Fictionality, Wieland, and the Eighteenth• Century German Novel 1
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Noble Lies, Slant Truths, Necessary Angels From 1949 to 2004, UNC Press and the UNC Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures published the UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures series. Monographs, anthologies, and critical editions in the series covered an array of topics including medieval and modern literature, theater, linguistics, philology, onomastics, and the history of ideas. Through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, books in the series have been reissued in new paperback and open access digital editions. For a complete list of books visit www.uncpress.org. Noble Lies, Slant Truths, Necessary Angels Aspects of Fictionality in the Novels of Christoph Martin Wieland ellis shookman UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures Number 118 Copyright © 1997 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons cc by-nc-nd license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses. Suggested citation: Shookman, Ellis. Noble Lies, Slant Truths, Nec- essary Angels: Aspects of Fictionality in the Novels of Christoph Martin Wieland. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. doi: https://doi.org/10.5149/9781469656502_Shookman Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shookman, Ellis. Title: Noble lies, slant truths, necessary angels: Aspects of fictionality in the novels of Christoph Martin Wieland / by Ellis Shookman. Other titles: University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures ; no. 118. Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [1997] Series: University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: lccn 96030545 | isbn 978-1-4696-5649-6 (pbk: alk. paper) | isbn 978-1-4696-5650-2 (ebook) Subjects: Wieland, Christoph Martin, 1733-1813 — Criticism and interpretation. | Fiction. | Fiction — History and criticism. Classification: lcc pt2571 .s56 1997 | dcc 838/ .609 Denn ein aus Mittelmafligkeiten konstruierter Charakter macht sich uber die Fiktivitat der Dinge und Erkenntnisse wenig Gedanken ... -Hermann Brach, "Methodologische Novelle" (1918) Contents Preface xi Introduction: Fictionality, Wieland, and the Eighteenth Century German Novel 1 Part I. The Early Novels: Imagination 1. Der Sieg der Natur tiber die Schwiirmerey, oder die Abentheuer des Don Sylvia von Rosalvn (1764) 27 2. Geschichte des Agathon (1766-1767) 46 Part II. The Middle Novels: Ideals 3. Sokrates Mainomenos, oder die Dialogen des Diogenes von Sinope (1770) 75 4. Der goldne Spiegel, oder die Konige von Scheschian (1772) 88 5. Geschichte des Philosophen Danischmende (1775) 104 6. Die Abderiten (1781) 115 Part III. The Late Novels: Illusion 7. Geheime Geschichte des Philosophen Peregrinus Proteus (1791) 135 8. Agathodiimon (1799) 153 9. Aristipp und einige seiner Zeitgenossen (1800-1802) 171 Conclusion 189 Notes 195 Bibliography 213 Index 235 Preface The first three concepts cited in the title of this book-noble lies, slant truths, and necessary angels-derive from Plato, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens, respectively. They suggest three aspects that the fourth-fictionality-assumes in the novels of Christoph Martin Wie land, where the idea of being (or at least seeming) made up pertains to myths sustaining political life, the obliqueness of narrative verities, and the human need for elevated messages. The following chapters ex plore these matters and explain how they are related. This book first began as a doctoral dissertation at Yale. Since then, it has been significantly revised and expanded. For readers unfamiliar with Wieland's novels, it includes summaries of their plots, some gen eral remarks on previous studies of them, and quotations that spell out the evidence for its thesis. For specialists, it also regards those stories, secondary sources, and textual proofs in greater detail. Brief passages of the introduction and of Chapter 2 appeared in articles listed in the bibliography. They are reprinted with the permission of their earlier publishers. I wish to thank Bruce Duncan, Dennis Mahoney, and Steven Scher for reading my manuscript-and Paul Roberge for facilitating its publication. xi Noble Lies, Slant Truths, Necessary Angels Introduction: Fictionality, Wieland, and the Eighteenth-Century German Novel Diese erlogene Wahrheit, die ganz allein Wirkung hervorbringt, wodurch ganz allein die Illusion erzielt wird, wer hat davon einen Begrijf? -Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96) I The concept of fictionality is crucial to the modern novel. Ever since Cervantes, there have been narratives showing concern with the fact that they are invented, that they describe characters and events at least partly imaginary, rather than real or literally true. This concern can be playful, but it also answers serious charges that such stories are made up or false. Authors, scholars, and critics accordingly have long consid ered the logical difficulty as well as the aesthetic appeal of distinguish ing creative writing from fanciful deceit in narrative prose "feigned" instead of corresponding to actual fact. Their arguments betray a ven erable ambivalence, recalling both Plato's suspicion of poets as inspired liars and Aristotle's claim that poetry describes what is possible and might happen, not what is historical and already has. Indeed, despite defenses of fiction as such an art of the possible, early European novels were often faulted for being counterfeit, rejected by learned detractors as delusive fabrication. Nowhere was the resulting skepticism more ex treme than in Germany, where novels were long decried as sinful flights of fancy and reading them was censured as an immoral waste of time. Authors such as Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813), who tried to justify the genre, therefore confronted critics and had to cultivate readers still unused to taking prose fiction seriously. Wieland met this challenge by writing nine novels that show and tell much about their own fictional nature. In those novels themselves, he examines the imagi nation needed to read and write them, their capacity to convey utopian ideals, and their problematic illusory effects. These topics involve fic tionality defined in literary as well as epistemological, ontological, and anthropological terms, since the nature of Wieland's storytelling closely 1 2 Introduction parallels his larger psychological, ethical, and social themes. The pres ent study suggests both that his novels cohere by treating fictionality in such broad terms and that they help us understand the significance of fictionality even now, nearly two centuries after the last of them was written. This suggestion combines interests in literary theory and the history of the German novel, hoping to prove how each can illuminate the other. Such a reading of Wieland's novels also requires combining ap proaches to fictionality taken in current theoretical work. Although im plicitly as old as Plato's and Aristotle's more or less severe definitions of mimesis, that concept has only fairly recently become an explicit ob ject of academic study. Philosophers frequently view it from semantic or ontological angles, investigating the meaning of fictional sentences, for example, or the names of fictional characters or the existence of fictional objects.1 Literary theorists tend to prefer historical and aes thetic categories established by their own notions of narratology, speech acts, reader reception, and similar subjects.2 The interests of these two camps seldom coincide, and their adherents can seem mightily at odds. According to one scholar on the philosophers' side, "Literary critics have not hesitated to use the concepts of fictionality, of truth in/of lit erature, truthfulness to life, etc., but the theoretical standard of critical discourse is rather low in this domain." 3 By contrast, it has been ob served that "logicians rush in where Lea vis fears to tread." 4 The depth of this scholarly rift may be measured by comparing Kate Hamburger's Die Logik der Dichtung (1957) with John Woods's The Logic of Fiction (1974). Despite their equivalent titles, these two books address strik ingly different topics. Hamburger relates her "phenomenology of fic tional narration" -an explanation of prose fiction according to its inher ent logical structure-to the traditional literary genres of epic, dramatic, and lyric poetry, whereas Woods proposes a "semantic structure of fictional discourse" that expressly ignores aesthetic considerations.5 Studies of fictionality from either point of view, moreover, rarely inter pret individual literary texts. Paying close attention to Wieland's narra tive ways and means not only invites aesthetic as well as logical in quiry, then; analyzing his novels one by one also avoids a shortcoming common in much prior research. In tum, those novels help put that re search in new perspectives, implying a conception of fictionality ap plicable to life far beyond that of the academic mind alone. Such research itself has shown that fictionality has many facets. While analytic philosophers study its logical implications, other theo rists consider fictionality a literary and aesthetic issue pertinent to the modem novel, or recount its semiotic history, or see it in terms of lin- Introduction 3 guistic communication, not necessarily between authors and readers. These judgments can have familiar yet far-reaching consequences.