Hyperion - Friedrich Hölderlin (1797)

 

Hyperion

Friederich Hölderlin’s “Hyperion” is novel written like a poem. Or poetry in the shape of a novel. Either way it is the sort of reading you are not supposed to blaze through but read slowly to enjoy the cryptic images it conjures. Unfortunately, I am a rather plebeian reader on whom that sort of flowery writing is rather wasted and that heavily influences my opinion on this book.

While it is something you are supposed to analyze your way to work out, I understand that this is a fellow, Hyperion, who has returned to Greece and from there sends letters to someone named Bellarmin, who I suppose is a friend. This Bellarmin apparently has talked him into telling his life story.

As a young man Hyperion met an older man named Adamas whom he loved as a father. Adamas disappeared and Hyperion met Alabanda whom he seems to have had a homosexual relationship with. It certainly takes bromance to another level. Hyperion does not like Alabanda’s friends, possibly he is jealous, so he leaves him. Then he meets Diotima, and she becomes the love of his life. Though what he loves more than anything is to set his people, the Greek, free from the Ottomans, because the Greeks are a noble people who founded civilization. So, when the Russians and the Ottomans go to war, Hyperion joins a rebellion and becomes some sort of officer together with Alabanda. Unfortunately, the rebels do not live up to Hyperion’s lofty ideals and is merely a rabble, so Hyperion gets depressed and wants to die. So does Diotima. Hyperion changes his mind, but too late to save Diotima. This makes Hyperion really depressed so he goes to Germany in exile, but the Germans are terrible people so now he is back in Greece to write his story, which is the story we have just been reading.

The story apparent is one about a hyper-sensitive guy who seems to get carried away, even overwhelmed, by emotions at every turn. Nothing is simple and easy for this guy, and everything from the morning breeze to the plight of the Greek people becomes loaded with higher meanings far beyond what reality can answer, hence Hyperion’s life is one of disappointments. I would say this is a guy with mental health issues, but for that I would probably be crucified as someone lacking sensibility for the higher arts.

My copy came with a lengthy analysis of the text of which I understood even less that the actual novel. This appears to be a very important text from the nascent German romanticism. Hyperion is supposed to be our priest to teach us… well, that is not really clear, but my assumption is the beauty of nature and that the intrinsic value of beauty is all that really matters.

I have to say that I was not particularly overwhelmed by this text. Or maybe I should say that it lacked appeal to me because it was actually rather overwhelming. I kept worrying that this guy would go over the edge and become raving mad and maybe he should go back to his medication. To me, this sounded like a bad case of bipolar disorder with each part of the sinus wave making Hyperion lose touch with reality.

It was not surprising for me to learn that Hölderlin actually was mentally ill and in the end succumbed to schizophrenia. Poor guy.

I could easily image a lot of people liking, even adoring the poetic nature of this text and the melancholic suffering it expresses, but I think I passed that phase some time back in the nineties.

  

The Nun - Denis Diderot (1796)

 

The Nun

We continue with another book by Denis Diderot, published posthumously decades after it was actually written. The subject matter and the style of writing is quite different from “Jacques the Fatalist”, this being a first-person narrative in the Richardsonian style about the suffering of a nun as opposed to the Sternian chaos which is “Jacques the Fatalist”, but Diderot being Diderot it also has very modernist elements.

The main part of the novel is formed as one, very long letter to a possible benefactor of the nun Sainte Suzanne. She describes her life story, how as an illegitimate child, her parents wanted to get her out of the way by placing her in a convent. In the first convent she flatly refuses to take her wows, causing quite a scandal, but subjected to enough emotional blackmail she finally accepts to take her wows in the second convent despite being convinced that the religious life is not for her.

The Mother Superior of this convent is a saintly woman who actually understands the misery Suzanne goes through and tries to make her life as tolerable as possible. She dies, and her replacement as Mother Superior is the exact opposite. She sees in Suzanne a threat to her dominion and Suzanne is subjected to all sorts of harassments. Suzanne decides to attempt to be released through a court ruling, which when it becomes known, makes her conditions in the convent even worse. Torments, taunts, starvation and theft are just some of the cruelties she is subjected to. She loses her court case for some reason, possibly because you needed very powerful friends in high positions to get out of a nunnery, and the torments continue, now without hope. Her lawyer and a friendly Vicar General do manage to get her transferred to another, third, convent.

The main problem here is that the Mother Superior is lesbian and abuses her position in true Weinstein fashion to get sexual favors. When Suzanne refuses, the Mother Superior goes into self-escalation and, everybody blaming Suzanne, her life again turns misery.

So far, so good. This story is fairly straight forward. Diderot presents the convent system, not as a religious asylum, but as a prison system to put away unwanted women. A system where compliance is required on pain of torment and a system that will drive those mad who are not suited for a religious life. Diderot obviously was not a fan of convents. His sister was driven mad in one, and he himself fled from a religious career. As a criticism of the enforced convent system, this story is very effective. Suzanne cannot say what it is she wants instead on the religious life, it is the lack of choice that is the problem for her. She has lost her freedom and as intangible as this may be, it is soul-crushing to her.

Then something really weird happens. In a lengthy preface text after the novel proper, it is revealed that the text is a hoax, invented to lure a Marquis back from the provinces to Paris where his friends are missing him. This Marquis was previously engaged in a case where a nun wanted to be released but could not and now, through letters pretending to be from a nun on the lam, they are trying to get him engaged in this story. He consents, so they have to kill her off, and then send him her full narrative as described above.

Why this hoax? And why present this story as a hoax? Do we really want to, or need to, know that this is not just an invented story, but a story invented for crude laughs and petty motives? And even weirder, the way these letters a presented with Diderot talking about himself in third person, makes me wonder if not even this correspondence is a fake, invented for the effect if will have on the story?

I think the whole thing is an exercise in false reality, what we today would call fake news. That the object is to make the reader question apparent truth as something that may look and feel real but is not. This is my guess of course and may be inspired by the times I live in as opposed to the eighteenth century, but if correct, it would make Diderot a far more modern writer than his contemporaries. And well, that was a conclusion I already drew with “Jacques the Fatalist”.

In many ways “The Nun” is the better book, if for nothing else then because Sternian writing tends to annoy me, and beside the modernist mindfuck it also concerns itself with very real social issues that would surely touch a reader, even today. Recommended.

   

Jacques the Fatalist - Denis Diderot (1796)

 

Jacques the Fatalist

A year or so ago I was reading a lot of “Enlightenment” literature, especially the endless writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He spent most of his life quarreling with everybody else and in particularly a character named Denis Diderot. Frankly, from Rousseau’s telling, Diderot sounded like a far more agreeable character to be around and as it turns out, he also wrote and a far more delightful writer he was.

Diderot dared not publish in his lifetime. Or rather, he stuck to the Encyclopedia, which was controversial enough as it was. His dabbling into literature was way more transgressive and subversive and had to wait for The French Revolution to become printable. Rather promising actually, but also sad for the writer. It also means that I am now thrown somewhere between twenty and forty years back in time.

“Jacques the Fatalist” has been described as the world’s first post-modernistic novel, preceding the advent of those by some 160 years. What is meant by that is that Diderot is playing with the format in a way that is sometimes meta, sometimes explorative and always playful. Heavily inspired by Laurence Sterne, Diderot is not interested in a plot. In fact, plot-wise “Jacques the Fatalist” goes absolutely nowhere. A Master, known only as “Master”, and his servant Jacques travels from place to place. En route the time is spent telling stories. Some stories are begun but never finished. Some are picked up repeatedly, only to be interrupted. I am not quite certain any of them are ever finished and if they were, it is in an abrupt and not really satisfying manner, as if there is actually more to the story than is told.

The theme of the stories is usually around escapades, love affairs, swindles or other juicy topics. This makes them rather amusing if not very coarse, but also so much more disappointing when they never finish. I think Diderot is telling us that the conclusion to the stories is unimportant or the fact that we never know how they end is a point in itself. Jacques himself constantly drives at the futility of changing anything. He is a declared fatalist and convinced that everything that happens is written in the great scroll above. If a thing must happen, it will, and we are powerless to change it. Exactly how that motivates the stories I am not quite certain, but they do serve to illustrate how bizarre and outrageous things can be and that it is virtually impossible to predict what is going to happen, even if it is prescribed.

Diderot insists that everything is true, in the sense that all his stories did actually happen in some form or another and it is difficult not to think that Diderot really just wanted to spread some juicy gossip. Another agenda of his seems to have been to lampoon and grill all the institutions and notabilities he could get away with. He was antiauthoritarian in an age where that was a very dangerous thing to be and he clearly had a lot of things to say about a lot of people.

The upshot is that “Jacques the Fatalist” is a chaotic and messy book to read but highly entertaining and playful, teasing you into rethinking what you think a novel should be. It will never be a favorite of mine, I think, but I am very happy to have read it and I do think I know both Diderot and his age a little better from reading this.

I am not done with Diderot though. The next book is another of his secret novels and another one will pop up when I enter the eighteen hundreds.

 

Camilla - Fanny Burney (1796)

 

Camilla

It was with much anticipation I went into “Camilla”. Frances Burney’s first novel “Evelina” is to this date one of the best books I have read on this List and “Camilla”, being her third novel, had to be good. “Camilla” is not a bad novel, but it is in my opinion an inferior novel to “Evelina”, partly due to some plot flaws and partly because it has not aged as well. Where “Evelina” pointed forward, it feels as if “Camilla” is pointing backwards.

In “Camilla” we follow the Tyrold family, the timid and meek Lavinia, the emotional Camilla and the scholarly but deformed Eugenia. They have grown up in the virtuous and protected home of Pastor Tyrold and Mrs. Tyrold. Mr. Tyrold is the younger brother of the country Squire Sir Hugh Tyrold, a generous and not too clever older man without children himself. His nieces spend a lot of time at his place, Cleves, together with Sir Tyrold’s other niece Indiana Lynmere, a very pretty, but vain and vacant girl.

During the period of what appears to be one summer the girls are exposed to the surrounding world and the dangers lurking everywhere. There are two main plotlines. One is of Camilla and her on/off relationship with Edgar Mandlebert, the other is the terrible adventures of Eugenia.

Camilla and Edgar are in love with each other, but instead of being candid about it, they manage to misunderstand each other to an exceptional degree. This is largely driven by Edgar’s wish to get proofs that 1. Camilla actually loves him (which is sort of understandable) and 2. That she will be a good wife. As Edgar is a very old school prude and puritan, this means that Camilla should not see the wrong people or do any wrong and certainly not be improper in any way at all. Since being exposed to world means that Camilla will get in contact with all those things, especially as she is untutored and have grown up in ignorance, Edgar, always lurking in the background sees plenty of things that convinces him that Camilla is not up to his standards.

Eugenia is subjected to blow after blow. At first it was Sir Tyrold’s plan to marry her to his nephew Clermont (incestuously?!) who were on the Continent studying. For this purpose, Eugenia received scholarly training for which she has a great talent. Clermont, when he returns, turns out to be a jackass and a moron and certainly not interested in Eugenia. Then Eugenia meets the equally scholarly Melmond, but he sees only Indiana’s beauty and finally she is the prey of mercenary and brutal fraud Alphonso Bellamy.

“Camilla” is a long book, over 900 pages, but we get the outline of these plots rather early and the bulk part of the volume is mainly Camilla and Eugenia sinking deeper and deeper into trouble. Their trouble of the heart is supplemented and, in my opinion, overtaken by pecuniary trouble. None of the younger generation in the Tyrold household has any sense of economy, especially the brother Lionel and Clermont, who between them manage to throw away thousands of pounds, threatening to ruin both Tyrold households. When Camilla through little fault of her own is preyed on to lose a much smaller amount, she sees herself as the ruin of the family.

Burney is very good with characters. Every character is distinct with their own idiosyncrasies. Sometimes bordering caricature, but they are all alive and real people. Burney also has a very good sense of the environment into which the characters move. You get a feeling she was not only an observer but actually was there in these settings, in the Rooms in Tunbridge or the bathhouses in Southampton. This is not an imagined world as much as a real world with imagined characters. She is also good at setting up the drama. The trouble Camilla and Eugenia get into is very real trouble, especially the pecuniary trouble and the hole they find themselves in is very deep indeed.

Unfortunately, as mentioned above, there are a number of problems here. One has to do with plot resolution. With about 50 pages to go I got the feeling Burney herself got confused how to resolve this. There are some very real problems here, both for Camilla and for Eugenia, but instead of working towards a resolution we spend the majority of the end-section with Camilla fretting, crying and gushing without anything really coming out of it, while around her, things sort themselves out on their own. Just like that. Even Eugenia, the most capable of the girls, just resigns and have outside agents, through accidents, sort things out. Why did nobody call out Mrs. Mittens?

Another problem has to do with the characters and their sentiments. Camilla always means well, but is either mislead by principles and good heart or is simply too unprepared for the outside world and consistently makes the wrong choices. And Edgar… if ever I saw a “hero” who did not deserve to be one. Very early I decided very much against him. To paint him and his sentiments in a positive light was so at odds with my own opinion. I was wondering why on Earth Camilla was pining for him at all. Somebody needed to kick him badly, and when he comes around in the end, it is not with an excuse for his opinions or actions, but because he is now convinced she is good enough. Phew.

My two favorite characters were by far Mrs. Arlbery and Sir Sedley Clarendel. Both represent modern ideals, free people who are capable of doing what they want, not caring of the opinion of prudes, but smart enough to make the right choices. And both of them with a heart. I get the feeling Burney actually admired this type, but was afraid to make them the ideal of the story. Their sentiments were completely at odds with those of the Tyrolds’ and particularly Edgar, representing as they were the modern world. Mrs. Arlbery also called out Edgar early on and warned Camilla what kind of marriage she was aiming for with him. When Sir Sedley takes an interest in her she gets the chance of setting herself free, but decides not to. That is her choice of course, but it also marks this as a poorly aged novel.

I did enjoy reading “Camilla”, Frances Burney is too good a writer not to, but it was at times an infuriating read and not up there with “Evelina”.

The Monk - Matthew G. Lewis (1796)

 

The Monk

There seemed to have been a wave of dark or gothic literature around the end of the eighteenth century and likely into the beginning of the nineteenth century, ranging from the romantic to the macabre and outright disgusting stuff. Whether this was inspired by the horrors of the French revolution or some other underlying and earlier reason I do not know, but the book List editors certainly have an affinity for these stories.

Matthew Lewis’ “The Monk” is, as I understand it, a highly influential work that tapped into this stream. From the basic idea that power and righteousness corrupt, he wrote the twin stories of two girls who falls into the clutches of corrupt monastic rulers. Or, as considered from the other side of the table, of the fall from grace of people who were supposed to be above these things, corrupted by power and temptation.

One story is about Raymond, Agnes and the prioress of the convent of St. Clare. We meet them while she is a nun and he is attempting some covert communication with her. In flashback we get the story how he was travelling in Germany incognito (he is the son of a Marquis in Spain) where he meets and fall in love with Agnes, a guest at the castle Lindenburg. Unfortunately, the baroness of the castle, Agnes’ aunt, is deeply jealous, thinking she should get his attentions. Raymond is kicked out and Agnes comes up with a scheme to pretend to be a renowned ghost to escape with Raymond. The real ghost gets in the way, Raymond disappears and Agnes, believing him dead, joins a convent. Back in Madrid, when they are reunited, they start a clandestine affair, Agnes gets pregnant and the prioress, massively incensed by this violation of rules, confines her to die in the dungeons of the convent.

The second story concerns Antonia, Lorenzo and the abbot of the Capuchin monastery, Ambrosio. In this story Lorenzo, a nobleman, is infatuated by the pretty but demure Antonia. Antonia’s father was of nobility (and related to Raymond) but disowned by his family and Antonia’s mother is convinced that so uneven a match will not end well. At the monastery Ambrosia is a super righteous monk who is slowly being led into temptation. A young novice he cares a lot about, Rosario, turns out to be a woman, Matilda, and she becomes the instrument to gradually corrupt the Monk. They start an illicit affair, but eventually he tires from it and instead turns his attention on the pretty Antonia. Matilda seems more interested in turning the monk onto the dark path than having an actual relationship and it becomes increasingly clear she has access to dark powers. With these Ambrosia manages to get Antonia into his clutches, hiding her away in the dungeon. Will Lorenzo get to her and his sister Agnes in time?

Lewis was very young when he wrote “The Monk” and I could tell how it is driven by his urge to tell a story. It is quickly paced and covers a lot of ground in relatively few pages, but it is also rambling in the sense that Lewis cannot decide exactly what story he wants to focus on and from what perspective and this gives it an almost anthology quality. There is a very important part about Ambrosia’s decent from holier than thou to be entirely in the thrall of sexual desires, ready to sacrifice every principle to satiate it. Antonia’s story is of course linked to it because she is his victim, but Lorenzo, the hero of the story, is largely relegated to an impotent observer and much less interesting to Lewis. The story of Agnes, Raymond and the prioress is, although the characters and linked to the first story, almost tangential to it with very little connection. It is a detour, an interesting one, but also so massive and different that it removes the focus from Ambrosia. I think Lewis let himself get carried away and he struggled to tie the stories together.

Thematically this is an attack on the hypocrisy of the righteous. That the vanity of religion corrupts and that we are not to trust those. It does feel a bit thin, though, and the real driver seems to me to be a desire to write a luscious and macabre story with ghosts, sorcery, pretty girls and evil people of power.

Reading up on the story before going in, I had the impression it would be way darker, maybe down the road of de Sade, but in that sense, I was happily disappointed. Sure, there is both rape and murder, but much less of it than I was led to expect, and it is not dwelling on it with sadistic glee.

The final verdict is that it is an easier and more entertaining book to read than expected but also a story strangely out of focus and unpolished. It was a bit hit in its time, but I frankly cannot see why people got so worked up on it.

 

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1795)

 

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

Can you be impressed and confused about a book at the same time? I hope so, because this is exactly how I feel having just read Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship”.

In this we follow a young man called Wilhelm Meister of middle-class origin. Wilhelm Meister is in love with theater. Watching it, the production, the plays, the characters and not least the actors and especially the actresses. He is chaffing at the expectations that he will pursue a career in the family business and easy to distract with anything theater.

On a business trip he gets seriously sidetracked and involved with actors and actresses and as they see him as a source of funding, he is soon involved in a theater project. Wilhelm’s ideal about theater and the reality of the business are quite different sizes and while he is not exactly being abused, he is being led on and for awhile I saw some comparison to “Der Blaue Engel”. But Wilhelm Mester is a lot more reflective than Professor Rath, taking a lot of responsibility on his shoulders and genuinely care for his, mostly ungrateful, colleagues.

Yet, Wilhelm is powerless to actually take charge of his life. Whenever he tries, it becomes false starts and instead he just drifts along from a conviction that fate is taking him to the right place. The result is that other agents are constantly pushing him around and he is lord of nothing.

There is a break in the story and when it returns, the tone is different. It turns out that practically everybody in Wilhelm’s surroundings is connected, that he is being manipulated in a way to discover for himself his true self by something called the Tower Society. Exactly why they take this interest in him and what their target is, is entirely unclear to me. The result, however, leaves Wilhelm as powerless as ever to control his own life.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote the first part in the 1770’ies, then only resumed the manuscript 20 years later and that shows. Where the first five chapters feel like a burlesque on the emerging theater scene in Germany with Wilhelm as the blundering fool but also as our keen observer, the last part is entirely different. Suddenly all the strings are being tied up. Apparently insignificant characters get a purpose and there is a mysticism and presentation of ideas entirely absent in the earlier part. Clearly Goethe has something on his mind and got some ideas about education, religion and purpose in life. But who makes that purpose? Are we born with it? Guided to it by “helpful” people or are we free to set a course on our own? Is Wilhelm Meister better off drifting along, making decisions on the spur of the moment? Or does he get to a better place if he is guided? And who reserve the right to guide us?

I sense a far more reflective Goethe in this latter section, one who is influenced by the enlightenment and the revolutionary thoughts in France. This is an age where fixed patterns are breaking up and people are allowed to reconsider their place in the world, especially the bourgeois. But what is to replace that earlier structure?

Meanwhile, Goethe himself had a love affair with the theater and was deeply involved with the theater at Weimar (where he wrote his most famous work “Faust”), so I definitely sense an autobiographical streak here as well. Is Goethe ironizing over his own life?

Ultimately, I am not certain what exactly Goethe is aiming toward with this novel, and I wonder if he was himself certain. Maybe he was just bouncing ideas and Wilhelm Meister was the unwilling victim of those ideas.

Absolutely recommended. Among the best books on the list so far.

The Mysteries of Udolpho - Ann Radcliffe (1794)

 

The Mysteries of Udolpho

Ann Radcliffe’s “The Mysteries of Udolpho” is touted as THE gothic novel to read, containing ghosts and old castles and mysterious murders. Sounds juicy and true enough, the story has all these elements, but not in that undiluted form we are used to expect in our time.

For the first third of this tome of a book (my version counted 672 pages), this resembled a romantic novella from a Readers Digest. Wholesome romantic fantasies in beautiful settings. Okay, there are parents that die, but even that is very pretty. A voyage through the mountains is mainly a highly detailed and sentimental description of the scenery and how it resonates the feelings of the characters.

We hear of Emily, a young French woman of the lower nobility and how she makes a journey from Gascony to Languedoc to improve the health of her father. On the way they befriend the young chevalier, Valancourt and a romance blossom. Emily’s father does not get better, but dies near the haunted castle of Chateau le-Blanc. Left on her own Emily falls under the guardianship of her aunt, Madame Cheron. She is not exactly a pleasant woman and when she marries the mysterious Montoni, Emily must go with them to Italy, far away from her Valancourt.

In Italy she becomes the de-facto prisoner of Montoni in a dilapidated castle, Udolpho, in the Apennines and this is where the novel turns gothic. Montoni is a mobster and an opportunist who seeks to achieve wealth and power through dominance and underhanded villainy. Emily’s part in his schemes is to be married away for his personal winning, a fate Emily consider too horrible to contemplate. Emily also fears for her life, but mostly for her virginity and then there are the ghosts in the castle…

“The Mysteries of Udolpho” is apparently often being considers a flawed, maybe even laughable novel. Radcliffe is good at building up tension, when she finally gets to that point, but her resolutions are terrible. There are several convoluted mysteries in the story. Supernatural, criminal or otherwise. They tend to scare or confuse Emily or her impressionable maid, Annette, but they almost uniformly deflate when they get resolved. Sometime revealed in an off-hand way, there is always a prosaic, even boring, explanation and Emily usually get out of her trouble surprisingly easy and with little or no effort. Her major quality being her ability to faint from fear and to be modest when tempted.

It is also obvious this is a story from Radcliffe’s fantasy. It is deeply anachronistic, the geography is all wrong and the men and women are cliché characters from a teenage girl’s day-dream. It is often difficult not to roll the eyes and groan. Yet, in the build-up phase there are these moments of brilliance that makes it worthwhile to read this book. The riddles are really quite impressive. So much more disappointing is it when they deflate in the resolution.

I am probably of the wrong gender for this novel, and I certainly belong to the wrong century. It is very possible a female reader two hundred years ago would find this a masterpiece and I could also see this be made into a telenovela. For me though it is merely okay and certainly way too long.