The Novel

by Steven Moore

  At first it seemed to me that I saw some wagons filled with numbers and hairpins traveling to the fair at Frankfurt, where they intended to walk the tightrope. After that a map wearing a coat came up and presented itself as a shoehorn. Soon afterwards I sat on a birdcage and road on it over hill and dale, often a good thousand miles in one leap. It seemed natural to me that I had to fetch a pair of freshly baked rolls for my preceptor from Tierra del Fuego. Soon there came four hundred pairs of knitted, torn, and ragged stockings; I mended them with my writing things and as compensation they honored me with an old peruke. I also saw people flying around in the air and dried cod being fished from the ground. I tore my grammar book into a thousand small pieces and then I had the snippets grilled on a spit and ate them as feathers from a turkey. . . . (4.5)

  It goes on like that for another page, but that last image impudently captures Beer’s attitude toward the rules of fiction.

  Winter Nights ends with one of Zendorio’s friends sickening of their life of “revelry and continual partying” and deciding to become a hermit to pursue the “eternal salvation” promised by Christian mythology (6.14). That’s where Summer Tales (literally “Amusing Summer Days,” 1683) picks up. For some reason, Beer renamed his characters—Zendorio is now Wolffgang von Willenhag—but they all decide to become hermits too, which doesn’t last long before they return to their old ways. Like most sequels, Summer Tales is inferior to its predecessor: it’s a rambling account of Zendorio/Wolffgang’s life over the next few decades and his souring attitude toward “the falseness of the world which is rotten to the very abyss of hell.”76 He had abandoned his earlier attempt at hermitage upon realizing “that true piety consists not in a change of place but of mind,” but nevertheless becomes a hermit again toward the end of the novel, only to realize, once again, that true piety consists “not in the lonely place but one’s inner disposition” (1.1, 6.10). Though not as ingenious as Winter Nights, the sequel is an entertaining read, especially for its realistic depiction of rural life. It’s a brutal world of beatings, assaults, murder, domestic violence, a peasant uprising, and some Thirty Years’ War stories, filled with characters who stink of tobacco and brandy, who complain of fleas and lice, swear at each other, suffer toothaches and sprained ankles, and are constantly on the make. Wolffgang finds some consolation in music—as in Winter Nights, the composer Beer includes an orchestra of musicians among the minor characters and trumpets musical metaphors—and a play is staged as pedantic as the one in the earlier novel. But even “these contrived vanities” (3.6) aren’t enough to salve Wolffgang’s world-weariness (or Weltschmerz, the Germans call it). There are a few narrative surprises and amusing pranks, and Beer’s realism continues to be startlingly modern compared to most novels of the time; “The world interprets everything not as it is but as it seems,” Wolffgang complains (5.4), so he tells it as it is. However, the interested reader should skip Summer Tales and curl up instead with German Winter Nights, ideally with a few bottles of Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier at hand.

  In the closing years of the 17th century, Christian Reuter (1665–1712) satirized the state of German culture in a short novel set in the early decades of that century entitled Schelmuffsky (1696–97). Mocking the vogue for both travel writing and the still-popular courtly romances, it’s the first-person account of a small-town schlemiel who reaches the age of 24 with nothing more than a reputation as a pea-shooting prankster, who nevertheless is convinced he is destined for great things. Embodying bourgeois pretension at its worst, he first travels to Hamburg, where he is feted by members of high society as fatuous as he is; Schelmuffsky’s calling card is the ludicrous story of his premature birth, which opens doors for him everywhere he goes:

  When the big rat which had eaten my Mother’s quite new silk dress could not be killed with the broom as it ran between my sister’s legs and unexpectedly got into a hole, the worthy lady falls on this account from exertion into such an illness and faint that she lies there for full twenty-four days and can, the devil take me, neither move nor turn. I, who at that time had never yet seen the world and who according to Adam Riese’s arithmetic book should have been waiting concealed four full months still, became so foolish on account of the cursed rat that I could no longer remain concealed, but looked where the carpenter had left the hole and quickly crawled out to daylight on all fours. (6)

  Reuter rejects literary German for this slangy account of a gull’s travels throughout Europe (with a side trip to India) and mocks literary staples like romantic intrigue, piracy, and dueling. In a rushing, tumbling style, Schelmuffsky observes everything with the undiscriminating enthusiasm of a child, and with a child’s predilection for gross details: he may be the first literary character who vomits his guts out from sea-sickness, wets his bed as an adult, and reels from other characters’ bad breath. (He also battles body lice, but Grimmelshausen and Beer beat him to that one.) Near the end, he encounters a boastful wastrel so like himself that there’s the potential for an epiphany, but with the impregnable self-confidence of a schmuck, he can’t see the resemblance. By that point the reader suspects Schelmuffsky has made the whole thing up—as he accuses other travel-writers of doing in his foreword—but either way Reuter comically brings down the hammer on “burghers who attempt to rise above their own class,” writes Wagener, “but also the nobility, and thus the whole outgoing Baroque culture, whose courtly character was gradually waning by the end of the seventeenth century” (83–84).

  Few German novels of note appeared over the next 50 years, and unfortunately those few have not been translated. I’d love to sample one of the “gallant” novels of Christian Friedrich Hunold (1681–1722), especially his “Satirical Novel” (Der satyrische Roman, 1706, 1710), a wicked exposé of the Hamburg opera crowd that led to death threats. More intriguing is Germany’s greatest contribution to the “robinsonade” genre, “Felsenburg Island” (Die Insel Felsenburg, 1731–43) by Johann Gottfried Schnabel (1692–c. 1752). That’s the popular title for this 4-volume, 2,000-page novel, whose original plot-spoiling title page translates:

  The Remarkable Fate of Several Sailors

  in Particular of Albertus Julius

  a Saxon Born

  Who in his 18th year takes to ship, is shipwrecked, and is one of four to be cast upon a cruel shore, and having overcome its steeps, discovers a fair land, weds his companion, and from their marriage sires a family of more than 300 souls, cultivates his land most excellently, collects by chance of accident the most amazing treasures, and at the end of Anno Domini 1728, to the delight of friends sought out in Germany, is counted hale and hearty in his 100th year, and presumably lives yet

  His story traced out by the great-grandson of his brother

  Mons. Eberhard Julius

  and prepared to be submitted for publication

  for the presumed entertainment of curious readers

  by

  Gisander

  Schnabel drew upon Robinson Crusoe, of course—it was translated into German immediately after its publication in 1719 and spawned countless imitations—but also Grimmelshausen’s Continuation and earlier utopias to describe a land that actually operates like the Israel of the Old Testament (evoked in numerous citations and allusions), that is, where virtue is rewarded, vice punished, and all is watched over by a benevolent god—unlike the real world. After Eberhard Julius lands on Felsenburg to meet his aged relative, visitors and islanders begin exchanging stories, explaining how the original inhabitants survived on the rocky island and why others have sought it out in recent years. Everyone who came from Europe tells dire tales of Europe in a tone as bitter as Beer’s, a godless land of corruption and oppression that they were glad to leave; life on Felsenburg, on the other hand, “combines an Enlightenment emphasis on order and reason with the overt piety and sentimentality characteristic of Germany pietism,” writes Janet Bertsch (113), an incongruous combo that marks this as a utopia. “Unlike Robinson Crusoe,” Emmel notes, the islanders “do not wish
to return to Europe and carefully protect their island from outside intrusion” (23).

  With its emphasis on storytelling, Schnabel’s Wunderliche Fata einiger See-Fahrer (to use the novel’s true title) is an analog for the world of fiction, a haven from the real world. Bertsch in particular develops this view: “Schnabel places great emphasis on the socially constructive effects of storytelling. His characters tell stories to amuse and inform each other, but their stories also fill a need beyond mere entertainment. The Felsenburg’s inhabitants have a voracious appetite for stories, and they display a delight in narration to the extent that it becomes a life-giving force” (126). Opposing the soul-destroying real world, life-giving stories fulfill aesthetic, not didactic, purposes. Bertsch makes this distinction: “Whereas Grimmelshausen tries to show people how to cope with the world around them—thereby affirming its value—Schnabel simply shows them how to ignore it” (131). The “entertainment” promised on the title page comes from watching a talented author create a world, not unlike the authors of the Lutheran Bible. “Why should a clever fiction, as an exercise of ingenuity, be so completely despicable and reprehensible?” asks Schnabel’s fictitious editor. “If I am not mistaken, the theologians themselves believe that we meet similar examples, even whole books, in the Holy Bible” (trans. Bertsch, 115). This is an early argument for art for art’s sake, not for moral edification. There’s plenty of the latter in the novel—decent people living decently on their island getaway—but that’s not why we read fiction. As Bertsch insists, Schnabel “justifies the existence of clever fictions because they demonstrate the writer’s genius,” not his probity, adding: “With this argument about the value of fiction and his description of the Bible as a book like other books, Schnabel is only a step away from the secularized worship of the literary imagination that appears in German Romanticism” (115–16).

  Felsenburg Island was enormously popular in Germany in the 18th century; in a delightful radio program on the novel aired in 1956, novelist Arno Schmidt says “we have evidence that around 1750 the library of the working man usually consisted of only two books: the bible and – : our Felsenburg Island!”77 Every German author of the late 18th century grew up with it—the young Goethe devoured it, Ludwig Tieck edited a slightly abridged version (harshly criticized by Schmidt)—but it faded after that. Few people today would agree with Schmidt that Robinson Crusoe is “far far more shallow” than Schnabel’s novel (47), but Felsenburg Island deserves to be remembered nonetheless; to quote Janet Bertsch a final time, “The book is escapist, and it is this sense of escape into an alternative world, a self-sustaining world of stories, that is Schnabel’s most important contribution to the development of the novel. Storytelling needs no didactic justification. The use of the imagination to generate and appreciate narrative has a value in and of itself” (132).

  When a German novel was finally deemed worthy of translation into English—and not once but twice (1752, 1776)—it was a mild one. A pious man named Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715–69), under the influence of pious Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), composed a short novel entitled The History of the Swedish Countess of Guildenstern (Das Leben der schwedischen Gräfin von G., 1747–48) that, according to the title page, was “Calculated to recommend an early attachment to Virtue in young ladies of no affluent fortune; also, a becoming fortitude in adversity, and a spontaneous resignation to our destiny.” The prim and proper narrator is married at 16 to a military man twice her age after a short courtship and quiet ceremony; discovers he has two kids from a mistress, which doesn’t faze her; learns he died in battle; four years later marries her husband’s best friend; befriends the mistress who accidentally marries her brother; is surprised by the return of her first husband 10 years after his reported death (husband #2 decently steps aside), then gives a long report on what her husband had been doing those 10 years (mostly showing “fortitude in adversity,” as the subtitle recommends). Gellert took pains to distance himself from romantic fiction: on her way to Sweden to be married, for example, the narrator writes: “And here, perhaps, it will be objected by novelists that I should have introduced a scene of seducing or ravishing me; but how would this agree with the love I bear to truth were I, for method’s sake, to charge an act of villainy upon any of my company?” (1:12) Richardson knew that the threat of “seducing or ravishing” was what kept his wide-eyed readers on the edge of their tuffets, but Gellert keeps it bland. When the countess’s friend realizes she has unknowingly married her brother, the unflappable narrator cautions: “Were this history designed for a romance, I might easily have introduced a scene of Carolina destroying herself either by a dagger, or poison, since she had been long enough by herself to perpetrate suicide. But a theatrical desperation, and a rashness which proceeds from an afflicted but unadvised mind, have not always the same effect in common life” (1:73). True, but Gellert’s avoidance of theatrical melodrama in favor of commonsense realism is at odds with his soap-operatic plot (incest! bigamy!). “The obvious discrepancy between content and world view gives the work the character of an experiment,” Emmel writes charitably; “Gellert may have thought of the novel as an art form in which Weltanschuung as well as human behavior could be examined through experiment and discussion” (33). Good thought, poor execution.

  While Gellert modeled his novel on English and French novels of his time, the first major German novelist of the 18th century went back to Don Quixote for inspiration for his first published novel. Despite a rigorously religious upbring, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) developed a healthy skepticism of conventional beliefs, which is the subtext of his delightful Reason Triumphant over Fancy, or the Adventures of Don Sylvio de Rosalva (Der Sieg der Natur über die Schwärmerei, oder die Abentheuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva, 1764). It’s the tongue-in-cheek story of a sheltered 17-year-old with a fertile imagination who believes fairy tales are true. Spotting a blue butterfly one day in the woods, Sylvio suspects it is a princess trapped in that form by a witch; this suspicion hardens into certainty when he next finds a locket containing a portrait of a beautiful girl, and convinces himself that a good fairy led him to the portrait in order to encourage him to pursue the enchanted butterfly and break the witch’s spell—a parody of the causal “thinking” of the superstitious. With his Sancho Panzan servant Pedrillo, Sylvio sets out in quest of the bewitched princess and has some comical clashes with the real world, then encounters the subject of the portrait, a young widow named Felicia, who is as daffy about poetry as Sylvio is about fairy tales. Sylvio rescues her brother Eugenio and his friend Gabriel from a kidnapping of Eugenio’s girlfriend, and all convene at Felicia’s mansion, which is decorated fancifully enough to convince Sylvio he has entered a fairy palace. There Gabriel tries to undo Sylvio’s faith in fairy tales by telling him the most ridiculous one he can concoct, the 80-page “History of Prince Biribinker,” which he claims is a lost chapter of Palaephatus’s On Unbelievable Things (4th cent. bce).78 Sylvio accepts it as fact because it resembles the other fairy tales he grew up on—though more erotic and scatological—but when Gabriel admits he made it all up and lectures the dreamy teen on scientific principles of empirical evidence, Sylvio finally recants. He arranges to marry Felicia, but not before taking a two-year tour of the continent, to replace the nonsense fairy tales put in his head with firsthand observations of the real world.

  Wieland handles all this with great wit and élan, but the novel issues a serious warning against mistaking one’s subjective outlook for an objective one, a distinction most people aren’t even aware of. Just as Don Quixote is not an attack on chivalric novels so much as on bad writing and irrational thinking, Don Sylvio isn’t a repudiation of fairy tales but of “the force of prejudices” and “of false reasoning.”79 The Schwärmerei in the German title refers to a range of attitudes from “fancy,” “imagination,” and “enthusiasm” to “prejudice” and “fanaticism”—that is, to believing what you want to believe (based on upbringing, social conditioning, un
examined religious and political beliefs, and wishful thinking) rather than what is objectively true. Several times the narrator interrupts his story to deliver lectures on ontology: how we know what we know. (One chapter is even titled “In Which the Author Displays His Profound Skill in the Mysteries of Ontology” [4.1].) It might seem harmless, even charming, for someone to actually believe in fairy tales—unlike Don Quixote, Don Sylvio does no harm, and his fancies enhance his life—but such subjectivity can wreak havoc in the real world, the narrator warns us:

  To understand this seeming paradox, we must remember that there are two sorts of realities, which, in concreto, are not so easily distinguishable as, perhaps, some may imagine.

  Now, as in spite of all the egotists in the world, there are things which exist out of ourselves, so are there, in return, others which exist only in our imagination. The former exist, though we do not know that they exist; the latter exist only so far as we imagine them to exist. These things have no reality in themselves, but with him who takes them for real they have the same effect as if they were so; and without depriving men, by this means, of a good share of that high opinion they entertain of themselves, we may assert that these matters are the mainsprings of most of the actions of mankind, that they are the fountain either of our happiness or of our misery, the source of our most detestable vices or of our most shining virtues.