Titan by Jean Paul

First published:Titan, 1800-1803, 4 volumes; (English translation, 1862)

Type of work: Romance

Time of work: Unspecified

Locale: Italy and the mythical principalities of Hohenfliess and Haarhaar in Germany

Principal Characters:

• Albano, the young Prince of Hohenfliess, who is approaching manhood ignorant of his parentage but following the dictates of his assumed father
• Julienne, his twin sister, who is reared apart from him and is unknown to him
• Schoppe, his resident tutor, companion, and friend
• Don Gaspard, a knight, Albano’s assumed father, who is intent on joining his family to the royal line
• Linda, Gaspard’s daughter, who is reared with Albano and later falls in love with him
• Luigi, Albano’s older brother, the crown prince, a degenerate
• Wehrfritz, a landscape architect who rears Albano
• Albine and Rabette, Wehrfritz’s wife and daughter
• Liane von Froulay, the daughter of the prime minister of Hohenfliess, Albano’s beloved
• Roquairol, her brother, Albano’s sworn friend, who is in love with Linda
• Idoine, the Princess of Haarhaar, a double of Liane

The Novel

Titan recounts, in four volumes, and with numerous shifts backward and forward in time, the rearing of Albano, the Prince of Hohenfliess, from childhood to his coming into his rightful inheritance as a man. The recounting, however, is far from clear or plausible, even in summary. The reader first meets him when, following his education in absentia, during which he has been forbidden to return to his native city of Pestitz, he has just been summoned to join his supposed father, Don Gaspard, whom he has never seen. He has been reared by Wehrfritz, an elderly landscape architect, who has given him free rein to pursue his own interests; this has been encouraged by Schoppe, an Italian vagabond, who has been appointed Albano’s tutor by Don Gaspard. Schoppe’s zany and somewhat cynical preference for small, concrete satisfactions over grandiose ideals has helped to temper Albano’s tendency toward dreamy extravagance. Nevertheless, Albano has become an extremely romantic, oversensitive, intensely passionate young man.

An episode early in the novel discloses both this condition and Jean Paul’s thematic strategy. Albano and his friends travel by boat to Isola Bella in Lago Maggiore, a site of incredible natural beauty. Albano lies in the boat with his eyes closed while his friends describe the splendor that he is missing. A gradual approach is not for him. He suspends the experience until he can open his eyes at the moment of peak intensity, so that he can be flooded with total ecstasy. At this point, he is a magnet of passionate longing for union with being, in part because he has been deprived of a father.

Albano’s long-awaited reunion with his father takes place under mysterious circumstances. Don Gaspard is remote and aloof; he has come to escort Albano back to Pestitz, but he sheds no light on the motives behind his exile or of his reasons for ending it so abruptly. (Albano later learns that the old Prince of Hohenfliess and his wife—Albano’s real father and mother—have just died.) Moreover, a series of apparitions, illusions, and disembodied voices begin to surround Albano’s life, all apparently directing him to prepare for a fateful encounter with the lover he has long sought in his dreams. These culminate in the apparition of her head (a wax bust, in reality) emerging from the waters of Lago Maggiore, during which an invisible voice intones, “Love the ever fair one; I will help you find her.” Albano suspects that someone is staging these illusions to manipulate him, but he has no idea why.

At any rate, the apparent hallucinations remind him of his dream love, a girl on whom he has never set eyes, Liane von Froulay, the daughter of the prime minister of Hohenfliess. He is similarly infatuated with Roquairol, Liane’s brother, with whom at an early age he shared a fencing and dancing master. This master praised the brother and sister so extravagantly that Albano feels that they are engraved in his heart. One story about Roquairol particularly impresses him. That young gallant had attended a costume ball in the character of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Werther; there he had met and fallen violently in love with Linda, the daughter of Don Gaspard, who was dressed as Lotte, Werther’s beloved. She rejected his love, so he seized a pistol and shot himself in the head, just as Werther did, succeeding, however, only in wounding himself in the ear. Nevertheless, his spectacular daring impresses Albano.

The two do not meet until several years later. Still, Albano has remained so impressed that he resigns all claim to Linda in deference to his sworn friend. They become inseparable; Roquairol joins Albano at Blumenbuhl, where Liane has also taken up residence. This is the happiest period of Albano’s life, for Liane proves to be everything that he has dreamed, and Roquairol pursues Rabette, the innocent daughter of Wehrfritz. The two couples spend an idyllic summer; Liane’s formerly fragile health—her vision is particularly delicate—improves. This happy scene, however, soon shatters, since it does not fit in with Gaspard’s machinations. He has Liane informed of Albano’s true identity, whereupon she realizes that she cannot aspire to royalty. Without giving Albano a reason, she breaks off relations. His response is, understandably, one of anger. Brokenhearted, she begins to suffer physically: Her eyesight fails, and she dies.

At this, Albano, feeling somehow responsible, suffers a breakdown. To relieve him, his tutor brings Idoine, the Princess of Haarhaar, to his sickbed. An almost exact double of Liane, Idoine impersonates her and is able to persuade Albano that he is forgiven. He revives, only to be struck down again by Roquairol’s confession that he has seduced and then abandoned Rabette.

At this point, Gaspard summons him to the reunion, and Albano’s mysterious apparitions begin again. Still, Gaspard does not bring Albano back to Pestitz; instead, he sends him to Rome, where Albano becomes intoxicated with the past grandeur of the empire and dedicates himself to recovering that glory and bringing the ideal of individual freedom to fruition. As part of this, he plans to join France’s Great Revolution. In the meantime, he encounters his older brother, Luigi, the crown prince, in Rome. To his disappointment, Luigi has degenerated, in the hands of an agent of the Prince of Haarhaar, into a rake and a sot, unfit for leadership of a state. Finally, in Ischia, Albano rejoins his twin sister Julienne, from whom he had been separated since birth. Linda is with her, and he realizes that Linda is the incarnation of the love apparitions that he had previously experienced. She possesses all the qualities of body, intellect, and spirit that he has longed for in a woman. Gaspard’s plot seems to be working: He is on the verge of uniting his house with that of the royal family.

Now Gaspard finally brings Albano, Linda, and Roquairol to Pestitz, where the stage seems set for Albano’s accession. Gaspard, however, has not taken full account of the human factors in his plan. Linda proves intractable; her passions demand a romantic liaison with Albano, not a conventional marriage. These passions make her fair game for Roquairol’s lust. Seizing on her night blindness and the similarity of his voice to Albano’s, he sets up an assignation with her in the very same park in which Albano and he had earlier sworn eternal friendship. She spends the night with him, thinking he is Albano. The following night, Roquairol stages a play in the park, in which he takes the lead; in the final act, he actually commits suicide. Linda, considering herself Roquairol’s widow, leaves with her father, whose plots have come to nothing. Disconsolate, Albano visits the tomb of Liane, where he once again meets Idoine. He recognizes now that she is the woman of whom he has dreamed. Like him, she is an heiress; like him, she is intelligent and dedicated to the welfare of her subjects. Further, she has created a model Edenic estate for them to nurture and enjoy. Since Luigi has died, Albano finally comes into his own, marries Idoine, and unites their thrones.

The Characters

Jean Paul’s characters have been controversial ever since the first publication of Titan. Some viewed the characters as the most sublime embodiments of idealized human nature; others found them incredible, strained, and implausible, both too grotesque and too abstract to be believable. That division has persisted: Modern critics either praise Jean Paul for the nobility and intensity of his creations or damn him for his distortions and exaggerations. Even his admirers note the inexplicable gap between his high critical celebrity and his lack of readership. Some of this can be attributed to the difficulty of his style; yet that has not proved to be a handicap to even the greatest writers, including William Shakespeare.

The dilemma can be resolved in part by recognizing certain qualities of Jean Paul’s period and certain consequences of his central themes. First, his era. Jean Paul was an almost exact contemporary of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. Like them, he seized on the larger-than-life possibilities that seemed implicit in the critical and political theories of the revolutionary phase of Romanticism. He, too, suffered from the waning of those ideals in later, more cynical periods. Like these other authors, Jean Paul ceased to appeal to the common reader, for whom extravagance of any kind became increasingly out of fashion.

Second, his themes require a unique manner of characterization. Jean Paul’s aim was to use words and images in order to set the imagination free, to release it from material bonds and enter the sphere of eternity, where it naturally belonged. To achieve that, he set everything in his novels into tumultuous motion and emotion, as if images and characters could then shake themselves free. Thus, all the characters exhibit “Titanic” energy. One result of this technique is that characters who seem very different at the outset appear fundamentally alike in the end.

Thus all the characters are intentionally overstated. Albano’s insistence on intense experience requires him to be drenched with feeling. In fact, all the main characters are “Titans”: Liane is the idealist of feeling; Linda requires the passion of defying convention; Roquairol is the consummate dramatist of the self; Gaspard is the manipulator, using others as puppets to his ends; and Schoppe is both a cynical opportunist and a philosopher abstracted from life. Each has to learn to temper this Titanism; failure to do so brings loss, death, or both.

Critical Context

Jean Paul has perhaps suffered more from the vicissitudes of literary fame than any other author, and Titan reflects that more than any of his other works. It was widely celebrated in his lifetime as a masterwork, a monument of genius; yet it has since suffered the ignominy of silence. Even among the Germans, Titan seems more notorious than beloved; everyone knows about it, but very few read it.

In many respects, this is unfortunate, for the novel is enormous, rich in wit, wordplay, puns, poetic imagery, subtle prose rhythms, and brilliantly phrased descriptions. Further, it catches and reflects the imagination of the time in depth and with fascinating insights. Jean Paul himself more than once referred to it as a kind of opera, and it certainly has the grandeur, splendor, multiple-phased action, and overlayered texture of opera. It has also been strikingly influential: The great Victorian Thomas Carlyle modeled much of his style on Jean Paul and borrowed many images and ideas from him. In turn, Carlyle directly influenced the styles and views of Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. These authors will remain a lasting tribute to the influence of Jean Paul and his Titan.

Bibliography

Benham, G. F. “Jean Paul on the Education of a Prince,” in Neophilologus. LX (1976), pp. 551-559.

Carlyle, Thomas. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, 1827.

Davies, M. L. “Some Aspects of the Theme of Representation and Reality in the Works of Jean Paul,” in German Life and Letters. XXX (1976), pp. 1-15.

Smeed, John W. Jean Paul’s “Dreams,” 1966.

Smeed, John W. “Surrealist Features in Jean Paul’s Art,” in German Life and Letters. XVIV (1965), pp. 26-33.