Poetical Nightshade Sabbaths
Jean Paul and Jean Baudrillard on Outgrowing Horror
Some Brief Literary News
In advance of Halloween, my friend Eric Williams, editor of Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation, talked with Cristina Politano at minor literature[s] about the anthology. If you’re interested in literary history and the history of horror literature in particular, I highly recommend reading this interview. [minor literatures] will also feature one of Eric’s original stories on Halloween. Keep a lookout for that.
Jeffrey Zuckerman will be giving what promises to be a very interesting connecting literary translation and land art at Princeton University on October 29th at noon (Held at Simpson 144). From Princeton’s announcement:
“What happens when we move away from thinking about translation as "this little art," to be considered in terms of beauty and fidelity, and begin envisioning translations as sculpture, or architecture, or land art? Jeffrey Zuckerman will talk about the ways in which a wide-angle approach to translation — pushing the limits of English syntax, and the literary canon, and the real world — can reshape our intellectual landscapes, our cultural contexts, and even ourselves.”
This speaker series, put on by the University’s Program in Translation & Intercultural Communication, has been excellent and less strictly academic, at least in my experience, than you might imagine. Last month, I attended a talk from Will Evans, founder of Deep Vellum publishing house, who talked about literary entrepreneurship and the responsibility of publishers to cultivate new readerships outside of elite institutions. Not very Princeton, seemingly, but it was well received regardless. Zuckerman’s talk should be different but also compelling.
The writer Gary Indiana has died, chronicler, as he put it, of the “depraved indifference” of late 20th century American life. A veteran (in more ways than one) of the New York City cultural scene, he was art critic for The Village Voice from 1985 to 1985 and active in the experimental theater and film scene, but was best known—that’s how I came to know of him—for his crime writing. Resentment, a lightly fictionalized account of the Menendez Brothers trial, was recommended to me as a good introduction to his work. I haven’t read that one yet, or any of his other books for that matter, but Indiana still exerted a kind of gravitational force. This piece in Granta, the last work to come out when he was alive, is a sad and lovely look back on an accomplished life:
It happens that validation can never be satisfied. With solidity comes decrepitude. The more we become what we intended to be, the less real the earlier versions of ourselves appear to us, and yet there we were, who we were, forever for all time a monad on its travels.
Poetical Nightshade Sabbaths
As Halloween approaches, I’m reminded of how much Jean Paul disliked the morbid. This might come as a surprise to the (very few) people who have read him. His books are filled with occult imagery and freaks (medical or otherwise)—he even coined the term doppelgänger in his 1796 novel Siebenkäs—and yet JP affirms time after time that, no, he is not a morbid writer, and in fact that he detests the new Romantic generation writing in his footsteps. Here is a representative passage, aimed at E.T.A. Hoffmann and Ludwig Tieck, from the preface to the second edition of The Invisible Lodge:
Fortunately, this romantic madness induces not only tears but laughter, which is called humor or caprice. For the sake of brevity, I refer here only to the artful Friedrich Hoffmann, whose Callotesque fantasies I earlier praised and recommended in a special preface, when he was of much lower standing and stood closer to me. More recently, however, he has driven these humorous characters to such romantic heights—especially in the unhinged fellowship of his morning, midday, afternoon and night spirits, which no longer partake of solid ground or pure daylight—that his humor really does border on real madness; something Aristophanes and Shakespeare, and Rabelais, never sought to achieve. In his early work, the cheerful Tieck made a few mad leaps at these humorous nightshade berries, but as a fox let them hang, keeping to the Bacchus berry vintage of delight – –
This much should demonstrate how willingly and joyfully the author accepts the highflying vantage of contemporary literature. Indisputably, belladonna (as the deadly nightshade is called) has become our muse, our prima donna and madonna, and we live in a poetical nightshade sabbath.
When I first translated this passage, I found it difficult to parse, and not just in the usual Jean Paul way of being difficult to parse, meaning gnomic in the extreme. I just didn’t think he was right. Hoffmann is a writer that I immensely admire and cherish (not always the same thing) precisely because of this “poetical nightshade sabbath”, an unmistakable dark atmosphere shot through with ludicrous but immensely satisfying supernatural narratives. He was an inspiration, along with Kleist and Kafka, for me learning German in the first place, and when I began reading Jean Paul, I was happy to see one of Hoffmann’s literary forbearers. But it was, as the passage suggests, very much a one-way admiration between the two, and I was relieved to find out that it is very unlikely Hoffmann would have read JP’s preface since he was, among other reasons, ill with the syphilis that would eventually kill him at the age of 46.
So why on earth was Jean Paul, being such a strange writer himself, so opposed to morbid imagery? It has to do, I think, with his background as an Enlightenment writer and a resultant horror at pessimism and irrationalism, even if that runs counter to a disposition deeply interested in what Agent Fox Mulder once called “extreme possibilities” that is to say freaks in the most general sense, a deep interest in the abnormal. Jean Paul could, for example, write in graphic detail about embryology and obstetrics, make jokes on those subjects, relating with unvarnished enthusiasm the birth of a two-headed calf or a two-headed child. But—and this his a critical distinction for him—he resists the tendency to derive from these births the idea that the universe is uncaring or cruel, or rather merely and only uncaring and cruel. This was largely because JP was, especially at the time of writing that preface, like Hoffmann, not long for this world but considerably older, and he thought of his earlier morbidity as a folly of his youth.
But it is just as certain that youth, this living poetry, in the midst of its blossoming branches (which already also bear fruit) and its warm sunny hills, loves nothing better than to read and write nocturnal mediations; and not only for the lovesick maiden, but also for the lovestruck young man—who await their slaughter with far more enthusiasm than old men—does the churchyard impend like a hanging garden in the air, and they long to be transported upward. Youth knows only green flowered barrows, but old age opens graves lined without verdure.
This youthful view now benefits the author, who wrote this work at a tender age, with its all too frequent burials and meditations on transience. –However, a not too timorous justification is needed here; for we swim in ever all-annihilating and all-destroying time, and we descend by the lesser grave of every minute into the greater one of the last hour: so here not the shy sideward glance of poetry—concerning evils that touch but a few and but rarely—rather a brave upward gaze can become poetical and vivifying., where no earthly power intervenes, sun and spirit have no setting and no grave.
Looking back on his life, which fortune granted a full two decades more than Hoffmann, Jean Paul found more reasons than he had previously to celebrate. His early days as a writer he called “the vinegar factory” and it was only when he turned to sweeter narratives (though no less strange) like that of the gentle crank pastor Maria Wutz that he achieved acclaim and a measure of worldly success. Jean Paul must have felt Hoffmann and Tieck were little children playing childish games with him, pulling him back to the days before he found his footing. He saw these younger writers, I imagine, in a similar way to how the theorist of hyperreality Jean Baudrillard, writing almost two centuries later, would see the American custom of Halloween.
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world. The threat from this evil force hangs over adults here, equal in intensity only to their devotion to children. There is nothing more unhealthy than this childish sorcery, behind all the dressing up and the presents—people turn out their lights and hide for fear of harassment. And it is no accident that some of them stick needles or razor blades into apples or cookies that they hand out.
From America
Now that Halloween is a thoroughly globalized holiday, I find Baudrillard’s fussy snobbish complaints—complete with a reference to discredited legends about spiked candy—amusingly quaint. That battle has been lost for decades. And anyway, in our geriatric, safety-obsessed society, adults are the ones playing tricks, depriving their children of unstructured playtime spent exploring their neighborhoods, forcing them to take candy in parking lots in daylight. But time collapses all such fine distinctions. The difference between Jean Paul and Hoffmann is quibbling precisely because all the principal actors have passed away, just as Halloween without trick or treating will matter less and less to children who celebrate the holiday differently. What remains, Jean Paul says, is the creative act, rather than youthful merrymaking.
Poetry not only boldly opens up our earthly tombs, but shows how art lies between realms and how we oscillate between entombed and exhumed. –And if we only sun ourselves as merrymaking mayflies, actual midday mayflies, in the rays of the setting sun and then sink: not only do the flies sink but the sun sinks also; but in the wide-open spaces of creation, where no earthly power intervenes, sun and spirit have no setting and no grave.
I suppose near the end of his life all Jean Paul had were his books. He died, it bears repeating, just a few years after writing this preface. But it’s a genial image, paradisiacal, wrapped in lovely alliteration, and correct for the most part. Despite putting down Hoffmann, I’ll credit the old man for getting the important part, that there is some redemptive power in poetry, right.
