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8 - Hermann Hesse’s Narziss und Goldmund: Medieval Imaginaries of (Post-)Modern Realities
- Edited by Ingo Cornils, University of Leeds
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- Book:
- A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 02 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 August 2013, pp 187-214
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Summary
Hermann Hesse’s novel Narziss und Goldmund was published in 1930 and became the most successful book during his lifetime. The novel is set in the Middle Ages and depicts the story of a friendship between two men, whose personalities are veritable case studies in character opposites. Whereas Narziss finds an intellectual home and spiritual sense of belonging in the cloister of Mariabronn, Goldmund seeks fulfillment in his perennial vagabonding through the world. At the end of his adventurous life he returns to the cloister in order to settle down as a sculptor, striving to transform his worldly experiences into works of exquisite art. During Goldmund’s extended absence, Narziss has risen to the lofty position of abbot, in which capacity he represents and reflects the powers and the teachings of his Catholic Church. Why would this medieval story of two very different friends, leading lives of, respectively, the vita contemplative and the vita activa be such a success with modern readers? One of the answers probably lies in Hesse’s thematic structure of the novel. The Romantics of the nineteenth century had already cultivated a deep affinity with the Middle Ages, and their relationship to that earlier time period became a congenial mode of reflection for Hesse, the neo-Romantic author of the twentieth century. Like a distant mirror, its medieval imaginaries project across the centuries central aspects of our modern and postmodern realities. Focusing on the development of intellectual history, this narrative mirror reflects specifically Adorno and Horkheimer’s “dialectics of enlightenment,” Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of values,” and last but not least, the eclipse of all reason, which characterized the genius and the insanity of Germany’s cultural history. This essay will trace this trajectory and illustrate the various reflections of the novel’s medieval modernity.
Essential for the understanding of the exemplary differences in the character formation of Narziss and Goldmund is the recognition that they are modeled after cultural archetypes. Narziss represents the patriarchal world order of an androcentric culture, whose societal hierarchy is based on male authority, maintained by social and sexual repression, and focused on spiritual values that find their quintessential apotheosis in God the Father, residing in heaven. Goldmund, by contrast is associated with the matriarchal myth of a gynocentric utopia, whose ideal state is characterized by female authority, based on social equality and sexual permissiveness, and centered in the material world, which finds its symbolic representation in the pagan Mother Goddess, living on earth.
13 - The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man
- Edited by Ritchie Robertson, University of Oxford
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 29 November 2001, pp 199-212
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Summary
The genesis of this work spans much of Thomas Mann's creative career. His collection of material dates back to 1910. In 1922 the first part of the book appeared under the title Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Buch der Kindheit [Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years]. In 1951, after his work on Doctor Faustus had once more delayed the continuation of the Confessions, Mann returned to this novel and to his former thematic trajectory. Hans Wysling, in his authoritative study, unfolds the multitude of literary influences and delineates the essential concepts and traditions which informed the Confessions. According to Wysling, the two creative phases are marked by distinctive shifts of models. The early phase is inspired by three major models: Georges Manolescu's memoirs A Prince of Thieves (1905), Goethe's autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth], which is part of the great eighteenth-century tradition of autobiographical and confessional writing, and the fairy-tale motif of the Glückskind, the fortunate child. All three models are more or less refracted and modified by other concepts. For example, Manolescu's literary memoirs of a self-proclaimed confidence man are problematised by the Protestant ethic of self-examination and the psychoanalytical school of self-interrogation. Whereas Felix Krull's imitation of Goethe's Poetry and Truth lacks the aspects of societal integration and self-realisation so essential to the eighteenth-century ethos of Bildung or self-cultivation, the deployment of the fairy-tale plot of the Glückskind is enriched both by the psychoanalytical complex of primary narcissism, which is symptomatic for the early stage of childhood development, and by the mythological features of collective archetypes. The protagonist's name Felix, signifying the happy one, is onomastic testimony to the felicitous nature and fate of his composite psychomythic character.