Norbert Miller: “The Artificial Paradises”. Review. – Culture

When Charles Baudelaire negotiated an edition of his works with his publisher in 1860, the first volume was naturally to contain his most famous work, the “Fleurs du Mal”. The second volume was projected as a collection of his essays on Delacroix, Thomas De Quincey and Edgar Allan Poe, among others. This volume was published during Baudelaire’s lifetime and was entitled “Les paradis artificiels. Opium et Hashisch”. It is the first part of this title that gives the title to the great book by the literary scholar Norbert Miller, the résumé of a scholar’s life.

The second part of Baudelaire’s title refers to the fact that authors of the 19th century in particular considered stimulants to be extremely beneficial to the imagination. In an earlier version it says “wine” instead of opium – an increase in intensity was built in, so to speak. In one of his most famous poems “Invitation to Travel”, Baudelaire, who himself only left Paris and northern France once as a young man, encourages his readers to take him to a region where everything is order and beauty, tranquillity, sensuality and well-being Poem beautifully set to music by Henri Duparc.

Miller takes on eleven poets of the 18th and 19th centuries who, as he says in the introduction, recreated the worlds of their childhoods with their writing, invented entire biographies, delved into paintings, gardens and landscapes, and also combined everyday scenes with the prism of the curious, developed unarmed utopias, in short, created an ivory tower of fantasy and the wondrous.

Miller returns to a basic theme of his research and to Jean Paul

The book begins with Restif de La Bretonne, the 18th-century French storyteller who, inspired by the tremendous success of the orientalist Antoine Galland’s version of the “Tales from 1001 Nights”, decided to convey the fairytale character of the Orient in the nights of Paris seek, a flâneur, long before Walter Benjamin. Jean Paul follows him. With this chapter, Norbert Miller goes back to the beginning of his literary career.

Around 60 years ago, together with Walter Höllerer, he began to work on the reading edition of the genius from the Fichtelgebirge, which is still valid today. Some still hold Jean Paul undeterred as the greatest German storyteller because he managed to design a second world away from the banality of the first with an unparalleled power of language and eruption of imagination. His dream images not only influenced surrealism. The case of Jean Paul in particular shows one of the great strengths of this book: like Jean Paul’s aeronaut Giannozzo, Miller has an astonishing and admirable overview of the European culture of the last centuries, of literature, but also of the fine arts, architecture, the Garden art and the music of these epochs were created. And so he can show like no other how intertwined European literature is when you look closely at this topic.

It is well known that ETA Hoffmann had amazing success in France, right down to Jacques Offenbach’s master opera. The fact that Jean Paul, which is actually quite difficult to translate, also had a significant impact in France, that Edgar Allan Poe and De Quincey in turn had an impact primarily on French literature, not just on Baudelaire, that Charles Nodier and Gérard de Nerval left without the stimuli Germany and France would hardly have created their fantasy worlds – the book makes this clear in an impressive way. All essential quotations are presented in two languages. In this sense, it is a comparative book, which is by no means just a special literary study, but can impose a sparkling network of relationships on each reader, which will hardly be felt as a restriction, but as an enriching sharpening of the perspective.

Norbert Miller: The artificial paradises. Literary creation of dreams, imagination and drugs. Wallstein, Göttingen 2022. 887 pages, 48 ​​euros.

(Photo: Wallstein Verlag)

The German reader also encounters authors here who are by no means as well known to us as Hoffmann, Mörike, Stifter and Baudelaire. Even Jean Paul is no longer an author who is taken for granted. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his friend Wordsworth are far less so. With what certainty Orson Welles had quoted Coleridge’s ballad of Kubla Khan, in which the dream of Xanadu was evoked, in his film masterpiece “Citizen Kane”.

Masterfully, as Miller illuminates ETA Hoffmann’s double reality in his fairy tales, subtle, as he can prove that Mörike, with whom one might not initially count in this context, also belongs in this book with his distantly shining Orplid. Miller arouses curiosity about Charles Nodier, the infinitely well-read book man who, like no other Frenchman of his time, absorbed the English horror fantasy.

Edgar Allan Poe, the only American author in Miller’s panorama, proves to be a narrator of a fantasy that was eminently influential, especially in European literature, and emerged from cool rationality. But some readers will perhaps be surprised that Adalbert Stifter is treated here with the “after summer”. Norbert Miller is of course prepared for this astonishment and tries to refute it with all his powers of persuasion and eloquence. Nevertheless, some readers will agree with Arno Schmidt, who said that Stifter had succeeded in “Nachsommer” in getting the German language to be as monotonous as possible.

And finally the crowning final chapter on Baudelaire, then the authoritative author of the artificial paradises in theory and practice, a chapter that gives an impressive conclusion to this great book, which can well be read without the accompanying indulgence of stimulants. Whether this comprehensive late work is described as an opus that can be classified as “magnum” or “summum” is irrelevant. Even if you think you know your way around a little here and there, you can only be enriched and learn from this book, a treasure chest and cabinet of wonders of the imagination.

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