Instrumentos a utilizar

As Jane K. Brown has shown, the Kunstmärchen around 1800 often comprises an allegorical medium in which concerns associated with the French Revolution, “the central political event for the Romantic generation,” as Brown puts it, can be dramatized and contested (although one whose revolutionary aesthetic form far outstrips the “limited political

81

revolutionariness” of its content; a view Brown shares in part with Jack Zipes’ seminal work on fairy tales, Breaking the Magic Spell).125 In a study on Goethe’s 1795 Märchen—the conclusion to the Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderter, and to no small extent also the beginning of the generic Kunstmärchen tradition so important to his Romantic contemporaries—Brown notes that Goethe’s Märchen is now generally accepted as one of his many literary responses to the contemporary crisis of revolution. This response, more specifically, is understood as aligning with his concurrent morphological interests: the text’s spatial and generative semantics, Brown claims, provide an implicit description of “how to purify monarchy rather than abolish it and how to control the mayhem of the Revolution.”126 In Goethe’s fairy tale, the primal event of revolution appears in a greater process of emergent change that ultimately recycles back to stability. The text charts a path away from a state of anarchic chaos and towards the

reestablishment of order, an evolution that is formally reflected in different representative movements—above all through the central image of the bridge—that structure the text’s narrative territory. Marked by a series of metaphorical and literal synapses, for Brown this territory is mapped out along the lines of attraction and repulsion that characters follow within the diegetic and conceptual bridge spaces of Goethe’s Märchen.

More significant for the present concerns, Zipes describes the progressive political import of the contemporary Kunstmärchen genre in closer reference to Romanticism. He takes note of the general revolutionary character of Frühromantik: the early movement is “Revolutionary in form, revolutionary in content,” which immediately allows the following premise:

Here we have the basis for comprehending the rise of the romantic fairy tale in Germany. This does not mean that all fairy tales preached revolution, nor that the romantics were political revolutionaries in disguise. However, this premise does assume that the

125 _{Jane K. Brown, “Building Bridges: Goethe’s Fairy-Tale Aesthetics.” Goethe Yearbook, vol. 23 (2016): 16.} 126_{Ibid., 1.}

82

romantics were consciously aware of revolutionizing an older form of art under new socio-economic conditions which they perceived to be problematic.127

Thus for Zipes, as well as for Brown, the Kunstmärchen genre—in both form and content— contains clear layers that reflect the problematics of the sociopolitical environment, and can do so in different ways, serving the ends of divergent political ideologies according to the given text in question. The fairy tale can be conceived either as a drama of the revolutionary overturning of order (something, as we will see below, that Novalis emphasizes), or as a reterritorialization of chaos into a higher-order potentialization, into the monarchical form promising perpetual peace that Goethe suggests at the end of his own fairy tale (which will also inform the discussion of monarchy in Glauben und Liebe to a certain extent as well).128 In this sense, the Märchen constitutes an aesthetic genre for a new kind of political thinking in its own right perhaps above all because its protean nature renders it supple enough for activation across the political

spectrum, for a variety of positions. It is precisely here that the ambiguity of political affect arises as an important element within the Romantic discourse of the fairy tale. What is at stake is not just the revolutionizing of a literary genre within a generally problematic political situation, as Zipes points out, but the application of the fairy tale’s transformative model of emotion for revolutionizing the social situation at hand.

127 _{Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979), 48.}

128 _{One way to make sense of such differences in the political evaluation of fairy tale is through attention to the well-}

known terminological shift in the concept of revolution between the premodern and modern eras. In the former, “revolution” (revolutio) is understood as a return to an earlier state, as in the orbital cycles of celestial bodies moving along the preordained circuits described in Ptolemaic astronomy. In the latter, by contrast, the modern concept of revolution becomes a fundamental break in the determined course of all orders of life—not just of the political status quo—that departs from the “Wiederholungsstruktur” of premodern revolutio, as Jörn Leonhard puts it, by introducing a “linearen oder teleologischen Geschichtsvorstellungen” in which revolution is now “mit einer bis dahin unabsehbaren, verdichteten und beschleunigten Ereignisfolge identifiziert, zu der die Gewalterfahrung und die kurzfristige Erosion von ehemals legitimen Herrschaftsstrukturen gehörte.” This conceptual development, Leonhard continues, “imprägnierte weit über Frankreich hinaus das Verständnis und die Kontur von Revolutionskonzepten im langen 19. Jahrhundert” (Romanitk und Revolution, 85).

83

The fairy tale is an under-appreciated and fascinating literary form for Novalis, and even in its conventional appearances it already provides a sense of imaginative experimentation with sociopolitical reality. Inasmuch as it encourages such imaginative energy in Novalis’ view, it also comes to represent the transformative aesthetic activity par excellence, the most

existentially productive of artistic pursuits (what Schlegel terms Poesie in this same period).129 _It

is thus intimately related to the above described operations of romanticization; indeed it can be understood as the literary medium in which figures of romanticized Liebe are called into being in their most expansive, and effective, forms. Novalis uses the Märchen—sometimes only retaining the name, entirely evacuating its traditional content—as a framework to foreground such figures of order and disorder as they metamorphize and mutate, inciting intense emotions like love and hate, desire and envy. The Märchen is the place for reflections on the chaotic, but ultimately restorative admixture of individual and mass affects, bridging the gap between them, and for their application as interventions into the course of modern life. A major aspect here is also the mode of speculative intervention into historical consciousness that is developed in Novalis’ fairy tale paradigm. “Das Ende des Haders” performs exactly such an experiment on the modern consciousness of historical temporality, and is itself a concentrated Märchen: it injects a difference or alterity into the concept and progress of history itself, prefiguring the vision of eternal concord through a politics of love.

In Novalis’ terms, the crucial point is that the emotional, and thus socially effective content of the fairy tale is endowed with a force that is neither solely natural nor divine, but magical (magisch); for him, this specific aspect constitutes the undeniable impact that alters historical consciousness. Furthermore, this evident magical valence of the fairy tale form is

84

hardly unmistakable in a period in which politics itself seems to appear in a succession of “miracles”: “In unsern Zeiten,” Novalis observes, “haben sich wahre Wunder der

Transsubstantiation ereignet.”130 Perhaps the most surprising revolutionary ordo inversus131—the regicide of King Louis and the rise of the French revolutionary state—had already provided a Potenzierung of the Third Estate and a Logorithmisierung of the monarch, so to speak, raising the former to the sovereign “head” of the nation and negating, denigrating to the point of contempt, and ultimately executing the latter (and here perhaps another sense of what Novalis calls transubstantiation above). He elaborates the magical paradigm of Märchen as a response to this specific turn of events and to the general political instability of the age—similar to but in a more radical vein than Goethe’s, for the “order” of the Novalisian fairy tale is far more that of a chaos theory, as will become more clear below, even if it ultimately points to the regulative ideal of a future performance of perpetual peace. As Zipes points out, Novalis consciously took up the attempt to rethink—and revolutionize—the very concept of the fairy tale for a critical-utopian engagement with contemporary social, historical, and political change: this, in its broadest of terms, constitutes the thematic of Märchenpolitik in its most developed discourse of political aesthetics and affect.

130 _{Novalis, 2:498. Hans Blumenberg’s observation that: “Aus der spekulativen Physik Johann Wilhelm Ritters lernt}

Novalis Transsubstantiation als das natürliche Prinzip, aller physikalischen und chemischen Vorgänge kennen,” can be extended to the sociopolitical order of reflection as well: indeed, Novalis’ frequent use of substantives with the prefix trans (as we will see with the central terms Transmundaner and Transfiguration below) is by no means limited to the domain of the physical sciences (Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981], 237). Transformation, transfiguration, becoming-in-time through variable forms and figures of active metamorphosis—as a key concept not only in Novalis’ own thinking but also in the wider tradition of

Naturphilosophie in general (see Chapter 2)—such terms should be understood as the natural or operative principles of all diachronic phenomena, which is to say, of all things in the world, including political life.

131_{Ordo inversus is here meant as an inversion of the historico-political status quo. To be sure, this is not unrelated}

to the philosophical Umkehrung between levels of reflection that Manfred Frank and Gerhard Kurz refer to with this term (see Manfred Frank and Gerhard Kurz, “Ordo Inversus. Zu einer Reflexionsfigur bei Novalis, Hölderlin, Kleist und Kafka,” 75).

85

William Arctander O’Brien identifies two periods roughly separating the major works of Novalis’ oeuvre.132 The first period covers his stay in Freiberg from December 1797 to May 1799, resulting in the unpublished notebooks of the Freiberger Studien, Allgemeines Brouillon, and the Politische Aphrorismen, alongside the published fragment collections Blüthenstaub, Glauben und Liebe, and Blumen (the latter set of poems including “Das Ende des Haders”). This period saw an increasing thematization of the Romantic concept of love described above, and unmistakable in this context is also the concurrent emphasis on a discourse of magic at the center of the conceptual framework of the fairy tale. The discussion of Romantic love—or now in the Brouillon a romanticized love understood as part of a speculative futurology, reconceived in what Novalis calls a magical idealism (magischen Idealismus)133_{—punctuates this phase of his}

literary production. And it always appears in close proximity to his reflections on the sense of magical possibility modelled in the fairy tale: “Liebe ist der Grund der Möglichkeit der Magie. Die Liebe wirckt magisch.”134 In turn, the effect of such love, and more specifically the kind of Verbindung, Union, and Ehe that it ideally produces, constitutes the means and ends of

Märchenpolitik: “Uneigennützige Liebe135 _{im Herzen und ihre Maxime im Kopf, das ist die}

alleinige, ewige Basis aller wahrhaften, unzertrennlichen Verbindung, und was ist die

Staatsverbindung anders, als eine Ehe?”136 To respond to Novalis’ rhetorical question here with an answer from an entry in the Brouillon: Staatsverbindung, or the ideal political bond, only

132 _{O’Brien, 130.}

133 _{On magical idealism, see footnote 539 below.} 134 _{Novalis, 3:257.}

135 _{In his later work, Schlegel will essentially invert Novalis’ concept of “uneigennützige Liebe.” By contrast,}

Schlegel speaks of “uneigennütziges Verbrechen” as precisely the cause of all the political turmoil of the revolutionary period (see Chapter 4).

86

takes on the form and function of marriage when love becomes magical in the sense Novalis gives to it: “wo wahre Liebe vorkommt,” he writes there, “sind Mährchen—magische Begebenheiten.”137

But while love and magic represent the synthesizers, binders, and mediators within the system of the Novalisian fairy tale “genre,” the acts of unification they produce are not always reconciliatory, harmonious, or otherwise designed to pacify the turmoil of the contemporary sociopolitical situation. By contrast, the productive effect of applying the signal imaginative procedures of the fairy tale to everyday (social, political, and historical) life practices—such as by extending the paradigmatic form of the marriage union throughout all fields of present existence—these may just as well appear at first as an alienating influence, a widening of oppositions and an intensification of the chaos subtending all worlds and all orders, especially when fairy tale operations are understood to entail an outright revolutionary aspect. The

moments of coalescing elements that Novalis desires appear truly unified only when they reflect the energetic clash of their parts in juxtaposition, reproduced in an active movement of

alternation and combination, as opposed to represented in completed or perfected processes. Indeed, the theory of the Märchen postulates the break-through or transfiguration into an exponentially higher organization that does not come without a significant quotient of violence to status quo normative orders, and indeed constantly returns to its potential to disrupt or perturb its own evolving organization. In this sense, the critical re-conception of historical order as such, or the modern subject’s consciousness of it, propels Novalis’ development of Märchenpolitik. We find its beginning in his encyclopedia project.

87