The Aesthetics of Biography in Moritz’s Anton Reiser A Chronotopic Reading At the heart of Karl Philipp Moritz’s psychological novel Anton Reiser (1785-1790) lies the faculty of the imagination, the seat of the mind’s aesthetic activity, that workshop which forges images out of the raw material of sense impressions and conveys them to the critical consciousness. Yet despite its prominence, the faculty of the imagination as it is represented in Moritz’s novel has yet to be exhaustively or conclusively discussed by scholars. Existing studies of the imagination in Anton Reiser are limited in two important respects. Firstly, while several scholars have remarked on the novel’s sustained attention to the categories or space and time, none has yet developed the connections between those categories and the workings of the imagination. Thus, Mark Boulby’s observations on Moritz’s representation of the power of place and time over the imagination, though perceptive, call for further development (Boulby 1979). Secondly, while scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to the imagination as a theme on the histoire level of the novel, they have tended to neglect it as a moment of discours. The reader can be in no doubt about the prominence of the imagination as theme in Anton Reiser – the psychological malaise afflicting the young protagonist is unequivocally identified as “Leiden der Einbildungskraft” (AR, 88). But, as the preface to the first of the novel’s four parts makes clear, the imagination is not merely a central theme, it is a faculty of the reader’s mind, part of “die vorstellende Kraft”,1 the power to make representations, that must be mobilized if he or she is to be enlightened by the protagonist’s suffering and development. It is with this aim in mind that Moritz departs from the conventional pattern of a late eighteenth-century 1 novel with its large cast of characters, a “große Mannigfaltigeit der Charaktere”, because his purpose is to relate “die innere Geschichte des Menschen”. This last phrase was taken directly from Karl Friedrich Blanckenburg’s Versuch über den Roman (1774), a contemporary treatise which argued that the value of the novel, a genre then struggling for recognition, lay in its capacity for representing the inner life of a human individual (Pfotenhauer 1987, 96). In the following, I will allow myself to be guided by two working assumptions. The first is that the faculty of imagination lies at the heart of Moritz’s psychological novel, and the second is that this vital yet potentially hazardous mental faculty is represented in such a way as to bring out its conditioning by environmental factors. If these assumptions are accepted as the basis of an approach to Anton Reiser, then it follows that an adequate reading will require a theory of the imagination that is attentive to the ways in which time and space bear upon that faculty. To be of value such a reading will need to build on previous studies of the representation of time and space, moving beyond them to show how these categories are the premises on which Moritz’s exploration of the image-making power of the mind is constructed.2 This, then, is my justification for deploying Bakthtin’s theory of the literary chronotope, that configuration of time and space which is “the elementary unit of literary imagination” (Keunen 2010, 35).3 There exists no single authoritative definition of the chronotope for the simple reason that the term was a leitmotif that accompanied Bakhtin’s literary-historical work over decades; it was a concept that he returned to at intervals, augmenting, modifying and refining it. Bakhtin wrote most of the monograph that we know as “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope” in 1934, during a period of great interest in the genre of the novel in Russia and elsewhere, but he did not complete it until 1973, 2 when he added the “Concluding Remarks” as a tenth chapter (Bakhtin 1981). The picture is further complicated by the fact that Bakhtin uses “chronotope” and “motif” as synonyms, referring, for example, both to the “chronotope of the meeting” and the “motif of the meeting”.4 Despite the absence of a precise definition, considerable progress has been made by scholars in elucidating the scope of the chronotope concept and its potential applications in literary scholarship, most notably at the 2008 Brussels conference “Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope”, the results of which were published in 2010. As Nele Bemong and Pieter Borghart remind us in their “Introduction” to the conference proceedings, although Bakhtin intended the concept primarily as a contribution to the historical typology of literary genres, it also has significance for the construction of plot (Bemong & Borghart 2010). These differences of application account for the distinction between major and minor chronotopes respectively. The minor chronotopes organize time and space over a relatively short range of the text, constructing a scene or chapter. The major chronotopes, by contrast, are those configurations of time-space that operate throughout the entire work, or a large part of it, giving it its particular character as an aesthetically-formed whole, and making it identifiable as a member of a genre. Those works of the imagination that are of hybrid character contain more than one major chronotope, combining, for example, the chronotope of the adventure novel with that of the Bildungsroman. In his contribution to the Brussels conference proceedings, Bart Keunen employs the typology of cinematic images that Deleuze derived from his interpretation of Bergson’s philosophy of experience in an effort to think chronotopes as representations of the lived experience of time. Keunen turns his attention to the five minor chronotopes discussed by Bakhtin in the “Concluding Remarks” of his 3 essay, arguing that these chronotopic motifs “underline the importance of the psychologically relevant literary images in the more recent history of the novel” (Keunen 2010, 41). Because they correspond to Bergson’s durée, pure duration, or lived time, these chronotopes – in the order given by Bakhtin: the encounter on the road, the Gothic castle, the parlour or salon, the provincial town, and the threshold – are images that serve both to make history palpable and to carry an affective charge. The fact that Bakhtin draws his examples of these motifs almost exclusively from works of nineteenth-century literature indicates that he associates them with a specifically modern aesthetic experience of time. Keunen uses the binary pairs saturation versus rarification and acceleration versus deceleration to map out the temporal and spatial parameters of Bakhtin’s five minor chronotopes, which between them express “four extreme forms of temporal experience that are frequent in nineteenth and twentieth century literature” (Keunen 2010, 43). The first binary pair, taken from the second chapter of Deleuze’s book on cinema, refers to changes in the spatial situation (Deleuze 2005, 13). At one extreme, the spatial situation may undergo little or no change, giving rise to few stimuli, a situation characterized by rarification. At the other extreme, the spatial situation may be subject to rapid change, producing new information at a great rate. The second binary pair refers to the experience of time by the observing consciousness as speeded up or slowed down, according to the rate at which information from the spatial surroundings is processed. The experience of deceleration, in which the processing of information is slowed down, may, for example indicate that consciousness is operating predominantly in the mode of memory; while acceleration, with its alertness to new information, would be characteristic of a mind operating in the mode of anticipation. When combined, these two binary pairs provide four poles representing 4 extremes of human temporal experience that can be summarized as follows: slowed down empty, slowed down saturated, accelerated empty, and accelerated saturated. The provincial town, Emma Bovary’s Tostes, the example chosen by Keunen, is characterized by an experience of time-space that is slowed down and rarified. Few new objects of attention present themselves in a thoroughly familiar terrain, and consciousness works at a slow pace, ruminating on familiar impressions. The road and the salon are associated with the opposite time-space experience of acceleration and saturation. Both locations are the sites of encounter with new people and objects, a richness of stimuli that produces a corresponding quickening of consciousness, so that the mind races to catch up with the new impressions and process them. The other two poles, speeded up saturated and slowed down saturated, also form a diametric opposition in terms of the qualities of temporal experience described by each. The Gothic castle describes a situation in which space is rarified, there is a deficit of information accompanied by a sense of threat as the mind races in anticipation of danger or sudden revelation. The example Keunen gives is the passage from Ann Radcliffe’s The Castle of Montoni (1794), where Emma glimpses the villain’s castle for the first time. This chronotopic structure is thus closely connected with the affection of fear. The opposite chronotopic configuration is described by the motif of the threshold, in which an individual’s will to process new information and take decisions is in conflict with his or her indecisiveness, with “the fear to step over the threshold” (Bakhtin 1981, 248). In this case the situation involves an excess of information: the subject compares new imformation with remembered material, perhaps struggling to reconcile the two, before either crossing the rubicon, or failing to do so. While the chronotope of the Gothic castle is associated with the affective charge of fear, and 5 with anticipation, the threshold describes a temporal experience that is strongly determined by memory. The enumeration of these examples has shown that chronotopes are images of that particular kind of temporal experience which Bergson called “durée”, each of which is defined by its particular temporal and spatial parameters, and endowed with an affective charge. It is with these examples in mind that we now turn to an analysis of the minor chronotopes in Anton Reiser. Each of the novel’s four parts is preceded by a preface, and it is in these prefaces that we encounter a narratorial persona whose interventions are designed to steer the reader’s responses and guide interpretation. Within the narrative proper, the perspective of this authorial narrator, described by Lothar Müller as a “philosophischer Arzt” (Müller 1987, 48), alternates with the viewpoint of the young Anton Reiser in the first twenty-one years of his life. The existence alongside one another of these two perspectives lends the novel its characteristic bilateral, or dialogic, structure. We have noted that in the first preface the narrator explains that he has dispensed with a large cast of characters, so as to avoid dividing the “vorstellende Kraft” (AR, 11), which must be concentrated if the mind’s insight into its own workings is to be sharpened. By the “vorstellende Kraft”, or the power to make representations, Moritz means both the imagination and the power of judgement.5 Both faculties, and not the power of judgement alone, are to be enlisted in the process of enlightenment, otherwise Moritz would have written a treatise rather than a novel. In opting for an aesthetic form, Moritz eschews a purely analytic view in favour of the holistic mode of seeing in images. The faculty of the imagination, the main object of interest, is thereby introduced: it will recur at many intervals, most strikingly in the 6 phrase that describes the psychological malaise of its protagonist: “Leiden der Einbildungskraft” (AR, 88). This phrase, “the sufferings of the imagination”, does not have for us the resonance it bore for contemporary readers versed in developments in the field of empirical psychology. In the first place, the diagnosis contained in this phrase is a clear token of the weight given to the imagination as theme; its insistent repetition shows that Moritz wishes his reader to see Anton Reiser’s troubles not as a maladie imaginaire, but as a very real disorder of a particular mental faculty. Secondly, the phrase would have alerted contemporaries to the intention to deal with a province of the human mind deemed to exist between the senses and the intelligence – a sphere of intense interest to practitioners of the discipline of anthropology, the so- called “philosophische Ärzte”, in the latter part of the eighteenth century. This interest had already been a feature of the faculty psychology developed in the early part of the century by Leibniz and Christian Wolff. For Christian Wolff and his students, Johann Christoph Gottsched and Alexander Baumgarten, imagination was one of the lower faculties (facultates inferiores). But the tendency from rationalism towards empiricism in the eighteenth century brought with it a revaluation of the senses and the lower faculties. The rehabilitation of the senses that accompanied Enlightenment empiricism gave rise to heightened interest in that part of the mental apparatus that was involved in receiving and arranging sense impressions, and in conveying them to the upper faculties of intelligence and reason.6 Indeed, since the proper concern of anthropology was the interaction between mind and body, the commercium mentis et corporis, the imagination as a region deemed to exist between these poles had to be a source of profound interest. That part of the imagination lying closest to the senses, and receiving impressions directly from them, and frequently identified as “Phantasie”, was 7 regarded as passive, whereas the part of the imagination in closest proximity to the faculty of reason, the imagination proper, was seen as active. Thus, Voltaire’s 1765 article “Imagination” in the Encyclopédie distinguishes between imagination passive and imagination active (Voltaire 2013, vol. 8, 560-564).7 The former is possessed by both man and animals. The latter is governed by the operation of “réflexion” and “jugement”, and it is a key characteristic of artistic genius. Contemporary English discourse made an equivalent distinction between “trivial” fancy and “solemn” imagination (Beattie 1783, 87). The rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff, whose Deutsche Metaphysik influenced German philosophers and aestheticians throughout the eighteenth century, was prepared to allow the imagination a cognitive function so long as it remained governed by such laws of nature as the principle of sufficient reason (Wolff 2009). The Deutsche Metaphysik plays a characteristically ambivalent part in Anton Reiser’s diet of philosophical reading. By acknowledging the contribution to cognition made by the imagination, Wolff had broken with the Cartesian disavowal of the senses and imagination in favour of reason. When considering the status of the faculty of imagination in Late Enlightenment discourse it is therefore important to avoid identifying it as the “other of reason” – a tendency evident in some scholarship. In his otherwise magisterial survey of Moritz’s psychological novel, Lothar Müller risks encouraging just such a view when he presents the relationship between “Denkkraft” and “Einbildungskraft” in Anton Reiser in terms of a straightforward conflict.8 There are ample grounds for seeing Anton Reiser’s imaginative life as a hindrance to his intellectual development; and the narrator certainly encourages us to do so. Those scenes in which the imagination appears as the opponent of reason, as a dark and troublesome province of mind to be illumined as far as possible by introspective self-analysis, far outnumber 8 those in which it is the engine of self-development and creativity. Thus, the young Anton’s boyhood fantasy of emulating his namesake, St Anthony, which begins innocuously enough with daydreams of inhabiting a desert a few paces from his parents’ home, culminates in the boy pricking himself with needles in a self-harming effort to reproduce the ascetic life of an anchorite. Here, as on so many other occasions in Anton’s young life, reading is the source of these destructive fantasies; and Moritz’s condemnation of misdirected and indiscriminate reading as Lesesucht is fundamental to his critique of imagination. That critique can, however, obscure the role of the imagination in the development of Moritz’s protagonist. The internal differentiation into three modes of imagination made, for example, in the Zedler Universal-Lexikon, with its distinction between ‘sinnliche”, “ingenieuse”, and “judicieuse” imaginative representations, demonstrates that the relationship between the imagination and reason was not seen as a matter of mere opposition (Zedler 2003, vol. 8, 533-538).9 Indeed, each of these three modes could be seen as developmental stages, marking the maturing individual’s path from sensuality to reason. Reprising an idea from medieval faculty psychology, Roger Bacon separated human science into three divisions, each of which expressed a particular aspect of the human spirit: history derived from memory, poetry from the imagination, and philosophy from intelligence. This hierarchy could also be used to describe the progression of the individual from sensuality via the imagination to philosophy as the highest expression of the human spirit. In Addison’s influential essay On the Pleasures of the Imagination, serialized in The Spectator in 1712 – an important source for Voltaire’s Encyclopédie article – the delights furnished by the imagination are less hazardous than those of the senses, but less subtle than the pleasures of understanding. According to Addison, the enjoyment 9 provided by art avoids the dangers of sensuality; and it is less strenuous than the exertions of the spirit. What is above all at issue in Moritz’s psychological novel is, then, the imagination; and this faculty is represented in such a way as to show the factors, material, social, and environmental, bearing upon it. Mark Boulby’s indispensable biography calls Anton Reiser “the outstanding, and the most unsentimentalized, portrayal of lower class life in German literature of the eighteenth century” (Boulby 1979, 45). Referring to “that remarkable study of environmental conditioning that is the great achievement of the book”, Boulby rightly observes that “Moritz’s understanding of economic oppression is purely subjective, his insight into political structures superficial. But he has an astonishing perception of the psychological determinants of time and place” (Boulby 1979, 45-46). In Anton Reiser the situation of the protagonist acquires a high degree of concreteness as a result of the sharp delineation of the contours of time and space. Historical time is inextricably bound up with the development of the protagonist from infancy to his twenty-first year. The history of eighteenth-century Germany makes its presence felt in the form of the Seven Years’ War, which compels Anton’s mother to avoid a possible siege of Hameln by taking her infant son to live in the country for two years while her husband is away soldiering. But the century is manifested primarily in the literary milestones of Anton Reiser’s career as a reader, from Johann Gottfried Schnabel’s desert-island novel Wunderliche Fata einiger See-Fahrer, better known as Insel Felsenburg (1731-43), the book that stokes his early enthusiasm for reading, to Goethe’s sensational Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, published in 1774, at just the right time to inflame the eighteen-year-old Anton Reiser. But historical time is also manifested in the personalities encountered by Moritz / Reiser. There is 10