THE TROUBLE WITH SAYING I SIMPLICISSIMUS AND ITS EMBLEM

• Published in: Daphnis 2007-07, Vol.36 (3-4), p.565-592
• Main Author: Burgard, Peter J
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Ambiguity; Baroque era; Christians; Christmas; Closure; Composition; Correspondence; Deception; Flying; Identity; Inscriptions; Legs; Narration; Novels; Reading; Religion
• ISSN: 0300-693X; 1879-6583
• DOI: 10.1163/18796583-90001038

The pointing gesture, if we accept it as such, must point at the book, but the horned-hand gesture remains directionally ambiguous, since it can be made either with the back or the front of the hand facing the object of derision. [...]the figure ridicules both us and the book it holds (and perhaps itself, as suggested above), drawing us into the same multiplicity and indeterminability of identity - further marked by the haphazardness and unclear referentiality of the images in the book - that it inhabits and thus breaching the closure of the emblem. In these lines, the monster insistently speaks in the first person, and in reviewing its adventures - flying through the air, journeying through water, voyaging over land, and generally swarming around (an explanation for the bee in the open book?) - it decrypts at least one of the terms of the inscriptio, the adjective "Abenteuerlich", and, more significantly, explains the puzzling composition of the monster in the pictura, its wings, its fishlmermaid body, and its cow/goat and duck/goose legs, even if it does not go so far as to enable a choice between these options. [...]with "Ich habs in diB Buche gesetzt" it establishes not only that it is itself speaking, but also establishes itself as the `writer' of the book it holds and the book as that which contains its story (which, incidentally, supports my earlier reading of the images in the book as suggestive of stories). In the course of these descriptions, the narrator makes a lie of what is ostensibly the main moral message of the novel - "Beständigkeit", constancy, a message that will then be attenuated and ironized in myriad ways over the course of the novel - by justifying the superiority of the soot-covered walls with the explanation that black is "die beständigste Färb von der Welt" (p. 48). [...]he makes a lie of the Christian religion in which the novel is ostensibly grounded by making a lie (St. Notglass) of the name of one of the most popular Christian saints and the saint who ushers in the Christmas season. What the narrator mainly makes a lie of, however, is himself and therefore the novel as a whole, for in the space of just three pages at the beginning of the novel, he establishes himself as a thoroughly unreliable narrator. Because of him we must doubt the veracity of everything we read in the novel and must expect deception and dissimulation at every turn, so that even within the fictional context we cannot count on any reliable correspondence