Two Stories by Jean Paul
This book is as red as my cheeks (but which pair?)...
Now that is one loud shade of red.
It is the hue of the uniform covers for the latest titles from the Empyrean imprint of the Sublunary Editions outfit, based in Seattle. (See this interview with the series editor Josh Rothes.)
These little red books contain reissues of obscure gems from literary history. The very first one included a piece by Laurence Sterne—a nifty dream story with an interpretive key related to the place the writer slept—sandwiched between two stories by Jean Paul Richter.
To be honest, your host had never heard of Jean Paul till the Empyrean Series rolled out in 2021. Maybe he was hidden from my view, obscured by Goethe’s shadow, similar to how Wilkie Collins may be overshadowed by Dickens in one’s literary upbringing. But in both cases, the latter figure is arguably more fun. Goethe may have been one of the most progressive Germans of his age, but Jean Paul wrote about butt cheeks.
He used the Francophone version of his Christian name Johann because he was quite the Francophile, and especially an admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He shares an affinity with the great Swiss writer for traditional prose—only with much looser discipline.
As a man of letters at the end of the 18th century, Jean Paul blends together some of the major literary currents, from Swiftian satire to Sternean sentiment, into humorous, digressive fiction characteristic of early Romanticism. The Great Revolution in France had consolidated bourgeois politics, as Enlightenment philosophy was reaching its apogee in Kantianism. All of these elements inform the mental wanderings of Jean Paul’s speakers.
“The Wondrous New Year’s Eve Company” doesn’t take place on just any New Year’s, but the last one of the 18th century (if I comprehend right). In the narrator’s written account, after his wife steps out to run some errands, he tries to get on with his writing but has a migraine.
What was he trying to write about? For a theme he was pondering how
To look for five or six millennia into the past gives us courageous feelings of youth: it is like an anticipated childhood, whereas to look far beyond our final day and see innumerable millennia passing by, piling ever more snow upon our mossy play- and burial-grounds, higher and higher, and new cities and gardens on top of those, and then even newer ones and and so on forever, this eternal down-digging and building-over darkens and burdens our happy hearts.
But some strange beings enter the scene, identified as “prophets of time.” There is a young man in black, a child with an attending maiden, and—weirdest of all—a mask set on the sofa, “made up in red with the nose askew and nightcap on; next to it was sitting an unpleasantly skinny creature with a Swedish head and flaming red collar.”
I’m still not sure what “Swedish head” indicates, but his name is Pfeifenberger.
From here out the rest of the text is a visionary discourse of the end times, courtesy of these visitors. They evoke the inevitable, sweeping progress of history, so that the present Enlightenment will be the Dark Age of the future, naturally. The author takes this in stride. He’s glad his works will eventually disappear. “I am glad to say that centuries, millennia even, will come in which I shall not be read.”
Then the red mask goes on to prognosticate these fragmentary visions of the future. They’re actually quite prescient, in their own way.
America will conquer Europe and whites will be enslaved; villages will become cities, and all cities will combine into a megalopolis; resources will be eradicated, and a wooden house will be as rare as a house of gold today (and giant Archimedean lenses will focus the sunlight for home heating); currency will devolve back into crude metals, and simplicity and austerity will become the new signs of opulent wealth; of course new clothes will be invented.
And this is to say nothing about the social formation as a whole, with its proliferating divisions of social labor: “when tradesmen and scholars have grown apart into ever small subdivisions…”
All of this, by the way, is frontloaded as the premises leading up to a single, simple question.
This story was very amusing.
Less amusing overall but just as endearingly odd is “The Night-thoughts of Obstetrician Walther Vierneissel on His Lost Fetus-Ideal” from 1814.
But it does have this excellent routine of an opening paragraph:
Now that I begin to mourn for lost ideals, I will doubtless cut nothing new from the same old cloth, but remain—as the anatomical tailors of physiology define man well enough—the only animal in possession of twin sets of cheeks, the posterior causing the anterior to blush needlessly.
The lost ideals include the ideas Vierneissel had as a fetus: dreams of the future human experience to come.
He goes on to describe the typical development of a baby, with a corresponding epistemological commentary. First, the head is developed, with an All-One subjective experience. “Eternity,” “perfection,” without the “silly hors d’oeuvre of a body.” Then the heart, and arms and feet sprout out, creating the conditions for “grasping and pursuing.”
The homuncular form has such distortions that Vierneissel digresses on famous monsters and giants, such as Og and Micromegas.
Vierneissel narrates the process of his own birth as if he were the observing OBGYN. (“I uttered about thirty or forty sailor’s curses in a row.”)
The ontogeny and birth, in Vierneissel’s strange essay, is equated with damnation into hell, since you’re suspended upside down and descend from a utopia into an inhospitable environment. “But we moon for a room back in the womb.” This expression seems eerily anticipatory of ideas that supposedly weren’t expressed for another few decades.
That impression only increases with reading more Jean Paul.
These stories were newly translated by Alexander Booth and Matthew Spencer, who has a Substack called Paradise Almanac.