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German Romanticism and Science: the Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter

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German Romanticism and Science: the Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter German Romanticism and Science Routledge Studies in Romanticism 1. Keats’s Boyish Imagination 9. Thomas De Quincey Richard Marggraf Turley New Theoretical and Critical Directions Edited by Robert Morrison and 2. Leigh Hunt Daniel Sanjiv Roberts Life, Poetics, Politics Edited by Nicholas Roe 10. Romanticism and Visuality Fragments, History, Spectacle 3. Leigh Hunt and the London Sophie Thomas Literary Scene A Reception History of his Major 11. Romanticism, History, Works, 1805–1828 Historicism Michael Eberle-Sinatra Essays on an Orthodoxy Edited by Damian Walford Davies 4. Tracing Women’s Romanticism Gender, History and Transcendence 12. The Meaning of “Life” in Kari E. Lokke Romantic Poetry and Poetics Edited by Ross Wilson 5. Metaphysical Hazlitt Bicentenary Essays 13. German Romanticism Uttara Natarajan, Tom Paulin and and Science Duncan Wu The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter 6. Romantic Genius and the Jocelyn Holland Literary Magazine Biography, Celebrity, Politics David Higgins 7. Romantic Representations of British India Edited by Michael Franklin 8. Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity Robert Mitchell German Romanticism and Science The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter Jocelyn Holland New York London First published 2009 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2009 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereaf- ter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trade- marks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Holland, Jocelyn, 1973– German romanticism and science : the procreative poetics of Goethe, Novalis, and Ritter / Jocelyn Holland. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in romanticism ; 13) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749–1832—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Novalis, 1772–1801—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Ritter, Johann Wilhelm, 1776–1810— Criticism and interpretation. 4. German literature—18th century—History and criticism. 5. Romanticism—Germany. 6. Human reproduction in literature. 7. Literature and science. I. Title. PT2213.H65 2009 830.9'145—dc22 2008044843 ISBN 0-203-87901-5 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-99326-1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-87901-5 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-99326-5 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-87901-6 (ebk) Bianca Theisen, in memoriam Contents Acknowledgments ix 1 Introduction 1 2 Poetic Procreation and Goethe’s Theory of Metamorphosis 19 3 Friedrich von Hardenberg and the Discourse of Procreation 56 4 The Poet as Artisan and the Instruments of Procreation 85 5 Johann Wilhelm Ritter and the Writing of Life 113 6 Procreative Thinking—Scientifi c Projects 134 Conclusion 157 Notes 165 Bibliography 209 Index 219 Acknowledgments I cannot express the extent of my gratitude to those who helped me com- plete this manuscript. To my parents, John and Jeanne Holland; to my dis- sertation advisors, Rüdiger Campe and Bianca Theisen; to my colleagues at UCSB, to my friends, and to Gil: thank you! 1 Introduction If we return to the fi eld of philosophy and consider evolution and epigenesis once more, then these seem to be words with which we only hinder ourselves. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, MA 12:101)1 Everything indicates that the essence of procreation is absolutely to be sought more deeply than in the mere laws of matter. (Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Fragmente, n. 504)2 According to Karl Ernst von Baer, it was a combination of luck and sci- entifi c practice that led him to identify the mammalian ovum in 1826, an important step in unveiling the secret of human procreation: Sonderbar! dachte ich, was muss das seyn? Ich öffnete ein Bläschen und hob vorsichtig das Fleckchen mit dem Messer in ein mit Wasser gefülltes Uhrglas, das ich unter das Mikroskop brachte. Als ich in dieses einen Blick geworfen hatte, fuhr ich, wie vom Blitze getroffen, zurück, denn ich sah deutlich eine sehr kleine, scharf ausgebildete gelbe Dotterkugel. Ich musste mich erholen, ehe ich den Muth hatte, wieder hinzusehen, da ich besorgte, ein Phantom habe mich betrogen. Es scheint sonder- bar, dass ein Anblick, den man erwartet und ersehnt hat, erschrecken kann, wenn er da ist. (Von Baer, Selbstbiographie, 311) Strange! I thought, what must that be? I opened a vesicle and carefully lifted that little fl eck with the knife into a watch glass fi lled with wa- ter, which I then brought under the microscope. As I took a look at it I jumped back as if struck by lightning, for I clearly saw a very small, precisely formed yellow yolk orb. I had to recover before I had the courage to look again, for I was worried that a phantom might have deceived me. It seems strange that the sight of something which one has expected and longed for can cause a fright when it is fi nally there. This passage in von Baer’s autobiography moderates the thrill of an elec- trically-charged epiphany with a healthy dose of skepticism. Is the vision which causes him to leap back from the microscope a mere trick of the light or a legitimate scientifi c discovery? Fortunately, the latter: the “phantom” of the mammalian ovum, which had long haunted theories of procreation without being confi rmed, was no ghost. Von Baer, with a nod to the earlier observations of William Cruikshank and others, can take his credit for 2 German Romanticism and Science revealing the “discovery of the true state of the generation of mammals, including humans.”3 The state of the unknown can be as thrilling as the moment of revela- tion, often more so. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, despite an abundance of theoretical explanations and empirical data, the mystery of procreation remained unsolved and European fascination with the topic had reached a peak. If the physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach is to be believed, procreation was the secret of the day, “the most basic object of research for inquiring minds.”4 He speaks for the masses with his delicately posed question, “What goes on inside one creature when it has given itself over to the sweetest of all impulses and now, made fecund by another, should give life to a third?”5 Blumenbach’s question, which governs his treatise On the Formative Drive and the Process of Procreation,6 captures the fundamental enigma which had preoccupied mankind ever since the fi rst procreating pair stared in astonishment at its own offspring like a sec- ond divine creation.7 His conviction that procreation was one of the most important unsolved questions of his time was echoed by many of his con- temporaries, including Franz von Baader, Lorenz Oken, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who, much like the original man and woman in Blumenbach’s mythological account, marveled at the ability of human birth to approxi- mate the divine. For Humboldt, the emergence of life, though relying on material which is already there, nonetheless remains “ein unergründliches Geheimnis” (an unfathomable secret).8 Any initial appearance of gender neutrality is deceptive. Humboldt differentiates very clearly between male and female roles in the process of procreation.9 Both he, Blumenbach, and their contemporaries were well aware that a signifi cant portion of procre- ation’s mystique derives from the “secrets of the females,” a subject which for Blumenbach spanned the classical Greek philosophy, the “carnal” books that heated the theological debates of the Middle Ages, and later debates.10 Or, in Kant’s laconic formulation, “man is easy to investigate, woman does not reveal her secret.”11 Not only in science is procreation a matter of inquiry around 1800. Literature has its own penchant for secrets, and the writers of German Romanticism conduct their own investigations. Johann Wilhelm Rit- ter muses in his fragment collection that “everything indicates that the essence of procreation is absolutely to be sought more deeply than in the mere laws of matter,”12 and Friedrich von Hardenberg, writing under the pen name Novalis, speculates on the “mysticism of this operation” between body and soul.13 My study poses questions about procreation as basic as Blumenbach’s. How do we account for procreation as a discur- sive phenomenon? What patterns, tendencies, and distinctive rhetorical features characterize this discourse? Is there a particular perspective or literary response to this scientifi c and cultural enigma which could be described as a poetics of procreation?14 Implicit in these questions is the assumption that the study of the literary text, not bound to any single Introduction 3 line of inquiry, is uniquely situated to assess the interdisciplinarity of the phenomenon. ‘Procreation’ around 1800 extends beyond a narrow set of physiological questions to include all processes of generation. I have therefore chosen as case studies three authors whose literary writ- ing is shaped by diverse scientifi c interests which, taken together, are as far-reaching as the problem of procreation itself: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Hardenberg, and Johann Wilhelm Ritter. In each case, the writing on procreation is determined by the scientifi c knowl- edge of the individual in question.
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