Lucinde

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Title page of the first edition, 1799

Lucinde (subtitle: Confessions of a Clumsy ) is a novel by Friedrich Schlegel , which appeared in 1799 as the first part of a four-part novel project. He describes the love of Julius and Lucinde in letters, dialogues, aphorisms, diary entries and other literary forms. The author - not only a writer, but also a literary theorist, historian and philosopher - articulates his early romantic novel concept in and with this book . An important principle of this is that a novel should always be both a novel and its own theory.

The concept

Lucinde is the only novel by Friedrich Schlegel who is considered the founder and pioneer of early romantic philosophy and literary theory. Schlegel had developed the concept of progressive universal poetry in fragments and essays in the Jena magazine Athenäum since 1797 . Based on two novels of his time - initially not understood as romantic - Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and Ludwig Tiecks Sternbald , he emphasized the importance of self-centered reflections within the romantic texts and demanded that a novel must have the ability to present its own concept . The Lucinda provides Schlegel is trying to implement this concept.

The critic

Although the theory was implemented in detail, this attempt is considered unsuccessful in older research. The main accusation that Lucinde is made is that she is not a novel in the true sense of the word - and that means a story that is pleasant to read - but rather "an aesthetic monster", a dry spelling of the complex theory that is difficult for laypeople to understand represent. According to the negative criticism, theory prevailed in Schlegel's project of portraying this himself in a romantic novel .
So it is the romance that some interpreters deny the novel Lucinde . In doing so, however, they are stuck with a conventional understanding of the genre Roman. Criteria for this are: a linear, coherent action as well as characters that go through a psychologically comprehensible development, embedded in a 'world event', i.e. a social environment, a society that mostly influences or evaluates their thinking, feeling and acting.
Schlegel's Lucinde, on the other hand, is a novel in the sense of early romantic progressive universal poetry (cf. Athenaeum fragment 116 ). Accordingly, the Lucinde is characterized by a generic openness.

Clemens Brentanos Godwi is generally considered to be a 'successful' romantic novel in the sense of the above criticism, which both implements the concept and remains legible in the conventional sense .

An “aesthetic monster”: the structure of the book

The text does not pursue an epic narrative, but rather offers its confused reader moods and reflections on the main character Julius (according to the “undoubted right to confusion” of the narrator / author). It is always uncertain how one piece of text relates to another. And if the reader suspects a context that resembles an action, this impression will soon be shattered again. The overwhelmed reader can hardly follow the jumps in the text. This anticipates features of the modern novel: research likes to compare Lucinde with James Joyce's Ulysses or Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway .
Nevertheless, the text is clearly structured. We find a “systematic chaos”, a - as it is called in Schlegel's speech about mythology - “artificially ordered confusion”. These paradoxical formulations, typical of Schlegel's theory, mean the following in practice:
The book consists of 13 parts and a prologue. Six short, fragment-like pieces of text are grouped around the middle section told in the third person. In this middle section, it remains unclear whether Julius or Wilhelmine provide the biographical description of Julius' development, or whether an outside authorial narrator must be assumed. The other twelve pieces of text correspond in terms of content and form down to the last detail, but the progression nevertheless expresses the development of Julius and his love, his spiritual development, because: The measure for Lucinde is the classic Bildungsroman of the time, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister .

structure

  • prolog
  • [First part]
- Julius to Lucinde
- Dithyrambic fantasy about the most beautiful situation
- Characteristics of the little Wilhelmine
- Allegory of insolence
- Idyll about idleness
- Loyalty and joke
  • [Second part]
- Apprenticeship in masculinity
  • [Third part]
- [Without heading]
- metamorphoses
- Two letters
- 1.
- 2nd
- Julius to Antonio
- 1.
- 2nd
- Longing and calm
- Flirtations of the imagination

The fabric

The theme of the novel is love and reflecting on love in every conceivable written form: letters, diary, scribbled thoughts, notes, recorded dialogues. It has already been mentioned above that Lucinde has no coherent plot. Nevertheless, the book is of course based on a certain material and this is autobiographical. This is also due to Friedrich Schlegel's theory. The novel is made to “fully express the spirit of the author: so that some artists who only wanted to write a novel have portrayed themselves by accident”. A romantic novel therefore necessarily represents the very personal feelings and deeds, in short: the author's way of life. And not in a hidden way - just as one likes to interpret various books with the author's biography in the context of an autobiographical interpretation (cf. B. Franz Kafka , Mark Twain , James Joyce ) - but quite explicitly.

The love model

Anthologies on the development of the love and husband model and the associated love discourse in Germany and Europe - be it sociological, historical or literary studies - always see Lucinde as the paradigmatic example of love in Romanticism (albeit the "light name" of the The heroine of the title and thus of the entire book seems to be obliged to enlightenment on this metaphor). In the following, the idea of ​​love in this book is presented.

Understood sociologically: marriage is love and love is marriage

In Schlegel's Lucinde , we find for the first time in the history of love (in modern times ) the explicit demand that radical love and marriage , that is, the great, wild passion and the bourgeois-good bond for life, belong together. The objection that this is a utopia IN QUESTION and that blazing emotions are permanently imaginable difficulties between "screaming children or kitchen smoke," the Romantics set the distinction between poetic people ( enthusiasts ) and Philistines ( Philistines ) contrary: the romantic people we speak the ability for ecstatic harmony by definition too. And the (romantic) art as well as the right way of loving devotedly help people to develop their poetic side. Here, too, the novel Lucinde would like to make a contribution.

Understood poetologically: Everything is animated for me

In addition, in love one (loving) subject no longer relates to the (beloved) other, but one now loves - according to the romantic principle of universality - the entire world through the other.

Everything we used to love, we love even more warmly. The sense of the world really dawned on us. (Lucinde, p. 89.)

In Schlegel's philosophical system, with which he attempted to fathom the immeasurable world of poetry at the end of the 18th century, love has a special place: He saw it as the first step towards understanding it. Because it can be felt immediately and nevertheless leads to the desire to reflect on it, so that two generally opposing principles - immediacy and reflection, unconsciousness and highest consciousness - are implemented at the same time.

In addition, romantic love is infinite like poetry.

The function of the love discourse

Reflecting on love is necessary in order to create a distance that ultimately leads to an increase in what has been experienced. In the Lucinde , reflection takes place in the form of literary dialogues, each piece of text is addressed to both Lucinde and the reader. Yes, you can say that it is a single big love letter that the reader can look into.

reception

Contemporary reception

The Lucinda learned immediately after their appearance a lively, sometimes angry reception . For one thing, contemporaries had problems with the bulky shape. The term “Roman” was perceived as a “sham package”. Second, he was viewed as highly immoral. The permissive treatment of sexuality, coupled with the self-confidently loving title heroine position pointing in the direction of emancipation , broke with contemporary moral concepts. In 1816, when Friedrich Schlegel was appointed Austrian legation secretary at the Bundestag in Frankfurt, he was anonymously reported to Lucinde at the Supreme Police and Censorship Office in Vienna as a “highly mindless and indecent scribbler”. The book was written as “anger and Depravity "accused. The main victim was his companion Dorothea Veit , who - since she understood the concept and adored it - defended the novel against attacks.

Newer reception

On January 21, 1900, Hermann Hesse was unable to recommend the novel to modern readers in the “ Allgemeine Schweizer Zeitung ”.

Feminist interpretation

In the gender studies of the 1990s, Lucinde is only seen as apparently emancipatory. First of all, the love model is to be criticized: Although the point is that everyone develops himself as an individual, the asymmetry of the sexes remains. “The man loves to love, the woman loves the man; She loves on the one hand deeper and more original, on the other hand also more bound and less reflected. ”The depicted utopia of the role reversal in the sexual act, as described in the dithyrambic fantasy about the most beautiful situation , is understood as a key scene for gender equality. Nevertheless, the traditional dichotomy: woman - nature, man - spirit remains throughout the book. The woman is the savior of the man - even if this mystical experience, which is also supposed to be an aesthetic one, is called marriage.

Sequels

The Lucinde was to be the first part of a four-volume novel project that would embody the four types of the novel. The first part, however, remained the only one. Friedrich Schlegel's estate contained numerous notes and plans for continuation. Three sequels were carried out - although not always in Schlegel's sense.

literature

Used literature

  • Ernst Behler: Friedrich Schlegel: "Lucinde" . In: Paul Michael Lützeler (Hrsg.): Novels and stories of German romanticism: New interpretations. Reclam, Stuttgart 1981.
  • Nicola Kaminski: Cross-aisles. Novel experiments of German romanticism . Schöningh, Paderborn 2001.
  • Niklas Luhmann: love as passion. For coding intimacy. Frankfurt / M. 1982 (1st edition/1994, stw).
  • Peter von Matt: betrayal of love. The faithless in literature. Munich 1989 (2nd edition/1994, German)
  • Karl Konrad Polheim: Afterword . In: Friedrich Schlegel. Lucinde . Reclam, Stuttgart 1963. (Revised and expanded edition 1999, with "Repertorium F. Schlegelscher Definitions zu Lucinde ")

further reading

  • Hermann Hesse : Die Welt im Buch I. Reviews and essays from the years 1900–1910 (= Hermann Hesse. Complete works in 20 volumes. Volume 16). Edited by Volker Michels . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988 (2002 edition), ISBN 978-3-518-02683-0 .
  • Manfred Engel : Friedrich Schlegel, "Lucinde": "As in an endless row of mirrors" (early romantic potentiation). In: Ders .: The novel of the Goethe era. Volume 1: Beginnings in Classical and Early Romanticism. Metzler, Stuttgart 1993, pp. 381-443.
  • Mark-Georg Dehrmann: Lucinde. In: Johannes Endres (Ed.): Friedrich Schlegel Handbook. Life - work - effect. Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, pp. 171–179.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Friedrich Schlegel: Lucinde. Frölich, Berlin 1799. ( digitized version and full text in the German text archive )
  2. ↑ Kaminski
  3. ↑ Your destiny [of romantic poetry] is not merely to reunite all the separate genres of poetry and to bring poetry into contact with philosophy and rhetoric. She wants and should also mix poetry and prose, genius and criticism, art poetry and natural poetry, soon merge [...]. (Athenaeum fragment 116)
  4. ↑ Athenaeum fragment 116
  5. ↑ So z. B. Niklas Luhmann: love as passion or Peter von Matt: betrayal of love.
  6. ↑ Kaminski
  7. ^ Karl Konrad Polheim: Afterword . In: Friedrich Schlegel: Lucinde . Stuttgart 1963. (RUB)
  8. ↑ Letter to Schleiermacher:
  9. ↑ Michels, p. 20, 17th Zvu
  10. ↑ Luhmann, p. 172.
  11. ↑ One of them is the funniest and the most beautiful: when we swap roles and compete with childish glee who can ape the other more deceptively, whether you succeed better in the gentle vehemence of men, or in the attractive devotion of women. But do you know that this sweet game has quite different charms for me than its own? Nor is it just the lust of weariness or the anticipation of vengeance. I see here a wonderful ingeniously significant allegory of the perfection of the masculine and feminine to the full whole of humanity. There is a lot in it, and what it contains will certainly not get up as quickly as I do if I succumb to you.