GERALD GILLESPIE

THE DISCOURSE OF DEFEAT IN NINETEENTH- CENTURY NARRATIVE

It is by no means difficult to think of works of the dawning nineteenth century in which the ruling discourse is that of vic- tory. In Heinrieh yon Ofterdingen (published 1802) Novalis proclaims the transcendent, redemptive power of poetry, love, and faith; and the dominant movement from "expectation" (Erwartung) into "fulfillment" (Erfi~llung)- as parts one and two of the novel are explicitly named-everywhere manifests salvation. In an alternate vision of empowerment set in the Middle Ages, Schiller's dramatic epic Wilhelm Tell (1804) reenacts and .celebrates the triumph of the republican principle actuated by a natural community. In the completed Faust H (1832), Goethe's representative experiencer does not exit in revulsion over the real hurt in existence, but under sublime guidance regains affirming insight. Nor is genuine victory as spiritual education impossible at mid-century, as we see in Emily Bront~'s Wuthering Heights (1847) where, through the younger generation, Heathcliffe works out his own and Cathy's salvation after her death in a haunting and haunted corner of contem- porary England. We could all extend this set of examples. But in the process of so doing, it would soon grow clear that to amass instances of a discourse of defeat is far easier. We could and should look back to the exposure of the crisis of sentimental development in Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) as harbinger of a lasting problematics of defeat. The inherited Enlightenment hope in man's perfectibility, the breakthrough of idealist philosophy, the charm of the organicist view, the new Romantic hope for a release of synthesizing powers of love and

15" Neohelicon XV/1 Akad~rniai Kiadr, Budapest John Benjamins B. V., Amsterdam 228 GERALD GILLESPIE poetry, the astonishing happening of the Revolution- all these currents and events could not forestall reconsideration of defeat, its meaning or lack of meaning. Early Romanticism seemed to promise a discourse which could encompass metonymic diver- sity or redeem manifoldness by subsuming it in the poetic mind as system-as a reinscribed metaphoric wholeness. The first serious challenge to the "heroic" moment of Romantic faith arises out of the ironic impulses that occasion precocious self- deconstructive agonies. If we characterize the Marquis de Sade's extreme libertine response as a "special" case in the eighteenth century, Romantic self-doubt occurs at least as early as the nightmarish collapse of values in the Nachtwachen of Bonaven- tufa (1804). The threat is characterized by a variety of troubled inter- nalizations of the Romantic imperative to poeticize life. Roman- tic retreat before the pressures of nature, society, and history appears in such works as Hoffmann's artist novella Der goldene Topf: ein Miirchen aus der neuen Zeit (1814). Des Vetters Eckfen- ster (1822), written shortly before Hoffmann's own death, observes the artist withdrawn into his room, 'explicitly into a bio-socially circumscribed mental space, and gazing upon the nineteenth-century theater of life outside his window. Alter- nating in a game of apprenticeship as story-teller and reader figures, the dying artist and his cousin-double engage in "inter- preting" the scene, that is, in generating variant texts in an endless intertextual universe of the human spirit. Magic is fled from the world into the imagination. By fusing naturalistic sobriety with intense sympathy for the humblest existences, Hoffmann suddenly begins to sound like Dickens and other mid-century Romantic Realists. Stendhal acknowledges the repression of Romantic dreams as a post-Revolutionary law in his disillusionistic novel Le rouge et le noir (1831). Julien Sorel learns that the mainline routes to success are by way of betrayal of self and others, and his redis- covery of the fullness of being can only flower in prison under sentence of death, while the same truth entails the love-death of