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The Nightwatches of Bonaventura

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Silenus:


The Nightwatches of Bonaventura by Anonymous


--- Quote from: University of Chicago Press ---First published in German in 1804, under the nom de plume “Bonaventura,” The Nightwatches of Bonaventura is a dark, twisted, and comic novel, one part Poe and one part Beckett. The narrator and antihero is not Bonaventura but a night watchman named Kreuzgang, a failed poet, actor, and puppeteer who claims to be the spawn of the devil himself. As a night watchman, Kreuzgang takes voyeuristic pleasure in spying on the follies of his fellow citizens, and every night he makes his rounds and stops to peer into a window or door, where he observes framed scenes of murder, despair, theft, romance, and other private activities. In his reactions, Kreuzgang is cynical and pessimistic, yet not without humor. For him, life is a grotesque, macabre, and base joke played by a mechanical and heartless force.

Since its publication, fans have speculated on the novel’s authorship, and it is now believed to be by theater director August Klingemann, who first staged Goethe’s Faust. Organized into sixteen separate nightwatches, the sordid scenes glimpsed through parted curtains, framed by door chinks, and lit by candles and shadows anticipate the cinematic. A cross between the gothic and the romantic, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura is brilliant in its perverse intensity, presenting an inventory of human despair and disgust through the eyes of a bitter, sardonic watcher who draws laughter from tragedy.

Translated by Gerald Gillespie, who supplies a fresh introduction, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura will be welcomed by a new generation of English-language fans eager to sample the night’s dark offerings.
--- End quote ---

Kreuzgang - German for "cloister."


One may read the first three of the "nightwatches" here.

Holden:
Thanks for the link. It is pure gold. Reminds me of..myself.Living in the underworld of Dante.

Nation of One:
Wow.  I don't know how I missed this one.  Better late than never!

I only found it because of the following : "Since its publication, fans have speculated on the novel’s authorship, and it is now believed to be by theater director August Klingemann, who first staged Goethe’s Faust."

There are used paperback editions on Amazon (here in Tobacco Plantation USA) for less than two US dollars.  Of course, there is the cost of shipping ... So, as an alternative, I found something at The University of British Columbia : This is a direct link to download or open The Nightwatches : an English translation of the anonymous German novel Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura, 1804, with an introduction

Abstract

The Nightwatches deserves an attempt at translation into English because it anticipates some of modern literature's preoccupation with meaninglessness and nothingness and elucidates the evolution of this attitude toward life both in form and in content. Written in 1804, The Nightwatches portrays a position opposed to the transcendental idealism that characterized the philosophical basis of the European Romantic Movement, and instead demonstrates that the indefinite longing for an unknown truth and the emphasis on the self and on the intuitive faculties of man's mind - all hallmarks of this movement which distinguished it from previous literary trends - led as easily to dissolution and nothingness as to certitude and the concept of a living, organic universe. Turning away from the objective world and placing emphasis largely on the mind with its dangerous dichotomy of intellect and intuition, The Nightwatches presents the result of the Romantic failure to combine the transcendental with the real, a failure that removed the mind's inner foundations of certitude and faith, resulting in a loss of religion and a negative view of existence. Life becomes a delusion, and knowledge mere hypothesis, and The Night-watches mirrors this new awareness with the help of masks, theatre imagery, and satire. Thus, The Nightwatches charts a world-view which was developed considerably by nihilistic writers of the latter half of the nineteenth century and which has culminated, in our own times, in the work of playwrights of the absurd, notably the work of Samuel Beckett, which demonstrates great similarity to the content of The Nightwatches.

Nation of One:
Has anyone taken a look at the English translation, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura ?  It was written in 1804, when the Buddha of Berlin would have been around 16 years old, right about the time that he came to the conclusion that this world must be the handiwork of some blind demon. 

The Nightwatches portrays a position opposed to the transcendental idealism that characterized the philosophical basis of the "European Romantic Movement".

Nation of One:
Reading this translation out loud is a powerful experience.  Even as it was originally published in 1804 by an unknown German-speaking author, it sounds as if it could have been written even more recently.   It's the same old story for poets and freethinkers.  There is simply no way to earn a living with poetry ...

It is worth reading aloud.   

May the Great Tiredness devour me.

Note: 


The Great Tiredness is every bit as good as death.  There was no color here, no pain, no emotional weather at all, just an occasional oddness that was the outside world trying to puff itself up into significance when, of course, the secret of the Great Tiredness, the truth of this realm, was that everything was arbitrary and meaningless.  In the Great Tiredness, the transition from sleep to wakefulness was often blurred.
 – W.B. Spencer

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