Lewitscharoff’s Blumenberg – the Metaphorical Lion as an Image of Transcendent Possibility

Abstract

In Blumenberg (2011), Sibylle Lewitscharoff – winner, in 2013, of the Georg-Büchner-Preis – presents a philosophy professor who regularly perceives a lion’s presence. For example, while delivering one of his lectures, “als er von seinen Karten hochblickte, sah er ihn [the lion]”.1 This arresting statement raises many questions. What exactly does the professor see? Do his students, likewise, observe this magnanimous animal sitting awkwardly in the lecture hall? No, they do not. Where then is this animal; what is its origin? This puzzles us, the readers, as much as it does the rationally minded philosopher. As we read the text, we, along with the professor, ask ourselves why we are taking this seriously; we are reading about an “absurd” occurrence in a fictional text. What does this have to do with reality? Lewitscharoff’s novel, I would suggest, uniquely complicates reality. Her text plays with the sentiment that twenty-first century readers and thinkers are still mystified about the irrational and the religious within the real. This persistent interest in understanding the presence (or absence) of the illogical – the unexplainable – in the modern world receives form in and through the picture Lewitscharoff’s novel projects. Lying between fiction and reality, the lion – the dominant picture textually engendered – demands, therefore, interpretation. This lion, I assert, is a linguistically constructed image stemming from the mind of the fictional Blumenberg who lives and teaches philosophy in the provincial German city of Münster. Lewitscharoff bases the fictional Blumenberg off the historical Hans Blumenberg, in whom she showed initial interest in her fictional autobiography Apostoloff (2009), where she referred to him as a “Löwenphilosoph.”2 This philosopher, fascinated with lions, propagated, in one of his seminal works, various paradigms for understanding metaphors, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (1997).3 Employing this philosopher, whose inquiries concerned investigations into the nature of a metaphor, Lewitscharoff’s narrator explores how her protagonist creates an image that actualizes one of Hans Blumenberg’s unique paradigms, namely an “absolute metaphor,” indicative, in this novel, of transcendent possibility. To provide clarity at the outset of this article, I will use “Hans Blumenberg” when referring to the historical philosopher, who lived from 1920 to 1996, and “Blumenberg” when discussing the fictional character.