Philosophy of/in Literature links

Nicole Im interviews philosophical novelist Joanna Kavenna.

Viorica Patea on 'Ana Blandiana and Hölderlin's Eternal Question'.

Erin Blakemore on 'Jane Austen and the Value of Flaws'. 

Duncan Richter on 'War and Peace and Wittgenstein'. From 2015, Henry W. Pickford's book Thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein: Expression, Emotion, and Art.

Danièle Moyal-Sharrock on 'Wittgenstein and Leavis: Literature and the Enactment of the Ethical'.

'Showing and Saying: An Aesthetic Difference' by Vicente Sanfélix Vidarte.

E. F. Mooney on 'Melville’s Moby Dick: Between Philosophy and Literature'.

From 2013, a conversation between E. F. Mooney and Dean Dettloff on 'Philosophical Style, Lyricism, Intimacy'.

Peter E. Gordon reviews Daphne Hampson's Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique.

Patrick J. Murray reviews recent books on Montaigne. 

Josephine Livingstone on Rachel Kadish's Weight of Ink. 

The latest issue of Philosophy of Literature has a symposium on "Literature and Moral Vision" (paywall).

Some Jeremias Gotthelf specs

Albert Bitzius was a Swiss clergyman who wrote didactic fiction under the name of Jeremias Gotthelf. Several films have been based on his work (all in German).

His most well-known story is Die Schwarze Spinne (The Black Spider -- on which see the posts by AR and WS). About this scary tale Thomas Mann said, "And so I read Jeremias Gotthelf, whose Schwarze Spinne I admire almost more than anything else in world literature" (p. 63 of Mann's The Story of a Novel, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (NY: Knopf, 1961) published in German in 1949).

This novella wasn't even published in English until 1957. According to the translator, H. M. Waidson, several other works by Gotthelf were translated into English in the 19th Century, including the novels Geld und Geist and Uli der Knecht. Interestingly, Der Besenbinder von Rychiswyl , an 1852 short story, was translated as The Broom Merchant by John Ruskin in serial form in 1873-6; this story was more recently translated by Robert Godwin-Jones for his 19th-Century German fiction site (hat-tip to Will for that source).

Ruskin didn't know German well enough and so translated from a French version of Gotthelf's tale. It's surprising, then, that (as Waidson reports) Ruskin revised Julia Firth's English translation of Uli der Knecht, as well as adding notes to it (this version was re-issued in 1907 as vol. 228 in Everyman's Library).

Ruskin prefaced his Broom Merchant translation with a brief bio of Gotthelf, in which he called Gotthelf "the wisest man, taking him for all in all, with whose writings I am acquainted" (quoting from p. 229 of Waidson's article). Waidson qualifies Ruskin's approbation as 'patronizing', for Ruskin regarded Gotthelf's works as vehicles of simple moral truths (what we might now call homespun or cracker-barrel wisdom).

I have posted a review of Black Spider.

Gotthelf's Black Spider

Image from here.
Jeremias Gotthelf's most touted story is his 1842 novella Die Schwarze Spinne (The Black Spider), which Thomas Mann professed to "admire almost more than anything else in world literature" (The Story of a Novel, trans. Richard and Clara Winston [NY: Knopf, 1961], p. 63).

This novella was not published in English until 1957, and was not among the most esteemed of Gotthelf's works until WWII, at which time it appears to have been co-opted by the Nazis. The story continued to grow in popularity in Germany after the war. It is not hard to see why; one of the story's motifs concerns the collective guilt of a community that has acquiesced in the evil plotting of one (or more) of its members.

I'll preface my review with a recommendation of these four posts on The Black Spider at Journey Round My Skull and of this review at Wuthering Expectations. I earlier provided some background information on Gotthelf.

The story begins in a Swiss village with preparations for a baptism. The villagers are affluent, indulging in a rich feast before departing for the church. They are keen to observe the social niceties and present themselves in accordance with the mores and customs of their community. After the baptism, they return to the parents' house for more socializing.

While lounging about, an old man tells a story about a window post in the house that looks out of place. It turns out that this post was taken from previous houses on this family's property. They preserve the post because it has for centuries imprisoned a monstrous spider. It is the family's duty to prevent the evil that lurks in this piece of their home from escaping.

The old man tells two tales, both of which are set centuries in the past.

The first story is set in the medieval era, when the Teutonic Knights ruled the area in which the village is located. The head knight commands the villagers to perform arduous tasks that leave them little time for their own farm work. The most burdensome of these tasks is to remove several large trees from a distant valley and erect them by the knight's castle.

The villagers realize that they cannot both complete this work and harvest enough food to get them through the winter. As they are complaining to each other, a green huntsman appears and offers to do most of the work required for re-locating the trees. His fee? Well, it turns out that he's Satan, and he wants the villagers to give him an unbaptized child. At first they refuse, but eventually one of the villagers, Christine, accepts the devil's terms. The other villagers are uneasy about this, but end up going along with the arrangement (by co-operating with the devil to move the trees). So the whole village is implicated in Christine's fiendish pact. They reckon, however, that they can refuse the devil his due by baptizing each newborn at birth.

Satan, of course, has prepared for this eventuality. When he made the agreement with Christine, he kissed her cheek, which made her feel "as if some sharp-pointed steel fire were piercing marrow and bone, body and soul." She sees his face "gleefully distorted," and then he disappears. (I'm quoting from p. 162 of German Novellas of Realism, Vol. 1, ed. Jeffrey L. Sammons, trans. H. M. Waidson [Continuum, 1989].) Commentators have long noted the sexual overtones of this passage, especially in view of the fact that the devil's kiss implanted the beginnings of a creature in Christine's face. When it becomes apparent that she plans not to keep her part of the deal, the creature grows in her face, taking the shape of a spider-like blemish. As it grows larger, it becomes clear that it really is a spider. Its growth causes Christine great pain, leading her to try and secure an unbaptized child for the devil.

At one point, the spider gives birth to a legion of smaller spiders which burst from Christine's face to torment and kill the villagers' cattle. A commentator, David Gallagher ("The Transmission of Ovid's Arachne Metamorphosis in Jeremias Gotthelf's Die Schwarze Spinne," Neophilologus, on-line preprint), says that on one longstanding interpretation the spiders represent the plague -- Christine is infected and the army of little spiders that spread from her are like germs that carry the disease.

After Christine's subsequent, failed attempt (abetted by other villagers) to steal a child, she undergoes a full metamorphosis into a large spider, or the spider in her face consumes her -- it isn't clear. This large spider kills many villagers. It does at least have the decency to kill also the local Teutonic Knights. Eventually, though, one heroic and pious woman, wishing to protect her kids from the spider, imprisons it in the window post. She does, however, suffer a spider bite, which kills her. The lesson is clear: a good mother is willing to lay down her very life for the sake of her children.

The second of the old man's stories is less involved. Briefly, a couple of centuries later a rash fool lets the spider out; it launches another reign of terror, which is ended only when another pious individual (this time a man) sacrifices his life in order to protect some children by putting the spider back in the window post.

The upshot of the old man's stories is that the villagers must always be pious and vigilant against the evil that lies within lest it erupt and destroy them all. Also, they must appreciate the significance of baptism, standing ready to sacrifice themselves for the well-being of their children.

I didn't really appreciate the point of Gotthelf's story until I read an article about it by Jamie Rankin ("Spider in a Frame" The German Quarterly 61 [1988]: 403-18). Rankin describes a narrative structure that typifies many of Gotthelf's stories: first, there is a framing narrative, in which a narrator (who is not a character in the story) describes some events that are roughly contemporary with their narration; the second part of the structure is an internal narrative, which appears when a character in the framing narrative recounts some events from the past. According to Rankin, Gotthelf used this structure for a didactic purpose. Briefly, the characters in the framing narrative exhibit some vice, the characters in the internal narrative more clearly exhibit the same vice, and the internal narrative is designed to impress upon the characters in the framing story the need to mend their ways.

Rankin then applies this template to The Black Spider, which requires finding some vice in the characters of the framing story. This runs counter to the interpretive tradition, though, since the frame narrative in The Black Spider seems to be full of merriment in a nice, solid community. So, what's wrong with the people in the framing story? Well, says Rankin, Gotthelf, a devout pastor, would surely not have approved of the villagers' attitude to the baptism. They see this religious ceremony mainly as a festive event, an occasion to socialize and display their material wealth (in the form of a great feast). Little thought is given to the religious purpose of the ceremony, the focus of which should be the well-being of the child.

For Rankin, the villagers' failure to attend to this point is an instance of the larger flaw of self-centredness. The focal concern for each person at the baptism seems to be her own reputation and the social game-playing that is designed to enhance it. As a result, the villagers come across as being too self-centred to care genuinely for the well-being of their peers (except insofar as their well-being is necessary for one's own). In short, each villager seems to regard his peers as mirrors, where what he really cares about is how he is reflected in their opinions. Such obsessive self-concern stands in marked opposition to the selfless care for others that Gotthelf prefers, and that is supposed to be at the forefront in baptism, a sacred rite performed for the sake of a new member of the community (and not an occasion to party or improve one's own social standing).

The villagers' self-centredness is reflected in an exaggerated, grotesque way in the internal narratives, especially the first one. There, the villagers end up trying to prevent a child's baptism, being prepared to sacrifice this potential new member of their community for the sake of their own material well-being. By contrast, the heroes in both internal stories display a thoroughly selfless devotion to the well-being of others (children in both cases).

Rankin doesn't mention Kant, but Kantian ethics fit nicely into Gotthelf's lesson, especially the Kantian idea that one ought never to treat others wholly as means but always as ends in themselves. The villagers in the framing story treat each other as mere means to self-praise, or to the ehancement of their reputations, showing little real concern for another person as an end in himself or herself (a locus of intrinsic value that may call for the sacrifice of something of one's own).

Finally, there is, sadly, blatant sexism in Gotthelf's work. For instance, in the second internal story there is this description of a male character: "... his will lay bound by that of his womenfolk, and such dependence is certainly a heavy sin for any man. ..." (p. 206). Again, we find this description of the fool who set the spider free: "... in the company at large he was like a ravening wolf and behaved as if he hated everyone, as if he wanted to outdo them all in wild deeds and words; but men like that are supposed to be just the most attractive to women." (p. 202) Also, Christine, an evil woman, is an assertive woman, and these traits seem to be linked in Gotthelf's view. (Worse still, she's from out of town!)

One critic, William Collins Donahue, has a paper in which he claims to excavate, by Freudian means, a deeper, pervading misogyny in Gotthelf's novella ("The Kiss of the Spider Woman," German Quarterly 67 [1994]: 304-24). I'm not convinced. I think the sexism is all on the surface, and once we dig deeper we find less sexism. For example, in Gotthelf's novella evil takes both male and female forms, there are powerful, scary male and femal characteres, both male and female characters exhibit the chief vice of the story, male and female characters make sacrifices for the sake of the children, male and female characters learn from the internal stories, etc.

Update (August 7, 2008): I've just found another interesting reference to The Black Spider, this time by Elias Canetti. On p. 216 of the Granta version of Canetti's A Torch In My Ear (part of his autobiography), he says that when his future wife, Veza, spoke highly of Peter Altenberg's work, he (Canetti) "found this ridiculous" and "opposed Altenberg with my Swiss writers: Gotthelf's The Black Spider and Keller's 'The Three Just Kammachers'."

Update (May 6, 2009): Oneworld Classics have re-issued Waidson's translation.

Update (July 30, 2009): Bill Marx has a short review at World Books.

Die Judenbuche (The Jew's Beech) by von Droste-Hulshoff

I've just read The Jew's Beech (Die Judenbuche), an 1842 novella by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. This story is her only completed prose work. She is known mainly for her poetry. Before Germany adopted the Euro, her image adorned the 20-Deutsche-Mark note, and an asteroid is named after her.

This month, Oneworld Classics is re-issuing the Calder & Boyars 1958 translation by Lionel and Doris Thomas (pictured above in orange), which also appeared in a volume of Continuum's German Library series. I read Michael Fleming's more recent translation. (The on-line translation, by Sir Edwin Nathaniel Bennett, was published by Oxford University Press in 1934 in a collection called German Short Stories [vol. 415 in the World's Classics series].) The above image on the right is of the cover of the new Oneworld edition.

The narrative is loosely based on a true story and is set in the village of B. (believed to be Bellersen, now part of Brakel) in Westphalia shortly before the French Revolution. Droste-Hulshoff characterizes the locals as a rowdy bunch who show little regard for the law -- they frequently poach game and pilfer timber from the surrounding woods.

The central character is Friedrich Mergel. We're told about his rough, lonely upbringing. His father, a wife-abusing alcoholic, dies while Friedrich is a child. The boy is then raised by his mother, Margreth, a bitter woman who shows him little, if any, tenderness. Margreth's malign character is revealed in a brief exchange with her son about Hulsmeyer, a neighbour. When Friedrich says that Hulsmeyer robbed and assaulted a Jewish acquaintance and also steals wood from the forest, Margreth insists that the neighbour is a good and respectable man. She doesn't deny that Hulsmeyer acted in the ways described by Friedrich. Instead, she tells her son that it's okay to take wood from the forest and proceeds to vilify Jewish people as swindlers and 'rogues'. Ironically, these traits are best exemplified by Margreth's younger brother, Simon.

The other villagers' superstitious nature leads them to believe that Friedrich's deceased father is an evil spirit haunting the woods. As a result, they generally don't interact with poor Friedrich.

The worst influence on the boy is his uncle, Simon, for whom Friedrich works in his adolescence. Simon, it seems, is part of a particularly destructive band of timber thieves. It also seems that he has co-opted his nephew into his criminal operation by putting him to work as a lookout. It's in this capacity that Friedrich sends an unwitting forest ranger to his death -- he deliberately gives the ranger inaccurate directions so that Simon can ambush the ranger. At least, that's what appears to happen. The ranger's murder, like the other three deaths in the tale, isn't portrayed in the story. In fact, throughout the story the narrator can convey only an unclear, incomplete presentation of the central facts. So it is possible that Friedrich himself killed the ranger. However, it is suggested in a later conversation between Friedrich and his uncle that Simon committed the murder and the boy merely set the ranger up (probably without realizing that the ranger would be killed rather than -- say -- beaten).

In the face of such corrupting influences, Friedrich reaches adulthood as a vain, nefarious ne'er do well. His debased character is most in evidence when Friedrich (apparently) commits manslaughter. He borrows money from Aaron, the same man who was robbed by Hulsmeyer, but doesn't repay the loan. Aaron locates Friedrich at a rowdy wedding reception and demands payment. Humiliated, Friedrich flees. As he is leaving, pursued by Aaron, others at the reception yell anti-Semitic insults, encouraging Friedrich to hit Aaron. Later, Aaron's lifeless body is found in the woods. Evidently he was beaten to death by Friedrich.

It is noteworthy that in both his crimes, Friedrich extends his mother's values. His complicity in Simon's timber-stealing is not surprising in view of Margreth's earlier defence of Hulsmeyer's activities; also, Margreth expressed virulent bigotry toward Jewish people and even condoned Hulsmeyer's assault, a judgment that found its echo in the taunts yelled by the people at the wedding reception. So, Friedrich may be seen as a conduit for the vicious values of his community. His adult personality has concentrated all that hatred, violence and rapacious greed into an especially toxic mix.

The community's greed is signified by the gradual disappearance of the trees. One tree stands out: the beech tree mentioned in the title. All four deaths in the story occur in its vicinity. After Aaron's death, the Jewish community buys the beech tree as a sort of memorial, engraving in its wood a line that expresses their desire for the killer to be brought to justice. By the end of the story, this happens (apparently). Friedrich, who had fled the authorities after killing Aaron, returns as an old man and, out of remorse and perhaps a desire for atonement, hangs himself in the beech tree. When he does this, the beech tree stands alone, the other trees having perished before the woodsman's axe. The villagers were poor stewards of their patch of creation. In their greed, they have laid waste to their environment.

Among the more interesting features of Droste-Hulshoff's story is the mysterious Johannes Niemand. His name translates into English as John Nobody. He appears to be Simon's son, born out of wedlock. He so resembles Friedrich that Margreth at first mistakes him for her son. But even as she does so, Johannes appears to her as a pared down, more timid version of Friedrich. Her misapprehension falls away when the real Friedrich enters the room. This is the first appearance of Friedrich as a bolder, more adult individual than before. Johannes is generally regarded by critics as Friedrich's double and, perhaps, is a distillation of Friedrich's old, more childish attributes. For more about this uncanny scene, I recommend Wuthering Expectations' post.

Another interesting feature of the tale is that the two people who were killed (Aaron and the forester) perished at the moment when they were trying to enforce obligations on members of Friedrich's bilious little village. Both victims were killed by members of that community but both killings were eventually blamed on distant outsiders (unidentified timber thieves and a criminal from a distant town).

Update added June 8: This novella is remarkable for its use of a blinkered narrator. Narrators are either omniscient, affording a God’s-eye view of events, or have only limited knowledge. In the latter case, the narrator is typically a character in the narrative who provides a fallible, incomplete, blow-by-blow account of events as they transpire. The odd thing about Die Judenbuche is that the narrator is not omniscient but also is not a character in the story. Since the narrator sometimes recounts things that only one or two characters could know about, and since the narrative establishes that neither of those characters is the narrator, it isn’t even possible to regard the narrator as a flesh-and-blood inhabitant of the world about which s/he narrates.

The result is a disembodied but not omniscient perspective, a flawed-God’s-eye-view, of events. This is just one of the things that makes Die Judenbuche such a strange novella.

Update (March 22, 2010): Here's an analysis of this story by Katje.

Justice Deferred

Heinrich von Kleist wrote Michael Kohlhaas in 1811. I read the translation published in Melville House's 'Art of the Novella' series.

In sixteenth-century Brandenburg, a horse dealer named Michael Kohlhaas sets out for business in neighboring Saxony (where he maintains a second home). At the border, a crooked knight seizes two of his horses. It later turns out that the horses were worked almost to death and that one of Kohlhaas's servants was harassed and abused by the knight's men.

The rest of the story is about Kohlhaas's quest for justice from the local potentate, the Elector of Saxony. Justice is repeatedly denied since the crooked knight has friends in high places. Kohlhaas rebels against the state by forming his own army, which attacks several Saxon towns.*

One interesting idea in the story concerns the role of the state. The state exists to provide justice to its inhabitants, from which it follows (according to one of the Elector's counselors) that by denying justice to Kohlhaas they have expelled him from the state, so that he is no longer subject to its laws; as a result, he's not so much a criminal as a foreign power making war against their state.

The tale at times comes across as a simple revenge story with Kohlhaas refusing to accept the legal outcome and forgive his enemies (as his wife and Martin Luther urged him to do). At other times, though, the story seems to present a clash between two laws: the human law that derives from the ruler and a higher, natural law that rulers ignore at their peril. This is the law that Kohlhaas, cast into the state of nature, aims to uphold.

In the end, it is Kohlhaas' willingness to die for this law that gives him more power than the Saxon prince, who fears for his own fate.

*Kleist thoroughly vilifies the Saxons, who in his own day were allied with Napoleon against his beloved Prussia.

Update (Sept. 26, 2009): Here's a stimulating reflection on Kohlhaas, the Grimms, etc. by Waggish.

Reflections on Der Schimmelreiter by Theodor Storm

I just read Denis Jackson's nice translation of Theodor Storm's Der Schimmelreiter (first published in 1888). For more about Storm, I recommend Jackson's great site about the author.

Storm’s novella contrasts two ways of responding to nature: there are the fanciful legends and superstitions of the community, and there is the more modern scientific and technological deployment of reason exemplified by the protagonist, Hauke Haien.

The story of Hauke’s life is told to a traveler by an old teacher, a ‘rationalist’ who doubts the supernatural elements of the tale. The teacher depicts Hauke as a great innovator whose engineering prowess gave him superior powers over nature, enabling him to design a better dyke to protect the community. The people repay Hauke with dark suspicion and rumors of his diabolical affiliation.

In the teacher's retelling of the story, the supposedly supernatural elements appear only ambiguously. So, e.g., there is a seemingly spectral horse, which is sold to Hauke by someone who laughs like ‘the devil’ (p. 72). But nothing much comes of this – the horse functions in the rest of the story like a natural though somewhat wild horse, one that only Hauke can tame (just as Hauke alone can tame the wild sea with better dykes). Then there's Trin Jans, who is presented not as a real witch but rather as ... well, as the sort of character who's a witch in more fanciful legends. There's also the suggestion that Hauke is cursed because he killed her cat (the cat came back, as it were). Thus, while the old teacher is aware of the supernatural aspects of the tale, he reigns them in to make them fit into a naturalistic interpretation.

The resulting narrative is in places quite eerie. Examples include the narrator's partly anthropomorphic characterization of some birds on the tidal flats (pgs. 22 & 99) and Trin Jans' uncanny story about a mermaid, which actually makes the mermaid seem terrifying, like something more and less than human (p. 98). In both cases the author embeds fragmentary human traits in what are ultimately strange, alien creatures that, like nature itself, efface humanity with a chilly indifference.

More generally, the tale charts a mundane landscape suffused with potentially supernatural elements that appear fleetingly in ambiguous forms, never quite surfacing as truly supernatural phenomena but, instead, appearing to be at home in the confines of nature. There is thus an ongoing juxtaposition of the world as (on the one hand) a natural order that fits the technical-scientific templates of reason and (on the other hand) a chaotic abyss from which wild, non-rational forces periodically erupt with cataclysmic effect.

These unpredictable natural forces find their echo within the human psyche. Hauke Haien, a paragon of reason, isn't alert to these destructive elements in his own soul, and so he's unaware of how they have eroded his own foundations over the years. Eventually, they catch him totally unawares, welling up from within and casting him into the abyss. Such a psychological reading is pursued in a meticulously Freudian direction by Anette Schwarz in her paper, “Social Subjects and Tragic Legacies: The Uncanny in Theodor Storm's Der Schimmelreiter” (The Germanic Review 73.3 [Summer 1998]: 251). Schwarz points out that neither Hauke nor his wife (Elke) has a mother who figures in the narrative (even though their fathers both loom large), and that Trin Jans stands in symbolically as the mother figure.

The most Freudian thing about Storm's novella, in my opinion, is its uncanniness. In describing the uncanny, Freud said that it characterizes fictional works that seem "to move in the world of common reality" but into which some strange, improbable or impossible events intrude. Freud focused on E. T. A. Hoffmann, but Storm's work seems a better epitome of Freud's theory.

Thomas Mann characterized Storm's achievement as "an art kind to the mystical and uncanny, the pagan northern art of [Der Schimmelreiter]. ... [I]t is precisely here ... that something of primeval power is finally achieved, some combination of human tragedy with the wild mystery of nature, something dark and heavy with the greatness and unknownness of the sea...." (Thomas Mann, 'Theodor Storm', 1930)

Update (Dec. 15, 2008): New York Review Books will re-issue James Wright's 1964 translation of this novella in early 2009. In their announcement of this upcoming publication, they quote from Kirkus Reviews the claim, "There is nothing better in German fiction prior to the work of Thomas Mann."

Falling in love with an automaton

I revisited E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Sandman, which Freud discussed in his paper on the uncanny. Written in the early 1800's, Hoffmann's tale anticipates more recent fiction involving automata. E.g., in The Sandman, a character falls in love with Olympia, whom he then discovers to be a robot. Freud notes that this strand of the narrative isn't the source of the story's uncanniness, and that, if anything, Hoffmann puts the automaton to a humorous, satirical use. E.g., once Olympia is exposed, Dr. Spalanzani, one of her designers, has to flee to "escape a criminal charge of having fraudulently imposed an automaton upon human society," a crime that sows "an absurd mistrust of human figures." Indeed, to be sure they're not dating robots, men start requiring their girlfriends to demonstrate their human imperfection by singing and dancing out of time, which is a very different male response from the one in Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives (where the realization that one is dealing with an automaton is uncanny). A similar motif animates one of the best episodes in the 1960's TV series The Outer Limits. This 1964 episode, 'Demon With a Glass Hand' (written by Harlan Ellison & starring Robert Culp), presents a woman's response to the discovery that she's fallen for an automaton -- she screams and runs away.

Update (Sept. 26, 2009): According to this Wiki article on the 'Uncanny Valley', real automata inspire only revulsion.

Update (Sept. 27, 2009): Unsurprisingly, there's also an old Twilight Zone episode featuring a relationship between a human person and a automaton. It's called 'The Lonely'.

Update (Oct. 4, 2009): And of course there's a Star Trek episode (from the original series) to be cited. It's called 'What are little girls made of?' It featured several 'androids', the best one of which was the obvious robot, Ruk (who was played by the same guy who played Lurch in the Addams Family).