In the course of my revision I have been reading and summarising Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which is the most representative example of early German Romanticism that exists in novel form.
It’s basically about a young man of twenty who has a hard-on for poetry, but has never met a poet nor heard a poem. He dreams about a blue flower (symbolizing some kind of sexual freedom, n’est-ce pas?) and his mother takes him on a journey to her native Augsburg, where she promises him some fitties and booze. On the way he meets a hermit obsessed with history, a miner obsessed with the religious sanctity it affords him and a crazy poet called Klingsohr whose songs and rhymes are frankly bollocks. However, the first bird he gets to chat up is a miserable cow called Mathilde and the soppy pratt falls head over heels for her. God, don’t you just want to slap Romantic leads sometimes?
This isn’t the worst of it, though. In the ninth and final chapter of the first, and only completed part of the novel, the mad git Klingsohr tells the most obscure and contrived fairy story about some semi-divine characters who engage in dozens of random actions and interchanges for about twenty pages. And this is supposed to symbolize the Romantics’ triumph over Enlightenment Rationalism? God, give me some plain-talking Kant any day.
P.S. Friendster is still shit.
In revising for my French period paper exam I have often come across the concept of the Absurd. The twentieth century philosophical novelist, Albert Camus, used the term to describe the sheer meaninglessness of life. The work of playwrights such as Ionesco and Samuel Beckett was later dubbed Theatre of the Absurd by the critic Martin Esslin in 1961. It referred, in this case, to the tendency towards non sequitur and confusing language that characterised such plays as Waiting for Godot, Rhinoceros and The Bald Prima Donna.
