The Blue Flower #4: Nothing happened
Footnotes & Tangents for chapters 26–33 of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
Thursday September 13 Today was hot and there was thunder and nothing happened and Hardenburch did not come. Friday September 14 Today no-one came and nothing happened.
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Hello and welcome to this slow read of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. My name is Simon Haisell and I am the host of Footnotes & Tangents, book guides and slow reads of novels worth savouring. Check out our read-along plans for 2026.
In Week 4 of this slow read, we are reading chapters 26–33. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading these chapters before returning to this post to join the discussion.
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This week: Nothing happened
Erasmus stood close to Fritz. 'What will you tell Father now?' Nothing. Fritz would accept that Fate and Chance sent and take the opportunity to say something. The distance between himself and Erasmus distressed him far more than falling-out with his father.
If last week was about “something” happening – something fleeting that no one can fully grasp – this week is about nothing. Fritz tells his father nothing. Sophie writes a letter, but can write nothing else. Sophie’s diary flatly contradicts Fritz’s heart by declaring, day after day, “nothing happened.” A painter comes to paint her, but he can get nothing from her. “I could not hear her question, and so I could not paint.”
When Fritz goes to see his mother with her sickly baby, “He would have liked to ask her to give him something, or to tell him something, but could think of nothing.”
Like everything else in The Blue Flower, this nothingness is comic, tragic and sublime. Sophie’s diary reveals her mind is, as Erasmus surmised, “empty as a new jug.” Hoffmann cannot paint her because “at twelve years old she has a double chin”, and not because he cannot see her soul – the polite excuse he gives to the poetical Fritz.
But to Novalis, “nothing” does not negate “something.” In Week 2, Fritz described himself as the antithesis of Karoline’s thesis:
‘Now we must question whether the synthesis will be harmony between us or whether it will lead to a new impossiblity which we have never dreamed of.’
Tragi-comically, that “new impossibility” is Sophie. But this is how his mind works: mind and body, internal and external, life and death, joy and despair, shadows and light. At some “impossible”, unseen level, it all becomes one.
How this will happen remains unresolved, mysterious and incomplete – like Novalis’ life, cut short at 28, and his unfinished novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, with its quest for the unattainable blue flower. How everything is resolved is perhaps less important than the search for resolution. When Sophie wonders “what is going to happen” next, Fritz replies elipitically:
'If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching.'
Fitzgerald’s novel spirals through these opposites: something and nothing, comedy and tragedy, reality and fantasy, romantic visions and sensible practicalities, the spoken and the silence. Like Novalis, Fitzgerald intimates that all these dualities are united somehow, somewhere, within the space of the novel, and in life.
But how? By what means? Beneath The Blue Flower, slender and poised, lies the dark subterranean world of a vast, unmappable salt mine. At its heart lies something – or nothing? – that will offer us final consolation. But how will we find our way down there, fumbling in the dark?
‘The external world is the world of shadows. It throws its shadows into the kingdom of light. How different they will appear when this darkness is gone and the shadow-body has passed away. The universe after all, is within us. The way leads inwards, always inwards.’
“Sometimes ignorance is bliss”: The timeless beauty of Novalis
Footnotes and tangents
1. She is my wisdom
This week’s reading opens with a letter from Sophie to Fritz, received on New Year’s Eve – Silvesterbend. This is Saint Sylvester’s Day, in honour of the fourth-century pope whose pontificate coincided with the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine. According to myth, he cured Constantine of leprosy and, in gratitude, the emperor resigned his office and handed Rome to the pope. This is not true. We also learn in passing that the Moravian Brethren used to choose their life partners by lot. This is true.
Silvesterbend: More on Saint Sylvester I, Pope of Rome
Guten Rutsch: How do Germans celebrate New Year's?
Blue cabinets: Love, Lust, and Marriage with the Moravians
Sophie’s letters are perfunctory. Fritz’s response is hysterically disproportionate: “She is my wisdom.” I blush to recall my own overblown statements on love at Fritz’s age!
2. The soul of the Mandelsloh
‘I think, indeed, that women have a better grasp on the whole business of life than we men have.’
Frau Leutnant Mandelsloh enters into the story with a sloshing bucket of water. She’s forgotten what she is supposed to be doing with it. She and Fritz have a serious conversation about Sophie and the soul of the Mandelsloh. And then the punchline: Sophie is playing with some new kittens, and the Mandelsloh remembers she brought the bucket to drown them.
The servants were faint-hearted about their duty in this respect.
She drowns all talk of souls in a bucket of dead cats. The sacred and profane, cheek by jowl.
This scene brought to my mind the poem The Early Purges by Seamus Heaney, which we studied at school:
I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’,
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din
Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout
Of the pump and the water pumped in.
Heaney’s poem ends:
‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.
Like Karoline and Sidonie, the Mandelsloh is good with particulars. She says, “What is wrong with particulars? Someone has to look after them.” Well, quite!
In our slow reads, I like to proceed on the assumption that everything is interesting, and that nothing is dull when approached with curiosity. Fritz/Novalis would no doubt approve. The Mandelsloh would roll her eyes!
‘Don’t look so interested!’ she cried. ‘I am very dull. My husband is very dull. We are two dull people. I should not have mentioned us. Even to think of us might make you weep from boredom.’
Of course, the Mandelsloh isn’t dull. She’s magnificent! We give her the definite article like the Bernhard because she’s larger-than-life, like some giantess from Brothers Grimm with her straight-talking and cat-killing particulars. Or perhaps I have imbibed too much of whatever Fritz is taking?
Can anything be made interesting?
3. How could he?
‘I deceive myself into thinking that everyone must feel about him in the same way.’
The exchange between Erasmus and Karoline is about hearts. Eramus, like Fritz, wears his on his sleeve, and we learn that he adores his brother and it pains him deeply that they have fallen out. Karoline armours her heart against life’s many disappointments. “She did not want to be pitied.”
They share dismay about Fritz and Sophie. Karoline sees this and recognises “never again will he have such sympathy for another human being whom he does not even know.” But in the same way that she wouldn’t let Fritz know he had hurt her, she won’t allow Erasmus to pity her. So she gives Erasmus the wrong impression.
Two people in love, and losing their Fritz. It is evidence of the forces working within her, and the strength of Erasmus’ sympathetic heart, that Karoline opens up to him, despite herself. “How could he? How could he?”
4. Waiting for Hardenburch
Today once again we were alone and nothing much happened.
Sophie von Kühn’s sparse diary is really all we have of her in the archive. Fitzgerald transcribes her entries verbatim, and what a stark contrast they make to Fritz’s own account. But then again, their inclusion here amongst all these Fritz/Fitzgeraldian fragments gives them a peculiarly aphoristic quality. As though unwittingly, and comically, Sophie is making some absurdist or Beckettian statement on the nature of being:
Today was like yesterday and nothing much happened.
Samuel Beckett was one of Penelope Fitzgerald’s favourite writers. Like Fitzgerald, Beckett was preoccupied with the dialogues between mind and body and the ways we endure life and our own company.1 Fitzgerald described herself as a “depressive humourist”, and there is much of Beckett’s elusive tragicomic universe in The Blue Flower.
5. There is more truth in folktales
‘It is the introduction,’ he told her, ‘to a story which I cannot write as yet. I do not know even what it will be. I have made a list of occupations and professions, and of psychological types. But perhaps after all it will not be a novel. There is more truth, perhaps, in folktales.’
Fritz’s second reading of the blue flower story is to a less appreciative audience than the first. Karoline wasn’t sure what to make of it, but Sophie and the Mandelsloh seem less patient with this “story for children” without an ending. They listen more out of politeness to their guest than anything else.
The unnamed hero of this fragment will become Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Ofterdingen was a lyric poet mentioned in the thirteenth-century epic, Sängerkrieg. These poems describe a “minstrel contest” at the castle of Wartburg in Thuringia. In the contest, better-known singers defeat Ofterdingen, who then calls on the aid of a magician called Klingsor von Ungerlant.
Novalis sends his medieval poet on a dream quest for the blue flower. Here, Fitzgerald has Fritz admit that his story may not, in fact, be a novel. The final unfinished work incorporates songs, dreams, and fairy tales. Novalis had asked:
‘Shouldn’t a novel include all sorts of styles, bound together in a varying order and animated by a common spirit?’2
With black humour, Fitzgerald tells us that Sophie puts Fritz’s story, lovingly copied by Karoline Just, next to her Evangelium and a list of dead dogs.
6. Will the real Joseph Hoffmann please stand up
The pressure of these ideas, which urged themselves upon him with the force of poetry, caused him to lay down his knife and fork and to say distinctly, without the least reference to the loud voices around him. 'Yes, there, exactly there.'
Last week, I shared “the wretched miniature” that pains Fritz and amuses “the whole family, Sophie above all.” It is curious the power these inadequate portraits have on us. Penelope Fitzgerald must have considered this image and wondered what it left out (a great deal), as Hilary Mantel contemplated the staging and ellipses in Hans Holbein’s painting of Thomas Cromwell.
As Fritz’s medieval poet hunts for the blue flower, he seeks to track down the “something” he sees in Sophie that no one else can. Fitzgerald gives us a fragment of Novalis’ attempt to set this down in writing.
He tells the Mandelsloh: “What I have written down about her does not make sense.” This is honest enough! And then he asks the Mandelsloh to write a portrait of Sophie. “Not possible!” she objects. So he turns to a painter to capture her soul.
Okay, so I went off on my own medieval quest to find this Joseph Hoffmann of Köln. Fitzgerald’s portrait of him is so vivid I felt convinced he must be real. I had seen his heart, his soul. But Fitzgerald must have anticipated my search with relish, for I can find no Joseph Hoffmann of Köln!
There is an Austrian landscape painter named Josef Hoffmann, born in 1831. He travelled to Asia, and painted Bombay and Varanasi. Could he have also used Penelope’s pen to time-travel back to 1795? It is not impossible. There is also the architect and designer Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956), part of the Vienna Secession art movement that included Gustav Klimt.
I feel like the joke is on me. The painter could not paint Sophie, and I cannot find the painter, because the painter does not exist.
Hermione Lee writes that Penelope Fitzgerald adopts Novalis’s methods in The Blue Flower, telling the “human story” that cannot be captured by biography.3 “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history,” Novalis tells us in the epigraph. Fitzgerald takes what Lee calls “fictional liberties” in pursuit of her object, inventing fictional characters like Jacob Dietmahler and allowing Fritz to begin drafting Heinrich von Ofterdingen earlier than his surviving notes suggest.
Hoffmann does not see the resemblance between Raphael’s self-portrait and Sophie von Kühn. He sees, “A decent, good-hearted Saxon girl, potato-fed, with the bloom of thirteen summers and the coarser glow of thirteen winters.” He is a realist; his patron, Fritz, is an idealist. Neither can hear “Sophie’s question.”
‘Hardenberg, in every created thing, whether it is alive or whether it is what we usually call inanimate, there is an attempt to communicate, even among the totally silent. There is a question being asked, a different question for every entity, which for the most part will never be put into words, even by thsoe who can speak.’
I feel like this is the novel speaking. The Blue Flower speaking. Each reader cups their ear to listen to the book. The words are the same, but every reader makes something different from them.
‘What is the meaning of the blue flower?’
7. Not human
In each of Fitzgerald’s later novels, there are scenes where something supernatural seems to press on the page – a light, indistinct touch that lets you know in passing of its presence. Fitzgerald was religious and believed in ghosts. Here, Fritz walks from the Wilde Mann into the churchyard at Weiseenfels:
… just a little ahead of him, a young man, still almost a boy, was standing in the half darkness, with his head bent, himself as white, still, and speechless as a memorial. The sight was consoling to Fritz, who knew that the young man, although living, was not human, but also that at the moment there was no boundary between them.
He returns home with “the impulse to tell somebody about what he had seen”, but Sidonie cuts him off with an interrogation about the phantom painter from the future. He never will explain what he saw. A statue? A ghost? A premonition?
Explaining it would exorcise it. Fitzgerald doesn’t tell us what Romanticism is; she shows us what it feels like. Fritz is consoled. Fitzgerald was writing this in her eighties, and she must have been thinking about her own mortality, as well as Fritz’s. Asked whether she saw her novel as a form of consolation, Fitzgerald said not if “consolation means something second best, to keep you quiet.” Hermione Lee records:
But yes, she does want it, ‘if consolation is to be made welcome in a different world, where the laws of time are suspended, and yet which is still my own.’4
8. Paradise regained?
In Jena, in autumn, friends walked together in the pine woods above the little town, or in Paradise, Jena’s name for its towpath along the Saale.
And so we reach the end of Week 4 with “His Ancient and Divine Majesty” Goethe in Paradise, Jena, as our story catches up with its beginning. Fritz asks Dietmahler, “How do I come into a room?” and we don’t need to be told – we can imagine! He invites his friend home to Weissenfels where the novel began, 33 fragments ago.
Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Next week, we will read chapters 34–42. The reading schedule, weekly posts and further resources can all be found on the main page for The Blue Flower at Footnotes & Tangents.
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In the comments, let us know what caught your eye and ask the group any questions you may have. And if you’ve tumbled down a rabbit hole or taken your reading off on a tangent, please share where you have been and what you have found.
Until next time, I wish everyone happy and adventurous reading.
Simon
See Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, p. 201.
Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels, p. 278.
Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, p. 397.
Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, p. 406.
I really liked the art selection in this week’s segment. Kandinsky’s The Blue Rider and Friedrich’s The Monk (I had never seen that one before) especially. But the question “Can anything be made interesting?” is what stayed with me the most.
This whole week’s “nothingness” keeps reminding me of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. That book is built out of fragments where nothing happens and yet everything burns beneath the surface. Nelson writes: “I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to make this nothing into something,” which feels exactly like Fritz. Sophie writes “nothing happened,” while his inner life is blazing. It creates a perfect parallel: both books turn emptiness into a strange, luminous presence.
And it made me think again about how beauty is always in the eye of the beholder. Sophie is “nothing” to almost everyone, blank and ordinary and unreadable, yet to Fritz she is luminous and singular, the source of meaning itself. It is the Blue Flower in miniature, not an object with its own intrinsic radiance but something transfigured by the one who truly sees it. One person, looking with the right kind of attention, can turn “nothing” into everything.
Perhaps Fitzgerald is giving us a lesson in looking.
I had hoped so much that Hoffman was real, and that his failed sketches were available and we would see them today. Ah well.
This week’s reading was actually a breakthrough for me, in that I now have a theory to explain Fritz’s passionate conviction, against all evidence, that Sophie is “his wisdom.”
What did it for me was the bored cows standing in their own manure, and the Mandolsloh with her kitten-drowning bucket. Everything in Fritz’s world is so bare, gray, and quotidian. There is no magic, no hidden depth, no inner light, no secret wisdom. The poor guy literally works in a salt mine!
I think there are some very intelligent people, like Fritz, who just can’t accept that things are as banal as they seem. There must be hidden depths. Many people who are drawn to conspiracy theories are highly intelligent, but their intelligence isn’t given a healthy outlet, and so they look for connections and meaning even when there’s nothing there. I think this is why Fritz is reading so much depth and meaning into Sophie’s totally normal comments. He is desperately seeking his blue flower, and his world offers him few if any opportunities for communing with beauty. So why not discover it in an empty vessel?