The romantic novel can manifest the continuity of forms of the poetic absolute—and it can give individuality to this absolute—because it has discovered the absolutely dissolving power of prose. Prose signified, for the romantics, the potential for indefinite encompassment that defies all conceptual thought and all systematic construction of the absolute. The romantics found this signification in the following manner. In the first, ordinary sense, prose refers to speech without poetic meter, speech close to ordinary speech, ungebundene Rede. However, as Gasché comments, “in addition to its proper meaning, prose has a figural, improper meaning, namely prosaic, plain, ordinary, sober. Furthermore, this improper meaning cannot properly be distinguished from the proper. But it is this very lack of differentiation, this ambiguity of meaning, that predestines prose to become the comprehensible manifestation of the Absolute.”
—Piotr Parlej, The Romantic Theory of the Novel, pp32-3
