5—
The Site of Instruction:
Literary Tales

Like the heart, reason has its epochs and its fortunes, but its story is told much less frequently. One appears satisfied with elaborating on passions and their extremes, mistakes, and consequences without taking into account how closely they are linked with the thought systems of the individual.
Friedrich Schiller, Philosophische Briefe

Like Minerva from the head of Jupiter, philosophy springs from the poetry of an infinite, divine being.
Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion

All language is of a successive nature; it does not lend itself to a reasoning of the eternal, the intemporal. . . .

Denying temporal succession, denying the self . . . are apparent desperations and secret consolations. . . . Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.
Jorge Luis Borges, "A New Refutation of Time"

The literary tales of German Romanticism choreograph the rise and fall or the condition and limits of logos, word, and reason against the background of an individual's life. In the true Romantic spirit each life constitutes a text weaving disparate strands of time, memory, knowledge, and intuition into a poetic reality. This reality is more an aesthetic form of self-reflection than a reflection of an epistemic or historical truth. The path of the fictional traveler proceeds from a unified subjectivity to a diversity of experience and understanding. The skeleton of abstract ideas is fleshed out in the body of fiction.

The tales of literary Romanticism discussed here present in the physical body of poetic texts the metaphysical concerns of Romantic idealism. Their interest is decidedly historical. The characters and events are drawn from or fashioned on historical and archival accounts. However, these sources are deliberately disguised or transformed in order to reveal the inadvertent failures of accuracy

and veracity that characterize the writing of history. Like fiction, historiography is a representational form, that is, it attempts to represent a spatial or temporal absence. It does this by using systems of signification by which we make sense of the past. If the past is to serve as an object of knowledge for the present, it has to be cast in the regulative metaphors of the present. In other words, it has to be interpreted within the framework of its relevance for the present. Thus the historian often recounts the past in terms of analogies, similes, and metonymies. The past, furthermore, is only accessible as textualized remains. In other words, not only do historians engage in an act of rhetorical interpretation but they also interpret texts rather than events, thus maintaining a double distance from the actual object of investigation. The operative trope of historiography appears therefore to be Romantic irony. Irony operates in terms of the relationship historiography has to its object and the distance that separates it from that object. Like all Darstellung, the writing of history is infinitely approximate and appropriative representation.

The problem of representation as mediated truth is translated into poetic or prophetic truth that is in turn an affirmation of the irreducible gap between aesthetic form and logical norm. The suspension of chronological or linear flow of the narrative in these tales is one example in defiance of logical norm. Time is no longer seen as a highly codified system divided into a past, a present, and a future. It is no longer calendar time, but a framework of experience that acquires its only coherence in memory (recollection), imagination, and text.

The three tales discussed do not designate any present as their point of reference. Rather the three dimensions of time are conflated and mediated in a representational form which operates by metaphors of memory and anticipation. The past, not merely as it was but rather in its alternative configurations, remains a source of reference for the narrative present and future. Imagination and recollection as instruments of human understanding realize and anthropomorphize time in narrative.

The protagonists of the following stories are in broad terms all participants in the convention of Bildungsreisende (travelers on the road to education). The quest for self-knowledge, typical of the Bildungsroman, takes the form of encounters with the "exotic other" that appears variously as primordial nature and a glorious past in Hyperion, a poetic experience beyond space and time in Heinrich

von Ofterdingen, and the occult in Isabella von Ägypten . The protagonists decode this otherness by learning a new alphabet, a new language, and a new geography. Their education constitutes an initiation into the sacred order of poetry. The initiation takes place in a timeless or unrepresentable time which is possessed in imagination and shared in memory.

In memory and anticipation, in suspended temporality, and accompanied by recurrent alterity, the hero of the Romantic novel attempts to meet the pedagogical imperative and learns to intuit the many voices and languages of the earth, to navigate the threatening channels of ambiguity, and to waltz between necessity and freedom. The following brief encounters with Hyperion, Heinrich, and Isabella are not conceived as full-fledged literary interpretations of their (hi)stories. The recent history of literary criticism offers many fine interpretive studies of German Romantic literature.^[1] Rather the following reading of three exemplary literary texts attempts to underline the metahistorical status of Romantic literature as it reflects on its own mode of narrative operation and on concepts of temporality and alterity. It is a compact recording of these texts as voices of a new poetic historiography. In other words, these tales are viewed as literary historical works that purport, as Hayden White has observed, "to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them" (1973, 2). This representation of historical experience cannot be conceived in terms of a narrowly historical documentary or realistic notion of history but rather as a heuristic challenge to the preconceived boundaries separating history from story.

Friedrich Hölderlin's Hyperion

In a review of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister in the Athenäum, Friedrich Schlegel refers to the pedagogical vision of the novel as follows: "Not this or that individual should be educated but nature and culture themselves should be represented [dargestellt ] in a multiplicity of examples and summarized in simple principles" (1958, 2: 143). This imperative coincides almost ideally with Hyperion's pursuit. The pursuit is realized not in any action but solely in reflection. The novel uses the epistolary form and is restricted, with the exception of a couple of letters by Hyperion's beloved Diotima, to a single letter writer, Hyperion. In a series of letters to his friend Bellarmin, Hyperion reconstructs through tem-

poral voyages of memory his attempts to live as a hermit and to embrace the lesson of freedom as exemplified by nature and ancient Athens, two terms that oppose an education regulated by the dictates of modern rationalism and political absolutism. Like Schiller's letters in Aesthetic Education, Hyperion's letters argue that no theory of knowledge nor its attendant progress can achieve legitimacy before undergoing an aesthetic re-vision. Philosophy is not born of "mere understanding," for it is more than "the limited knowledge of what is," writes Hyperion. Nor is it born of "mere reason," for it is more than a "blind demand for a never-ending progress in combination and differentiation of some practicable matter" (1969, 1: 369). However, once the ideal of beauty illuminates reason, then reason begins to see what it is striving for. In art, which is a testament to the ideal of beauty, knowledge can ultimately exercise autonomy and become an agent of freedom.

In another text, known as "Fragment von Hyperion," Hölderlin describes the itinerary from the confining dictates of reason to the autonomy of will as the "eccentric path" (exzentrische Bahn ; ibid., 1: 440). This path originates in the pure simplicity of nature and ends in the multiplicity of formation. This last stage is not a naïve unity with nature but an informed encounter with it. It is a conscious effort of the self to form (bilden ) itself in a dialogue with the other. The educated approximation to nature in art and myth, in other words, in beauty, signals an infinite progression. "Oh ye who seek the highest and the best, in the depths of knowledge, in the turmoil of action, in the darkness of the past, in the labyrinth of the future, in graves or above the stars! do ye know its name? the name of the one which is one and all?" (ibid., 1: 339). Not surprisingly, this rich diversity and union of knowledge and experience is named Beauty.

In his letters Hyperion retrospectively charts the course of this progression toward the ideal of beauty. In a nonlinear order governed only by the dictates of a selective memory, Hyperion recounts childhood dreams, his trip to Athens, his encounters with the teacher figures Adamas and Alabanda, his arrival at the ideal of beauty in Diotima, his participation in the Greek war of independence, his return to Germany, and his final search for a new mythology. The time of the letters is a reconstructed time, whose anachronism orders the accounts in accordance with the perceived progress of Bildung . Self-representation is intimately linked to the

representation of another time and place. However, neither the identity of the protagonist nor the time and space where he dwells refers to a fixed person, history, or geography. Hyperion is alternately a German and a Greek, simultaneously the narrator and the narratee. The time in which events are chronicled switches between antiquity and the eighteenth century, the setting of narrated action, between Germany, Greece, the Ottoman Empire, and the Orient at large. The status of the topoi of history or the story is, in the final analysis, equivocal. Time and space are represented both as monument and ruin and homeland and foreign land, respectively.

The locality presented is always a memorial, the locus for recollection of what has been lost, forgotten, removed, or erased through time. "Oh, it is so sweet to drink from the cup of oblivion" (ibid., 1: 336), muses Hyperion. The Greeks of the eighteenth century are subjects of the Ottoman Empire and fighting against it for independence. However, the Greece of the narrative is not the "real" Greece of the eighteenth century inhabited by a modern Slavic people but an ideal representation of what ancient Greece was. At some point, for example, Hyperion goes to Smyrna in Asia Minor. Smyrna is the ancient name of the Ottoman city of Izmir and all reference to Smyrna is to the ancient city. If the action is taking place in the eighteenth century, it is unlikely that Hyperion would visit one of the major ports of the enemy. Hyperion's father advises him to go to Smyrna to learn "the speech of cultivated peoples and their political constitutions, their views, their manners and customs" (ibid., 1: 308). Clearly, this idealized picture simply glosses over the historical fact that ancient Smyrna is now occupied by what Hyperion sees as Oriental despots. Nevertheless, there are references to actual historical events. The second letter in the first book of the second volume contains a historically accurate reference to the Cheshme naval battle with the Ottoman sultan's fleet on July 4, 1770 (ibid., 1: 405). In this way, like the vision of Romantic poetry in fragment 116 of the Athenäum, the narrative floats between the real and the idea(l), the historical and the fictional. John Jay Baker, in a study on Hölderlin's elegy "Brod und Wein," has observed that one approach to the elegy is "to treat its historical dimension as a rhetorical overlay," that is, to understand Hölderlin's Greece not as "the Greece of history but instead the history and product of a trope." This trope, in turn, is "the inauguration of the aesthetic character by which the West has known itself" (1986, 471).

The picture of an idealized ancient Athens in Hyperion can be read tropologically as an allegory of nature and freedom. This allegory is the criterion by which the phases in the process of Bildung of the individual and of history are judged. The memory of Athens stands in sharp contrast to Hyperion's representation of Sparta, the Orient, and, later, the Germanic North.

More undisturbed in every way, freer from violent interference than any other people on earth, the Athenians grow into adulthood. No conqueror weakens them, no victory in war intoxicates them, no foreign religion stupefies them, no rash wisdom urges them to untimely maturity. (1969, 1: 363)

The Athenians "cannot tolerate arbitrariness, because their divine nature refuses to be upset, they cannot tolerate legality everywhere for they do not need it everywhere" (ibid., 1: 366). Hyperion draws a parallel between this picture of Athens and his happy childhood before knowledge had "ruined everything" for him. Indeed, "the child is a divine creature . . . The pressure of law and destiny does not touch it; only in the child is freedom" (ibid., 1: 298). Like Schiller, Hölderlin celebrates the inauguration of freedom in beauty. The child's freedom is one with beauty. "The first child of divine beauty is art. Thus it was among the Athenians" (ibid., 1: 365). In a sentence reminiscent of Schiller, Hyperion states that "the spiritual beauty of the Athenians produced the necessary sense for freedom" (ibid., 1: 365–366).

Sparta, in contrast, never enjoyed an unfragmented childhood situated in nature and beauty, and therefore moved into a problematic adulthood. Egyptians impassively bore "the despotism of arbitrary action" while the people of the North tolerated without resistance "the despotism of law, injustice in the form of codes of justice" (ibid., 1: 366). Here Hölderlin seems to adopt Hegel's view of the Oriental world and its submission to despotic will as a primitive stage in the history of the spirit:

Like a supreme despot, the Eastern climate in its power and splendor casts its inhabitants to the ground. Before humans learn to walk, they must kneel, before they learn to speak, they must beg; before the heart finds equilibrium, it must bend, before the spirit is strong enough to bear flowers and fruit, fate and nature drain all its strength through scorching heat. Egyptians are devoted before they are a whole so they know nothing of wholeness, of beauty, and what they call the most

sublime is a veiled power, an awful enigma; the dark, dumb Isis is their first and last, a hollow infinity and nothing reasonable has ever come out of it. Even the most sublime nothingness gives birth to nothingness. (ibid., 1: 367)

Nevertheless, the text maintains some trace of the Romantic notion of the Orient as a place of higher truth and learning. Alabanda, for example, leaves Hyperion to go to a mysterious unnamed place in the heart of Asia to benefit from its age-old wisdom. On the other hand, the North forces its pupils into introspection too soon. "If the spirit of the fiery Egyptian hurries forth to travel happily through the world, in the North, the spirit returns into itself even before it is ready to travel" (ibid., 1: 368). "Pure intellect, pure reason are always the kings of the North," adds the narrator.

Hyperion remains troubled by the contemporary dominance of the Nordic spirit. His imagination strives to refashion the German spirit on the image of the Hellenic ideal. But that spirit is too absorbed in the self, hence unable to divide itself to become different. The only way to freedom lies not in philosophical certainty or a belief in order but in the poetization of existence. And this starts at the point of positing and accepting difference. Hyperion observes that the great saying of Heraclitus about positing difference within oneself is an adage only a Greek could have found, "for it is the essence of beauty, and before that was found, there was no philosophy" (ibid., 1: 367). Without beauty there is no philosophy, and beauty only comes into being when the self separates from itself (posits itself) and recognizes this difference, this separation, as beauty. In art, the first child of divine beauty, divine humanity rejuvenates and renews itself. In order to present itself to its own consciousness, the self posits its beauty. "Thus human beings give themselves their gods. For in the beginning humans and their gods were one, when, unknown to itself, eternal beauty was " (ibid., 1: 365). This view is heavily indebted to Schelling's philosophy of art. As Schelling argues at the end of System of Transcendental Idealism, art is the only genuine agent and document of philosophy because it

continues to authenticate what philosophy cannot represent in external form, namely the unconscious element in action and production and its original identity with the conscious. . . . The view of nature which the philosopher appropriates artificially [künstlich ] is, for art [Kunst ], the original and natural one. (1979, 272)

Thus, artistic representation coincides with a primordial, natural reality or truth. This is what Hyperion seeks. His poetic language is cast in a mythological idiom that permanently recalls Greece as a preeminent topos of divine utterance.

Hyperion charts the course of Bildung as a move toward a new intimacy with the divinities of a mythologized past. The present makes a mockery of an aesthetic and moral education. In his letters to Diotima Hyperion records fragmented memories of a bloody war: "It is over, Diotima! Our people have plundered, murdered indiscriminately" (1969, 1: 399). With the triumph of barbarism and the defeat of primordial Greek sensibility, language loses its emancipatory force and becomes a tool of oppression. Hyperion therefore seeks silence: "I can scarcely speak. . . . Language is a great superfluity. The best is ever for itself, and rests in its own depth like the pearl at the bottom of the sea" (ibid., 1: 400). Silence is the language of the poetic, after the poetic is disappointed by language. When Hyperion receives no word of farewell from Diotima after a long wait, he writes to her, "but you remain silent. That, too, is a language of your beautiful soul, Diotima" (ibid., 1: 402).

After his profound disappointment in modern-day Greeks—"I have nothing more to do with the Greeks" (ibid., 1: 400)—Hyperion's rendezvous with contemporary Germany proves even more devastating:

So I arrived among the Germans. I did not demand much and was prepared to find even less. I came humbly, like the homeless, blind Oedipus to the gates of Athens. . . . Barbarians all along, they have grown more barbarous through industry and science and even religion, and are profoundly incapable of any divine emotion. . . . It is a hard saying, and yet I speak it because it is the truth: I can think of no people more torn apart than the Germans. You see artisans, but no human beings, thinkers, but no human beings, priests, but no human beings, masters and servants, but no human beings, youths and adults, but no human beings—is this not like a battlefield where hacked-off hands and arms and every other member lie pell-mell, while the life-blood drained from them vanishes in the sand? (ibid., 1: 433)

The only salvation from the memory of this bloodbath lies in recourse to the primordial unity of all beauty: "There will be but one beauty; and humanity and nature will be united in one all-embracing Divinity" (ibid., 1: 375). The locus of this transcendental re-

covery is poetry where a new poetic history or a new mythology is constituted in the encounter of the past with the future. This vision corroborates Schlegel's statement that only poetry serves as both model and remembrance (1958, 19: 5, no. 19). The model of Hölderlin's Greece is an allegory of the historical realization of an emancipatory and anticipatory vision. Thus, the projection of myth in Hölderlin re-calls the memory of this allegory.

The vision of a new mythology as the only feasible Bildung is borne out by the content of a short and incomplete text called "Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus" (The earliest systematic program of German idealism) and discovered by Franz Rosenzweig among a collection of Hegel's papers and published in 1917.^[2] This fragmentary document has been variously attributed to Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy read the "program" as a text that introduces a disruptive break "within the philosophical, . . . a distortion and a deviation, which inaugurates the genuinely modern position of the philosophical (which is still our own, in more ways than one)" (1988, 29). In "Hölderlin und der deutsche Idealismus" (Hölderlin and German Idealism) Ernst Cassirer concludes that the author of the "System" is in all probability Hölderlin (1971, 132–135). Cassirer claims that, after a meeting with Hölderlin in the summer of 1795, Schelling perhaps conceived of a new duty for philosophy inspired greatly by Hölderlin's vision of the role of art. Indeed, the decisive insight of the text that "the philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy" is the site where Idealism gives way to Romanticism. Like Schlegel's fragment 116 in the Athenäum, this text serves as a kind of manifesto of Romantic idealism. Its foremost item stipulates the representation of the self as absolutely free: "The first idea is, of course, the representation [Vorstellung ] of myself, as an absolutely free being. With the free, self-conscious being arises simultaneously a whole world —from nothingness—the only true and conceivable creation from nothingness " (1969, 2: 647).^[3] The world is created out of nothingness by the self-consciously free self. The subject's free self-presentation is the true form of the world. This reaffirms the Fichtean idea of the absolute self as self-consciousness.

The absolute freedom of consciousness is the possibility of the system: "Only that which is the object of freedom is called idea " (ibid., 2: 647). And the idea of beauty unites the ideas of consciousness, knowledge, and ethics. It is the ideal idea. It sublates all con-

tradiction and resolves the opposition between system and freedom or, to use Kantian terms, necessity and freedom. This resolution takes place, implies the text, in the act of poetic representation. Philosophy realizes itself, becomes conscious of itself, when it represents itself in art. "I am convinced," reads the text, "that the highest act of reason, which covers all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are related only in beauty " (ibid., 2: 648). Without a sense for the aesthetic, philosophy can only be a philosophy of the letter. Hyperion sees the work of all understanding devoid of the "beauty of spirit," as a labor of mere necessity (ibid., 1: 369). If "the philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy" (ibid., 2: 648), then poetry as Hyperion 's lesson shows is the teacher of humanity. Diotima assigns this pedagogical role to Hyperion who embarks on a symbolic search for the divine embodiment of beauty. In farewell Diotima says to Hyperion: "You will be the teacher of our people, you will be a great man, I hope" (ibid., 1: 375).

The "System Program" continues with a plea for a sensible religion, that is, a material form of art that engages the human senses: "We often hear that the masses need a sensible religion . Not only the great masses but also the philosopher needs this. Monotheism of the reason and of the heart, polytheism of the imagination and of art, that is what we need!" (ibid., 2: 648). This implies a new mythology of reason—a reconstituted mythology which stands to inherit the poetic configurations of a re-visioned idealism. And this mythology constitutes a religion of free will. "Do you know," Alabanda asks Hyperion, "why I have never given death any thought? I feel a life in me which no god created and no mortal begot. I believe that we exist through ourselves and that only through our own free desire are we so intimately bound to all." What meaning would life have if the world "were not a harmony of free beings?" (ibid., 1: 421). This freedom defines the priesthood of poetry. In Diotima's words Hyperion will be "the priest of divine nature" (ibid., 1: 429). At the height of the bankruptcy of reason, morality, and politics which informs the present age, the hope of healing lies in a new religion of the beautiful. And Hyperion heals as he writes, understands the state of affairs better as he recounts it, and understands the continuity and necessity of horror in history and the loss of Alabanda and Diotima. "We depart," he remembers Diotima saying, "only to be more intimately united, more divinely at peace with

all, with ourselves. We die in order to live" (ibid., 1: 428). In this sense time flows backward and death leads to youth and birth.

The focus on a new mythology as a means of recollecting the lost lessons of history and as a moral corrective to the idolatrous worship of reason in modernity marks the path of Romantic Bildung . In a certain sense, this path originates in a work that was unacknowledged at the time of its publication and forgotten soon afterward but recovered and much acclaimed in recent critical history. In 1725 a distinguished Italian jurist by the name of Giambattista Vico published a book called Scienza nuova (The new science). The key to this new science lay in Vico's perception that the so-called primitive peoples when properly understood reveal themselves as neither naïve nor savage but instinctively poetic in their response to the world. This response issues from their inherent "poetic wisdom" (sapienza poetica ) which governs their interaction with the world and reveals itself in forms of poetic representation such as myth and symbol. The mythical universe of the ancients is then not to be understood as a mode of ingenuous coping but as an attitude of a radically different order whose ultimate function is cognitive. The mythical accounts of creation are not supernatural visions of the primitive eye but means of encoding the world and coming to terms with its mysteries. All myths are rooted in the actual experience of the ancients and represent their attempts to impose a graspable, human shape on nature. Vico's theory of myth represents one of the earliest modern arguments to base the importance of art on the notion that abstract thought emerges from mythical imagination and iconic expression. Vico consequently reverses the rationalistic understanding of poetic tropes as forms of deviation from standard language. He regards them as both temporally and logically prior to abstract thought. In the final analysis, it is the faculty of poetic wisdom which displays a consistent ability to deploy myth and metaphor in the translation of the mysteries of nature into earthly vision. The conclusion inherent in Vico's argument is that how we articulate the world determines our way of arriving at what we call reality.

This poetic reality implicitly criticizes the idea of the Enlightenment that the world is a rationally ordered whole. Such criticism finds its forceful expression in Novalis's notion of Romantisieren (romanticizing) which "is nothing other than a qualitative potenti-

ation. . . . This operation is as yet quite unknown. By attibuting a higher meaning to the ordinary, a mysterious appearance to the commonplace, the worth of the unknown to the known, the appearance of infinity to finitude, I romanticize them" (1960, 2: 545, no. 105). In other words, knowledge is not limited to the sphere of the rationally and quantitatively accountable and verifiable. Through the transcendental vision of poetic wisdom, images, dreams, and memories expand and diversify the human capacity for understanding. In Heinrich von Ofterdingen poetic understanding shows itself capable of being realized both in the real world of representable time and space and in a world that is beyond a representable reality where time and space form a seamless continuum in memory and anticipation.

Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen

Of all the novel fragments and novellas of German Romanticism Heinrich von Ofterdingen is perhaps the one that exemplifies most consistently Schlegel's statement that a "theory of the novel would have to be itself a novel" (1958, 2: 337). In his notebooks Novalis lists the "unities" (Einheiten ) of the novel as "the struggle between poetry and non-poetry. Between the old and the new world. The story and history of the novel itself" (1960, 1: 340 and 3: 639, no. 510). In fact, this novel fragment is a configuration of various literary forms which narrate the story of their own historical and formal production. The conceptual tapestry of the novel, where various reflections on the nature of understanding, interpretation, and knowledge are interwoven, makes a ready categorization of the work untenable. Novalis's notes of February 11, 1800, indicate that Ofterdingen was conceived as a poetic response to Goethe's "unpoetic" Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's apprenticeship) (ibid., 3: 645–652). Novalis finds Meister "fundamentally a fatal and stupid book—so pretentious and ornamented (artificial)" (ibid., 3: 646, no. 536). Novalis's polemic against Goethe's work provides the former with the pretext to formulate his own theory of the novel. For Novalis the novelist's endeavor is a hermeneutical event co-sponsored by the philosophical act of reflection and the poetic principle of selection and combination: "The novelist attempts to create poetry by events and dialogues, by reflection and portrayal. . . . Everything depends on the manner and art of artistic

selection and combination" (ibid., 3: 649, no. 549). The various parts of this narrative combination are reflected, as sanctioned by fragment 116 of the Athenäum, in an endless series of tropological mirrors. These parts often "float" between the real and ideal, between "what is represented and what represents . . . on the wings of poetic reflection."

The notion of "qualitative potentiation" or the exponential increase in the power of the poetic integer is implemented through a frequent use of foreshadowing. In this way, dreams, songs, poems, memories, and actual happenings all recall, anticipate, and reflect on one another. This recurring shift between various representations of reality is already apparent in the first two sentences of the novel:

Heinrich's parents were already in bed and asleep; the clock on the wall was ticking monotonously; outside the rattling windows the wind was blowing. From time to time the glimmer of the moon lit up the room. The youth lay restless on his bed and thought about the stranger and his stories. (ibid., 1: 195)

From one sentence to the next there is a shift from an everyday scene to the remembrance of things past, a reference to a mysterious stranger. The next sentence introduces the recurrent metaphor of the blue flower:

I yearn to get a glimpse of the blue flower. It is perpetually in my mind, and I can write and think of nothing else. I have never felt like this before; it seems as if I just had a dream or as if I had been transported into another world in sleep. For in the world where I otherwise lived, who would ever bother about flowers? (ibid.)

Novalis invests the unknown with the known by assigning the stranger and the blue flower the definite article from the very beginning. The blue flower with its wide repertoire of significations is the informing allegory of the novel and points to changing concepts at different temporal levels. It is introduced as a sign of indescribable longing, then becomes a symbol of ideal love, harmony with nature, the key to the code of nature, and, in a manner of speaking, the fleur-de-lis of the future kingdom of poetry.

In spite of the many shifts between the real world of the narrative and the ideal world of poetic prophecies, memories, and dreams the first part of the story called "Die Erwartung" (Expectations) takes

place in a real time and place: medieval Germany. Furthermore, the historical character of Heinrich is loosely based on a medieval bard of that name. Heinrich's actual journey with his mother from Eisenach to his grandfather's home in Augsburg constitutes the plot in the first part of the book. During the course of what appears to be an educational pilgrimage, Heinrich meets an unusual cast of characters including a party of traveling merchants, a group of crusaders, a Saracen slave girl, an old miner, a hermit in an underground library, and the poet Klingsohr and his daughter Mathilde. Heinrich's encounters and conversations with people from exotic worlds mark the stations of his Bildung . One of his early encounters is particularly revealing in its Romantic representation of the Orient. In his notes Novalis sketches the Saracen girl, Zulima, as an allegory of poetry: "The Oriental woman [die Morgenländerin ] is also poetry" (ibid., 1: 342). Heinrich is deeply moved by Zulima's song which tells of the woes of a stranger in a strange land. She tells Heinrich the story of her brother who moved to Persia to apprentice with a famous poet and was never heard of again, of the mysterious language of nature in her land, and of the poetic sentiments of her people:

She lingered particularly on the praise of her country and her people. She described their magnanimity and their pure, great sensitiveness to the poetry of life and to the wonderful, mysterious charm of nature. She described the romantic beauties of the fruitful Arabian regions, which lie like happy isles amid the pathless deserts, like refuges for the oppressed and the tired, like colonies of paradise. (ibid., 1: 236)

In Zulima's account Arabia is a museum of natural history where "strange, bright and many-colored figures and scenes on the old stone slabs" have preserved the myriad signifying practices of the past and intimate the presence of no longer presentable time and meaning: "An obscure recollection amid the transparent present reflects the images of the world in sharp outlines, and thus one enjoys a double world which in that way is freed of all that is crude and violent and becomes the magical poetry and fable of our senses" (ibid., 1: 237). In parting, Heinrich asks Zulima for her headband adorned with unknown letters. This gesture is yet another testimony to Heinrich's ongoing fascination with the esoteric signs of nature and occulted history.

The tales and fables within the novel constitute, in Schlegel's

definition of Romantic poetry, the endless series of mirrors that reflect the thematic concerns of the narrative. The Atlantis tale told by the traveling merchants in the third chapter of the first book introduces a compact itinerary of this novel. The song of the youth in the Atlantis tale deals with

the origin of the earth, the appearance of heavenly bodies, plants, animals, and human beings; with the omnipotent sympathy of nature; with the primeval golden age and its sovereigns—love and poetry; with the emergence of hate and barbarism and their battles with those beneficient goddesses; and finally with the future triumph of the latter, the end of misery, the rejuvenation of nature, and the return of an eternal golden age. (ibid., 1: 225)

The theme of the song becomes part of a progression in a symbolic series. It reappears as a more elaborate narrative in Klingsohr's tale and is then summed up in the Astralis poem which introduces the second part of the novel where it shifts from a second-order—as a story within a story—to a first-order narrative. In other words, the allegorical tales that were deviations from the plot of the first book become the thematic concern of the second book. Novalis orders experience in what he calls the "geometric progression" of the novel (ibid., 2: 534, no. 34). The idea of the novel cannot be contained in a center. Unlike Kant, who discounts the possibility of a conceptual rule adequate to the "free play of cognitive powers," Novalis finds a mathematical series that coincides with open-ended signification:

The novel is not the image or reality of a sentence . It is an intuitive implementation—realization of an idea. . . . An idea is an infinite series of sentences—an irrational quantity —that cannot be posited (musically)—incommensurable. . . . The law of its progression, however, can be formulated—and it is by this that a novel should be evaluated. (ibid., 2: 570, no. 212)

In spite of his wizardry with mathematical allegorizations, Novalis does not consider conceptual knowledge as an end in itself but as a means of achieving a state of informed innocence: "Knowledge [die Erkenntnis ] is a means of arriving at Non-knowledge [Nichterkenntnis ]. . . . Distant philosophy sounds like poetry—for each call into the distance becomes vocalic. . . . Everything becomes poetry—poem from afar" (ibid., 3: 302, no. 342). The Romantic

ideal of arriving at this state-of conscious naïveté through Bildung is realized in Heinrich's utopic experience of homecoming in the second part of the book. Here Heinrich returns to a dimension of theoretical innocence and poetic re-cognition. Understanding is not always categorical, nor is it governed by a priori forms of intuition. It can happen in the irrational world of a lost time, in hallucinations and dreams. The unconscious assumes the force of statement just as much as the conscious. A striking example is Heinrich's dream of Mathilde's drowning in the sixth chapter of the first book. On the one hand, its status in the story is one of a mere dream, for the real Mathilde makes several appearances in person after this dream. On the other hand, the only reference to Mathilde's actual death is in the dream, and, therefore, its symbolic representation and its reality become the one and the same. The force of the symbolic spares both Mathilde and the narrator the experience of the actual drowning or its replay at another narrative level.

Like dreams, memories are symbolic representations of knowledge. This is illustrated in a long conversation on history in the fifth chapter of the first book. Here Heinrich and a group of his traveling companions descend into mines in the company of a miner who has acquired a vast knowledge of the past by decoding the language of fossils. He was able to reconstruct a fragmented and forgotten past by studying the material remnants and ruins of the earth. The underground journey leads to the innermost cave where Heinrich and his companions meet Count von Hohenzollern, a hermit living in a vast library. He greets the travelers warmly and tells them the story of his youthful days as a soldier, of his children who were born in the Orient and died shortly after their arrival in Europe, and of his life with Marie, his wife who lies buried in the cave. During his conversation with Heinrich, Hohenzollern embarks on a lengthy argument for the literary structure of history. He emphasizes the importance of the associative power of imagination in imposing a coherent narrative form on the events of history. It is in Erinnerung (as memory and recollection) that the moments of Geschichte (as history and story) become an object of understanding and re-cognition:

The true sense for the stories [and histories] of human beings develops late and rather under the quiet influence of recollection than under the more aggressive impressions of the present. The immediate events seem

to be only vaguely related but they sympathize all the more beautifully with the more remote ones, and only when one is in a position to survey a long series [of events] and to avoid not only taking everything literally but also confusing the actual order [of events] with wanton dreams, does one apprehend the secret union of the past and the future and learn to piece together history out of hope and memories.

Only those to whom all past is present may succeed in discovering the simple rule of history. We come upon only incomplete and complicated formulas and can be glad if we find, even if only for ourselves, a useful prescription which provides us with an adequate explanation of our short lives. . . . Youth reads history only out of curiosity, like an entertaining fairy tale; for those in their more mature years history is a comforting and edifying friend who through her wise conversation prepares them gently for a higher, more comprehensive career and makes them familiar with the unknown world by means of telling images. (ibid., 1: 257–258)

History is then a representation of alterity, in this case, of another time which can never be recalled in its totality. This lost time is available to present consciousness only through fragments of texts or of collective memory which, in order to be understood, need narrative coherence. In Hohenzollern's view, therefore, only poets can write history, for they can re-collect fragments of time and rearrange them as a metaphorical whole in Darstellung :

When I seriously reflect on all this, it seems to me that a historian must necessarily be a poet, for only poets are likely to perfect the art of skillfully configuring events. In their stories and fables I have with quiet pleasure observed their fine sense for the mysterious spirit of life. There is more truth in their fairy tales than in scholarly chronicles. Even though the characters and their fates are invented, the spirit in which they are invented is nevertheless truthful and natural. To a certain extent, as far as our enjoyment and instruction are concerned, it does not matter whether the characters in whose fates we trace out our own ever really lived or not. We want to perceive the great simple soul in the events of an age; if this wish is granted, we do not bother about the accidental existence of its external figures. (ibid., 1: 259)

In this interpretation of Geschichte, based on its double meaning of history and story and governed by the poetic principle of narrative coherence, the paths of history and literature as well as historiography and literary criticism converge. Consequently, history is seen, as E. L. Doctorow once observed, as "a kind of fiction in

which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history . . . by which the available data for the composition is seen to be greater and more various in its sources than the historian presupposes" (1983, 25). In Novalis's "speculative history," the foregrounding of poetic operations helps identify, prior to analysis and explanation, certain levels of experience which may pose philosophical and cognitive challenges to understanding. The rhetorical use of language in the writing of history, the employment of tropes, can subject phenomena represented in historical texts to a poetic and ultimately a critical transformation.

An incident that follows the hermit Hohenzollern's discourse on history serves as a revealing reflection that the story makes on its own structural development. In Hohenzollern's library Heinrich finds a book "written in a foreign language which seemed to him to have some similarity to Latin and Italian" (1960, 1: 264). Gripped by a strange curiosity, Heinrich turns the pages of the book, which has no title, only to find his own image reproduced at various stages of his past and future life. He sees himself with his parents, present companions, and an imposing figure whom he does not yet recognize. The pictures on the last pages of the book get darker and blurred. When he comes to the last page Heinrich realizes that the book has no ending. He is overcome by a strong desire to read this occulted script: "He ardently wished he knew the language, for the book pleased him tremendously without his understanding a syllable of it" (ibid., 1: 264). Later Hohenzollern tells Heinrich that the book is written in Provençal and recounts the wondrous life of a poet. This book within the book prefigures the structural fortunes of the novel. Like the Provençal book, which has no title and no end, Heinrich von Ofterdingen remains a fragment. The actual book and the fictional book within the book, the "real" story and the prophetic story within the story are linked in their common structural destiny. Furthermore, this narrative strategy is a commentary on the intertextual nature of all books. Whether real or idea(l), books refer not to things in the world but to other books. Many postmodern novels such as Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose reflect on their own intertextual heritage. "I had thought, each book spoke of the things, human and divine, that lie outside of books," states Eco's narrator, "now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves" (1984, 342).

In the second part of the book, called "Die Erfüllung" ("The Fulfillment"), Heinrich moves from the real world of his family, his friends, his mentor Klingsohr, and beloved Mathilde to an ideal universe beyond time and space. He enters a domain of pure representation. Here the lines between different forms of narrative—story, poem, song, dream, prophecy—dissolve into a dreamlike vision. This vision is focused on reconstructing a world in a new language attuned to the pulse of nature. On this plane or planet suspended in a mythical time and space, Heinrich exists in a world of memory. He meets Sylvester, an old man intimate with the mysteries of nature. Heinrich's father had visited Sylvester's house in Rome as a young man. Sylvester is a figure from a past that would be inaccessible to Heinrich in a world of real or linear time. In the beginning of the novel Heinrich's father had recounted an earlier dream where Sylvester had appeared to him as a guide, leading him by the hand through long corridors into an open space where, like his son many years later, he is enchanted by the sight of the blue flower. A dream figure from the first part of the novel now reappears as a mediator and interpreter of fleeting and fragmentary signs of nature's languages. Sylvester instills in Heinrich an awareness of the universal signifying system that unites the disparate forms of human experience:

Plants are the most immediate language of the earth. . . . This green mysterious carpet of love . . . is renewed every spring, and its singular script is legible only to the beloved, like the Oriental bouquet. He will read forever and yet never be satisfied, and daily he will perceive new meanings, new, more enchanting revelations of loving nature. For me this infinite satisfaction is the secret charm which inheres in traversing the surface of the earth, for each region solves different riddles for me. (1960, 1: 329)

Just as the actual world of the first part often digressed into a world of poetic imagination, the poetic universe of the second part points to actual philosophical, moral, and social concerns. When Heinrich observes that Gewissen, the transcendental conscience that "generates the universe and meaning," appears to him "to be like the spirit of the world poem," Sylvester replies:

Conscience appears in every serious completion, in every cultivated truth. Every inclination and truth developed through reflection into a world picture becomes a phenomenon, a transformation of conscience.

All education [Bildung ] leads to what one can only call freedom, regardless of the fact that what is designated by this is not a mere concept but the creative ground of all being. This freedom is mastery. The master exercises unrestricted power in a purposeful, definite, and reflective manner. The objects of his art are his and subject to his will, and they do not chain or inhibit him. And precisely this all-encompassing freedom, mastery, or sovereignty is the essence, the drive of conscience. (ibid., 1: 331)

Like poetry, conscience cannot be reduced to conceptual categories yet it insures the freedom of human life. This union of moral and aesthetic education grants human beings mastery over the world by allowing them to read phenomena poetically or intuitively. Freedom resides in Bildung, which opposes the forces of ignorance and bigotry, and in the human capacity for visualization and symbol making through which we order and understand experience. As a representational system that subsumes sign and symbol, language insures this freedom. "Language," observes Heinrich, "is really a little world in signs and sounds. Just as human beings rule over it, so they would also like to rule over the great world and be able to express themselves freely in it" (ibid., 1: 287).

We also approach elusive time in language. We recover it in words, in a textualized archaeology, or we internalize it in dream and memory, which, like language, are signifying systems. The noumenal world and lost time are accessible, albeit indirectly, by representational remains. "In the age we live in there is no longer any direct intercourse with heaven," states Heinrich's father, "the old stories and records are now the only source of knowledge, in so far as we need it, of the divine world" (ibid., 1: 198). The important stations in Heinrich's journey are libraries. He sees images of the past, the present, and the future in the mysterious book in Hohenzollern's library. In this library time is experienced as a continuum. Indeed, in Foucault's definition the library is the site that collapses temporal difference by rendering all historical epochs co-present.^[4] Library circumscribes the field where the voyages in time, expeditions, and excavations unfold. The Romantic idea of the endless book is housed in the larger metaphor of the universal library. In "The Library of Babel" Borges employs a strikingly similar metaphor. Borges's library duplicates Hohenzollern's library by situating in its center an artifact that is an allegorical representation of the world of experience. In the latter this artifact was the Pro-

vençal book, which mirrored Heinrich's life in memory and anticipation. In the former it is a mirror. Talking about "the universe (which others call the Library)," the narrator notes that in its "hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it really were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite. . . . Like all men of the library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues" (Borges 1964, 51). Situated between Plato's cave and Borges's Babylon, Hohenzollern's library is a collection of the various representations of time.

The library is also a laboratory. In this case it is the site not only of an archaeological excavation of knowledge but also of a geological laboratory. Geology is a discipline of memory, for the study of nature is here represented as a historical work in language and its origins. Geology, a parent of archaeology, was one of the major pursuits of Novalis's scientific career; during the last four years of his life he practiced it professionally. A student of Abraham Gottlob Werner, a preeminent geologist who blazed his own trail in the field, Novalis was inspired by and respected his mentor's work yet was sceptical of his emphasis on outward signs and symptoms of mineral remains which excluded an understanding of their historical character. He criticized Werner's synchronic or atemporal, that is, merely theoretical analysis of data which failed to elicit the significance of their diachronic or temporal constitution (Haslinger 1981, 87). "Both mineralogists and organologists seem to have taken very little notice of the development of categories as such—of the serial degree of increase [Graderhöhungsreihe ] in columns" (Novalis 1960, 3: 392, no. 661). Novalis, for his part, demonstrates in metaphors of geographical strata—mines, an underground library—that knowing both draws on the fixed moment in the past (as tradition) and recasts it in the present. In other words, all knowledge comes into being at the intersection of cultural and scientific heritage and theoretical and empirical evidence.

Layers of geological time constitute a form of encyclopedic knowledge. The old miner explains his passion for mineralogy as a passion for hidden origins. Just as Heinrich always pursues words that could represent his dreams, so did the miner always wish as a boy that the brilliant stones he gathered could speak so as to reveal

their mysterious origins (ibid., 1: 239–240). "You miners are almost astrologers in reverse," says Hohenzollern, "they study the powers and effects of the constellations and you investigate the powers of rocks and mountains and the manifold effects of the strata of earth and rock. To them the sky is the book of the future, whereas to you the earth reveals monuments of the primeval world" (ibid., 1: 260). As a natural science that is also archaeological, geology, in a sense, allegorizes the study of language as a form of natural history. In a fascinating study on the discovery of geological time, which echoes Novalis's geological insights, Stephen Jay Gould, a renowned contemporary geologist and paleontologist, recounts how two British geologists James Hutton and Charles Lyell were aided in their discoveries both by the organizing principles of time and cultural tradition and by their superior scientific knowledge of rocks. Gould shows how the understanding of time is compressed in metaphor as well as in geological layers.

The interplay of internal and external sources—of theory informed by metaphor and observation constrained by theory—marks any major movement in science. We can grasp the discovery of deep time when we recognize the metaphors underlying several centuries of debate as a common heritage of all people who have ever struggled with such basic riddles as direction and immanence. (1987, 8)

Memory is not the ontological ground of knowing as in Hegel. In fact, memory and its discipline, history, are fragments—"the motley and living creation draws its nourishment from the ruins of past ages" (Novalis 1960, 1: 327). Memories and dreams (as the topos of knowing outside time and space) maintain the Romantic tension between epistemological certainty and metaphysical anxiety. Like the Provençal manuscript, which constitutes the mirror image of the larger text, Heinrich von Ofterdingen excludes that moment where total representation is possible, in other words, where the irreducible gap between representation and concept is closed. The moment of this closure is infinitely postponed. In "The Library of Babel" Borges writes that humanity has always lived with the desire to discover "the origin of the Library and of time." This task is an endless task of seeking the direct and immediate representation of being and truth. "If the language of philosophers is not sufficient" for this end, "the multiform Library will have produced the unprecedented language required, with its vocabularies and

grammars." The elusive language of truth is pursued by "official searchers, inquisitors, " who endlessly search all corners of the earth and "always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words" (1964, 55). The search is never called off. Like Scheherazade's tales in The Arabian Nights, the endless search for narratives in the library points to the human desire for life and survival. Human understanding and life depend on a perpetual postponement of closure. In the heart of this allegory of the cave or library lies the art of remembering the collective tales of "one thousand and one nights."

Ludwig Achim von Arnim's Isabella von Ägypten

When Achim von Arnim died in 1831 at the age of fifty, he was an almost forgotten figure. With the exception of his wife, Bettina, Görres, and the Grimm brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm, no one had really understood and appreciated his work. The disorienting experience of reading Arnim arises from the free and seamless association of the mimetic-representational and the fantastic. Goethe compared this work to a pitcher that overflows, because the cooper forgot to hoop it, while Wilhelm Grimm compared it to a picture framed on three sides with the fourth side open, thus allowing the picture to be painted on and on until earth and heaven are no longer distinguishable (Völker 1979, 114). In fact, the line between the real and the imaginary, the historical and the fictional, and the discursive and the occult is canceled and everything is subsumed by poetic representation. Although the unabashedly allegorical impulse of Arnim's storytelling went unappreciated during his lifetime, Heine recovers this quaint specimen of Romantic fantasy and restores it to literary memory in his Romantic School . Heine is vocal in his admiration of Arnim's allegorical boldness:

Ludwig Achim von Arnim was a great poet and was one of the most original minds of the Romantic School. Fans of the fantastic would find him more engaging than any other German writer. Here [in the art of fantasy] he surpasses both Hoffmann and Novalis. He knew how to penetrate more intimately into nature than the latter and could conjure

up far more gruesome specters than Hoffmann. In fact, sometimes when I watched Hoffmann himself, it seemed to me as if Arnim had invented him. (1970–, 8: 85)

Heine's highly favorable reading of Isabella von Ägypten in this essay is significant, because here Heine is very critical of most Romantic literary works on the grounds that they either represent conservative ideologies or are mired in mystifying symbolism. Isabella instead draws unabashed praise from Heine, for in his view it is a self-consciously allegorical work that does not claim to represent a realistic view of life or history. It refigures reality in memory, imagination, and anticipation. But most important, Isabella's story presents the world of experience from a perspective of otherness, in terms of the occult and the arcane, and as an alternative to such organizing principles as reason, logic, causality, or coherence. Heine singles out Isabella as an exemplary text that succeeds admirably in giving life to the painful marginalization of strange or exotic constituents of society, in this case, gypsies. "Of Arnim's novellas his Isabella of Egypt seems to be the most precious," states Heine, "this strange fairy-tale people, with their brown faces, friendly soothsayer eyes, and sad mysteriousness come to life here. The chaotic, illusory cheerfulness veils a great mystic sorrow" (ibid., 8: 88). According to the legend, "told very charmingly in this novella," as Heine remarks, the gypsies were condemned to wander around the world for some time as punishment for the harshness with which their ancestors turned away the Virgin Mary who requested lodging for the night for herself and her child during her flight in Egypt. Because of this, people have felt justified in treating the gypsies cruelly, and they were persecuted most unjustly and brutally. It was common practice in many countries to hang them on suspicion of theft without investigation and trial.

As the novella begins, we are told that Isabella's father, gypsy king Michael, was wrongly accused and hanged, a casualty of the persecution of gypsies in Europe. In the night his people take Michael down from the gallows, wrap his royal cloak around his shoulders, place his silver crown upon his head, and lower the royally attired body into the Scheldt in the belief that the waters will carry him to Egypt. Isabella, who lives in an old, supposedly haunted house on the river at the outskirts of town, does not know of this incident. One night she hears strange murmurs coming from

the water and sees the apparition of her father rising from the river in his robe. She tries to hold on to the sad ghost of her father who floats away to Egypt to be properly buried there. All alone, Isabella holds a solemn funeral feast for her father. From this moment on her destiny follows a course that goes from the margins of the Occidental society to the holy shrines of her Oriental homeland. The exotic other, excluded and misunderstood, emerges as the representation of a higher truth.

Isabella's story consists of a repertoire of familiar literary patterns, historical pre-texts, and prophetic visions which are alternately foregrounded and backgrounded. Negotiating the curves of this narrative is the adventure in Romantic reading. The effortless shift from the real to the fantastic, from the historical to the mythical, embodies Schlegel's vision of Romantic poetry gliding "on the wings of poetic reflection." One critic refers to Arnim's narrative pattern as a "hybrid" that interweaves various strands of fairy tale, history, and social criticism (Tymms 1955, 277). In "Über Goethes Meister" (On Goethe's Meister), an exemplary Romantic reception of a literary work, Schlegel observes that the characters in Goethe's Meister resemble a portrait in their method of representation but are nevertheless more or less general and allegorical. This allegorical nature is what makes them "the inexhaustible material and most outstanding exemplary collection for moral and social investigation" (1958, 2: 143). In a similar vein Arnim's characters in their highly variegated allegorization constitute a narrative thread of social and cultural hue.

The subtitle of the novella, Kaiser Karl des Fünften erste Jugendliebe (Emperor Karl the Fifth's first love), sets up the expectation that the story is a semihistorical fiction about the emperor Karl's encounter with a gypsy princess. All historical references are freely refictionalized. The anticipation of the supernatural permeates every fact of the narrative. A quality of the bizarre envelops all aspects of Isabella's life. As a woman, an Oriental, and a gypsy-witch, Isabella is the ultimate representation of the exotic other. Her otherness takes on many faces. She leads a "secret, nightly life" in a haunted house and suffers the perils of homelessness in a physical way. With her father's death she is orphaned for the second time, having already lost her mother four years earlier. Although she has the occasional companionship of Braka, an old gypsy woman, there is no one in whom she can place complete trust. She is also set apart

from her own race by her noble birth, unusual beauty, and her status as the one chosen to lead her people back to their homeland. Although a stranger through and through, she is the director of choreography in this poetic dance or free play, guiding Karl and others through complicated steps of understanding an occulted nature and history. She steers the narrative from the realm of the natural and historical to that of the supernatural and the mythical. As the story opens, Isabella looks out of the window, murmuring: "Oh, look at the angel, how he laughs at me" (1981–, 1: 510). Braka shudders at the mention of an apparition. "Child," she gasps, "what do you see?" "The moon," answers Isabella matter-of-factly. Isabella moves between these two kinds of discourse, the natural and the supernatural, without effort. For her, neither reality excludes the other. Each is a form of representation, a certain language. Understanding is a form of self-reflection in the mirror of alterity. Isabella often looks into these mirrors to catch a glimpse of the extrasensory world. She is familiar with "the cycles of the moon and the stars" (ibid., 1: 524). Like Heinrich she consults dreams, esoteric texts, and signs from nature to chart the course of her destiny.

After her father's death Isabella goes through his possessions among which she finds several old manuscripts:

Finally, in an old chest she found old writings, many decorated with exquisite seals written on beautiful paper in a foreign language, which she had not yet learned. There were also others written in Netherlandic German which she could write and read, since her mother, who had fled an old house of the counts of Hogstraaten with Michael, had instilled the love for this old language in her husband and her child. (ibid., 1: 516)

The knowledge she gleans from these texts guides her in her subsequent mission to lead her people to freedom. Her access to the occult through deciphering the secrets of language invests her with the power of invention, creation, and prophecy, all of which are domains of the poetic in the Romantic view.

Freely subscribing to the occult and steeping herself in the esoteric formulas of her newly found books, Isabella produces for starters an Alraun, a miniature man, from a mandrake root she pulls out from the earth. The mandrake man is to play an important role in the subsequent course of events. As the legend goes, the man-

drake root sprouts at the spot where the tears of a wrongly hanged man fall on the earth. Isabella goes to the site where her father was hanged and by applying the magic formula finds herself in possession of a mandrake man who calls himself Cornelius Nepos. The narrator steps in to comment that this Nepos is not related to the famous historian of the same name. By conjuring up the Alraun Isabella steers the narrative into the realm of legend and myth and destabilizes the initially established historical background of her own story. The narrator compares Isabella in her act of creating the Alraun to a "young artist" (ibid., 1: 530). She generates life through language, creates a man by the magic of words. In the final analysis, Isabella's tale itself becomes an allegory of the construction and definition of reality in language.

After her father's death, the dilapidated house on the river becomes Isabella's refuge, since townspeople, fearing ghosts and other monsters, dare not come near it. However, one day the crown prince, Karl, having heard that the house is haunted, decides to spend the night there to prove his courage. Isabella and Braka, fearing that they might be driven away from this shelter if the prince finds out that they live there, plot to scare him away by having Isabella appear to him disguised as a ghost in the middle of the night. The plan succeeds and the crown prince flees the house in utter terror. At this point, the narrator observes that even the most daring and arrogant man harbors a deep-seated fear "of the world that cannot be named" (der unnennbaren Welt ; ibid., 1: 521). The fast traffic between what can be named and what remains unnamed, being (Sein ) and appearance (Schein ), and history and story constitute both the thematic concern and the structural form of the novella. The characters are either doubled, coupled, or both. The narrative proceeds by doubling and mirroring where the difference between the actual and the double is consistently elusive, if not lost. In other words, even within the fictive frame of the novella characters are cloned, images reproduced, visions reenvisioned, and apparent narrative closures duplicated. In a sense, the fiction mimics its own fictionality and representationality. Concepts of the real and the original become faded memories amidst the bustle of ongoing duplications.

After fleeing the haunted house, Karl realizes that he has fallen in love with what he believes to be a ghost. In fact, Karl is depicted as a character who can never tell the real and its image apart. He

later falls in love with Isabella's clone. The Alraun doubles as a caricature of the historical Cornelius Nepos and as Isabella's lover and her child. Another grotesque double is the Bärenhäuter (bearskin), the ghost of a slave who has sold his soul to the devil. In order to earn some extra cash, he has now risen from the dead and contracted to serve as a servant for seven years. Although he is fat and clad in bearskin, he is always cold. At one point, the whole cast of characters and their doubles travel from Buik to Ghent, the seat of the monarchy. Heine considers Arnim's rendering of this journey a spectacle that would make all the painstakingly invented recent ghost stories of the French seem to be only "the rosy morning dreams of an opera danseuse " (1970–, 8: 89).

In Ghent Isabella and Karl are fated to meet again. The story now takes a realistic course only to be subverted by upcoming supernatural episodes. Karl and Isabella's romance heads for the rocks as a result of the Alraun 's jealousy and his claim to her affections. In order to get the Alraun out of the picture, Karl enlists the help of a Jewish magician who creates a golem, an Isabella clone, identical in appearance with the real woman but, in fact, a soulless and shallow apparition. Karl falls for the clone and deserts the real Isabella. Abandoned and facing great difficulties, Isabella has a dream where her father, crowned and seated on an Egyptian pyramid, tells her that she is destined to bear a child who will lead her people to their homeland. Karl eventually wakes up to the truth and sees the golem for what she is. He erases the first syllable Ae of the word Aemeth inscribed on the forehead of the golem who thereupon collapses and turns into thin air. The evil spirit of the golem is exorcised by an antispell, or in this case, an antisyllable. Once more, the language of fairy tales and charms creates another dimension of reality.

Not only Isabella's dream and her subsequent vision of holding the child of the prince, in front of whom people of many lands kneel, but also a revelation the prince's minister Adrian has foreshadow the events of the story. The visions are realized in re-vision in somewhat altered form. Karl and Isabella have a son, Lrak. However, it is Isabella, not her son, who leads the gypsies back to Egypt. She dies in her homeland after a long and successful reign. After Isabella's departure Karl retires to a monastery. Both Karl and Isabella die on the same day by their own will. As Karl lies down in his coffin ready to surrender his soul, the vision of Isabella, who is also

voluntarily preparing to leave this world, appears to him. Thus, Isabella's death is not related at the "realistic" level of the narrative but in Karl's vision, just as Mathilde's death in Heinrich von Ofterdingen was only represented in Heinrich's dream. Furthermore, the narrator invents a "historical source" for his account of Isabella's death, claiming that the detailed account of Isabella's funeral and of the burial customs of the Egyptians narrated in the novella were recorded in a two-volume travelogue written by a printer's apprentice named Zacharias Taurinius. This work, Beschreibung einiger See- und Landreisen nach Asien, Afrika und Amerika (Description of some sea and land travels to Asia, Africa, and America), was actually published in 1799 and 1800 in Leipzig but it contains no such record. The coeval transitions of Karl and Isabella mark the second ending of the story. Like everything else in this narrative—including the double departures from this world of Karl and Isabella—the ending is also doubled. The narrative comes to its first closure when Isabella, who has had a very ambivalent relationship with Karl, leaves him, joins her people, and heads for her homeland. Here the closure divides and continues on to the second ending. In other words, the ending is postponed only to be duplicated. The story reflects itself in several mirrors.

Isabella's story deals a decisive blow to philosophy's claims to direct or schematic representation. All conventions are installed only to have their unity divide and proliferate. A mocking reference to the idea of split subjectivity is a parody of Fichte's self and not-self dichotomy which proves to be non-sense in the Alraun 's words. When Braka asks him, "well, are you a ghost or a man, dear Cornelius?" he retorts, "that is a stupid question, I am I and you are not-I. . . . I don't want to hear of such damned, hair-splitting questions" (1981–, 1: 545). Of course Arnim splits every concept and convention every which way. The Bildung, for example, applies to not only one individual but many and its direction is not always progressive but also regressive. The Alraun deteriorates in every way: physically, mentally, and morally. Karl's life and deeds go the way of anti-Bildung, and his final and perhaps only moment of Bildung comes in the form of Isabella's image (Bild ) as he dies. There is no unity of subject and narration but a multiplicity of subjectivities that institute allegorical understanding. Nature, history, and geography are no longer epistemologically reliable points of reference but players in the infinite game of the universe. Arnim dwells

at the Romantic frontier and creates a poetic space that houses the disparate conventions of the objective and the mundane and the subjective and the unearthly (or uncanny).

Several elements of the story, such as the person of Karl and the persecution of gypsies (who also are an allegorical representation of the persecuted Jews), are historical. Dreams and visions are psychologically explainable. However, the materialization of the Alraun, golem Isabella, and the bearskin ghost resist any realistic or psychological explanation and are only possible in the realm of the fantastic. Tzvetan Todorov offers an account of the genre of the fantastic (la fantastique ) which describes it in terms of the neighboring genres of the uncanny (l'etrange ) and the marvellous (le merveilleux ) (1975, 24–57). The fantastic never wanders off into these adjacent territories, no matter how strongly it may be drawn in one direction or the other nor however much it may represent the tension such a vacillation generates. Thus, the fantastic essentially manifests itself in ambiguity, in the disorientation felt by the reader who knows only natural laws and is confronted by an event which is apparently supernatural. The genre of the fantastic therefore implies not only the narration of a strange event but also a certain mode of reading, one which opts neither for a strictly allegorical reading of events nor for a poetic interpretation that would normalize and dispose of the inexplicable. The hesitation between the natural and the supernatural which the narrative generates then has to be echoed in the readers' own uncertainty about the conventionally available patterns for their individual responses. At the end, they resolve the dilemma by opting to classify the events in one or another of the neighboring areas, the uncanny or the marvellous, depending on the way they see the matter settled. Ultimately, as Todorov argues, the role of the fantastic has always been to set that which is real or capable of causal explanation against that which is imaginary or supernatural. Hence, it can only exist as a genre in a-society which articulates its own experience in terms of that simple dichotomy. Todorov maintains that in challenging the certainty of these terms by posing the question of whether the events narrated are real, the genre of the fantastic may have enacted the role of the uneasy conscience of the nineteenth century.

In short, the genre of the fantastic transmits to the society the message that life is not as simple as it collectively makes out. By abolishing the concept of representational certainty in their redis-

covery, reinvention, and valorization of fragmentary and mixed genres, the Romantics were instrumental in instituting the critical function of the fantastic as Todorov defines it. "In the psychological and philosophical novel," notes Schlegel, "the absolute fantastic and the absolute mimetic must be able to be juxtaposed without merging" (1957, 53–54, no. 384).^[5] Thus, the ambivalence of Arnim's narrative could not be considered an obstacle to be reduced into manageable meaning. The act of reading a synthetic writer like Arnim means participating in the vicissitudes of the text. As in Goethe's Meister, all textual elements refer to "spectacle, representation, art, and poetry" (Schlegel 1958, 2: 131). As such, the very form of the narrative in true Romantic fashion becomes a comment on the story of its own formation or coming into being. The apparently conflicting languages of the text—natural, supernatural—become nonreferential in that they are not compelled to signify an objective reality beyond themselves and therefore need not be mutually exclusive categories.

The literary history of German Romanticism abounds with tales that testify to the lasting union of memory and imagination. History and story unfold against a background of imaginatively remembered fragments of temporality. "Like those birds that lay their eggs only in other species' nests, memory produces in a place that does not belong to it," writes de Certeau, "it receives its form and implantation from external circumstances, even if it furnishes the content (the missing detail)." The deployment of memory, he argues, inevitably involves alteration. In fact, memory draws its "interventionary" power from its "unmoored," moving position. It "is formed (and forms its 'capital') by arising from the other (a circumstance) and by losing it (it is no more than a memory)." Thus, memory alters its object and is altered by it. If memory is no longer capable of this alteration, it will fall into decay, for it "constructs itself from events that are independent of it, and it is linked to the expectation that something alien to the present will or must occur" (1984, 86–87). In this fashion the Romantic memory reinvented an exoticized history sustained by the belief in that history's power to poeticize present experience and enhance future expectation.