Tuesday, March 31, 2009
The Tale of a Naked Saint is a fairy tale from the point of the monster that becomes redeemed. We enter the magical realm at the start of the story, when similair to the phrase "once upon a time", the author asks us to suspend our disbelief and view the crazy hermit as a trapped soul. The story plays out almost as a distorted version of beauty and the beast, however, in this version the form of the beast is the hermit', only to be released by the lover's son. Further, the hermit is made out to be a sort of monster in his actions and residence, he forces travelers to adhere to his peculiar rules or he attacks and kills them. It is the mark of the Kunstmarchen that asks us to set aside our normal beliefs. If we at any time consider the story from our normal mindset, it simply becomes a story about a crazy man, but if we truly buy into the author's pact, we enter into that mindset of the wounderous. The end end truly fulfills the promise of the beginning as we are shown the hermit's transformation back into the genius of love and music.
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I wonder what Wackenroder was trying to say when he depicts the naked saint as a killer. I clearly see the saint before his transformation as a depiction of a rational thinker under the influence of the Enlightenment. Therefore is he trying to say that rationalization is dangerous? Or is logic the end-all to human creativity and the soul? I think Wackenroder depicts the saint this way on purpose- an Enlightenment thinker would see violence as an abomination to the progress of humanity, but at the same time, his rationalization of the human spirit endangers the tenuous nature of creativity. Therefore, Wackenroder depicts the saint under the Enlightenment "spell" as violent and capable of murder because his rationality has robbed him of his appreciation for life. The danger of trying to explain everything is that one looses the appreciation for the sentimentality and enjoyment of life.
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