actually writing to you any of these words. But maybe I am after all. At any
rate, I was certainly a fool to read whole books through with enjoyment, as I
used to do, and to imagine that I had the spirit of the author right in front
of my eyes.” I defy the reader to produce a more succinct,
comprehensive, or devastating debunking of the so-called metaphysics of
presence. Here, rather than figuring
words commonsensically as tokens with which pre-formed human subjects swap
pre-formed ideas with each other, Balder represents them as immanent units of
subjectivity and thought eo ipso, beyond which nothing more originative,
coherent, or perduring is to be sought.
William, Balder asserts, will be forced to read Balder’s letter “as a
letter from yourself to yourself” (i.e., from William to William) because at
the moment of reading Balder will have long since ceased to think any thoughts
corresponding to the words contained in the letter, such that as phenomenal
units these thoughts will exist only in William’s own mind. But even to call the thing that does the reading
“William’s mind” is probably to give it too much ontological credit in the view
of Balder, who has long since grown out of the illusion that in reading a book
from beginning to end he has had “the spirit of the author right in front of my
eyes.” According to Balder, as words
cease to be the property of their owner the moment they are committed to paper,
any string of words concatenated over a period of months, weeks, or even
minutes (i.e., a book, a pamphlet, or even a letter) perforce cannot amount to
the objectification of a unified or unifying intelligence. The bottom line for the Balder of the end of
Module II is that words think us rather than vice-versa, and that we pseudo-exist
as bounded pseudo-entities only by the grace of the arbitrary convention that certain
strings of words on folded and sealed sheets of paper are referred to certain
creatures answering to certain names. In
the beginning was the word, yes—but also in the end and in the middle, with no room
for God or man as such at any point along the way. Pretty hoopy, whacked-out, axon-frying, proto-Wittgensteinian-cum-Derridean
privet-civet shit for 1795, what-what?
As
you can see, DGR, I have something of a soft spot for Module II Balder and the
Module II Balderian ethos. My spot for
Module II Rosa and the Module II Rosan ethos is not really anything of a soft
one (I would liken this spot’s tenderness to that of the crust of a chicken pot
pie left to cool an hour or so past its optimum into-tucking point), and yet I
feel duty-bound to devote at least as much space to them as I have done to
their Balderian counterparts, insofar as they are much more evocative of the psycho-metaphysico-aesthetic
orthodoxy of our own time. Now I
mentioned earlier that the cardinal virtue of the Rosan ethos was
“submission to the actualities of human nature,” and that the cardinal such actuality was the libido. The most crudely credo-esque wording of Rosa’s fetishization of the libido occurs in Letter 4 of Book IV, when, apropos of William’s news that he has recovered from a fit of melancholy paranoia immediately after a roll in the hay with the whore Bianca, he remarks, “It is, alas, no less humbling than true that your melancholy was more properly addressed by a medical inquiry than by a philosophical one. Bianca has cured you of an illness that no sage, no poet, no walk in the city or the country, no painting, no piece of music, could ever have cured.” This is wisdom that any adult born in the past half-century will have imbibed from a source scarcely less formative than his or her mother’s or wet-nurse’s tit, namely the second or third most-famous composition in the oeuvre of Marvin Gaye. If you are depressed, this wisdom apodictically argues, it is simply because you haven’t gotten laid recently. But earlier and elsewhere one sees that the Rosan ethos attributes to libidinal occlusion far more elaborate and highfalutin consequences than a mere transient attack of the quotidian blues. Appropriately enough, the first occasion forRosa ’s
specification of these consequences is presented by Balder in full-on bedridden,
voluntarily hallucinatory mode:
“submission to the actualities of human nature,” and that the cardinal such actuality was the libido. The most crudely credo-esque wording of Rosa’s fetishization of the libido occurs in Letter 4 of Book IV, when, apropos of William’s news that he has recovered from a fit of melancholy paranoia immediately after a roll in the hay with the whore Bianca, he remarks, “It is, alas, no less humbling than true that your melancholy was more properly addressed by a medical inquiry than by a philosophical one. Bianca has cured you of an illness that no sage, no poet, no walk in the city or the country, no painting, no piece of music, could ever have cured.” This is wisdom that any adult born in the past half-century will have imbibed from a source scarcely less formative than his or her mother’s or wet-nurse’s tit, namely the second or third most-famous composition in the oeuvre of Marvin Gaye. If you are depressed, this wisdom apodictically argues, it is simply because you haven’t gotten laid recently. But earlier and elsewhere one sees that the Rosan ethos attributes to libidinal occlusion far more elaborate and highfalutin consequences than a mere transient attack of the quotidian blues. Appropriately enough, the first occasion for
But I am also [i.e.,
like Balder] familiar with the charms that this ecstasy vouchsafes us; we
surmise that we are on intimate terms with the spirits that enchant us; the
soul bathes in the purest ethereal luster and forgets to return to earth; but
the power that the world refashions after the image contained within the
inflamed imagination soon dies; sensuality (for what other name is there for
such a phenomenon?) is exalted to so high a station that it finds the actual
world empty and prosaic; the less nutriment it receives from outside itself,
the more it glows with its own auto-generated light; it fashions new worlds for
itself and lets them perish; until at length the too-tautly stretched bowstring
snaps and a condition of total
flaccidity paralyzes the mind and renders us insusceptible to all pleasure;
everything withers, and eternal winter surrounds us.
If one were not familiar with the context of this
passage, one would have no choice but to regard it as a graphically
straightforward—albeit somewhat eccentrically worded—start-to-aftermath account
of an episode of male masturbation.
Indeed, in some places (especially the bit from “sensuality” to “prosaic”),
it recalls half-verbatim the language of Countess Blainville’s account of
male-female sexual congress, with the notable difference that the figure of
Venus is not present—and who by default can be regarded as her substitute if
not Priapus? But let us see how this
decidedly unsavory interpretation is inflected by our knowledge of the
context. Recall that from Balder’s point
of view, the “ecstasy” Rosa refers to has been induced by his close encounters
with the outlandish inhabitants of the spiritual realm, which is notionally the
absolute antipode of the realm of the “sensuality” from which Rosa asserts that this ecstasy hails.
Merely to assert that these encounters correspond to no objective state
of affairs, that they are “all in Balder’s head,” would require no great
intellectual dexterity on Rosa’s part, and indeed would relegate Rosa to the
company of such plodding, intellectually petit-bourgeois champions of
bastardized enlightenment as the pre-duel Wildberg, and leave Balder securely
one-up on Rosa. But to assert, as Rosa
actually does—and sympathetically at that, as if from first-hand
experience—that Balder’s visions are all in his cock, that they
constitute but a more self-sufficient and perhaps even superior way of getting
his rocks off than copulation–why, that requires brain-moxie of a
peculiarly resourceful and involuted sort, a sort that the West was not again
to see strut its stuff with such exhibitionistic testicular fortitude for
another eighty years or so. “Eighty
years?” you echo: “Why that would put the stuff-strutting at about the time of
the earliest published writings of—”
That’s right, DGR, that’s right—Siggie “Mitts off My Humidor, Punk!”
Frood. And naturally Rosa ’s analysis of Balder’s condition calls to mind the entire sheaf of
Freud’s early case studies on hysteria and psychosis. But the Rosan ethos’s proleptic affinities
with psychoanalysis extend far beyond the strictly diagnostic portion of
Freud’s corpus. Consider the following passage
from a high-Rosan epoch letter from William to Edward (the same earlier-cited
one [Book IV, No. 2] in which he expresses belated and misplaced gratitude to
“my worthy Moritimer”):
[T]o be sure, sensuality is nothing less than the
principal cog of our machine; it sets our existence in motion and imparts
gaiety and life to it; a crank turning inside us and lifting heavy loads with
light counterweights. Everything that we dreamingly term beautiful and noble
takes hold of this crank. Sensuality and lust are the spirit of music, of
painting and of all the arts; all human desires cluster around this magnetic
pole like gnats around a flame. The sense of beauty and the love of art are but
other dialects and accents of this language; they signify nothing more than the
human lust for sensual fulfillment; our drunken eyes feast themselves on every
enchanting form, on every poetic image; the tableaux before which delight
genuflects are nothing but preludes to sensual pleasure; every sound, every
artfully draped garment beckons it thither; accordingly, Boccaccio and Ariosto
are the greatest poets, and Titian and the wanton Correggio tower over
Domenichino and the pious Raphael.
I regard even religious devotion as a mere
drainage-channel for the unrefined sensual urge, which refracts into a thousand
manifold colors and casts a single coruscation on every hour of our
life.
This
carries us clear on through to the very late Freud of Civilization and Its
Discontents, for whom all the
products, practices, and institutions of polished, post-prehistoric human life
could be explained away as neurotic sublimations of the libido (albeit
admittedly in conjunction with the so-called death instinct, but the absence of
any mention of this second drive from the above passage simply goes to show
that Tieck in Module II Rosan mode was more of a Freudian than Freud himself). Here, too, in William’s hierarchy of Italian poets
and painters—which grants priority to those who frankly give vent to the
sensual urge over those who hypocritically pretend to deny it—we see a schematic
anticipation of Nietzsche’s eulogizing of unfettered “Dionysian” art to the detriment
of its restrained “Apollonian” opposite.
And vis-à-vis this proto-Nietzscheism, as with the Freudian prolepses,
it will not do to engage in any waistcoat watch pocket-thumbing cavils to the
effect of “although Nietzsche certainly lamented the passage of the Dionysian
age and its art, he by no means wholeheartedly disparaged their Apollonian
successors ,” for such subtle give-and-take-ism, while faithful to the actual textual
Nietzschean legacy, forms no part of the popular Nietzschean legacy,
which has always figured Nietzsche as the heroic
arch-scourge of anemic, tight-assed, asexual Apollonianism and the
equally heroic arch-champion of full-blooded, booty-shakin‘, every-available-orifice-penetratin‘
Dionysianism; and to the extent that William Lovell’s Module II Rosanism
preemptively streamlines Nietzsche’s aesthetics into something more nearly
resembling this schema, it shows itself to be farther ahead of the Weltgeistial
curve than The Birth of Tragedy itself.
Thus, as implicitly promised, I have demonstrated
(or at least so I flatter myself) how Module II Rosanism is pungently “evocative of the psycho-metaphysico-aesthetic
orthodoxy of our time.” What,
then, of the psycho-metaphysico-aesthetic ethoses of Module III? Surely anything discoverable there is bound
to come across as a gratuitous pleonasm or, what is worse, an anticlimax. Surely the early twenty-first century critic of
antient fcreeds is but a handmaid or pissboy to the movie director or theater
producer looking to tog out the dramatis personae of some moth-eaten powdered wig-opera
in fluorescent chartreuse Brazilian-flaunting onesy-kinis; surely his mission
consists exclusively in showing how the author of or characters inhabiting his
assigned text are just like us (who have indeed all had Brazilians and
do indeed take our Sunday afternoon promenade in fluorescent chartreuse
onesy-kinis right?), such that to go on writing about this text after having
shown as much smacks of union-busting work off the clock and without pay. Surely the present writer would do better to
fold, knock off, or punch out while he is ahead. Surely, to be sure, I would, if the various
orthodoxies of the present constituted the furthermost limit of this particular
moth-eaten powdered wig-opera[2]’s
possible range of insight. But I see William
Lovell’s range of insight extending, in its Third Module, far beyond that
pseudo-limit, and indeed to insights scarcely likely to be entertained on a
demographically significant scale even centuries hence. I hinted at the structure if not quite at the
nature of these insights when I wrote that Module III the “metaphysical
continental ethoses of Module II bleed[…] over into the thoughts and actions of
the non-eponymous Britain-based personages of Module I,” and I singled out
Walter Lovell’s deathbed meditations as inaugurating this into-bleeding. Now that the reader is better acquainted with
the metaphysical continental ethoses of Module II, he will doubtless readily
appreciate in the following passage from these meditations the depth of their
indebtedness to those ethoses:
I have
looked down into the valley of death, and now all of the beings of this world
are staggering vacuously and prosaically into and out of my gaze. They are all
specters that do not even know each other, such that when one of them passes by
another and utters a few empty words to him, the latter responds by making some
unintelligible gesture. How fallow has everything since seemed to me, and how
chaotically confused it all is, like the turbid and indiscernible shadows of an
old-fashioned painting. I can hardly recall what happened even yesterday; my
soul wanders through the landscape of futurity; I contemplate myself as I would
a stranger, and yearn for the moment of my death.
In its spectral and tenebrous imagery, in
its up-pointing of the apparent impossibility of intersubjective
communication—above and most terrifyingly of all, in its expression of
incredulity in the continuity of experience, this passage is pure Module
II Balder. But the author of these
Balderian ravings is not some visionary (or harebrained) twenty-something
would-be Christopher Columbus of the spiritual realm, but rather a mature
(fifty-something?), seasoned, grounded man of the world who a matter of months
earlier could get worked up over nothing more ethereal or less mundane than hitching
his son to a socially well-placed bride.
“Fair enough,” you mock-concede, before demurring, thus: “but a matter
of months earlier this selfsame man of the world was if not exactly in the pink
of health then at least not irretrievably resigned to sinking first ever deeper
into the blue of disease and finally into the black of decease. Surely any man at death’s door may be granted
a license to hallucinate and rant.” But
this demurral is tantamount to question-begging of the most unregenerately
shameless sort. A solidly prudential, mondaine
worldview should be unshakeable even by the hand of death, such that if any
fast adherent of such a worldview must go out hallucinating and ranting, it
behooves him to hallucinate and rant, like Shakespeare’s Earl of Warwick, about
how his “parks, walks, and manors forsake him,” rather than about what a dark, incoherent,
and lonely experience life has been.
That in his last moments a seemingly fast adherent to such a worldview
cannot help effectively turning into Module II Balder suggests that at least at
this stage of the novel Tieck regards Balderian madness as our default and
destined state, from which all prudential endeavors constitute so many futile
lunges. Even so, at this point, it is at
least still possible to regard the prudential worldview in a certain heroic,
albeit tragic, light. Considered merely
in the light of all the correspondence that has preceded it, Walter Lovell’s
deathbed notes suggest that while it is beyond the powers of even the most
ardent fans of property and propriety to keep up their enthusiasm until the
bitter end, such maintenance nevertheless can do much to sweeten and ennoble
the not inconsiderable duration of the beginning and middle in which it is still
practicable.
All comparatively cheering intimations
of this sort are summarily tossed into the wastebasket with the presentation of
a remarkable postscript and companion piece to the Lovellian last testament,
namely, the diary of Lord Burton (Book VII, Letter No. 7), compiled over a
stretch of several decades, from his adolescence through to his death not long
after that of his contemporary, youth-hood friend, and adulthood arch-enemy,
Walter Lovell. To be sure, until now, the
moment of this document’s appearance, we have not learned much of the elder Burton
My ardor never tempts me to forget myself; no [mere] story
can transport me into a potentially damaging [rapture of] enthusiasm. My gaze
is always centered on the large and involute tapestry of human life, and I feel
that I am transforming myself into the central point of this tableau, that I
must turn my eyes back on to myself lest I reel with giddiness. At bottom everybody speaks a language that
is completely different from that of other people. Hence I can change my
circumstances and my odds only according to the rules of my [own] mode of
thinking and acting; and all people meet and pursue a single path because they
all set out from the same basic principle. A parti-colored web is [thus] woven,
[a web] on which everyone works according to his ability and insight; everyone
regards his own part of the work as the most indispensable part, and yet
everyone would be useless in the absence of everyone else.
This
passage certainly starts out seemingly grounded in an adamantine faith in the rough-and-tumble
primacy of here-and-now social intercourse: it asserts Burton Burton Burton
Fortunately for the reader bemused by this
incongruity, in a Burton diary entry “written not long after” the one
incorporating the conceit of the tapestry, Tieck provides the logical missing
link between resignedly autistic Burton and Burton the smug master manipulator
of human marionettes. This entry consists
entirely of a remarkably thorough and incisive character study of the great and
notorious revolutionary warrior and post-revolutionary statesman Oliver
Cromwell. “I have always taken offence,”
the study begins, “upon hearing or reading the name Cromwell used to
point the moral of some cautionary tale of human depravity and degeneracy.” By such a “cautionary tale” Burton Burton Burton
A quarter of a century after penning this entry, at
the age of forty-four, Burton
And yet, incredible as it sounds, the most
spectacular and devastating implications of this epistemological head-standing
act have yet to be demonstrated, witnessed, or felt; its other and infinitely
weightier shoe—evidently this EH-SA is club-footed (yes, yes, yes, like the not-unLovellesque
Lord Byron)—has yet to drop. For a
moment’s thought will remind us that Lord Burton’s successful spiritualized
prudentialism has a less heartening logical corollary. Briefly put, this corollary amounts to
this—that the portals leading to the spiritual realm (a.k.a. the realm of
madness) from the prudential realm cannot but be two-way entrances. You see (or, rather, will already have seen, having
thought the aforementioned moment’s thought by now), if it is practicable even
for the most outwardly sensible, down-to-earth sort of chap or chappess to talk
himself or herself into believing that he or she is God’s chosen instrument of
justice, a puppeteer for whom all the rest of the world is a Punch and Judy-stage,
or what have you, it must be equally practicable for such a chap or chappess to
be talked into believing something equally at-first-blushedly implausible. For after all, the only material the
auto-suggester has to work on is his own psyche, and that medium perforce lies
exposed to manipulation by any Tom, Dick, Harry, or indeed, William
Otherman who wants to have his own go at shaping it. “I smell a segue[3]
in the italicized W-name in the preceding catalogue.” And you smell aright. “Good.
But as yet the segue[4]
only leads me up a blind trail. For as
near as I can remember William Lovell never reports having so much as exchanged
two words with the elder Burton Burton
There is no need for you to make any suggestive sniffing
sounds this time round, DGR; as I trust that that double carriage return
immediately after the dropping of the big C-name signals with sufficient
semiotic indubitability the onset of a mighty segue into a mightily long
paragraph centering on We All Know Who or Whom. And so it does, but as obdurately as I am convinced
that Signor Cosimo deserves such overstated typographical heraldry, I
nonetheless feel almost duty-bound to apologize in advance for the flagrant
unspectacularity of the observations on his significance that I am about to
proffer. For there is certainly no
denying that AC is a spectacular
character, or indeed that he is the most spectacular character in the entire
novel, its eponym very much not excepted.
Who among us is capable of beginning to read any WL letter after
the first one penned by Cosimo (No. 20 of Book I [quoted above]), with its
ominous use of the royal “us”--suggestive of an infinitely extensive and
implacable network of Mafiosi or KGB agents—without posing to himself the
question, “Will this be the letter in which the horrible truth about AC
is revealed?” Who among us can help
participating in William’s thrill of horrified revulsion at AC’s features—“one
of his eyes staring directly ahead, the other turned askance in a slight
squint; a mouth that seemed at first to be smiling, but on closer inspection
was simply itching to show its teeth” (Book III, Letter 10)? And who among us, having twigged (aeons
before William himself) that this hideously uncanny creature, Andrea Cosimo,
and Walter Lovell’s scourge Waterloo ,
are one and the same person, can help pondering why such a person would go to
such elaborate and unscrupulous lengths to destroy the happiness of a fellow
human being (assuming that he, Waterloo/Cosimo, even is human)? WAU can fail to be impressed by his power to
attract into his orbit that circle of young intellectual heavyweights, the
so-called Secret Society, by these young men’s disposition to “bow down before
him as before a higher being” (Book VI, Letter 8) despite their own unexampled “calm intellectual fertility,” by
the supineness with which the most “whimsical” and “jocular” among them,
Francesco, has been transformed into a “grave and venerable” sage under
Andrea’s aegis; to say nothing of the quite unfiguratively spectacular feats of
conjuration by which he places William in touch with the ghosts of his father,
of Rosaline, even of the beloved pet dog of his boyhood years. And finally, who among us can fail to be both
impressed and horrified by Andrea’s remarkable feats of self-replication
(or self-teleportation), as attested to in Rosa’s last letter (Book V, Letter
10) before a long, four book-spanning silence—by his naturally impossible
appearance first at Rosa’s side, then in the ruined church in company with the
creepy bloke with the shovel, and finally at Rosa’s front doorstep, all within
the span of perhaps a few-dozen minutes; to say nothing of his even more
mind-boggling TV-weathermanesque bodily insertion of himself into the surreal
fabric of Module-II Balder’s delirious visions.
By this point, any application to Andrea of the dreaded “M” adjective[5]—that
adjective that by law must be included in any discussion, written or oral, of die
Romantik –would seem perforce to eventuate in a gross understatement of the
scope and nature of his apparent powers.
For M************s enjoys command in a full sense only of the inanimate
forces of the external world (in which bailiwick one must include his merely
transportational control over the likes of Helen of Troy and Alexander the
Great); when attempting to sway or alter the human psyche he is obliged to
avail himself of the humble rhetorical tools of Joe Mortal—flattery, buffaloing
braggadocio, and threats. (The whole
moral/metaphysical gist of the Faust story, after all, derives from the
fact that Faust chooses to sell his soul.) In contrast, early Book-VI Andrea appears to
exert complete volitional dominion over both the internal and external worlds:
not only can he apparently conjure up the spirits of the dead, but he can also
(apparently), like a veritable psychic alchemist, alter the thoughts, the
temperaments, and the wills of other people to suit his fancy. And yet by this point, I would argue, we have
still not been properly introduced to Andrea, and so this super-M*************n
Andrea is but a characterological bubble, fully burstable by the first
down-to-size-cutting factoid about the real Andrea revealed posterior to this
proper introduction, which I would argue is made only in Letter 13 of Book VI. Mind you, DGR, I would not go so far as to write
off all the above-cited bits of Andreaiana as so much foreplay or upbuilding,
for in an epistolary novel the distinction between when a character is present
and when he or she is absent is never as clear-cut as in a play or a novel of
the “traditional” (from an early twenty-first century point-of-view)
omnisicentally narrated sort. In an
epistolary novel, the episodes in which a character figures most prominently in
point of sheer volume of name-guano—viz., letters penned by people other than
himself—are often those in which his activities impinge least on the novel’s
plot (the identification of which is itself a contentious matter in this
genre), and in which the fidelity to life of the character-strokes is most
dubious (here once again I would not be taken to make too much of the so-called
unreliable narrator—for the dubiety is at least as often owing to the
verisimilitudinous marginality of the character to the letter-writer’s agenda
as to some authorially engineered fatal blind-spot thanks to which the
letter-writer reveals in perfect negative the character’s complete portrait). On the other hand, the episodes in which he
is nominally most present, namely his own letters, are also those in which he
is in a certain respect most absent—i.e., in that for their duration he cannot
be observed even obliquely from without as an agent. All these casuistic “When Does Life
Begin?”-esque concessions to ambiguity of inception having been granted, I would
and indeed will and shall argue that Book VI, Letter 13, Andrea’s first letter
to William, marks the first appearance of the real Andrea, of Andrea in all his
naked septuagenarian Andreity. For from
the very beginning (excuse me-- pseudo-beginning), viz. that first V.
Putin or M. Brando-esque letter to Rosa, we have had a hunch that Andrea has
designs of some sort on William, a hunch that has since been drawing
asymptotically ever nearer to being transformed into a dead certainty, and has
maintained the character of a de facto one since Letter 6 of Book V (Rosa to
Andrea; the letter in which R. hazards the jealous “suspicion that you are
devoting yourself more tenderly to young Lovell” than to R. himself); such that
in Andrea’s first letter to William we have come to expect to be presented with
what we have come to regard as the keynote of Andrea’s character—viz., his telos
and modus operandi as a would-be William-poacher. We have heard plenty about all these
fantastic stratagems by which Andrea has attempted to capture young Lovell’s
will; now at last we are to be vouchsafed a glimpse at one such stratagem in
the word qua flesh, and from this glimpse we hope to glean insights into both
the nature of Andrea’s power and the purpose for which he is exerting it on
William. What we actually get in this
letter is a tad underwhelming, to say the least, on both counts. For in the first place, it shows Andrea to
have no overt interest in anything but the sort of abstract philosophizing that
we have already received in shedloads from several other characters—from
Balder, from Rosa, from Lord Burton; indeed, from William himself: the letter begins “Admittedly, my dear
William, we are deceived by everything both within and without ourselves…” as
if picking up the thread of an earlier disquisition, and squarely in the inadhominable
realm of collective “we”-ness, and concludes in an even more abstract vein,
with a sentence bereft of a single noun that even the dimmest misconstruction
could contrive to apply to the alienable circumstances of a specific person:
“But nature resists with all her might, [for these] are curious prodigies that
recoil in horror from themselves; the seams are torn apart, the mind peers into
existence and the objective world directly, without the senses and without the
intermediary mirror of the understanding, and the body is racked by violent
convulsions.” Hence we gather that
whatever Andrea’s intentions may be, his means of trying to realize them are
utterly unoriginal. In the second place,
the argument set forth in this mode is one with whose gist William has already
been familiar for donkey’s months. “Only
in sensuality,” Andrea writes, “can we comprehend ourselves, and it governs and
orders the web that we perpetually believe is set in motion by our mind. All
plans and designs know themselves to be founded entirely upon this
[phenomenon].” In substance, and partly
even in words, this is of course pure Module II Rosan materialism, which we
have already seen most eloquently expounded by Module II William. Of course this letter, for all its anticlimacticity,
is only one letter; and if it were followed by a stream of letters in a
completely different and AC-redeeming vein we would soon forget it or write it
off as a false start. But as it is in fact
only the first of two AC-penned letters (apart from the final testament, which
is a special case to be separately addressed), and its successor (Book V,
Letter 18) is merely a three-sentence goodbye note, we are really left with no
choice, throughout the best part of the last third of the novel, but that of
regarding Andrea as a rather derivatively dull fellow. But that he should seem so is entirely in
keeping with these two letters’ essential if covert function of paving the way
for the fourth and final module of the novel , a module that may perhaps most
aptly if not most elegantly be dubbed that of The Reprosification (or
Reaustenization) of the World. In this
module, the heartily sane prudential outlooks of Module I make something of a
comeback, a comeback that they naturally achieve only at the expense of the
less salubrious ethoses of the middle modules, and that Tieck would seem to
want us to mistake for an outright triumph. The fact that it is not such an outright
triumph makes the demarcation of its beginning a rather tricky and contentious
operation–for no sooner have you alighted upon a robust, Module I-esque,
Austen-friendly gesture of obeisance to the social collectivity than the very
next letter turns out to be an apparently equally robust articulation of some
unwholesome Module II or III-esque
antithesis; and indeed the fact that the very last letter in the novel (Book
X, Letter 26—Charles to Mortimer) is itself a barely qualified negation of
Module I-ism makes it devilishly difficult to prove that Module IV even exists. Nonetheless, if pressed to specify the latest
possible proper beginning, a proper terminus ad quem, to a properly
extant Module IV, I would pinpoint it at Letter 4 of Book VII, the letter
addressed to William by Francesco just before William’s departure for England
and the sojourn that will witness (among several other enormities) his
seduction and abandonment of Emily. (I
mention everything past “Francesco” in the preceding sentence by way of
informing or reminding the reader of just how alive and kicking Module III
still is at this point.) The most
salient attribute of this letter qua module-delimiter is its tone, which
is best described as overwhelmingly jocular. Francesco begins by ribbing William over his
resentment at being walked in on in coito, goes on to poke fun at his
(Francesco’s) own corpulence and indolence, and concludes by proffering a
succession of nudge-nudge wink-wink-ish aphorisms centering on various
travel-related trivia (“Never stay attached to a girl in one town for more than
a day,” “Postilions are at their best when they are half drunk,” etc.). All fine and good-stroke-well and dandy until
one recalls the particulars of the last (and first) reference to Francesco
(Book VI, Letter 8), in which he is described—by William—as a former joker
turned “grave and venerable” sage thanks to Andrea; whereupon one does a
so-called double take and wonders whether one should not set one’s time machine
for Book VI, Letter 7 at the latest. But
by and by Occam’s razor comes to the rescue and whispers to one the suggestion
that the transformation remarked by William either didn’t take place or didn’t
take. And sure enough, when we next meet
Francesco, he is serving as the auditor of a confession by his fellow Secret
Society member Adriano; a confession in which Adriano acknowledges the
factitiousness of his own ensagement—“At a few of [Andrea’s nocturnal
gatherings] I was foolish enough to do a bit of declaiming for the sake of
winning the admiration of a passel of blockheads”—and begs Francesco to
acknowledge that his own Andrean-inspired vaticinations were a put-on, which
Francesco very obligingly does in his reply.
From these two peripheral figures the taint of Andrea-affiliated
lameness spreads to Rosa, who, the reader will recall, we have not heard from
since Book V, Letter 10, when he felt himself at the mercy of an Andrea whom he
seemed to regard as little short of an omniscient deity. Now, in his reply (Book IX, Letter 4) to
Francesco’s counsel-seeking letter, he admits that while he is still unable to
shake off the Cosimoan yoke, his attachment to Andrea arises not from any
conviction of his greatness but rather from a combination of inertia, nostalgic
egoism, and weakness of will: “If I were to renounce him I would be giving up
along with him everything that holds me together; I have done so much to become
like him, and all of it would now have been in vain!” What a far and abject cry is this servile
wretch from the suave, effortlessly self-commanding Valmontesque Rosa we were
introduced to way back in Book II! But
even now that Rosa is out of the way, there remains quite a big Balder-shaped
matzoh ball to be dispatched; for while Lord Burton’s jet-setting transactions
with the spiritual realm may have rather cast Balder’s feeble daytrips therteo
in the shade, Balder remains a compelling Module II norm in that in contrast to
Rosa he has always been, as they say, his own man; he has never knowingly been
subject to another person’s will.
Accordingly, Tieck causes William’s return route from Britain
to Italy to pass
by a significantly “grated” window behind which he espies Balder’s face. All seems normal with the Baldster during
William’s subsequent catching-up breakfast with him, indeed one might almost
say that it is too normal for comfort: his eyes are unprecedentedly “serene and
untroubled”; he is “both gayer and more human than he had been when I first met
him at Paris.” Sure enough, a spell of
painful reminiscing about the death of his second great love, a woman he has
met and married since William last saw him, is enough to precipitate his
transformation first into the melancholy, brooding, quasi-nihilistic Balder of
old, and then into the full-blown, rabid, homicidal and suicidal loony that it
transpires is now his default self. Finally
and conveniently, as if by way of rubbing in just how un-cut out for the real
world he has become, only two days later this new and decidedly unimproved Balder
dies without having enjoyed a moment of lucidity in the interval. “Would it not appear,” William reflects in memoriam,
“that madness was bequeathed to this unfortunate man at his birth? He at first
passed through all of the gradations of madness only slowly, but upon falling
in love a second time he was driven with ever-accelerating speed to the utmost
extremity of delirium.” In a word--or a
dozen or so of them—Balder’s bent for the fantastic turns out to have a much
more straightforward and ineluctable, and therefore much more prosaic, cause
than (as Rosa conjectured) the sublimation of the libido—namely, genes (unless
viruses can be inherited). Balder could
not have helped going mad because nature made him a madman; William, on the
other hand, need never fear going mad because nature made him sane—as of now the
partition is as comfortably simple, stark, and impassable as that. It is a pity that William’s itinerary has
brought him so far afield of England :
for at this moment he is in just the right frame of mind to take a Hogarthian tour
of Bedlam.
Speaking of England, all this while (meaning since about the second
half of Book VIII), Tieck has been doing his best to restore the status quo
ante chez the tiny remainder of his original fabulae personae who are still
alive and resident north of the Channel.
Out of Mortimer’s hunt for the absconded Emily, the author scares up a
bride for Edward in Betty, “the daughter of a decayed nobleman” (actually only
a knight, but caste distinctions do not translate well) (Book VIII, Letter 29),
who supplies him from the beginning with all the undivided affection previously
denied to him by his sister, and eventually with a daughter “whom we have named
Amalie” (Book X, Letter 29). And as
meanwhile Amalie (the other, grown-up one) has borne Mortimer a son, the two
old ex-bachelors now have a perfectly plausible excuse to spend their remaining
textual balance swapping child-rearing advice and planning their very
1950s-esque future as next-door neighbors as though that awful William person
were some psycho-loser type they had only read about in the papers and
Mortimer’s former constant epistolary companion were not now roaming about
Europe in a monomaniacal homicidal frenzy.
But the true, animavorous potency of Module IV’s revelations
and resettings can be fully appreciated only in the light of Andrea’s final
testament (Book X, Letter 20), which provides the same sort of key to this module
as was furnished to Modules II and III, respectively, by the testaments of
Walter Lovell and Lord Burton. From
William’s point of view, of course, this testament is most significant in
revealing to him that from the get-go—that is to say, long before he ever met
him, and indeed before he began to receive secondhand reports on him from Rosa,
and possibly indeed from the moment of his birth—Andrea has never had the
slightest interest in him as anything but a passive agent of his (Andrea’s) own
cupidity and vindictiveness. Being the
elder Burton ’s uncle,
Andrea/Waterloo has always been within two or three legatees’ remove from sole
legal possession of all that family’s property.
During the elder Burton’s youth, he tried to jump the inheritance queue
by serving as a kind of silent partner in young Burton’s attempt to acquire the
Milford and Lovell estates, and when that failed he began to set his bloodthirsty
and money-grubbing sights on the next generation of Lovells and Burtons. Originally, in influencing William through
Rosa, Andrea sought merely to exact revenge on Walter Lovell by “mak[ing] you
rebel against your father; you would then fall out with him and with yourself;
then I would send you back to England,” where William presumably was to have
felt parricidally incensed enough to bump off Walter. But then as luck would miraculously have it,
William managed to make Walter die by remote control, so to speak, via his
epistolary negligence; and Walter’s death was shortly followed by the equally
apparently natural one of the elder Burton . A/W was thus free to reactivate his old plan
of trying to get hold of the Burton
estate, and accordingly William was reprogrammed to attack Emily with the
shafts of Cupid and Edward with the drafts of the Roman god of poison (whose
name unhappily escapes me). But because A/W
preferred not to divulge his true identity to William (and so presumably was
obliged to keep cloaking his intentions in the dodgy garb of disinterested
materialism), William ended up “execut[ing]”at least the Edwardian half of
these “commissions….like a boy ignoramus” in allowing his poor manservant Willy[6]
to poison himself in Edward’s stead; and with the failure of this attempt ended
both William’s utility for A/W and A/W’s compunction about giving vent to the
full tide of his contempt for William.
Taken on its own this is all, as I said, naturally very devastating news
for our nominal hero, but for us it merely confirms our long-harbored suspicion
that William was a bit of a sap and reaffirms our discovery that A/W was much
more than a bit of a mountebank. (In the
course of this reaffirmation A/W also reveals that he was the old man in
Balder’s delirious daydreams, as if by way of allowing Tieck to assert once
again with Gerald Ford-esque tenacity, There is no such thing as the so-called
spiritual realm.) But the really
gamily meaty revelations about A/W—the ones that provide the much deeper and
infinitely more demoralizing proper metaphysical bottom to these—actually come
much earlier in the testament, in its purely autobiographical portion. Early in life, A/W tells us, he was
disappointed in his love for a girl named Antonia, who, though “she was
friendlier towards me than towards many other people,” did not love him and
married another man. Later, in the
fruitless course of trying to woo Maria Milford away from Walter Lovell, he found
himself developing a “concupiscence” for her that he came to regard as a
“love…even stronger than my first youthful passion, for Antonia.” But she was even less enthralled by him than
Antonia had been and “recoil[ed] from [him] completely, like a flower from a
cold shadow.” By then, though, he knew
better than to be surprised by such feminine cold-shoulderdom, for in between
the two amours, during his first self-exile on the Continent,
I had heard from a so-called
confidant of mine that there was something about my face that put off other
people from the start; a hidden repulsiveness that was impossible to describe
exactly, that by turns made me ridiculous and an object of fear. But now I knew
why people hated and persecuted me: because my nose did not look quite as they
wanted it to look, they found me reprehensible.
This passage provides us with the true key to all of A/W’s
machinations, namely, injured vanity, the vanity of a man so abominably ugly
that no woman will sleep with him and no man will make friends with him. What is more, this key proves to be skeletonesque
when we apply it to certain key, erm, make that pivotal, moments in
William’s history. The reader will or at
least should recall (it was, after all, only 150,000 or so words ago) a remark
made by Countess Blainville during her seduction of William: “I heard little of
what he said; his features, his fine physique, his blazing eyes distracted me:
he is one of the handsomest men I have so far ever seen.” This single half-sentence is the only
description of William’s physical person we ever get (and indeed one of the
very few we get of any of the novel’s characters), but juxtaposed with the
above-quoted passage it says enough to explain (or at any rate, to present a
revised explanation of) the better part of the plot of the entire book. For say what one will about William (and one shall
find plenty of bad things to say about him, willy-nilly), he has never had any
trouble pulling the birds, and has had a noticeably much easier time pulling
them than any of the novel’s other young male characters—Charles, Mortimer,
Edward, even the acknowledged super-playahh Rosa. Indeed, in relation to other men’s romantic
schemes, William seems to function as a sort of inexorable if gormless cock-blocker,
voiding the field in his favor whenever he comes within radar detectable
propinquity to a member of the Sex. Emily,
as we have already seen, throws Charles overboard the instant she sets her eyes
on an available William; Mortimer secures the matrimonial hand of Amalie only
in the capacity of a pis aller appropriating the sloppy seconds of the
true custodian of her heart, young Lovell; and Rosa’s little kept girl Blondine
fancies William so much that she risks her life in defending him from an attack
of armed brigands. (Interestingly, the
only woman who even temporarily avoids succumbing to the Lovellian mojo is the
peasant girl Rosaline—I say that she avoids succumbing thereunto in that
although she is clearly smitten by William from very early on, it is only after
learning of the death of her fiancé that she consents to coition with him.) And he achieves all these conquests in the
apparent total absence of woomanly charm or finesse, without resorting to a
word of flattery or a grain of bribery, by simply being his glum, stroppy,
uncommunicative self at all times to all women.
Is it any wonder that a man like A/W, a man utterly devoid of personal
beauty in a world in which such beauty unabetted by any other attribute or
power can procure the unconditional submission of half the human race, should
both wish to annihilate a man like William and find him incredibly useful as an
intermediary?
So here, at Module’s and novel’s end, we have apparently
overshot Jane Austen along the prosiness axis and finished up at a worldview
perhaps most reminiscent of Michel Houellebecq–a worldview in which the
biological facts of human existence have been both fully taken into account and
radically embourgeoisé (I would write embourgeoisfied if I could
alight on a reasonable spelling of it that stood the remotest chance of eliciting
the pronunciation I have in mind for it).
“Yes,” Tieck’s last word of the novel seems to read, “pace Module
II Rosa and William (and Freud), sensuality is indeed ‘nothing less than the
principal cog of our machine,’ but it has no need of such sublimating
escapement mechanisms as art and religious devotion. Those, like William, whose physical beauty
makes the enjoyment of sensual pleasure readily accessible to them indulge in
this enjoyment openly and ad libitum.
If they eventually crash and burn they will do so not for lack of
opportunity to make good but for failure to recognize the power at their
disposal. Those, like Mortimer and
Charles, who are less than overwhelmingly physically prepossessing must work to
secure their sensual fix, often in tandem with the unpleasant realization that
their embrace will never be entirely welcome to their intended
co-coitionists. Finally, those, like
Andrea, who are downright physically repulsive, must resign themselves to a
lifetime of involuntary chastity. If
they subsequently engage in activities that smack of the altar or the artist’s
studio with varying degrees of pungency, they do so not by unconscious way of
sublimating their unfulfilled sexual urges, but by deliberate way of getting
even with their more beautiful contemporaries.
That their vindictive schemes ultimately come to naught (in that these
handsomer foes survive them) proves that physical beauty is indeed fortune’s
trump card.” (SITS, this otherwise
all-embracing schema does not impinge on the likes of Balder, whose genetic
destiny impels him to fall to pieces in the teeth of a reasonably successful
rapport with the Sex.)
This denouement has much to recommend it from a purely
formally aesthetic point of view: the figure who all along seemed to be the
novel’s center of power, an inexorable black hole drawing every person and
thing ever closer to its annihilating maw, has turned out to be a red dwarf paradoxically
fueled by the figure who has all along seemed to be the least self-controlled
of the novel’s characters, the one most susceptible to the gravitational
influence of others. At the same time it
(i.e., the denouement) is awfully demoralizing in seeming to offer as its last
word the decidedly ignoble prescription “Settle down and procreate with the
most attractive co-coitionist your beauty points can land you.” But one must beware of judging William
Lovell too exactingly. For in the
first place, technically speaking the actual Kraftsmittelpunkt of the
novel—at least insofar as the old Baconian equation of knowledge with power
holds up—is not Andrea/Waterloo but Lord
Burton, and it remains self-sustainingly operative at the novel’s end. We are obliged to acknowledge this upon adding
the two of Andrea’s concession that his nephew was “more than a match for me”
and that “even if I was his uncle, I could not forbear feeling quietly awed in
his presence” to the two of Burton’s verdict (delivered in the diary) on Uncle Waterloo (“He
believes he has everything because he has wit; he supposes that he understands
people well enough because he knows merely how to make them laugh; perhaps he
would have made a good comic playwright, but in social intercourse he is a
washout”) and coming up with the four that Lord Burton occupies the
epistemologically un-bestable seat of the one who sees through the one who sees
through all others. And we must remember
that this same Lord Burton is something of a mystic whose ruthlessly cynical
impulsion to material self-aggrandizement is but the surface manifestation of a
liaison with realms and depths of experience in which sensuality plays no part,
and from whose perspective it would seem too trivial a motive for enterprises
of the slightest pitch or moment. So at
its heart—a heart that admittedly has been cruelly marginalized by novel’s end—William
Lovell inculcates a far creepier prescription than the Houellebecquian one,
namely, “Stop at nothing in attempting to get the better of your fellow human
beings, lest in yielding to them you cease to believe in yourself and thereby
lose your lifeline with the mysterious un-human forces that truly call the
shots both ici-bas and in the hereafter.”
In the second place, we must remember in the fullest most
multifarious sense the world from which William Lovell emerged and
whither that world was headed. For
example/starters: WL’s similarity in certain parts and respects to a
Jane Austen novel, the similarity I made so much of at the beginning of this
essay, is neither fortuitous nor
nugatory; such that both 1) one cannot really get away with merely using this
similarity for purely heuristic purposes as I have so far done, and 2) by
explaining why WL is as much like a Jane Austen novel as it is one may
hope to begin to appreciate why it need
not apologize either for not being exactly like one or for not being
even more un-Austenian and “modern.” Tieck
and Austen were virtual exact contemporaries—he was born in 1773, she in 1775. Had these dates been 1673/5 or 1873/5, one
would not have much justification for making much of them, for in the late
seventeenth century non-scholarly books by English authors were hardly read at
all on the Continent, and by the late nineteenth century the German language
had a hefty narrative prose tradition of its own in relation to which new
novelists and short story writers were obliged to orient themselves. But in the 1780s, Tieck’s and Austen’s
formative decade, Britain had been banging out and exporting novels by the tens
of thousands (copies not titles), for getting on for three generations, whereas
the German language still had to its name but one proper modern narrative prose
classic, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. Now, before I go any farther (or should it be
“further”?) I shall beg of you, DGR, a dozen or so seconds that I may disclaim the
remotest consanguinity of my argument with any vile Whiggish tubthumper’s
screed of the “they didn’t have television in those days” variety. Far be it from me, DGR, to insinuate that the
Germanophone reader of the 1780s had no choice but to read English
novels, for after all, he could have chosen not to read novels at all, to have
said to John Bull, “Peddle your long tales elsewhere, Herr Stier, for I
am quite content with my Luther Bible and my Klopstock odes.” In that case, of course, to misquote Charles
Rosen ever so slightly, “the history of literature would have been very
different.” But as things turned out
they did want to read novels and therefore were obliged to read English
ones—chief among them those of Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne. And so Ludwig Tieck and Jane Austen grew up
on broadly identical reading diets despite living in two different countries
separated by seven hundred or so miles, a language, and thousands of
substantial divergences in the organization of political and social life. And so, in writing a novel of his own, Ludwig
Tieck found it scarcely less natural than Jane Austen did to set it partly in a
small collection of expansive English country estates peopled by well-behaved
if slightly eccentric rural English ladies and gentlemen, along with their
servants. (When people ask me what
business a book with a title like William Lovell has being originally
written in German at all, I have a devil of a time convincing them that my
author merely hearkened to that much reviled but still incessantly quoted hoary
so-called creative writing-teacher’s maxim “Write what you know”; because Pamela,
Tristram Shandy, et al. were what he knew, at least as a reader.) And so (finally), one finds Ludwig Tieck not
only imitating the English novelists but also acknowledging his debt to them—not
without a tinge of irony—in a series of explicit references both general
(Countess Blainville likens the prim demeanor she is obliged to assume in
seducing William to that of “one of those insufferably sententious, windbaggish
heroines of the English novels” [Book II, Letter 15) and specific (Charles
writes of having formerly “exercised my memory” by “learning by heart passages
of Tristram Shandy, and tells Mortimer that he expects him to
metamorphose into “the living, incarnate presence of Sir Charles Grandison,” [Book
VIII, Letter 8], the eponym of Richardson’s last novel ). But the English writer whose name and works
are mentioned most often in William Lovell was neither a novelist nor a
native of the eighteenth century. I am
referring here to William Shakespeare.
Whether an “of course” should have been included in the preceding
sentence is debatable. I am certainly
not one of those tendentious futators who earn their daily bread (or at least
the non-pedagogically dependent part of it) arguing that the English
Romantics—i.e., for present purposes, Tieck’s mostly junior contemporaries—“invented”
the Shakespeare we all know and revere (or at least know that we are supposed
to revere) as The Greatest Writer Ever.
Certainly he had effectively attained that title in Britain
decades before the oldest of the ERs (except perhaps Blake) were twinkles in
their respective daddies’ okies.
(Consider in proof of this assertion David Garrick’s 1769 Stratford
Jubilee and the young Edward Gibbon’s schoolyard-wimpish self-consciousness as
a non-Bardolatrous Francophile.) And
even in Germany
the Bard’s plays were repeatedly if sporadically performed by touring theater
troupes from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Nevertheless, it is quasi-demonstrably true
that Tieck’s generation of German readers were the first for whom Shakespeare
was required reading even within that small portion of it who could read
English. (The best-known of the novels,
I should perhaps mention, were always available in translation.) What I
meantersay, then, is that Shakespeare was alive, vital, and
quasi-contemporaneous for late eighteenth-century Germans in a way he had not
been for native Anglophones since the early 16-oughties if not even earlier. When in the preface to his 1765 Shakespeare
edition Samuel Johnson wrote that there was “perhaps not one” Shakespeare
“play, which, if it were now exhibited as the work of a contemporary writer,
would be heard to the conclusion,” he was merely recording the low-water mark
of a recession of the British play-goer’s sympathy with the Bard that was already
well underway in Shakespeare’s lifetime.
In the late eighteenth century Britons may have revered Shakespeare more
than ever before but they also identified with him (as we would say nowadays) less
than ever before; and they would certainly never have dreamt of deliberately,
transparently imitating him in their own writings. (Note here that I do not say that they were incapable
of being influenced by WS, but influence is an entirely different thing from
imitation, which is why the pop journalist’s hardy perennial “Who are your
major influences?” has always provoked a hail of bristling from every artiste
with so much as a soupcon of critical finesse.)
The Germans had no such fastidious compunctions—for them, Shakespeare
was effectively a contemporary writer, to be waylaid and plundered as
insouciantly as the author of the latest potboiling bodice-ripper of a
novel. The most circumspect—and in the
long run the most illustrious—of these plunderers (e.g., bordering on i.e.,
Schiller) had either the good sense or the lack of moxie (depending on your
point of view) to confine the scene of their rapine to Shakespeare’s favorite
mode, the dramatic, and even more narrowly, to the dramatic genre in which Shakespeare
was at his most po-faced and therefore least embarrassing, namely tragedy; and
to follow WS’s precedent in setting these tragedies in remote ages and places. The more insouciant of them, such as Tieck,
simply interpolated Shakesperean topoi wholesale and unmodified like so many
un-vetted exotic animal species or transplant organs.[7] Hence, whenever we encounter something that
seems especially far-fetched in William Lovell, before rejecting it
outright as the unhandiwork of a transcendent bungler we would do well to ask
ourselves, “Would this look out of place in a Shakespeare play?” Consider William’s attempt to poison Edward
Burton. It seems entirely
disproportionate to its apparent efficient cause, namely a garden-variety
mutual estrangement precipitated by a disagreement over abstract philosophical
principles. In a Jane Austen novel such
an out-falling could never eventuate even in anything so dire as a duel. The attempt seems, in a word, gratuitous. But does not Hamlet’s contrivance of the
execution of his childhood friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seem equally
so? For all Hamlet’s moral justification
of it on the grounds that R&G “made
love to [the] employment” of getting him shipped off to England ,
does it not seem principally calculated to illustrate our hero’s antinomian
contempt for old school tie-bound friendship qua factitious human institution? Throughout our reading of William Lovell,
we would do well to keep one eye cocked towards Samuel Johnson’s caveat about King
Lear:
perhaps, if we turn our thoughts upon the barbarity and
ignorance of the age to which this story is referred, it will appear not
so unlikely as while we estimate Lear's manners by our
own. Such preference of one daughter to another, or resignation of dominion on
such conditions, would be yet credible, if told of a petty prince of
regulated by softer manners; and the truth is, that though
he so nicely discriminates, and so minutely describes the characters of men, he
commonly neglects and confounds the characters of ages, by mingling
customs ancient and modern, English and foreign.
In applying this caveat we must substitute not only William
for Lear and Tieck for Shakespeare but also “the typical Shakespeare tragedy”
for “Guinea or Madagascar .” Tieck by the mention of his barons and
country squires has given us the idea of times more civilized, and of life
regulated by [the] softer manners of late eighteenth-century England, but the
“ages” to which a great part of his story is referred, are the
quasi-paleolithic / Madagascaresque ones of Lear and Hamlet. “OK,” the reader may well be inclined to
interject here, “I get it: the Shakespearean precedent explains all these
incongruities in WL, but it hardly justifies them.” Very true.
So for that justification I point the reader to the second half of
Johnson’s last sentence, whose syntax and diction have to be tampered with only
ever so slightly to produce the proper distribution of emphasis I am looking
for: “the truth is, that though he
commonly neglects and
confounds the characters of ages, by mingling customs ancient and modern,
English and foreign, he very nicely discriminates, and very minutely describes the characters of men
and women.” By which I meantersay, “If
Tieck’s description of the characters of men and women is broadly accurate
across the ages, who cares if it registers with minute accuracy the characters
of men and women of the late eighteenth century?” Just because the hyperpolite Augustan and
Regency Britons flattered themselves that they had outgrown wantonly
destructive Jacobean nihilism along with Jacobean farthingales and trunk hose,
the depictor of eighteenth-century British life is by no means obliged to
restrict his characters’ scope of conduct accordingly. That one would attempt to poison one’s former
best friend in consequence of a philosophical disagreement with him may have
been socially inconceivable in 1790s Britain (as indeed it is socially
inconceivable in the Britain of the 20-teens), but it was hardly psychologically
inconceivable—as the 1790s Britons, inasmuch as they continued to read Hamlet
and Lear with pleasure, would have been bound to admit. But alas!: the heaping helping of convention-defying, proto-Lydonian
piss-and-vinegar I have just doled out to William Lovell with one hand I
am compelled to take back with the other.
For the equally sound obverse of the postulate I have just set down is
that what is psychologically eminently conceivable may very well from a social
point of view be equally categorically inconceivable, and the social is no less
exigent in whittling things down to its microwavically narrow compass of
conceivability than the psychological is indulgent in swelling them to its
complementarily cinemascopic compass. The
German-speaking peoples of the young Tieck’s day may not have been as starchy,
as uptight, as compulsively well-behaved, as their British contemporaries, but
they did have pronounced leanings and aspirations to British starchiness,
uptightness, compulsive well-behavedness.
William Lovell was composed a mere twenty years before the
official onset of that long reign of German middle-class complacency known as
the Biedermeier period. Received
historiographic opinion attributes the triumph of the Biedermeier ethos to the
reestablishment of monarchical absolutism throughout continental Europe in the wake of the defeat and ouster
of Napoleon, as though assuming that left to his own devices every single
living individual from Lisbon to Moscow would have become a republican pamphleteer-cum-revolutionary
syndicate cell leader. But a good bit of
the impetus to this triumph naturally came from sources that both antedated and
survived the political events of the 18-teens—from the commercially fueled
improvement of the so-called standard of living throughout the Western world, for
example, and from the wider dispersal—in novels, yes, but also engravings,
conduct books, mail-order catalogues, &c.—of models of “respectable” modes
of living. The general point that I am
rather inefficiently trying to make here is that not only was the Biedermeier
spirit very much already in the air in the 1790s Germanosphere, but that within
that sphere it had an aura of something new, cool, even—dare I say it? “Oh, for
crying out loud, g’head!” I fancy I hear you saying, DGR—sexy. For Germanophones, English-style middle-class
life was not, as it was for the English middle class themselves, merely a
matter of keeping the ball rolling while keeping it from rolling downhill, but
the dernier cri, and hence a quite competitive rival ethos to that set
of ostensibly revolutionary beliefs and practices that was already beginning to
be reified as Romanticism. Such that
while it is only fair play to remark that the Ozzie and Harriet-esque
ending of WL clashes stridently with its hyper-Romantic middle, it would
be inadmissibly anachronistic and indeed downright nonsensical to label that
selfsame ending a retreat—for axiomatically one can retreat only from a
place that one has reached, and for Tieck and his fellow Germanophones the
comfortable semi-autonomous domesticity represented in and by Edward and
Mortimer’s last letters was still in the remote offing at best.
With all this
in mind—the all this in this case essentially being the wooly mammoth’s
share of this essay from the moment when I remarked on WL’s division
into “modules” to the preceding sentence—we may conclude that the best, which
is to say the most succinct, concise, compendious, and nearly accurate way of
describing WL, is as a text that relentlessly enjoins us to look askance
at the notion of being “of one’s time,” or at least at most people’s idea (or
concept) of that notion. Most people
seem to believe that an historical epoch’s thoughts are strictly delimited in a
kind of Flatlandian manner by its external folkways—that if, for example, the
historical record shows that from year A to year H no respectable man was seen
out of doors in trousers of any color but green this must be because for that
entire A-to-H stretch the human mind was bereft of the capacity even to imagine
trousers of any other color. And no
amount of evidence to the contrary—letters in which an A-t0-H inhabitant fondly
reminisces about his “old red regimental pantaloons,” broadsheets advertising a
“blue-trouser fancy dress ball,” reports on “orange-trouser dandies” in the
newspapers —will ever carry any weight with them. Vis-à-vis the microepoch William Lovell
hails from, the microepoch of the very late eighteenth-cum-very early
nineteenth century, this schema is a bit more complicated, but only just the
weest bit. Most people who are aware of
this microepoch allow it its handful of celebrated loose cannons—Byron,
Napoleon, the Shelleys. But at the same
time they reduce the background against which these idiosyncratic figures strut
their stuff to a sort of Talibanesque caricature of a Victorian stage flat,
allowing their most mildly unconventional gestures to stand out like
transgressions of a Sophoclean order (“Mary was more than once seen attending
performances at Covent Garden alone, without either female companion or male
escort” [gasp!] ; “Byron was once heard to acknowledge that his sister had almost
got the better of him in a dispute on Kantian metaphysics” [swoon!] ). The notion that a by no means negligible
proportion of the inhabitants of that stage flat often contemplated and
sometimes even indulged in behavior that would have made the most profligate of
the celebrated loose cannons’ toes curl does not compute for them. But William Lovell, in proving to us
that at least one would-be inhabitant of that stage flat (i.e., Tieck) did
contemplate such behavior, compels us to reject the historico-ontological priority
of the stage flat itself. And once we
have completed this rejection, all sorts of wonderful and terrible
possibilities are opened and foreclosed.
Firstly, most obviously, and most wonderfully is opened the possibility
of a more immediate and unembarrassed identification with both real and
fictitious personages of bygone epochs.
No sooner have we realized that it was seldom for want of having been
thought of or imagined that this or that scandalous, social-order-overturning
word or action did not ultimately become second nature among the ancients, than
we may cease feeling ashamed or guilty either at not being as reserved and
well-bred as Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy or at wishing that we were. One realizes that while the choice of the
denizens of Austenworld to behave like creatures bereft of genitals and bowels
may have governed every last gesture of their waking lives, it was still very
much a choice undoubtedly made in conscious visceral awareness of every
micrometer of small intestine and fallopial tubage. But the logical obverse of this easy
identification with the ancients is the impossibility of any longer seeking
consolation from them from the outside in.
For once we have recognized that the ancients were every bit as troubled
as we are by socially transgressive impulses, we can no longer solace ourselves
with the thought that merely by behaving like them we may conjure away our own
daemons. And yet again—to flip the egg
back on to its sunny side—the reflection that the ancients were capable (à la
William vis-à-vis Module-IV Balder) of imagining the basic schema or template
of the etiology of madness in the absence of all “our” supposed “advances” in
neurology, psychiatry, genetics, and so on, may exhort us to a salutary pruning
of our personal taxonomy of mental illnesses; such that while our compassion
and terror before such apparently ineluctable nature-induced conditions as
schizophrenia is only increased, we come to genuflect less servilely before the
supposed ontological actuality of such nurture-induced phenomena as obsessive-compulsive
disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
And yet again still (sunny side once more occluded), the reflection that
the preponderance of rationally dubious rhapsodizing in WL can be authoritatively
traced to no other source than the ratiocinative involutions of the mind itself
qua organ of thought (including reflection) should remind us that it may still
be possible even for a genetically sane-destined person to think himself into
a kind of madness.
I shall close
this essay on a superficially entirely fresh note, by trying to answer a
question that at first blush will probably seem to have nothing to do with any
of the others of which I have so far treated, but that in fact clinches all of
them, namely: Is William Lovell from a purely aesthetic point of view
the equal of, say Pride and Prejudice, or indeed any damn good at all? “Wellsir,” I should like to answer, “at
bottom it all rather depends on which of the two classic artworkish
attributes—namely truth or beauty—you prize the more,” naturally
implying thereby that Pride and Prejudice is beautiful but false and William
Lovell ugly but true. But I really
cannot answer thus in good faith, aware as I am of how balefully (albeit I hope
not fatally) WL’s truthfulness is compromised by its ugliness. This is not to say that Tieck-and-Austen’s
junior contemporary John Keats was right when he said “Beauty is truth and
truth beauty,” at least insofar as that statement amounts to a simple equation
of the two qualities, to an assertion that each is analytically a priori
bound up with the other in the way that yellowness is (according to
Tieck-and-Austen’s senior contemporary, Kant) bound up with the metal known as
gold, or to be more exact, the way yellowness would be bound up with
gold in a world in which nothing other than gold was yellow. But it is to say that certain kinds or
registers of untruth are a priori synthetically bound up with certain
kinds or registers of ugliness (a.k.a. “unbeauty”), such that what is ugly in
these kinds or registers at minimum cannot be absolutely true. Chez William Lovell, the truth-corrupting
kind or register of ugliness may be variously termed verbosity,
long-windedness, superfluity, or repetitiveness. No undemented reader of William Lovell
can reach the end of its second book without being assailed more than once by a
feeling that one might not inaptly term deja-vu on your
performance-enhancing-drug-of-choice (speaking of deja-vu, I wonder where
I’ve heard that expression). Or
perhaps déjà vu-on-your-performance-diminishing-drug-of-choice would be
a better name for it. At any rate, chez
this feeling, one happens upon a certain passage; one is certain that
one has come across something to its effect in an earlier passage; there is not
(unlike chez deja-vu) anything creepy or uncanny about this feeling, and yet
(like chez deja-vu) one cannot readily pinpoint the earlier passage. The feeling arises from the fact(s) that
Tieck’s stock of images, conceits, and observations is too small and that he
apportions it too promiscuously. And
from this slimness and whorishness arises a pronounced vitiation in WL of
the only means by which a writer can hope to articulate a statement (or, more
accurately, a complex of statements) about the world, and consequently
hope to say something true about it—namely, significant similitude in
tandem with significant differentiation.
And so a character will say (or, as is of course more usual, write) something
that is essentially identical to something he has already said, thereby leading
the reader to infer (as Ockham’s razor obliges him to do) that the character is
insufficiently self-aware and hence of negligible epistemological value, such
that however sane his observations may seem in isolation, they do not deserve
to be regarded as normative.
Or a
character will say something that seems completely atypical of him or her
altogether, or at least in the context of the utterance. A good example of this sort of incongruity is
when Louise Blainville writes of her uncle and prospective fiancé (“Yuck!”
indeed, DGR), the aged Count Melun, that “[t] he entirety of his present
existence seems shallow and uninteresting to him; an autumn wind has shaken the
leaves from his trees, the present has become barren and empty, and he takes in
at a single glance those vacant spaces in the garden that were once
filled by secret passages that afforded him the keenest temptation.” These lines occur in a letter (Book II, No.
18) in which the Countess not only coolly records that “I am as good as engaged
to my dearest uncle,” but also heatedly describes the near-attainment of her
seduction of William. That in the midst
of her contemptuous indifference to her uncle and her passion for another man
Louise should happen to feel a brief twinge of sympathy for the old gentleman
is not beyond the pale of plausible improbability. But it is hardly possible that this twinge
should be verbalized in words much more numerous, expressive, or specific than
“Boy, it must really be a drag to be an old guy in love with a young woman.” By contrast, the passage as it actually
stands reads like the sufferer’s own first-hand articulation of his suffering
with the “I”s replaced by “he”s at the last minute. In asserting this I am
objecting not that as a young person Louise is simply incapable of imagining in
rich detail the emotional life of an old person—for after all, Tieck himself
was barely twenty when he wrote the passage—but that as a person tout court
whose affections were at best divided she would never either have taken the
trouble to imagine this life in such detail or wished to assert such
apodictically certain insight into it.
Luckily our quasi-déjà vu comes to the rescue and allows us to explain
if not to justify the oldster-channeling: “I have lost my beloved comrades and
in vain cry their names into the darkened woods; the hollow echo thrown back at
me affords no consolation; the vast and solitary void cares not a fig for my
wretchedness. A biting wind gloatingly gusts over my [head] and shakes the last
leaf from my trees.” This is William
writing in Letter 2 of Book I, employing the same metaphoric vehicle of exfoliation
that Blainville will later apply to Melun’s plight. One gathers that Tieck liked the vehicle and
rightly thought it as apt for the conveyance of an old man’s disillusioned
loneliness as a young man’s pre-Grand Tour jitters but neglected to consider
that it was a tad too extravagant to be transposed from the first into the
third person.
Finally, there
are entire pen-wielding characters who do little but muddy the reader’s sense
of the novel’s purpose. Chief of these
characters is William’s trusty servant, Willy.
He is a problematic figure in much the same way and for much the same
reason as Jones’s sidekick Partridge is in Fielding’s Tom Jones. His plain-as-day original raison d’être is to
provide what peasant characters have traditionally provided throughout the
history of literature, viz. a “natural,” “uncorrupted” alternative to the
representation of the world offered by their over-refined masters. During the first three or so books we see him
dutifully fulfilling this function by marveling, for example, at the tremendous
racket produced by the not-quite simultaneous striking of London’s hundreds of
church-bells, at the perversity of Parisian theatergoers in deliberately
watching something that makes them feel sad, and at the less than adequately
mimetic character of the art on display in the galleries of Rome. (On this last item it is worth remarking that
it shows that dissatisfaction with pictorial “realism” long antedated not only
the impressionists but also even Balzac’s “Chef-d’œuvre inconnu.”) Taken on its own, this
is all well and good if slightly stale and pro-forma, and if it were merely
extrinsic to the more broadly established tenor of the narrative, it could be
enjoyed or skipped over as a harmless digression. Unfortunately, Willy’s commentaries are not
merely extrinsic to the aforementioned tenor but at outright cross-purposes with
it. For as we have already seen, from
the very beginning of the novel—from Book I, Letter 1—Tieck has been keen to
foreground an antinomy between an impractical, visionary, “Icarus”-like
worldview instantiated by William and a practical, no-nonsense, down-to-earth
worldview instantiated by Mortimer, Edward, Walter Lovell, and Charles—each of
whom, like William, is self-evidently not a representative of the peasantry or
even the petit bourgeoisie (Charles’s relative poverty notwithstanding). In short, by the time he gets Willy up and
running, Tieck has already found his norm—the commonsensical baseline against
which his hero’s extravagancies are to be measured—within his hero’s own class;
such that Willy’s rubish musings on arty diversions have an effect akin to that
of a badly voice-led melody in a piece of music, the effect one gets at the
moment when, say, an oboe line crosses into a line on the staff already
occupied by a bassoon line: instead of the continuation of the two melodies
together in their former equal strength, one hears the continuation of the
bassoon line alone, as the oboe line seems simply to have disappeared. There are indeed representations of the world
in which the enjoyment of plays and avant-garde painting can turn one into a
raving visionary, but we have not hitherto been led to regard William Lovell
as such a representation. After all,
Mortimer—good-old solid, commonsensical, untakeinable Mortimer—has never had an
unkind word to say about fictive spectacles, and he seems to enjoy plays and
operas as much as the average Parisian theatergoer, in that he accompanies
William and Willy to them without complaint; moreover, he emerges from the
playhouse at the end of each performance every inch the same good-old solid,
commonsensical, untakeinable Mortimer he entered it. Such being the case, Willy’s strictures on
the drama come across not as what they might have done in a very different sort
of novel—namely, the artlessly perspicacious musings of a bona fide natural
sage, but rather as the artlessly thick-headed musings of a bona fide natural
imbecile; and as (in Dr. Johnson’s famous words) “natural fatuity is not the
proper prey of a satirist,” one cannot help reading them without suppressing
(or not bothering to suppress) an embarrassed groan. That Tieck himself eventually picked up on
(or got sick of) Willy’s third-wheelishness we may gather from W’s being first
written out of the main course of the narrative towards the end of the
Rosaline-seduction episode and then killed off in the middle of the
Emily-seduction one. (Also plausibly
ascribable to Tieck’s irritation with Willy, a kind of salutary antibody
thereunto, is Willy’s brother Thomas, who in addition to reciprocating his brother’s
piously sentimental pap with witheringly deadpan cynicism also manages to exemplify
a kind of peasant who can function as a norm within the novel’s
metaphysical ecosystem, at least vis-à-vis the parochial domain of artistic
production–namely, the figure of the peasant artist who though ungraced
by a liberal education can discourse on his chosen métier [in this case,
gardening] as competently as any gentleman practitioner of it.)
[1] For lack of a term of wider currency, I use
“romantic” here—as on all other occasions on which it prefaces the word
“love”—in the vulgar modern sense significative of “centering on or aiming
towards the act of coition.” I do so in
full consciousness of the fact that “romantic” has a welter—some would say
rather “rash”—of other, more upmarket, senses, not the least upmarket of which
is “having to do with a so-called literary movement instantiated by (among many
other more illustrious texts) Ludwig Tieck’s William Lovell.”
[2] Admittedly, William Lovell , in postdating
the French revolution, is a few years too new to merit being called a
powdered-wig opera. On the other hand,
in antedating Napoleon’s coronation, it is too old to merit being called (à la
one of Austen’s novels) a sexy maternity dress opera.
[3] (sic) on the lowercase “S,” Mr. Gates, and to
blazes with your squiggly green underscore and the diabolical incahootsness
with a certain manufacturer of two-wheeled motor-scooters that it betokens!
[4] Which still is not a motor scooter (and still
lacks two wheels).
[5] “Mephistophelean.”
[6] I confess I do not know what to make of the bizarre
fact that William and his Sancho share a Christian name, or of the fact that at
no point in the novel is any trace of a fuss made about this fact.
[7] Most of William Lovell’s English proper
names—along with a few of its French ones—can be found in Shakespeare. For example, “Lovell” is the surname of a
courtier in Henry VIII, Mortimer is the Percy-sponsored pretender to the
English throne in I Henry IV, and Count Melun is an officer of the
Dauphin’s army in King John. On
the rare occasions on which Tieck strays from the Shakespearean corpus and
coins his own names, the results (e.g., “Bosring” and “Waterhall”) are none too
convincing, “more like to Dutch than to English,” as William Caxton said of the
English of the Anglo-Saxons.
[8] By “high bourgeois realism” I mean that
sub-current of bourgeois realism that makes no bones about excluding the lower
classes from its bailiwick. It should go
without saying that many of the big contributors to the broader current—e.g.,
Balzac and Dickens–do not participate in this sub-current.