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125 8 Rhapsodic Dismemberment: Hamann and the Fable Lori Yamato The eighteenth century saw a peculiar interest in the fable as an important literary genre. The fable, precariously perched between philosophy and literature, sacred and profane, sophistic manipulation and wisdom, and didactic tool and whimsical entertainment, involved thinkers in public debates about how to define and use this equivocal genre. Given his own preoccupations, Hamann’s attention to the genre, especially as the questions the fable provokes lie paradoxically hidden within a deliberately straightforward kind of prose, would seem to be a foregone conclusion. Yet Hamann’s contributions to the fable debates of the eighteenth century are largely allusive and themselves enigmatic. Unlike writers such as Lessing, Herder, and Rousseau, who made the fable question central to large-scale works, Hamann’s comments on fables tend to come as digressions, passing remarks, and metacommentaries on the debates that are more directly engaging his contemporaries. Hamann does not propose a system for defining the genre, nor does he even spend much verbiage explicating any particular fable.1 Rather, Hamann elliptically wields fragments of fables, and the use of these sharply cutout shards often comes across as implicit criticism of proposed theories of the genre. Hamann’s is a pointedly savage rhetorical use of the fable, a commentary on its potency. As such it is also a protest against the idea of the systematic categorization of the open-ended and primal fable, the neutering into usable rhetoric, of something originally much more vital. Further, when looking at the content of Hamann’s fable comments, a parallel to the form of his commentary becomes apparent: the fables that he takes up are often about dismemberment and/or occur within the context of Hamann’s own metaphors of dismemberment. I propose that far from the comfortingly civilizing uses (whether didactic or virtuosically literary) for the fable that his contemporaries were proposing, Hamann hints at a different understanding of the fable genre, one that is bound up in Hamann’s own questions of rhapsody as a means of reassembling 126 L O R I Y A M A T O “all that we have left in nature for our use . . . jumbled verses and disjecti membra poetae.”2 As a prelude to examining this disquieting phrase from the major work Aesthetica in nuce, I will consider some key strategies at work in the representatively compressed form of a private letter. Written to Friedrich Nicolai, Hamann’s letter contains his account of the Tarquinius Superbus legend, a version of which would gain a broader audience as the epigraph for Kierkegaard’sFear and Trembling (ZH 2:194–97). Briefly, the legend is this: Tarquinius Superbus’s son Sextus sends a messenger to his father to ask how to deliver the city of Gabii into Tarquinius Superbus’s hands. Without saying a word, Tarquinius Superbus goes about the garden , cutting off the heads of the tallest poppies. The son understands the cutting of poppies as a symbolic gesture to convey that he should kill or banish the most prominent citizens.3 Lessing, in his Treatises on the Fable, uses this legend more or less in full as a case study for determining what differentiates mere symbolic action from fable proper; the story is for Lessing an example of a “hidden lesson” (versteckte Lehre) transmitted by an “allegorical action” (allegorische Handlung) that is not a fable.4 Lessing, we should note, makes the rather peculiar move of drawing this distinction by treating the legendary Tarquinius Superbus as the potential fable composer, not as the subject of the legend; Lessing focuses on the action (the physical cutting of the poppies) as a means of conveying a lesson, not on what we might call the narrative about Tarquinius Superbus and the poppies.5 Hamann, on the other hand, focuses on the story itself. He finds so much in this legend that not only does a truncated version of it appear in his letter to Nicolai, but he repeats it in a second letter to Lindner (which quotes, with small alterations, much of the Nicolai letter).6 When Hamann takes up the Tarquinius Superbus story, he makes a couple of characteristic motions that I would like to call attention to here. First off, he brings back the literary flavor of the story. He treats it as a story as opposed to considering Tarquinius Superbus as an inadequate storyteller . By doing so, Hamann implicitly reenters the legend into consideration as a fable in the...

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