ABSTRACT
The extent to which the understanding of language and truth is transformed in Romantic philosophy can be gauged from Novalis’ startling Monologue of 1798. Monologue is also significant because it offers an enactment of what Romanticism might mean by ‘literature’ (Poesie). 1 By asking the question whether Monologue is itself literature or a text about literature one can begin to show both how many of the philosophical issues we have considered so far inform the questions posed by Romantic literary theory and how these questions have returned to the contemporary philosophical agenda. That Novalis and his friend Friedrich Schlegel were thoroughly aware of the philosophical issues is evident from discussions of Kant, Fichte and Jacobi at numerous points in their work. Here is the complete text of Monologue:
It is a strange thing about speaking and writing; a real conversation is just a game of words. One can only be amazed at the ridiculous mistake, that people think they speak for the sake of things. Of the fact that language is peculiar because it only concerns itself with itself, nobody is aware. That is why it is a wonderful and fruitful secret, —that precisely when someone speaks just in order to speak he pronounces the most splendid and original truths. But if he wishes to speak of something determinate, temperamental old language makes him say the most ridiculous and mistaken things. That is also the source of the hatred which so many serious people have for language. They notice its mischief but do not notice that wretched chattering is the infinitely serious side of language. If one could only make people understand that with language it is as with mathematical formulae—They constitute their own world—They only play with themselves, express nothing but their wonderful nature, and this is why they are so expressive—precisely for this reason does the strange game of relations of things reflect itself in them. Only via their freedom are they members of nature and only in their free movements does the world-soul express itself and make them into a gentle measure and outline of things. Thus it is also with language—whoever has a fine feeling for [language’s] application, for its rhythm, for its musical spirit, 66who hears in himself the gentle effect of its inner nature and moves his tongue or hand accordingly, will be a prophet; on the other hand, whoever knows this well enough but does not have the ears and the feeling for language will write truths like these but will be made fun of by language and will be mocked by people, like Cassandra by the Trojans. If I believe that I have thereby indicated the essence and role (Amt) of literature (Poesie) in the clearest possible fashion then I yet know that no one can understand it and that I have said something completely stupid, because I wanted to say it, and in this way no literature can come into being. But what if I had to speak? and this drive to speak were the characteristic of the inspiration of language, of the effectiveness of language in me? and if my will as well could only want whatever I had to do, then this could in the last analysis indeed be literature without my knowing it and believing it, and could render a secret of language comprehensible? and thus I would be a writer by vocation, for a writer is really only one who is enthused by language [ein Sprachbegeisterter, which has the sense of one who is ‘in-spirited’ by language]?
(Novalis 1978 pp. 438–9)