Narratives of Emergence: Jean Paul on the Inner Life

Narratives of Emergence: Jean Paul on the Inner Life William N. Coker (bio) Poetry is the only peace-goddess of the earth and of the angels, who leads us, and if only for a matter of hours, out of prisons and onto stars. —Jean Paul, Pre-School of Aesthetics[Vorschule der Ästhetik] (1804) 1 In his treatise on poetics and aesthetics, Jean Paul personifies poetry as an angel that frees “us” readers—and writers—from confinement. As definitive as the theme of interiority is for the Romantic period as a whole, in Jean Paul’s fictions the transition between inner and outer spaces is of pervasive significance both thematically and formally. Attention to these transitions offers a clue to a riddle otherwise posed by Jean Paul’s texts: the thematic emphasis on the inner life can seem strangely at odds with the externality of their form, a predominantly authorial discourse relying mainly on a nexus of metaphors rather than the modulation of the narrative voice. Doubtless this tension relates to the situation of writing in a period in which the idea of an indispensible inner core to the human individual no longer enjoys unchallenged metaphysical support. Wolfgang Pross locates Jean Paul’s writing at the crossroads between “metaphysical [End Page 385] need and historical awareness.”2 The following analysis aims to pinpoint more closely the source of this tension as well as one of Jean Paul’s strategies for working through it, by focusing on a recurrent motif that binds together themes central to the discourse of Romanticism—interiority, transcendence, education, and confession—namely the motif of emergence. Jean Paul’s scenes of emergence reflect the problematic status of an interiority that has come to be seen as a product of historical development rather than as metaphysically given. Accordingly, Jean Paul’s first narrative of education, in his early novel The Invisible Lodge [Die Unsichtbare Loge] (1792), considers the paradoxical case of inwardness cultivated from the outside. His definition of poetic genius in the Pre-School of Aesthetics concedes the ambivalence of the inner life as a harbinger of either transcendence or death, and consequently as something that both beautifies life and potentially deceives as to life’s true nature.3 His philosophical anticipation of immortality in the late work Selina (1823–25) is inseparable from both his reliance on analogy as a guide to thought and his understanding of the soul as a process of continual emergence. Both the notion of thought as a structure of comparison and the motif of the inner life unfolding as from a cocoon are latent in Jean Paul’s most significant precursor, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with the later writer even borrowing part of Rousseau’s first name to use in his pseudonym. In Rousseau’s description of the emergent “facultés virtuelles” of the mind in Émile (1762), a paradigm is set for a tension present throughout his writing.4 Rousseau defines the inner life as a widening gap between imagination and fulfillment, linking imagination ineluctably with desire, and immediately sets about attempting to contain this gap. The plot of education in Émile, in which the tutor and narrator guides his pupil’s development [End Page 386] by awakening and restraining his imagination, displaces onto the interaction between tutor and pupil the basic problem of the inner life as the narrator has earlier defined it. Jean Paul effectively reframes the relationship between tutor and pupil as one between writer and reader across the rhetorical and narrative surface of the text. In doing so, Jean Paul replicates, in the metaphorical structure of his own text, the temporal structure foreseen by Rousseau in his discussion of emergent “imagination,” and revises the notion of “happiness” that Rousseau’s account had placed off limits. Happiness, which by Rousseau’s definition becomes inaccessible upon the emergence of a significant interiority, is redefined programmatically in Jean Paul to comprise the exchange of perspectives and shifts in and out that also comprise the narrative and rhetorical style of his texts. When seen against the background of Rousseau’s philosophical fiction, episodes in Jean Paul’s novels that emphasize the performative nature of revelations of interiority can be seen as part...

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