[In the following essay, Flores examines the magical and realistic elements of Peter Schlemihl, viewing the novel as a complex study of its protagonist's alienation from society.]

Critics have recognized Chamisso's Peter Schlemihls Wundersame Geschichte to be an odd work—one for which the categories of literary history and criticism may seem to be adequate, yet one which seems to elude those categories in a somewhat disturbing way. Most critics have noted that the work, like other Romantic tales, is mixed in its modality: it combines the paraphernalia of magic (mandragora, a bird's nest, seven-league boots) with a "realistic" and quasi-autobiographical depiction of the exigencies of bourgeois life. Such is the point of departure, for example of Oskar Walzel's commentary.¹ Again, Stuart Atkins notes Grillparzer's remark that the story is "schlecht gemacht," suggesting that it lacks unity; then, in tracing affinities and influences, he views the work as a Märchen lacking the succinctness or naiveté of a "true" Volksmärchen, being tearfully sentimental but also a humorous satire on sentimentalism.² H. A. Korff, in his Geist der Goethezeit, designates the work as one of the first "modern" Märchen, since unlike the Märchen of Brentano and Fouqué, with their knights and fantasy, this work depicts the bourgeois realm of the present; it is "eine Satire auf die bürgerliche Welt der Wirklichkeit und in diesem Sinne ein echt romantisches Produkt."³

Valid as these observations may be, they do not touch upon the uneasiness suggested (if not resolved) by the positions of other commentators. Benno von Wiese, for example, questions Korff's observations, and, by implication, all attempts to put the work into a literary-historical niche without having sufficiently pondered the work's strangeness. Peter Schlemihl's wanderings, he notes, are anything but Romantic: the story is devoid of Romantic yearnings for the Blaue Blume or for the higher realms of dream and art. Indeed, in Peter Schlemihl, the usual Romantic "quest" has reversed its direction: "Das Märchenmotif des verkauften Schattens wird zum dichterischen Gleichnis für [den] verlorenen Bezug zur alltäglichen bürgerlichen Welt."⁴ Similarly, Thomas Mann, in his remarks on the story, draws attention to its realistic, bourgeois elements—pointing out, for example, that the devil, presented without demonic trappings (cleft feet, hellish wit, odor), appears as a polite and deferential gentleman. Mann, like most critics, is aware that Peter Schlemihl's shadowlessness is not allegorical in any simple, specifiable sense; he discounts the notion that a man without a shadow must be a man without a country. But Mann goes on merely to cite Chamisso's perversely unilluminating remarks prefacing the French edition, about the physics of shadow-making: "La science de la finance nous instruit assez l'importance de l'argent, celle de l'ombre est moins généralement reconnue."⁵ Ulrich Baumgartner is more speculative, and notices the tragic aspects of Schlemihl's plight: "Er unterscheidet nicht zwischen Ich und der Welt, zwischen seinen geringen Möglichkeiten und den umfassenden der Welt der Gesellschaft, sondern er bringt seinen Wunsch nach einer gewissen Stellung und Bedeutung, die er zu verstehen mag, in Gegensatz zu einer dunkeln, unverständlichen Welt, die er scheut und vor der er Angst hat."⁶ Since Baumgartner is primarily concerned to place the work in its historical and social context, he does not examine the paradoxical phenomenon of what he calls a "tragedy" involving the loss of a mere shadow. What requires elucidation, in other words, is how shadowlessness can become dynamically entwined with ordinary social phenomena—some of them ominous and disturbing, if not tragic. This in turn, will engage us in the question of how the work's "magical" and "realistic" constituents are interrelated. The task is not an easy one.

It has been begun, however, by Hermann J. Weigand, who attempts to systematize—indeed schematize—the major elements of the story. The story, according to him, presents two systems of value:

They may be ranged in a single mathematical series as (1) the shadow, (2) gold, (3) the immortal soul. In this series, the shadow appears as the equivalent of zero value, the inexhaustible purse is a finite value, and the immortal soul, which we can render as personal integrity, is of infinite value. In discussing this graded series of values, the devil deftly turns the three on the central axis to an angle of 180 degrees.⁷

Granted that these are the important values in the work, to set these values in a mathematical sequence is only deceptively instructive; we are still left in puzzlement about the qualitative interconnections between them, and here Professor Weigand offers scant help. On his reading, Peter is simply a foolish consumer who makes a very unwise investment, and the story is a "great satire on salesmanship and business ethics" whose moral "sounded by implication all through the story [is] caveat emptor."⁸ Such a reading is unsettling precisely because of its initial plausibility: there seems, indeed, to be an inversion of values in the story, involving a misestimation of the relative worth of money, shadow, and soul. But to assume that the story is a satire on business ethics, and that Peter Schlemihl's error is no more serious than a mistaken purchase, is merely to accept the very values by which Peter is socially ostracized. In this story, surely, society and its values are hardly displayed in a favorable light, and Peter's position in relation to society (and the demonic man in gray) is more ambiguous than any mathematical representation is likely to suggest.

The issues posed by the story are more complex than they appear; critics have been only partially successful in attempting to allay bewilderment by adducing formulae or by viewing the work in the perspective of standard literary-historical categories. A different approach seems called for at this point, one which would examine the story's psychological and social dynamics and draw upon the musings of other writers on money, shadows, and the soul. We would do well to examine the meaning of shadowlessness (or of shadows) from as many different viewpoints as possible, with particular interest in writers who are somewhat removed from strictly "literary" concerns. In gaining what Kenneth Burke might call "perspectives by incongruity," we should be able to see the work from fruitfully odd angles. I thus propose to look backward to one literary antecedent, Dante, and forward to a number of writers—Locke, Nietzsche and Marx—who although they might be loosely placed in the tradition of Romanticism, are valuable in providing ways for exploring the qualities and issues of Chamisso's tale.

A useful starting point, in considering the tale, is the concept of priority. The story of Peter Schlemihl involves an absence or misvaluation of priorities. What happens, for example, prior (in time) to Peter's disembarkation is not specified; we can only infer that, wherever he came from or however he was educated, Peter had never learned the priority (in value) of his shadow over other values. When he arrives on land, his mind is rather naive with regard to social norms; the tale depicts his painful education into "necessary" priorities. But whether his education is (or even could be) complete or satisfying is dubious: in the story, an absence or misestimation of priorities seems inevitable, not only on the part of Peter, but (to a possibly greater or lesser extent) of virtually everyone else as well. In recognition of the arbitrariness as well as importance of priorities, the reader is forced to step back from the story's immediate events to attend to the interplay of priorities as a psycho-social phenomenon. Since priorities and their rationales are largely tacit, this attending to the interplay of priorities is also a process of hypothetical supplementation.

The burden of supplementation falls most immediately and exigently upon Peter Schlemihl, who in his ignorance and desperation is concerned with social acceptability; but the burden of supplementation also falls upon the reader. The story is a challenging one, after all, because (as with Kafka's stories) the act of attentive reading is at the same time a continual and deceptive attempt to interpret ambiguous elements and attitudes, an attempt culminating in the uneasy awareness that any interpretation can, like a shadow, be arbitrarily overvalued. The reader of Peter Schlemihl is disconcerted by critical "conclusions" about the work because the work, even with its delightful folktale qualities, is also puzzling and ominous; it offers an experience of impenetrability which confident affirmations necessarily ignore and even offend against.

I

Peter Schlemihl is an "outsider" (the story opens with his arrival from somewhere by ship) who desires to be a member of the wealthy class. When he first appears, Schlemihl seems to have some potentially profit-making scheme in mind. But the scheme, if there is one, is never specified or carried out, since it apparently becomes unnecessary: in exchange for his shadow, a nameless man in gray offers Schlemihl a magical bag which produces endless pieces of gold. At the time he makes the deal, Schlemihl does not imagine the loss of his shadow to be a serious matter; but it soon becomes apparent from the outraged and astonished exclamations of passersby, his shadowlessness constitutes a grave breach of social decorum. As readers, we can well understand the kinds of emotions expressed by the passersby, but not immediately the cause of these emotions. We are confronted with a lack of "fit" between the outrage expressed and the shadowlessness which seems to engender that outrage. We have several avenues of possible recourse: we can question the emotions being expressed, assuming that something is wrong with the passersby, who would seem more justified to be astonished or indifferent than to be offended; or we can assume that in Chamisso's fiction, a human shadow (or its lack) must "mean" something. We cannot, however, be quite sure what the shadow "means," either to the local offended citizenry or in any possible larger "literary" or "historical" sense. (To an extent which will become more and more apparent, we, like Schlemihl, are outsiders.) We are gradually forced to examine the entire configuration of givens (the gray man, shadowlessness, the responses of passersby, the narrational details) with a sense that more is occurring than we understand. We become engaged in the familiar process by which children learn—joyfully, painfully, intuitively—the mores and manners of their families and societies.

Schlemihl, however, has no peers, and his social elders do not treat him as a child. He is placed in the position of having seriously but unwittingly misbehaved, and he is compelled, on account of uncontrollable circumstances, to continue to misbehave. In his conspicuous impropriety, Schlemihl finds himself in a society which is privy to an assumption (appearing as superior insight) which is so well understood as to remain tacit. As readers, we vacillate between a respect for the annoyance and indignation of the passersby and a disdain for their foolishness in being upset over nothing more than a missing shadow. At the same time, however, we know that it is precisely the seeming foolishness, the arbitrariness, of social norms which give those norms their awesome authority: the norms need no sanction or justification; they are simply to be obeyed and respected. On one level, we are in sympathy with Schlemihl's desperate attempts to disguise his shadowlessness (by using the power of his money, by going out only at night, by standing behind Bendel's shadow). At another level, however, we find ourselves looking for clues as to why shadows are cherished and what they could possibly mean.

Meaning, we discover, emerges negatively: a shadow is a necessary but not sufficient condition for respectability and human intercourse. Literally and positivistically, this seems foolish. Unless he were a magician or a prankster, a man without a shadow would present a phenomenon to be studied (and presumably explained) by the laws and theories of optical physics. He would not be subjected to outrage and rejection. Yet consider the matter again: a man without a shadow would be a rather bizarre creature. He would seem to have a body, and yet at the same time would not seem to be ensconced, like ordinary mortals, in "this muddy vesture of decay." Shadows, as an indication of body, are an indication of mortality and the flesh. Having a shadow involves belonging to the society of mortal things. Schlemihl assumes a part in the human world but seems exempt from the human condition. Indeed, Schlemihl is exempt from a major aspect of that condition: by means of his money sack he is freed from the curse of labor. Here the connection between money and shadow begins to emerge: however meaningful they may be in themselves, money and shadow must also be considered—in this story—in conjunction. As propaedeutic to such a conjunction, let us reflect upon the terms separately.

II

Perhaps the most painful concrete consequence of Schlemihl's shadowlessness is the disruption of his engagement to Mina.⁹ One expression, in particular, of this disruption is worth remarking. When her father becomes suspicious and accuses Schlemihl of being without a shadow, Mina exclaims in dismay that she herself had had such a presentiment ("'O meine Ahnung, meine Ahnung! … ja, ich weiß es längst, er hat keinen Schatten!'" [V. 41].¹⁰ This is admirably unclear: is Schlemihl's defect peculiar to him alone or do shadowless men constitute an undesirable social class? Paradoxically, both alternatives apply: Mina and others behave toward Schlemihl as though he belonged to a class of undesirables—those without shadows—but Schlemihl's plight is devastating because (apart from the devotion of Bendel), his torments are his alone; he is totally isolated; he encounters no fellows in his sufferings. The peculiarity of his plight notwithstanding, Schlemihl's shadowlessness evokes a disapprobation which is not relative to any particular society: he is offensive no matter where he wanders. How is this to be accounted for?

In questing for an answer, we might do well to entertain the possibility, so strongly suggested in the story, that shadowlessness is at least in some respects an unfortunate state of mind, since metaphorically our shadows perpetuate concourse between our deeper selves and our social performances. By selling his shadow, Peter "gives away" a major part of himself, and thereby condemns himself to a continual psychic imbalance; for the bulk of his story, we observe Schlemihl in incessant doubt and self-turmoil. At the moments of his major decisions (when exchanging his shadow or when about to sign away in blood his soul) Schlemihl is overcome by swoons, as though unconscious forces flooded into his conscious mind and led to the conditions which follow.¹¹ When Peter exchanges his shadow for the magical money bag (the first unfortunate event from which all others follow), he is not in full possession of "himself." He becomes entranced by his own repetitive and automatic seizing upon coins, expressed in incantatory rhythms ("Ich griff hinein und zog zehn Goldstücke daraus, und wieder zehn, und wieder zehn, und wieder zehn; ich halt ihm schnell die Hand hin: 'Topp! der Handel gilt, für den Beutel haben Sie meinen Schatten!'" [I. 17]). But passive though he may be in the early parts of the story, Peter Schlemihl is more than a mere victim to unconscious forces; he takes a resolute stand in finally banishing the gray man once and for all. Should there have been any doubt, however, these observations give backing to the possibility that we would do well to view shadowlessness as a human phenomenon rather than a problem in physics.

For a more refined specification of the phenomenon, we must look to our literary tradition, which provides a rich harvest of examples: images of shadows as more or as less than human figures (as stalking ghosts, for example, or as underworld shades who are not quite alive or dead).¹² At one particular point in the tradition we meet a figure without a shadow. In the third canto of Purgatorio, Dante the pilgrim is astonished to discover that his master Virgil is shadowless. The pilgrim, aware of the red sun rising behind him, is startled to find the figure of only his own shadow and is afraid of having been abandoned. In his terror, he turns aside, provoking Virgil's chastisement and explanation:

And my Comfort turned full to me then to say:
"Why are you still uncertain? Why do you doubt
that I am here and guide you on your way?

Vespers have rung already on the tomb
of the body in which I used to cast a shadow.
It was taken to Naples from Brindisium.

If now I cast no shadow, should that fact
amaze you more than the heavens which pass the light
undimmed from one to another?

[E 'l mio conforto: "Perchè pur diffidi?"
A dir mi comiciò tutto rivolto;
"Non credi tu me teco, e ch' io ti guidi?

Vespero è già colà, dov'è sepolto
Lo corpo, dentro al quale io facea ombra:
Napoli l' ha, e da Brandizio è tolto.

Ora, se innanzi a me nulla s' adombra,
Non ti maraviglia più che de' cieli,
Che l' uno a l' altro raggio non ingombra."]¹³

The main point here is immediately apparent: the mortal body, by nature, casts a shadow; so it is no wonder that the figures seen by Dante, which are no longer alive, should no longer be with shadow. More intriguing, however (and quite relevant to Peter Schlemihl), are two seemingly unrelated observations: that Dante the pilgrim, in his need to see a shadow, lacks faith in the person and presence of his guide, and that Virgil's body itself cannot cast a shadow, because of being ensepulchered within a tomb and moreover (as if to clinch the point) it is now evening in Naples. Virgil speaks of "lo corpo dentro al quale io facea ombra," as though somehow the process of life itself involves the making of shadows. Obviously his meaning is not merely that any physical, solid body, when illuminated, gives off a shadow, but rather that a living, earthly body, in the human world (the world which contains Naples and Brindisi) gives off a shadow.

The opposition between two realms, one in which shadows are made, the other, beyond life, in which they are not, suggests different, less explicit oppositions. The shadow externalized itself in the visible, earthly world; but a converse activity may be required to see "into" (empathize with) another member of that world. Dante the pilgrim, in seeking for a shadow, seeks for the kind of "proof" and "assurance" which shadows, in a living person, might provide, not seeing that a need for assurance may preclude faith in that person. A shadow is a "figure" of something else; the external figure cast by a shadow is usually a distorted image of the person who casts the shadow. In the highest realms of Paradiso, minds are perfectly luminescent and shadowless to one another; but in lower realms, and on earth, the weaker lights of human minds are inconstant and penumbral. They illuminate one another fitfully; they "make" shadows as well as light; indeed, darkness and light are the conditions of one another. The "I" ("io") makes shadows which can be seen by others, and thus contributes to the play of light and shadows which is so familiar and assumed a part of the ordinary mortal world. Dante, the living pilgrim, brings his shadowed vision with him and must trust in the compassionate presence and guiding insight of his once mortal guide.

III

What we learn about shadows from Dante's Virgil has a bearing on Peter Schlemihl. Schlemihl, in responding to social beliefs about the importance of visible shadows, comes to share that society's attitude against shadowlessness. The social judgments against Schlemihl are made, for the most part, by strangers rather than by friends or by intimates, and thus are based on external appearances. (Persons are seen in their outward figures as having and playing roles.) Even when characters sympathetic to Schlemihl are involved, such as Bendel and Mina, the social bias against shadowlessness is unavoidable: the bias, whose rationale is never questioned, is a fact which they have to accept. It is important to the story that although Schlemihl's lack of a shadow transgresses social norms, those norms are never explicitly stated or justified: the seriousness of his transgression is not immediately revealed; Schlemihl apprehends what the norms might be through the varying reactions of a succession of individuals. The early reactions to Schlemihl's shadowlessness are of a wide range: (1) concern, (2) a reminder of carelessness or forgetfulness, (3) indignation, as though Schlemihl had been improperly dressed, and (4) mockery from young schoolboys, who throw pieces of mud at him (II. 18, 19). Schlemihl's response to the last of these reactions is to throw money at the boys—his first gesture of self-protection, one which is soon to become habitual with him. They throw mud; he throws money. He counterattacks with something more "substantial" than their mud and "shows" them that he is better than he seems, all the while seeming to be bribing them. Here, as elsewhere, Peter Schlemihl gives the impression of a man who wants desperately to be a member of society, who is deeply impressionable and sensitive to manners, yet who—for these very reasons, perhaps—seems ignorant of "prior" matters; matters which, more basically, give the social order its sustenance and value. To a deeper extent than might be apparent, Schlemihl is implicated in his own increasing alienation.

At the outset, Schlemihl arrives on shore, pushes his way through the scurrying people ("das wimmelnde Volk"), as though superior to them. The opening narrative has concision, purposiveness, and directness: Schlemihl has "modest plans" and makes his way to the home of a rich man, Herr John. But the world of the rich which so dazzles Peter Schlemihl is not quite real: appetites are satisfied with delicacies and wishes are immediately granted. Here is a Gesellschaft ("society" as well as "company": a word without any ready English equivalent), the members of which speak lightly of important matters and importantly of light matters—an inversion of what is leicht and what is wichtig. Any possible reservations about what Peter sees, however, are superseded by his admiration. What repeatedly amazes Peter Schlemihl, even more than the magical feats of the gray man, is the lack of amazement of the Gesellschaft at such feats. Peter sees before him a Gesellschaft in which magical feats seem to have become an expected convenience—the normal and routine way in which desires are realized. In his amazement at the lack of amazement, Schlemihl fails to discern what he sees: in this Gesellschaft there is scant concern for others; the people here gossip maliciously about absent friends and fail to offer thanks to anyone. Neither the feats nor the person of the gray man are noticed: the Gesellschaft is narcissistically self-enclosed, and seems to have developed a habitual blindness to anyone outside its present circle.

Peter Schlemihl fails to recognize a dichotomy which might alert the reader: on one side, an extreme scraping and fawning on the part of the gray man, on the other an extreme indifference and unceremoniousness on the part of the Gesellschaft. Peter seems, in this situation, to have no self of his own and thus wants very much to be defined, to be told how to respond ("[ich] rieb mir die Augen, nicht wissend was ich dazu denken sollte …" [I. 14]). In his astonishment, Peter fails to suspect that the entire setting might be a performance: he is captivated by a well-performed magical show. Peter's astonishment, in short, helps to weaken his natural resistance: he has just seen that immediate and repeated fulfillment of wishes is not only possible, but (among a certain class) a routine and socially acceptable convenience. The distinguishing feature of the members of this Gesellschaft is their wealth. It is natural, in Peter's eyes, that wealth and magic should be connected; thus he is prepared to accept, without thought or hesitation, the gray man's offer of a magical money sack. Peter's experiences at the Gesellschaft at Herr John's occur before he makes a deal with the gray man, which in turn is prior to all the misfortunes which follow. In both cases, it seems clear, the priority is more than temporal: from an ordering of values in these episodes, other orderings inescapably follow.

Thus just as the show at Herr John's is theatrical and illusory, money too, it turns out, is theatrical and illusory. Gold provides Schlemihl with a temporary and only apparent respite from feelings of alienation, for gold is only a mediator and an abstraction, intensifying rather than relieving Schlemihl's need for direct and personal human contact. After Schlemihl engages in an orgy of gold-throwing, surrounding himself with piles of gold and revelling in the gold's sound and glitter (II. 20), he finds himself burdened with his earlier foolishness. The gold seems somehow indecent; it cannot be left lying around on the floor. Yet it will not fit back into the pouch (whose "magic" is apparently irreversible). Schlemihl's laborless production of gold has been counterbalanced by an odd phenomenon: gold, which usually is the reward for labor, has now become the curse of labor—since Schlemihl does not want to attract attention to himself, he must secretly and laboriously haul his gold away, out of the public eye.

Schlemihl's gold has made him more alone than ever: "Ich lag, … fern von jedem menschlichen Zuspruch, bei meinem Golde darbend, … um dessentwillen ich mich von allem Leben abgeschnitten sah" (III. 24). Schlemihl here comes to see that he is isolated from human contact not only because of his shadowlessness, but because of his money as well. In repeatedly giving money to those who find him offensive, Schlemihl is compelled to commit against others the misdeed which had been committed against him by the gray man. The effect is to weaken still further Schlemihl's genuine relationships with other people, and to produce an illusory and compensatory sense of identity. As Karl Marx has argued, money deludes us into believing that we are someone else and can thus attain rectification for all our defects.¹⁴ Money undermines and subverts natural human capacities and associations: communal relationships are replaced by exploitation and dependency.¹⁵ In this light, there is something odd about Schlemihl's deal (Handel) with the gray man; most deals involve an exchange of money or its equivalent, but this one involves an endless source of money. It is no irony that Schlemihl must have recognized, even in his swoon, that this was a deal to end all deals. But whatever feelings of exploitation may have flitted through his mind, Schlemihl is the exploited more than the exploiter. The gray man can afford all too easily to treat the money sack as a toy, suggesting his complicity in a strange and perhaps ominously powerful social order which can dispense so blithely with gold.

Granted its alienating powers, money is nonetheless a means not only of separation, but of union.¹⁶ It brings men together in order for them to benefit from one another's various and specialized talents. Money is a fluid form of property (the "blood" of the commonwealth. Hobbes calls it), and is of stable value under socially "healthy" conditions. Without getting into the murkier regions of economics, we can venture the generally accepted assumption that property rights have some connection with labor. On John Locke's formulation, "every man has a property in his own person…. The labour of his body and the work of his hands are properly his."¹⁷ Schlemihl's shadow might seem to be a property in his own person, to do with what he might. But without having labored, Schlemihl exchanges it for what is given value through labor: the gold he gains is not properly his, since he has not mixed his labor with it.

Schlemihl's plight involves other and deeper elements, as well. The binding power of a commonwealth is partially based upon fear and loyalty among its citizens: a whole tradition of thinkers have speculated upon the origins of society in a "social contract." Whatever the reality of the "social contract" (as a principle if not as an empirical locus in time), this "prior" contract supports and justifies lesser contracts and the framework of law. An example of a lesser contract is Schlemihl's enforced agreement with Mina's father to obtain a shadow within three days' time or else forfeit the girl. Schlemihl cannot fulfill this lesser contractual relationship, it can be argued, because he has broken the larger and prior contract in trading his shadow for an endless source of unearned wealth, freeing himself hypothetically (if not in intention) from all fear and loyalty to anyone else. Here the psychological and social strands of the story can be connected: Schlemihl is "guilty" for having committed himself blindly (and irrevocably) to an anti-social compact. This compact might in some sense be "pre-social" and is deeply connected, as well, to "later" social orderings and Schlemihl's lack of a place in those orderings. One possible genesis for the feeling of guilt is suggested, in general terms, by Nietzsche: "… jener moralische Hauptbegriff 'Schuld' [hat] sein Herkunft aus dem sehr materiellen Begriff 'Schulden' genommen."¹⁸ This seems applicable: Peter Schlemihl is "indebted" to the gray man in a manner which prevents the incurring of other kinds of indebtedness. Schlemihl's Schuld is both an indebtedness (to the gray man) and a feeling of guilt (towards his fellow men); he cannot deal fairly with the latter and his prior Schuld is demonstrated by his later states and incapacities. On these grounds, Schlemihl lacks a social-economic "person" with the pertinent rights of such a person. In other words, on account of his deal with the gray man, Schlemihl is schuldig in a way which he can never make good in public. It seems that he knows, deep within, that the gray man was not merely a man among men, and that to admit to having had dealings with the gray man would be to jeopardize whatever small and temporary social status he might perchance have attained. His feeling of Schuld, which seems (and to some extent is) social in origin, can nonetheless never be exposed to social scrutiny. Schlemihl's prior transaction with the gray man precludes rather than facilitates ordinary day-to-day social transactions: no sequent canon of justice or fair play could arise from such a transaction. The so-called "Gesellschaft" at Herr John's, which set the atmosphere for Schlemihl's deal, was permeated with unreal and narcissistic fantasies given magical fulfillment.

IV

Schlemihl was predisposed by temperament and situation to have dealings with the man in gray, who might even be designated as a double for Schlemihl. Schlemihl is led into an identification with the gray man (whom he instinctively finds repugnant): both seem to be outsiders, both maintain a deferential and respectful distance from the Gesellschaft they observe, both are hardly noticed or welcomed, both of them sneak away. When the gray man approaches and Peter returns his overly courteous bow, it becomes clear that the gray man gives expression to (externalizes) Peter's own deepest wishes and returns them to Peter himself. Peter's feeling is naturally ambivalent: he is personally repulsed by the gray man and thinks the offer "insane," yet is secretly delighted to be treated with such politeness; despite his feelings of aversion, he "fits" his voice to the humility of the gray man (I. 17). Schlemihl at first assumes that the gray man is insane, yet he all too sincerely adapts himself to that insanity (I. 17). The gray man's display of sentiments similar to Schlemihl's is an astute seductive ploy—similar feelings and mutually advantageous possessions connected with those feelings lead reasonably to an exchange. Schlemihl's similarity to the gray man continues even after he has exchanged the shadow. Schlemihl with his endless wealth has an influential power at his command. Yet like the gray man's, Peter's power is poisoned at the source: the gray man was personally repulsive, and Peter is repulsive for his shadowlessness.

If Peter's double is the gray man, Peter's double is also, however, "Chamisso" (the implied persona to whom he writes).¹⁹ Peter's character is refracted in two directions—on one side, toward the gray man, and on the other side, toward "Chamisso." As the story progresses, Schlemihl's partial identification with the gray man (his bad double) gradually gives way to his identification with "Chamisso" (his good double). Three refracted images of Peter Schlemihl (gray man, Peter Schlemihl, "Chamisso") are roughly parallelled by the three kinds of "society" through which Schlemihl passes: the group at Herr John's, the social order which ostracizes Schlemihl and the larger world of nature through which Schlemihl wanders in his seven-league boots.

In the world of Herr John and in the world which cherishes shadows, Schlemihl is forced (and is willing) to play roles. Whenever Peter gains a temporary place in society, his position is delineated theatrically. Schlemihl repeatedly finds himself to be an actor; he meets his beloved Mina during a flamboyantly theatrical procession and is mistaken for the King of Prussia, who himself was travelling under the name of a count (IV. 34); Peter accepts the gratuitous title of Count and then tries to live up to it (to play it). Again, his sincere and deeply emotional relationship with Mina is seen, in retrospect, to have been inextricably entwined with a badly-played stage part (" … die gemeine Posse beschlißt eine Verhôhnung" [IV. 29]). The emptiness of Schlemihl's social position inevitably mirrors the emptiness of the Gesellschaft he earlier admired. Schlemihl can easily forgive Raskal's thefts, since the distinction between taking and being given has become blurred. Raskal's embezzlements can hardly harm a man of endless wealth, who might just as easily have given what was stolen. By the same reasoning, however, Schlemihl's attitude is merely a role: his forgiveness seems false and his charity empty.

As a role-player, Schlemihl continually lies, in order to countenance his shadowlessness. Each of Schlemihl's "stories" is designed to "explain" his shadowlessness, and thus, to a certain extent, each of these stories is in competition with the larger story which Schlemihl addresses to his friend Chamisso. There are several competing stories: to the painter, Schlemihl recounts (in the third person) that while travelling in Russia, his shadow froze to the ground and could not be torn loose; to the forester, Schlemihl says that his shadow was stepped on by a rough man and is being repaired; finally, to a peasant he meets, Schlemihl claims that he suffered a serious illness in which his shadow was irretrievably lost (III. 25; V. 42; IX. 66). Each time he recollects having made up a story, Schlemihl admits that he lied and each time that he lies, the lie is ineffective in winning for him the pity or forgiveness he craves. What is to prevent us from assuming, however, that Schlemihl might have produced his biggest lie of all for us, and that we, his readers, are his most gullible victims? The story, after all, is very much a "story," with its magical paraphernalia and its set of "bad" and "good" characters.

An answer is implied in the final sections of the work. There, Schlemihl no longer needs to assume theatrical postures. In gaining his seven-league boots, Schlemihl gains a point "outside" the human world, from which to measure and classify the natural world, of which the human world is only a part. Schlemihl becomes almost god-like in his ability to change places and seasons. From this point of view, human society and the gray man fade into a single perspective: the gray man attacks the human world by making use of methods and values of that world. The gray man is a perpetual actor, with allegiance to no law, and yet makes claim to (has pretensions of) "legal" ownership of Schlemihl's shadow, which will not "stick" to Schlemihl without the gray man's consent (when Schlemihl tries to make off with the shadow, it returns to its "gesetzmäßigen Eigentümer" [VIII. 60]).

Schlemihl, through "Chamisso," validates the truth of his tale. The tale is only partially a matter of magical or story-telling capacities; it is also a matter of social pressures within and against which the truth of his tale emerges. The false stories, on Schlemihl's part, were attempts to avoid revealing his creditor and to minimize or undo his Schuld. With his friend "Chamisso," Schlemihl presumably establishes a small but solid society in which truth is possible. As Schlemihl becomes more and more alienated from society, the number of addresses to his author increases: Schlemihl, it seems, can be cured of his habitual mendacity only when he has broken all concrete ties with humanity except his tie with (or as) the author. "Chamisso" is the sole confessor of Schlemihl and the sole possessor of Schlemihl's "full" story. The story, we discover, has a built-in system of narrative integrity: the isolation of Schlemihl at the end is necessary to deprive him of any motivation for lying—he becomes a "disinterested" servant of truth. The larger narrative encompasses and replaces the smaller, false narratives which it contains; it tells the "real" story of Schlemihl. It is, however, a discomfiting testimony, giving bitter perspective upon the price of truthfulness: Peter's "better" self reveals itself only outside of ordinary human context and community.

V

Its system of narrative self-validation notwithstanding, Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte is questionable. For reasons not necessarily having to do with the veracity or perceptiveness of the narrator, the story has not yielded to critical generalizations, nor have readers been dispelled of their puzzlement. To a certain extent, this is fortunate: the "wundersame Geschichte" produces an appropriate sense of pleasurable amazement. Yet another element—ominous but familiar—confounds our responses. This element has to do with our sense of the potency of social sanctions and the frightening vulnerability and plurality of possible justifications for such sanctions. "Romantic" elements mollify the story's terror, but only for readers innocent enough to be content with saccharine gratifications. For such readers, the story ends well: Schlemihl has learned from his experiences, the "devil" is exorcised, Schlemihl has become "good" and "useful," he has discovered his "true" self, he has made himself at home all over the world, and the story itself—which is, after all, only a story—even has a moral: caveat emptor. Many readers, however, will not be so easily mollified: the magic is too entangled with the illusions by which terrifying social sanctions are nourished and exacted. Magic is a tool to the nameless man in gray, and it results less in delight than in agony and dehumanization.

We are now in a position to understand the reader's uneasiness and the inadequacy of critical commentary. The story offers a series of incompatible but equally exigent alternatives, without suggesting any possible resolution between them. The story attacks as well as defends its protagonist, whose ostracism is both deserved and thrust upon him. Money, which plays an important role in changing Schlemihl, could be viewed as a cause of separation (as Marx contended) and as a necessary binding of the commonwealth (as Hobbes and Locke contended). The ambiguity is not resolved by considering the valuation of money in conjunction with other potential values—such as the shadow, the soul, or human society—because with each of these, the same ambiguity obtains. The shadow, for example, seems to represent an important part of the person, and Schlemihl, in underestimating its value, underestimates the entire realm of mortal affairs; on the other hand, however, the shadow seems to be given social value only out of entrenched but foolish and narrow-minded prejudice. The soul itself, although intimately connected with the other values, seems to be the only element which might nonetheless be purified.

In his final dealing with the gray man, Schlemihl is neither passive nor swooning (as in his earlier dealings); his language is resolute and commanding. He asks for Herr John: '"bei Gott, ich will es wissen!'" (VIII. 64). The invocation of God's name reminds us that the divine order (according to which the corpse of John claims to have been justly judged) is supra-social, thus providing the story with a counterbalance to the arbitrariness of merely social norms. Another counterbalance is apparent in Schlemihl's newly-found selfhood. Here, for the first time, Schlemihl's attitude is not merely reactive to social expectations; he himself dismisses the gray man. Schlemihl wants to know, and his desire for a knowledge independent of social pressures is a major impetus for his studies of nature. Schlemihl's repeated crises gradually give way to a "higher" self which takes pure knowledge as its object and which is not constricted by social prejudices. But there can be no doubt that this outcome is unsatisfactory. Schlemihl is condemned to know only the surfaces of the external world, and on account of physical limitations, is hindered even there (X. 70). His abstract investigations, a result of his exclusion from the concrete human world, are for the betterment of "humanity" in the abstract. Earlier in the story, Schlemihl experiences alienation in immediate social contexts; here, alienation is a matter of scientific knowledge. The gradual progression from one kind of alienation to another is embodied in many techniques of aesthetic distancing, particularly in techniques of magic. The shadow-tale and the seven-league-boots tale at first seem unrelated: from an external viewpoint, the author has simply linked together two discrete folktales. But in both tales, magical powers are the origin and instruments for realistically portrayed feelings of alienation. In the shadow tale, as we have seen, the rationale for Schlemihl's ostracism is suggested with indirectness, this very indirectness being a part of the experience of exclusion. In the seven-league-boots tale, however (which begins after Schlemihl has abandoned society and dismissed the gray man), indirectness is no longer necessary: feelings of homelessness and distance are at once magnified and concretized in a kaleidoscopic shifting of geographical locations.

Both kinds of magic serve to strip Schlemihl of all but his soul in its purely cognitive capacities. Peter seems to have gained a "self," but can there really be a self at all without a human world (in Dante's sense)? The chilling end of Peter Schlemihl is to be most alive when dead to the human world. Unlike Dante the pilgrim, who learns from Virgil to cherish and understand the bases for a civilized order, Peter Schlemihl, without a guide, learns little, if anything, to justify society as he experiences it. Like Dante, Peter leaves the living human world, but unlike Dante, Peter knows no prospect of return.

Notes

¹ Introduction to Chamissos Werke, in Deutsche National-Literatur, 148 (Stuttgart, n.d.), esp. pp. xliv-lxi.

²"Peter Schlemihl in Relation to the Popular Novel of the Romantic Period," Germanic Review 21 (1946), 191-208.

³Geist der Goethezeit, 4 (Leipzig, 1953), p. 348.

⁴Die Deutsche Novelle, 1 (Dusseldorf, 1964), p. 106.

⁵ "Chamisso," in Thomas Mann's Gesammelte Werke, 9 (Oldenberg, 1960), pp. 46-55.

⁶Adalbert von Chamissos Peter Schlemihl, Wege zur Dichtung 42. (Leipzig, 1944), p. 40.

⁷Surveys and Soundings in European Literature, ed. A. Leslie Willson (Princeton, 1966), p. 221.

⁸Ibid., p. 219.

⁹ Elsewhere, too, Schlemihl's shadowlessness terrifies a woman with whom he is involved, disrupts the relationship, and forces him to realize that a major change in his life is required (III. 28). Shadowlessness is connected with Schlemihl's sexual identity and thus deeply with his psychological dynamics.

¹⁰ References to Pteer Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte are to the Reclam edition (Stuttgart, 1965), which is based on Max Koch's edition.

¹¹ Carl G. Jung has used the term "shadow" to indicate a negative but essential part of the psyche. On his line of thinking, any person whose shadow-side is undeveloped or repressed must fall into a state of psychic paralysis (Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, trans. R. F. C. Hull [New York, 1953]), p. 313, note 5. The appeal of Peter Schlemihl is partly to the unconscious; the story is puzzling partly because Schlemihl is quite unaware of the workings of the unconscious and considers his problems to be "outer" problems of social adjustment rather than problems of the integrity of the self in its social relations.

¹² One underworld source, from Lucian, has been noted by Grillparzer. See Atkins, 191, n. 1.

¹³Purgatorio, trans. John Ciardi (New York, 1957); La Divina Commedia, ed. C. H. Grandgent (Boston, 1933), canto 3, lines 22-30.

¹⁴ "Geld," in Ökonomische-philosophische Manuskripte (1844), Werks, Ergänzungsband 1 [Berlin, 1968], p. 564; "Das, was ich bin und vermag, ist … keineswegs durch meine Individualität bestimmt. Ich bin häßlich, aber ich kann mir die schönste Frau kaufen" [Marx's italics].

¹⁵ "Bedürfnis, Produktion und Arbeitsteilung," in Werke, p. 547: "Jeder Mensch spekuliert darauf, dem andern ein neues Bedürfnis zu schaffen, um ihm einem neuen Opfer zu zwingen, um ihn in eine neue Abhängigkeit zu versetzen … Jeder sucht eine fremde Wesenskraft über den andern zu schaffen, um darin die Befriedigung seines eigenen eigennützigen Bedürfnisses zu finden" [Marx's italics].

¹⁶Ibid., p. 565: "Wenn das Geld das Band ist, das mich an das menschliche Leben, das mir die Gesellschaft, das mich mit der Natur und den Menschen verbindet, ist das Geld nicht das Band aller Bande? Kann es nicht alle Bande lösen und binden? Ist es darum nicht auch das allgemeine Scheidungsmittel? Es ist die wahre Scheidemünze, wie das wahre Bindungsmittel, die chemische Kraft der Gesellschaft?" [Marx's italics].

¹⁷The Second Treatise of Civil Government, chap. V, sect. 27 in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Thomas I. Cook (New York, 1947).

¹⁸Zur Genealogie der Moral, in Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta (München, n.d.), sect. 8, p. 811.

¹⁹ Chamisso writes in his letter to Hitzig (27 September 1813) that Peter Schlemihl is a part of himself and (in the prefatory poem) indicates more specific resemblances.