The Art of Recollection in Jena Romanticism: Memory, History, Fiction, and Fragmentation in Texts by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9783110910544, 9783484181649

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STUDIEN ZUR DEUTSCHEN LITERATUR

Herausgegeben von Wilfried Barner, Georg Braungart, Richard Brinkmann und Conrad Wiedemann

Band 164

Laurie Ruth Johnson

The Art of Recollection in Jena Romanticism Memory, History, Fiction, and Fragmentation in Texts by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis

Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 2002

Gedruckt mit Unterstützung des U I U C Campus Research Board (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

dedicated to Carl Niekerk with gratitude to: Paul Michael Lützeler Georg Braungart Meike Werner Lutz Koepnick John A. McCarthy Lynne Tatlock

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme

Johnson, Laurie Ruth: The art of recollection in Jena romanticism : memory, history, fiction, and fragmentation in texts by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis / Laurie Ruth Johnson. - Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002 (Studien zur deutschen Literatur; Bd. 164) ISBN 3-484-18164-8

ISSN 0081-7236

© Max Niemeyer Verlag G m b H , Tübingen 2002 Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany. Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier. Satz und Druck: Guide-Druck GmbH, Tübingen Einband: Geiger, Ammerbuch

Das Welt-Ich hatte seinen Ursprung vergessen: es findet ihn wieder. Dieses Wiederfinden ist die Erinnerung: diese Erinnerung aber muß mit Schmerz und Reue verbunden sein, über den wo nicht gänzlichen, doch teilweisen Verlust der ursprünglichen Einheit, über den innern Zwiespalt und Kampf, der das Wesen des Welt-Ichs ganz zu zerrütten droht. Friedrich Schlegel, »Theorie der Entstehung der Welt« Die Erinnerung ist der sicherste Grund der Liebe. Novalis, Heinrich von

Ofterdingen

Mich führt alles in mich selbst zurück. Novalis, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais

V

Contents

I.

Introduction: Memory and its Objects in Early Romanticism

. .

II.

Reconciliation and Fragmentation: The Early Romantic Memory Model ι. The Ambiguity of Memory and the Form of the Fragment . . 2. Memory For and Against History: Reciprocal Movements, Conflated Narratives 3. The Remembering Subject: Body, Mind, and Memory in the »Belated Present« of Fragmentary Representation a. Memory as Material and Transcendent b. The Importance of the Fragment for Representing Early Romantic Conceptions of Memory

ι

9 9 27 36 36 52

III. From Recollection to Depiction: An Incipient Crisis of Memory and Representation in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory . . ι. Constructions of Memory as Metaphorical and Material in the Mid- to Late Eighteenth Century 2. Aesthetics and History, and the Historiographie Function of Art: Schiller and Herder 3. Aesthetic Autonomy Versus Traumatic Memory: Lessing and Moritz Conclusion

74 85

IV. Reconstructing Origins: Remembrance in German Idealism . . . ι. The Problem of »Enacting« the Origin of Consciousness . . . 2. Critical Philosophical and Idealist Definitions of Memory . . . 3. Constructions of Memory in Fichte and Schelling Conclusion

87 87 91 94 101

V.

Novalis's Conceptualizations of Memory and Its Role in Literary and Philosophical Production ι. »Gedächtnis« and »Erinnerung« as Components of Novalis's Theories of Consciousness and Poesy 2. Literary Reconstructions of Individual and Collective Memory

56 56 63

103 103 113 VII

a. Heinrich von Ofterdingen b. Die Lehrlinge zu Sais c. Hymnen an die Nacht, Geistliche Lieder, Die Christenheit oder Europa 3. Memory as Indispensable and as Unstable: The Reciprocities of Consciousness and Their Implications for Memory in Novalis's Philosophical Fragments 4. Memory as Metaphor? Implications of Novalis's Theory of Memory for a Philosophy of History Conclusion VI. Memory and History in the Fragments of Friedrich Schlegel . . . ι. The Creation of a Philosophy of History as a Mnemonic Act . 2. The Relevance of the Fragment Form for Schlegels Theory of Memory 3. Constructing Relationships Between Present and Past Self and Between Self and Other in the Philosophical Fragments and in Lucinde 4. Historiography as Fragmented Recollection Rather Than as Narrative Documentation Conclusion

113 121 125

130 137 138 142 142 146

152 160 167

VII. Conclusion: Early Romanticism and Later Theories of Memory and Representation

171

Bibliography

182

Index of Names

194

VIII

I.

Introduction: Memory and its Objects in Early Romanticism

Jena Romanticism, 1 with its focus on progression toward an increasingly perfect »universal« aesthetic form, was in many respects an explicitly futureoriented movement. But its authors were preoccupied simultaneously with the search for origin, with attempts to reconstruct a vision of the past - the past of consciousness, of art, of politics, or of all three - that would function as a model for future perfection. In Romantic literary and philosophical texts, the refiguring of origin and of the process of remembering itself is always a depiction of something irrevocably lost. In fact, Romantic depictions of origin and of remembering aim to memorialize and to reconstruct aesthetically the fundamental moment of loss, of original trauma, or of separation. The Romantic term for this moment of separation is »Ursprung« or »Urhandlung« - the initial split between feeling and reflection, between subject and object - the first separation of the individual from the infinite. 2 The authors often depict this split in exceedingly abstract terms, but they also frequently choose images of concrete entities in order to represent the separation between subject and object as well as to de-

' F o r comments on the use of the term »Early Romanticism« as problematic but also as justifiable, see Gerhart Hoffmeister, Deutsche und europäische Romantik, 1990 and Silvio Vietta, Die literarische Frühromantik, 1983. After suggesting alternative names f o r the period, including »the romanticism of Jena,« »theoretical romanticism,« and »the Athenäum,« Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy settle on »Early Romanticism« in The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, 1988, pp. ι , ζ , 7. I will also use synonymously the term »Jena Romanticism.« There is justification beyond the topography of Jena and the time that Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Ludwig Tieck, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm J o seph Schelling, and Friedrich Schleiermacher spent together there for grouping their concepts and depictions of memory and remembering. The Early Romantics' explicit advocation and pursuit of collective work (understood in terms of »Symphilosophie« and »Sympoesie«) supports Tzvetan Todorov's statement that »[t]here is one doctrine and one author, even if their names are several: not that each repeats the others (that would be no more than sympathy); but each one formulates, better than any other, some part of the same single doctrine.« See Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, 1982, p. 165. 2

Manfred Koch briefly explicates »Urhandlung« and »Ur-Teilung« in »Mnemotechnik des Schönen.« Studien zur Erinnerungspoetik in Romantik und Symbolismus, 1988, pp. 73 f. ι

pict a partial reattainment of unity. The mix of empirical and transcendental, physical and mental, concrete and abstract that ensues is particularly intriguing and complex when expressed in the Romantic fragment, a form that symbolizes the persistence as well as the erosion of meaning. Friedrich Schlegel, the primary philosopher of the Jena Romantic circle, presents the ultimate object of Romantic remembrance - the origin of the world as the origin of consciousness and therefore of meaning - when he describes how memory functions in what he calls world-consciousness. Schlegel's philosophical fragments and lectures demonstrate how a concept of memory defines the self, rather than vice-versa. The second, third, and fourth books of Die Entwicklung der Philosophie in zwölf Büchern, a collection of lectures held in Cologne from June 1804 to March 1805, are entitled »Die Psychologie als Theorie des Bewußtseins.« Here Schlegel offers a detailed theory of memory in order to present a history of the self, to sketch the »Verhältnisse des abgeleiteten Ichs zum Ur-Ich.« Jener Begriff des Ichs, als nur eines Stücks von uns selbst, ist es, der den Ubergang zur Theorie der Erinnerung macht; er führt unmittelbar von der Anschauung zur Erinnerung. Das Insichzurückgehen setzt notwendig ein Aussichherausgehen, das Wiederfinden ein Verlorenhaben voraus. Dieser Wechsel, wo das Ich sich zum Teile selbst verliert, zum Teil selbst gewinnt, ist ohne einen fortgehenden, begleitenden Faden des Bewußtseins, ohne Erinnerung nicht möglich; dieses Wiederfinden eines Verlornen ist ja auch eben, was man allgemein Erinnerung nennt.3

Although he distinguishes between a »derived« and an »original« self, Schlegel intends to portray the process of recollection in the »derived« self as a reciprocal movement in a consciousness that is still collective, in fact all-encompassing. Wir kamen auf den Begriff der Erinnerung, indem wir das Ich als Stückwerk, als endliches und unendliches, als Ding und Welt zugleich fanden. (A)lles, was wir anschauen und denken, geistig ... alles, was uns erscheint, (erscheint) uns in dem Ich ..., weil alles Ichheit ist ( Κ Α XII: 380).

The history of the derivation and development of the self, of the consciousness (»Ich«) that is simultaneously world-consciousness (»Welt-Ich«; KA XII: 435), will also be the history of the world, for Schlegel argues that consciousness structures the world: his »Theorie der Entstehung der Welt« (1804-1805) is a history of nature arrived at through a present reconstruction of world-consciousness. When we reconstruct the history of the world-consciousness, in the present, we tell the story of the origin of the world as well (KA XII: 429). This history of world-consciousness is not representable, and therefore not knowable, without a mnemonic movement. »(D)er Anfang aller Geschichte, sowie 3

2

Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe. Ed. by Ernst Behler, 1958, XII: 348. Further references to this edition are given parenthetically as K A , followed by volume, page number, and fragment number where applicable.

der Anfang und die Grenzen unserer Erkenntnis sind einzig in der Erinnerung und Ahnung zu suchen« (ΚΑ XII: 421). Schlegel derives the notion of remembering as a back-and-forth movement (»Hin- und Her-Bewegung«) of recollection and anticipation, as well as the idea that there can be no remembering without loss, primarily from Plato. 4 But he writes these lectures on philosophy and psychology immediately after his years in Jena, and the influence of critical philosophy and of Early Romantic aesthetic theory is also clear. The Cologne lectures, which Schlegel later partly integrates into his project of the »philosophischen Lehrjahre,« an attempt to present a philosophy of universal history, represent a moment in which theories of memory, representation, and history come together in a unique and repercussive way. It is in the early nineteenth century, when Schlegel articulates the idea of a philosophy of history most fully, that history is also presented as a problem of memory. The history of the self, accessible only through memory, is world history, whose representations are often presented in a fragmentary form that mirrors what the Romantics perceive as the fragmentary structure of consciousness itself.' Like Schlegel, Novalis combines ancient paradigms of memory's functioning with insights about the nature of subjectivity gleaned from idealist philosophy and eighteenth-century developments in aesthetic theory and psychology in order to produce a new, modern model for memory. This model represents something considerably more complicated than a »subjective turn« away from Enlightenment and Classicist thought. The Early Romantics represent memory as a faculty of both body and mind, and as both indispensable and unstable. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis in particular choose the form of the fragment to represent much of their thought on memory and history. The relationship they conceive between form and content is not arbitrary. The fragment functions as a metaphor for the ambiguous capacities of memory - like memory, the fragment both preserves something of the past and yet also bears witness to the decay of that past, to loss. Finally, the Romantic notion of history and historiography depends upon this model of memory as a province of body and mind, yet as only representable in fragments.

4

5

Chapter Six examines connections between Schlegel's thought and Plato's in more detail. Schlegel explicates this in part in »Die Psychologie,« where he addresses the fragmentary representative form of the »Witz« and its relationship to consciousness: »(D)er Witz aber tritt ohne alle Beziehung auf das Vorige, einzeln, ganz unerwartet und plötzlich auf, als ein Überläufer gleichsam, oder vielmehr ein Blitz aus der unbewußten Welt, die für uns immer neben der bewußten besteht, und stellt auf diese Weise den fragmentarischen Zustand unseres Bewußtseins sehr treffend dar. Es ist eine Verbindung und Mischung des Bewußten und Unbewußten,« Κ Α X I I : 393.

3

The present study elucidates connections between the fragment form and Early Romantic conceptions of memory. I contend that the Romantics' privileging of the fragment as a representative form in literature and philosophy is symptomatic of a crisis of memory, identity and representation still present today. M y arguments derive in part from the conviction that Early Romantic texts are relevant to current theories of, and theories of dilemmas of, representation of the past in aesthetic and other forms. In particular, the Romantic awareness that the praxis of memory inevitably takes place in the present, and therefore that present concerns help to define what individuals and communities remember about the past, leads in part to questions of what happens to research and to knowledge when present reconstructions are accepted as historical evidence, and »evidence« itself seems increasingly difficult to define. Although scholars often read Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel as prefiguring later theories of representation, their comments on memory are informed by eighteenth-century theories of the appropriate use of past experience in art. The Romantics integrate insights from these aesthetic theories with concepts of consciousness developed by critical philosophers, but their portrayals of memory also reflect the influence of contemporary psychology and natural science, and of debates about the relationship between body and soul. B y examining the psychological as well as the philosophical influences on Early Romantic theories of memory, this study departs from the majority of analyses of Jena literary production. Perceptions of Jena Romanticism as representative of an abrupt break with German Classicism, or as a primarily philosophical movement, have been adjusted already in American German Studies by scholars such as G é z a von Molnár, Alice Kuzniar, Wm. Arctander O'Brien, and Azade Seyhan. Borrowing from and adapting their approaches, I shift my analytical focus to memory and remembering in texts by the Early Romantic and idealist authors who treat these subjects most explicitly: Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Fichte, and Schelling. I attempt to demonstrate that ideas about memory and remembering are at the heart of the philosophy and psychology of the day. This study's exploration of Romantic depictions of memory as a faculty of body as well as of mind reveals that when the subtext on remembrance in Early Romantic texts turns to questions about memory's employment and depiction in art - or: to the aestheticization of recollection - these texts evince serious doubt about the explanatory ability of the supposedly discrete philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic discourses against which Romantic, and modern, thought is constructed. The Jena Romantics represent the experience and presentation of memory as privileged and creative, but also as not always capable of giving reliable information about the actual past. But rather than depicting representations of systems of signifiers with no stable referents, their portrayal of memory and remembering as creative displays a belief that meaning is accessible through its representations. The Romantic critique of the knowability 4

of origins and of memory's reliability results in an emphasis on originality over imitation, but also blurs distinctions between memory and historiography. The form of the fragment embodies the dilemmas and possibilities that the Romantics associate with memory. B y focusing on the aestheticization of recollection in Romantic texts, I also wish to illuminate anew the highly aestheticized aspects of the cultural modernity that the Romantics help to define. Schlegel and Novalis in particular convert their doubts about memory's reliability into an aesthetic solution to what Richard Terdiman has called the modern »memory crisis«6 by emphasizing meaning as something that is constituted in the moment of its aesthetic appearance. I examine some of the more problematic and promising implications of the aestheticization of recollection by emphasizing the tension between reconciliation and fragmentation in the specifically modern »crisis of representation«7 in which the Early Romantics found themselves (and which they partly shaped), and by tracing the trajectory of recollection to depiction that objects of memory follow in Early Romantic texts. In Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (1993), Richard Terdiman argues that European Romanticism does not merely respond to, but also helps create, a rupture or crisis in history and philosophy. 8 1 will rely on Terdiman's definition of a »memory crisis,« a flexible concept that offers promising implications for a more specific study of remembrance and representation in the post-1789 texts of Early Romanticism in Germany. A re-thinking of perception and representation similar to that which Terdiman ascribes to nineteenth-century Europe in general is visible as well in a more specific place and time: in Jena during the years 1796-1801, and most particularly from 1798-1800 (the years in which the journal Athenäum was published). The modern memory crisis that followed the French Revolution and that has found recurring treatment in literary, philosophical, and historical works is intimately related to what Gerhard Neumann has termed recursive perceptual crises in Western thought.9 Early Romantic texts form important links in a fractured, discontinuous, but nevertheless identifiable chain of depictions of the incongruous relationship between (1) the signs and symbols that help us remember the past and (2) a pre-

6 7

8 9

Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, 1993. Both Terdiman (in: Present Past) and Azade Seyhan (in: Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism, 1992) rely on the concept of a modern and Romantic »crisis of representation« when developing their different arguments about nineteenth-century aesthetic and philosophical responses to eighteenth-century events. Terdiman, Present Past, pp. 3-4. Gerhard Neumann, Gedächtnis-Sturz. In: Akzente 2, 1993, p. 1 0 0 . 1 return to this argument, and to its position relative to contemporary theories of memory and representation, in the concluding chapter.

5

sent in which the reliability and significance of those representations are debatable. Much scholarship exists on the philosophies of history developed during Early Romanticism. However, I contend that the Early Romantics' engagement with idealism and their integration of that philosophy with earlier insights regarding memory, history, and art, contribute to an additional focus on memory and mnemonic processes in their texts. This subtext on memory contributes to the speculative but rational aspects of Early Romantic aesthetic theories and concepts of history. Terdiman notes that memory is »a faculty so deeply intertwined with the very possibility of thinking itself« that it is an »apparently seamless and omnipresent function.« 10 In this sense, all that is presented as remembered in the texts examined here must be considered important, and not merely the explicit reflections on the faculty of memory (»Gedächtnis«) and on remembrance (»Erinnerung«). But there is textual evidence enough to warrant investigating - and historicizing - those explicit treatments as well. The Jena Romantics work with ancient memory »images« (including the metaphors of the wax tablet and the storeroom, and of body, text, and ruin) as well as with more recent convictions about the appropriate use of memory via symbol and allegory in art; they also integrate these notions with theories of self-identity advanced by critical philosophy. The fragment in particular is the form most often chosen by the Early Romantics to represent post-revolutionary temporality, as it sublates memory and permits reminiscence to reappear as a representation of the trace of a past moment or event. The form of the fragment, which makes sense out of the past only in the moment of its aesthetic appearance - but which also simultaneously alters that past event and places its facticity in doubt - yields new ways of narrating past time. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis present the operation of memory as crucial for artistic production as well as for self-consciousness; memory is necessary for immediacy and presence. But they also depict memory as prey to the same problems of representation that distance the subject from itself and block access to the absolute. The form of the fragment, which Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy call »the romantic genre par excellence,«" expresses and embodies this tension between immediacy and distance. Schlegel asserts in the Athenäumsfragmenten: »Memorabilien sind ein System von Fragmenten« ( Κ Α II: 176, no. 77); here he refers to a tradition of interpreting fragments (whether physical or poetic) as ruins. 12 But when the concepts of »Gedächtnis« and »Erinnerung« find expression in the Romantic fragment, they

10

Terdiman, Present Past, p. 9. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 40. " Thomas McFarland explores this tradition in detail in Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, 1 9 7 1 .

11

6

bear witness to the conservation of the past as well as to its decay. These traits of preservation and ruin are duplicated in the structure of the fragment itself. The fragment is incomplete, yet also self-sufficient, auto-iconic, and intransitive: in Schlegel's formulation, the fragment must »gleich einem kleinen Kunstwerk von der umgebenden Welt ganz abgesondert und in sich selbst vollendet sein wie ein Igel« ( Κ Α II: 206). But despite the fragment's ability to address representational and mnemonic paradoxes, the temptation to begin to view it as a »hedgehog« with redemptive powers should be resisted. T h e fear of amnesiac dissolution can prompt visions of fragments as tiny totalities that indeed fulfill the instrumental function of constructing a »grand narrative« out of small parts. Recollection must be represented to make sense, but the alteration of the past in aesthetic form, and the radical doubt that this alteration can encourage, should not be read in the Early Romantic context as an invitation to fall into an endless dissemination of signs corresponding to nothing. This would be the end of the crisis of memory, which would mean the end of even a broken relationship between rememberer and referent. Even in their most skeptical moments, the Romantics did not advocate such an end. B y privileging memory as a faculty of body and mind, but also by questioning its reliability and the reliability of representations of past events in general, the Jena Romantics create a sustained tension between sign and signifier that simultaneously supports their convictions about the eternal reciprocal movements of consciousness and creativity in time. In their fragmented literary and philosophical texts, Novalis and Schlegel in particular present landscapes, objects, and bodies as conduits for m e m o r y - as corporeal forms that the subject always attempts to transcend, yet also finds necessary f o r memory to function. Romantic literature, rife with allegories within allegories and symbols of symbols, does not employ images to represent real bodies in a specific actual past. But even its most obviously fabricated envisionings of history rely on images of the human b o d y that correspond to concepts of subjective consciousness. This consciousness emerges first in a self-other relationship; it is meaningless outside of that relationship and away f r o m the images of physicality used to represent it. Remembering is crucial to this construction of a reflective and sentient subject that, in turn, refers to a b o d y never completely enclosed in linguistic discourse. I argue that memory in Early Romantic texts is inescapably social and corporeal, and that this very fact contributes significantly to the Romantic subject's experience of time in spaces different f r o m what Novalis calls the »definite infinity« of critical philosophy. In other w o r d s , the remembering subject is not a totally disembodied transcendental subject. I develop this and other arguments in the following chapters under the auspices of three main theses about m e m o r y and remembrance in Early Romanticism:

7

ι. The Early Romantics represent the experience and presentation of memory as privileged and creative, but also as unstable - as not always capable of giving reliable information about the actual past. But rather than depicting representations as systems of signifiers with no stable referents, their portrayal of memory and remembering as creative and imaginative displays a belief that meaning is accessible through its representations (representations that are enabled by memory). 2. The Early Romantic critique of the knowability of origins and of the reliability of memory results in an emphasis on originality over imitation, but also blurs distinctions between memory and historiography. 3. The form of the fragment embodies the dilemmas and possibilities that the Early Romantics associate with memory. Chapter Two presents a survey of theories of memory and situates Early Romantic fragments in a context of traditions of thought about memory and history. Chapter Three then focuses on memory in the aesthetic theory of four writers whose work was formative for the Early Romantics: Schiller, Lessing, Herder, and Karl Philipp Moritz. I argue that these authors conceive of art as a conduit for the faculty of memory - a faculty of both body and mind - and as a site for the representation of memories. Continuing in chronological fashion, in Chapter Four I move into the Jena period and summarize German idealist insights on memory. The analysis that follows again emphasizes the themes of a crisis of representation and the split between body and mind evinced in the explicit and implicit thematization of memory in these works. Chapter Five interprets conceptualizations and representations of remembering and memories in Novalis's literary and philosophical fragments. Chapter Six continues with Friedrich Schlegel's fragments and the intersections of memory and history therein. Finally, in the conclusion I suggest ways in which Early Romantic thought about memory - and specifically its concèption of memory as a fragmentary phenomenon and its representation of memories in fragmentary forms - is relevant f o r contemporary thought on memory and representation.

8

II.

Reconciliation and Fragmentation: The Early Romantic Memory Model

ι.

The Ambiguity of Memory and the Form of the Fragment

The faculty of memory has been represented in texts since antiquity as fundamentally ambiguous. As the faculty encompassing both retention and recollection, it belongs to both body and mind. As a function necessary for constructing identity over time, it enables us to represent knowledge in a consequent fashion, but simultaneously threatens our ability to do so. In Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (1993), Richard Terdiman locates a specific historical manifestation of the dual nature of memory in the period following the French Revolution. He calls the simultaneous cultural and temporal unease that prevailed in nineteenth-century Europe a »memory crisis« specific to modernity, and even more specific to the post-revolutionary years: In this period people experienced the insecurity of their culture's involvement with its past, the perturbation of the link to their own inheritance, as what I want to term a >memory crisisc a sense that their past had somehow evaded memory, that recollection had ceased to integrate with consciousness. In this memory crisis the very coherence of time and of subjectivity seemed disarticulated. 1

Rather than being unable to remember the pre-revolutionary past, Terdiman contends, inhabitants of post-revolutionary Europe experienced disjunction when reflecting upon events that had been »burned« into their individual and collective memories, events at worst violent and at best incongruous. The continuity and stability that memory provides was obviated by memory itself, or rather by what Terdiman calls the »uncanny ambiguity« of memory. The very faculty that permits us to be aware today that we are the same selves we were yesterday forces us to acknowledge a difference between those two selves or identities, and hence to experience discontinuity. Terdiman's location of this phenomenon in a specific historical context, that of post-revolutionary France, permits him to extend his observations on the ambiguity of memory within the individual psyche to incongruities in history; that is, to see a recursive relationship between events in »individual« (here: psychological) and »general« (sociopolitical) arenas. The following passage grounds a theory of individual and collective history in a notion of memory as both preserving and destroying: ' Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, 1993, pp. 3-4.

9

From the unending recurrence in national and international affairs of conflicts rooted in seemingly bygone political, religious, or cultural disputes to the involuntary repetition of struggles with psychic trauma surviving from an archaic period of our individual lives, we appear unable to cease contending with a past we might otherwise have thought was gone. But the past does not evaporate. Its persistence is the effect of memory. So although memory salutarily stabilizes our sense of the world, that is not all it does. Intertwined with such beneficent and indispensable effects, the uncanny ambiguity of memory manifests itself in just these sorts of discomfiting survivals. 2

When the experience of temporality is disjointed due to this mnemic ambiguity, or: due to the inability to reconcile what is remembered about the past with what is perceived in the present, a disturbing sort of repetition takes place. The »discomfiting« aspect results partly from the fact that the »repeated« event the psychic trauma, the social or political conflict - is not really a re-occurrence of an event that happened earlier, but rather a recursive appearance, quite literally a re-presentation of a past event real or imagined. In such a discontinuous but memory-surfeited period, that re-presentation fills and determines present reality; »discomfiting« is the awareness that an already mediated experience is being mediated again. This double-mediation not only blocks access to an authentic past, but puts the nature of that past - and of »authentic« experience itself - in question. Terdiman's description of nineteenth-century Europeans could be re-applied to any number of modern, postindustrial subjects: »It seemed to them that their past was only slightly less uncertain than their future.« 3 To live among representations that are both unpredictable and recurring is to experience an alienating discrepancy between past and present self, and between those selves' past and present temporal and spatial situations. This dilemma has been famously addressed by Walter Benjamin, who depicts the dissolution of coherence between temporal-spatial experience and the experience of one's own identity as a problem of representation, focusing on the same historical context as does Terdiman. »Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire« delineates the modern, urban subject's division and ordering of perceptions into brief moments (»Zeit-Stellen«) as neither a conscious rearrangement of temporality nor as a meaningful association of perception and image, but merely as a survival-oriented response to discontinuity and disjunction. 4 Terdiman's analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature and theory, which makes use of Benjamin's Baudelaire studies, demonstrates that the post-revolutionary subject does not understand itself as part of a pre-existing history; its »recollection ha[s] ceased to integrate with consciousness.« Although he con-

2 3 4

10

Terdiman, Present Past, p. viii. Terdiman, Present Past, p. 14. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser , 1, 1972, p.695.

centrâtes on French texts written after 1815, Terdiman's work also acknowledges German historicism and its responses to (as well as its role in constructing) the modern »memory crisis.« The development of that historicism, and indeed of history as a professional discipline, was much indebted to German Romanticism and its crisis of remembrance and representation. 5 In Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (1992), Azade Seyhan summarizes the ways in which memory, history, and signification are linked in Early Romanticism: The early Romantics saw history as a kind of memory, but this was not the reconstructive memory of the Hegelian system that insured the ontological status of representation. In fact, Romantic criticism stressed the relation between the problem of representation and acts of memory which replace presence with a dialectic of creation and dissolution/

Awareness, then, of the unreliability of representation and of »presence« as always slipping away from cognizance differentiates Early Romantic thought from later historicism, and also binds that thought to its own historical context and to much earlier philosophies. Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel in particular represent the faculty of memory in a context that both receives philosophies of harmony and balance dating to pre-Socratic thinkers and reacts to a post-revolutionary world in which it is increasingly difficult to integrate recollection with a harmonic view of consciousness. These perspectives are often represented in the form of the fragment, a form intimately related to conceptions and portrayals of memory, and a form uniquely suited to expressing the »dialectic of creation and dissolution« enacted by recollection. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy associate notions of fragment, ruin, and memory as follows: »Ruin and fragment conjoin the functions of the monument and of evocation; what is thereby both remembered as lost and presented in a sort of sketch (or blueprint) is always the living unity of a great individuality, author, or work.« 7 Only this »ruin,« this presence of something acknowledged as lost, can hint at totality by expressing, in »small« form, the »will to System« articulated initially in Das älteste Systemprogramm des

' Theodor Ziolkowski summarizes German Romanticism's influence on the development of various disciplines in German Romanticism and its Institutions, 1990. Werner Leibbrand, Die spekulative Medizin der Romantik, 1956, while older, also gives a useful synthesis of research on connections between the Romantics and the fields of history, linguistics, music, and science. For a more detailed approach to links and ruptures between Hegel's historicism and Romanticism, see Suzanne Gearhart, Philosophy in Crisis: Hegel, History, Romanticism. In: Stanford Literary Review 6.1, 1989. 6 Azade Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism, p. 67. 7 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, 1988, p.42.

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deutschen Idealismus} The Early Romantic fragment is also a form associated with rupture, with the beginning of a »new« time that also signifies an end, or decay. Friedrich Schlegel's placement of the fragment in a temporal context, and his equal privileging of »Fragmente[n] aus der Vergangenheit« and »Fragmented] aus der Zukunft« 9 enables an understanding of the fragmentary as both remembering and anticipating; as expressive of irony and hope. Novalis's collection of fragments entitled Das Allgemeine Brouillon blatantly acknowledges the inability to reach totality (in this case, in the form of a compendium of all knowledge) and the simultaneous attempt to achieve totality via extreme fragmentation.10 Throughout this study, I examine the Early Romantic insights on memory that find expression in the genre of the Romantic fragment; I also attempt to demonstrate that the relationship between the Romantic fragment and memory is unique and worthy of investigation. Before conducting readings of Romantic texts, however, I present a conceptual framework for understanding that relationship. I propose that an understanding of memory in Early Romantic fragments depends not on an undifferentiated concept of the fragment as privileged aesthetic form, but on an exploration of (i) what the connection between »fragment« and »form« means in the Early Romantic context, and (2) how the mnemonic both operates through and finds expression in this »form.« Although I cannot discuss in detail the immense body of inquiry into connections between memory and language, the fact that the idea of the Romantic fragment is expressed in the signs and symbols of written language prompts me to comment briefly on at least one way of thinking about such connections. Dietrich Harth, in his introduction to the collection entitled Die Erfindung des Gedächtnisses, paraphrases how, according to Hegel,

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Authorship of the text entitled: Das älteste Systemprogramm, which was found in Hegel's handwriting, is now attributed to Schelling. K A II, no. 24. In an essay entitled: Rilkes Archaischer Torso Apollos in der Geschichte des modernen Fragmentarismus, Peter Horst Neumann notes: »Durch diese Gleichstellung der traditionellen Fragmentstypen - des Zerbrochenen und des Unvollendeten - vollzog Schlegel eine entschiedene Aufwertung der Zeit innerhalb der ästhetischen Theorie, und zwar der zeitigen Zeit, die durch die Fragmente hindurch geht. Die Bruchstellen der Fragmente sind die Wegweiser zu einer Vollkommenheit, die nicht hier und jetzt erscheint, sondern nur in der Vergangenheit aufgefunden oder in der Zukunft eingelöst werden kann,« In: Fragment und Totalität, ed. by Lucien Dällenbach and Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig, 1984, pp.258f. Manfred Frank's analyses of Early Romantic conceptions of the fragment and totality can be found in: Das Problem »Zeit« in der deutschen Romantik , 1990, and: Der unendliche Mangel an Sein, 1975. They are presented in very concise form in his essay, Das »fragmentarische Universum« der Romantik. In: Fragment und Totalität, ed. by Dällenbach and Nibbrig, pp. 212-224.

die sprachlichen Akte des Erinnerns formal beschaffen sind: Sie fügen das bewußt oder spontan auftretende Erinnerungsfragment [...] in Kontexte ein, deren JetztStrukturen auf dem Fundament der Tradition ruhen. Das Ergebnis ist eine - vom sprachlichen Erinnerungsakt aus gesehen - Neustrukturierung sowohl der grammatikalischen Zeitverhältnisse als auch der Semantik: Während ich schreibe, organisiere ich hier und jetzt Erinnertes und antizipiere zugleich, daß die Rede vergangen, der Satz/der Text abgeschlossen sein wird." While Harth then proceeds to divorce spoken from written language, showing that the mnemonic operates and is received in very different ways in both, the above paraphrase helps define two ways in which the operation of memory relates to fragmentary representation. Remembrance here is a fragment, and that »Erinnerungsfragment« expresses itself as an act of organization and anticipation. Although Hegel's view of »tradition« and of history as a monolithic continuity has long been questioned, 1 2 it is important to recognize that the Jena R o mantics' ability to envision a history with any continuity whatsoever depended in part on a certain kind of theoretical bridging that anticipates Hegel's historical bridging of antiquity and the present: specifically, on the joining of content and form; on the conception of content as form. A s Lacoue-Labarthe and N a n c y put it in a section of The Literary Absolute that focuses on the relationship between the Romantic »form« and »idea,« the term »form« in the context of the Athenäum does not only refer to representative form, but rather [to] the fusion of everything that composes the absolute. This status, however, does not prevent the incompletion of form, or what [Friedrich] Schlegel - with reference to an ancient Pallas - called roughness or, in short, that schematization which alone is capable of drawing out the essential.1' Schlegel defines this »schematization,« this »incompletion of form« that is form, both as the abstract »symbol« and via analogy to the more readily visualized »man« (as well as to »masculine form« and »feminine form«). 1 4 While this »form« on the one hand promises access to »the essential,« it remains incomplete; its »roughness« would perhaps not be problematic if the Romantics

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Dietrich Harth (ed.), Die Erfindung des Gedächtnisses, I99i,p. 15. The reference is to the 1830 edition of Philosophie des Geistes. Harth refers to Hegel's choice of the term »Mnemosyne,« the Greek word for »remembrance,« as a linguistic trick that »die Antike wie selbstverständlich in den modernen Gedanken einschließt und so vergegenwärtigt,« in: Die Erfindung des Gedächtnisses, ρ. 15. At the same time, Hegel extends the myth of Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses, into the present (the source of Mnemosyne's story is Hesiod's Theogonie); this consciously continued mythologizing of memory contributes to a lack of differentiation between the functioning and expression of memory in written as opposed to spoken language. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 77. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy cite Schlegel, Uber Lessing (1797; Kritische Schriften, p. 381) and his Ideen (Athenäum 3, 1800, no. 98); The Literary Absolute, p.77.

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had understood the relationship between form and content as reliable. But although the ideal of a collapse of form and content informs the Early Romantics' critical-literary endeavors, acknowledgment of the impossibility of actually achieving such a collapse appears again and again in their fragmented texts.' 5 The »man« posited as embodying the »finite formed into the infinite« remains a mere scheme, trapped in finitude. As Lacoue-Labarthe's and Nancy's work makes abundantly clear, the Early Romantic use of seemingly material references such as »man« or »masculine/ feminine form« must be understood in a philosophical context saturated with the demands of metaphysics and dominated by the agenda of the transcendental aesthetic. »If romanticism is approachable,« they write, »[...] it is approachable only by means of the philosophical path,< if it is true that crisis is fundamentally philosophical and that the crisis at stake here, as we will see, is opened by nothing other than Criticism itself.« 16 However, the title and content of the conclusion of The Literary Absolute, »Romantic Equivocity,« are telling. In this conclusion, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy elaborate a point that recurs throughout their work: that the Early Romantic desire to systematize and schematize a boundless philosophy is counteracted and complemented by an awareness of the futility of that desire - and that when authors or artists deal with that awareness in an aesthetically productive manner, they produce ironic »fragments« (incompletions) that represent and embody attempts to fill the empty »I« of critical philosophy. 17 The daunting task of speculative idealism' 8 ' ' Addressing a similar topic, Alice Kuzniar notes that »the Romantics mistrust[] the schematization offered by a philosophy of history, a teleology, or the myth of organicism, even though the vigilance of their mistrust almost approaches a systemization in itself,« and criticizes the authors of several works of scholarly literature on Romanticism f o r themselves engaging in an »overriding schematization« that obscures the critique of organicity and the »nonclosure« that she identifies in Romantic texts. See: Delayed Endings: Nonclosure in Novalis and Hölderlin, 1987, p. 49. Kuzniar's argument here is helpful in that it frees readings of Early Romantic texts from an endlessly recursive schematizing-of-schemes that encourages »closing off« the content of these texts from a meaningful engagement with sociohistorical problems or with dilemmas in aesthetic theory. M y reliance on Lacoue-Labarthe's and Nancy's study is in par: due to the fact that they tend to avoid precisely the kind of »overriding schematization« of the Romantics that Kuzniar mentions. 16 17 18

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Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 29. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, pp.30, 1 2 1 - 1 2 7 . Speculative idealism is defined by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy »more or less rigorously as the project of reconquering the possibility of effective speculation, the possibility, in other words, of the auto-recognition of the Ideal as the subject's own form;« essentially, the task of »recovering« the »substance« of the subject after Kant has rendered the »I« a »pure logical necessity,« The Literary Absolute, pp.33, 3 1 , 30. Doubt about the subject's ability to »regulate« a present or future time via representations of remembered events threatens the Jena Romantics' attempts to postulate and realize an autoproductive subject within which real and ideal would be united.

is, in Romantic texts that attempt to set the principle of form as content into practice, continually interrupted by doubt and by the »reality« that Novalis understands as fundamentally opposed to »the >fragmentary< world of books.« 19 The anticipation, »daß die Rede vergangen, der Satz/der Text abgeschlossen sein wird,« can only be expressed in fragments - fragments that must remain anticipatory and somehow at odds with »reality,« even as they claim to be real and more. The Jena Romantics understood the form of the fragment, in short, as symbol (for a totality that cannot be realized) and as (total, complete) sense. Manfred Frank summarizes this understanding in part as follows: Totalität ist also nicht das All des Seienden im Unterschied zur Einheit seines Begriffs, sondern die wieder in Einheit zurückgenommene Zersplitterung selbst: die Einheit von Identität und Unendlichkeit, wie Schelling, oder die >in sich vollendete und vereinigte Vielheits wie Fr. Schlegel sagt ( Κ Α X V I I I : 12, no. 84).

The very expression, fluid and synthetic, of such metaphysical aporiae can tend to obscure what Azade Seyhan calls the »uncertain status of the sign« in Early Romantic texts,20 an uncertainty that has everything to do with the inability of the Romantic fragment to bridge »reality« and the idealist »totality.« Seyhan, working with Frank's notion of an all-pervasive »Verzeitlichung des Selbstbewußtseins« in Romantic philosophy and literature (Das Problem »Zeit« in der deutschen Romantik-, 1990, 1972), focuses on a different awareness of temporal experience in Jena Romanticism as a factor crucial to this uncertainty. 21 The subjective awareness of time elapsed between the experience of an event and its representation makes true identity between representation and its object impossible; only »elusive modes of representation« such as »allegory, irony, catachresis, metalepsis, and ellipsis find their physical home in the fragment.« 22 True unity of form and content could only take place in a »temporal void.« 23 Ri-

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Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 126. Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents, p. 7 1 . Alice Kuzniar attributes this »Verzeitlichung des Selbstbewußtseins,« or the temporalization of consciousness, almost entirely to the Romantics' perceptions of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror (»The French Revolution as Preface,« Delayed Endings, pp. 12-25). Frank's work departs from another of the three events that Friedrich Schlegel called »determining for the age:« Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. He then explicates Novalis's and Schlegel's concepts of time relative to Fichte's philosophy. See: Das Problem »Zeit« in der deutschen Romantik, Chapters ι, 3, 4.

" Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents, p. 7 1 . 2J Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents, p. 70. Terdiman writes that while at the end of the nineteenth century, »philosophers of time proffered the notion that all perception involves a displacement or extension in time as though it were a new discovery,« Kant was of course considerably ahead of them. I remain with Terdiman's summary and his reference to Charles M. Sherover (The Human Perception of Time: The Development of its Philosophical Meaning): »In >The Critique of Pure Reason< r

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chard Terdiman paraphrases this deceptively simple problem of time and representation when he describes »the process of representation itself, engaged in a fundamental historical dimension« as that of the dialectic, which »must always both remember (conserve) and overcome (transform) its referent.« 24 Representation, then, is a conserving and a transforming: a remembering and an overcoming that occurs in the present, and hence both brings consciousness of the past into the present moment and reconstructs that consciousness. This paraphrase is consistent with Seyhan's remark that the Romantics »went beyond Hegelian metaphysics by assigning the fragments of memory a distinctly material, albeit reinvented, history and form. Knowledge buried in memory could only be made present to consciousness by a machinery of formal representations.« 2 ' For the Romantics, these representations are uncertain and unreliable markers of experience, due not only to the consciousness of the rather obvious fact that (i) past is not present, but also that (2) there is no assurance of a linear connection between past, present, and future. This awareness of elapsed time and of noncontinuity threatens the subject's ability to remain »present to itself« and hence confident of its identity;26 a condition that goes essentially unquestioned in a state Terdiman calls »mnemonic harmony.« 27 Memory crisis, identity crisis, and representational crisis seem necessarily mutually inclusive. However, while Terdiman's conceptualization of the representational process in dialectical terms is helpful, particularly for locating a place for memory within that process, the equation of remembering with reproduction and of »overcoming« with production eliminates a movement in the representational scheme important to an understanding of the operation and expression of memory in Romantic fragments. The act of remembering itself can be thought of as already encompassing both conserving and transforming moments; as Andreas Huyssen points out, memory »is itself based on representation.« 28 The

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Immanuel Kant argued that even the simplest act of perception has a temporal dimension. A n y such act — the fundamental form of mediation by which we relate to the extra-individual world - synthesizes immediate presentation on the one hand, and recollection on the other,« Present Past, p. 9—10. Terdiman, Present Past, p.65. Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents, p. 15. A s Seyhan points out, for Augustine this coeval state was a prerequisite for the subject's very existence; Representation and Its Discontents, p. 1 1 . Alice Kuzniar contrasts Condillac's and Rousseau's theories of temporality and their rendering of links between the experience of time as linear, memory, and identity with those of Novalis and Hölderlin when she notes that Condillac »states that we can imagine the future by extrapolating on our knowledge of the past. Memory guarantees that something will occur in the future. [...] Rousseau's Savoyard vicar similarly concludes that his identity is constituted in and through time: there is no identity of the self except by virtue of memory,« Delayed Endings, pp. 33-34.

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Terdiman, Present Past, p. zi.

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Andreas Huyssen's remark that »[t]he past is not simply there in memory, but it must

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constructive movement of »overcoming« or »transforming« the memory into representational form is, then, itself a representation of the constructive, but also reproductive, movement of remembering. 2 ' The Jena Romantics very much advocate a concept of memory as active, constructive and even as a construction itself. Friedrich Schlegel calls memory one of the »Tätigkeiten des Bewußtseins« that constitutes space and time;30 Novalis describes »Fantasie, Verstand, Gedächtniß etc.« as »Handlungsweisen, die auf die verschiedenste Weise modificirt seyn können.« 31 The dialectical scheme of remembering and representation given above also allows for openness and for deferral of a final synthesis because of what Terdiman terms »the crucial tension between the dialectic's paired dynamics of conservation and overcoming;« 32 a sustained, yet dynamic, play between a remembering/representing consciousness and a remembered/represented referent that, I contend, is manifested twice: (i) during the act of remembering itself and (2) during the representation of what is remembered. But if the fact that the past cannot be made present and that representation always involves deferral is easy to accept, an understanding of expressions of memories in terms of layers of representations and re-representations - that is, in terms of pure constructions, of signifiers not beholden to an »original« past is perhaps less so. What, in other words, makes sense, and how does »sense« re-

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be articulated to become memory« helps support his depiction of »memory as a cultural construction in the present,« as a movement already productive and active, »itself based on representation,« before it is re-represented in any type of text. See: Twilight Memories. Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, 1995, pp. 2Í, 260-1. This formulation of the dialectic of representation recalls the relationship between the ancient ars memoriae and rhetorical inventio, which combined to create argumentation. Stefan Goldmann helpfully paraphrases this ancient connection between the topoi of remembering and inventing as follows: »Bei der Verfertigung einer Rede hat der Redner drei Aufgaben zu erfüllen: die Stoffsammlung (inventio), die Stoffanordnung (dispositio) und die stilistische Durcharbeitung des topisch gefundenen und angeordneten Materials mittels der Figurenlehre (elocutio). In dem anschließenden vierten Stadium (memoria) gilt es, die entworfene Rede innerhalb des künstlichen Gedächtnisses des Rhetors in kraftvolle, affektive Bilder (agentes imagines) zu übertragen was ja die Figurenlehre leistet - und auf feste Plätze (loci) zielen, so daß die Bilder beim Vortrag der Rede (actio), dem fünften Stadium, durch imginäres Abschreiten derselben Plätze wieder abgerufen werden können. [...] Uber die Epochen hinweg bleiben diese Plätze in ihrer Mehrzahl unverändert; es sind die Erinnerungsbilder und Gedankenfiguren, an denen sich die Phantasie abarbeitet.« See Topos und Erinnerung: Rahmenbedingungen der Autobiographie. In: Der ganze Mensch. Anthropologie und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. by Hans-Jürgen Schings, 1992, pp. 6yi(. K A XII: 412. Novalis, Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Ed. by Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, 1960-1988, II: 296. Abbreviated henceforth as H K A . Terdiman develops this model against the background of Marx's teleology and Derrida's critique thereof, Present Past, p. 65.

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late t o a m e m o r y that both reproduces and transforms, when the instability of expression has been acknowledged and representation has been shifted even further f r o m the »source« of a real, authentic past? W h e r e is coherence and meaning w h e n Novalis questions the idea of a »beginning,« 3 3 and Schlegel acknowledges the radical instability o f a future that emerges from a past marked by radical discontinuity? 3 4 What happens to the relationship between representation and meaning when, as Azade Seyhan argues, the texts produced b y the entire J e n a circle evince representational modes that elude their objects, and that such »elusive modes« are truly at » h o m e « in the f o r m o f the fragment? 3 5 D o e s this n o t imply that the fragment itself must be elusive and unstable? If this seemingly endless dissemination o f signs threatens to upset the »crucial balance between [ . . . ] conservation and overcoming,« so does an attempt to »get back« to sense and authentic experience via a theoretically posited collapse of f o r m and content. Such collapse would in fact move beyond the realm of representations-of-representations to reification, because the temporal trajectory of representation would be »flattened out,« denied, as though a temporal void within which f o r m and c o n t e n t could be united were possible. A n d for that unity to be accepted, w e would in effect have to forget the spatial-temporal gap between o b j e c t and representation. T h e o d o r A d o r n o has pointed this out in another time and context, stating that »all reification is a forgetting.« 3 6 F o r the Early R o m a n t i c s (and particularly in Friedrich Schlegel's theory o f the fragment), the fragment was supposed to provide a sort o f solution t o this problem: the fragm e n t should resist reification by being both representation and content simultaneously. B u t R o m a n t i c texts also acknowledge that m e m o r y itself, and the elapsed time necessitated by perception, necessitates re-representation, and thus risks disrupting the tensions between remembering and representing crucial t o the R o m a n t i c s ' o w n conception o f the ideal relationship between absolute and incomplete, between totality and fragment. Seyhan's semiotic analyses of literary figures and tropes, Frank's and L a coue-Labarthe's/Nancy's philosophical examinations, and Terdiman's c o m b i nation of sociohistorical with text-immanent approaches explore in detail the difficulties inherent in the Romantics' o w n use of language, which Alice K u z -

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Novalis writes: »Wozu überhaupt ein Anfang? Dieser unphilfosophische] - oder halbphilfosophische] Zweck führt zu allen Irrthümern,« H K A III: 383. See also H K A II: 591 (»Aller wircklicher Anfang ist ein 2ter Moment. Alles was da ist, erscheint, ist und erscheint nur unter einer Voraussetzung [...]. Ich muß allem etwas absolutes Voraus denken - voraussetzen - Nicht auch Nachdenken, Nachsetzen?/ Vorurtheil. Vorsatz. Vorempfindung. Vorbild. Vor Fantasie. Project./«). 3 < K A 7: 7. 35 Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents, p. 7 1 . 36 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 230. Cited in Terdiman, Present Past, p.65. 18

niar (in a primarily semiotic analysis) convincingly portrays as prefiguring modern critical thought and theory. 37 Seyhan concludes her book with the reminder that »the kind of literary criticism which reflects on the constitution of reality in representational constructs need not be a merely self-referential enterprise,«3® but tautological traps are difficult to avoid when the »reality« whose representation is reflected upon is composed of recollection, reminiscence, and recognizance - in other words, of mnemonic representations. The danger for an analysis of the conceptualization and depiction of memory in texts of any period, but perhaps particularly for the Early Romantic period (and any number of attempts to historicize and materialize literary criticism about Jena in general attest to this), is that it remains »sense-less,« imprisoned in schematizations of schemes no closer to meaning than Schlegel's pure analogy-»man« is to infinity. Georg Braungart's contention that there is another modern critical tradition, »die zur sprachskeptischen sich komplementär verhält,« 39 offers alternative possibilities for reflections on these representational dilemmas, and holds particularly interesting implications for examinations of Early Romantic depictions of memory. In an article in Rhetorik, Braungart finds the »Idee des erscheinenden - und nicht ins Unendliche aufgeschobenen - Sinnes« in Karl Philipp Moritz's aesthetic theory. 40 The concept of »Erscheinung« (or »appearance«), which Braungart traces to Herder's Plastik (1778), enables an understanding of the surface of an art work as its meaning; in Moritz's aesthetic physiognomy, this relationship is analogous to that between surface and sense (which, for Moritz, is »das Schöne«) in the human body. »Die Oberfläche des Kunstwerks, die Oberfläche des menschlichen Körpers - sie ermöglichen die unmittelbare Erfahrung des Schönen.« 4 ' The argument for this type of direct experience of meaning comes from the reception of the hermetic tradition of

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Kuzniar, Delayed Endings, p. 10. Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents, p. 167. Georg Braungart, »Intransitive Zeichen:« »Die Signatur des Schönen« im menschlichen Körper bei Karl Philipp Moritz. In: Rhetorik, ed. by Joachim Dyck, Walter Jens, and Gert Ueding, 13, 1994, p.3. Braungart, »Intransitive Zeichen,« p.3. Braungart's assertion that Moritz's »Ideen über den menschlichen Körper und dessen Darstellung in Werken der bildenden Kunst« play a »prominente Rolle in den Diskursen über die Präsenz des Sinnes« (ρ. finds support in several studies of eighteenth-century aesthetics. Thomas P. Saine's Die ästhetische Theodizee: Karl Philipp Moritz und die Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts, 1 9 7 1 , Simon Richter's Laocoon's B o d y and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe, 1992, and Tzvetan Todorov's Théories du symbole, 1977, are only a few examples. Their findings justify attention to a number of the key concepts in Moritz's aesthetic theory, concepts examined in more depth in Chapter Three of this study. Braungart, »Intransitive Zeichen,« p. 14.

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microcosm and macrocosm found in the works of Paracelsus, Plotinus, Helmont, Mesmer, and Novalis, among others. 42 If w e think of the body as the microcosm of absolute, beautiful meaning, then an analogous 43 relationship between that meaning and the finite body obtains. The art work, the most perfect example of which is the form of the human body (for Moritz collapses art and natural forms in his attempt to show that the surfaces of both convey meaning in the same immediate w a y ) , »soll nur von sich selber, von ihrem innern Wesen durch ihre äußere Oberfläche gleichsam sprechen, soll durch sich selbst bedeutend werden.« 4 4 This surface, whether of the human body or of the art work, is not the mimetic expression of some inner meaning that points to the external world; Moritz acknowledges that beautiful appearance is at most a »deutliche Beschreibung dessen, was unsrer Sterblichkeit nur dunkel ahndet.« 45 As Hans Joachim Schrimpf explains, the artist cannot replicate what Moritz calls »die innewohnende Vollkommenheit der Natur,« 4 6 but can produce a representative mirror image, a shadow outline 47 that re-presents (rather than reproduces or imitates) sense - that makes sense present as the form that is appearance. The autonomy of the w o r k of art (best analogized, again, to the human body), its »innre Zweckmäßigkeit,« is possible due to this analogical correspondence (rather than to difference 48 or to mimetic similarity) between finite form and infinite sense. Moritz writes: »Der Künstler muß suchen, den Zweck, der in der Natur immer außer dem Gegenstande liegt, in den Gegenstand selbst zurückzuwälzen, und ihn dadurch in sich selbst vollendet zu machen.« 4 ' The resulting beautiful form is then completely non-instrumental; its surface is its meaning,

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Werner Leibbrand, Die spekulative Medizin der Romantik, traces connections between these thinkers' works, microcosm/macrocosm theory, and alchemy. See also Braungart, »Intransitive Zeichen,« p. 8. This analogous relationship essayed in traditional microcosm/macrocosm theory posits the real presence of »the whole« in »the particular« (via the »Signatur,« which I discuss shortly), and insofar should be distinguished from Christian concepts of man as God's likeness. Karl Philipp Moritz, Uber die Allegorie. In: Beiträge zur Ästhetik. Ed. by Hans Joachim Schrimpf, 1989. Cited also in Braungart, »Intransitive Zeichen,« p. 8. Moritz, Die Signatur des Schönen. In wie fern Kunstwerke beschrieben werden können? In: Beiträge zur Ästhetik, p. 83. More on the concept of beautiful appearance can be found in Moritz's essay Uber die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen. In: Beiträge zur Ästhetik, pp. 27-78. Moritz, Beiträge zur Ästhetik, p. 84. Hans Joachim Schrimpf, Karl Philipp Moritz, 1980, pp. 9sf. Braungart, »Intransitive Zeichen,« p. 5, with reference to Michel Foucault's use of the term »correspondence« in: Les mots et les choses, 1966. Karl Philipp Moritz, Schriften zur Ästhetik und Poetik. Ed. by Hans Joachim Schrimpf, 1962, ρ. 153.

and it only means what it appears to be.'0 This non-propositional logic, applied in an aesthetic theory that encompasses metaphysical and empirical interests, prefigures the Early Romantics' insistence on compatibility between form and sense as well as their conviction that only non-linear micro-entities can approximate »das große Ganze.«' 1 But how can this notion of »appearing sense« in art and nature - which implies not only independence from significatory relationships with the »outside world,« but also instantaneity - be reconciled with memory, with a re-cognition of past experience and the elapsed time that recognition requires? For the Early Romantics (and, regarding theories of the body as art, for Novalis in particular)'2 as well as for Moritz, the reception of ancient and hermetic traditions of correspondence and harmony, and the reapplication of those traditions in developing aesthetic theories that emphasize a crucial role for the art work's creator-subject (and which, as we will see, permit discontinuity and chaos to exist together with correspondence), enable an understanding of the presence of sense in appearance as neither requiring a temporal void, nor as rendering the past insignificant. For the surface of a work to become one with meaning, its creator and recipient must undergo a mnemonic process. Upon contact with a beautiful work, the subject experiences what Moritz calls the »zurückgelaßne Spur von irgend einer Sache [...] die ihr[en] vorübergehenden] Hauch auf dem Grunde der Einbildungskraft zurückläßt;«53 this »Empfindung des Schönen« refers both to sense perception and to an experience not unlike the »intellectual intuition« (»intellektuelle Anschauung«) of transcendental philosophy.'4 This sensory and spiritual experience, prompted by a trace of something now gone, is an act of recognition motivated by the representation that Moritz calls the Signatur, or signature. The aesthetic interaction between a subject's mental and physical processes and the work (which is an embodied form of those processes) ensures the continuation (not the imitation) of the remembered past.

See Braungart, »Intransitive Zeichen,« p. io. ' ' Tzvetan Todorov calls Moritz the »transitional figure« between classicist and romantic aesthetics, and documents his influence on Early Romantic thought. In addition, he argues that Moritz, far from being »Goethe's reflection, his spokesman« in several works that had significant impact on the Jena group, actually advanced crucial segments of his aesthetic theory before meeting Goethe. Theories of the Symbol, 1982, pp. 148-221 and especially pp. 1 4 8 - 1 5 0 . 52

53 54

See for example Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Ed. by Hans-Joachim Mahl and Richard Samuel, 1978, II: 762^ Noted also by Braungart in »Intransitive Zeichen,« p. 8-33. Moritz, Beiträge zur Ästhetik, pp. 89, 91. Frederick Copleston describes Fichte's notion of »intellektuelle Anschauung« as an immediate awareness accompanying all self-consciousness and all bodily activities as well; see: A History of Philosophy, 1994, p. 4 1 .

21

The past is transformed and continues, not in art, but as art, »in sich selbst vollendet.«" I examine the implications of eighteenth-century aesthetic theories and their reception of harmonic hermetic concepts for remembrance and representation in Early Romantic texts in Chapter Three of this study; I return to the representational dialectic sketched above, and to its compatibility with Moritz's theory of aesthetic autonomy, in the third section of the current chapter. For the moment, I emphasize that the concept of appearing sense in the beautiful work does not necessarily completely collapse past and present, thus obviating memory, but rather can function to »save« memory from the amnesia portrayed in theories of representation and documentation dating to Plato's skepticism about technéS6 While different art forms permit different experiences of microcosmic-macrocosmic harmony and beauty, poesy as well as sculpture is capable of uniting spectator and sense via the sensation of the Spur, or trace. When, as Moritz's concept of aesthetic autonomy demands, representation and meaning are joined on the work's »surface,« the representation (the signature, the mirror image, the shadow outline) is not a mimetic reifying »preserver« of the past that robs the subject of mnemonic competence, but rather a mnemonic aid to that subject's creativity and agency. It enables simultaneously the corporeal feeling and transcendental intuition of the trace, and hence of »absolute« beauty. Thinkers such as Moritz, Salomon Maimón, Lessing, and Herder, writing in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, received older theories of memory as located in the body as well as a faculty of consciousness; 57 these receptions were integrated with insights from chemistry, alchemy, and the growing discipline of psychology.' 8 As several scholars have already demonstrated, the Jena Romantics worked intensively with several of these earlier texts; this is evident in their fragments on art and philosophy as well as on science.59 In addition to

55 56

57

58 59

22

Moritz, Beiträge zur Ästhetik, p. 97. For more on Plato's distrust of the technology of writing, see David Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge, 1990, pp. 13-39, a n d Harth, Die Erfindung des Gedächtnisses, pp. 13—48. Both Aristotle's »ensouled body« and Descartes' ontological body-soul duality, as well as a concept of memory as inseparable from either body or soul, are received in works that pre- and post-date critical philosophy. David Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing, Edward Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, 1987, and Drew Leder, The Absent Body, 1990, are helpful in tracing these influences. Exemplary texts by Moritz, Lessing, and Herder are examined in Chapter Three. See for example Peter Kapitza, Die frühromantische Theorie der Mischung. Über den Zusammenhang von romantischer Dichtungstheorie und zeitgenössischer Chemie, 1968, and John Neubauer, Nature as Construct. In: Literature and Science as Modes of Expression, ed. by Frederich Amrine, 1989, in addition to Hans-Jürgen Schings, Der ganze Mensch, and Werner Leibbrand, Die spekulative Medizin der Romantik.

the insights of critical philosophy and its contributions to the redefinition of aesthetics, evidence of the reliance of earlier aesthetic theory on rhetoric and on the images and metaphors of ars memoriae mentioned earlier in this section joins the above discourses in Jena texts. Remembering, as a movement within the Early Romantic conception of temporalized consciousness, functions in recursive patterns reminiscent of Moritz's »gewölbte Linien;«60 it finds expression in the incomplete, yet whole forms that Moritz's and other pre-Kantian aesthetic theorists call definitive for representational processes in consciousness and in art.6' Memory has been repeatedly figured as body - and, literally, as the re-membering of bodies in fragments - since Simonides's identification of Scopas and his crushed banquet guests.62 Stressing such connections, but without attempting to coerce discursive syntheses where ruptures are more evident, my readings interpret the Early Romantic fragment both as the form that was content (the content of the inexpressible, absolute idea; content based on the trace of the past) and as a forever-inadequate, truncated representation of what is re-constructively remembered via the sense organs' transmissions of images and sensations and consciousness's active response to those transmissions. The discussion in this study of the fragment both as representative of memory and as memory itself maintains the focus on the Jena Romantics' conception of the fragment as both representative form and as content. The following chapters address problems of thinking about this fragmented notion of representation (representation as fragment, representation in fragmented form) while acknowledging the diachronic, harmonious reciprocations that particularly Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Schelling also portray. Werner Leibbrand notes that Romantic reciprocities belong to traditions traceable to pre-Socratic thinkers (such as Pythagoras), to notions of similarity and the above-mentioned microcosm-macrocosm theory (Plotinus, Paracelsus), to Protestant mysticism and pantheism (Weigel, Böhme), as well as to concepts of polarities between systole and diastole advocated by Goethe and Schiller.63 In these contexts, the fragment constitutes a part of a whole whose present or future existence is not contested; it serves as a microcosm of and anticipates totality. As Lucien Dällenbach and Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig put it in their introduction to Fragment und Totalität (1984): »Das Bruchstück ist dabei weniger Rest und Ruine einer verlorenen, sondern vielmehr Indiz einer in die Zukunft aufgehobenen Ganzheit.«64 However, when discontinuity and unease enter Romantic 60 61 62 63 64

Schrimpf, Karl Philipp Moritz, p.95. See Schrimpf, Karl Philipp Moritz, pp.95^ Cicero, De oratore II: lxxxvii, pp. 3 5 1 - 5 4 . Werner Leibbrand, Die spekulative Medizin der Romantik, especially pp. 12-20. In this passage, the authors contrast Novalis's and Friedrich Schlegel's »offene« and »flüssige« fragment collections to Hegel's »in sich selbst gekrümmten System« that

23

t e x t s - w h e n the a u t h o r s and characters h a v e t r o u b l e o r d e r i n g w h a t t h e y rem e m b e r i n a sequential (though n o t n e c e s s a r i l y linear) narrative, o r w h e n t h e y h a v e d i f f i c u l t y r e m e m b e r i n g at all - t h e n that secure f u t u r e is indeed in d o u b t , the »will

t o System«

b r e a k s d o w n , and signs of a crisis of r e p r e s e n t a t i o n - a s -

m e m o r y crisis are evident. In these narrative contexts, the f r a g m e n t a p p e a r s as m u c h as r u i n as f o u n d a t i o n . I u n d e r s t a n d » f r a g m e n t s « in this c o n t e x t n o t j u s t as t h o s e a p h o r i s t i c pieces that the R o m a n t i c s n a m e d » f r a g m e n t s « a n d p u b l i s h e d in the f i r s t t w o issues of the Athenäum

( 1 7 9 8 , v o l s . 1 and 2), b u t also as the nar-

ratives and statements characterized b y w h a t A l i c e K u z n i a r calls the » n o n c o n t i n g e n c y « a n d the »parcelled, d i s p e r s i v e n a t u r e of m u c h w r i t i n g « of J e n a R o m a n t i c i s m / ® W i t h this writing, the J e n a R o m a n t i c s p o i s e d themselves historic a l l y and p h i l o s o p h i c a l l y between h a r m o n i o u s hermetic traditions a n d a m o d ern c h a o s , a m n e m o n i c disjunction that is u n i q u e to the p o s t - r e v o l u t i o n a r y phase." T h e p r o j e c t of » U n i v e r s a l p o e s i e , « e m b e d d e d in f r a g m e n t s that e m b o d i e d » s e n s e « b y representing it, fragments w h o s e relationship to a real o r i m a g i n e d w h o l e can be u n d e r s t o o d in o f t e n c o n f l i c t i n g w a y s , w a s f u n d a m e n t a l l y c o m m e m o r a t i v e . A s A z a d e Seyhan w r i t e s : » T h e ramifications of the

Athenäum

demands systematic closure via a »maximale Verkettung zwischen Teil und Ganzem,« as well as to Nietzsche's nihilism: »>Daß es kein »Ganzes« gibt, daß alle Abwertung des menschlichen Daseins, der menschlichen Ziele nicht in Hinsicht auf etwas gemacht werden kann, das gar nicht existiertmere< images is, however, more problematic than the realization that a chair, a weapon, or a torrential downpour is not real or even referential. For any notion of a subjective agent in history is necessarily housed in images of the human body, and these images are in turn intrinsically related to concepts of subjectivity. 126 124 125 126

40

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p.xi. Adelson, Making Bodies Making History: Feminism and German Identity, 1993, p- 2. Adelson, Making Bodies Making History, p. 2.

Romantic literature, rife with allegories-within-allegories and symbols-ofsymbols, does not employ images to represent real bodies in a specific actual past. But even its most obviously fabricated envisionings of history rely on images of the human body that are »intrinsically related to concepts of subjectivity.« This is a subjectivity that emerges first in the self-other relationship, a subjectivity meaningless (trapped in »einer unendlichen Reihe von Spiegelbildern«127) outside of that relationship and away from the images of physicality used to represent it. And remembering is crucial to this construction of a reflective and sentient subject that, in turn, refers to a body never completely enclosed in linguistic discourse.'28 Adelson stresses the representations of intersubjective experiences in real spaces that are, like bodies, constructed by but not limited to discourse. She rejects the classical distinction between »subjects and subjectivity on the one hand and society and social processes on the other« as an »exclusionary maneuver«129 used to justify indifferent isolation from social reality (for instance in the form of flights into purely textual realms).'30 Using this formulation as a 127 128

Κ Α XII: 351. Adelson, addressing and recontextualizing social theory exemplified by the Frankfurt School and by Michel Foucault, formulates the distinction between »the subject« as a construct and the real human bodies whose images are indispensable to that construct. These bodies, while »socialized, engendered, historically signified« are »at the same time, real, that is, not merely products of discourse or objects of institutionalized power. B y this I mean that bodies as physical organisms are not ontologically reducible to discourse as such or to institutionalized functions ascribed to them,« Making Bodies Making History, p. 3.

I2

' Adelson, Making Bodies Making History, p. 9. This distinction is not the only such »exclusionary maneuver« Adelson identifies (as part of her discussion of Negt and Kluge, Geschichte und Eigensinn), but it is perhaps the most basic one imaginable, and certainly the most relevant for this study. 1JO Adelson also cites Elaine Scarry's 1988 justification for attempts to »restore the material world to literature,« in particular via attention to literary depictions of the human body. Scarry: »The very extremity of the scepticism about the referential capacities of language in the past decade made it almost inevitable that at the moment when language was finally reconnected to the world, the primary site of reconnection would be not just this or that piece of material ground but the most extreme locus of materialization, the live body,« Literature and the B o d y , pp. xx-xxi. Adelson comments: »What is at stake is less the question as to whether the institution of literature continues to >matter< than the concern as to how those broader social issues to which literary texts refer (however nonmimetically) persist in >mattering< in the last decades of the twentieth century,« Making Bodies Making History, p. 132. According to Adelson's argument, the interpretive act of »restoring« materiality (as not outside of, but not subsumed by, discourse) to literature is really a task of revealing the processes by which meaning, quite literally, matters, is figured in form, in literary texts. In a second step, then, an analogical relationship is established between this mattering in the literary text and mattering in the real world. Relying on the work of scholars such as Adelson and Scarry, I contend that later eighteenth-century and Early Romantic dis-

41

springboard for observations about memory in literary subjects and texts, and building on the discussion begun in the second section of this chapter about collective memory, I emphasize that the remembering that takes place within represented-and-real bodies is always socially constituted. Peter Burke agrees that remembering does not take place in the vacuum of an isolated individual body and mind, but rather always integrates social, intersubjective influences. The traditionelle Auffassung, nach der das Gedächtnis die Ereignisse und die Geschichte das Gedächtnis widerspiegelt, erscheint uns denn doch etwas zu einfach. [...] Sowohl die Erinnerung an die Vergangenheit als auch das Schreiben darüber besitzen wohl kaum noch jene Unschuld, die ihnen einst zugestanden worden ist. Wir haben inzwischen erkannt, daß in beiden Verfahren bewußte und unbewußte Auswahlmechanismen, aber auch Deutung und Entstellung zu bedenken sind. Aber weder Auswahl noch Deutung, noch Entstellung sind allein vom Individuum zu verantworten, sie sind vielmehr gesellschaftlich bedingt.' 31 This general hermeneutic principle is reflected in the more specific studies of museums and monuments in Andreas Huyssen's Twilight Time in a Culture

of Amnesia,

Memories:

Marking

which presents mnemonic processes as inextri-

cably intersubjective and as never occuring anywhere else but in the »real« (or, in literary texts: imagined as real, remembered as having been real 1 ' 2 ) space in which those intersubjective interactions take place. Keeping the above analyses in mind, I argue that memory in Early Romantic texts is inescapably social and

1,1

132

42

course about the presence of sense in depictions of the human body and in relationships between work and world is important for understanding these authors' views of the appropriate role of memory in the creation of art. Burke, Geschichte als soziales Gedächtnis. In: Mnemosyne. Formen und Funktionen der kulturellen Erinnerung, ed. by Aleida Assmann and Dietrich Harth, 1991, p. 289. Theories of memory such as Augustine's are representative of what Burke thinks of as an earlier individualistic hermeneutic »innocence:« Book X of the Confessions portrays memory and imagination as roughly synonymous, and as taking place very much within a monadic individual body/mind, and in the most lonely of circumstances. »Even when I am in darkness and silence, I can if I will produce colors in my memory [...]; and sounds do not break in and disturb the image I am considering that came in through the eye, since the sounds themselves were already there and lie stored up apart. For I can summon them too, if I like, and they are immediately present; and though my tongue is at rest and my throat silent I can sing as I will [...],« Confessions, 19 5 2, p. 179. Shortly following this passage, however, Augustine ponders the problem of a memory (part of the mind) larger than the individual, and wonders where such a »limitless room« could possibly be: »Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself: but where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside itself and not within? H o w can it not contain itself? [How can there be any of itself that is not in itself?],« p. 180. Jean-Paul Sartre's text in Harth's collection, Die Erfindung des Gedächtnisses, pp. 145—54, takes up a distinction between memories of events real and imagined in a manner consistent with this discussion; Adelson indicates this distinction as well.

corporeal, and that this very fact contributes significantly to the Romantic subject's experience of time in spaces different from the »definite infinity« of critical philosophy.153 In other words, when we refer to a remembering subject in Early Romanticism, we are not speaking of a totally disembodied transcendental subject. Oskar Negt's and Alexander Kluge's Geschichte und Eigensinn (1981) emphatically portrays consciousness as emerging from the corporeal. Adelson provides a concise paraphrase of this crucial connection in Negt and Kluge, and of how that connection works in a temporal context. F o r N e g t and Kluge, the b o d y is an ever open d o o r to experience of the self and the w o r l d ; indeed, their analysis does not a l l o w f o r the distinction between the t w o since they exist not as entities unto themselves, but as mutually constitutive components of social reality as p r o c e s s . ' 3 4

Within this reality-as-process, remembering (Erinnern) is conceived of as a »social organ« constructed in the body. As Negt and Kluge formulate it: U n s interessiert die N a t u r der Zellen, die H a u t , die Körper, das H i r n , die fünf Sinne, die darauf aufgebauten gesellschaftlichen O r g a n e : Lieben, Wissen, Trauern, Erinnern, Familiensinn, H u n g e r nach Sinn, die gesellschaftlichen A u g e n , die kollektiven A u f merksamkeiten. Einiges davon gibt es wirklich; anderes davon existiert als nicht ausgeübtes V e r m ö g e n , als Protest oder U t o p i e . ' 3 '

Here the concepts of individual and collective, of self and world, correspond but do not collapse. As in Friedrich Schlegel's theory of psychology cited above, in »social reality as process« self and world are »mutually constitutive.« And memory, as »a faculty [...] deeply intertwined with the very possibility of thinking itself,«'36 plays an indispensable role in this processual relationship. There can be no mutual approximation of self and other - in transcendental philosophy or in social reality - without mutual recognition. Romantic texts as well as works dating to Aristotle and Plato conceive of recognition as involving psychological and philosophical memory, but the tradition of thought about memory that the Romantics received is deeply

' " In the Fichte-Studien, N o v a l i s theorizes time as »das unbestimmte Endliche,« w h i l e space is »das bestimmte Unendliche,« H K A I I : 1 6 8 , no. 2 1 8 . 1 take the influence of critical philosophy on E a r l y R o m a n t i c literature into account without attempting to conduct philosophical readings of literary texts. T h e philosophical, psychological, and poetic conceptualizations that characterize the history of thought about m e m o r y can all be f o u n d in E a r l y R o m a n t i c texts. 134

A d e l s o n , M a k i n g Bodies M a k i n g H i s t o r y , ρ . 6 .

135

O s k a r N e g t and A l e x a n d e r Kluge, Geschichte und Eigensinn. Geschichtliche O r g a nisation der Arbeitsvermögen, Deutschland als Produktionsöffentlichkeit, G e w a l t des Zusammenhangs, 1 9 8 1 , p . 4 5 . C i t e d in A d e l s o n , M a k i n g Bodies M a k i n g H i s t o r y , pp.éf.

1,6

T e r d i m a n , Present Past, p. 9.

43

divided about the significance that should be attributed in this process to corporeal experience. Theories since antiquity about the faculty of memory (»Gedächtnis«) and about the process of remembering (»Erinnerung«) are generally structured according to notions of psychological (»Anamnese,« »Wiederholung«), philosophical, and poetic (»Mnemosyne,« »Erinnerung«) memory. These categories can be further subdivided into concepts of remembrance, recollection, reminiscence, and retrospect; their differences are addressed in more detail later in this section. As Dietrich Harth implies in his introductory essay on various concepts of memory in Die Erfindung des Gedächtnisses, and as Negt's and Kluge's assessment of memory as a social organ emerging from the body indicates, notions of psychological, philosophical, and poetic memory often intersect when images of individual and social, real and metaphysical spheres intersect.' 37 While theory attempts to unravel these intertwined concepts, in literature they are joined and recombine. The following summarizes only a few thinkers' concepts of memory that highlight the indispensability of physicality (whether understood as real or as »merely« represented) to mnemonic processes. The notion of recognition as a physical manifestation of memory is at least as old as Aristotle's On Memory, which depicts a two-step mnemonic: (i) recollection (= inference based on perception), and (2) remembering (= synthesizing perception and recollection; an act of re-cognition). Remembering is an affective as well as cognitive process; unlike in Plato's Theatetus, the soul is not disembodied. 1 ' 8 Augustine, while reporting that »truth says to me: >Your God is not heaven or earth or any corporeal things,Hypogram is close to prosopopeia, the trope of apostrophes... The hypogram is that subtle part of the victim's discourse that represents the crime against the victim. Thus it is appropriate that the final meaning of hypographé is a signed bill of indictment, a criminal accusation,« pp. 145—146.

dung.«8' From the ancient tale of Simonides's discovery of the art of memory to Philomela to Moritz's Bildungsroman protagonist Anton Reiser, images associated with destruction and suffering combine in the individual memory and are employed in expressions that affect a wider community. In the context of aesthetic creation, the process of channeling personal memory traces into art results in an objectification that releases the »community« of recipients from the limitations of their individual existences by actually expanding subjective experience. Moritz says: Das Licht, worinn sich uns das Schöne zeigt, kommt nicht von uns, sondern fließt von dem Schönen selber aus, und verscheucht auf eine Weile die Dämmrung um uns her. Darum fühlen wir beym Anblick des Schönen unser Herz und unsern Verstand erweitert, weil uns etwas von demjenigen sichtbar, und fühlbar zu werden scheint, was immer unsern forschenden Gedanken sich entzieht (Beiträge zur Ästhetik, 83).

Moritz contributes only one paragraph to the eighteenth-century literature on the Laocoon, in his Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien of 1792. But Simon Richter maintains that »Laocoon's pain ... found its place in [Moritz's] theory of beauty,«86 and that theory appears most definitively in the essay »Die Signatur des Schönen.« Like Philomela's garment, the Laocoon represents a body in pain. In his Laokoon, Lessing says that the sculpted Laocoon does not cry out because he is a statue, not a figure in a poem (which would have the power of speech). However, the fact that pain resists representation does not mean that pain cannot be represented in ways other than those Moritz would consider strictly allegorical and therefore not worthy of art. Rather, the memory of pain permits the past pain to be represented and to become part of the art work - in fact, to become the work, as the work becomes it. By becoming the cloth, Philomela's memory makes the past material (or: expresses it materially) without reproducing it »as it really was.« The »mental act« of memory (which was also always corporeal) thus becomes an »embodied act,« and this aesthetic act ensures the continuation (but not the reproduction) of the remembered past. Past events are transformed and continue, not in art, but as art, »in sich selbst vollendet.« In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World( 1985), Elaine Scarry states that pain resists representation because the experience of pain is an extremely material phenomenon that takes place »outside language.«87 While Scarry does not deny the discursive construction of experience, her analysis of

85 86 87

Gerhard Neumann, Gedächtnis-Sturz. In: Akzente 2, 1993, p. 100. Richter, Laocoon's Body and the Aesthetics of Pain, p. 162. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 1985, p. i l . Scarry's argument bears similarities to Leslie Adelson's convictions about the historicity of real bodies that do »not exist outside discourse and (are) yet not by any means subsumed by it,« Making Bodies Making History, p. 2.

83

the real experience of pain reveals a point at which such constructions are simply no longer possible.88 When pain is present, it has »no referential content;« it is »anterior to language.«8' Indeed, Philomela is literally placed outside language when Tereus cuts out her tongue. But when the painful experience lies in the past, Philomela is able to re-member it, to reconstitute and express it in an aesthetic form. Moritz, in turn, re-represents Philomela's act of re-membering, when he writes an aesthetic theory in and for what can be termed his own »belated present.« In the process, Philomela's pain is indeed sublated into something »beautiful;« as he restores her power of speech, Moritz »aestheticizes« her body, her pain, and that speech. This aestheticization, rather than the original crime against Philomela, informs Moritz's theory, just as the idealized Laocoon rather than the real statue informed much classical aesthetic theory. What Scarry has called the »mental act« of representation can never again become the original »embodied act,« but the fact that memory involves both body and mind, and exists in part outside of discourse, while at the same time being subject to discursive construction (much like the body itself), means that representation must remain informed by the embodiment it describes. Although he does work to render Philomela's pain »beautiful,« Moritz, to a greater extent than many of his contemporaries, demonstrates an awareness of corporeal and discursive disempowerment and translates that awareness into his aesthetic theory. And Moritz's aesthetic theory perhaps most strongly prefigures Early Romantic aesthetics. Tzvetan Todorov maintains that »Moritz is the first to have combined in his work all the ideas (he did not, of course, invent them) that are to determine the profile of the romantic aesthetic.«90 Issues of representation and creation that later dominate Romantic aesthetic discussions certainly find a forum in Moritz's work; he is, for instance, one of the first explicitly to advocate a concept of genius that, together with the autonomy principle, constitutes a definitive break with the notion that the beautiful can only be an imitation of an ideal. For Moritz, a beautiful work is not a reproduction, but the representation of the (genius) artist's sensation or perception (Empfindung) of an idea (»[das,] was unserer Sterblichkeit nur dunkel ahndet«); this is clearly not the same entity as a memory understood to operate in terms of reproduction rather than representation. In the essay Die Signatur des Schönen, the »Verwandlung des aus in in« yields a representation (rather than the reproduction, or imitation) of past mental and physical pain. That representation (which is simultaneously re-rep-

88

Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 2/8ff. For instance, Scarry describes the experience of injury as illustrating »the ease with which our descriptive powers break down in the presence of a concussive occurrence,« p. 278. 8 ' Scarry, The B o d y in Pain, p p . 4 - 5 . 90 Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, p. 148. 84

resented by Moritz as narrator) in effect achieves a collapse of past and present, of event and description, within the »autonomous« aesthetic work that speaks for its crippled, compromised creator, whose individual autonomy has been destroyed.

Conclusion The metaphorical depiction of memory as a physical phenomenon found in the earliest mnemic models - the wax tablet and the storehouse of Plato's Tbeaetetus are just two examples - is gradually obscured by the emphasis in philosophy, primarily since Descartes, on memory as a purely abstract knowing-before-knowing. With Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes, memory perhaps reaches its most abstract depiction, as here the »ruin« of the sign finally completely replaces images representative of physical experience.91 The Early Romantics are often read as prefiguring Hegelian notions of representation, but their comments on memory have much to do with eighteenth-century theories of the appropriate use of past experience in art. The place for memory in the creation of art portrayed by Schiller, Lessing, Herder, and Moritz contributes to the notions of aesthetic autonomy, the creator-subject, and memory as a catalyst for art that surface again, although in altered form, in Early Romantic texts. The Romantics to a certain extent provide the most complete fulfillment of Giambattista Vico's thought on memory; they follow Vico's exhortation that the »contemporary philosopher ... must use his memory to reverse the process« of using the body to explain the mind, and of proceeding from primordial poetic techniques to modern prosaic knowledge. The Jena philosopher-poet follows Vico's advice and return(s) from the rational discourse in which he is presently at home into the alien poetic idiom of the past whose meaning he will rediscover as he establishes connections with its imagery. In descending the tropological gradient of linguistic expression, the new art of memory completes the hermeneutical circle, the circle of Hermes' flight and his return.' 2

This attempt to recover »origins understood as lost poetic powers«93 can become nostalgia; it can lead to the attempt to collapse idea and image »back« together. Telling history as a fragment will be no less problematic than portraying it as narrative, and again representations of memory will help to expose this dilemma. Memory is required for knowledge of the origins of consciousness

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke. Ed. by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 1 9 7 1 , p.458. 92 Hutton paraphrases Vico in: The Art of Memory Reconceived, p. 379; see also: The N e w Science pp. 122, 604-606, 7 1 3 , 741. " Hutton, The Art of Memory Reconceived, p. 380.

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and of language (representation) - memory that is subjective, individual, corporeal, and sensory. That sensible quality makes the historiographie function of art a deeply historical process itself, and a process that is not separate from aesthetic discourse (which is also a product of historical subjects). The analyses of specific texts of the Jena period in the following chapters emphasize continuing discussions about the representations of perceptions of time and views of history in various aesthetic forms. To a certain extent, these texts affirm Vico's thesis that memory itself is a historical construct, one influenced by views of temporality dominant in a given age. Early Romantic theories of representation stress the temporal nature of poetic creation and the temporal nature of the relationship between referent and representation. The form of the fragment, as well as Romantic insights on art and their inescapable political implications, all emerge from, rather than in strict opposition to, the traditions of rhetoric and aesthetics noted above. As immediate predecessors of the Romantics, Schiller and Herder in particular demonstrate both a drive for a unifying system of knowledge and a recurring, but rarely explicit, insecurity about the possiblity of realizing such a system. Moritz, however, perhaps the most »transitional« of transitional figures between the movements called Classicism and Romanticism, deals explicitly with the conflicting demands of historiography and aesthetic autonomy, with the problem of attempting to assign these concepts to entirely separate spheres of action, and with the significance of the body to representation. As important as these issues are to the Early Romantics, philosophers of the same period focus on the relationship between representation and mind, and specifically on how the self-consciousness that depends on memory originates and represents itself. The following chapter presents the reflections of idealist philosophers on memory, and evaluates their significance for the crisis of memory and representation that begins to emerge in Jena.

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IV. Reconstructing Origins: Remembrance in German Idealism

ι.

The Problem of »Enacting« the Origin of Consciousness

Seminal works of German aesthetic theory in the mid- to late eighteenth century conceptualize and represent memory in ways that reflect theories of the relationship between mind and body as they emerged throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While they continue to focus on seamless metanarratives of history as it could be, and while they increasingly associate memory with a mind-based imagination that is free of the restrictions of sensory perception, Schiller's and Herder's ideas about world history acknowledge corporeal remnants of the past. Often, however, these remnants are in fragmentary ruins (Schiller's references to ancient books and ruined monuments, Herder's theory that speech originated in a moment of pain) and require a synthesizing present consciousness to smooth them into a seamless telos (such a world view is often conceived as represented by a beautiful painting or sculpture that subjugates corporeal details). In Jena in the 1790s, the body seems to continue to vanish as idealist philosophy focuses on a transcendental theory of consciousness and on the awareness, demonstrated most fundamentally by Kant, that the mind structures the world. Fichte then situates self-consciousness, and its origin, as the privileged topic of the new idealist philosophy. 1 But as with eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, certain works of German idealism demonstrate how problematic the positing of a dichotomous opposition between body and mind is. Indeed, the theory of mind that results can be quite untranscendental. Part of what Benjamin Bennett calls the impossible dilemma of enacting (re-representing) the origin of consciousness 2 results from the difficulty of opposing transcendental to natural history - or, rather, of opposing the story of consciousness to the story of the natural world, to which the body belongs. Moira Gatens paraphrases Kantian and post-Kantian positions on the relationship between mind and body, shows that the body really has not disappeared as a problem for these thinkers, and describes one common way out of the dilemma: 1 2

Manfred Frank (ed.), Selbstbewußtseinstheorien von Fichte bis Sartre, 1991, p. 7. Benjamin Bennett, Beyond Theory: Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the Poetics of Irony, 1993, pp. 7 - 1 3 .

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Many philosophers (particularly since Kant) have tended to treat the soul or mind as, in essence, sexually neutral. Apparent differences between minds are generally seen to be due to the influence of the passions of the body. This element of sensuous and passionate corporeality allows philosophers to maintain the essential neutrality of the mind while allowing f o r individual and sexual differences. 3

The construction of the history of consciousness as separate from natural history depends upon a fundamental split between mind and body; yet differences between minds are also attributed to the body's ability to influence the mind. As the task of philosophy comes to be defined in terms of self-consciousness and its »ground,« the relationship of perception to its representation (»Vorstellung«) in consciousness and the definition of perception (»Empfindung,« with sensory connotations, versus »Anschauung« as an intellectual intuition) is increasingly questioned as well. Such questions in idealist and Early Romantic texts contribute to an eventual crisis of representation, identity, and memory - to an awareness of the difficulty of depicting a telos or communicating any certainty about the past - as much perhaps as do historical events such as the French Revolution and changes in the technology of printing and distributing printed matter (since the ability to store and reproduce information in different w a y s also affects the w a y memory is conceptualized). The Early Romantic philosophers and poets problematize the gap between past and present and between the subject and the object world in an unprecedented way, but they simultaneously emphasize the necessity to build new fragmentary connections between past and present, object and subject, as well as between mind and a body represented in poetic images. Several Jena philosophers who studied with and critiqued Kant (including Reinhold, Niethammer, Jacobi, Fichte, and Schelling) present memory as faculty of body and of mind, with reference to the dualism debate, and demonstrate the indispensability of memory for present constructions of the history of consciousness. More specifically, what interests these philosophers is the problem of positing the origin of human consciousness and its knowability through memory. In the following, I summarize depictions of memory in several philosophical works important for the particular Romantic historiography developed by Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, which I explicate in Chapters Five and Six as a historiography dependent upon memory. Benjamin Bennett defines the »enacting« of the origin of consciousness in late eighteenth-century German thought as dependent upon an act of remembrance that cannot give reliable information; 4 this is similar to the adaptation 3

4

88

Moira Gatens, Towards a Feminist Philosophy of the Body. In: Crossing Boundaries: Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledges, ed. by Barbara Caine, E . A . Grosz, and Marie de Lepervanche, 1988, p.60. Bennett, Beyond Theory: Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the Poetics of

presented in Chapter Two of this study of Richard Terdiman's definition of representation as recollection in the present, a movement that requires the past, yet also overcomes and irrevocably transforms the past. Bennett writes: T h e origin, in crucial texts f r o m the later eighteenth century, becomes an object of enactment, of a f o r m of enactment t h a t . . . has the effect, in one and the same m o v e , of both being its object and displacing that object into the realm of the strictly inconceivable.'

The origin of consciousness cannot be remembered, and thus a history of consciousness cannot be even conceived, let alone represented, because the origin of consciousness is the moment that memory awakens. Yet memory is necessary to »enact« an origin that must be posited in order for the self to serve as any kind of reliable ground of thought. This is one of the fundamental dilemmas addressed by Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel in their critique of Fichte. In Manfred Frank's paraphrase, Schelling und Schlegel haben Fichte v o r g e w o r f e n , daß er einer H a n d l u n g (Schellings Brief an Fichte, 3 . 1 0 . 1 8 0 1 ) , nämlich dem A k t des Sichsetzens, die Tauglichkeit z u m absoluten Prinzip zuerkennt.... D i e U r h a n d l u n g , in der sich das seiner selbst b e w u ß t e Ich losreißt aus seiner unvordenklichen Einheit und in D i f f e r e n z zu seinem Sein setzt, kann nicht Prinzip der Philosophie sein. D i e Philosophie, deren erster Schritt die Fundierung des Endlichen als eines Endlichen ist, genügt dem eignen A n s p r u c h nicht, unbedingt zu beginnen. 6

The Early Romantics will manifest what Bennett calls »radical irony,« 7 the knowledge that the origin of consciousness, the »Urhandlung,« cannot be definitively posited, and yet must be posited for anything to be known and for thought to continue. As the faculty whose primary function is to enable awareness of the initial separation between feeling and reflection (or self-awareness), 8 memory is at the core of this dilemma. The »Urhandlung« alone does not create the mediating intellect that is the self; memory (awareness) of, and awareness of separation from, that past is necessary for awareness of a present and future self, and therefore for self-consciousness.

5

I r o n y , pp. 7 - 1 3 . Bennett summarizes the history of the concept of enactment, or representation in various f o r m s , of origins on p. 7. Bennett, B e y o n d T h e o r y : E i g h t e e n t h - C e n t u r y G e r m a n Literature and the Poetics of I r o n y , pp. 6—7.

6

M a n f r e d F r a n k , D a s P r o b l e m »Zeit« in der deutschen R o m a n t i k . Zeitbewußtsein und Bewußtsein v o n Zeitlichkeit in der frühromantischen Philosophie und in Tiecks Dichtung, 1990, p. 22.

7

Bennett, B e y o n d T h e o r y : E i g h t e e n t h - C e n t u r y G e r m a n Literature and the Poetics of I r o n y , p. 7.

8

M a n f r e d K o c h , »Mnemotechnik des Schönen.« Studien z u r Erinnerungspoetik in R o m a n t i k und S y m b o l i s m u s , 1988, p. 85. 89

Frank argues that Friedrich Schlegel will address this problem in part by introducing the concept of consciousness as a temporal phenomenon 9 within which an abstract synthesis of consciousness and representation that Schlegel terms »fragmentarische Universalität« is achieved through a type of irony called »fragmentarische Genialität.« 10 But this is only achievable in a highly specific, individual, fragmentary form incompatible with any narrative of consciousness through time: »Durch die schärfste Richtung auf Einen Punkt kann der einzelne Einfall eine Art von Ganzheit erhalten.« 11 As Frank notes, »Individualität als Form des Fragments hat bei Schlegel immer den dialektischen Doppelaspekt von Einzelheit und Einheit;« 12 Schlegel maintains that the fragment is an appearance with proximity to the meaning it represents rather than a reliable narrative of a knowable past essence or experience. The definitions of memory summarized in this chapter are among those immediately preceding and contemporaneous with the fragmentary writings of Schlegel as well as Novalis, who criticized Fichte and Schelling in particular but also derived from them ideas crucial to their (Schlegel's and Novalis's) eventual conceptualizations of consciousness as a temporal phenomenon. In preparing to examine Novalis's and Schlegel's texts in more depth in the following chapters, I construct the readings in the following sections around two main arguments: ι . Doubts about the reliability of memory, and therefore doubts about the reliability of knowing anything about self-consciousness as well, surface in both the idealist debate on whether or not an unknowable origin can be posited as a regulatory idea, and in the discussion of the relationship between natural history and the history of consciousness. 2. Conceptions of memory as a faculty of both body and soul prove disruptive for a transcendental theory of memory as unifying and synthetic. Despite attempts to derive a »neutral« transcendental theory (in which the mind is free of the passionate body), memory is constructed according to sociopolitical and gendered concerns that belie attempts to portray remembering as a purely intellectual phenomenon.

9

Frank, Das Problem »Zeit« in der deutschen Romantik, p. 22. K A II: 148, no. 9. " K A II: 160, no. 9. Cited in Frank, Das Problem »Zeit« in der deutschen Romantik, p. 36. 12 Frank, Das Problem »Zeit« in der deutschen Romantik, p. 37. 10

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2.

Critical Philosophical and Idealist Definitions of Memory

Kant defines remembrance, or »Erinnerung,« as a representation (»Vorstellung« 15 ) which is an event or occurrence in itself as well as a representative moment. 14 There are two types of representation possible: schematic and symbolic, and they take place in the realm of intuitive, as opposed to discursive, knowledge. Schematic representations are demonstrative, while symbolic representations are analogical. Both are formed according to the laws of associative imagination (»assoziative Einbildungskraft«). For Kant, to think intuitively is to anthropomorphize, as ideas can only be represented symbolically, in anthropomorphic analogies.15 A symbolic representation is the externalization of the mind's representation of perception or intuition to itself; thus there must be a second moment of representation beyond the moment in which the mind fixes a perception or intuition as an image. As Kant writes in the Kritik der Urteilskraft. N u n sage ich: das Schöne ist das Symbol des Sittlichguten; und auch n u r in dieser Rücksicht (einer Beziehung, die jedermann natürlich ist, u n d die auch jedermann andern als Pflicht zumutet) gefällt es, mit einem A n s p r ü c h e auf jedes andern Beistimmung, wobei sich das G e m ü t zugleich einer gewissen Veredlung u n d E r h e b u n g über die bloße Empfänglichkeit einer Lust durch Sinneneindrücke b e w u ß t ist, und anderer Wert auch nach einer ähnlichen Maxime ihrer Urteilskraft schätzet.' 6

Symbolic representation proceeds in a manner similar to Richard Terdiman's historical dialectic of representation, in which the symbol transforms a memory of a referent.' 7 While the Kritik der Urteilskraft explicates the process of symbolic representation, Manfred Koch explains that the underlying structures of consciousness that enable that process are theorized in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. There Kant divides die E r i n n e r u n g in den zwei Stufen der >Reproduktion in der Einbildung< und der >Rekognition im Begriffwomanlybody,< thus allowing the fantasy of the masculine body politic to >live.sexism,< >the double shift,< >sexual harassment/ and »marital, date, and acquaintance rape,< p. 123). The »private« may overlap with these publics, particularly if »private« also encompasses that which pertains to »private property in a market economy« as well as to »intimate domestic or personal life, including sexual life.« In: Habermas and the Public Sphere, pp. 1 1 0 , 123, 1 3 1 .

41

Gatens in: Crossing Boundaries: Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledges, p. 65.

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Fichte resituates older definitions of memory within his theory of self-consciousness, a theory that Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel do not attempt so much to undo as to modify, primarily by identifying a past »Urhandlung« as both the awakening of memory and the foundation (»Grund«) of being, a moment which cannot be known definitively but must be represented. Their own philosophical and literary fragments weave concepts of retention and recollection together rather than preserving strict dichotomies. This conceptualization is presented in figurative language in the fragments, as metaphor, allegory, and symbol. Significantly, though, Fichte's notion of the all-encompassing ego also relies on an undoing of dichotomies between sensing (understood as intellectual intuition, »intellektuelle Anschauung,«) and thinking. Sensing, later analogized by the Romantics to feeling, attains a privileged status, as sensing enables the productive imagination (Fichte's »ästhetische Einbildungskraft«) to form the self (as a composite of absolute ego, determined self, and undetermined self). In Novalis and Schlegel, this sensing is figured as bodily experience and is balanced by the reciprocal intellectual movement of reflection. In Schelling's work, the problematic nature of the distinction between body and mind, and between retention and recollection, continues to surface. In the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen of 181 o, Schelling portrays memory both as corporeal and as contributing to transcendental history, but ends with a depiction of memory in the afterlife, the future of all humankind, that is exceedingly abstract. Eine Frage ist: "wie wird es mit der Erinnerungskraft beschaffen seyn? Diese wird sich nur nicht auf alles Mögliche erstrecken, da ein rechter Mann schon hier viel darum geben würde, zur rechten Zeit vergessen zu können. Es wird eine Vergessenheit, eine Lethe geben, aber mit verschiedener Wirkung: die Guten dort angekommen werden Vergessenheit alles Bösen haben, und darum auch alles Leids und alles Schmerzes, die Bösen dagegen die Vergessenheit alles Guten. - Übrigens freilich wird es auch nicht Erinnerungskraft seyn wie hier; denn hier müssen wir uns erst alles innerlich machen, dort ist schon alles innerlich. Die Bezichnung Erinnerungskraft ist dazu viel zu schwach. Man sagt von einem Freund, einem Geliebten, mit denen man Ein Herz und Eine Seele war, man erinnere sich ihrer, sie leben beständig in uns, sie kommen nicht in unser Gemüth, sie sind darin, und so also wird die Erinnerung dort seyn. 42

In his commentary Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, Heidegger identifies a deep anxiety in Schelling's thought, one centered on the tension between remembering and forgetting in time. Afraid of remembering too much, and thus blotting out consciousness, but also of descending into an oblivion of forgetting, Schelling's subject is in the grip of an anxiety that »nur in die Stimmung eines möglichen Entschlusses (bringt). Ihre Gegen42

98

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Ausgewählte Schriften. Ed. by Manfred Frank, 1985, IV: 90.

wart hält den Augenblick, als welcher sie selbst und nur sie möglich ist, auf dem Sprung,«43 This anxiety is rooted in Schelling's inability to reconcile the notion of a unified body and soul with the desire to believe in an eternal life for the soul in which remembering and forgetting are in perfect eternal balance. David Farrell Krell contends that Schelling succumbs to what he calls »the urge to separate soul from body ... interiority from exteriority, life from death, spirit from sensuality« in order to portray »the life of the soul in splendid isolation.« 44 This is the price of obtaining a timeless balance between the kind of remembering and the kind of forgetting that sustains the soul (as in the afterlife the virtuous will only remember that which is beautiful and good), and of freeing the mind from the sickening awareness of time and decay that characterizes Schelling's concept of anxiety. Schelling also characterizes this dilemma as one of forming the relationship between the subject and object worlds, or, more specifically, of a subject whose consciousness is trapped in the temporal, finite world of objects. Weil du mit deiner Erkenntniß an Objekte gebunden bist, weil deine intellektuale A n schauung getrübt und dein Daseyn selbst für dich in der Zeit bestimmt ist, wird selbst das, wodurch du allein zum Daseyn gekommen bist, in dem du lebst und webst, denkst und erkennst, am Ende deines Willens nur ein Objekt des Glaubens für dich gleichsam ein von dir selbst verschiedenes Etwas, das du ins Unendliche fort in dir selbst als endlichem Wesen darzustellen strebst, und doch niemals als wirklich in dir findest - der Anfang und das Ende deines Wissens dasselbe - dort Anschauung, hier Glaube! 4 '

This attempt on the part of the subject to negotiate between itself and the object world, that here results only in a paralyzing objectification of the subject by its own consciousness, can be understood as a cognitive and representational gesture of what Stephan Grätzel terms »introverted transcendence.«46 While N o valis and Schlegel will develop a more productive and hopeful version of this movement (although this hope is also jeopardized by the subject's potential inability to know itself), the self that Schelling portrays is »dulled« by the fact that the individual body and mind either must become part of the finite, determined object world (the result of »Anschauung,« similar to Kant's transcendental apperception), or rely on faith to find a transsubjective infinity.

41

44 45

46

Martin Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), 1 9 7 1 , p. 229. Cited in David Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: O n the Verge, 1990, p. 2 5 2. Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing, p. 50. Schelling, Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe. Ed. by Wilhelm G. Jacobs, Jörg Jantzen, and Walter Schieche, 1976, 140: I 216. Stephan Grätzel, Die philosophische Entdeckung des Leibes, 1989, pp. 39—107. I investigate this concept in more detail in Chapter Five.

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Denn das Unbedingte in uns ist getrübt durch das Bedingte, das Unwandelbare durch das Wandelbare, und - wie, wenn du hoffst, daß das Bedingte dir selbst wieder das Unbedingte, die Form der Wandelbarkeit und des Wechsels die Urform deines Seyns, die Form der Ewigkeit und der Unwandelbarkeit, darstellen werde?47 Krell summarizes the hopelessness of this situation f o r Schelling: »Erinnerung is itself an Entäusserung. to go farther inside implies that the spirit is farther outside ... the spirit remains in the presence-absence of its unequal icons. It is no consolation if what spirit remembers proves to be its own handiwork.« 48 The spirit unified with the body and with the object-world is doomed to decay, and the spirit that has transcended this world is trapped in what Schlegel calls the mirroring process of »einem ewigen Sichselbstabspiegeln, (in) einer unendlichen Reihe von Spiegelbildern ..., die immer nur dasselbe und nichts Neues enthalten.« 49 The self can only look forward to life after death f o r the salvation of lethe, forgetting. According to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Schelling's philosophical and representational dilemmas are best understood as introducing a form of modernity, and specifically »a distortion and a deviation« between the subject of philosophical writing and its representation. 50 In Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus (1796 or 1797), as in the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen and Uber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, this position is evident in the form of the conception of a split between thought and the aesthetic form that Schelling praises. Mann kann in nichts geistreich sein, selbst über Geschichte kann man nicht geistreich raisonnieren - ohne ästhetischen Sinn. Hier soll offenbar werden, woran es eigentlich den Menschen fehlt, die keine Ideen verstehen - und treuherzig genug gestehen, daß ihnen alles dunkel ist, sobald es über Tabellen und Register hinausgeht. Die Poesie bekommt dadurch eine höhere Würde, sie wird am Ende wieder, was sie am Anfang war - Lehrerin der Menscheit; denn es gibt keine Philosophie, keine Geschichte mehr, die Dichtkunst allein wird alle übrigen Wissenschaften und Künste überleben.5' B y 1798, Schelling has concluded that a philosophy of history is not realizable, but that the representation of history as poetry would prove instructive f o r the masses and for philosophers alike. 52 After his time in Jena, Schelling was influenced substantially by Jakob Böhme's mentalization and aestheticization of corporeality in his philosophy

47 48 49 50 51

52

Schelling, Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, 140:1 216. Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing, p. 237. Κ Α XII: 351. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 29. Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus, found in Hegel's handwriting and cited here in Hegel's works, is now attributed to Schelling. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, 1971,1: 235. Alice Kuzniar, Delayed Endings: Nonclosure in Novalis and Hölderlin, 1987, p. 16.

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of nature. Ernst Behler comments on this influence, and on its earlier manifestations in the work of Schlegel and Novalis as well: Für Schlegel und Novalis hat der Realismus der Naturanschauung eine eigene, vornehmlich auf die dichterische Phantasie bezogene Bedeutung gewonnen. Die Auffassung des Urwesens als »eines durchaus Beweglichen, nie Ruhenden und Beharrenden« kennzeichnet Böhme als ein Denker, der die Philosophie nie »auf die menschliche, bedingte Ichheit« beschränken wollte (ΚΑ X V I I I : xxxii-xxxiii).

The movement of »introverted transcendence« in Schelling's theory of consciousness echoes Novalis's and Schlegel's convictions that consciousness operates in continual reciprocal movements (»Wechselwirkungen«) that require it to reach beyond the limitations of the self. These movements progress towards, but never reach, the »absolute,« or totality of knowledge. Introverted transcendence, or what Schlegel will call »das Insichzuriickgehen ... das Aussichherausgehen« ( Κ Α XII: 349), will for Novalis and Schlegel require a creative and dynamic memory (that, like the »Urwesen« from which it derives, is always in motion) that continues to attempt to portray the history of consciousness in figurative form.

Conclusion In the fragments and fragmentary writing of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, idealist conceptions of consciousness and theories concerning the representation of the past in aesthetic form are integrated with interpretations of memory that rely on Platonic and hermetic traditions. As Manfred Frank has shown, it is in part the Jena Romantics' engagement with the notion of temporality that distinguishes them from past thought on consciousness and representation; they figure consciousness as a process over time, and draw parallels between the history of consciousness and the history of the world. 53 But, also significantly, Novalis and Schlegel will make this philosophy of consciousness a problem of representation (or: of the »metalanguage« of representations of representa" Frank, Das Problem »Zeit« in der deutschen Romantik, pp. 19-37. Frank identifies the crucial philosophical difference between German idealism and Early Romanticism as follows: »Als idealistisch bezeichne ich die - zumal durch Hegel verbindlich gemachte Uberzeugung, Bewußtsein sei ein selbstgenügsames Phänomen, das auch noch die Voraussetzungen seines Bestandes aus eigenen Mitteln sich verständlich zu machen vermöge. Dagegen ist die Frühromantik überzeugt, daß Selbstsein einem transzendenten Grunde sich verdankt, der sich nicht in die Immanenz des Bewußtseins auflösen lasse. So wird der Grund von Selbstsein zu einem unausdeutbaren Rätsel. Dies Rätsel kann nicht mehr (allein) von der Reflexion bearbeitet werden. Darum vollendet sich die Philosophie in der und als Kunst. Denn in der Kunst ist uns ein Gebilde gegeben, dessen Sinnfülle von keinem möglichen Gedanken erschöpft wird,« lecture held at the Universität Tübingen, February 16, 1993. ιοί

tions) rather than a problem of ascertaining the »real« nature of consciousness independent of its representations. In the following chapters, I propose that a linking of memory and history is crucial to this new thought about consciousness and representation. This linking necessitates both a rationality grounded in the Enlightenment and an irrationality, manifested as nostalgia, that, despite its background in what Benjamin Bennett calls the liberating »poetics of radical irony« of the late eighteenth century, 54 has disturbing political implications. Novalis and Schlegel do figure memory as a faculty of both body and mind, as do the philosophers examined above and the authors whose works were explored in Chapter Three, and thus a more complex way of thinking relationships between body, mind, art, and politics results. The fragmentary representative form that the Jena writers privilege contributes to that complexity. The ability of the fragment to »approximate« infinity in finite form, and its relinquishing of claims on absolute knowledge, can open up »a working framework from which to think and live other w a y s of being, of being political and of being ethical.«" At its best, the project of Early Romanticism worked toward that end, and toward the concomitant goal of maximizing the potential for expression of knowledge among individuals who are free but also exist in community. However, there is also the chance that the discourse of freedom in the fragment and the potentially infinite interpretability of fragmentary representations can dissipate in a sort of virtual reality of represention, of appearance without reference to essence, or into nostalgia. Today the idea of fragmentariness or fragmentation is seemingly naturally associated with this virtuality, or with a postmodern aesthetic that denies reference. But Chapters Five and Six will analyze the more differentiated and, I contend, ultimately subject- and meaning-affirming relationships between memory and representation in texts by Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, the two members of the Jena circle most associated with fragmentary writing.

H

Bennett, Beyond Theory: Eighteenth-Century German Literature and the Poetics of Irony, p. 13.

55

Gatens in: Crossing Boundaries: Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledges, p. 60.

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V.

Novalis's Conceptualizations of Memory and Its Role in Literary and Philosophical Production

ι.

»Gedächtnis« and »Erinnerung« as Components of Novalis's Theories of Consciousness and Poesy

N o v a l i s , o f t e n p o r t r a y e d as o n e of the m o s t i m p o r t a n t p r e d e c e s s o r s of literary m o d e r n i t y , 1 is p e r h a p s also the G e r m a n a u t h o r v i e w e d as m o s t representative of the nostalgia and sentimentality that characterize that m o d e r n i t y . 2 A l t h o u g h a substantial a m o u n t of p u b l i s h e d research exists c o n c e r n i n g N o v a l i s ' s t h o u g h t o n history, particularly as it is e x p r e s s e d in the n o v e l Heinrich in the Fichte-Studien

von Ofterdingen

and

f r a g m e n t s , q u e s t i o n s a b o u t the extent of nostalgic and in

f a c t r e a c t i o n a r y v i e w s in his literary and p h i l o s o p h i c a l narratives r e m a i n u n s e t tled. 3 B o t h A l i c e K u z n i a r a n d H e r b e r t U e r l i n g s h a v e recently a r g u e d against the »secularization thesis« in N o v a l i s s c h o l a r s h i p , that is, against the idea that N o valis a d v o c a t e d a tripartite, p r o g r e s s i v e , c o n t i n u o u s v i e w of h i s t o r y and that his w o r k consistently d e m o n s t r a t e s a y e a r n i n g f o r either a return to a g o l d e n past o r an a p o c a l y p t i c end to time. 4 W h i l e K u z n i a r ' s b o o k f o c u s e s o n N o v a l i s ' s i m a g i n -

1

2

Herbert Uerlings, Friedrich von Hardenberg, genannt Novalis. Werk und Forschung, 1991, p. 2. Uerlings summarizes trends and currents in Novalis research from 1800 to the present in Friedrich von Hardenberg, genannt Novalis. See especially pp. 1 0 - 1 1 , 78. Wm. Arctander O'Brien discusses Novalis reception history and »the making of the N o v a lis myth« in detail in the first chapter of his study, Novalis: Signs of Revolution, 199 5, pp. 1 1 - 2 6 . O'Brien argues that »because the name >Novalis< has come to designate a myth, we shall instead speak of [Friedrich von] Hardenberg,« p. 4. While agreeing that the myth-generating (and -rejuvenating) potential of the name »Novalis« should be kept in mind, I will adhere to the practice of the editors of the critical edition of N o v a lis's works (Paul Kluckhohn, Richard Samuel, and Gerhard Schulz), and refer to the author by his pen name.

' Uerlings, Friedrich von Hardenberg, genannt Novalis, p. 5. The two authors understand this problem differently, however; their disagreement forms part of the debate on historicity in Novalis research. Uerlings takes issue with Kuzniar's deconstructive reading of Novalis's works, stating that while the historicalphilosophical aspects of Novalis's works bear witness to »die Erfahrung der Diskontinuität, [...] das Resultat [...] ganz gewiß noch keine bloße diskontinuierliche Serialität von Ereignissen [ist]. Spezifisch frühromantisch dürfte vielmehr die Teleologie ohne Telos sein. Hardenberg reagiert auf den Verlust der Teleologie - besser vielleicht: den Einbruch von Diskontinuität - mit Konstruktion,Romantisierung< als narrative Konstruktion immanenter Transzendenz.«2I 3. The form of the fragment embodies the dilemmas and possibilities associated with memory. The arguments outlined above support a re-reading of Novalis's literary and philosophical fragments as privileging memory as a faculty of consciousness while questioning its reliability - and, in fact, the reliability of originating moments themselves. The chief implication that this view of memory entails for Novalis's theory of history is that his conceptualizations and representations of memory exemplify what Izenberg calls a »dialectic« between text and life.22 While this perspective has been interpreted as compatible with deconstructive notions of the impossibility of locating essence and stable meaning, it is actually a fundamentally hermeneutic assumption. Novalis often portrays memory and history (i.e., the remains of the past that the author/historian chooses to weave into a historical narrative) as rendering the notion of a fixed authentic »origin« even more questionable, while simultaneously making memory more »concrete;« i.e., more readily discernable via poetic forms. In other words, when he 19

20

21 22

no

Uerlings explains his preference for the term »poeticize« over »aestheticize« in the introduction to his study, Friedrich von Hardenberg, genannt Novalis, p. 15. In the foreword to Marjean D. Purinton, Romantic Ideology Unmasked: The Mentally Constructed Tyrannies in Dramas of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Joanna Baillie, 1994, Terence Allen Hoagwood notes that the »theatrical character of social hierarchies (including the deteriorating structure of feudalism, and the persisting oppression of women) and political institutions (inlcuding monarchy and state religion) were themes in the political polemics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The fictive constitution of >roles< - sexual, familial, political - was an explicit topos in political rhetoric,« p. 12. Uerlings, Friedrich von Hardenberg, genannt Novalis, p. 14. Izenberg, Impossible Individuality, p. 1 1 .

refers explicitly and indirectly to the mnemonic, Novalis makes representation (appearance) more accessible while questioning essence in ways that not only influence theories of representation, but thought about history and historiography as well. This raises questions about the extent to which »reality« in Novalis's thought is transformed into representation, and subsequently about the extent to which Novalis is a »nostalgic« thinker.23 The prevalence of fragmentary form in Novalis's work is relevant to this question. Novalis's theories of consciousness and poesy reflect upon and expand the tensions and dualisms delineated in SchlegePs Athenäumsfragmente. Many of these theories, whether in Novalis's philosophical or poetic pieces, are also articulated in the form of »fragments.« Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy remind readers of the distinction between an »intentional« fragment and a work that is simply left uncompleted; they also note that only Friedrich Schlegel's collection of Fragmente corresponds »entirely (or as much as possible) to the fragmentary ideal of romanticism, notably in that it has no particular object and in that it is anonymously composed of pieces by several different authors.«24 Much of Novalis's work that was not published in the Athenäum collection can be considered »fragmentary« in Lacoue-Labarthe's and Nancy's sense, particularly since these scholars characterize the »fragmentary ideal of romanticism« as one that is rarely, if ever, realized. In particular, the philosophical aphorisms25 of the Fichte-Studien (1795-1796), and Das Allgemeine Brouillon (1798-1799), the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1799-1800), and the incomplete Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (1798) defy structural and compositional closure and yet can still be termed self-sufficient, perhaps even »self-posited.«26 Furthermore, as unfinished collections, the philosophi23

Part of the definition of »nostalgia« that Susan Stewart presents in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 1993, includes the yearning for meaning that arises from the recognition that the signifier can never equal the signified: »The inability of the sign to >capture< its signified, of narrative to be one with its object, and of the genres of mechanical reproduction to approximate the time of face-to-face communication leads to a generalized desire for origin, for nature, and for unmediated experience that is at work in nostalgic longing. Memory, at once impoverished and enriched, presents itself as a device for measurement, the >ruler< of narrative,« pp. 22-24.

24

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, 1988, p.40. Shifting somewhat from Lacoue-Labarthe's and Nancy's fairly purist definition of the fragment, Gerhard Neumann uses the terms »aphorism« and »fragment« virtually interchangeably as he defines the genre of the aphorism in Ideenparadiese. Untersuchungen zur Aphoristik von Lichtenberg, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel und Goethe,

25

1976. See in particular pp. i6${f. 26

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy list autonomy and an attempt to »be absolutely self-posited« among the characteristics of the Romantic fragment, in The Literary Absolute, pp· 40-41· III

cal fragments lack a distinct object. In addition, Novalis's notion of the fragment derives from the same philological and literary traditions as does Schlegel's conception. 27 Novalis treats the form of the fragment in much the same way as he does the notion of memory - he esteems and even idealizes it, but also finds it deeply inadequate. The fragment can have only a »transitorischen Werth« ( H K A II: 623!), for instance, but, as he also asserts, »Als Fragment erscheint das Unvollkommene noch am erträglichsten und also ist diese Form der Mittheilung dem zu empfehlen, der noch nicht im Ganzen fertig ist, und doch einzelne merkwürdige Ansichten zu bieten hat.«28 The fragment is both symptom of and antidote for a crisis of memory: the recourse to fragments, to the depiction of experience as splintered and of representation as unreliable, serves as a panacea for the inability to construct a complete narrative of the actual past. At the same time, the recourse to the fragmented form also perpetuates the memory crisis by re-articulating or re-representing it. The dilemma of representation in Early Romanticism, the danger of succumbing to nostalgia as well as the possibility for a productive, non-reactionary post-Revolutionary way of thinking about history, rests in part in the fact that the only access to the past is in the fragmentary representation that constitutes the »belated present.«29 Novalis uses the self-sufficient, autonomous genres of the aphoristic fragment, the fragmented novel, and lyrical fragments to examine the past in aesthetic form and simultaneously to express notions of the role of memory in aesthetic creation. The fragment is perhaps the literary form best suited to the representation of remembering, as its very structure acknowledges separation (from a whole), striving (for completion), but also evocation (the fragment stands as a »ruin,« as a monument to the past). The fragment simultaneously embodies the production of memory and disrupts the nostalgic impulse that the privileging of memory over history can create.30

27

28

29

30

112

Gerhard Neumann, in: Ideenparadiese, and Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, in: The Literary Absolute, provide extensive histories of the traditions of the genre of the fragment. Cited in Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel (eds.), Vorrede zur ersten Auflage. In: Novalis Schriften, 1826, pp. 6-7. See also the outline in Chapter T w o of this study, which presents a basis for reading a discourse on representation and its dilemmas in the Early Romantic fragments. Susan Stewart contends that nostalgia depends on attempts to restore unmediated experience. Novalis and the other Early Romantics exalted the nature and process of mediation, while ironically regretting the fact that the past was forever lost. In this their theories of representation depend to a certain extent on Schiller's work, which is discussed in Chapter Three of this study.

2.

Literary Reconstructions of Individual and Collective Memory

Novalis intended both Heinrich von Ofterdingen, written in 1799-1800, and Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, composed in 1798, eventually to become encyclopedic projects.51 But although he wanted these works to form enclosed systems of thought on language, nature, philosophy, and politics, Novalis structured their internal composition in the fragmentary, non-linear style he advocates in Das Allgemeine Brouillon·. »Erzählungen, ohne Zusammenhang, jedoch mit Association, wie Träume« (HKA III: 572). In the seemingly associative juxtapositions of different genres of texts within these narratives, as much as in their overall incompleteness, Novalis 's particular conceptions of how »Erinnerung« and »Ahnung« work and how they help to construct history become evident. The unconventional structure of these literary works, far from being »ohne Zusammenhang« or purely associative, is highly constructed; this aspect of constructedness reveals all the more sharply Novalis's view of history and of the personal and collective self as essences whose meaning depends on their linguistic and aesthetic representations. a.

Heinrich von Ofterdingen

Heinrich von Ofterdingen opens with a poem entitled »Zueignung« that demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between past and future. The poem addresses a female figure who is mother, lover, and teacher, and who encourages a boy's imagination and inspires him to create by serving as an »Urbild:« Mit Ahndungen hast du das Kind gepflegt, Und zogst mit ihm durch fabelhafte Auen; Hast, als das Urbild zartgesinnter Frauen, Des Jünglings Herz zum höchsten Schwung bewegt [···] Ich darf für Dich der edlen Kunst mich weihn; Denn du, Geliebte, willst die Muse werden, Und stiller Schutzgeist meiner Dichtung sein ( H K A I: 193).

The narrative that follows (the sections of Heinrich von Ofterdingen entitled »Die Erwartung« and »Die Erfüllung«) re-presents the trajectory and content of this poem; the poem also prefigures the narrative. Yet another of Novalis's reciprocities, that of »Erinnerung« and »Ahnung,« appears in both the content of »Zueignung« and in its relationship to the rest of the text. Manfred Koch shows that Novalis derives his notions of remembrance and anticipation from the concepts of feeling and reflection,32 a pair that is in turn 31 32

See O'Brien, Novalis: Signs of Revolution, pp. 194, 274; see also H K A IV: 281. Manfred Koch, »Mnemotechnik des Schönen.« Studien zur Erinnerungspoetik in " 3

analogous to memory and understanding. In the »remembering-anticipation« pair, however, remembering is the manifestation of reflection, while sensing is aligned with immediacy and with feeling. »Memory« and »remembering,« then, often appear on opposite sides of Novalis's reciprocal series. While »memory« is a »direct (positive) sense« and is also a senszwg that enables reflection, »remembering« is reflection on the past. »Remembering« also entails a nostalgia that is balanced by the anticipatory »sensing.« Novalis writes: Die Vorstellungen der Vorzeit ziehn uns zum Sterben, zum Verfliegen an. Die Vorstellungen der Zukunft treiben uns zum Beleben, zum Verkürzen, zur assimilirenden Wirksamkeit. Daher ist alle Erinnerung wehmüthig, alle Ahndung freudig. Jene mäßigt die allzugroße Lebhaftigkeit, diese erhebt ein zu schwaches Leben ( H K A II: 461).

In addition to employing the »remembering/anticipation« pair, the placement of the poem of dedication at the beginning of the text echoes older narrative forms; it performs to a certain extent functions similar to that of the medieval prologue. The »du« form addresses both the mother/lover and the reader, and the title »Zueignung« can be read as indicative not only of an attraction between the »Jüngling« and the female figure, but as establishing a connection between author and reader as well. Like the medieval texts that fascinated the Romantics, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which is set in the middle ages, is a narrative full of other narratives. Anecdotes, poems, theoretical discusssions, and fairy tales interrupt, undermine, but also reinforce the »main« story - much as excurses, poems, and anecdotes do in medieval works, particularly in epics such as Iwein, Tristan, or Parzival. Heinrich von Ofterdingen, like so many of Novalis's texts, demonstrates the reception and integration of various philosophical and literary traditions; in it the dialectical relationship between imitation and originality that also characterizes Die Lehrlinge zu Sais and Geistliche Lieder again takes shape, as older narrative structures are invested with new content. Novalis's own reciprocities, including that of remembering and sensing, are part of that new content and of a way of conceiving of history as predicated upon highly subjective memory.

Romantik und Symbolismus, 1988, p. 82. Wordsworth's »Tintern Abbey« employs a concept similar to »Ahnung,« and presents its interaction with memory as reciprocal. As he contemplates nature, the narrator's memory (re-cognizance) permits him to sense totality: »And I have felt/A presence that disturbs me with the joy/Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/Of something far more deeply interfused,/Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/And the round ocean and the living air,/And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:/A motion and a spirit, that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/And rolls through all things. Therefore I am still/[...] well pleased to recognize/In nature and the language of the sense,/The anchor of my purest thoughts«; The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. by E. de Selincourt, l 949, P - 3 6 0 · 1X4

In the early pages of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, twenty-year-old Heinrich begins a journey intended to educate him and thus to improve his future. But this journey leads not only into the future, but into the past: Heinrich's mother accompanies him, and their destination is her homeland (Schwaben). Still, Heinrich's separation from the only surroundings he has personally ever known (those of Thüringen) is painful. The following passage re-figures the initial moment (»Urhandlung«) of memory's awakening in a bourgeois setting, as Heinrich is separated from his home: Es ward [Heinrich] jetzt erst deutlich, was Trennung sei; die Vorstellungen von der Reise waren nicht von dem sonderbaren Gefühle begleitet gewesen, was er jetzt empfand, als zuerst seine bisherige Welt von ihm gerissen und er wie auf ein fremdes Ufer gespült ward. [...] Eine erste Ankündigung des Todes, die erste Trennung bleibt unvergeßlich (HKA I: 204 - 205).

When he begins his journey, Heinrich has no experience, only intuitions. In order to realize his calling as a genius poet, he must accumulate, and reflect upon, experience - and that reflection will involve a reciprocal movement between remembering and imagining.33 Heinrich imagines the possibility of reflecting in the future on a present sensation when he speaks of his desire finally to meet an artist personally: »Es ist mir (jetzt), als würde ich (in der Zukunft) manches (Vergangenes) besser verstehen, was jetzt nur dunkle Ahndung in mir ist« (HKA I: 208). The poetic figuring of »Erinnerung« and »Ahnung« in such passages can be read in the context of the »representative theory« of memory, which acknowledges the unreliability of memory as a means of knowing the actual past. This Aristotelian theory, as revised by Hume and Locke, contends that someone's remembering a past event consists at least partly in his apprehending [...] something that is not past, that is, something existing or occurring at the time at which the person has the memory. What the person thus apprehends is something private to him, a content of his mind [...] it was clearly Hume's view, and seems to have been Locke's final view, that the memory-image of a past perception is not that perception itself, still existing in the mind, but a numerically different perception which resembles, or is in some way capable of representing, the no longer existing past perception.34

Novalis combines similar empiricist notions35 when he addresses how memory and imagination form self-consciousness, fiction, and fictions of self-con35

34 35

Manfred Koch reiterates Novalis's concept of »Reflexion« not only as part of a reciprocal pair, but also as an »Uberbegriff« subsuming other reciprocities. Therefore the dynamics of »Gedächtnis/Verstand« and »Erinnerung/Ahnung,« for example, can and do take place within the sphere of reflection. See »Mnemotechnik des Schönen,« p. 80. Encyclopedia of Philosophy 5, 1967, pp. 266-267. For a more differentiated reading of empiricist theories of memory, and particularly

"5

sciousness. Heinrich von Ofterdingen can be read as one such fiction, as the following passages demonstrate. Heinrich and his mother are joined on their journey by several merchants, who tell tales of singers and artists in order to help pass the time. These tales awaken vague memories in Heinrich: Mir ist auf einmal, als hätte ich irgendwo schon davon in meiner tiefsten Jugend reden hören, doch kann ich mich schlechterdings nichts mehr davon entsinnen. Aber mir ist das, was ihr sagt, so klar, so bekannt, und ihr macht mir ein außerordentliches Vergnügen mit euren schönen Beschreibungen ( H K A I: 210).

This passage can be read as an example of a sort of »déjà vu« that has been called typical for heroes of Romantic novels.' 6 But it can also be read in terms of a type of representative memory. Heinrich has not really experienced the events to which the merchants refer; he rather senses that he has because he is a born poet with a natural affinity for the content of these stories. But the feeling that he knows the stories is very real and immediate. His sensing, therefore, exemplifies a form of what empiricist philosophers call »ostensible« memory thinking that one remembers something as opposed to actually remembering it. In the above scene, Heinrich is only a recipient, listening to the merchants' tales; he believes he senses prior knowledge of the tales' content. Later, he will use his »veridical« memories of the tales - in other words, his actual memories of hearing the memories of others - to supplement the ostensible memories of personally experiencing the tales' events. This interaction of veridical and ostensible memory is repeated in the novel, as Heinrich hears more stories depicting events that seem familiar (Klingsohr's fairy tale and the story told by the old »Bergmann« are just two examples). These events, which Heinrich ostensibly remembers, are transformed and re-presented in his own »narratives« - his dreams (most notably that of the blue flower, a fantasy that a stranger tells Heinrich he has actually experienced). The memories of others, woven into imaginative narratives, increasingly come to constitute Heinrich's self-consciousness and his history, as well as the content of the novel itself and the ideal medieval past it is supposed to represent. While the representation of events from Heinrich's memory and from the memories of other characters in stories and dreams is indeed a recurring topic in the novel (in other words, memories and their representations are highlighted consistently), the faculty of memory is also thematized through various metaphors. Physical spaces, objects, and other characters function as metaphors for memory and for the relationship between memory and history, both personal and collective. Theodore Ziolkowski traces Novalis's studies of geology and

JÉ

f o r connections between Lockean and Romantic thought, see Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud, 1991, pp. 1-43. Lothar Pikulik, Frühromantik: Epoche - Werk - Wirkung, 1992.

116

work in the mines to show that mines and caves become metaphors for history in Novalis's literature.37 In the fifth chapter of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the miner's appreciation of fossils found in the caves as actual traces of the real historical past serves as a counterpoint to the villagers' irrational fear of the caves, a fear grounded in their mythological cultural memory. But rather than dividing history and this (mythological) memory into dichotomous conceptual categories, Novalis weaves the two together in the miner's song, which relates memories of the mountains that in turn, as Heinrich descends into their depths, instruct him about the past. The miner's song is one example of what the Count von Hohenzollern, whom Heinrich encounters in the cave, calles the »geheime Verkettung des Ehemaligen und Künftigen,« a combination of memory and imagination that composes history and its recording ( H K A L 2 5 7 - 2 5 8 ) . Memory, awakened by contact with objects and images, becomes history at the hands of the poet. According to the count: »Wenn ich das alles recht bedenke, so scheint es mir, als wenn ein Geschichtschreiber nothwendig auch ein Dichter seyn müßte, denn nur die Dichter mögen sich auf jene Kunst, Begebenheiten schicklich zu verknüpfen, verstehn ... Es ist mehr Wahrheit in ihren Mährchen, als in gelehrten Chroniken. Sind auch ihre Personen und deren Schicksale erfunden: so ist doch der Sinn, in dem sie erfunden sind, wahrhaft und natürlich« ( H K A I: 259).

When Heinrich passes up the chance to travel with his companions to nearby caves, and instead remains in the count's library, he encounters the object that is perhaps the most potent symbol for the relationship between memory and history in the entire novel: a book in which he finds his entire life reproduced in a strange language, accompanied by pictures. This magical, mnemonic' 8 book embodies what Novalis considered a mystical corresponding symbolic relationship between certain objects and the absolute. 39 But in perusing the book's pictures (he cannot actually understand the language in which it is written), Heinrich does more than enact a representation of hermetic theories of correspondence. He participates in a fundamentally mnemonic act - a cathexis of the object, an investing of the book with his own psychic energies, memories, and hopes. This act, this reading of the »Lebensbuch,« produces Heinrich's life history. Beautiful female characters and the objects they possess and exchange also contribute to Heinrich's knowledge of the world, and they exist in a similar cathectic relationship with him as does the book of his life. In the fourth chapter, 37 38

39

Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and its Institutions, 1990, p. 33. According to Eckhard Heftrich, this book of Heinrich's life »ist selbst ein Symbol der Anamnesis, der erinnernden und zugleich schöpferischen Entdeckung des Urbildes,« Novalis: V o m Logos der Poesie, p. 82. See for instance Margaret Mein, Novalis a Precursor of Proust. In: Comparative Literature, 23, 1 9 7 1 , pp. 2 1 7 - 2 3 2 .

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the Arabian Zulima, who symbolizes poetry, gives Heinrich a lute during an evening celebration in which the travelers (Heinrich and the others) are reminiscing about their homeland. Zulima describes her home to Heinrich, and symbolically offers her knowledge and skill to him with the gift of the lute (also a symbol for poetry). Heinrich does not accept the lute, however; this would entail unmediated contact with poetry. Here, as throughout the novel, Heinrich's knowledge of the world and of history remains mediated by the memories of others, memories represented in their poetic speech or song. Klingsohr's fairy tale, another example of such mediation, includes the figure of Ginnistan, who represents imagination. She also has a »sehr gutes Gedächtnis« ( H K A I: 296); she is capable of being a source of knowledge about the past as well as an inspirational muse.40 The bowl that she passes to Fabel, her daughter (who represents poetry), transmits this knowledge between them. Finally, when the male and female figures in the fairy tale participate in a revision of the communion ritual, drinking the mother's ashes from Sophie's bowl, they both imbibe the past and gain power for the future - the power to give birth forever. 4 ' They also become, in a sense, living monuments to the deceased, since their bodies now house the dead mother's ashes. Such scenes, by referring to medieval, mystical, religious, and ancient traditions, fictionalize history while representing the way memory »really« functions - through processes of creatively retrieving and re-weaving stored images into new narratives and rituals. In other words, these scenes fictionalize history while telling the facts about memory. This results in the simultaneous privileging and destabilizing of the actual past, which Heinrich can only encounter in forms that are not only overtly mediated, but are dependent on memories whose veracity can never be ascertained. The narrators within Heinrich von Ofterdingen present experience as if it were that of their own personal, subjective, actual pasts. This »as if« component means that the narrators are distanced from their tales - they have no »direct knowledge« of the pasts represented in the tales, but rather mediate their sensing of the past via art (poetry, song), and then present that art as memory. The conflation of the operation of memory with aesthetic production is not surprising, given Novalis's conviction that the creation of art mimics the reciprocal movements of consciousness itself. Those movements begin when memory awakens, in the moment of »Urhandlung« - a moment whose existence, according to Novalis, can never be deduced definitively on the basis of our pres-

40

41

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Michel Beaujour comments on the tradition in Western poetics of linking memory with inspiration in Memory in Poetics. In: Memoria. Vergessen und Erinnern, ed. by Anselm Haverkamp and Renate Lachmann, 1 9 9 3 , p. 10. See also Alice Kuzniar's analysis of this scene in: Hearing Women's Voices in Heinrich von Ofterdingen. In: P M L A , 107.5, J 9 9 2 > P· I 2 0 ° -

ent self-knowledge. As he puts it in the Teplitzer Fragmente: »Wozu überhaupt ein Anfang? Dieser unphilfosophische] - oder halbphilfosophische] Zweck führt zu allen Irrthümern« (HKA II: 597). Rather than offering stable access to an actual past, memory permits the artist to create fragmentary narratives via the most fundamental operation of consciousness: that of the »Doppelspiegelung« - or, in narratological terms, the »ordo inversus.«42 Manfred Koch paraphrases Novalis's concept of this mirroring structure of consciousness: [D]ie erste Reflexion (Setzen des »Selbst« im Gefühl), die aus der Einheit in die Endlichkeit versetzt, erscheint in der Reflexion als Gefühl des Unendlichen; das reine Gefühl wird in der Reflexion derart wirksam, daß es die Reflexion als Spiegelung entlarvt, aus der Bestimmtheit wieder auf die entzogene Einheit verweist.43

The process of mediation through artistic representation is likewise double-reflexive. In Novalis's words: »Das Bild ist immer das Verkehrte vom Seyn. Was rechts an der Person ist, ist links im Bilde« (HKA II: 142). Koch adds: »Das eigentümliche Wiederfinden eines nie wirklieb Besessenen - eine der auffälligsten Figuren der romantischen Literatur - hat in Hardenbergs Überlegungen eine transzendentalphilosophische Begründung.«44 The act of remembering-what-never-was that forms the art work, while it reflects the past and forms the future, takes place in the present: »Alle Erinnerung ist Gegenwart. Im reinem Element wird alle Erinnerung uns wie nothwendige Vordichtung erscheinen« (HKA II: 559). The interaction between memory and imagination in part enables the movements between individual and collective that are characteristic of Novalis's work, and contributes to a conceptualization of »Poesie« as an entity through which the future can be constructed via representations of the past. Novalis's privileging of aesthetic forms does not necessarily characterize the actual past as unimportant or as purely the material from which »art« is made. Rather, »Poesie« is a communicative cultural form that enables others to experience, »as if« personally, events and emotions otherwise inaccessible; representations of memory in the poetic work thus serve an expansive, projecting, and supposedly truth-revealing function. And: »Nichts ist poetischer, als Erinnerung und Ahndung oder Vorstellung der Zukunft. [...] Die gewöhnliche Gegenwart verknüpft Vergangenheit und Zukunft durch Beschränkung. [...] Es giebt aber eine geistige Gegenwart, die beyde durch Auflösung identifizirt, und diese Mischung ist das Element, die Atmosphäre des Dichters« (HKA II: 461). 42

43 44

See Manfred Frank and Gerhard Kurz, Ordo inversus. Zu einer Reflexionsfigur bei Novalis, Hölderlin, Kleist und Kafka. In: Geist und Zeichen. Festschrift für A. Henkel, ed. by H. Anton, et al., 1977. Manfred Koch, »Mnemotechnik des Schönen,« p. 8of. Koch, »Mnemotechnik des Schönen,« p. 82; emphasis added.

il 9

Attendant to this idea is an understanding of memory as the »Seelenkraft« through which individual experience (whether factual or relayed by others) is presentable in the first place. Individual experience can be generalized (or: transcended) due to the fact that »experience« itself is an »idea,« a conception separate from rather than identical to whatever was experienced (or to whatever is remembered as personally experienced; in other words, there is a difference between the idea of experience and the experienced event itself). Again, Novalis presents fragmentary individual experience and its expansion to a general system as if that experience were personally remembered; he presents his fictive history as if it were memory. The overtly triadic model of history in Heinrich von Ofterdingen actually emphasizes the fictive nature of that model. Not only is a Utopian future not possible in actual time, but an idealized past is presented as equally fictive. The blatant and inescapable fictionality of representations of the past does not mean, however, that Novalis subscribes to the notion that everything about the actual past is unknowable, or that all representation is pure appearance, with no real essence. Rather, Novalis's concepts and representations of memory exemplify a reciprocal movement between text and world that permits the questioning of a fixed authentic »origin« while making memory's operation more »concrete;« i.e., more readily discernable through poetic forms. As the work of history is displaced by memory, remembrance, which Novalis elsewhere calls a »truly poetic book,« provides the only access possible to the past, via the enactment of a poetic present. This simultaneous »mnemonification« and »poeticization« of history means that reality in Novalis's thought is indeed largely transformed into representation. This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in his construction of Heinrich as a virtual man, a hero without a history, yet one whose identity is formed through anamnestic acts. This denial of, but at the same time dependence upon, history makes Heinrich von Ofterdingen exemplary for what Paul de Man calls the »curiously contradictory« relationship between history and modernity: »If history is not to become sheer regression or paralysis, it depends on modernity for its duration and renewal; but modernity cannot assert itself without being at once swallowed up and reintegrated into a regressive historical process.«45 The construction of history and identity through memory and imagination in Heinrich von Ofterdingen presents readers with a fictionalized history that is both exceedingly regressive (depicting a hyper-idealized medieval past) as well as aggressively »modern« (valorizing a hero with no history). Novalis emphasizes the subjective character of historiography in ways that reflect his studies of Kant and Fichte, but also in ways that privilege the frag45

Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 1988, p. 1 5 1 .

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ment over the whole and set the stage for readings of history as memory, history as fragment rather than as narrative. While the recourse to fragmentary form, to the depiction of experience as splintered and of representation as unreliable, is itself a panacea for the inability to construct a complete narrative of the actual past, this recourse also perpetuates memory crisis by re-articulating or re-representing it. The dilemma of representation in Novalis's work, the danger of succumbing to nostalgia46 as well as the possibility for a productive, non-reactionary post-Revolutionary way of thinking about history, rests in part in Novalis's conviction that the only access to the past is in the fragmentary representation that can only have what he calls a »transitorischen Werth« ( H K A I I : 623-624). From their position at approximately the »beginning« of at least one of literary history's modernities, Novalis's fictional fragments exerted considerable influence over later literary and philosophical constructions of relationships between memory, history, and representation. These relationships and their constructions present and past of course still demand our attention, especially in times when virtually everything (not merely traditional forms of historical documentation) is permissible as evidence, when it is increasingly difficult to delimit the contextualization of whatever we do select as evidence, and when attempts to write and to understand »the past« (whose reality in the present can only be virtual) often seem to be encroached upon by the actual, but ever-shifting, reality that is memory.

b.

Die Lehrlinge zu Sais

In Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, as in Heinrich von Ofterdingen, objects act as transmitters of sensory memory, and in ways that overshadow the human subjects who move them about. The naive pupil, in finding the sought-after stone that completes the mysterious pattern, is not himself capable of relating the story of the pattern's complete past. Only the missing stone can do this, and the resulting pattern then forms the »belated present« of representation, thereby revealing a present truth. But in completing the pattern, the stone also conceals its own recent, broken past. In this way, the stone duplicates the function of Isis's veil, which also reveals and conceals information about past and present realities. Bodies, as well as objects, perform this paradoxical function in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais.*7 These forms produce tangible, concrete, material connections that awaken sensations, which in turn induce the memories that enable con-

46

47

I understand »nostalgia« here again in terms similar to Susan Stewart's; see O n Longing, pp. 22-24. See also Kristin Pfefferkorn's analysis of Novalis's Die Lehrlinge zu Sais in: Novalis: A Romantic's Theory of Language and Poetry, 1988, pp. 1 2 4 - 1 2 5 .

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sciousness itself. These forms therefore also permit the creation of narratives; in this respect Novalis shows himself a »precursor of Proust,« in Margaret Mein's estimation.48 But Mein reads Proust, and also Novalis, as propounding the reliability of memory, and even its infallibility. Richard Terdiman shows, on the contrary, that Proust's confidence in his memory's ability to replicate the actual past is somewhat shaky. Hence, A la recherche du temps perdu does not offer a literary »solution« to the nineteenth-century mnemonic crisis.49 In Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, the contradictory hiding-and-revealing functions of objects and figures, as in Heinrich von Ofterdingen, both privilege memory and disrupt confidence in its reliability. Ultimately, these objects and figures serve as metaphors for memory and history within a larger, fragmented literary work, and as such they help disclose Novalis's ideas about the representation of the past in art. For Novalis and for Friedrich Schlegel, art mediates not only between reason and sense (as Kant's notion of the symbolic maintains), but also between finitude and infinity. This aesthetic, sensory mediation parallels the reciprocal, time-encased movements of consciousness - movements whose existence, in turn, depends upon a corporeal form. Schlegel offers the following comment on the role of art as intercessor between the finite self and the infinite absolute: Die Philosophie lehrte uns, daß alles Göttliche sich nur andeute, nur mit Wahrscheinlichkeit voraussetzen lasse, und daß wir daher die Offenbarung für die höchste Wahrheit annehmen müssen. Die Offenbarung aber ist eigentlich eine für den sinnlichen Menschen zu erhabene Erkenntnis, und so tritt die Kunst sehr gut ins Mittel, um durch sinnliche Darstellung und Deutlichkeit dem Menschen die Gegenstände der Offenbarung vor Augen zu stellen.' 0

Art also indicates and makes productive (in that it brings to our awareness) a tension between the individual and the absolute; its creation and apprehension entail the realization that expression is limited to individual, finite units, yet it must attempt simultaneously to convey infinity. Jedes Gedicht, jedes Werk soll das Ganze bedeuten, wirklich und in der Tat bedeuten, und durch die Bedeutung und Nachbildung auch wirklich und in der Tat sein, weil ja außer dem Höheren, worauf sie deutet, nur noch die Bedeutung Dasein und Realität hat."

The process of artistic creation and reception can be conceived of as a futureoriented, approximating, always-becoming52 movement. And, as noted above,

48

Margaret Mein, Novalis a Precursor of Proust, pp. 217 - 3 2. Proust discusses the mnemonic and narrative-forming function of objects in: Time Regained, 1993, p. 518. 49 Richard Terdiman, Present Past, p. 201. >° Κ Α X I I I : 174. Κ Α II: 414. 52 Κ Α II: 182.

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while this process parallels the process of what Schlegel and Novalis contend is a progressive, reciprocal structure of consciousness, it is not a solipsistic enterprise. Art has a communicative and didactic function, and Novalis's fragment Die Lehrlinge zu Sais establishes a parallel between creating art and discovering nature that emphasizes this function. Die Lehrlinge zu Sais depicts the process of discovering truth via a »Naturentschleierung« that mirrors the »Sinnerschließung« provided by art. The master (»der Lehrer der Natur«) who guides the apprentices toward an understanding of nature's mysteries is described in terms nearly identical to those Novalis will use to portray the inspired »Dichter« in Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Like the born artist, the master's function is to teach the truth - a truth contained in nature - through art. [S]o muß derjenige, der den innern Beruf fühlt, das Naturverständnis mehreren Menschen gemein zu machen, diese Anlage in den Menschen vorzüglich zu entwickeln, und zu pflegen, zuerst auf die natürlichen Anlässe dieser Entwicklung sorgfältig zu achten und die Grundzüge dieser Kunst der Natur abzulernen suchen (Werke, 127).

Art is capable of mediating what Karl Philipp Moritz calls the »Vollkommenheit, die im Innern der Natur verborgen [ist],«53 and Novalis's artist-teacher has an inborn connection to a similar notion of completeness in nature. He »feels,« or senses, his calling. And the master in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais does not teach his students merely to imitate nature, but rather to learn its secrets through a process of active artistic creation that encourages originality.54 The apprentice-narrator remarks: Den Lehrer kann und mag ich nicht begreifen. Er ist mir just so unbegreiflich lieb. Ich weiß es, er versteht mich, er hat nie gegen mein Gefühl und meinen Wunsch gesprochen. Vielmehr will er, daß wir den eignen Weg verfolgen, weil jeder neue Weg durch neue Länder geht, und jeder endlich zu diesen Wohnungen, zu dieser heiligen Heimat wieder führet [Werke, 98).

The process of artistic creation, the attempt to understand and communicate the truth hidden in nature, unfolds along a spatial and historical trajectory. The originality it encourages and requires, the originality that leads to »new lands,« simultaneously encourages a symbolic return to tradition, to the past, back »home.« These forward- and backward-moving travels of the apprentices are marked and propelled by the discovery of nature's truths, as Heinrich von Ofterdingen's journey will be defined and enabled through the discovery of beauty and its expressions. Heinrich and the apprentices do not merely receive and store 53

H

Karl Philipp Moritz, Beiträge zur Ästhetik. Ed. by Hans Joachim Schrimpf and Hans Adler, 1989, p.83. Die Lehrlinge zu Sais echoes organic theories of art developed by Herder (in: V o m Erkennen und Empfinden der Menschlichen Seele) and Goethe (in: Über Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit der Kunstwerke). I2

3

information; they use their perceptions and knowledge to participate actively in the creation of their own life trajectories (their own histories). In order to do this, they must first know, and then express that knowledge in ways that are individual, original - yet that also all lead back to the same common »Heimat.« Memory makes the combination of images into expression possible. Novalis describes the role of memory in gaining knowledge as follows: »Gelehrsamkeit entspricht dem Gedächtniß. Fähigkeit oder Geschicklichkeit dem Geist« ( H K A III: 277). Manfred Koch explains further: Novalis hat nicht die Absicht, deutlich zwischen äußerlichem Wissen und Erlebtem, das im Gedächtnis ruht, zu unterscheiden. Prinzipiell geht es um die Ablagerung und Bewahrung des >VergangenenDaten< nebeneinandersteht. Das Vergangene insgesamt erscheint in Verbindungen, die die >romantische Gelehrsamkeit als >Combinationsfertigkeit< [...] aufdecken s o l l . "

As the apprentices in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais gradually discover the »endlosen Zerspaltungen der Natur« {Werke, 104), they learn to combine images of remembered, learned perceptions in individual expressions - they learn to pursue »den eigenen Weg.« The capacity (»Fähigkeit«) of memory enables creativity and the ability to imagine the future and the absolute. The apprentices are instructed by an artist who possesses a didactic system, but who still takes the individual into account; in fact, individuality is indispensable to his system. Mit Hülfe dieser erlangten Einsichten [über die Natur] wird er [der Lehrer der Natur, der Künstler] sich ein System der Anwendung dieser Mittel bei jedem gegebenen Individuum, auf Versuche, Zergliederung und Vergleichung gegründet, bilden, sich dieses System bis zur andern Natur aneignen, und dann mit Enthusiasmus sein belohnendes Geschäft anfangen (Werke, 127).

The reception of ancient rhetoric (and of the ars memoriae ), of eighteenth-century aesthetics, and of self-consciousness theories that characterize Novalis's philosophical fragments and that are to a certain extent also evident in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais continues in the subtext on memory that also appears in his poetic fragments. Depictions of memory processes and of memories themselves'6 are, in Novalis's literature, re-enactments, re-presentations, of the fundamental, original awareness that is »Urhandlung.« However, while the impetus for and nature of memory remains the same throughout Novalis's work, memory's possible manifestations and representations are potentially limitless; they are also highly varied in his texts. Novalis's definition, in his philosophical " Koch, »Mnemotechnik des Schönen,« p. 86. Novalis is quoted in H K A IX: 277. ®6 I refer to such memories (depicted in Novalis's literature as the memories of his characters) as »personal memories;« this term is derived from Stanley Shoemaker's discussion of memory in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy 5, pp. 265-274. Such memories can either refer to actually experienced events or be what Shoemaker calls »ostensible« memories. I develop this distinction further in Section 3.

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fragments, of memory as awareness of the »Urhandlung« does not restrict future memories and their expressions. Rather, it lays the basis for the philosophy of being that underlies his literary fragments and enables them to continue to approximate totality, to express a yearning for unity of fragment and whole, and to complete what Manfred Frank calls a »Philosophie des Seins, diesseits der Trennungen der Reflexion.« 57 Before moving to a discussion of memory's conceptualization and representation in the philosophical fragments with which Novalis's literary production is so intimately connected, I will comment briefly on confluences of individual and collective memory in three of Novalis's »closed,« or non-fragmentary, works. c.

Hymnen an die Nacht, Geistliche Lieder; Die Christenheit oder Europa

The overtly triadic model of history in these three texts actually emphasizes the fictive nature of that model, as Kuzniar has convincingly argued. Not only is a Utopian future not possible in actual time, but what is called the past in these texts is equally, and consciously, constructed. As Novalis puts it in the Teplitzer Fragmente: »Wozu überhaupt ein Anfang? Dieser unphil[osophische] - oder halbphilfosophische] Zweck führt zu allen Irrthümern« (HKA II: 597). Again, though, the blatant fictionality of these scenarios does not mean that Novalis subscribes to the notion that everything about the actual past is unknowable, or that all representation is pure appearance, with no real essence.'8 Rather, these three works encourage the reader to reflect upon his own certainty about the progress of history and the structure of time. In addition, they provoke an awareness of art as intrinsically political and social. Although the individual poems in Novalis's Geistliche Lieder cycle were written at different times, and there has been some controversy as to their proper order," they nevertheless comprise a cycle/ 0 This cyclical structure was 57

Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik, 1989, p. 248.1 attempt to heed the warning of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (among others) about the problem of examining Novalis's philosophical work with regard to a certain problem, only to »find« all of the assertions made about that philosophy »confirmed« in Novalis's literature. Of course the content of Novalis's philosophical fragments and the literature which he began to produce shortly after completing those fragments (he took a hiatus from »Poesie« in order to concentrate fully on philosophy during his university studies) are connected in significant ways.

58

See Geza von Molnár's discussion of this problem in the introduction to his Romantic Vision, Ethical Context: Novalis and Artistic Autonomy, 1987. " See also Johannes Mahr's commentary in the notes for Novalis, Gedichte. Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, 1984, pp.253—254. 60 Wm. Arctander O'Brien notes that these poems are now recognized as a »fabrication,« Novalis: Signs of Revolution, p. 4. I 2

5

popularized earlier in the eighteenth century,6' and coincided with the peak of German Pietism and its influence on theories of history. Kuzniar warns, however, against reading the poems - or, for that matter, any of Novalis 's texts - as reproductions of a chiliastic or apocalyptic world view.62 She maintains that his work evinces »nonclosure,« meaning »a deferral of decision.« Rather than presenting the trajectory of time as predetermined, »Novalis criticized the closed narrative that structures the belief in progress towards resolution.«63 His work, she says, is therefore characterized by »temporality,« which emphasizes intermittance, purposelessness, and multiplicity of outcomes, as opposed to »temporalization,« which is unitary and directed. Novalis's »fragmented« texts confirm these theses. Heinrich von Ofterdingen, with its multiple narratives which present perspectives of past and future different from those in the »main« story, clearly does not present only one possible temporal structure. But in the Lieder, »das Bild vergangner Zeiten« is the image of Christ's death, and present days are described as »bange Zeiten,/Es gibt so trüben Mut.« The future promises salvation: »Ein Engel zieht dich wieder/Gerettet auf den Strand,/Und schaust voll Freuden nieder/In das gelobte Land« (Werke, 70-71). Kuzniar contends, however, that Novalis's very use of »golden-age imagery [...] points to the fictive quality of his utterance. He thereby asserts that the closed, self-reflexive realm of poetry is conscious of its illusory characteristics.«64 These assertions seem plausible in light of Novalis's comments on the poetic depiction of history. In the Fragmente und Studien, he envisions a »Behandlung der Geschichte, als Evangelium« (Werke, 530). But in the fragment collection of 1799-1800 (»Dichterische Pläne«), he questions whether there is only one possible manifestation of such a history: »Begriff eines Evangeliums. Läßt sich nicht die Verfertigung mehrerer Evangelien denken? Muß es durchaus historisch sein? Oder ist die Geschichte nur Vehikel? Nicht auch ein Evangelium der Zukunft?« (HKA I: 431). Kuzniar finds this questioning, hesitant style everywhere in Novalis's texts, and points to it as further evidence of Novalis's resistance to closure and determinism.6' Elsewhere Novalis portrays the past, as well as the present and future, as incomplete: Die unvollkomne Gegenwart sezt eine unvolkomne Zukunft und eine unvollkomne Vergangenheit voraus - eine Zukunft, der Vergangenheit beygeraischt ist, die durch Vergangenheit zum Theil gebunden, i.e. modificiert ist - eine Vergangenheit, die mit Zukunft gemischt und durch dieselbe modificirt ist. Aus beyden besteht die unvollkommne Gegenwart - welches eigentlich ihr Erzeugungsprocess ist ( H K A VIII: 61). 61

Novalis, Gedichte. Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, p.253· Kuzniar, Delayed Endings, pp. 7; 74. Kuzniar, Delayed Endings, pp. 6; 7. 64 Kuzniar, Delayed Endings, p. 79. 6 ' Kuzniar, Delayed Endings, p.75. 62

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This example of what Kuzniar would call »temporality« describes a situation in which nothing is complete, and »nothing is sustained except the flow of time itself. Neither memory nor hope is redemptive.«66 The Hymnen an die Nacht is another »complete« text that depicts history in ways different from the fragments. These depictions of history, which closely follow a Christian temporal schema, can be interpreted as »closed,« fictional experiments. Jochen Hörisch, for example, denies any attempt on Novalis's part to give literature a »transempirical« capacity; portrayals of history in fiction deconstruct rather than perpetuate teleological time.67 But whether these texts are read as strictly self-reflexive or as attempts to blur the boundaries between history and fiction, they indeed do not refer to memory as possessing redemptive power. Rather, their stylization of the past renders memory a vehicle for nostalgia rather than for the presentation and questioning of different possible futures. In the fourth hymn, the poet resists the coming daylight: Noch weckst du, Muntres Licht, Den Müden zur Arbeit Flößest fröhliches Leben mir ein. Aber du lockst mich Von der Erinnerung Moosigen Denkmal nicht. Gern will ich Die fleißigen Hände rühren Uberall umschauen Wo du mich brauchst, Rühmen deines Glanzes Volle Pracht Unverdroßen verfolgen Den schönen Zusammenhang Deines künstlichen Wercks ( H K A I: 136).

He enters the night in an attempt to re-enter the past: »Abwärts wend ich mich zu der heiligen, unaussprechlichen, geheimnisvollen Nacht. [...] In Tautropfen will ich hinuntersinken und mit der Asche mich vermischen. - Fernen der Erinnerung, Wünsche der Jugend, der Kindheit Träume« (HKA 1 : 1 3 1 ) . During the night, sensing, feeling, and intuition dominate reflection; memories are a refuge and remembering is a nostalgic exercise.

66 67

Kuzniar, Delayed Endings, p. 8. »Mit dem ihr immanenten Verzicht auf die Kategorie transrealer Erlösung betreibt poetische Reflexion die Stillstellung einer Geschichte, die sich als teleologisch sanktionierte traditionell mißverstand.« Jochen Hörisch, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft der Poesie. Der Universalitätsanspruch von Dichtung in der frühromantischen Poetologie, 1976, p.203. I2

7

The third hymn presents us with a memory-image of Sophie von Kühn; this is the poeticized version of Novalis's famous mystical experience at her grave in 1798. Kristin Pfefferkorn points out that in contrast to this hymn, the fragment Klarisse, composed during Sophie's lifetime, is a »remarkably unemotional and distanced account of some of her traits This hardly allows us to think the relation to have been an ardent love affair.« 68 The image of Sophie as a Christ-like redeemer and of love as a religious force took shape only after her death, and only in an act of graveside remembering which clearly involved the full poetic and creative aspects of »Erinnerung« as well as the retrieval function of »Wiederholung.« In Die Christenheit oder Europa, Novalis depicts a past which, although fictionalized, is portrayed as real (»Es waren schöne glänzende Zeiten«; Werke, 499). This depiction claims to retrieve a past that has been »forgotten« in an imperfect present {Werke, 504). Novalis describes the coming utopia with phrases that resonate with what Lacoue-Labarthe and N a n c y call the »will to System« expressed initially in Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus. F r o m the fragments of the present (characterized by the »unzeitigen gefährlichen Entdeckungen [...] im Gebiete des Wissens«), a unified future will arise: »die heilige Zeit des ewigen Friedens, w o das neue Jerusalem die Hauptstadt der Welt sein wird« (Werke, 518). Die Christenheit oder Europa yields an »Ahnung« that is far more determined than inspired by the past. However, the »will to System« is still expressed here in a form that questions more often than it assures. Uberdem haben wir ja mit Zeiten und Perioden zu tun, und ist diesen eine Oszillation, ein Wechsel entgegengesetzter Bewegungen nicht wesentlich? und ist diesen eine beschränkte Dauer nicht eigentümlich, ein Wachstum und ein Abnehmen nicht ihre Natur? aber auch eine Auferstehung, eine Verjüngung, in neuer, tüchtiger Gestalt, nicht auch von ihnen mit Gewißheit zu erwarten? (Werke, 502).

The golden age remains a Utopian construction rather than a reality or even a realistic expectation. 6 ' Die Christenheit oder Europa is subtitled »Ein Fragment.« However, the text's nostalgia f o r a stylized past and prediction of a glorious future seems to indicate determinacy and closure. As Alice Kuzniar notes, however, the future is only predicted, not realized - and it is predicted in a fictional text denoted as a »fragment.« »[B]y continuing always to hypothesize about the preconditions of an end, [Novalis] actively stave[s] off its arrival. The presence of this sceptical voice does not deny, however, that the structure of [...] Christenheit oder Eu-

68 69

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Pfefferkorn, Novalis: A Romantic's Theory of Language and Poetry, p. 134. The term »goldenes Zeitalter« also invokes an older reference, to Hesiodic poetry (Koch, »Mnemotechnik des Schönen,« p. ι). This term is reconstructed in Hans-Joachim Mähl, Die Idee des goldenen Zeitalters im Werk des Novalis, 1965.

ropa, or the various Marchen by Novalis is predominantly triadic.«70 In his fragments in particular, Novalis balances totality and individuality in a similar manner. Totality (which must lie in the future) is always deferred; it can only be approximated in individual and finite form. The fragment (whether it takes the form of an aphorism, a letter, a dialogue, or an essay) represents memory as a finite capacity, and memories as finite expressions. Again, to quote Schlegel: »Memorabilien [sind] nur ein subjektives System von Fragmenten;« 7 ' they aim to approximate the absolute without denying subjectivity. Memory may permit an imagined »return« to the past, but the moment of remembering entails the awareness that that past is different from now, will always be different, and can never be reached again. And while Novalis defines memory as the awareness of the (temporal) distance between fragment and whole, he also problematizes that distance as something that memory attempts to overcome. In »completed« works such as the Geistliche Lieder and Hymnen an die Nacht, representations of memory are almost completely nostalgic in a reactionary sense. In the philosophical and literary fragments, however, in which statements on memory's role in self-consciousness and the creation of art are more plentiful but views of history are less static, memory is permitted to contribute actively to visions of the future. This does not mean that the problem of a regressive type of nostalgia72 has disappeared from these texts, but rather that memory is portrayed within them as operating explicitly in the present to create visions of both past and future. While its portrayal and function may vary somewhat in Novalis's different texts, memory remains vitally important to the perceiving, creating, and communicating individual. In short, there is nothing like the »death of memory« in Novalis's work that can be perceived, for example, in Hölderlin's »Mnemosyne« 73 - and consequently there is no death of individual agency. The regressive potential of that individual, though, is still highly problematic, particularly when, as in Heinrich von Ofterdingen, explicable documents from the actual past are not necessary for constructing even an empirical history - or, rather, when the entire status of the empirical world is in question because the history of consciousness does not require texts, sources, and documents but only symbols, palimpsests, and memories.

70 71 72

75

Kuzniar, Delayed Endings, p. 199. K A II: 176, no. 77. Azade Seyhan describes the ambiguous character of Romantic nostalgia as follows: »The nostalgia of Romanticism can border on a form of self-worship through veneration of relics associated with its own development. O r such nostalgia can be a vital link to a history facing the threat of being forgotten,« Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism, 1992, p. 21. Jochen Schmidt, Hölderlins letzte Hymnen. »Andenken« und »Mnemosyne,« 1970. 12 9

Novalis's literary fragments reveal the fictive nature of the discourses on historiography and the self, partly via the representation of memory and remembering as both central to self-awareness and as fundamentally unstable. In the next section, I examine Novalis's philosophical fragments, and their depictions of the underlying consciousness structures that permit memory's function, as well as its representations in the literary works just discussed. These fragments, often parts of never-completed works, frequently evince a tendency towards objectivity or facticity that is absent from Novalis's literature. However, they are also indicative of a critique of the alleged stability of concepts central to Idealist and Romantic thought about the past and the self.

3.

Memory as Indispensable and as Unstable: The Reciprocities of Consciousness and Their Implications for Memory in Novalis's Philosophical Fragments

The Fichte-Studien, Novalis's response to his reading of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre of 1795, include a characterization of memory as a modality of consciousness, an active faculty that both constructs reality and is itself constructed. As one of the »activités of the mind« that »constitutes« space and time, 74 memory brings order into chaos. Here Novalis joins a tradition of conceptions of memory as more than a mere storage-and-retrieval system; 75 he rejects the description of »Gedächtnis« as a »Bilderbude.« But while Novalis presents mnemonic activity as necessary for our ability to make sense of ourselves and our surroundings, he does not conceive of its operation as linear or as capable of creating a system of all knowledge. The collection of fragments that memory's operation helps produce is also incapable of this, as Lucien Dällenbach and Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig point out. D e m Hegeischen Anspruch auf systematische Geschlossenheit, in der das Wahre als das Ganze im Durchgang durch seine Momente, als bacchantischer Taumel, an dem kein Glied nicht trunken istSelbstgefühls< wird von Novalis in Abgrenzung gegen den der >Selbstbetrachtung< eingeführt. [...] >Selbstbetrachtung< hieße eine Erfahrung, in der die intellektuelle Spontaneität >wieder ein Gegenstand (...) würdeGefühl< als Ursache und Wirkung [gegeben]« (HKA II: 115). In fact, for Novalis, as for other thinkers of the period who responded to Descartes's assertion of a dichotomy between body and soul, the term »Selbstbewußtsein« is often replaced by the term »Selbstgefühl,« which has sensory connotations.82 As Manfred Koch shows, Novalis will later substitute »Gefühl« with the term »Gedächtnis.«83 This metynomic relationship is expanded in Das Allgemeine Brouillon, where Novalis categorizes »Gedächtnis« as »direkt, positiv, sinnlich« (HKA III: 298 - 299). Memory must be »reciprocally unified« with understanding for the proper functioning of both. The Fichte-Studien echo these reciprocal classifications. Here Novalis states that the unification of memory (as »Gedächtnis«) with the subject and with reflection is enabled by the productive imagination (»Einbildungskraft;« H K A II: 132, 266). »Schweben,« the »approximierende Oszillation«

80

Koch, »Mnemotechnik des Schönen,« p. 74. See also H K A II: 1 1 3 . Fichte later describes the »Urhandlung« as the »Moment, daß das unbegreifliche Eine sich in diese beide [Subject und Object] trennt«; this »Moment« enables the existence of consciousness itself. Sec Fichte, Gesamtausgabe II, p. 225. See also Gerhard Sauder, Empfindsamkeit, ι , 1974, for connections between eighteenth-century debates on the relationship between soul and body and literary discussions about the relationship between thinking and feeling. Koch, »Mnemotechnik des Schönen,« p. 77. Wordsworth links memory and feeling as well, and hints at an interaction between feeling and reflection that bears similarities to Novalis's analysis, in »Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the W y e during a Tour. July 1 3 , 1798«: »But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din/Of towns and cities, I have owed to them/In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,/Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;/And passing even into my purer mind,/With tranquil restoration: - feelings too/Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,/As have no slight or trivial influence/On that best portion of a good man's life.« William Wordsworth, Poems. Ed. by John O . Hayden, 1, 1977, p. 3 5 8.

81

8î

83

r

3

2

that necessitates remembering, holds these reciprocities together both conceptually and over time. In the fragments of the Fichte-Studien, Novalis interprets the structure of consciousness as die selbstinduzierte Hin- und Herbewegung einer unvordenklichen Einheit, die prinzipiell völliges Zusammenfallen von Sein und Erscheinung dieses Seins - sich in die zwei Momente Fühlen und Denken aufteilt, weder als >gedachtes< noch als >gefühltes< Ich aber vollständig ist und deshalb immer wieder ins Andere übergeht {Werke, 2 9 4 f ) .

Feeling and reflection, like all of Novalis's reciprocities, exist in an interdependent rather than a dichotomous relationship. Memory will also work together with the ability to comprehend (»Verstand«) as the thinking, feeling subject becomes cognizant of what it is and what it is not (or, in Fichte's terms, of the »Ich« and the »Nicht-Ich«). This cognizance is accompanied by temporal awareness. As Koch explains, Kennzeichend f ü r den Gedächtnisbegriff Hardenbergs ist immer die Verbindung von Vergangenheits- und Zukunftssinn und ihre Befassung unter eine höhere Einheit, die sie vermittelt: ein doppelsinniges >EinstNirgends< verweist. 84

The self has no awareness at the moment of »Urhandlung,« but rather only afterwards, as memory. This memory is a feeling, a sensing, with mythological attributes (Mnemosyne is the »Mutter der romantischen Musen«). 8 ' The original, primary function of memory is to initiate awareness of that initial separation, of the two moments of thinking and feeling - and is itself a part of those moments, aligned among the numerous analogical concepts that proceed from them. The origin of consciousness (»Urhandlung«) alone does not enable consciousness to continue; memory (or: awareness) of, and awareness of separation from, that past is necessary for awareness of a present and future self. Kant demonstrated the indispensability of a »synthetic unity of self-consciousness« (»synthetische Einheit des Selbstbewußtseins«); a unity constructed by the connection of representations in time (as opposed to a merely »analytical« unity of self-consciousness, in which the self recognizes that consciousness and representation are linked, but temporality does not play a role).86 Manfred Frank links Novalis's reciprocal movements (»Hin- und Herbewegungen«) to this synthetic unity by showing that those consciousnesscomposing movements are also conceivable in temporal terms. In other words, reciprocations between feeling and thinking, remembering and understanding, 84 8s 86

Koch, »Mnemotechnik des Schönen,« pp. 8jf. Koch, »Mnemotechnik des Schönen,« p. 77. Dieter Henrich summarizes Kant's theory of consciousness in: Identität und Objektivität. Eine Untersuchung über Kants transzendentale Deduktion, 1974. J

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nothing and something, infinite and finite, are past-to-future as well as back-and-forth movements. Frank contends that Novalis's »[Wechselwirkungen] als eine zeitliche Bewegung zwischen den Dimensionen Vergangenheit und Zukunft aufzufassen [sind], in der die Gegenwart die >Schwebung< hält.«87 Memory, as part of the reciprocal structure of consciousness, is both embedded in and constitutive of the self's perception of time. At this point a return to the notion of coexisting crises of memory, identity, and representation is important. Azade Seyhan paraphrases pre-Romantic conceptual connections between the experience of time and identity, stating that in earlier times, »[f]or the subject to exist meant to be present to itself, that is, to be coeval with itself.«88 But what of the post-Revolutionary »memory crisis,« a time when such coevality is no longer possible? How does Novalis cast the relationship between temporality and identity? By using either fragmented or blatantly fictional forms, Novalis avoids coercing identity and history into a fixed trajectory. This viewpoint is supported by the fact that for Novalis, memory and other operations of consciousness are ruled strongly by chance (»Zufall«), a mode that was for Novalis expressed best in the nonlinear, associative forms of the philosophical and literary fragments. The statements on memory in the philosophical fragments do not only evince a working-through of the consciousness philosophies of Kant and of Fichte, Novalis's teacher. A recognition and revision of aspects of the ancient rhetorical ars memoriae is also present. The »Fragmente und Studien« (1799 1800) include the following remarks: Die Wirckung der Rede beruht auf dem Gedächtniß - die Redekunst lehrt die Regeln der Aufeinanderfolge der Gedanken zur Erreichung einer bestimmten Absicht. Jede Rede sezt die Gedanken erst in Bewegung und ist so eingerichtet, daß man die Gedankenfinger in der leichtesten Ordnung auf bestimmte Stellen sezt (HKA III: 564^.

This fragment echoes the ancient memoria tradition, which presented memory both as an art indispensable to public speakers and as a mental collection of »places« (loci) into which information (in the form of images, imagines) was inserted.89 With the phrase »Aufeinanderfolge der Gedanken,« Novalis explicitly acknowledges the role of chronologically successive time in the mnemonic process, and he also depicts memory as active - as the movement of a »Gedankenfinger« capable of accessing information stored in various places. Although Novalis rejects the notion of memory as a »Bilderbude« (because a mere storage space can only refer to the past rather than actively build the future90), he does acknowledge that memory works with images and signs. In other words, 87 88 89 90

r

Frank, Das Problem »Zeit« in der deutschen Romantik, p. 168. Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents, p. 1 1 . See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, 1974, pp. 33, et al. Koch, »Mnemotechnik des Schönen,« p. 87.

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m e m o r y operates through representations of ideas. Theories of h o w m e m o r y interacts with and acts within signs and symbols also date to antiquity. F o r A r istotle, in Frances Yates's paraphrase: [sjpoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. [...] Memory [...] is a collection of mental pictures from sense impressions [...]. [T]he intellectual faculty comes into play in memory for in it thought works on stored images from sense perception.' 1

Klaus Ruder's analysis of Novalis's aesthetic theory interprets virtually all of the reciprocal interactions in Novalis's conceptualization of consciousness as symbolic processes. Ruder's work is helpful in that it provides a bridge between Novalis's philosophy and literature, and serves further to support connections between memory and the creation of art. Novalis's statements about the symbolic often resemble Goethe's in the article »Uber die Gegenstände der bildenden Kunst« (written in 1797, but published m u c h later). Goethe famously distinguishes symbol f r o m allegory, maintaining that while allegory constitutes direct representation, symbolization is an indirect process. Similarly, Novalis calls the symbolic the »indirekte Konstruktionslehre des schaffenden Geistes« ( H K A IV: 132). Elswhere, in the Fragmente und Studien, he writes: »Das Symbolische affiziert nicht unmittelbar - es veranlaßt Selbsttätigkeit - dies reizt und erregt« {Werke, 567). His choice of expression in both statements again emphasizes creation and action. The creation and combination of symbols will produce a w o r k complete in itself; a w o r k in which the particular and the whole exist interdependently. In Novalis's fragments, Ruder argues, the symbolic is defined as die Form und Funktion einer Darstellung innerhalb eines Ganzen, in welchem jedes Glied oder Individuum durch das Ganze bestimmt ist beziehungsweise in diesem sich selbst bestimmt, wie immer das System, die Beziehungen von Glied und Ganzem inhaltlich erfüllt sind. 92

Novalis's concept of a whole (»das Ganze«) and his symbol theory bear any n u m b e r of similarities to eighteenth and early nineteenth-century theories of the a u t o n o m y and organicity of art. Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft is perhaps the most influential, but certainly not the only w o r k in which art is granted an aut o n o m o u s status. As quoted in Chapter Three of this study, Karl Philipp M o ritz writes in »Uber die Allegorie«: »Das wahre Schöne besteht aber darin, daß eine Sache bloß sich selbst bedeute, sich selbst bezeichne, sich selbst umfasse, ein in sich vollendetes Ganze sey.« 93 Similarly, in the Blüthenstaub collection, Novalis states: »Alles Schöne ist ein selbsterleuchtetes, vollendetes Indivi-

92 93

Yates, The Art of Memory, p. 33. Ruder, Die Symboltheorie des Novalis, p. 27. Moritz, Beiträge zur Ästhetik, pp. 97-98. J

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duum« (HKA II: 460). But while the symbols that compose this beautiful creation may not refer directly to outside objects, the creation nevertheless cannot exist without the past and without the creator's active use of memories of that past. In fact, what Moritz calls the »zurückgelaßne Spur von irgend einer Sache« inspires the artist's creativity.94 That »Spur« is a sensation, produced by a perception in the present, that echoes the sensation produced by a similar perception in the past; the artist works such sensory echoes into his creation. This creation, in turn, is a beautiful »whole« that provides access (albeit a mediated, indirect access) to the (future) absolute. Novalis writes: »Je mannichfaltiger die Glieder dieses Ganzen sind, desto lebhafter wird die absolute Freyheit empfunden - je verknüpfter, je Ganzer es ist, je wircksamer, anschaulicher, erklärter, ist der absolute Grund alles Begründens, die Freyheit, darinn« (HKA II: 270). Memories, like ideas, can only be conveyed or represented to the understanding symbolically; this notion is indebted to Kant's theory of the symbolic (laid out in the Kritik der Urteilskraft)." The process of symbolizing is not purely imitative. Rather, it is also a creative activity (»Tätigkeit«) that relies upon memory for its existence. Ruder offers another formulation for the active nature of symbolizing: »Symbolisierung ist mithin in einen Erkenntnis- und simultanen Erzeugungsprozeß eingeschlossen.«96 This »Erzeugungsprozeß« culminates in an art work that is no more static than the processes of memory or symbolizing which contribute to it. Art, says Novalis, »ist die eigentümliche Handlungsweise des menschlichen Geistes« (HKA I: 287). Through memory, the self becomes aware of the »Urhandlung.« Through art, the self expresses that awareness.97 Novalis's construction of an analogical relationship between »Gedächtnis« and »Gefühl« permits memory to be conceived of as a sensing of the split between self and non-self. This spontaneous sensing is active and creative; it refers to the 94 95

96 97

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Moritz, Beiträge zur Ästhetik, p. 91. Novalis does use memory and symbolism together in an attempt to overcome temporal and spatial separations. In H K A II: 620 he refers to the »Gedächtnißmale eines Freundes,« employing the symbolism of holy communion in order to depict a striving to unite with the dead. During a prolonged period, Novalis observed an »Erinnerungsstunde« each day in honor of - and in attempted communion with - his dead fiancée, Sophie von Kühn. Of course the »Gedächtnißmal« and the »Erinnerungsstunde« invoke representations of the dead rather than the dead themselves, and Novalis gives no indication that he ever denied this. See Gerhard Schulz, Novalis in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, 1969, pp. 69, et al. Ruder, Die Symboltheorie des Novalis, p. 29. Rousseau connects signs and self-consciousness even more explicitly in the Confessions. He records his memories of his own personal »Urhandlung,« or the beginning of self-consciousness in childhood, attributing it to awareness and comprehension of signs and images. »I do not know what I did until I was five or six years old. I do not know how I learned to read; I only remember my earliest reading, and the effect it had upon me; from that time I date my uninterrupted self-consciousness.«

past, but it may symbolically represent that past in any number of way s. The self's representation of the past actively forms the present and future; thus self-consciousness can continue to exist in time. Manfred Frank writes that the production and reception of art forms a vital part of Early Romantic theories of self-consciousness. The creation and apprehension of art permits the »Sinnerschließung« (the search for truth) that Frank identifies as the primary goal of Early Romantic philosophy and literature. »Nicht länger mehr wird der Kunst die authentische Darstellung des Wahren abgesprochen; vielmehr ist's allein und ursprünglich in der und durch die Kunst, daß das Wahre sich aktiv ins Werk setzt.«'8

4.

Memory as Metaphor? Implications of Novalis's Theory of Memory for a Philosophy of History

Memory in Novalis's philosophical fragments is, as we have seen, represented as simultaneously privileged (as related to »Urhandlung«) and as unstable (particularly in terms of the inability to ever definitively know the moment of origin). This problematic nature of memory seems to bear resemblances to more recent discussions of the privileged yet unreliable status of representation in general. Recent interpretations of the fragment entitled Monolog (1798), in particular, emphasize Novalis's destabilizing of the relationship between sign and referent; they occasionally align this view with what are perceived to be his reactionary politics." But to what extent has reality, for Novalis, become representation? Frank writes that Novalis in part prepares the way for the later philosophy of l'art pour l'art. He quotes Novalis's definition of Romantic poetry as »das acht absolut Reelle,« and maintains: Ihr zufolge besteht es in einer qualitativen Potenzirungdas acht absolut Reelle< genannt werden. 1 °°

However, the elevation of poetry to the level of the real does not mean that the poetic present and the actual past are completely conflated. Again, remembrance, which Novalis elsewhere calls an »ächt poetisches Buch,« provides the only access possible to the past, via the enactment of a poetic present. As Frank

' 8 Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Vorlesungen, 1989, p. 17. 99 Uerlings provides an exhaustive summary of recent and past Novalis research in Friedrich von Hardenberg, genannt Novalis. The concluding section is devoted to poststructuralist interpretations of Novalis's work. 100 Manfred Frank, Kaltes Herz, unendliche Fahrt, 43.

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also points out in his discussion of the prevalent symbols of metal and metal coins in Romanticism: »Die Münze teilt ja mit dem Wortzeichen die Eigenschaft, Repräsentant eines Anderen (des Arbeitswertes bzw. der Semiosis), nicht jedoch dieses Andere selbst zu sein.«101 Geza von Molnár also reminds us of a fundamental difference between poststructuralism and Early Romantic thought, stating that Novalis never reduced questions of ethics and practical reason to questions of representation. Rather, Novalis remained a student of Kant and Fichte, who, although they »furnishe[d] the ideological basis from which it becomes possible... to cut off artistic expression from its mimetic bonds,« never denied »its relevance to any context external to it.«102 In other words, Novalis never denied that there existed a context external to art. In fact, as Wm. Arctander O'Brien also points out in a recent study, Novalis did not desert his pro-revolutionary stance in favor of apolitical art; although his philosophy of history remains extremely general, he continuously attempted to relate it to real events.103

Conclusion Novalis's philosophical and poetic fragments espouse a longing for totality and for a system - a longing typical during a period of memory crisis.104 This longing, encoded in Novalis's aesthetic theory, has often and certainly still can be read as representing an ideology of history rife with reactionary implications (particularly in Die Christenheit oder Europa and the Glauben und Liebe collection). However, although Novalis's visions of the future and yearnings for totality are expressed in and theorized through art, he does not present art as an escape or as a shelter for the venting and re-shaping of memories into fantasy. Rather, the work of art represents the possibility of a productive workingthrough and expression of memories; at the same time, art provides a space for imagining. The production of art requires an integration of the same reciprocities that structure consciousness; memory belongs to those reciprocities. And memory in fact must be combined with imagination into expression in order to give the future significance. Die Geschichte erzeugt sich selbst. Erst durch Verknüpfung der Vergangenheit und Zukunft ensteht sie. Solange jene nicht festgehalten wird durch Schrift und Satzung, kann diese nicht nutzbar und bedeutend werden. Die Menschen gehn viel zu nachlässig mit ihren Erinnerungen um (Werke, 547).

101 102 105 104

Frank, Kaltes Herz, unendliche Fahrt, p. 43. Molnár, Romantic Vision, Ethical Context, p. xxviii. O'Brien, Novalis: Signs of Revolution, p. 15. Terdiman, Present Past, p. 159.

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The question »Wozu überhaupt ein Anfang?« destabilizes the past and contributes to the delay of the future - with results for concepts of history and the self that are skeptical, but not deconstructive in the contemporary sense. Novalis's »subtext« on memory integrates aspects of, and can be integrated into, the long Western tradition of conceptualizations of memory. This tradition of course continues into the present century. Michel Beaujour points out that early twentieth-century avantgarde movements such as dada, futurism, and surrealism were »hostile to >memory,< in all relevant senses of the word: cultural tradition, generic >horizons of expectation/ verse, imitatio, elegiac nostalgia and even the autobiographical impulse were all discarded.« 10 ' Beaujour goes on to state that these movements have a »romantic geneaology«; theories of inspiration, originality and genius realized most fully in Romanticism are reflected in the avantgarde's conception of art production as a »>pure psychic automatisms« 1 0 6 The fact that avantgarde theories derive in part from Romanticism in itself casts doubt on their claim to be something utterly new; in addition, says Beaujour, since memory is a partner to inspiration in Western poetic traditions, the avantgardes were in an important sense bound to the past. Novalis's linkage of memory with intuition draws on this ancient connection, whether he places the concepts in an analogous (»Gedächtnis/Gefühl«) or reciprocal (»Erinnerung/ Ahnung«) relationship. Instead of attempting to sacrifice the past to the future by privileging (inspired) action over memory, Novalis makes the past indispensable to the future by conceptualizing memory as action. The »Hin- und Herbewegung« that characterizes the operation of consciousness as well as the creation and apprehension of art is, for Novalis, a fundamentally progressive movement. Appearing at various junctures in the fragmented and fragmentary texts examined in this chapter, Novalis's statements about and representations of the process of remembering do not form a closed, consistent »work,« but rather express a tension between fragment and whole; a tension that underlies all experience since the »Urhandlung« and is articulated in ways open to any number of interpretations. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy state that »romanticism implies something entirely new, the production of something entirely new«; 107 yet the combination of memory and imagination that Novalis theorizes as part of the production of poesy and philosophy requires integration of the past into that production. Novalis's aesthetic theory links the autonomy principle of art (the idea that the work of art should refer only to itself; this principle is enabled by Kant's concept of art's »Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck,« and articulated per105 Ioi 107

Beaujour in Haverkamp and Lachmann, p. 10. Beaujour in Haverkamp and Lachmann, p. 10. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 11. 139

haps most fully by Karl Philipp Moritz in »Über die Allegorie«) with theories of self-consciousness that demand that art somehow bear witness to the past. Novalis's »subtext« on memory shows how recollection can be made productive in art and in aesthetic criticism, and maintains that the »Dichter« can use his personal memory in the production of art (as the recipient can employ his in art's apprehension) without retreating into a totalizing nostalgia. Like Kant, Novalis asserts that remembering is a form of knowledge. 108 And while fragments that form »Memorabilien« may express purely subjective, individual, psychological recollection, Novalis makes the transition from personal to a more general type of memory by asserting that all individuals experience, as a mode of knowledge, the same »higher powers« that enable awareness of the infinite. In a passage that reflects this conceptual shift while simultaneously restating the ancient poetic connection between memory and inspiration, he writes: »Die höheren Mächte in uns, die einst als Genien unsern Willen vollbringen werden, sind jetzt Musen, die uns auf dieser mühseligen Laufbahn mit süßen Erinnerungen erquicken« (HKA V: 564). Novalis presents memory as crucial for both the subject's self-consciousness and for artistic production. The art work produced by a free, self-cognizant subject is in turn intended to be communicative, and to serve a future-forming, public function. This function cannot be performed (i.e., the future cannot be imagined or created) without knowledge of the past. 109 The art work (whether it takes the form of »Poesie,« visual art, or music) communicates the intensely personal, transmuting subjective experiences into intersubjective communication. Novalis's fragmented works in particular can be read as statements in support of art's ability to bring personal memory out of the realm of the singular subject and to give that memory communicative, progressive significance and flexibility. Novalis's fragments support the idea that memory is indispensable for the construction of a system that transcends the merely subjective. This chapter has delineated the contours and content of a subtext on memory in Novalis's oeuvre - a subtext that involves the confluence of classical and empiricist theories of memory, issues in contemporary debates on aesthetics, and philosophies of self-consciousness. Novalis's works have often either been characterized as reactionary and irrational, or mystified and mythologized (along with their author). But contemporary scholars, including Kuzniar, Uerlings, O'Brien, Pfefferkorn, and others, use contemporary literary theory, in108 109

Manfred Koch, »Mnemotechnik des Schönen,« pp. 15, 77, et al. Alice Kuzniar summarizes Condillac's and Rousseau's theories of memory and reads receptions of these theories in Novalis and Hölderlin. Condillac »states that we can imagine the future by extrapolating on our knowledge of the past. Memory guarantees that something will occur in the future. [...] Rousseau's Savoyard vicar similarly concludes that his identity is constituted in and through time: there is no identity of the self except by virtue of memory,« Delayed Endings, pp. 33-34.

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eluding newer perspectives on the relationship between history and fictionality, to read Novalis as a highly speculative, but not irrational, poet and philosopher. The subtext of memory in Novalis's fragments supports that contention. It also supports a continuing interest in redefining, rather than discarding, the possibilities of individual agency in artistic creation, in criticism, and in communication.

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V I . Memory and History in the Fragments of Friedrich Schlegel

ι.

The Creation of a Philosophy of History as a Mnemonic Act

I n C h a p t e r T h r e e , I stressed the n o t i o n that the p r o c e s s of transition f r o m r h e t o r i c to aesthetics, and f r o m an e m p h a s i s o n reason t o the integration of e m o t i o n and r e a s o n d u r i n g the last d e c a d e of the eighteenth c e n t u r y is, as K a r l M e n g e s f o r m u l a t e s it, »intimately c o n n e c t e d w i t h the e m e r g e n c e of historical t h i n k i n g . « 1 M e n g e s continues: It is, in fact, during this latter third of the eighteenth century that the self-reflective realization of historicity raises the issue of a theoretical determination of aesthetic contemporaneity, an issue which until then had been consistently resolved in deference to the towering examples of classical perfection. 2 T h e a w a r e n e s s of one's o w n time as q u a l i t a t i v e l y d i f f e r e n t f r o m the past and t h u s as r e q u i r i n g its o w n aesthetic standards is part of this » s e l f - r e f l e c t i v e reali z a t i o n of historicity.« S u c h a realization a n d its c o n c o m i t a n t r e f l e c t i o n o n the p r e s e n t is the definition of the praxis of m e m o r y ; ' the re-representation of the p a s t that m e m o r y enacts involves r e f l e c t i n g o n the present as w e l l , in that m e m o r y relates p r e s e n t t o past, and v i c e - v e r s a . F o r the R o m a n t i c s , historical t h i n k i n g w a s constituted in this t y p e of r e c o l l e c t i o n ; they a c k n o w l e d g e d recollection as a representative m o v e m e n t in and o v e r time. 4 F r i e d r i c h Schlegel and N o v a l i s 1

1 3

4

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Karl Menges, Herder and the »Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes.« In: Eighteenth-Century German Authors and Their Aesthetic Theories: Literature and the Other Arts, ed. by Richard Critchfield and Wulf Koepke, 1988, p. 147. Menges in Critchfield and Koepke, p. 147. Michael Geyer defines memory as such in The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Germany. In: Radical Evil, ed. by Joan Copjec, 1996, p. 195. Azade Seyhan emphasizes the Romantics' identification of »the relation between the problem of representation and acts of memory which replace presence with a dialectic of creation and dissolution« in Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism, 1992, p. 67 (also quoted in Chapter T w o of this study). Manfred Frank identifies and explicates the Early Romantic »Verzeitlichung des Selbstbewußtseins,« a temporalization within which all representation and recollection takes place, in: Das Problem »Zeit« in der deutschen Romantik. Zeitbewußtsein und Bewußtsein von Zeitlichkeit in der frühromantischen Philosophie und in Tiecks Dichtung, 1990. Rather than understanding memory as a static phenomenon, as sim-

define this representative, historicizing, self-reflexive movement as an aesthetic5 act; ultimately, then, Romantic historiography will require the aestheticization of actuality. »History« for the Early Romantics is not what actually was, but what was, is, and will be possible. The trajectory of the aesthetic portrayals of this history as possibility parallels the trajectory of representative movements that constitute the »history« of »universal poetry,« as Friedrich Schlegel defines it in the Athenäumsfragmente. N u r (eine progressive Universalpoesie) kann gleich dem Epos ein Spiegel der ganzen umgebenden Welt, ein Bild des Zeitalters werden. Und doch kann auch sie am meisten zwischen dem Dargestellten und dem Darstellenden, frei von allem realen und idealen Interesse auf den Flügeln der poetischen Reflexion in der Mitte schweben, diese Reflexion immer wieder potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen. ... Die romantische Dichtart ist noch im Werden; ja das ist ihr eigentliches Wesen, daß sie ewig nur werden, nie vollendet sein kann. 6

The connection between aesthetic acts and portrayals of history is now fully acknowledged, much more so than in the classical aesthetic theory that immediately preceded (and was to a certain extent contemporaneous with 7 ) Schlegel's aesthetic theory. Novalis's literary and philosophical fragments emphasize the role memory plays in the creation of identity through various art forms; they portray memory as an active, creative capacity that makes consciousness, literature and philosophy possible in the first place. A similar view of memory was already apparent in late eighteenth-century aesthetic theory preceding the Jena period, as it was in idealist philosophy, in which the consciousness-creating activity of »introverted transcendence« required imaginative recollection. Friedrich Schlegel's fragmentary writings on history, politics, and aesthetics relate the concept of a universal poetry to a specific view of a history that depends on mnemonic movements that are similarly creative and imaginative. They take place in a consciousness that has unique as well as collective traits; this consciousness is capable of differentiation, but at the same time it seeks similarity between itself and other objects. These tensions between uniqueness and sameness, difference ply a retention that does not change over time, Schlegel, Novalis, Fichte, and Schelling emphasize a recollection that requires elapsed time and a dynamic imagination. ' »Aesthetic« again as creation of art rather than as referring specifically to Kant's sphere of aesthetic judgment. 6 K A II: 182-83, no. 116. 7 Schiller's text, Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, appears in 1796, and Schlegel's piece, Uber das Studium der griechischen Poesie, is written in 1796 and 1797. Both works address the disjunction between the supposed harmony of ancient art and the fragmentation and differentiation of modern aesthetic production. For a comparison of these two works in particular, see Karl Menges in Critchfield and Koepke, p. 149. See also Ernst Behler's introduction to K A X X , Schlegels Theorie der Zeitlichkeit und Geschichtlichkeit im Konflikt mit der Aufklärung, pp. xii-xiii.

:

43

and identity, form the process of recognition or »keeping« 8 that is recollective and that can only be expressed in fragmentary form, a form that both performs and embodies that recollection (»Erinnerung,« a revision of Plato's anamnesis). Schlegel invests the »empty present« (the »Substanzlosigkeit [der] Gegenwart« 9 ) of transcendental apperception not with »presence« or »being,« but with the »appearing sense« of the fragment form. The fragment is an expression of consciousness and of sensory experience itself. It corresponds to, rather than identifies with, the consciousness it represents. Schlegel defines it as a form of expression that parallels the epistemological model of the paradoxical self (»Ich«), whose only possibility for self-knowledge lies in expressing contradictory representations of possible systems and selves. 10 As argued in Chapter Two of this study, the fragment sublates memory and permits reminiscence to reappear as a representation of the trace of a past moment or event. The fragment makes sense out of the past only in the moment of its (aesthetic) appearance, but also simultaneously alters that past event and places its »actuality« in doubt. Peter Horst Neumann stresses Friedrich Schlegel's contribution to the conviction that the fragment expresses and embodies a specific view of time: »Die Bruchstellen der Fragmente sind die Wegweiser zu einer Vollkommenheit, die nicht hier und jetzt erscheint, sondern nur in der Vergangenheit aufgefunden oder in der Zukunft eingelöst werden kann.« 1 1 This chapter focuses neither on the lost past nor on the anticipated future totalities imagined in Early Romantic fragments, but rather on those fragments' representations of memory as the faculty that is crucial for both maintaining and challenging those temporal illusions. According to the interpretive framework explicated in the third

8

In Chapter T w o , I adapted this concept from Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, who use »keeping« in the eighteenth-century sense of »maintaining harmony of composition« or »agreement, congruity, harmony« (in the introduction to their translation of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, 1988, p.xi). I argue that Romantic theory displays a similar aesthetic concept of »keeping« as the maintenance, through recollection and recognition, of a productive tension between self and other in which proximity or similarity is represented (as opposed to an alienating difference or a collapsed unity).

9

Manfred Frank, Das Problem »Zeit« in der deutschen Romantik, p. 20. K A X V I I I : 97. Gerhard Neumann paraphrases Schlegel's concept of the fragment and of the self in Ideenparadiese. Aphoristik in Goethe, Schlegel, Lichtenberg, Novalis, 1976, p. 446. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy note that Schlegel derives his theory of the fragment primarily from Chamfort's Pensées, Maximes et Anecdotes. See The Literary Absolute, p. 40. In addition to Chamfort, Rousseau and Montaigne choose the fragment, aphorism, or incomplete text (often the form of the anecdote) to represent the quest for self-knowledge via reflections on one's past.

10

11

Peter Horst Neumann, Rilkes Archaischer Torso Apollos in der Geschichte des modernen Fragmentarismus. In: Fragment und Totalität, ed. by Lucien Dällenbach and Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig, 1984, pp. 2j8f.

144

section of Chapter Two, I here examine the dual role of the fragment as (i) a representative form and as (2) a form that, for Friedrich Schlegel in particular, mirrored its own content. I conduct this examination by discussing the fragment both as representative of memory and as an attribute of memory itself. I will look first at the thematic relationship between Friedrich Schlegel's theory of the fragment and his theory of memory, and then examine the passages in Schlegel's psychology, philosophy, and aesthetics that deal with memory explicitly. Several of these texts are intentionally fragmentary; others were not completed or are composed of notes from lectures he never published. All demonstrate, however, what Alice Kuzniar calls the »noncontingency« and the »parcelled, dispersive nature of much writing« characteristic of the Jena group. 12 Although Schlegel did not compose all of these texts while in Jena, the theory of the fragment that he and his brother August Wilhelm developed there in the context of their journal Athenäum still informs many of his later convictions concerning how an idea of history and the place of the self within time could be best expressed in aesthetic form. The analyses in this chapter focus on the Theorie der Erinnerung und des Verstandes from lectures Schlegel delivered in Cologne following his time in Jena, on Lucinde ( 1799), on several Athenäums- and Kritische Fragmente ( 17981800), and on Zur Geschichte und Politik (1826) as well as other philosophical fragments. I attempt to arrive at a better understanding of the particular process of the representation of memory that takes place in the fragment and finally to demonstrate the implications that these representations have for Schlegel's theory of history. I also stress the consequences of Schlegel's thought for the representation of self-reflection that requires recollection. My arguments are structured around the following theses: ι. In Friedrich Schlegel's fragments and fragmentary writing, remembrance is indispensable for the constitution of two types of relationships, both of which are fundamental to consciousness (of self and world): the relationship between present and past self, and between self and other (»Ich« and »Du«). His later writings subsume the other into the self, but distinctions between past and present and between self and world persist. 2. The corollary activities of remembrance and anticipation move in the form of a »keeping« tension (or a cathexis over time) between present and past, subject and object. For Schlegel, representations of this reciprocal movement in Romantic poetry should present the relationship between present and past, self and other as one of proximity rather than either identity or difference. This conviction helps form a positive notion of crisis (in the sense of

12

Alice Kuzniar, Delayed Endings: Nonclosure in Novalis and Hölderlin, 1987, p. 3; I also cite this passage in Chapter Two.

M5

a productive tension), in which historiography relies on an unstable but indispensable memory faculty that is aesthetically (and practically) superior to empirical history. 3. In Schlegel's writings on memory as well as on history, the idea of a philosophy of history is articulated as a problem of creative remembrance. This articulation is preparatory to a more negative form of memory crisis than the one described above, as in Schlegel's work the poetic fragment becomes a material documentation of the inability to create a whole, reliable historical narrative. As for Novalis, for Schlegel history then comes to be represented as fragment rather than as narrative. The texts I examine below reflect Schlegel's changing political convictions during his republicanist as well as authoritarian phases; they begin with his time in Jena and extend through 1826. These changing convictions illuminate what Gerald Izenberg has called »contradictions in the political goals of Schlegel's Romanticism [...] fatal to the political project of Romantic art but apparently reconcilable, or at least sustainable, in the sphere of love.« Izenberg goes on to argue that for Schlegel, love ultimately (after the conversion to Catholicism) becomes »the only possible politics.« 13 In this sense, Schlegel continues to consider memory and its importance for history as at least potentially politicized activities, even after his thinking takes a decidedly aestheticist turn. Schlegel does increasingly (and particularly during and after his process of conversion to Catholicism) relegate remembering to the realm of a unified consciousness in which politics and love are essentially one and the same. This unified consciousness, however, which will fully manifest itself in the future (specifically at the time of the Second Coming) is constituted intersubjectively, through recollection.

2.

The Relevance of the Fragment Form for Schlegel's Theory of Memory

Just as the fragment is the form that the Romantics find best suited to express their perceptions of time as dynamic and processual, so the process of active, imaginative recollection necessary for self-reflection and representation may resemble fragmentation. Lothar Pikulik describes the relationship of the fragment to time, and the activities of recollection and anticipation that must occur before and as fragmentary representation takes place: »(D)as Fragment (bedeutet) nur eine Bewegung auf die Wahrheit zu, Annäherung, aber nicht Erreichen. ... Das Fragment bedeutet einen Vorstoß ins Dunkle, Unbekannte,

13

Gerald Izenberg, Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, Revolution and the Origins of Modern Selfhood 1797 - 1802, 1992, p.67.

146

ohne es >aufzuklären< und ihm seinen Nimbus zu rauben.«14 The reciprocal movements between awareness of and reflection on past and future that characterize the fragment appear spontaneous and even involuntary; the fragment »lebt von Gnaden der überraschenden Entdeckung, des Einfalls, und von den tastenden Schritten des Experiments.«'' Such spontaneity, however, is actually carefully constructed, as are the representations of memory as involuntary found in Novalis's diary (perhaps most notably his carefully staged depiction of his »involuntary« memory of Sophie at her grave) or in Heinrich von Ofterdingen (especially in the construction of dreams as sites of involuntary recollection). Schlegel's notion of the fragment includes a more explicit awareness of its constructed nature; he conceives of it as a venue for an aesthetic criticism that is invested with an energy that resembles spontaneity. In the Athenäum in particular, the fragment presents »Dinge in der zweiten Potenz« (KA II: i8i, no. i io). This »second power« is a magnification of the past work, a re-representation that can only occur in the present moment of reflection,16 and depends on the recollection of a past, but also contributes to a future imagined poetic system. The fragment's anticipation of the future, which expresses Schlegel's plan for an ultimate (and ultimately never to be attained) universal art, is then also an expression of and about the past. Schlegel defines memory as a similarly incomplete, but dynamic, process. Remembrance, the »Wiederfinden eines Verlorenen« (KA XII: 348), is predicated upon forgetting. When something »lost« is »found again,« the mediating intellect immediately also integrates the remembered and represented image into a projection about the future: »Erinnerung« is always accompanied by »Ahnung.« This movement occurs not only in and as fragment, but in the trope of allegory, which is able to represent the idea of infinity in the finite form of the fragment.'7 Azade Seyhan offers further insight into the proximity between Schlegel's concepts of allegory, fragmentation, and his definition of memory: »Allegory fixes the reality that presents itself to consciousness in the form of images.... As a trope that negotiates analysis and synthesis, fragmentation and restoration (re-membering), allegory resembles memory.«18 As between the 14 15 16

17

,8

Lothar Pikulik, Frühromantik. Epoche - Werk - Wirkung, 1992, p. 87. Pikulik, Frühromantik, p. 87. See also on this point Walter Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, ed. by Hermann Schweppenhausen 1991, p. 82: »Ein Unterschied zwischen dem Kantischen Begriff der Urteilskraft und dem romantischen der Reflexion läßt sich ... unschwer andeuten: die Reflexion ist nicht, wie die Urteilskraft, ein subjektiv reflektierendes Verhalten, sondern sie liegt in der Darstellungsform des Werkes eingeschlossen, entfaltet sich in der Kritik, um sich endlich im gesetzmäßigen Kontinuum der Formen zu erfüllen.« Schlegel's theory of allegory is recorded primarily in his lectures on Transzendentalphilosophie, held in Jena in 1800-1801 ( K A X I I : 1 - 1 0 6 , and particularly pp. 3-43). Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents, pp. 1 4 - 1 5 .

147

image of a past perception (in memory, »Gedächtnis«) and its present re-representation in fragmentary form (via recollection, »Erinnerung«), there is proximity, rather than identity, between the trope of allegory and the faculty of memory. An additional similarity between the Romantic idea of the fragment and the Romantic conception of the faculty of memory lies in the ambiguity of both, and particularly in the ambivalent nature of the ability of either form or faculty to provide reliable information. Just as memory is subject to the effects of time, and both preserves past perceptions and is the site of their decay, so the fragment embodies decay (ruin) and construction (of the universal poetry eternally »im Werden«), Another ambiguity appears in Schlegel's own changing concept of the fragment, as he never formulated what Eberhard Ostermann calls an »einheitliches und endgültiges Konzept des Fragments im Sinne einer literarischen Kunstform.« 19 Rather, Ostermann continues, Schlegel schwankt [...] mit seinen in drei Sammlungen (Kritische Fragmente, Fragmente, Ideen) zwischen 1797 und 1800 veröffentlichten Fragmenten > Wiederhersteller der epigrammatischen Gattung< (ΚΑ XVIII: 130) oder sogar Begründer einer ganz neuen Gattung zu sein, zwischen einem an den geschlossenen Werkcharakter des Aphorismus gemahnenden Verständnis des Fragments als einer igelhaft abgegrenzten und auf sich selbst konzentrierten Einheit (vgl. Κ Α II: 197) und einer Sichtweise, die am Fragment das Bruchstückhafte und Paradoxe einer >formlosen Form< (ΚΑ II: 398) betont.20

As Manfred Frank contends, though, Schlegel very likely intended this ambiguity; it helps to make possible the simultaneous, precariously balanced existence of »Einzelheit« and »Ganzheit«21 in addition to several more seemingly contradictory, but reciprocal, conceptual categories that are given concrete expressive form in the fragment. For instance, Schlegel conceives of fragments as both progressive (»Fragmente der Zukunft«) and regressive (»Fragmente der Vergangenheit«) at once (KA II: 168-169, n o · 22)> this also parallels the reciprocal movement of remembering and anticipation that constitutes the »abgeleitete^), fragmentarische(s) Bewußtsein()« (KA XII: 393). Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy articulate the perhaps most fundamental paradox of and within the fragment, as well as the simultaneity of the fragment's being and becoming, as follows: »in the very same moment and gesture of fragmentation, the fragment both is and is not System.«22 Peter Horst Neumann stresses what he calls the »Positivität (Schlegels) Fragmentbegriffs (...). Schlegels emphatische Bestimmung dieses Begriffs er19

20 21

12

Eberhard Ostermann, Fragment/Aphorismus. In: Romantik-Handbuch, ed. by Helmut Schanze, 1994, p.276. Ostermann in Schanze, p. 276. Frank argues that through a positive concept of irony (»fragmentarische Genialität«) Schlegel synthesizes fragmentation and universality, individuality and generality, in the fragment. See: Das Problem »Zeit« in der deutschen Romantik, pp. 36-37. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 50.

148

klärt sich aus einem nicht w e n i g e r e m p h a t i s c h e n Festhalten an d e r I d e e des s c h ö n e n V o l l k o m m e n e n . « 2 3 T h e » e m p h a t i s c h e B e s t i m m u n g « of the c o n c e p t of the f r a g m e n t , h e continues, derives p a r t l y f r o m the » k ü h n e r G l e i c h s t e l l u n g der B e g r i f f e romantisch,

progressiv,

fragmentarisch

u n d modern.«H

Romanticism

w i s h e s t o p r o g r e s s t o w a r d a p o e t i c »reality« that w i l l include b u t u l t i m a t e l y s u p e r s e d e empirical reality. T h e n o t i o n s » p r o g r e s s i v e « and » m o d e r n « d o not entail a d e - e m p h a s i s o n the past, h o w e v e r . R a t h e r , t h e y reflect a desire t o u s e the m o v e m e n t s of r e m e m b r a n c e , i m a g i n a t i o n , and f e e l i n g to f r e e the self f r o m the limitations of the natural w o r l d . E r n s t B e h l e r clarifies this as he explains that Schlegel's aesthetic »reality« represents an attempt t o discard the reality o f Empirismus, Sensualismus und Materialismus ..., die doch eine Beschränkung der unendlichen Tätigkeit des Ich bedeuten. (Schlegels) Realität findet eher in dem spinozistisch-pantheistischen Realismus eine entsprechende Verwandtschaft, jedoch mit dem Vorbehalt, daß F. Schlegel... an diesem System eine Gefährdung der Freiheit des Ich durch den Naturalismus aussetzt.... (Schlegel) gibt... den Versuch auf, entweder das Universum durch das Ich oder das Ich durch das Universum zu beweisen und erdenkt ein ellipsenförmiges System, dessen beide Brennpunkte - die Idealität und die Realität - in einem sie gegenseitig begründenden, bedingenden und belebenden Wechselerweis begriffen sind ( Κ Α X I I : xiv). R e c o l l e c t i o n , anticipation, a n d the feeling ( » G e f ü h l « ) that unites t h e m in the present m o m e n t traverse and in f a c t constitute the space b e t w e e n real and ideal. In the f o l l o w i n g passage, f r o m the Theorie

der Erinnerung

und des

Verstandes,

Schlegel describes the role of m e m o r y in the p r o c e s s of the d e v e l o p m e n t o f selfconsciousness. Gefühl und Erinnerung sind uns die einzigen Quellen der Erkenntnis, indem sie den ganzen Umkreis der Erkenntnis der Ichheit umfassen. Das Gefühl, als unmittelbare Wahrnehmung eines andern Ichs in der gegenwärtigen Welt; die Erinnerung, als ein Wiedererwachen und Wiederfinden des vollständigen Ichs in dem gegenwärtigen, zerteilten, abgeleiteten. Das Gefühl erschöpft den ganzen Umfang der unvollständigen, abgeleiteten Ichheit; die Erinnerung den ganzen Umfang der ursprünglichen vollständigen Ichheit, sie umfassen alles, was gewußt werden kann, - mit einem Wort die Welt und führen auf die Gottheit ( K A XII: 355). Schlegel's t h e o r y of the f r a g m e n t and of f r a g m e n t a r y , b u t p r o g r e s s i v e , c o n sciousness parallels his u n d e r s t a n d i n g of his o w n p o e t i c w o r k . N u r sehr unvollständig, ganz zufällig und fragmentarisch ist in verschiedenen Epochen mir eins und das andre von dieser meiner immer noch im Werden begriffnen, und nicht vollendeten Philosophie, in meinen übrigen und frühern literarischen Arbeiten und Werken zum Vorschein gekommen, oder herausgefahren. 2 '

23 24 25

P . H . Neumann in: Dällenbach and Nibbrig, pp. 259. P . H . Neumann in: Dällenbach and Nibbrig, pp. 259. Schlegel, Philosophie des Lebens, 1828. Cited in Ernst Behler's introduction to K A X V I I I : ix. 149

Schlegel did not intend this fragmentary state to become permanent; he conceived of fragmentation as a stage along the path to the attainment of an objective system of knowledge (ΚΑ XVIII, xi). This eventual objective system would have to be based upon the subjective system of fragments available to and produced by the present self, however. Subjective recollection and anticipation should continue to be represented, even if the past to which it refers is not (yet) definitively knowable. The fragment, as the re-representation of memory and feeling in the »belated present« (the moment following unmediated perception and its initial representation to the self as image), permits the self to make sense of a chaos of perceptions, or to negotiate between chaos and system, by temporalizing the relationship between the original event and its re-representation. The possible dilemma implied by this concept of metarepresentation (or what Schlegel calls the »Darstellung der Darstellung des Darzustellenden«) that depends on recollection involves the connection between the representing self and the self that is represented becoming tenuous. Since no objective system encompassing these selves into one theory of self-consciousness has been achieved, the progression of expressions via fragments remains somewhat fragile. From the Athenäumsfragmente: Ein Dialog ist eine Kette, oder ein Kranz von Fragmenten. Ein Briefwechsel ist ein Dialog im vergrößertem Maßstabe, und Memorabilien sind ein System von Fragmenten. Es gibt noch keins was in Stoff und Form fragmentarisch, zugleich ganz subjektiv und individuell, und ganz objektiv und wie ein notwendiger Teil im System aller Wissenschaften wäre ( Κ Α II, 77).

The fragment composed of palimpsest, traces, and memories26 has not yet reached the status of a part of a system of all knowledge; it is anticipatory, »im Werden.« At the same time, its anticipatory movements are informed by its memory-content. In Ludnde, for example, Schlegel refers to present feelings of indolence (»Müßiggang«) as fragmentary echoes of a past mythical unity: these feelings form a »heiliges Kleinod! einziges Fragment von Gottähnlichkeit, daß uns noch aus dem Paradiese blieb.«27 What we have of the mythical, archetypal past are fragments, and they are not always reconcilable with a coherent view of consciousness. The fragmentary nature of memory and of documentation is mirrored in the fragmentary nature of consciousness, derived from a shattered past »Welt-Ich.« Schlegel describes this fragmentary consciousness and the crisis of memory and representation to which it contributes as »eine Verbindung und Mischung des Bewußten und Unbewußten. Ohne alle Absicht und bewußtlos wird plötzlich etwas gefunden, was mit dem Vorhergehenden gar

26 27

150

Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents, p. 60. Cited in Ernst Behler, Friedrich Schlegel, 1988, p. 22.

keinen Zusammenhang hat, vielmehr im Gegenteil immer gleichsam in einem grellen Widerspruche steht« ( Κ Α X I I : 393)- i S These disruptions and syntheses in memory, consciousness, and representation find parallels both in human history and in historiography. F r o m fragments in Zur Philosophie aufgelöst in Geschichte

(1802): »Alles dieß = Chaos (Geschichte d[er] Welt

der Dichtkunst.).«

Chaos can only be balanced by sys-

tem in and through a poetry that depends on memory: »Vollendeter Idealismus ist Poesie. D e r Erinnrung ewigen himmlischen

der ursprünglichen

Freiheit

Einheit

ist die Erschaffung

der

- entgegengesetzt - Das ist das Wesen des Idea-

lismus« ( Κ Α V I I : 4 7 3 - 4 7 4 , nos. 25, 27). Idealistic poetry is also the preferred f o r m f o r historiography, as it recasts the textual remains of the past into an ironic interpretation. Seyhan paraphrases the conflation of historiography and m e m o r y - w o r k that Schlegel enacts as follows: 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.... Time is no longer calendar time, but a framework of experience that acquires its only coherence in memory (recollection), imagination, and text. 2 ' T h e aestheticization of recollection that contributes to Romantic historiography does not constitute a complete shift away f r o m the empirical realm to the world of the mind and of abstraction. Schlegel grants real, material, documentary status to w o r d s , to fragments, to texts themselves. H e conceives of

i8

There are parallels between this articulation of a crisis of memory, consciousness, and representation in Schlegel and explications of the unconscious and conscious mind in Freud. In his analysis of Wittgenstein's readings of Freud, Jacques Bouveresse writes that Freud refined »a technique that allows us to induce the subjects to recognize as theirs various motives that were hitherto unacknowledged and which they would never have accepted at the outset.« Acknowledgment of the role played by one's own unconscious mind in past behavior is then the kind of remembering that forms a coherent concept of the self over time. However, as Bouveresse argues, Wittgenstein identified a problem with this theory: »in what sense does the patient's recognition that she >now sees< the true reason for her behavior constitute proof that she has discovered ... that it was present and operative during the entire period in question?« In other words, what is the link between the speaking (representing) self in the present and that self's past and present unconscious motives for behavior? As Bouveresse puts it, simply admitting »that the existence of an unconscious reason constitutes the only possible explanation for my behavior« does not imply coherence of a self-identity that encompasses a conscious and unconscious mind over time, as »this (admission) is no different from the way I might speak of someone else.« This is quite different from »describing the result of the process (of acknowledging unconscious motives for behavior) as a conscious grasp of the fact that my behavior was indeed dictated for this reason.« Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious, 1991, pp. 30-31.

29

Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents, p. 106.

the texts of the past as fragmented, but real, documentation in the present. We now receive Schlegel's own fragmentary work in much the same way. Simon Richter explicates this idea with reference to Lessing, but in words that apply to Schlegel's writing as well: What we have actually inherited, however, are fragments, not only the fragments of Greek art and poetry, but the writings, the words and letters, say of Lessing, understood as fragment. What is given to us with the text of Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet is not the spirit of meaning of the work. We inherit its shards and pieces.30

Schlegel neither coerced such »shards and pieces« back into a retrospectively imagined whole, nor allowed them to disintegrate further into chaos by asserting a lack of reliable relationship between referent, remembrance, and representation. Rather, he formed a highly complicated but subject-affirming philosophy-poetry of balance between self and other, present and past, fragment and whole. The following section focuses in more detail on the treatments of memory and remembering in Friedrich Schlegel's fragment collections, those he published and those he did not, that contribute to this system.

3.

Constructing Relationships Between Present and Past Self and Between Self and Other in the Philosophical Fragments and in Lucinde

As noted in Chapter Four, Friedrich Schlegel (independently of Schelling and Novalis, but with similar conclusions 31 ) addresses Fichte 's basic dilemma of an inconceivable ground of consciousness by figuring the separation between reflection and perception as happening in an inaccessible past that must nevertheless be represented as it could have happened through imaginative recollection. This mnemonic representative process can only occur in a present that is »substance-less.« 32 But the poet fills the present with substance through the »appearing sense« of representation. This results in a cathexis (or »keeping«) between present and past, substance and emptiness, being and nothing, that Schlegel posits via his theory of irony.33 When he writes that memory resembles allegory, then, Schlegel does not contend that representation (allegory) is only

30

Simon Richter, Laocoon's Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe, 1992, p. 81. 3 ' Frank, Das Problem »Zeit« in der deutschen Romantik, p. 20. 32 Frank, Das Problem »Zeit« in der deutschen Romantik, p. 20. 33 Schlegel refers to irony as a »Verhältnis von (Chaos) zu (System)« that is constantly in motion. Gerhard Neumann defines Schlegel's irony also as a movement of representation, a »Pulsieren zwischen unendlichen Details und übergreifendem Ganzen.« Ideenparadiese, p.445. J

52

surface without substance, but that access to reality is possible in representation. The beginning of memory cannot be known, but without the representation of remembrance as phenomenon and of specific recollections, there is no meaning at all. Lack and substance exist simultaneously, and the assertion of this contradiction is not without complications in Schlegels philosophical fragments and fragmentary writing on memory. In the Entwicklung der Philosophie in zwölf Büchern (published in the Kritische Ausgabe on the basis of student notes, taken in lectures Friedrich Schlegel gave in Cologne in 1804 and 1805), Schlegel continues to address topics related to consciousness that he began to deal with in the Jena years. One such topic is the relationship between the history of consciousness, which is only accessible via recollection in the »empty« present, and the history of the natural world. In the Theorie der Erinnerung und des Verstandes (part of the books entitled Die Psychologie) and the Theorie der Natur, Schlegel differentiates between empirical reality, whose history can be told based on facts, and the reality of the transcendental spirit. Die Geschichte der Weltentstehung und die ersten Schritte und Anfänge in der Natur gehören, so lang es noch Philosophie als für sich gesonderte Wissenschaft gibt, dieser allein an; denn der Anfang aller Geschichte, sowie der Anfang und die Grenzen unserer Erkenntnis sind einzig in der Erinnerung und Ahnung zu suchen. Unser Inneres, ohne alle anderen Hilfsmittel, ist das einzige, was zu einiger Kenntnis von dem Anfang der Welt führen kann, alles was wir hiervon wissen können, haben wir bloß daher zu nehmen, ist also von aller Empirie entfernt (ΚΑ XII: 421).

This passage illustrates the Romantic attempt to counter empiricist assertions, and particularly what the Romantics believed was the faulty conviction that we can locate the origins of knowledge in the sensory world, by, as Cathy Caruth states, »replacing the observed empirical origin with a kind of lack or absence, a fundamental break with, or detachment from, sensory reality, which is what makes possible the turn of the mind upon itself.«34 The Romantics substitute a »figurative narrative for the literal empiricist's tracing of origins.«35 Rather than empirical historiography, then, the Romantics conduct mnemonic historiography, the history of consciousness, which can only be figured as fragment, not represented as narrative based on archival sources and documents (and even 34

35

Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud, 1991, p. 133. Manfred Koch notes that the Romantics derive this distinction in part from Augustine, who in his Confessions assigns memory (Gedächtnis) to the empirical world and recollection (Erinnerung) to the spiritual. »>Staunen< sollten die Menschen nicht so sehr über gewaltige Naturerscheinungen, sondern über jene Vermögen, die sie in sich finden und von denen sie ständig und selbstverständlich Gebrauch machen. Auf diesem Weg führt Augustinus seine Untersuchung des empirischen Gedächtnisses zum >Eingedenksein< Gottes,« »Mnemotechnik des Schönen.« Studien zur Erinnerungspoetik in Romantik und Symbolismus, 1988, p. 10. Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions, p. 133.

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their status is placed into question). In the aesthetic theory of Herder, Schiller, Lessing, and Moritz, there is an attempt both to represent sensory origin and to integrate such representations into aesthetic forms that also communicate general human truths. The Romantics transform this attempt by postulating historiography as an anamnesis that consciousness enacts from within the body in order to transcend it; this is »introverted transcendence.« In figurative language in fragmentary writing, however, Schlegel and Novalis reinvest the history of consciousness with material references. This has the effect of refiguring, or re-membering, experiences in empirical reality within a text that is intended to reveal the history of transcendental reality. In Lucinde (1799), which Schlegel intended to embody the form of the arabesque, self and other are imagined and figured as two »real« bodies, male and female, and also as mind and body, as Julius's letters to Lucinde consist of aphorisms expressing the aesthetic theory developed by his intellect. The perfect love between Julius and Lucinde is a component of their perfect mutual understanding; here Fichte's »Nicht-Ich« is transformed most explicitly into a »Du,« and with this reconceptualization of the self-other relationship (as »Ich«/»Du« rather than as »Ich«/»Nicht-Ich«) comes a temporalization, as Lucinde is a retrospective, a narrative remembering in fragmentary form. Julius can recollect and re-represent his own past in the aphoristic utterances of his letters because he has found a center, the appropriate perspective from which to remember; through his relationship with Lucinde, but also with other women in the past, he becomes an artist and his life becomes an aesthetic creation. In the section »Lehrjahre der Männlichkeit,« which traces Julius's history through his relationship with Lucinde, the narrator informs us: Wie seine Kunst sich vollendete und ihm von selbst in ihr gelang, was er zuvor durch kein Streben und Arbeiten erringen konnte: so ward ihm auch sein Leben zum Kunstwerk, ohne daß er eigentlich wahrnahm, wie es geschah. Es ward Licht in seinem Innern, er sah und übersah alle Massen seines Lebens und den Gliederbau des Ganzen klar und richtig, weil er in der Mitte stand.' 6

Through art and cathexis with an other, Julius is able to order his recollections within the framework of a higher unity; he can perceive his entire life and all of time in a stable and coherent form. This type of remembering through artistic expression is contrasted with the somewhat crude form of remembering practiced by Julius's former love, Lisette. Lisette, who also has no interest in poetry, »schien ganz sorgenlose nur in der Gegenwart zu leben,« and only reminisces when prompted by Julius: »Sie erinnerte sich vielleicht zum erstenmal mit Rührung an ihre erste Jugend und Unschuld und gefiel sich nicht in der Umgebung, mit der sie sonst ganz zufrieden war« 37 Rather than form her life into a uni36 37

Schlegel, Lucinde, 1993, pp. 75-76. Schlegel, Lucinde, p. 57.

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fied w h o l e , Lisette's memories disrupt her pleasure in a ceaselessly f o r g e t f u l present. H e r inability to synthesize recollection, expression, and perceptions of herself in relation to others' 8 does not b o d e well, as s o o n she is pregnant w i t h a child J u l i u s does not want and does n o t believe is his. W h e n he rejects her, she kills herself. A l t h o u g h her inability to m a k e present sense of her past has p r o v e n fatal, L i sette does manage to cut o f f a lock of her o w n hair b e f o r e stabbing herself to death, w h i c h Julius takes as a m e m e n t o b e f o r e departing the scene. A f t e r Lisette's death, J u l i u s becomes obsessed with her m e m o r y f o r a time. » D i e erste F o l g e v o n Lisettens R u i n war, daß er ihr A n d e n k e n mit s c h w ä r m e r i scher A c h t u n g vergötterte.« 3 9 B u t this sentimentally nostalgic reminiscence, conducted in isolation, contributes nothing to the development of his character, n o r does it i m p r o v e his art. B y the time he has developed a relationship w i t h L u c i n d e and become a mature artist, Julius's reminiscences m a k e n o sense w i t h out his imagined audience, L u c i n d e , the » D u . « T h e images of L u c i n d e are those of a real w o m a n w h o has already had a child p r i o r to her relationship w i t h J u lius; her narration of this event takes place within the exchanges of memories that eventually make the lovers inseparable. W h e n L u c i n d e tells J u l i u s she has had a child, he responds w i t h his o w n recollections: » A u c h er erinnerte sich an die Vergangenheit u n d sein L e b e n w a r d ihm, indem er es ihr erzählte, z u m erstenmal z u einer gebildeten G e s c h i c h t e . . . . Was sie ihm gab und f ü r ihn fühlte, nannte er Zärtlichkeit, E r i n n e r u n g , H i n g a b e u n d H o f f n u n g . « 4 0 A g a i n , the reciprocal pair of m e m o r y and anticipation appears, n o w in the context of the selfother love relationship. T h e m e m o r y that Julius exhibits depends on sensory experience; and m o r e specifically on the ability to recollect retained experiences and then to represent t h e m in art. T h e split b e t w e e n »Erinnerung« and »Gedächtnis« is, as in N o ' 8 Schlegel, Lucinde, p. 56. 39 Schlegel, Lucinde, p. 5 8. In History as an Art of Memory, 1993, Patrick Hutton notes: »On one level, memorializing the deceased reflected the deepening bonds of personal affection that characterized the sensibilities of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenthcentury culture. But on another it signified a new awareness that the lived experience of the past can never be directly retrieved. What had been lost was the presence of the past, felt with immediacy by societies that sensed themselves to be more completely immersed in living traditions. In an age of political revolution, emerging into a fuller awareness of the realities of change, the past came to be held at a critical distance. The passion for commemoration, therefore, was in some measure tied to the need to reaffirm ties to a world that was passing,« p. 2. Julius's memorialization of Lisette does not fulfill that commemorative, identiy-forming need, because their love was never true, the cathexis between self and other never complete. His behavior after her death is melancholy rather than mournful. Novalis's aestheticized recollections of Sophie, also inspired by various memento objects, permit him to continue and in fact improve upon his real-life cathexis with her as other after her death, and consequently permit him to improve as an artist. 40

Schlegel, Lucinde, pp. 7 1 , 73.

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valis's philosophical fragments, not completely dichotomous. Recollection is not possible without retention; there can be no transcendental apperception without a corporeal origin of sensory experience. Sensations, accompanied by intellectual intuition, can produce »die höhere Erinnerung ... manche Gefühle, welche die geistige Anschauung begleiten, enthalten solche Erregungen der heiligen Zahlen in unserem Seelengrunde, z.B. bei der Musik« (ΚΑ XII: 388). Schlegel holds that understanding also has a sensory component, and in fact the revelation that the art work produces is exactly this type of what Schlegel calls »sinnliche Deutlichkeit.« According to Schlegel as well as to Novalis, art mediates not only between reason and sense (as Kant's notion of the symbolic maintains), but also between finitude and infinity (ΚΑ XIII: 174). This mediation parallels the reciprocal, time-encased movements of consciousness. Schlegel offers the following comment on the role of art as intercessor between the finite self and the infinite absolute, again with reference to the »sinnliche Deutlichkeit« that the art work reveals: Die Philosophie lehrte uns, daß alles Göttliche sich nur andeute, nur mit Wahrscheinlichkeit voraussetzen lasse, und daß wir daher die Offenbarung für die höchste Wahrheit annehmen müssen. Die Offenbarung aber ist eigentlich eine für den sinnlichen Menschen zu erhabene Erkenntnis, und so tritt die Kunst sehr gut ins Mittel, um durch sinnliche Darstellung und Deutlichkeit dem Menschen die Gegenstände der Offenbarung vor Augen zu stellen (ΚΑ XIII: 174).

Manfred Frank comments further on the function of art for self-knowledge in Jena Romanticism, in a passage that further separates Romantic theories of consciousness from those of the idealists. Als idealistisch bezeichne ich die - zumal durch Hegel verbindlich gemachte Uberzeugung, Bewußtsein sei ein selbstgenügsames Phänomen, das auch noch die Voraussetzungen seines Bestandes aus eigenen Mitteln sich verständlich zu machen vermöge. Dagegen ist die Frühromantik überzeugt, daß Selbstsein einem transzendenten Grunde sich verdankt, der sich nicht in die Immanenz des Bewußtseins auflösen lasse. So wird der Grund von Selbstsein zu einem unausdeutbaren Rätsel. Dies Rätsel kann nicht mehr (allein) von der Reflexion bearbeitet werden. Darum vollendet sich die Philosophie in der und als Kunst. Denn in der Kunst ist uns ein Gebilde gegeben, dessen Sinnfülle von keinem möglichen Gedanken erschöpft wird.... Diesen Typ von symbolischer Repräsentation nennt die Frühromantik in polemischer Absetzung vom klassizistischen Wortgebrauch Allegorie.4I

This Romantic allegory, which resembles memory, constitutes an art form that, when received by an other, produces the »sensory clarity« inconceivable for thinkers who insist on a strict division between body and mind. The relationship between self and other in Lucinde, although it is represented to us by Julius (i.e., Lucinde herself has no voice), is nevertheless depicted as one of mutual recognition, of intersubjective recollection. Recogniz41

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Manfred Frank, lecture held at the Universität Tübingen on February 16, 1993.

ing is recollecting for a transcendental subject whose possibilities f o r representing its own self-knowledge are not limited, but enhanced, by representations of recollections of corporeal experience. This does involve an aestheticization of that experience, and of the love object. 42 But Schlegel does not subsume corporeal to transcendental reality so much as he enacts a balance in the »material« form of figurative, aphoristic, allegorical language. T h e Theorie der Erinnerung und des Verstandes and Zur Philosophie (1805) recast some of the thoughts that inform self-other relationships in Lucinde in transcendental terms that are simultaneously intended to refer to the individual psyche, with its unique experiences, as a part of collective history. A t the same time, these and later texts reflect Schlegel's move toward conversion to Catholicism and ultimately to a far more totalized notion of »individuality,« one that has subsumed the other into itself. 43 As I noted in Chapter One, Schlegel contends that the »individual« self derives from the »world« self via recollection. Zur Philosophie contains a variation on this point that includes an implication of a relationship between self and other in the form of the relationship between present and past self: »Erinnerung ist der Anfang des abgeleiteten Ich und zugleich die Gestalt der vollendeten Liebe« ( Κ Α X I X : 92, no. 97). A s »Gestalt,« or the appearance, of love, recollection represents that love. This recollection is also a beginning - the inception of the derived, or individual, s e l f - but it can only be represented to the self as a concept (»Begriff«) of an origin, rather than as the self's actual origin. A f t e r the self is derived from the originating and fundamentally unknowable world-consciousness, it reconnects to that origin, or cathects with that origin, by representing love as recollection. Love, re-presented by memory, is necessary f o r understanding, whose basis again is in sensory perception and whose representation requires recognition of an other: Dies unmittelbare Wahrnehmen des Sinnes, die Bedeutung, welche die Grundlage des eigentlichen Verstehens ist, ist eine eigentliche innerliche Verbindung geschiedener, aber ähnlicher Geister, ein liebevolles Einswerden des Ichs mit dem, was der Gegenstand des Ichs ist, dem Du. Und sofern wir dies Wahrnehmen und Ergreifen des Ichs des Gegenstandes, diese Vermählung des wahrnehmenden Ichs und des wahrgenommenen Geistes sehr gut Liehe nennen, können wir den Satz aufstellen, ohne Liehe kein Sinn, der Sinn, das Verstehen beruht auf der Liehe.44 The »different, but similar spirits« to whom Schlegel refers can be thought of as members of a group whose »individual« life experiences may be quite different, but whose perceptions are governed by collective recollections. Recollection enables present perceptions as well as the entire derivation, or existence, of the

42

4J 44

See David Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: O n the Verge, 1990, Ρ· 2 37· See also on this point Izenberg, Impossible Individuality, p. 138. ΚΑ XII: 350-1· From Die Psychologie; also cited in ChapterTwo of this study. I

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»derived self.« The relationship between individual and community, and between self and other, requires that a synthesis of perception and intuition contribute to representation. Schlegel's theory of recollection and historiographical-aesthetic representation resembles Maurice Halbwachs's contention that perception itself cannot be a completely individual, isolated phenomenon, inasmuch as perception must always be accompanied by the memory of words and notions that allows people to come to some agreement in regard to objects, for this memory alone makes the perception possible. Purely exterior observations are hence in this case not possible. In the same moment that we see objects we represent to ourselves the manner in which others would look at them. If we go outside the self, this is not to become fused with objects but rather to look at them from the point of view of others. This, in turn, is possible only because we remember the relations we have previously had with them. There are hence no perceptions without recollections. 45

Schlegel's thought on the relationship between individuality and generality is related also to Plato's models. Ernst Behler notes that much of Schlegel's entire motivation for composing his »Philosophische Lehrjahre« (the collection of notebooks that Schlegel gathered under this title in 1804 - 1805) came from Plato, »der in der Zeit um 1804 von Schlegel als Urbild des Philosophen in Vorlesungen dargestellt wurde« (ΚΑ X V I I I : xii). Earlier, in 1799, Schlegel wrote to his brother August Wilhelm that Plato's dialogues had directly influenced the composition of Lucinde,46 The unfinished Grundsätze zum Werke Platons and Philosophie des Platons hint at rather than fully develop Schlegel's notion of a past »collective individuality« as an update on Plato's pre-birth collective soul. Like Plato, Schlegel contends that only images of a past idea are accessible to the present self, and he also models his trajectory of the derivation of the individual from the collective on Plato's theory of anamnesis (»Rückerinnerung«), in which the progress (or regression) of the self through life is always informed by its reaching back to the unity that existed before birth and that awaits after death. Schlegel comments on this theory, which is found primarily in the Theatetus, as follows: Die Lehre von der Rückerinnerung setzt die Präexistenz der Seele notwendig voraus; an diese schließt sich nun die Lehre von der Seelenwanderung. In der intellektuellen Welt konnte der Mensch nicht unsern unvollkommenen Körper haben, ohne allen Körper konnte er nicht anschauen, dies ist ja aber schon eine Art Seelenwanderung, aus einem vollkommenem in einen schlechtem Körper, aus der vergangenen folgt die künftige nun ziemlich von selbst Die Voraussetzung von der Präexistenz der Seele, wenngleich sehr einfach, befriedigend und erklärend, ist doch immer sehr willkürlich ( Κ Α X I I : 220).

4! 46

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Halbwachs, O n Collective Memory, ed. and trans, by Lewis A. Coser, 1992, p. 168. Letter of Friedrich Schlegel to August Wilhelm Schlegel, March 8,1799. Cited in Luise Zurlinden, Gedanken Platons in der deutschen Romantik, 1976, p. 17.

Schlegel notes that Indian philosophy presents a more cohesive and convincing argument for the pre-existence of the soul than does Plato ( Κ Α XII: 221). Nevertheless, Schlegel accepts Plato's basic construction of a relationship between individual and general over time. In addition, Schlegel models his concept of love to a certain extent on Plato's anamnestic theory, but modifies it. »Plato leitet die Liebe zwar aus der Erinnerung her, aber diese bezieht er bloß auf den Verstand. Die Liebe, wie er sie darstellt, ist nur die undeutliche Erkenntnis der ewigen Schönheit, die Bewunderung des von dem höchsten Verstände entworfenen Urbildes« ( Κ Α XII: 220). SchlegePs concept of anamnesis relates memory to feeling, as in the following passage referring to the psychic pain of memory on a collective scale: Das Welt-Ich hatte seinen Ursprung vergessen: es findet ihn wieder. Dieses Wiederfinden ist die Erinnerung', diese Erinnerung aber muß mit Schmerz und Reue verbunden sein, über den wo nicht gänzlichen, doch teilweisen Verlust der ursprünglichen Einheit, über den innern Zwiespalt und Kampf, der das Wesen des Welt-Ichs ganz zu zerrütten droht ( Κ Α XII: 435).

This painful remembrance and awareness produces yearning, which Schlegel calls the second level of anamnesis. The third level introduces consciousness of temporality, als Zurückgehen in den Anfang, mit dem Bewußtsein, daß es der Anfang ist.... (W)as die Zeit zur Zeit macht, ist die Vergangenheit. Auf der ersten Stufe strebte das Welt-Ich in der unendlichen Ausdehnung in eine unermeßliche Zukunft, jetzt erwacht die Erinnerung seines Ursprungs, der Vergangenheit, und so entsteht die Zeit ( Κ Α XII: 435).

For Schlegel, as for Schiller, Lessing, Herder, and Moritz, the use of the general (general words, expressions, images that could also be applied in other individual cases and are therefore to a certain extent arbitrary) reinstates at least some of the individual's lost power. This is in fact the only way to represent the individual's experience of meaning. The memory of the pre-birth collective soul is always with us throughout our individual lives, and its representation is constituted by a movement between the present consciousness of the derived self and representations of the past collective self. This anamnestic movement of representation culminates in the »appearing sense« of the art work, which evokes present and past simultaneously. Schlegel describes this anamnestic movement as representational process in the following passage: Die Philosophie eines Menschen ist die Geschichte, das Werden, Fortschreiten seines Geistes, das allmähliche Bilden und Entwickeln seiner Gedanken Wenn der Philosoph eine bestimmte Quantität von Wahrheiten vorzutragen hat, kann er immer die Form eines geschlossenen Systems, einer systematischen Abhandlung, eines systematischen Lehrbuchs wählen. Hat er aber mehr zu sagen, als in diese Form sich bringen läßt, so kann er nur suchen, in den Gang und die Entwicklung und Darstellung seiner Ideen jene eigentümliche Einheit zu bringen, die den objektiven Wert der Platonischen Werke ausmacht ( Κ Α XI: Ii8ff).

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Like Novalis, Schlegel refigures Plato's mnemonist as a romantic philosopherartist. Schlegel expresses this through strong emphasis on the contemporary artist's ability to intuit and construct symbolic correspondences between past and present, individual and collective, part and whole, chaos and system. At the same time, Schlegel deemphasizes the value of sources and documents, instead stressing the palimpsestic, anamnestic construction of consciousness. This standpoint comes in large part from his conviction that time is not directly representable in finite form, as it belongs to the absolute; this conviction in turn springs from his rejection of linear and cyclical models of history. Azade Seyhan writes that for the Early Romantics, the past provided no insight, the present was chaos, and the future could not be visualized, since the recurring pictures of history were irreparable damaged. ... (Time) moved into the metaphysical space of the absolute, where art alone could claim to represent it, albeit nonmimetically. 47

Where empirical historiography recorded as narrative fails, transcendental memory represented in art takes over. But rather than constitute part of a solipsistic, completely subjective turn, this memory still relies on empirical reality, at least to the extent that a body is necessary to house the mind. Memory will also fail in its transcendental task - and the fragmentary form within which it contributes to approximate representation of the absolute will be only a ruin rather than both a monument to the past and an anticipation of a future whole - without a relationship of recognition between present and past, self and other. For Schlegel as well as for Novalis, »(d)as universale Gedächtnis, dessen Vielfalt einen Eindruck von der absoluten, im transzendentalen Gedächtnis verloren gewußten Einheit gibt, ist geschichtliches und lebensgeschichtliches Gedächtnis zugleich.« 4 ® When Schlegel translates these movements of memory and consciousness into a philosophy of history, the result is a definition of historiography as representable only through recollection and as fragment, rather than as narrative.

4.

Historiography as Fragmented Recollection Rather Than as Narrative Documentation

What Azade Seyhan calls the »exoticized history« of Early Romanticism requires an other, but is primarily a reflection on the self, and on how self-identity is constituted through difference. 49 This reflection on the other in order to 47 48 49

Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents, pp. 58-59. Manfred Koch, »Mnemotechnik des Schönen,« p. 89. Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents, p. 9. For instance, both »Weimar Classicism and Jena Romanticism... return to ancient Greece to uncover there an >archaeo-

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know the self is, like all activities of Romantic consciousness, temporal, and depends therefore on an imaginative memory of a collective past. For instance, Schlegel positions classical antiquity as the »other« in order to gain perspective on the present (ΚΑ XVIII: 24, no. 66). But in Jena, as well as in texts written in Berlin and Cologne during and after his process of conversion to Catholicism, Schlegel's view of historiography emphasizes possibility rather than actuality. Historiography must tell everything that could happen rather than simply what did, as no coherent and unifying narrative can be constructed based on actual events. As Karl Menges argues, with the concept of »progressive Universalpoesie,« whose »open-ended historical proposition suggests a modernistic emancipation from Antiquity based on a new aesthetic consciousness, Schlegel leaves the modern world in a more advanced, yet also more alienated state of affairs.«'0 In the Transzendentalphilosophie of 1800-1801, Schlegel describes the task of a historicizing philosophy, and of a philosophy of history. Aphorismus: Die Tendenz der Philosophie geht aufs Absolute. Aber nicht auf ein relativ Absolutes, sondern aufs absolut Absolute. Auch das Absolute theilen wir nach der Methode der Mathematik in zwey Faktoren. Den negativen Faktor finden wir, wenn wir den Gegensatz nehmen von unbedingt, und das ist das Bedingte. Dies hängt gleichsam an einer unendlichen Kette zusammen, deren ursprüngliches oder erstes, so wie jedes Glied schlechthin etwas Einzelnes ist. Das Ursprüngliche heißt auch das /Primitive, und der Gegensatz davon ist Totalität. Ein Wissen von dem Ursprünglichen oder Primitiven giebt uns Prinzipien. Und ein Wissen der Totalität giebt Ideen. Ein Prinzip ist also ein Wissen des Ursprünglichen. Eine Idee ist ein Wissen des Ganzen ( Κ Α X I I : 4, no. 2).

A representation of knowledge of past and future wholes is only achieveable in nonmimetic art, and then only if the anamnestic movements that make aesthetic portrayals of the past possible are ironic - ironic in a positive sense of negotiating contradictions in the art work, and permitting it to represent both an idea of totality and its own finitude.5' This ironic positing of the simultaneous existence of totality and limitation differs from Novalis's portrayal of similar paradoxes; in Novalis's fragmentary writings memory enables the portrayal of a connection between past, present, and future that is completely unattainable and thus often mystified through fiction and essays that read like fiction (such as Die Christenheit oder Europa or Glauben und Liehe).

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logy< of themselves. Schlegel and Novalis add India and the Near East respectively to their historical-textual itinerary. Thus, representations of antiquity and the Orient are thinly veiled allegories of contemporary Germany. In other words, representations of otherness are self-representations.« Menges in: Critchfield and Koepke, p. 149. Gerald Izenberg explicates this notion of irony's function for the art work in: Impossible Individuality, p. $5. 161

But for Schlegel historiography is still aestheticized (since poetry in particular is best suited to representing knowledge) and portrayed as founded in memory (»der Anfang aller Geschichte, sowie der Anfang und die Grenzen unserer Erkenntnis sind einzig in der Erinnerung und Ahnung zu suchen. Unser Inneres, ohne alle andere Hilfsmittel, ist das einzige, was zu einiger Kenntnis von dem Anfang der Welt führen kann,« Κ Α XII: 421). History itself is collective memory. »Die Geschichte ist ihrer Natur nach durchaus poetisch, sie ist die Erinnerung des Menschengeschlechtes, ihrem Inhalt nach unendlich« (ΚΑ XI: 114). Such portrayals derive in part from Vico's historicization of memory and his assertion that poetics form the foundation of knowledge. Schlegel's disavowal of material reality and empirical history enables this privileging of memory as the precondition for historiography to continue. Schlegel echoes Vico's conception of a prophet-mnemonist as the ideal historian when he says: »Der Historiker ist ein rückwärts gekehrter Prophet« (KA II, 80). The prophet must believe that totality is achievable (i.e., he must be »enthusiastic«52) and know that allegory (memory) is the only way of representing it; in other words, he must know that totality is not achievable. The prophet-historian, like Novalis's genius-artist in Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, risks seeing only himself in the mirrors of history. But he escapes this fate when he acts aesthetically in the interest of a community. Schlegel's prophet-historian is a poet who has the function of helping others to a collective identity via poetic communication, and specifically through a communication that refers to mythological and Christian mnemonic rituals. The Rede über die Mythologie grants this »apostolische Funktion« to poetry. Poetry verkündet in bildkräftigen Symbolen, was bis dato nur den in die Mysterien der Transzendentalphilosophie Eingeweihten zugänglich war. Poesie soll damit im Ausgang von den Raisonnements der Philosophie leisten, was die überkommene Religion nach der Aufklärung nicht mehr leisten kann: sie soll der Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der analytischen Vernunft eine kollektive Identität ausbilden helfen. 53

Like Schiller and Herder, Novalis and Schlegel focus not so much on representing past events (empirical history) as on representing »the past« of consciousness through the portrayal of fictional past events in literature, and through teleological abstractions in philosophy and writings on history. The result, history as possible rather than as actual, can on the level of representation lead to an emphasis on the virtual and the aestheticized rather than on the actual.54 This 52

53 54

Izenberg notes that »enthusiasm is the religious term Schlegel used to refer to genuine belief in an achieved totality,« Impossible Individuality, p. 59. Cited in Koch, »Mnemotechnik des Schönen,« p. 18. James Wilkinson provides concise differentiations between »history,« »past,« »evidence,« »remains,« »virtuality,« and »actuality« in A Choice of Fictions: Historians, Memory, and Evidence. In: P M L A 1 1 1 . 1 , 1996, p. 80. »The past is conceived (by historians) to include everything that ever happened, recorded or not; history, in con-

162

is apparent in Zur Geschichte und Politik (1826), in which Schlegel assigns Jews and heathens to opposite sides of his reciprocal pair of remembrance and anticipation, and uses that conceptual pair to explain the Diaspora: Man kann das jüdische Volk in seiner ganzen Beschaffenheit nicht besser bezeichnen, als durch den Begriff eines prophetischen Volks; denn vom ersten Anfang an war ihre ganze Existenz und selbst ihre Grundidee als Nation, auf die Zukunft gestellt; und dieß ist eigentlich] der Schlüssel zu ihrem Charakter, ihrer Geschichte, so wie auch für den Geist der Schriften des alten Bundes. - Eine strenge Losreißung von aller sie umgebenden Gegenwart, und den andern, mehr in der Erinnerung und Sage (als in der Zukunft und Hoffnung) dem Geist nach lebenden, heidnischen Völkern war dazu nun die erste, nothwendige Bedingung und Grundlage ihres (prophetischen) Daseyns ( Κ Α X X I I : 344, no. 1 0 4 ) . "

By asserting that different peoples experience time and situate themselves within it differently, Schlegel's theory of history contributes to his theory of consciousness. A similar dynamic is at work in Schlegel's fragmentary efforts to write a history of ancient Greece. The entire purpose of writing such a history is aesthetic as well as ethical: Nichts befreiet den menschlichen Geist so sicher und dennoch so sanft von Einseitigkeit der Meinung und des Geschmacks, als Beschäftigung mit dem Geiste andrer N a tionen und Zeitalter. Sie erhebt ihn allmählich zu einer rein-menschlichen Denkart, zu einem rein-menschlichen Gefühl, indem aus dem Conflikt der streitenden Meinungen die bleibende Wahrheit hervortritt.' 6

Schlegel also conceptualizes the art work as the form best suited to historiography. In a letter to August Wilhelm in 1793, Schlegel asks »ob sich nicht der ganze eigentümliche Charakter dieser (griechischen) Nation in der Darstellung eines ihrer Heroen und einer ihrer Katastrophen zugleich in einem Bild vereinigt geben ließe: ein Kunstwerk, welches die tätigste Wirksamkeit dieser Natrast, is what historians represent the past to have been. The remains of the past comprise what survives of everything that ever happened; evidence consists of those remains that historians use in making histories. Evidence, in other words, occupies the same relation to remains as history does to the past: it is a tiny subset of a far larger domain. But unlike the past, remains constitute an actual, not a virtual, reality and are thus subject to the effects of times. N o t everything in the past has left traces, and not all traces have survived. In the absence of remains, there can be no evidence, and in the absence of evidence, there can be no history.« 55

Schlegel's writings on the histories of cultures and nations often resemble historiography as the the history of collective mentalities, which Patrick Hutton describes in its twentieth-century incarnation as focused »on the structures of thought rather than on particular ideas ... habits of mind, conventions of speech, customary practices, and folk traditions... all such topics, by virtue of their identification with the inertial power of the past, led in one way or another to the underlying issue of the nature and resources of collective memory.« History as an Art of Memory, p. 1.

íé

KA XXII. 163

tion in einem Brennpunkt vereinigen würde.«57 In Ueber die weiblichen Charaktere in den griechischen Dichtern (1794), Schlegel portrays the history of female characters in Greek poetry as identical to the history of actual women in ancient Greece. He suggests that contemporary women invert this relationship and permit themselves to be educated by ancient art: »Sittengemählde des weiblichen Geschlechts und Beyträge dazu, verdienen also wohl einen Platz in einer für Damen bestimmte Sammlung.«'8 By communicating truths from the collective past, art shapes collective identity in the present." While these complicated intertwinings of concepts of history, memory, and art would seem to impede rather than facilitate portrayals of either empirical history or the transcendental past, memory, as the faculty of both mind and body that is indispensable to aesthetic-historiographic representation, has for Schlegel a clarifying and constructive capacity, unlike the documentation of »natural« history, which can only describe and is not the province of philosophy-poetry. Memory speaks from and of the »experience« of both feeling and reason (memory is at the basis of feeling and reason, Κ Α XII: 355). Recollection is therefore a more authentic way to build a sense of nation, of character, of selfhood, and finally of history itself. In his later theory, Schlegel conceives of collective memory as »Seelengefühl,« preserved in language by theorizing the »Ursprache« as something that came into being at the moment consciousness came into being, and that is preserved through collective memory, albeit only as fragments. In Zur Geschichte und Politik he writes: Die Ursprache muß also als das Centrum der andern (verschiedenen, ethnischen Sprachen) und zwar als entsprechend den drey Principien des Lebens und des vereinigten Bewußtseyns betrachtet werden. - Das tiefe Seelengefühl ist der Mittlepunkt in dieser, welches die menschliche Rede selbst vor der Geistersprache voraus hat; den magnetischen Seelenlaut könnte man es nennen. S7

Cited in Behler, Friedrich Schlegel, p. 24. ®8 Schlegel, Theorie der Weiblichkeit, ed. by Winfried Menninghaus, 1983, p. 12. Here again a similarity to Plato's thought is evident, as Schlegel agrees that women should be educated, but in a way different to that of men, as required by their different natures. " Maurice Halbwachs refers to the didactic effect of collective memories, which »consist not only of a series of individual images of the past. They are at the same time models, examples, and elements of teaching. They express the general attitude of the group; they not only reproduce its history but also define its nature and its qualities and weaknesses. When we say, >In our family we have long life spans,< or >we are proud,»speaking with the tongue of the present< (historiography) and spelling out the message of the present< (philosophy of history),« and continues: »whereas our presents are always inscribed with historical traces, we ascribe meaning to the past only when we seek in it answers to our own questions.« Making Bodies Making History: Feminism and German Identity, 1993, pp. 2jf. Compare also Azade Seyhan's delineation of Early Romantic notions of history (as »werdende Philosophie,« which can roughly be compared to »speaking with the tongue of the present«) and philosophy (as grounded in empirical history, systematic, distanced from the present - «spelling out« rather than »speaking with«), Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism, 1992, p.61. Knapp, Collective Memory and the Actual Past, p. 132.

!77

rates past, present, and future, and acknowledges that memory always takes place in the present and is both restorative and imaginative,22 bears more similarity to Romantic theories of memory and representation than does Knapp's tendency to subsume »life« to »text.« In Casey's theory of memory as well as in Early Romanticism, present perception and past experience are cathected in the »belated present« of the re-representation of the mind's depiction of a past perception. Casey defines this representative moment as the »clarification [of] an otherwise ambiguous or attenuated situation,« in which, whether instantaneously or slowly, the uncertainty as to whether the present object corresponds to the past experience is driven out by the »new light« of recognition.23 This illumination reveals the appearance of sense to the observer; it comes from the sensory interaction of observer and object, and reflects both the observer's interest in the object and the object's effect on the observer. Representation reveals the recognized object as »finally and fully expressive.« And, again, while this representation joins past and present, form and content, it also preserves memory and past experience, and protects memory from the amnesia of an eternal present. The representation of memory, for Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel in particular, necessitates a concept of the self as more than a monad who requires no objects and others and who is trapped in a self-referential language. The self-asmonad would have to definitively surrender actuality to virtuality in the form of what Schlegel calls »dies reine Denken des Gedankens des Ichs(, das) nur zu einem ewigen Sichselbstabspiegeln, zu einer unendlichen Reihe von Spiegelbildern führt, die immer nur dasselbe und nichts Neues enthalten.«24 Although Novalis's apprentice in the Lehrlinge zu Sais states: »Mich führt alles in mich selbst zurück,« and sees himself behind the goddess's veil, this seemingly selfcontained individual is the necessary precursor for social identity. There is no way to circumvent the primacy of the world-interpreting, world-creating self for the Early Romantics or for any of their literary representations of idealist concepts (the characters of Heinrich and Julius as well as of the apprentice, for example). But the automatic distancing effect of memory, and the expression of difference between representation and referent, present and past that it entails, means that a collapse of identity into a world-encompassing subject is ultimately not achievable in aesthetic representation. The fragment, which re-depicts a present memory of a past event in the »belated present« of representation, also undermines the authority of a potentially totalitarian monad-subject 22

23 24

Edward S. Casey's theory, and particularly its usefulness for illuminating Romantic constructions of the relationship between self and other as necessitating recollection, is paraphrased in Chapter Two of this study, pp. 72-77. See also Casey's Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, 1987. Casey, Remembering, pp. 128-129. K.A X I I : 351.

I/»

by always displaying a gap between the form of an assertion and its content. Novalis, theorizing about the phenomenon of metempsychosis, envisions an eventual »Verdrängung des Individualprincips« that will lead to a »neue, haltbarere, fähigere Verbindung« after death. 2 ' This does not mean, however, that a meaningful sense of social identity or of intersubjective communication is not possible during life. In fact, the imperfect form of the fragment, which often does contain »recollections« of an unbelievably glorified past as well as anticipations of an equally aestheticized future, acknowledges the subject's present need to make the world out of something more than himself. Narcisissm and self-absorption certainly are possible and present in Romantic thought and texts. In addition, the Romantic concept of the task of history as the representation of the possible (or, as Schlegel writes: »Der Gegenstand der Historie ist das Wirklichwerden alles dessen, was praktisch notwendig ist« 26 ) could lead to a devaluation of the actual past and of discourse about it due to the conviction that intersubjective communication about the actual past is impossible.27 Ultimately, however, the Jena Romantics' treatment of memory, as contradictory and potentially problematic as it is, demonstrates how we can assimilate crises of memory, identity, and representation without losing critical capacity, without falling silent, and without surrendering the individual (understood as a member of a community of selves) to general discursive structures. This productive model for memory and meaning arises in part from what Paul de Man calls the historical changes in the definition of »imagination« as well as »memory« during the late eighteenth century. He writes that this is an ... evolution in poetic terminology (that)... corresponds to a profound change in the texture of poetic diction. The change often takes the form of a return to a greater concreteness, a proliferation of natural objects that restores to the language the material substantiality which had been partially lost. At the same time, in accordance with a dialectic that is more paradoxical than may appear at first sight, the structure of the language becomes increasingly metaphorical and the image - be it under the name of symbol or even of myth - comes to be considered as the most prominent dimension of the style. 28

As the authenticity of the original »idea« increasingly comes into question in Early Romanticism, the possibility of multiple representations in »images« (»Darstellungen,« also »Bilder«) is acknowledged and even celebrated. This awareness in Early Romanticism, and the »evolution in poetic terminology«

25 26 27

18

H K A III: 259, no. 100; also cited in Chapter Five. Κ Α II: 178, no. 90. As maintained by Jacques Derrida with his notion of »violent« différance, or by JeanFrançois Lyotard's concept of the »sublimity,« and hence unrepresentability, of the Holocaust. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1976, p. 140, and Lyotard, Heidegger and »the jews,« 1990, pp.43-45. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 1984, pp. 1 - 2 . J

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that partly shapes it, is possible due to shifts in older paradigms of memory, and to their replacement with an aesthetics that encompasses a philosophy of history and is enacted in consciousness via the reciprocal, representative activities of remembrance and anticipation. These activities find expression in metaphors in pre-Romantic as well as in Romantic literary and philosophical fragments that portray memory in terms of »natural« objects and sensory experiences (Philomela's cloth, Heinrich's blue flower, the »musical« quality of »Gedächtnis«). The »keeping,« or »maintenance of composition« that characterizes aestheticizations of relationships between present and past selves and between self and other in Early Romantic fragments is enabled by recollection and by the awareness that that recollection occurs in a present that inevitably reshapes the past. The crisis of memory and representation occasioned in part by this awareness is subsequently the precondition for the continuation of intersubjective recognition and remembering. Although the Romantics are often accused of apolitical aestheticism, they did use cultural and aesthetic artifacts to search for meaningful social identity while representing ideas of origin and of the collective past. The Romantic model for memory presents a way of coping with loss not a model for mourning precisely in Freud's sense, but certainly a set of possibilities for creating meaning out of an otherwise terrifying void. The Romantic project of making meaning out of memories, and of constructing memories out of meaning, with all of its attendant ambiguities and uncertainties, persists in various forms today, whether in cultural products intended for mass consumption or in the »high« art Andreas Huyssen analyzes in order to assess the ways in which it represents and shapes cultural memory. In 1801, Johann Wilhelm Ritter described the purpose of art as »Vergegenwärtigung des Abwesenden, Monument. Die Geliebte selbst aber ist mehr als ihr Bild.« 2 ' If the individual's ability to exercise reason within the general »house of language« is recognized, then art can assume a monumental rather than a reactionary nostalgic function, 30 and yet also not become a substitute for, or escape 29

3

Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers, 1969,

P·1^· ° Here I borrow from James E. Young's definition of monuments as imagological entities that serve ethically responsible purposes, as opposed to the type of solipsistic nostalgia that Azade Seyhan identifies as also present in Romanticism (»a form of selfworship through veneration of relics associated with its own development,« Representation and Its Discontents, p. 21 [also cited in Chapter Five, note 72]). Young calls monuments »a subset of memorials: the material objects, sculptures, and installations used to memorialize a person or thing« in The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, 1993, p. 4. This definition is more consistent with Seyhan's description of the potentially progressive and ethical side of nostalgia in Romanticism: »a vital link to a history facing the threat of being forgotten,« Representation and Its Discontents, p. 21.

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from, a confrontation with a historical reality that will always be »more« than its representation. Schlegel writes: Das Wesen des Verstandes (which, Schlegel notes earlier, is based on memory) besteht aber in der Freiheit des Denkens und in der Anordnung der Konstruktion. Das freie Denken ist in der Einbildungskraft gegeben, der Verstand ist nicht, wie diese, ganz frei, aber auch nicht so gebunden, wie die Vernunft; er ist tätig, aber geordnet. ... Dieser Zweck, dieses Geschäft muß im Ich, in dem Gebiete des Bewußtseins gesucht werden; denn würde es außerhalb desselben gesetzt, so würde der Verstand unter die Herrschaft eines Dings geraten.31 The subtext of remembering in Early Romantic texts depicts hope f o r the possibility of a sensory, creative memory that belongs to a free intellect whose limitless possibilities are represented in limited form. Although the Romantics never completed a »universal poetry« portraying a »universal history,« their conceptions of the mnemonic movements necessary to produce such a poetry contribute to a model for memory and representation that suggests not only how, but what, to remember.

' ' Κ Α XII: 386. 181

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193

Index of Names

Adelson, L. 40—41, 831187, 1771120

Fraser, Ν . 97Π40

Adorno, T. 18, 35

Freud, S. 52, I5in28, 153, 1 7 2 , 1 7 5 , 180

Aristotele 22Π57, 43> 44' 5^>

63, 94~ Gatens, M. 7 5 ^ 4 , 87-88, 96, 97

95, 115, 131, 135 Augustine ién2é, 39,

42ηΙ3Ι>

44~45,

44 η Ι 39> 4 5 η Ι 4 ' > Ι53"34

Geyer, M. 1 4 2 ^ Goethe, J.W. v. 2 i n 5 i , 23, 58, 64, 7^> 79,

135

Baudelaire, C . 10, 32, 74~75

Goldmann, S. ΐ7 η 2 9> 33—34

Beaujour, Μ . ιι8η4ο, 139

Grätzel, S. 99, 106—107

Behler, Ε. ι ο ί , 149, 158 Benjamin, J. 38m 18

Habermas, J. 97Π40

Benjamin, W. 10, 34, 35, Ι 47 η ι *>, '75

Halbwachs, M. 158, 1 6 4 ^ 9

Bennett, Β. 77~78, 87, 88-89,

Harth, D. 12-13, 1inlz,

Ι02>lé6>

167

44, 54

Haslinger, J. 45

Bergson, Η. 175

Heftrich, Ε. ιθ5η8, ιΐ7Π38

Böhme, J. 23, ι ο ο - ι ο ι

Hegel, G.W.F. 11, i¿—13, I2n8, I3ni2,

Bouveresse, J. I5in28 Braungart, G . 19, ΐ9Π40, 7 1 , 7 2 Burke, P. 35, 42 Carus, F.A. 47 Caruth, C . 1 1 5 ^ 5 , 153 Casey, E. 48-51, 53, 1 7 7 - 1 7 8 Chamfort, S. i44nio Cicero 23né2, 60, 174 Collingwood, R . G . 29 Condillac, E. i6n26, 45ni42

16, 26, 32, 56, 85, 93, ioin53, 130, 156, 167 Heidegger, M. 98-99 Heller, A. \ j7n20 Herder, J.G. 8, 19, 22, 31, 3 1 ^ 3 , 37, 55, 58, 61, 62, 63, 71-74, 75, 77, 78, 85, 86, «7, 154, 159,

i62>

i67

Hesiod I28n69 Hölderlin, F. i6n26, 28n82, 32, 35, 92, 921121, 129 Hörisch,J. 27, 127

Dällenbach, L. 23, 23n64, 130

Hofmannsthal, H. v. 173

Damasio, A . i 7 4 n i o

Hume, D . 61, 115

D e Man, P. 54-55, 82n84, 120, 179

Hutton, P. 26, 59, Ι55Π39, 1 6 3 ^ 5

Derrida, J. 55, 1 7 9 ^ 7

Huyssen, A . 16, i6n28, 42, 175—176,

Descartes, R. 22Π57, 46, 56, 85, 132

I75ni4, 177, 180

Diderot, D . 63 Donato, E. 32-33, 52-55

Izenberg, G . 107, 110, 146

Fichte, J.G. 4, 2in54, 32, 37, 47, 87, 88,

Jacobi, F. 88

89, 9°> 93, 94-98, 106, 109, 120,130, 131, i 3 i n 7 9 , I32n8i, 133, 134, 138, I42n4,

!5 2 > 1 54, 169

Kant, I. Ι5Π23, 32, 37, 62, 64, 67, 69, 81, 87, 88, 91-92, 93, 94, 99, 106, 120, 122,

Foucault, M. 4 i n i 2 8 , 168

131, I3in79, 133, 134, 135,136, 138,

Frank, M. i2nio, 15, 18, 89, 90, 92, 93,

139, 140

93Π25, 101, ioin53, 125, 131, 133-

Kluge, A . 43, 44

134, 137-138, Ι42Π4, 148, I48n2i, 156

Knapp, S. 27117% 176-178

194

Koch, M. 91-92, 1 1 3 , 1151133,119, 132, I

53 n 34 Krell, D.F. 51, 99, 100 Kühn, S. v. 105, 106, 1061113, I2 8> 1361195, 147, 1551139 Kuzniar, A. 4, 141115, I5n2i, i6n26, 18, 19, 24, 27, 28, 281181, 281182, 29, 30, 31. 3A 35. 37. 47, 103-104, 103114, 125, 126, 127, 128-129, I 4 ° . H5 Lacoue-Labarthe, P. 6, 1 1 , 13, 14, 15, 141115, I4ni8, 18, 241165, 25, 26, 38, 40, 100, i n , 128, 139, 144118, 148 Leibbrand, W. 11115, 201142, 23, 6i, 73-74 Leibniz, G.W. 95, 172m Lessing, G.E. 8, 22, 37, 55, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63. 74, 75, 76-77. 78, 83, 85, 152, 154, !59 Libeskind, D. 175m 5 Librett, J. i65n6o Lichtenberg, G . C . 173 Locke, J. 45, 61, 115 Lyotard, J.-F. 1791127 Mahl, H.-J. 28n82 Maimón, S. 22 McFarland, T. 26 Menges, Κ. 71, 142, ι6ι Mein, M. 25071, 122 Mesmer, Α. 20, 109 Molnár, G. v. 4, 138, 172 Moritz, K.P. 8, 19-23, Ι9Π40, 2in5i, 39, 53, 55, 5 8 , 6 l , 74, 78-85, 86, 123, 135, 136, 140, 154, 159 Nancy, J.-L. 6, 1 1 , 13, 14, 15, I4ni5, I4ni8,18, 24065, 25, 26, 38, 40, 100, i n , 128, 139, I44n8, 148 Negt, O. 43, 44 Neumann, G. 5, 2 4 ^ 5 , 82-83, i n n 2 5 , I 2n 5 33> ! 7 2 , '73, 174-175 Neumann, R H . I2n9, 144, 148-149 Nibbrig, C. 23, 2 3 ^ 4 , 130 Niethammer, I. 88 Nietzsche, F. 2 3 ^ 4 , 25, 173, 175 Novalis 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 1 1 , 12, i6n26, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25, 28n82, 29, 30, 31, 3*, 35,45-46, 47, 5 1 , 53, 6 l , 88, 90, 9Z_93> 94, 98, 99, 101-102, 103-141, 142-143, 142114, 146, 147, 152, 154, 155-156, Ι55Π39, 159, 161, 162, I ^4 n 59, 168, 178, 179

O'Brien, W.A. 4, 138, 140 Ostermann, E. 148 Ovid 78, 80-83 Paracelsus 20, 23, 104, 109 Pfefferkorn, K. 128, 140 Pfotenhauer, H. 33nioi Pikulik, L. 146-147 Plato 3, 22, 22Π56, 43, 44, 51, 56, 57, 85, 105, 144, 158—160, 1 6 4 ^ 8 , 169 Plotinus 20, 23, 104, 109 Proust, M. 25, 25Π72, 27, 34, 122, 175 Reinhold, K. 88 Richter, S. 19040, 57, 57n5, 61-62, 72, 7577, 821184, 83, 152 Ritter, J.W. 180 Rousseau, J.-J. i6n26, 75, 1 3 6 ^ 7 , 144010 Ruder, K. 135, 136 Saine, T.P. 1 9 ^ 0 , 80 Scarry, E. 410130, 83-84 Schelling, F.W.J. 4, I2n8, 23, 29, 30, 45, 46, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 98-101, 107, Ι42Π4, 152 Shelley, M. 38-39 Schiller, F. 8, 23, 37, 55, 58, 62, 63, 64-71, 7 2 , 7 4 , 7 5 , 7 7 , 7 8 , 85, 86, 87, 154, 159, 162, 167 Schlegel, A.W. 145, 158, 163 Schlegel, F. 2-3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 1 1 , 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 23, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 38,43, 54, 5 5, 78, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 98, 99, 100, 101-102, 107m5, I I I , 112, 122, I23, I29, I42-I7O, I72, 178, 181 Schleiermacher, F. 38, 92-93 Schopenhauer, A. 106 Schrimpf, H.J. 20, 46 Schubert, G.H. v. 46, 460151 Seeba, H. 311193 Seyhan, A. 4, 5n7, 1 1 , 15, 16, i6n26, 18, 19, 24, 29, 52, 94, Ι29Π72, 134, 142114, 147, 1 5 1 , 1 6 0 , i6on49, 167, 168, 169, Ι77Π20, i8on30 Shoemaker, S. 1 2 4 ^ 6 Simonides 23, 60, 83, 174 Serensen, B.A. 79 Spinoza, B. 75, 75n64 Stewart, S. Iiin23, ii2n3o Strauß, B. 173, 174

195

Terdiman, R. 5, 6, 9 - 1 1 , 151123, 16-17, 27, 29, 30, 54, 57116, 89, 91, 106, 122, 168, 175, 176 Todorov, T. i n i , 211151, 39, 63, 80, 84

Wilkinson, J. ιο8ηΐ7, 1621154 Winckelmann, J.J. 58, 62, 76 Wittgenstein, L. I5in28 Wordsworth, W. 32, 1 1 3 ^ 2 , 1 3 2 ^ 3

Uerlings, H. 103—104, 103114, 104115, n o , 140

Yates, F. 13 5 Young, J.E. i8on30

Vico, G. 55, 58-61, 64, 65, 85, 86,162, 166

Ziolkowski, T. n n 5 , 31-32, 34, 47, 116-117

196