A GENETTIAN READING OF PENELOPE FITZGERALD’S THE BLUE FLOWER

Abstract

This study examines how Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower (1995) represents the inner life of a historical figure without projecting the psychological realism of the modern novel onto the past. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s (1980) categories of voice, focalization, diegetic level, and narrative time, the study shows that Fitzgerald constructs her protagonist, Friedrich von Hardenberg, later known as the poet-philosopher Novalis (1772–1801), almost entirely through the perceptions of other characters, withholding direct access to his own thoughts. The same strategy governs the portrayal of Sophie von Kühn, whose importance in the novel is repeatedly asserted by other characters, but never confirmed by any stable account of her inner life. This structural withholding, the study argues, formally enacts the Romantic idea of irony described by Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), a German philosopher and literary critic who argues, in many of his literary studies, that an ideal representation of reality is permanently flawed and that there is no objective representation, as the process of writing about an event or a figure remains unavoidably subjective. Schlegel’s views on the complexity of having an authentic representation of an event in history or a historical figure through literature are exemplified in the unfinished tale embedded within the novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which is read differently by each character who encounters it, reinforcing this same pattern of asserted but unverifiable meaning. The study concludes by showing how the focalization technique contributes to existing literature on Fitzgerald and on the historical novel more broadly.