The Bounds of the Infinite

In the graveyard-scene of the final, sixteenth vigil of Bonaventura's Nachtwachen, the narrator ridicules a poet whom he dreams of unsuccessfully trying to compose a Gedicht tiber die Unsterblichkeit. The poet prepares to write of the Last Judgment but to no avail: Eben war er im Begriffe alle Tote zu erwecken, da schien es als ob etwas Unsichtbares seine Hand hielte.' The poet in the graveyard, unable to raise the dead and his el1an deflated, poses the question Jean Paul did in his Rede des todten Christus: 'Wie, ist denn kein Gott!' . . . und das Echo gab ihm das Wort 'Gott!' laut und vernehmlich zurtick (p. 134). A dream citing another dream, this passage from Die Nachtwachen thematizes its own act of echoing another voice-continuing the empty mirroring and unending self-reflection that characterizes Jean Paul's text. If the Rede des todten Christus vom Weltgebaude herab, dab kein Gott sei has not been the subject of many scholarly publications,2 it nevertheless has provoked an illustrious reception in les belles lettres. Not only the Nachtwachen testify to that but also, through Madame de Stael's French translation, works by Hugo, Vigny, and, most important of all, Nerval.3 Dostoevsky, of course, also portrayed the return of Christ in an uncanny setting. Philosophers from Hegel and Nietzsche to Heidegger4 retell the story of the absence / withdrawal/death of Godas if Jean Paul's black apocalypse demanded to be rehearsed anew, or as if the void needed to be filled. To use a term from the turn of the nineteenth century, a new mythology' is ever sought to replace the old. In other words, all these authors believe that the apocalypse seems

Art · Art history · Psychoanalysis · Self-Reflection · Theology · French Literature and Critical Theory · German Literature and Culture Studies · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy · Psychology