Gothic Truth and Mimetic Practice: On the Realism of Schiller’s Geisterseher

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe official reality claim of the eighteenth-century novel established itself in sharp distinction from fantastic modes of narration (ancient epics, medieval romances, religious allegories, etc.). Realist narratives following the laws of probability draw on a fictional ontology of contingency that goes back to the Aristotelian definition of the term as “possible” and “not necessary.” The pluralistic poetics of the early novel, thereby, not only participate in the programatically modern project “of a scientific scrutiny of life” (Watt) but also forms an essential part of the modern belief in the self-determined nature of the human subject. By contrast, Gothic realism gains all its attraction by depicting impossible events and actions as “real” and assumed unrealities as “possible.” Gothic novels develop an alternative ontology of contingency that actualizes the real possibility of non-being. Next to Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, I analyze Schiller’s Ghost Seer. Schiller’s contagious poetics of mimesis transforms calculable contingencies into the imponderability of sheer accidents. Moreover, it is a tale about the mystery of sociality and about the morally justifiable degree of individual freedom. Within a fictional framework of radical indeterminacy and unexpected novelty, Schiller’s tale calls for an ethics of absolute contingency. It does not content itself with taking the possible for real and the real for non-necessary; instead, its narrative environment calls for a radically situational ethics.