The Enlightenment Novel As Artifact

4 The Enlightenment Novel as Artifact J. H. Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere and C. M. Wieland’s Der goldne Spiegel How did German authors respond to the widespread perception of literature as a luxury good and reading as a form of consumption? Or, to use a more modern idiom, how did German literature around 1800 respond to its own commodi- fi cation? The question is not new to scholars of German culture; nonetheless, the topic deserves further attention. 1 The idea of literature as a potentially pernicious form of luxury posed a serious challenge to writers in this period, a challenge that not only infl uenced conceptions of the book as artifact and of the impact of reading, but also shaped the narrative structure and rhetorical features of the literary works themselves. Previous analyses of the subject have tended to be either too broad or too restric- tive in their approach. Too broad in the sense that they have addressed general concerns, such as the rise of the middle class or the dehumanizing impact of modern capitalism rather than the way in which evolving, complex, and often confl icted 1. Daniel Purdy addresses the topic in his insightful treatment of neoclassicism (Weimar classicism), and it has also been dealt with in some recent and not so recent genealogies of aesthetic autonomy and of what is known in German as Trivialliteratur. See Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Capitalism in the Era of Goethe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), esp. 28–34; Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1994); and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Der Kritik der Trivialliteratur seit der Aufklärung (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1971). The Enlightenment Novel as Artifact 101 attitudes toward discretionary consumption give shape to individual works. Too specifi c in the sense of approaching the sphere of literature as autonomous and thus in dialogue primarily with itself. With regard to this latter issue, one need only think of the conceptual and semantic overlap between the luxury controversy and concerns about luxury editions or excessive reading to see that conceptions of the literary take shape in the context of a broader discussion, in which various artifacts—ranging from exotic foods and fashions to tools, tokens, and relics— serve as either foils or models for the literary object. Most scholars, moreover, have drawn a sharp line between the mainstream Enlightenment and the positions adopted by theorists and practitioners of what has come to be termed aesthetic autonomy, especially Moritz, Kant, Schiller, Goethe, and the romantics. For these artists and intellectuals, so the argument goes, it is precisely the lack of any obvious utility that defi nes true art and sets it in oppo- sition to the sphere of economics. Artworks are self-suffi cient totalities whose value is intrinsic. The canonical authors of the Enlightenment, in contrast, remain indebted to the idea of moral instruction, combining the traditional Horatian aim of prodesse et delectare with more modern insights into the value of pleasure as a tool of socialization. 2 In the remaining chapters, I will suggest that we reframe this alleged aesthetic watershed. My intent is not to deny that an important transformation occurs at the end of the eighteenth century in the way authors and intellectuals think about art and literature, but rather to argue that our understanding of this transformation can be enriched if we move from a simple comparison between didactic and autonomous art to a triangulation of both positions vis-à-vis the third element of luxury. Adopting this perspective enables one to grasp these diverse authors as offering different responses to a single dilemma: the possibility that culture is superfl uous. Phrased provocatively, what connects the authors of the Enlightenment to those of Weimar classicism and romanticism is precisely the denial of the autonomy of literature. The best example of a truly autonomous literature would be one that serves as pure entertainment. If we return for a moment to the Lesewut controversy, we can see that some commentators were in fact prepared to consider the legitimacy of such an idea. The anonymous author of an article that appeared in 2. Two examples from recent reference works confi rm that this is the consensus view. Alo Allkem- per and Norbert Otto Eke write: “ Prodesse et delectare , the Horatian formula regarding the utility and entertainment provided by poetry, is also the central aim of poetry in the Enlightenment—whereby the poetics of the Enlightenment tend to emphasize utility, that is to say, instruction, more strongly than entertainment.” Allkemper and Eke, Literaturwissenschaft: Eine Einführung in die Literaturwis- senschaft, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: UTB, 2004), 70. In his history of German literature, Bengt Algot Sørensen writes: “Among the most important ideas of German classicism is the conception of the autonomy of art, according to which the work of art should be determined exclusively by its own immanent laws and never be subordinated to any concepts or ideas or any utilitarian thinking that has been imposed upon it from the outside. With this idea the formula ‘ prodesse et delectare, ’ so beloved in the Enlightenment, had lost its validity.” Sørensen, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, vol. 1, Vom Mittelalter bis zur Roman- tik (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003), 255. 102 Necessary Luxuries the Neues Hannöverisches Magazin in 1795, for example, explains that he does not object in principle to “the reading of enjoyable books that have been written to provide pleasure, something that scholars and laymen, as well as ladies from the cultivated estates, allow themselves from time to time as a means of recreation.” 3 The key point here is moderation, in the sense of a temporal embedding. As long as the recreational reading pleasure is confi ned to the leisure hours, there is no reason to condemn it, even if the book in question promises no real intellectual or moral edifi cation. This argument fi nds its parallel in the many luxury treatises that insist that conspicuous consumption poses no threat as long as the individual has successfully discharged his duties to the state, his family, and his fellow man before indulging himself. 4 None of the authors discussed in this study—including, ultimately, the author of the aforementioned article—is prepared to justify literature solely in these terms. All of them, in other words, come down on the side of utility, even if, as outlined in the introduction, they conceive the nature of this utility in dramatically different ways. Chapters 5 , 6, and 7 will address the works of Moritz, Novalis, and Goethe, respectively. This chapter considers the constellation of luxury, modernity, and anthropology as it emerges in two celebrated novels of the 1770s: Christoph Martin Wieland’s Der goldene Spiegel (The Golden Mirror, 1772) and Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere (Robinson the Younger, 1779). Because these inter- pretations are intended to foreground a specifi c facet of the novels, they are neces- sarily partial rather than exhaustive, but I hope it will also become clear that they extend and complement the insights of existing scholarship. In addition, inasmuch as these chapters contain analyses of complex literary objects, they are intended to offer more multidimensional investigations into the boundaries of acceptable extravagance than was the case in the preceding two chapters. This multidimen- sionality becomes especially apparent at the level of psychology. Works of literature are of course an especially rich font of material for reconstructing normative sub- jectivities, and each of these novels provides insight into how discourses of luxury shape late eighteenth-century conceptions of the well-tempered self, whose forma- tion is understood precisely in terms of the controlled stimulation, or controlled de-control, described previously. The novels thus offer early examples of how literature functioned as an imaginative space for thinking through the implications of an emerging culture of consumption for individual identity. Equally signifi cantly, however, these works also reveal just how closely such refl ections are interwoven with an interrogation of the value of the fi ne arts, and of the legitimacy of the novels themselves as artifacts. As many of the writings on luxury make clear, from the essays of Rousseau and Hume to the lesser-known volumes 3. “Wie ist dem unter uns eingerissenen Übel der Lesesucht abzuhelfen?,” Neues Hannovrisches Magazin 81 (1795): 1296. 4. Istvan Hont points to Francis Hutcheson as an example. See Hont, “The Early Enlightenment Debate on Commerce and Luxury,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 401. The Enlightenment Novel as Artifact 103 of the German cameralists, the anthropological orientation of these thinkers means that the fi ne arts tend to be viewed as a subset of luxury goods more generally. They are thus subject to the same concerns about access and stadial progression that are addressed to the latter. As products of a process of historical development, both are cast simultaneously as either promoting or impeding social cohesion; both are evaluated on the basis of the same set of cognitive-anthropological categories; and both are subject to the same refl ections regarding the appropriate locus and type of regulation necessary to maintain psychic as well as social equilibrium. Particularly in the case of the anthropologically oriented novels of the Enlightenment, one fi nds an engagement with these issues on multiple levels. 5 A preoccupation with luxury codetermines the plot, but it also generates a series of formal responses as well as self-referential attempts on the part of these authors to position their own works along a continuum of artifacts that ranges from well-ordered luxury to dangerous opulence.

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