Some thoughts on The Blue Flower with a glance at The Beginning of Spring. Beware spoilers! These are notes perhaps best read if you've read the novels.
17 June 2001
Of the three novels by Fitzgerald I have read - - all within the past few days - - The Blue Flower (1995) seems to have least plot.
A few minutes after having finished it, I don't perceive a focused resolution of the obvious issue, namely the young poet's love for the very young girl who dies. The novel is about Novalis, yet he is offstage a lot of the time. I take it we can say he kept faith with her.
There are snatches of various people's ideas, but at first glance, at least, they don't seem to relate very meaningfully to the events of the book. With some authors one might take it that that is the point, but I am not sure that's so with Fitzgerald.
It's a story of several families:
Hardenbergs, at Weissenfels (Novalis's own - - and calling him "Novalis" is anachronistic, because it was only after the time covered by the book that he assumed this pen-name; he is often just Fritz in the book) - - his Moravian father, his mother, his sister Sidonie, several brothers - - "the" Bernhard (I don't know why the definite article), Erasmus, Karl...
Justs, at Tennstedt - - including Karoline, who experiences unrequited love for Fritz
Rockenthiens, at Gruningen - - the family of Fritz's beloved, Sophie van Kuhn
One also read a bit about Jena, a city of professors and students.
People talk about revolution in France.
Goethe appears briefly. One or other of the Schlegels also.
A theme does seem to be the inadequacy of man's studies. One sees a number of mentions of a doctor, the inventor of "Brownismus," which seems
of its time, and not very likely to help much.
Fritz learns the salt mine trade. And he sees mining for precious metals as releasing something from its underground darkness, not as spoliation of nature.
I don't know if we are supposed to make any connections between digging in the earth, and digging in people; anyone who finishes the book will have been struck by the minimally presented account of Sophie's incisions to drain a tubercular tumor, etc.
We're given passages from letters and diaries (including Sophie's, which usually records nothing having happened), which sound authentic. There was one thing that didn't sound authentic to me, and that was when a portraitist (who never completes a portrait) comes to Sophie's family, and pretty much keeps his room - - and someone thinks perhaps he's bedding one of the maids, since one hears mattress springs. I doubted that the mattress would have springs.
Quite often one character doesn't know what another is thinking or feeling.
Fritz insists that he fell in love with Sophie in 15 minutes. The novel doesn't lead us to doubt that. There is not a lot about his poetry - - we are to understand that he writes poems and that some have been published by the end of the period covered by the book, but his actual poems are not emphasized. That's not a fault; the book covers several years of Fritz's life; in fact Chapter 5 takes us back to the birth of Fritz's father. The story certainly is something of a family chronicle.
That's interesting because we might expect a novel about a founder of (German) Romanticism to emphasize the emotions of an individual.
Readers probably would want to explore the contrasts between the early-married woman (turns out she is only 22 at the book's end) called "the Mandelsoh" and Karoline (who's 27 when she meets Fritz - - so older than he; but unmarried) and, I suppose, Sophie. The men in the story seem to be on the move a lot from town to town on various errands, learning a trade etc. while the women sit home.
I know a little about German Romanticism, having read things about George MacDonald who was influenced by it, and so on, but there are things here that elude me. What about readers who know less about GR than I do? Who does Fitzgerald think she is primarily writing for? She had to be confident that this audience would be faithful because she has not bent her efforts to make a book that will captivate a wide range of readers. Having said that, I'll say that there is plenty of concise but good description of rooms, the surroundings of houses, dusty roads, streams, etc.
I kept being reminded of Caspar David Friedrich paintings but, note, not really of any particular one.
The Beginning of Spring was set at a time of obvious social transition - - Moscow in 1913. All right, so is this book about Novalis - - the beginning of Romanticism. I think Fitzgerald is pretty sympathetic to it although she doesn't work up the emotional content in obvious ways, and as I was reading I thought, several times, that I felt pretty detached. But, anyway, here are people "on the cusp" (is that correct?) between two readily labeled eras.
Yes, there is a fair bit of contrast between father and son. . . but no set-piece confrontations, as, after all, are perhaps not very common in real life. So I appreciate what PF is doing there.
The title comes from the novel that Novalis never finished, Heinrich von Ofterdingen; of which we are given about a paragraph - - the blue flower idea. Of what is it an emblem?
The dry style noted by a reviewer can allow a reader to miss the actually strong emotion and rapid activity of various characters.
What's the significance of Fritz's rescue of his younger brother, the red-capped Bernhard - - and assuming him to be, then, at least, so unhappy, why was the boy so?
Things that can't be helped... that’s an idea that comes up.
