FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER, IMMANUEL KANT, SWEDENBORG, AND

 LE FANU

 

By Gary William Crawford

 

(ISSN 1932-9598)

 

            Recent studies have focused on the philosophical and theological aspects of Le Fanu’s fiction.  Scholarship on Le Fanu has reached a point at which it has moved beyond a sole psychological interpretation to a study of Le Fanu’s work as “hybrid” embodying drama, painting, music, and folklore (see Sage).  As James Walton writes, Le Fanu’s “imagination had its way with many of the recognizable topoi of the period: the haunted mind; the sado-moralistic appeal of the persecuted heroine;  the melodramatically displaced fear of popular violence; the horror vacui that inserts specters into empty space (2).”

            It is this “empty space” that Le Fanu writes about in his fiction.  The blackness, or the void, is at the core of his work.  As Walton finds, “the fragility or hollowness of the tragic design that recurs in a body of fiction whose ‘hauntings’, literal or figurative, consist in the re-inscription of a sexual, domestic, historical and ultimately theological tragedy upon the same darkness or void” (194).

            Many ideas of Le Fanu’s day shaped this view.  They came to him from his wide reading and his journalistic endeavors.  In this essay, I show that philosophy, the arts, and theology, specifically the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the writings of Frederich von Schiller, and the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, influenced Le Fanu’s fiction.  These works were discussed in the many German-related articles Le Fanu read in The Dublin University Magazine when he was in his late twenties. In particular, one article by an obscure Dublin citizen named Henry Ferris, “German Ghosts and Ghost-seers,” (1841) contains passages that influenced Le Fanu.

            In this essay (the authorship of which is still in question: see Ferris and Hayes), one finds a section on how the drinking of green tea produced in people a number of hallucinations; and how such visions are like those of Swedenborg.  And of course the story “Green Tea,” which contains both the use of green tea and references to Swedenborg, was influenced by it.  This essay and other German-related essays in The Dublin University Magazine, according to Patricia Coughlan, “had a strong, though equivocal influence on Le Fanu” (18).

            Furthermore, although I have no absolute proof that he read it, Schiller’s Gothic novel fragment, The Ghost-seer (1798), contains many themes that were later echoed in Le Fanu’s famous collection of Gothic tales In a Glass Darkly (1872).  As with In a Glass Darkly, Schiller’s novel deals with philosophical and religious questions about the nature of reality and faith in God.  As I wrote in my thesis, “no one means to rationalize the irrational is successful:  supernatural terms, scientific terms, and psychological terms all fail to explain adequately the terrible forces that haunt his characters to their deaths, which are either actual or metaphorical.  In the dark vision of the world that In a Glass Darkly presents, nothing, or everything, is real” (3).

            It is this same dark vision that one finds in Schiller’s novel.  In his introduction to The Ghost-seer, Andrew Brown, remarks “the strong and clear narrative line, enlivened by the tales-within-tales, the many parallels, echoes and mirrorings, the masks that hide other masks, the impostor caught out by his own imposture—or is he?—and the growing sense of paranoia, all make Schiller’s story, as it stands, an outstanding piece of Gothic fiction” (Brown xv).  Similarly, there are tales-within-tales, frame narratives, and masks that hide other masks, in Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (see also the frames in Le Fanu as discussed by Sage).

            In the Schiller, the central first-person narrative is that of a Count von O**, who is the old army friend of the Prince of **.  The setting is Venice, and the Prince and the Count are followed and duped by a dark, mysterious Armenian.  This man and his accomplice, a Sicilian, engineer the Prince’s moves—and the Count remarks at the outset that his tale is “the history of the way the human mind can be deceived and go astray” (Schiller 5).  Deception is central to the narrative, and this trope is also found in the Le Fanu and through much Gothic fiction as a whole.  One finds the theme of deception in the masquerades in both the Schiller and the Le Fanu.  These scenes are basically celebrations of deception in that the identity of the individual cannot be seen.  We all wear masks.

            In the Le Fanu, one finds a series of short stories linked by the framing device as cases from the papers of Martin Hesselius, “the German physician.”  Within this framing device are other narratives or tales-within-tales and other narrative devices that display questions about the reality of the supernatural and faith in God. I have remarked in my thesis that all of the narrators are unreliable, creating a pervasive sense that “all is mystery.”

            Similarly, in Schiller’s The Ghost-seer,  the narrative of the Count von O**, is the unifying thread, but within his narrative are other narratives in the form of reminiscences and letters from others that make the reader wonder if any of these narratives present a true picture of the experiences of the Prince, who is the central character.  The prince begins to question his faith in God, as do other of the characters of In a Glass Darkly, especially the Rev. Mr. Jennings in the tale “Green Tea.”

            The themes of “Green Tea” and the other tales in the Le Fanu can also be found in the philosophy of Immanuel  Kant.  Kant wrote “that time as well as space is subjective, not a thing, but a form of sense—not a condition under which things exist, but a condition under which we become cognizant of their existence” (quoted in Walton, 7). In addition, Kant, in 1766, published a short work, Dreams of a Spirit-seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics, in which he uses the writings of his contemporary Emanuel Swedenborg as an example of the belief in ghosts.   Brown remarks that Kant regarded Swedenborg with “caustic irony and curious respect” (xiii).

            Kant recounts certain stories, apparently true, about Swedenborg’s psychic abilities.  Kant shows how genuine and honest Swedenborg was with everyone.  His psychic abilities and his communication with spirits were so ordinary and plain to him that he could not be refuted.  Kant concludes generally with the utility of believing in spirits.  That is, although the reason cannot support the idea of spirits, it is still useful to think about such things.  Faith is basically practical; and this is why theologian G.K. Chesterton based much of his thinking about religion on Kant.  Kant admitted that one had to go through some great crisis to come to a belief in the spirit world.

            Swedenborg was a well-respected scientist of his day, but in mid-life he went through a crisis that he chronicles in his Journal of Dreams (1743-44).  This work relates “his dreams and visions, his spiritual experiences and his powerful sexual fantasies and obsessions” (Brown xii).  He abandoned science after a vision of Christ and wrote long exegeses of the Bible, the most well-known being Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell:  From Things Heard and Seen.  However, Inge Jonsson in her book Emanuel Swedenborg writes that “most specialists tend to agree that Swedenborg was mentally ill” (126).

            In Le Fanu’s tale “Green Tea,” Doctor Martin Hesselius talks to the Rev. Mr. Jennings at a small gathering and Jennings tells him that he has read his book on Metaphysical Medicine, which as Hessselius says, was influenced by Swedenborg.  Jennings himself has been reading Swedenborg (the ideas of Swedenborg also appear in Le Fanu’s novels Uncle Silas (1864) and A Lost Name (1868)). and complains to Dr. Hesselius of the malefic monkey that has been haunting him. Hesselius fails to help Jennings, and even unknowingly places him in a situation in which all he can do is commit suicide.   Hesselius hides himself away in a hotel to work without making his whereabouts known to Jennings after Jennings tells him of the monkey.  Unable to contact Hesselius, Jennings takes his own life.  He had lost his faith in the face of his nemesis.

            These events are conveyed through several narrators, as are the other stories of In a Glass Darkly.  There are four narrators in “Green Tea.”  There are three narrators in “The Familiar.”  There are seven narrators in “Mr. Justice Harbottle.”  There are two narrators in “The Room in the Dragon Volant.” And there are four narrators in “Carmilla.” All of these narrators contradict the others in subtle ways and in a sense present fabrics of deception. In The Ghost-seer  this is also true.

In Schiller, the Prince is a victim of deception.  He is deceived by the mysterious  “Armenian” and “Sicilian” who have actually engineered everything he experiences.  In Le Fanu’s “The Room in the Dragon Volant,” Richard Beckett is deceived by a false Countess and her husband.  Beckett thinks he is in love with the deceptive Countess, even though her face remains hidden by a black veil. She and her husband dupe Beckett, give him a drug called Mortis Imago (death image) and attempt to steal his money as he watches, frozen and helpless, appearing to be dead.

            The theme of deception also runs through other of the Le Fanu stories.  In “Carmilla” a Countess deceives the uncle of a female character, Bertha, at a masquerade and leaves her daughter Carmilla in his care.  There are two masquerade scenes in Le Fanu, in “The Room in the Dragon Volant” and “Carmilla.”  There is one masquerade scene in the Schiller.  The same events that happen to Bertha and her uncle occur to Laura and her father, who is also deceived by Carmilla’s mother.  Carmilla and her mother are vampires, members of a family of them, the Karnsteins, and the reader learns that Laura’s mother was a Karnstein, but she was not a vampire.  Bertha dies, but Laura is saved by her father and Bertha’s uncle, General Spielsdorf.  With the help of the vampire scholar, Baron Vordenberg, the vampire Carmilla is destroyed.

            In the Schiller, deception is also presented.  The Prince is drawn to a mysterious woman, but, as Brown says:

 

The “demonic Armenian . . . is also responsible for stage-managing this encounter with the woman in the church . . . the techniques are the same: to induce an openness to “spirits” (or the Spirit) by exposing the victim to a particularly suggestive atmosphere—in this case, what seems to be Palladio’s great church of the “Redentore,” embellished with a beautiful and mysterious woman who clasps the crucifix with the same fervour as the Sicilian in the earlier episode.  But in the latter case, the “trick” works, and the Prince experiences a deluded erotico-mystical flight of fancy—or a profound religious experience—and accepts the supernatural (the Christ figure held in the hand of the beautiful woman). (Brown xv).

 

            A major problem, however, is that The Ghost-seer is unfinished. Schiller simply lost interest in it and found technical philosophy more satisfying than fiction.  Le Fanu’s tales are finished, but the protagonists die or are left in an illusion.  The Rev. Mr. Jennings dies. In “The Familiar” Captain James Barton dies of horror. Judge Harbottle in “Mr. Justice Harbottle” hangs himself, a self-inflicted punishment for his crimes on the bench. In “Carmilla” the protagonist Laura  is left in the momentary illusion that Carmilla is still present.  But was Carmilla really destroyed?  This is one of the many questions that run through In a Glass Darkly and The Ghost-seer.  Is or is not the supernatural real?

            In both works this question is unanswered.  Uncertainty, doubt versus faith, is at the crux of much Gothic fiction, from the first Gothic novel, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) onward.  Le Fanu, if he did not read The Ghost-seer, was indirectly influenced by it because Schiller influenced the Romantic poets and other Gothic works. Le Fanu and Schiller were “kindred spirits.” In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale “The Entail” a character is actually reading The Ghost-seer, and Hoffmann is a known influence on Le Fanu.

            These ideas were “in the air” in the late eighteenth and nearly all of the nineteenth centuries.  The spirit of “the Spirit” took hold of much imaginative literature and continues to taunt us today.  But it is most often presented with a detached irony.  As V.S. Pritchett remarked, Le Fanu’s distance and detachment was pronounced:  Le Fanu “is as detached as a dompteur [a horse-tamer].  He caresses, he bribes, he cracks the whip.  It is a sinister but gracious performance.”

            Thus, the ironic frames of the two works, and the multiple and contradictory narrators produce a tension between what is real and what is not.  For Le Fanu, the truth is obscure and hidden.  Like the helpless Richard Beckett of “The Room in the Dragon Volant,” man is locked in his own mind, a victim of what Swedenborg calls “his own fantasies and cupidities”: he must forever see “in a glass darkly.”

 

 

 

WORKS CITED

 

Coughlan, Patricia.  “Doubles, Shadows, Sedan-Chairs and the Past: The ‘Ghost Stories of J.S. Le Fanu.”  Critical Approaches to Anglo-Irish Literature.  Ed. Michael Allen and Angela Wilcox.  Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1989. 17-39.

 

Crawford, Gary William.  “Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly:  Ironic Distance and the Supernatural.”  M.A. Thesis, Mississippi State University, 1977.

 

Ferris, Henry.  A Night with Mephistopheles.  Ed. S.T. Joshi.  Horam, East Sussex:  Tartarus Press, 1997.

 

Hayes, Richard. “’The Night Side of Nature’: Henry Ferris, Writing the Dark Gods of Silence.”  Essays for the Maynooth Bicentenery.  Ed. Brian Cosgrove.  Blackrock, Ireland: Columbia, 1995.

 

Hoffmann, E.T.A.  “The Entail.”  In Tales of Hoffmann.  Trans. R.J. Hollingdale.  London: Penguin, 1982. 

 

Jonsson, Inge.  Emanuel Swedenborg. Trans. Catherine Djurklou.  New York: Twayne, 1971.

 

Kant, Immanuel.  Critique of Pure Reason.  Trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn.  Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003.

 

Kant, Immanuel.  Dreams of a Spirit-seer, Elucidated by Metaphysics.  Trans. Emanuel F. Goerwitz.  Ed. Frank Sewell.  2^nd ed.  London:  New-Church Press, 1915.

 

Pritchett, V.S.  “An Irish Ghost.” In his The Living Novel and Later Appreciations.  New York: Random House, 1964. 121-27.

 

Sage, Victor.  Le Fanu’s Gothic:  The Rhetoric of Darkness.  Houndmills, Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

 

Schiller, Frederich von.  The Ghost-seer: An Interesting Tale from the Memoirs of Count von O**.  Trans. Andrew Brown.  London: Hesperus Press, 2003.

 

Walton, James.  Vision and Vacancy:  The Fictions of J.S. Le Fanu.  Dublin:University College Dublin Press, 2007.