Die Welt als Machination und Verschwörung
摘要
In Cajetan Tschink’s novel, a young nobleman sets out for an adventure but soon finds himself enmeshed in a web of illusions that curtail any prospect of clarification. In research, Gothic novels are frequently discussed in view of the pattern »secrecy and enlightenment«, but this focus cannot account for the bold narrative and philosophical experimentations seen in the novel. The article argues that Tschink’s poetics of mystification answer to the sociopolitical upheavals in the wake of the French Revolution, when the commandments of realism and probability could no longer represent a world that wrought unprecedented levels of heteronomy and violence on populations. Written by Tschink, a professor of philosophy, the novel leaves open more questions than it answers, one of the typical features also found in the conspiracy theory novel, a Victorian genre with a particular penchant for epistemic uncertainty. Here, the fixation on conspiracies does not tally with the atrophic causality (an integral factor of conspiracy theories) but results in an ambivalent skepticism that strikes a delicate balance: between the tragic awareness that there are no reliable means for accessing the truth and the joy of experiencing epistemic vertigo.