German Quixotism, or Sentimental Reading: Musäus's Richardson Satires

German Quixotism, or Sentimental Reading: Musäus's Richardson Satires John P. Heins Over the last tiiirty-five years or so, scholars ofeighteenth-century German literature have attempted to expand earlier conceptions ofliterary and cultural value by filling in the picture ofthe print culture ofthat era. Where previously the artistic triumphs ofGoethe and Schiller's Weimar classicism provided the privileged object of interest for most scholars, in more recent decades a fuller variety of literary movements and cultural expressions has been subjected to renewed and more broadly conceived scholarly exploration. In particular, the field ofsentimentalism {Empfindsamkeit) has benefited gready from diis new attention.1 The centrality of this movement to eighteenth-century German literature and thought has been reestablished , particularly in the relation of the movement to questions of genre and thus to the hierarchies ofprint culture, as well as to larger 1 Among book-length studies, see especially Georgjäger, Empfindsamkeit undRoman: Weltgeschichte , Tlteorie und Kritik im 18. undfrühen 19.Jaltrhundert (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969); Gerhard Sauder, Empfindsamkeit,vol. 1 (Stuttgart:Metzler, 1974);WolfgangDoktor,.D¿e.Krií¿* derEmpfindsamkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1975); Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Dereuropäisc/ie Roman der Empfindsamkeit (Wiesbaden: Athenaion, 1977); Nikolaus Wegmann, Diskurse der Empfindsamkeit· ZurGeschichteânes Gefühls in derLiteraturdes 18.Jalirhunderts (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988). I would like to thankAlex and Karen Winter-Nelson for facilitating the first version of this article, and Margaret Gonglewski and Walter Rankin for enabling die final version. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 3, April 2004 420 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION questions of literary representation and of the role of the arts in modern societies.2 What a literary representation is, and how one does or should respond to it, are questions central to debates around die sentimental novel, and, not coincidentally, central to quixotism. Since the publication of Cervantes' Don Quixote in the early seventeenth century, the "quixotic problem" experienced awide variety of expressions in European cultures as writers used the quixotic figure to explore die relationship ofliterature to the empirical realm. In the eighteenth century especially, die literary engagementwith quixotism addresses die function ofaesthetic illusion as it satirically or humorously portrays the purported effects ofreading imaginative literature. The quixote is the literal-minded reader who mistakenly believes diat die world portrayed in literature is literally true, and then interprets die empirical world according to die terms and forms supplied by the particular category ofliterary fictions.3 Eighteenth-century Germanlanguage portrayals of this literal-minded reader, the quixote, are generally intended satirically, in contrast to the portrayal of Don Quixote as a heroic and noble dreamer in later periods.4 A particularly significant eighteenth-century German variant of quixotism is, in fact, the satirical portrayal of sentiment; in the German context, we may risk the generalization that quixotism and sentimentalism tend to appear together. Perhaps more than in other national literatures in the eighteenth century, in German literature the quixote is the unwitting victim of sentimental novels.5 The On the relationship ofsentimentalism to the novel genre, in addition toJäger (above) see also Dieter Kimpel, Der Roman der Aufklärung (1670-1774), 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977) and Wilhelm Vosskamp, Romantheorie in Deutschland: Von Martin Opitz bisFriedrich von Blanckenburg(Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973). On the emerging stratification ofthe print market, see Helmuth Kiesel and Paul Munch, Gesellschaß und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert: Voraussetzungen undEntstehungdes literarischen Markts in Deutschland (Munich: Beck, 1977). My definition here differs from other recent definitions because it prioritizes misreading over the naive belief in ideals and the reader's tragi-comic sympathy (Jürgen Jacobs, Don Quijote in derAufklärung [Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1992]), the idealistic madness and the form of die quest (Ronald Paulson, Don Quixote in England- TlteAestlielics ofLaugliter [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998]), and idiosyncratic reason (Wendy Motooka, The Age ofReasons: Quixotism, Sentimentalism and Political Economy in EigliteenthCentury Britain [London: Roudedge, 1998]). Jacobs, above; Theo In der Smitten, Don Qiixote (der "riclitigc" under der "fabelte") und sieben deutscheLeser (Bern: Lang, 1986). See especiallyJacobs, and Lieselotte Kurth, Die zweite Wirklichkeit: Studien zum Roman des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), for informative discussions of eighteenth-century German quixotism, neither of which, however, exhausts die question...