Romantic Boredom in Fantasies about Art (Phantasien über die Kunst) and “The Rune Mountain” (“Der Runenberg”). A Study of Affinities with Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Art and Existence

Abstract

The present article aims to analyze the literary representations of boredom in a selection of Romantic works—Fantasies about Art by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, and “The Rune Mountain” by the latter—as well as the main themes with which these are bound up, examining to what extent it can actually be spoken of possible affinities with Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art and existence. Following Ros Velasco’s research on boredom, it will be found that the most frequent typology within the Romantic period consists in situation-dependent and chronic boredom, as well as in its profound variant, fact which reflects the Romantic character’s experience of crisis and existential emptiness towards an increasingly mechanized perception of time. A little part of the Romantic representations of boredom will reflect aesthetic ideas defended also by Arthur Schopenhauer in his magnum opus The World as Will and Representation. Moreover, it will be found that Schopenhauer’s different backdrop concerning the thing in itself compared to the view of the Romantics determines significantly the narrow segment of affinities between the writers and the philosopher. That being said, it is also true that 1) both Schopenhauer and the Romantics gave a special status to art and, more specifically, music—an important affinity which appears to be bound up with boredom in “A Wondrous Oriental Fairy Tale of a Naked Saint”; and 2) the representations of boredom help to elucidate the complex amalgam of ideas that were circulating around 1800—for example, Tieck’s mystical and philosophical influences.