Sotavento: But the love angle is shoehorned. We can admit as much. He has to concede something to his audience, and that’s the easiest thing to concede.
Barlovento: I’m not sure whether you’re a superficial reader or a too partial one.
Sotavento: At the beginning, Richter does try to flesh out Karlson’s attachment to the soon-to-be-married Gione. His rhetorical huff even adds a layer of tragedy, but that’s it. He is clearly concerned with other matters, hence the subtitle. Think of Plato’s dialogues. They have their quirky introductions, always verging on subtle characterization, but they’re ultimately philosophical treatises.
Babor: Are they? They live and seem to be the answer to Plato’s own objections to writing.
Sotavento: Look, I’m not going to bicker about the classification of Plato’s works. I just want to emphasize that Richter here has taken a philosophical roundtable and dressed it up as a suitably coquettish novella. A German habit, no? Anyway, it shares more with Phaedo than with Werther.
Estribor: High praise. Exceedingly so. Richter has neither the depth nor the range. I’ve always found unbecoming the comparison of German bluster with Greek serenity. Goethe himself falls short.
Barlovento: Richter is not striving for Plato’s seat. On the contrary, his lineage is that of the possessed bards of Ion. It seems to me uncharitable to imagine a poet of his stature throwing crumbs to the masses in order to subsist.
Babor: Yet it is known to be the way forward. And we mustn’t condemn anyone for it. Even this restriction can encourage an otherwise unattainable greatness. The mature Schlegel thought so.
Barlovento: My sympathies lie with the revolutionary. What you call “unattainable greatness,” I call “majestic compromise.” I can admire it, but it is definitely wanting.
Babor: We owe at least a number of epics to this public-facing effort.
Barlovento: Why do we insist on taking these fixed stars as not only guides but culminations? This is what I admire in Richter. He understands that human beings are demigods, that the inner universe longs for a vastness that cannot be surmised through the world without. And if art is, as I firmly believe, the sole remedy for this longing, we have done too little with it.
Estribor: You have nailed my problem with all manner of Romantics. Art is far more humble and far more effective. It is a splendid gratification of our sensuous urges. So splendid, in fact, that it is perfectly natural for the delicate temper to envisage it as a mystical source. But we must outgrow this innocuous doddering. It is the artist-catering counterpart of moralism.
Barlovento: Ah, well, the phlegmatic hedonist is always there to remind us that the opposition is feeble and contagious. Isn’t it comfortable for the aging professor, the supine bibliomaniac, and the 9-to-5 poet to see the artist as a purveyor of pleasure?
Sotavento: Whether someone here grants your point or not, writers still make mistakes. And Richter committed a favorite of the philosophically inclined: perorating without motion. A bit like you, really. I enjoyed Campaner Thal. It is bursting with natural imagery, it is devilishly clever in its similes, it even reaches a sort of metaphysical eloquence, but it fails at conveying some shade of life.
Estribor: Life is too intermittent for the German Romantics. It is merely the reminder of embodiment which interferes with their heavenly ascents. Richter offers a rickety love story because he is not able to do otherwise. To him, love is a belle dame tormented by pious lusts who needs her tender-minded amorist. I will agree with Barlovento’s assumption: Richter was too much the ingénue to have thought long and hard about satisfying the public.
Babor: You share with him the temptation of hyperbole. Did the authorial play escape you? In one of the footnotes, he mentions that if Karlson had been a materialist, he would have read a part of Hesperus to him. An author reading his books to his characters—Richter is assuredly not a simpleton. He is also not quite a “culmination.” As Carlyle argues, he lacks unity. One is pleased to see Richter frolic with so much zest; at times, one is in awe. But I do not sense in his volatile habits the force of exuberance, but that of incontinence.
Barlovento: So you don’t see life, love, and exuberance in Richter? You see mere abstraction, piety, and incontinence? It has always been thus, I suppose. The artist sticks to their vision, and the rest stare at a diverting anomaly.
Sotavento: The problem is that I’m one of those annoying readers you talk about. I’m not part of the priesthood. I’m limiting myself to Campaner Thal. Maybe there is a consummate artist in Titan. That’s all a reader can say.
Babor: I respect artists committed to their vision, but I certainly don’t owe them assent. Moreover, entrancing though the Romantics be, they are preeminently half-artists. Lost among the theologians, mystics, and philosophers, they never come to fruition. It is difficult for artists to acquire self-confidence; they are always eyeing the reputations of their neighbors. Ah, but when they do, it is extraordinary. Perhaps you and I, Barlovento, meet there.
Estribor: In what exactly does this self-confidence consist of?
Babor: It varies, of course. The writer must have an irrecusable faith in language, must believe that it alone crosses the gulf between individuals, if only for a moment. I would say that you and I meet there.
Estribor: By no means. I hold nothing as grand as that. Language is fundamental, doubtless. The cascade of sounds should soothe and thrash at turns. For all I care, the writer could be discoursing upon a knuckle. I rather like the gulf. If a writer wishes to reach out, I will slam his serenade shut. Is it not sufficient to deal with salespeople and off-the-cuff therapists day in, day out?
Barlovento: There is so much music around. Why bother with literature?
Estribor: It is naturally closer to my heart, but one should vary. Don’t you tire of hitting the same note?
Barlovento: I agree with Babor. The lack of self-confidence devolves into retaliations similar to yours. It is pitiful to live in this negative space, hiding from values on account of the polemics in which they play an important role.
Sotavento: Let’s see if we can converge again, people. Many things are being asked of Richter’s slim volume at once. I guess only a superlative work would be able to answer them all.
Estribor: Leopardi asked for pleasure, usefulness being extraneous. I can do no better than he. Richter affords close to none. His speculations were already done to death by the Greeks in their most arid tracts. His grotesqueries were already denounced in their time by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. This is the result of living on pastiche.
Barlovento: Who doesn’t? You yourself are a Wilde and Cocteau knockoff. Campaner Thal is an example of absorption and overcoming. “The sounding-board of the body is neither the soul's scale nor its harmony. Grief has no resemblance to a tear, — shame, none to the cheek-imprisoned blood, — wit, none to champagne, — the idea of this valley, none to its portrait on the retina. The inner man, this God, hidden in the statue, is not of marble as it is, but in the stony limbs, the living ones grow and ripen in an unknown life.” Sure, Plato lurks between the lines, yet in Plato's own lurked Pythagoras. This repertoire of images (a sounding-board, a tear, a blush, a banquet, a valley, a statue) comes to Richter’s mind owing to the peculiarities of his constitution. This is not immortality viewed from nowhere. This is immortality as it struck Richter. And something in his imagery is sure to resonate and bring forth a new visionary flight.
Estribor: I will make sure to notify the ambitious MFA candidate of your recipe for genius.
Barlovento: Suit yourself. You can play all you want with disparate images, but if they are not irresistible and swift, they are nothing.
Sotavento: I don’t know. Maybe with a botanical encyclopedia at hand . . .
Barlovento: “Unperceived, I now added Gione, not only Karlson, to the list of rare beings, who, like Raphael's and Plato's works, uncloud themselves only on earnest contemplation, and who, as both, resemble the Pleiades, which to the naked eye seems only to have seven suns, but with a telescope discloses more than forty.” Would this occur to you with astronomy and philosophy textbooks at hand? It isn’t as simple as that. Beauty is uncalled for, and we must always tend our soil in order not to mishandle its sudden advent.
Babor: Saintsbury believes that Shakespeare merits the highest praise because of his elasticity, power to transport, and vividness. These seem to me fair points of departure for evaluation. Richter is a virtuoso as regards the third. Not so with the remaining. Behind the flash of his technique, I fail to notice variety of incident. He is as provincial as the most accomplished philosopher: there are peasants and nobles, but they are imbued with transcendent sensibilities. Richter chiefly soars alone. Aesthetic bliss requires a measure of restraint, for it is ultimately brought on the heels of suggestion.
Barlovento: Is this a summing up of Richter?
Babor: I certainly don’t subscribe to the idea that each individual work is an island. They are all part of the same river—sometimes it overflows, sometimes it trickles. Richter is all there in Campaner Thal.
Barlovento: Untenable. Where is the tempestuous Roquairol?
Babor: An author’s characters are always the surface.
Barlovento: Variety of incident, remember?
Babor: Language in the final tally. Variety of incident can be achieved only through a corresponding variety of syntax and diction.
Sotavento: We are not reading him in German, you know. This is getting out of hand.
Babor: I am not too concerned. Though we surely miss in translation the delightful intricacies of sound and meaning that give a language its intimate vitality, all is not lost. Dante is no foreigner.
Estribor: But Richter most emphatically is. I won’t impute it to the poor drudge who has inflicted his geysers upon the world; she had to tame him into coherence. No miracle resulted. Bless her, regardless.
Barlovento: There stands an artist whole, unafraid of the delimitation frenzy into which humanity inevitably relapses. There stands the highest achievement: duty toward the imagination and a well-rounded disregard for the minutiae of one's milieu. All artists have intermittent moments of clarity in which they see this, but it goes against everything commonly cherished: fellowship, assent, comfort. They must freeze outside without compromise. Then they will come into their own.
Babor: I am always sympathetic to an excess of seriousness regarding literature. But this excess should involve the intellect and not solely the heart, as it were. The artist as pariah is an inadequate image. Richter is a chimera— philosopher, poet, preacher. And while it would be desirable in these cases to have the poet take the place of lion, it is not so. He is the protruding goat. We can follow him now and then to that curious meadow where his kin—Apuleius, Rabelais, Sterne, Pessoa—graze. The air is not suitable for us, but its sights cannot be found elsewhere.
Estribor: Not the most rigorous metaphor, I fear. A literary work is an exercise in avoidance. So much of life is drudgery, especially the urgent. It is no small matter to offer a rarefied experience that seals us into a magnificent vacuum. Let’s not pretend Richter doesn’t try wholeheartedly. The little book is fiction, but it comes from an undisciplined writer who values it insufficiently. Typical mistakes abound. One is unforgivable: focusing on the head before the ear. I don’t suppose abstractions are any more harmonic in German: Glückseligkeit. Ugh.
Sotavento: Campaner Thal remains philosophy to me, but it is sweet and it is short. I insist: he knew his audience. I’d rather a lesson with him than with Kant. Isn’t that something?
Translation
The Campaner Thal, and Other Writings. Ticknor & Fields: Juliette Bauer.
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