Few today have heard of Novalis, the pen name of Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg. This is a shame for he was an important figure in the developing Romantic tradition and explored in his work the many-faceted dimensions of reality.

The novel’s epigram is a quote from Novalis — Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history — which hints at the nowadays common failure to distinguish realism from naturalism, two conditions which sound alike but are non-identical. The latter is an attempt to delineate life as we live it, while the former attempts something far more inclusive and may explore a less quotidian view of the nature of being. The novels of Sally Rooney are naturalistic, while Fitzgerald’s are realistic; that is to say they explore intangible states that for all their impalpable quality none the less reflect authentic, if less apparent, aspects of real life.

The title of Fitzgerald’s novel is taken from another work of fiction, the mysterious and fragmentary story, The Blue Flower — which became Heinrich von Ofterdingen and the real-life Novalis never completed. Fitzgerald plays with this, stealing the title of her hero’s story and in some sense finishing it without, in a characteristic stroke of genius, finishing either the story of his life or his own fictional creation. This is an example of art reflecting quotidian life but allowing glimpses of something stranger and more impalpable: Fitzgerald transports us to the half-completed life that was Novalis’s (he died aged only 28) and his half-completed work. Her highly individual style — allusive and elusive, fragmentary, dryly humorous — allows the form of her fiction to reflect her own shadowy vision of her hero’s shadowy intimation of reality’s multidimensional, protean nature.

Fritz recounts his fragmentary tale twice, first to his friend Karoline. As in his original story, a stranger arrives out of the dark and poses a question both to the young man, who we guess will become Novalis, and to those who hear the story; and also, of course, to us, the readers. We, the readers, are never vouchsafed the question, but we assume it is one Fritz asks Karoline: “What is the meaning of the blue flower?” She cannot answer; she remains in the dark. In fact, we are all left somewhat in the dark about the meaning of the story, but for Novalis the dark was not a condition of obscurity but a highly generative state. In the Fitzgerald tale, taken from his own, Novalis describes how: “It is as if until now I had been dreaming, or as if sleep had carried me into another world”.

More from this author

Why we need fairies

By Salley Vickers

The second time the tale is told is to Sophie, the unremarkable 12-year-old with a double chin with whom, for no rational or discernible reason, Fritz falls in love, leaving Karoline, the woman whose empathy and intelligence by rights should have won his heart, to a life of lonely spinsterhood. But there are no “by rights” in a Fitzgerald novel. Of all contemporary novelists she best understood the antinomianism of the human heart.

A funny and poignant example of one of the important strands in the book, the generative power of absence and nothingness, occurs between Karoline and Hardenberg. As we the readers know, she is in love with him — and he, manifesting one of the many blanks that the book celebrates, is obdurately insensitive to this. “I see,” he says, when he comes to tell her that Sophie is his “heart’s heart” and she, aghast at his choice, demurs: “there is one thing, the most important of all, unfortunately, you don’t grasp, the nature of desire between a man and a woman.” Stung into a kind of semi-revelation, Karoline retorts: “Not everyone can speak about what they suffer. Some are separated from the only one they love but are obliged to remain silent.”

Fritz radically, comically, misconstrues this by at once envisaging a fantasy lover for Karoline and capturing his non-existence in some dubious verse. So that Karoline’s “lover” becomes a double fixture — he exists in the mind of Hardenberg but also in his verse — and so becomes a genuine prop for Karoline’s pride when she has to bear the fact that the man she loves with all her heart loves not her but the very ordinary — irritating even — Sophie.

Out of a gap in understanding, the unreal has been bodied forth through Fritz’s energetic imagination and given objective form in his art. So we are left asking: what kind of reality has this figure? Is it so different, the novel implicitly asks, from Fritz’s passion for the unremarkable Sophie, who nonetheless becomes his lode star, his “philosophie”? Does love, in fact, require an object at all, worthy or otherwise? Or is the fact of love itself enough? It is Sophie’s very blankness out of which the extraordinary love which Hardenberg feels for her is conceived, although in human terms Karoline is clearly a better match. But it is precisely Sophie’s nothingness, her mind “empty as a new jug”, which summons the love.

More from this series

The West needs to grow up

By Paul Kingsnorth

Before he reads Karoline the blue flower fragment, Fritzl tells her: “there is something else I have written and which I want to read you while I still have time… It will not truly exist till you have heard it.” This is another aspect of the question, for which no answers are supplied, of what makes for the “real”. If it is not quite the case that something has no real existence until we apprehend it, it is suggested both by Hardenberg, and his author, that our human apprehension has a seminal role in creating reality; that reality is, it turns out, a co-operative enterprise in which, if we are to live truly, we must be involved.

The significance of the blue flower evolves in the repeated renderings of the story, in the way that the image of a rose evolves in “a rose is a rose is a rose”. Fritz’s young brother, known as the Bernhard, surreptitiously reads the story and we are told afterwards that for “some time” he had recognised the “meaning” of the blue flower, just as the doctor, who attends Sophie in her mortal sickness, would also, we are told, have understood its meaning had he been introduced to the tale. It becomes apparent that Sophie’s life, despite a harrowing operation undertaken without anaesthetics, will be curtailed by TB and we learn in an elliptical Afterword that the Bernhard drowns. The flower we begin to apprehend is our mortality, but paradoxically it becomes, at the same time, the fragile breath of life airing the series of turns, blank walls, cul-de-sacs and twists of fate which make up the novel’s loose and beguiling narrative.

Much of the texture of that narrative comes from its humour. The Bernhard complains to his elder sister about the latest addition to the Hardenberg family: “There are now two younger than myself. It will be hard for me to attract sufficient attention.” “But you love little Christoph,” said Sidonie patiently. “On the whole I hate little Christoph,” the Bernhard replies.

More from this series

The fate of Europe lies in the steppes

By Aris Roussinos

The mine of wit and intelligence in this slight-seeming book is as wide and deep as the Saxon salt mines for which the young Fritz becomes the unlikely overseer. But for me its peculiar virtue lies in how, without being in the slightest bit solemn or portentous, it conveys Novalis’s intimation that in this world there is no barrier between the seen and the unseen. The question of the meaning of the blue flower is never openly answered. But when the story is told for the second time, Hardenberg suggests: “If a story begins with finding, it must end in searching.” And it’s this sense of an unfolding universe, in which we live with always unanswered, perhaps unanswerable, questions that perfuses the book.

At some point, Hardenberg reflects: “When we catch sight of certain human figures and faces, especially certain eyes, expressions, movements, when we hear certain words, when we read certain passages, thoughts take on the meaning of laws… a view of life true to itself without self-estrangement.” In these increasingly fractured and fractious times, we need to be reminded that the world may be a larger, stranger, like the blue flower both fragile yet enduring, and so ultimately a more numinous place than our limited reason comprehends, but that it is still possible, after all, to have “a view of life true to itself without self-estrangement”.

***

Salley Vickers’s latest novel, “The Gardener”, Penguin, is out in paperback

This was good-humoured inter-colleague banter but there was a seriousness in my words. Take opera, ballet, classical music, drama, poetry — take almost any medium you like — and you will find unapologetic representations of fairy stories. Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera, Hansel and Gretel, Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker or The Sleeping Beauty, Spenser’s The Fairy Queen, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci or the many poems about the Sidhe by W. B. Yeats — all admired and respected by adults. So why, then, in the world of novels is it only in children’s literature considered really respectable to speak of fairies or magic?

There are a few allowed exceptions. Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s superb novel about a witch has lately come back into fashion, especially among younger readers. Penelope Fitzgerald’s understated novels often have an element of the other-worldly slipped subtly into the fabric of the more quotidian plot; indeed, this is essential to the ending of her masterpiece, The Gate of Angels, where a supranatural element is brilliantly and suddenly invoked. Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, or her still more original Piranesi, have been rightly lauded. But, for the most part, anything to do with witches, wizards, ghosts, spirits and fairies is considered at best whimsy, at worst tosh.

But why? Why is this subject, which former ages embraced as representing time-honoured intangible aspects of life beyond our everyday experience, now ignored or despised?

My first novel, Miss Garnet’s Angel, drew on the very old tale — part-Jewish, part, very likely, Zoroastrian — of Tobias and the Angel, and I wove it into a contemporary drama in which the Archangel Raphael makes a transforming appearance. The fact that the book was set in Venice threw a camouflaging mist over this element. Since then, and throughout my career as a novelist, following many years working as a Jungian analyst, I have deployed the mythical, fabulous and supernatural in my books. But while readers have apparently warmed to this theme, and indeed ask for more, in reviews, even the most favourable, this aspect is overlooked, as if to even mention the subject is to be somehow tainted with the unrespectable.

Suggested reading

The deracination of literature

By Mary Gaitskill

My latest novel, The Gardener, received praise for its psychological rendering of characters and its treatment of post-referendum Britain, but no single review touched on the fact that the ancient landscape, in which the book is set, appears to be the domain of another world and at the heart of the book there is a scene which depends upon this factor. It was as if by politely ignoring the subject they were doing me a favour, sparing me some unliterary egg on my face.

I believe this loss to fiction is part of a larger loss which is concurrent with the undeniable increase of the reign of those grim twin isms, reductionism and materialism. We once inhabited a world that was animate, in which humans were creatures who not only perceived but were themselves perceived. To live in this world meant to live among vital elements that were beyond our human control, that could not be corralled by human will, or predicted or captured by desire.

Whether or not Shakespeare believed in fairies is irrelevant. He had within his repertoire a living concept of fairies with whom, or through whom, he could dramatise the irreducible folly of humankind. “Lord, what fools these mortals be,” Puck observes. When, in the same play, Duke Theseus superciliously pontificates about the spurious nature of the imagination, a faculty which in his view is allied only with poets and madmen — and which he rubbishes since it “bodies forth the form of things unknown” — he does so to an audience who has just been witnessing, in the form of the fairies, the power of the so-called “unknown” to disrupt, disarray and revitalise human life (the joke, set up by his author is that Theseus himself is a creature of myth).

Suggested reading

How sensitivity readers corrupt literature

By Kate Clanchy

Earlier cultures were more extrovert than ours, so those invisible realities that we have internalised, and tend to treat as at best poetic metaphors, at worst psychiatric conditions, were habitually expressed as externalised presences, imaginative forms of invisible truths. Shakespeare still lived in a world where “the real” was not confined to the tangible or the testable. A dream, a wish, an impulse, and instinct — these are all “realities” despite their insubstantial nature. We don’t question the reality of a dream — or if we do, we are more likely to be questioning something like the integrity of the reporter of the dream. We might question the dream’s meaning, but that is another matter. Nor do we question the reality of, say, fear, or joy, or embarrassment — we might suggest it is irrational or inappropriate but again, unless the person reporting these emotions is a liar, fear or joy is a potent reality for the subject who experiences it, whatever the cause.

Let us assume, then, that angels, fairies and gods are those traditional aesthetic forms that have traditionally served to stand for the rarer aspects of life that are intuited and are both real and impalpable — reality being only partially confined to what can be empirically verified. The philosopher and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist persuasively argues for a world in which all matter, together with all the multifarious forms of life, is conscious — consciousness not being substantially comparable in degree or effectiveness (as he puts it, the fact that the mountain behind his house doesn’t shop at Sainsbury’s or drink a beer in the evening does not logically make it less conscious than you or me). But nonetheless, in his view, consciousness runs, to use Wordsworth’s terms, “through all things”.

Whether or not fairies, gods and angels exist is not the point. Fairies, gods, and angels can, and should be, thought of as manifestations of the mysterious untold aspects of a world whose multiple facets are not easily apparent to us but nonetheless have salience, responsiveness and place — an argument made enchantingly by the philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart, who shares many of McGilchrist’s ideas. To see the world as made up of dimensions other than ours, and possibly more vital and responsive than ours, is not merely a modest but a quite rational perspective.

It seems to me odd that while we accept, for example, the reality of the Higgs Boson, so far radically unavailable to our ordinary perception, we laugh off the reality of these other invisible forms, which have been convincingly attested to and certainly respected, if only as powerful images, by people of acknowledged genius. At the very least, they represent states of intelligence beyond the ordinary order available to our circumscribed and culturally limited perception. A hidden layer, or layers, of the world responsive to us foolish mortals, that may react and respond surprisingly to us, in ways both beneficent and malign.

Suggested reading

The books that made me

By Michel Houellebecq

McGilchrist’s originating thesis is that we have allowed the deconstructing, limiting and over-explanatory left hemisphere to overtake and dominate our culture, which has left us lonely and unwitnessed in a seemingly dead world. His claim is that the brain’s right hemisphere, which uncritically absorbs and intuits experience, which doesn’t dismiss or judge but sees out the corner of the eye rather than with a narrowing squint, has had a diminishing influence in our culture, with the result that the culture has lost its way, and we in it.

So that the world that once, for all its many dolours, seemed in Matthew Arnold’s words “so various, so beautiful, so new” is now also in his words “a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight”, not because the nature of the world has changed but because the nature of how we perceive it has changed, and so radically and dispiritingly. And with that shift has died a loss of wonder, a loss not simply of religious awe, but, what might be worse, the range of the aesthetic palette. If, as I passionately do, you believe that the arts expand experience and thereby enlarge meaning, then we need a wider range not a narrower one to work with. There may or may not be fairies at the bottom of my own garden. But they may, by the perspicacious, be found at the bottom of my fictional garden, and I don’t apologise for one moment for that.