Actually, lovers seldom die together, any more than Jacob and Esau were born simultaneously. Stefan Zweig and his wife took poison together in Brazil in Literary linkings of love and death constitute a class best defined not as the sum total of particular events satisfying an essential criterion of inclusion such as the literal simultaneous death of two tightly embracing lovers which would be a class with no members , but as all of those instances that refer to this paradoxical concept, address it, and approximate it to a recognizable degree.
A Study in Evidence Berkeley: U of California P, , U of Chicago P, , Our concern here is with works in which love and death relate to each other, and with the paradoxical thematic link between love and death in the writings of Goethe in particular — with his use of the Liebestod as a topos. His awareness of the conventionality of language, thought, and creativity reflects both the thinking of the age in which he lived and his own personal doubts and beliefs, but it also 25 shows that conventions may be used in creative and surprising ways, especially by an author conscious of their conventionality.
We will notice themes and structures that were popular in the literature and culture from which Goethe emerged, which he helped shape, and which have lost none of their vitality today. Even apparent arbitrariness may betray a convention at work. Instances of love and death that lack any discernible dialectic between the two, however, are beyond our scope. As noted, the Liebestod is an example of the paradox of unity in duality, one and double, often referred to as a coincidentia oppositorum and launched 23 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans.
Montgomery Belgion ; rev. Norton, , —67 n. The coincidentia oppositorum works its magic in Hegel, Marx, and every other dialectical philosophy and is the fulcrum around which Romantic rhetoric and thought revolve. This term covers many pairs of strange bedfellows — any bridging of opposition in which the sense of opposition hovers in unstable tension with a unifying counterforce. Of these, Goethe, like Donne and Congreve, is conspicuously, almost self-indulgently, fond. Because he saw no way of stripping truth down to its naked essence, his revelations contain an element of mystery.
His Life and Thought New York: Singer explains that both Bruno and Nicolaus Cusanus hold to this doctrine. His work was commented on by Johannes Eriugena d. Thomas —74 ; by Albertus Magnus — ; by Meister Eckhart d. The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, trans. Brooks Haxton New York: Viking Penguin, , The line to Nietzsche and to Heidegger is a direct one. We reach for truth and grasp soap bubbles. Goethe doubts that the thing in itself can be accessed through language, which is always insufficient in its anthropocentricity, conventionality, and ephemerality and always as much a barrier as a gate, arresting in its very concreteness.
The love-death theme, noteworthy in its own right, is a metaphor for paradoxical approaches to the primal question. Ernst Behler et al. The polarity of articulation and submergence,33 for which Goethe coined the verb sich verselbsten, and its opposite, sich entselbstigen, has its own historical dynamic. It hurt his mother to behold Jesus on the cross, but not in the same way, and probably not as much, as it hurt Jesus himself.
They are uncomfortable with the opposition between subject and object and long for unity. That the love-death topos mirrors their effort to highlight and bridge the chasm and allies them with Goethe will, I hope, become plain. An articulated worldview is one thing; habits of mind and conventions taken for granted are something else again, and are at least as revealing.
All readers and students of literature profit from paying attention to women or men whose reception and rearticulation of their cultural inheritance has a distinctive stamp and a lasting effect. Goethe was such a man — an exemplary recycler and a fecund creator of culture. Even the once skeptical T. Cornell UP, , passim.
Doubleday, Anchor, , 58— Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed. Princeton UP, ], n. All of us have been impoverished. In the course of this study I explore a variety of matters that are associated with the theme of love and death — lovesickness, venereal disease syphilis, AIDS , predatory women as targets of love and agents of death, the equation of womb and tomb Romeo and Juliet 2. His unsystematic openness to a variety of configurations and arrangements of ideas is evident in his fiction as well.
In Die Leiden des jun35 H. Nisbet, Goethe and the Scientific Tradition London: Institute of Germanic Studies, , One thing may substitute for another to a greater or lesser degree and in one way or another. But many factors affect our belief that similarity or difference is more important in a given case or that one tertium comparationes is more important than another. In an analogy, the sensory properties of the analogon are not the same as those of the original, but they function according to a similar formal principle.
Goethe views humans as having only mediate, that is, only symbolic access to such ultimates as God, truth, or immortality. It was he who first defined humans as symbol-using animals, and his works abound in symbols of symbolism — symbols of our dependence on symbols as mediators of truth. Andrzej Warminski Minneapolis, MN: U of Minneapolis P, , There can be no unmediated relationship between opposites. The stairway enables twoway traffic between above and below, and suggests the reversibility of our own exit from unity into selfhood and back again.
I try to avoid these mistakes through a judicious selection of examples and through inquisitive reading as well as through reflection on the larger cultural context and the function of conventions. I wonder what the Liebestod tells us about Goethe, about the works in which this theme occurs, about the discourse of which it is a staple, and about the culture it reflects. His use of a traditional theme also provides an occasion to reflect on the originality and the quality of the works in which love and death play a part, and to ponder originality as a literary value.
I do not refrain from making non-thematic, for example linguistic and aesthetic, observations about the works considered. Poems, in particular, are addressed as artifacts, not as mere nodes of intersection in an intertextual system. In them I look for cohesiveness, integrity of design, and special meanings and effects.
On the other hand, no work of art is an atomistic organic whole, separate from its cultural history and context. The 41 Stuttgarter Zeitung, July 3, , Walter de Gruyter, ], lines — Some twins, such as Wiligis and Sibylla, are sexual opposites, yet narcissistically in love with themselves in each other, but all twins are opposed when they face one another or when they both want the same toy or lover.
Love and death, too, are at once opposites and an identity. Love creates life, death destroys it. To love is to live — to experience an extreme of vitality at the farthest remove from the oblivion which is death. Lovers live and die on love. Only when in love is the individual truly him- or herself, yet when in love he or she is no longer a self at all, but part of a higher unity.
Editions du Seuil, , 7. Allen, The Femme Fatale: Erotic Icon Troy, NY: Whitston, , Beck, , The desire to possess, blend with, incorporate, or be absorbed in an other or a world of others informs the myth of Venus and Adonis and the stories of Hero and Leander, Orpheus and Eurydice, Admetus and Alcestis, Protesilaus and Laodamia, Pyramus and Thisbe, and Tristan and Isolde, all of which Goethe knew at a young age.
Cotta, , 1, 7: Spring Publications, , Lambert Schneider, , Harvard UP, , While particulars are specimens of their class or genus, individuals generate and express novelty. It would be a dull world that had only classes and particulars, but no individuals. Goethe is more interested in the existential predicament of the lone individual than in the logical or ontological status of the individual as a category. Blackwell, , Suhrkamp, , The features of an individual, however, are not inferable from its class.
Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit, One may lose oneself temporarily, as in love, or permanently, as in death. Philosophical Library, ], An Introduction, 2nd ed. U of Minnesota P, ], Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality: Walker, , Problems in the Containment of Representation New York: Oxford UP, , Mai , in FA 2,6: The term comes from Samuel Richter, pen name: Studien zur hermetischen Tradition des deutschen Wilhelm Fink, , For the self is neither indivisible nor impermeable; it allows a flow of fragrances, fluids, and fictions in and out of seemingly hard, impenetrable bodies, vessels, and ideologies of many kinds.
Metaphors of flowing, confluence, influence, often linked with potions Tristan und Isolde, Faust , poisons Romeo and Juliet , and ointments are essential to the love-death tradition. How much of Don Juan has flowed into Donna Anna if she has succumbed to him, as the narrator believes? To what extent are we always already in the world, and to what extent does the world always reside and preside in us? How do individuals come into being in the first place? It is no skin off their nose if their creatures suffer torment or privation. Emanation impoverishes only the emergent individual, not the gods, even if the idea that the self could ever be separate and alone can only be an illusion.
But insofar as subjectivity is defined by longing, only the creature, not the Creator, is possessed of subjectivity. Though unpredictable, individuals, like particulars, do always refer back to their source or to their prototype, like variations on a theme, or to the community that defines their expatriation. The lamp awaits the flame that will ignite it.
This complicated his reception by the Nazis. We are not alone in our loneliness. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ], 3. An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation Princeton: Princeton UP, , 4 and passim. In the last case, the individual would not come into being but always already be. Emanation is a proceeding forth from a point of origin, but sometimes Goethe speaks of symmetrical division.
Beck, , 68— Stein, 19 November The aim of Eros, by contrast, is to burn individuality away. Darkness, declared the mother of light by Mephistopheles, finds herself in mortal combat with her ungrateful offspring, through whose agency bodies have a transitory being Faust, lines — She is independent of the things on which light shines in order to show itself. When they pass away light itself will disappear. The paradox that personal identity arises out of a loss of identity with the source is at the core of the Romantic world view and the premise on which all of its struggles are based.
The desire to lose a sharply delineated selfhood in an enveloping liquid All informs Romantic yearning and explains the prominence of the Liebestod in its artistic expresWissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ], 75— Montgomery Belgion New York: Tausend Jahre sind nur eine halbe Nacht. He tells of a noble race of horses who bite open an artery when the pressure becomes too great.
For this, the sexual act as such is the appropriate symbol. For Goethe, the ecstasy has the aim of metamorphosis to a higher form: Insel, , New Directions, , Uncomfortable with finality, Goethe sometimes depicts a reunion as only a bridge to subsequent separations and reunions, forays outward and returns at a higher level, in an ascending spiral.
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At other times the paradigm seems static, his characters propelled by the desire to escape temporality in search of an enduring, timeless spatiality. In conflict with itself, the self seeks both selfpreservation and surrender to unity. The Liebestod, a Coincidentia Oppositorum The unity of love and death is manifest in the paradox of the Liebestod. Love unites opposed selves temporarily; death does so absolutely.
Benzinger Brothers, —48], 1: Cambridge UP, ], Mephistopheles says of theology: This is a topos. The philter drunk by Tristan and Isolde both restores them and destroys them as individuals. U of Chicago P, ], Holzner, 10 ]: Walter de Gruyter, , Mario Domandi New York: Yale UP, ; rev. Norton [The Norton Library], , —12, — Abrams discusses the connections between Romanticism and neoplatonism in Natural Supernaturalism: Norton, , — Princeton UP, , — See also Alice D.
Ann Arbor Press, , n. Litterarischer Verein, ; repr. Max Niemeyer, , Wilhelm Dobbek defines thinking dialectically as the contemplation of opposed phenomena in their mutual interdependence. The unity of contraries is never simply a compromise, but a tense and productive interaction of genuine antitheses 17— According to Dobbek, the Goethezeit combines the idea of immanence against transcendence with a dynamic conception of unification in time against a timeless unity in space. It is hard to identify Goethe with either tendency, as though he himself were a timeless, unchanging identity and his thought an established, undeveloping and undialectical pledge to dynamic development from his youth in Frankfurt until his old age.
Rather, each concept serves a local, limited poetic need and is not binding in a weltanschaulich sense. Yet he does rely on a fairly stable set of categories, while keeping an ironic distance from them and absorbing infusions from many sources. Dialectical thinking remains productive today, especially in non-AngloSaxon philosophical discourse. She is powerless to control its effects. The too much is, without an aufhebend counterweight, too obviously too little. U of Chicago P, , 3 — emphasis added. The ever unfinished nature of the body was hidden, kept secret; conception, pregnancy, childbirth, death throes, were almost never shown.
The desire for unity in love and death, then, follows from the fact of individuation, just as unity may derive from differentiation in logic. If, on the other hand, unity is prior and multiplicity secondary,57 this may attest to the lateness and modernity of Romanticism. Every union, therefore, is a coincidentia op53 Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, 1 Oxford: Clarendon P, , 13— 16, Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans.
MIT Press, , An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics [London: Methuen, ; paperback reprint ], Goethe allows for either originary unity or originary division. U of Chicago P, , 25— Muenzer, Figures of Identity: Penn State UP, , n. It is hard to see why the prospect of an open-ended universe did not deny Nietzsche, who is otherwise so dependent on Goethe, his belief in the eternal recurrence of the same.
Implicit in the idea of organicism, it is a crucial, indispensable insight — one not congenial to mechanistic world views. Other Explanations of the Link between Love and Death The pervasive link between love and death in the history of literature, religion, and philosophy has been explained in a variety of ways. As opposed forces, love and death are a near match for each other, love being strong enough to cancel out death. Boney sees equal intensity as the common element in the fires of love and death,61 while H.
Munzer and Patrick Brady believe that love and death are paradoxically linked by their opposite effects, love tending toward activity, death toward stasis. This distinction originates with Schopenhauer, and is commented on by Freud: U of Pennsylvania, According to Norman O. Love and death both coincide and oppose each other; sie heben einander auf. A moment of ecstasy so strong that he would want time to stop would be the death of Faust, which is not only a risk he is willing to take but a consummation he would gratefully embrace: Since erotic passion is incompatible with marriage and a Frau Isolde unthinkable, according to Rougemont, the novel of adultery is the quintessential narrative of passion.
It is the one most suited to intensifying passion. Random House, , Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the page number. De Rougemont perceives no identity, analogy, or homology between love and death, and views the relationship between them mechanistically. Love is linked with death because it may eventuate in death. A passion may be fatal. Passion is a diminished and socially tolerable surrogate for death, since both passion and death are suffered rather than committed. To be sure, passion German Leidenschaft is suffering Leiden , but de Rougemont mistakes the terms of the traditional equations: But death and dying are not the same thing.
There is no such thing as death, only dying. Dying is part of life and living is dying. Both birth and dying are suffered. We are thrown into life and yanked out of it again by agencies greater than ourselves. Desire is a part of life, not a lesser death. Nor is death a more intense passion, but release from passion. Harrison gets it right: We live until we are dead. Goethe can be counted on to use traditions logically. To him, an anxious, self-protective chastity would be equivalent to egoism. In resisting absorption in another we may hold death temporarily at bay.
It is when we submit to love that we are lost. Only a daredevil who prizes love above life may fall in love: Love will not tolerate separation and individual identity. To die is to complete the cycle of life and return to the source — ultimately to return to God. Ethical love is a renunciation of oneself for the sake of another, as in the psychology of Eric Fromm. The quest for love and death devalues the human and the individual, for love and death mix the separate and discrete and usher in unity, disorder, and oblivion.
Zu Literatur und Kunst der Jahrhundertwende, ed. Roger Bauer et al Frankfurt am Main: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ], Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, — Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ], xviii.
Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, 3rd ed. Kohlhammer, , 1: Goethe says of his friendship with Schiller: This split is what produces romantic striving and accounts for the prominence of the Liebestod as the preeminent symbol of reunion in Romanticism. No chasm, no need to build bridges. The existential fact of individuation underlies all such permutations.
Thus the Liebestod has enjoyed a dramatic flowering in modern culture. Yale UP, , , Love-Death Topos a Male Construct? Verlag Roter Stern, U of Minnesota P, Thus the reconstitution of the androgyne during intercourse, the union which reestablishes the unity, is a brief return to the primal state of completeness from which, as created and shaped matter, as self-aware, distinct individuals, we are otherwise in permanent exile. It is really strange, this pars pro toto; and strange how very deeply we dip when we dip into woman.
As an adolescent I learned that just to place my nose into the warm and intimate shelter of my hand made me feel warm and sheltered all over,. It was a foretaste of that other sheltering insertion which is equally partial in extent and even more total in effect, bringing with it a sense of peace and completeness comparable to immersion in a warm, long-forgotten ocean; a state of being before thought and before pain, an oceanic feeling less nostalgic than that which overcomes us in nature, but equally related to the mother: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender Berkeley: U of California P, Every boy, by contrast, must face his difference, and suffers a consequent discontinuity and generalized loneliness as well as the fear that he can never again know the sense of oneness and fusion that he knew as an infant.
Most pregnant women identify intensely with their unborn children, and through that identification in some measure reexperience a state of complete and harmonious union. Several female readers of this chapter have protested, however, that love carries no connotation of blending or loss of selfhood for them. A separate female culture has survived male cultural dominance, they say. Vulnerable to rape and pregnancy, women want to fortify boundaries, not break them down. The Oedipus complex is in the first instance a yearning for union on the part of the child, which may account for adversarial relationships among boys and men, the boy competing with his father for the affection of his mother.
To the lonely male, woman is the goal and the instrument of his de84 liverance. Men value autonomy, and they think of their interactions with others principally in terms of procedures for arbitrating conflicts between individual rights. Already embedded in a network that provides an anonymous security, women embrace independence. Men, on the other hand, who are essentially needy, long to return to the womb — all the while anxious to preserve their individuality.
Yet even this ambivalence is not unambiguously male. In considering the meaning of these episodes, and the identity of the male, it was suggested that perhaps Death itself was 86 the mysterious lover. In sexual intercourse it is the man who is incorporated and the woman who incorporates. Yet not only are these all works by male authors, but the dominant culture has projected onto women a desire for conjunction equivalent to that characteristic of men, which amounts to the absence of the female voice from literature.
Although the Liebestod theme occurs in women writers and female mystics from as far back as Sappho and Hildegard von Bingen and is pervasive in the work of Margaret Fuller, George Eliot, Iris Texts, and Contexts, ed.
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Flynn and Patrocinio P. Johns Hopkins UP, ], 54— Metzler, , You preyed, or were preyed upon. Love and depredation went hand in hand. That is why Freud. Henry Holt, ], Even Medea, with whom Marwood compares herself, is the creature of Jason. After vicarious alienation through the medium of the male consciousness, can women ever regain their natural, unalienated attachment to their mother?
We will never know. If the love-death theme is implicitly sexist, it must also be time-bound, ephemeral, a passing fancy, its hoary antiquity notwithstanding. We may someday see fascination with love and death as a mark of a particular broad era, of which Romanticism is the last full flowering and of which an implicit belief in the atomized self, accompanied by defensiveness and dread, is a defining characteristic. If so, we may be in the dawn of a new era.
Being is time, and time is constitutive of being, while both love and death imply stasis, an endless, but eternally unavailable spatial presence. Faust demands a moment so lovely that he will want it to stay. No search for meaning can be complete that does not explain why we use such conventions. Are they, like language in general, as Chomsky believes, a manifestation of human nature without practical utility, or do they represent a form of agreement that contributes to the survival of the social unit? The recognition that human intercourse is informed with topoi subverts the pre-Romantic over-estimation of originality as a primary source of literary value.
The topos of love and death continues to be repeated. Why do we love it so much? We will not know what it means to love and die until we know what it means to be, perhaps not even then. Chatto and Windus, ; New York: Vintage, , The Earth Spirit describes his incessant activity as weaving: To understand the ways in which traditions engage or are engaged by a poet and weave or are woven together to yield what Stephen C.
Even if we restrict ourselves to what may seem to be atomistic thematic traditions, we are likely to favor those that bear a name such as the love-death tradition and leave underlying concepts or less clearly outlined ones unremarked. Every insight entails blindness, every perception some repression. Goethe saw in the collision of Hellenism and Christianity in the first century and the resulting blending of Hellenism into Christianity a rich quarry for poetry. He believed neither in any kind of ahistorical autonomy nor in a primitive ideal of national cultural purity.
Goethe knows that he is in good company in mining 6 Asked by Eckermann whether a Chinese novel that Goethe had been reading was one of their best, Goethe answered: Returning from Vienna to Paris in as a secret agent of the French royal house, Beaumarchais himself stopped at Augsburg. The play is also confessional, according to Dichtung und Wahrheit. Knopf, , ; see also FA 1,4: Yet he is not without remorse. When Marie dies of a broken heart, Clavigo is himself heartbroken, and, happening onto her funeral procession on a Madrid street, delivers himself over to a just retribution at the hand of her brother, who appears on the scene just as Clavigo throws back the lid of the coffin with the words: Nimm mich mit dir!
The language of the heart that is given such eloquent expression, the envisioned utopia in which true love transcends the topoi of property and economics and, later, the tragic ending of the second Stella are all incorporations, if also transmutations, of ready-to-hand cultural material. See the reprint of a D. Friedrich Burschell, Friedrich Schiller: Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bildokumenten [Hamburg: One cannot actually speak of love and death in this poem, only of love and aggression, love and violation.
But this too was a passing phase. How can we preserve our humanity in the face of irresistible violence? How can we preserve our freedom, given the existential fact of human contingency and the fact that all of us are always at the mercy of forces greater than those under our control? He recalls his remorse in Dichtung und Wahrheit: Goethe left Strassburg and Frederike in August — perhaps without making it clear that his departure was an irrevocable good-bye. His subsequent self-reproach may not have been as heartfelt as he and some of his biographers pretend.
If he did feel guilt after the fact, it may have been aggravated by his knowledge that his high-handedness was premeditated and by some shame over the frivolous liberties he took in approaching the Brions. His heart may have been lightened, on the other hand, by a selfexculpatory satisfaction in the surprising depth and sincerity of his remorse.
In the Ausgabe letzter Hand, the poem appears ambiguous: The Poet and the Age, vol. The Poetry of Desire — , vol. Revolution and Renunciation — [Oxford: Clarendon Press, , ], here 1: In the first collection of his poems published by Goethe and usually regarded as authoritative,21 there is no ambiguity: But Goethe did bear scars from his affair with Friederike. Friedenthal hears his lament to her father about the pesky Rhine mosquitoes as a metaphor for his own pangs of conscience.
No angel with a flaming sword had driven Adam and Eve from the garden, said Goethe to the good Reverend Brion. The mosqui22 toes from the Tigris and the Euphrates were deterrent enough. On his first visit at the Pfarrhaus in Sesenheim Goethe presented himself in two separate disguises, first as a poor theology student and then in the clothes of the son of the innkeeper in the nearby village of Drusenheim FA 1, One is reshaped and moved forward by a disguise.
In his mind Goethe dresses the entire Sesenheim episode in characters, categories, tropes, and topoi borrowed from The Vicar of Wakefield, not only in retrospect but while experiencing it. The conclusion seems inescapable that the young author, not yet twenty-two years old, saw the entire Sesenheim affair in the light of a literary tradition and as grist for his own mill.
Sein Leben und Seine Zeit Munich: Piper, , A more mournful melody, familiar in German-speaking lands, does it better justice, for it is not an amusing tale that is told here. I would not call the poem pornographic. It has dramatic power, a deftness and economy of portraiture, a lullaby-like musicality and authenticity not found in pornography. To read it adequately is to shudder at its invitation to enjoy a voyeuristic pleasure in the destruction of a girl by a red-blooded, therefore violent young man. In he was a vigorous, enterprising young man and an ambitious talent conscious of his powers, trying out new forms of life and poetry, and willing to exploit not only his own experience in his art.
His ode to her, fifty-four years after her death, ends with the strophe: An Anthology of German Literature — Boston: Houghton Mifflin, , In its dramatic context it is tragically ironic since its theme is loyalty in love, and Gretchen will soon be loved and forsaken by Faust. Pregnant, disgraced, and driven to distraction by the persecution of the townspeople, she will drown her child and be imprisoned and executed for the crime of being female and having fallen for a frivolous, self-indulgent man.
Friederike und Sesenheim Kehl: Morstadt, , Schnell und Steiner, , Its significance for the king stems from the fact that it comes from her, and, like a memento, it will accompany the king after his separation from her, recalling her to him, evoking her presence in absence. The meaning of a memento is decisively affected by the peculiar, if not unique knowledge and experience of its recipient. This does not mean that love itself is transferable, only that multiple loves are possible and, indeed, common in human experience, each of them irreplaceable. There are many drinkers, but only a few of them are kings.
The drinking itself is significant. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Stanford UP, , A Critical Anthology [New York: He takes a last drink in memory of the beloved gone on before and dies. But first he casts the goblet over the cliff,34 watches it fall, fill up with water, and sink into the sea. He never drinks another drop. He drinks her, but she drinks him too. One is struck by the apparent affinity between theme and genre, an impression reinforced by the ballads of Werther writes to Lotte: We should perhaps not extract too much emotion from either song.
Goethe is after a poignantly melancholy touch. It also mirrors the frenzy of the knowledge-hungry Faust, racing through the curricula of the university, then resorting to experiments in magic, and finally attempting to escape the confines of selfhood. He now wants to experience what his fellowmen experience. It is part of the paean tradition, for example: It is still a matter of one individual embracing another, as we do not need to count the pronouns to feel: Wilhelm Fink, ; vol.
Wilhelm Fink, , 2: A shepherd awakening in the cool morning air exults in the warmth of morning redness. Love, however, is not drawn passively from a chaste coolness. A coolness poised in anticipation of warmth. In the history of art Ganymede is an icon of the desire for love. There is growing warmth: And the abstractness seems to enhance the effect. There is a coolness everywhere which is, in fact, various sorts of coolness, produced by different contributory factors in different sets of circumstances. The word has an embracing power.
There are coolnesses everywhere, all pervaded by scents and perfumes. Each different in itself, but each cool. And all of them transfigured by the calm light of the summer moon and brought to coolness by it; so that the forest is an amalgam of coolnesses. The world of love is a sunny world in whose warmth the shivering lover basks.
Recall the sudden warm glow of Quinquin and Sophie in the presence of each other at the beginning of act 2 of Der Rosenkavalier. A person in love basks in the incredible lightness of being. Love transforms and transports the world. Love is a passion for shared experience: Love warms the world. For someone in love the earth glows — glows transitively, lifting up and transforming the person touched by its glow. Ein Mythos des Aufstiegs in der deutschen Moderne, trans. Carl Hanser, , The German Tragedy [Ithaca: Cornell UP, ], It is true, very little in the poem is addressed to a specific, personal lover, rather more to springtime in all of its manifestations, including the bubbling in the blood that a vernal love provokes.
Personification there is, but broadly and inclusively. In the Corregio Zeus is identifiable as a person mainly by the one diaphanous arm reaching to embrace the willing Io. It is the god who approaches, but she is open to his approach. The Poet and the Age, 1; Not yet in this poem. If, on the other hand, the boy Ganymede is an autonomous self, an embrace, but not yet complete fusion, is what transpires.
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Das Phantasiebild einer 50 Ibid. Separate identities are marked, so division remains. We long for what we lack. There is no trace of disappointment in the poem, just anticipation and a mutual embrace that is as close as individuals ever come to forgetting themselves. The narratives that evolved around Friederike Brion, too, rely on stereotypes of woman as virgin and woman as whore. As love object, she promises release from individuation; as a femme fatale, she threatens it, inspiring both rapture and terror. Eine Untersuchung zur deutschen Literatur des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts Munich: Goethe expressed the same sentiment to Riemer: Denn er hat immer noch eine Art von Gewissen.
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ], 6. U of Chicago P, , 90, Artemis, , , no. There is uncertainty about the date. Dies allein ist Moral. Now in love with Suleika, he has also recovered faith — faith in her love. With her on his lap and a cup of saki in hand, who needs hope? Goethe here treats a grotesque figure with his characteristic lightness, a gift from the anacreontic culture in which he made his first poetic forays.
The history of literature and art is replete with femmes fatales, including the sirens and harpies of antiquity: Her image also adorns the south portal of the Cathedral of Worms. Sebaldus Church in Nuremberg in his book Disease and Representation: Cornell UP, , Illustrations can also be found in Wolfgang Stammler, Frau Welt: Hexed onto his body, they could cause an enemy to languish and die. Like the Lorelei, she holds a mirror.
Das Volksbuch und das Puppenspiel, 3rd ed. Princeton UP, , In Rabelais and an uncounted array of other authors, woman is metonymically the abyss, a hole that no man can fill,20 in others she is the boundless, engulfing sea. Portraying her as a harpy is a favorite way of demonizing a woman and one exploited in the journalistic annihilation of Marie Antoinette prior to her execution in the flesh in Jennifer Curtis Gage, Critical Inquiry 20,3 spring A Festschrift for George C.
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Harrasowitz, , See Hoffmeister, Dirnenbarock, For the Duke, her primary victim, love and death. Nethercot, The Road to Tryermaine Chicago: Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models, ed. Wayne State UP, ], — Roger Bauer et al. Klostermann, ], —64; here, The thrill her performances gave their male audience depended on their vicarious fulfillment of the ambivalent desire of men both to submit to and to kill the vampire. It institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy, fusing the eroticization of dominance and submission with the social construction of male and female.
The myth of the vagina dentata overdetermines the idea of incorporation, combining the concept of engulfment by the enveloping womb with the idea of oral devouring. The vagina becomes a mouth, and the mouth a tunnel to the source. Women, Violence and Civil Liberties, ed. Catherine Itzin Oxford UP, , , SP4 Army Active, Age A soldier may pine for la petite mort, but he fears mutilation. Her pretty face is a mask, behind which lurks the death head. Greenwood Press, , Syphilis figures prominently in Shakespeare, as Bentley shows.
Die erbare und scheinheilige Hure dies of syphilis but at peace with the church, after repenting and receiving forgiveness for her sins.
Bentley, Shakespeare and the New Disease: Yale UP, , 99— Alfred Kelletat ; repr. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, , , Eissler shows that Goethe was at least syphilophobic. Both Roman Elegy no. The Weimar Duke, Carl August, was a sufferer.
It seems unfair that bad grammar could cause disease but good poetry could not cure it. Woman is a more interesting and more threatening phenomenon for another reason than that she might dominate, devour, smother in slime, or infect with a fatal disease. As a predator needs a prey, a real man needs something to domesticate and reform, perhaps even redeem, knowing that he is ultimately in need of redemption by her. A Psychoanalytic Study —, 2 vols. Wayne State UP, , , As the river threatens the buildings and gardens of an ordered municipality, a strong woman threatens male power and hegemony.
This was the fate of Marie Antoinette, who passed through Strassburg on her way to the French throne while Goethe was a student there in and upon whose short, unhappy life he casts a nostalgic glance in Dichtung und Wahrheit. Ein Schauspiel is studied for its historical-political significance.
Peter Lang, , 31—56; here, Remarkably, in view of her prominence, especially in the first, unpublished version — the Geschichte Gottfriedens von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand dramatisiert — Adelheid is neglected in the handbooks but she is recognized as an agent of love and death by Friess.
In ihren Augen ist Trost, gesellschaftliche Melancholie. Wayne State UP, ], — 86; here, This is part of a misogyny dating from a time before the Christian era. One may see in such systems the cunning of culture, which conspires to make woman contemptible, an object on which violence may and must be exercised. This is the double-bind in which woman finds 53 herself and explains the Lustmord as a pattern. The way to restore an ailing world is to excise the cancer at its core. Ornament and sex toy of those in power, Adelheid uses her sexual allure to further her ambitions.
Franz would murder his own father if he stood in the way of his love for her Adelheid is fundamentally weak, however. She cannot control the effect of her powerful sexuality on the quick excitability of men, which is a topical paradox of the femme fatale tradition.
The femme fatale is herself always a victim — even in her temporary dominance, which always causes her to be victimized anew. Carl Hanser, , 2: Admonishing her to appeal to the heavenly avenger to accept her death as a just penalty for her crimes, he is temporarily distracted by her radiant beauty. Like the hunter sent to dispatch Snow White, he considers deceiving his commissioners and sparing her.
The scene underscores the relationship between misogyny and sadism, which better explains the orgiastic ecstasy experienced by males in destroying a powerful woman than does the thesis of an abstract, generic hatred for the female sex. The crime of both women is that they are irresistible. Vile because of her beauty,59 she is to blame for her own death. It is significant that Adelheid is a widow. There is no sexual power like that of a woman of experience.
Ein Schauspiel, Johann Heinrich Merck having loaned him enough money to buy the paper. Minuit, ], who, on p. Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman ever, has been a scandal for millennia: Helen is the ancestor of every adulteress and, indeed, any woman with any kind of checkered past, including the penitent women mentioned at the end of Faust: Continuum, , Karl Lachmann, 3rd rev.
As the personification of classical beauty and the ideal complement to the occidental, medieval Faust, she is what he seeks. The episode was expanded, and parts of it underwent many revisions. Quoting the extant eleven versions of verses — Eine Denkfigur des Geburtstag Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, , 93— See also FA 1,1: Clavigo, an enduringly popular play, does not actually celebrate the blending of the lovers in a death-transcending union: Werther indulges appetites that social developments have awakened but that a repressive class structure cannot yet tolerate.
That he does not seriously believe in the narrative to which he claims to subscribe and according to which he stages his death does not alter the trajectory of his life, but it bears importantly on the question of his character. Werther elicited comment, pro or con, from almost every belletrist of the time. Two French versions and a French dramatization appeared in the first year after its publication.
Translated into English in seven more English editions came out in the next twenty years , the work was available in most European languages by We know that Napoleon claimed to have read Werther seven times and carried it with him on his Egyptian campaign. Francke, , 17— There is a consensus that the book is revolutionary, whether in its novel use of the epistolary form all of the letters are by the protagonist , in its infectious sensibility and rhetorical power, in its protest against the class system, or, finally, in its challenge to orthodox theology.
Readers are given an intimate account of the suffering of a real young man, not a heroic example, as in accounts of the suicides of Cato, Dido, or Lucretia. Gehlen, , Generation after generation of critics have identified Werther as a particular psychological type, depending on prevailing fashions in psychology. Ilse Graham sees lology 46 Brown and Thomas P. Henceforth Goethe travelled incognito. All this seemed to Goethe to repeat precisely the error Werther warned against.
His role as critic of public consciousness became lost in the success of his role as its portrayer. Worse, it was confused with an unwanted role as public consciousness incarnate. He slowly moved towards the foundation of a German classicism. This is evidenced in part by new enthusiasm for non-poetic vocations. In fact, Goethe never stopped writing. Thanks to their inability to share his new tendency, all, save Herder, were promptly disinvited.
He thus functioned as a court poet, offering admittedly slight occasional lyrics, Singspiele, and like poetic amusements for the narrow aristocratic circle, and ran the amateur court theatre. But Goethe found it impossible to complete major poetic works in this environment. Big projects begun before Weimar — Faust —3 and Egmont — were repeatedly taken up and dropped again. But the text is dominated by the labyrinth image. Some follow the obvious path of fortune. Others leave the path without trace.
Henceforth he trusts to love, rejects Wertherian inwardness, and turns to externality. Its keynote, as Goethe strives for classicism, is purity. To the discipline of this austere love Goethe willingly submitted for ten years. Other mortals pass their lives in untroubled self-ignorance. But since they are in reality separated, they must renounce happiness, and struggle to understand why. But its author deemed even this act of objective self-renunciation unpublishable. It appeared only in Other work of this epoch translates the yearned-for purity into a privatized and psychologized version of the courtly sphere.
Like Goethe, he feels accepted and understood by this select readership HA v, They compete in mutual misrecognition. Upset, Tasso draws his sword on Antonio and embraces the Princess, so guaranteeing banishment. Ferrara is no cultural utopia. He rightly yearns for the papal glory of Rome and exchange with other great poets. Ferrara, then, is too provincial to hold 31 n i c h o l a s sa u l him. Antonio is both the rock on which his wave is dashed and recalling once more the motif of life as sea voyage a rock which wrecks his vessel, but also the rock to which he must cling.
Reduced to the existential minimum of his malfunctioning poetic voice, Tasso needs a new environment and audience. Of course these works are already in some sense the product of the renewal that Goethe portrays himself in Tasso as seeking. Allegedly begun on his thirty-seventh birthday, the journey was planned as a rebirth. The encounter with Italian art and nature was conducted in the name of primordial objectivity Italienische Reise, 17 September ; HA xi, This spiritual and poetic self-reinvention went hand-in-hand with a transformation of his public image. Complete or collected editions of his works were for Goethe always troubling confrontations with his past self.
Goschen, —90 was his response. Of eight volumes, four were allegedly complete when he left for Italy, and he struggled throughout his sabbatical with the rest. Werther had its passionate style smoothed and de-personalised, and acquired a more censorious narrator. Simple imitation, whilst not inconsiderable, is but the earliest degree of aesthetic achievement; it connotes an active and thorough, if only external, rendering of the object.
Manner mixes this inevitably unsatisfying aesthetic experience with subjectivity; it expresses the object in the language of the subject. Nor was Goethe ready for Germany. His Weimar circle tired of the never-ending stream of nostalgia for Italy and greeted with incomprehension his new views on the homology of nature and art and the paradigmatic relation of art and society in classical antiquity HA xiii, In his literary life the impulse came from the unexpected quarter of the writer Friedrich Schiller, hitherto known for his passionate tragedies.
They detected common, complementary interests beneath their differences HA x, —1 — one emphasizing the ideal of nature, the other the ideal of nature. Both now saw aesthetic experience as the way to promote that harmony. This project had several aspects. For Goethe, the encounter with Schiller was one of those rare occasions when he felt himself understood and realized that he too could learn something.
Once again, this experience was a poetic rebirth January ; HAB ii, As he had hitherto done only with Herder, Goethe passed his nascent poetic projects, notably Faust and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, to Schiller, and granted him something like the right of tacit co-authorship.
Schiller played a large part too in the re-founded Weimar theatre, of which Goethe was director. They also entered publicistic debate. Both were clear that they needed to form readers and writers to Schiller, 8—19 October ; HAB ii, They sought alliances with writers of approved tendency: When Die Horen was mocked, they countered with a jointly written set of monitory epigrammatic couplets, the Xenien.
Prescriptive writings were the positive side of this. Thus they produced separately and jointly sets of literary norms on epic and dramatic poesy and dilettantism, and Goethe wrote models of modern classic genres: The reincarnation of his stillborn attempt to reach a middle-class audience in the early Weimar years, Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung, 34 Goethe the writer and literary history the Lehrjahre reject aesthetic mission and teach Bildung as practical philanthropy.
As such, Schlegel felt he had discovered a paradigmatic expression of the Romantic aesthetic. With this in mind he clearly wished to appropriate Goethe to Romanticism. This brilliant campaign re-established Goethe as the literary authority. For a time Goethe sought to co-operate with the early Romantics. Even if he sympathised with its pantheistic and critical tendencies, Romanticism represented positions he had overcome or always rejected: The early Romantics soon distanced themselves from him.
In he seriously entertained the possibility of promoting the Catholicizing Romantic dramatist Friedrich Ludwig 35 n i c h o l a s sa u l Zacharias Werner into that role HAB iii, 62—8. Both were invited to Weimar or to send their work, it was performed without success, and they were then dismissed for their mystical, untheatrical, tasteless or disharmonious productions. Goethe continued to produce enjoyably vitriolic anti-Romantic aphorisms until his death.
Schiller seems shortly before his death to have suggested a further edition of collected works. Cotta, —10 provoked another attack of self-doubt. Again he sheds his literary skin in a crisis.
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Second, as a personal encounter with Napoleon himself in September revealed — the great man focused almost entirely on Werther HA x, —6 — Goethe saw again how far public opinion still distorted his achievement. Only his youthful works seemed to interest the Germans. Having read so much, they were insensitive to new forms, and had no sympathy for his new writing HAB iii, Yet he never lost his thirst for public success, even if he had to wait twenty years for it HAB iii, The result, apart from Goethes Werke, was a sustained burst of highly complex autobiographical writing over the next two decades.
It was certainly designed to serve one traditional end of such discourse, intimate self-insight. But the autobiography is never merely introspective. Selfinsight, he insists HA ix, 9 , emerges not from unmediated introspection, but from analysis of the subject in dialogue with his objective contexts. The very fact of it being autobiography runs counter to the tendency of the age.
Against this noisy and uncompromising literary background, autobiographical writing seemed a complacent self-indulgence, a manifestation of the sovereign Jovial arrogance of which Goethe was often accused. His accounts of the effect on his young personality of the French occupation of Frankfurt am Main and the investiture of Charles I as Holy Roman Emperor at Frankfurt in both defend the cosmopolitan humanity of the French and satirize the archaic Holy Roman Empire at a time when such opinions were almost unsayable.
Not just Goethe, but all the authors of the great Classical-Romantic age were reduced to obscurity as absent gods of high culture. The Farbenlehre Theory of colour, contains anticipatory retaliation against unsympathetic readers, in the form of a polemic against uncritical reliance on received authority HA xiv, 50, 56 , and vainly anathematizes Newton.
Goethe continued to write. But he now sought his band of kindred spirits beyond German borders in time, space and language. Their common interest in folksong as vehicle 37 n i c h o l a s sa u l of national culture was always subsumed under the cosmopolitan cultural relativism which derived from their humanism and anthropological interest. As such, many of its confessional lyrics, echoing Storm and Stress genius, verge self-consciously on the hubristic. Elsewhere he praises the Oriental custom of selecting a poet-king at court, with analogous status and powers to the real king But now the frank assertion of still lively, overweening genius is silenced as Goethe, once more a pioneer, formulates the broadest possible category under which his own activity might be understood.
World literature is a thoroughly decentred, and in this sense anti-authoritative idea. Weltliteratur has no overarching standpoint or master narrative: At once present and absent in Germany, he read foreign literature in phenomenal quantity: His house became the stopping-point for cultured foreign travellers; he corresponded with promising non-Germans. The same policy governs his last writing phase. The cultivation of memory, as Goethe recalls his deep sense of a modernity out of control and incapable of self-knowledge HAB iv, —7 , is its common term. Goethe thus allows Eckermann to function as Boswell to his Johnson.
Sensitive about the reception of Faust II, Goethe had the package sealed for posthumous publication. Yet neither of these monumental works imposes an authorial line on the reader. The Wanderjahre narrator is ostentatiously incapable of integrating his material into a coherent whole, so that the reader must justify his own interpretation. Thickly hedged with distancing devices, Faust II offers the same challenge. Only those can understand these works who can understand them. Goethe thus insists he was master of no one. Echoing the terms of his youthful poetics, Goethe argues only that the poet must work out of himself.
He gives them no norm ; that they must do themselves. It is perhaps just this real, yet intangible and fundamentally dialectical quality which has made him available for appropriation to lesser 39 n i c h o l a s sa u l causes since his death. But it is also this which makes the real Goethe into the authority modernity deserves.
Schoningh, — , ii, pp. Paul Kluckhohn, Richard Samuel and others, 6 vols. Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, and Mainz: Kohlhammer, — , ii, p. Georg Muller, , ii, p. Goldmann, , pp. Reed and Dorothea Holscher-Lohmeyer. Goethe and Weimar — London: Croom Helm, , esp. Goethe and the Authority of the Writer. Lambert Schneider, , p. Metzler, , pp. Wellbery, The Specular Moment. Stanford University Press, , esp. Niemeyer, , pp. Vollstandige Ausgabe letzter Hand, 40 vols. Cotta, — , vols. Bhabha, The Location of Culture London: Routledge, , pp.
Most modern anthologies, and many critical studies of his poems, are chronologically structured — allowing for the problem that many of his poems cannot be dated with certainty, and that he often revised individual poems, sometimes drastically, for publication. But his own groupings of his poems, and his ordering of individual poems within those groups, were also complicated by the publication history of the major collections of his verse during his lifetime.
They are arranged in a non-chronological but thematically coherent order; the sequence may at times appear whimsical, but it is often based on principles of comparison and contrast, on a contrapuntal or dialectical progression, with some poems appearing to contradict, but more usually complementing or balancing previous or following ones.
The recent Munchner Ausgabe MA prints the poems in chronological order, grouped throughout the edition among the collected works — which is instructive, but scarcely practical for the student. Both the Munchner Ausgabe and the Frankfurter Ausgabe scrupulously print the early versions of the poems — though even here the texts have been discreetly modernized. The Annette poems are very much in the style of the prevailing lyrical fashion in francophile Leipzig, a style to which Goethe made strenuous efforts to adapt his more homespun German literary instincts. For the most part, however, these poems some, in the manner of Gerstenberg, partly in prose strive for an effect of sophisticated wit and elegance.
They revolve around seduction strategies and roguish erotic adventures in arcadian settings between lovers with neoclassical names, aided or frustrated by a rococo Cupid or Amor. In short and dense unrhymed quatrains, Goethe voices a passionate empathy for his wronged friend in a laconic expression of disgust concentrated into images of a tree attacked by loathsome insects and of swamps infested with snakes and toads.
The songs, ballads and odes, the burlesque sketches in prose and verse that pour from his pen in the Strasbourg and subsequent Frankfurt years are characterized by a youthful exuberance and energy and by an intensely personal idiom. The detached and facetious manner of the Leipzig verse gives way to serious emotional enthusiasm; poetry is not presented as entertainment, as an ironic game of wit and affected sophistication, but as a visceral response to love as a life-enhancing force, to nature as a dynamic organism, creative or destructive, idyllic or sinister.
Even before his departure to Italy, Goethe had experimented with classical metres and genres, notably with distichs. But the Roman Elegies mark the serious preoccupation with classicizing forms that characterizes much of his poetic production during the decade or so of Weimar Classicism: To be sure, he also wrote quasi-Romantic lyric poems during the s; but he increasingly sought classical models to emulate, though not slavishly to imitate: The French Revolution, which preoccupied, distracted, and thoroughly unsettled Goethe during the s, and indeed well beyond that, was scarcely the ideal subject for lyric poetry.
It is a common, and quite misleading, perception that during the Revolution and its aftermath Goethe withdrew into an Olympian classical isolation in Weimar, perversely turning a blind eye to the greatest political upheaval of his age. Reineke Fuchs is, rather, an exposure of the abuse of power, of 49 john r. He preserves the late medieval political, religious and legal structures of the story, mixes in some parodic Homeric allusions, and exploits the animal allegory to reveal the bestiality of human nature.
The story shows the fragile parochial idyll of a small village on the right bank of the Rhine during the revolutionary wars; the Revolution is perceived here in its effects rather than its causes, in the plight of the refugees uprooted by the aftermath of political instability that threatens the ordered, indeed complacent, quietism of the domestic idyll. The epic hexameter, the nine cantos that take their titles from the nine Muses, the use of Homeric extended similes, repeated epithets and allusions, the unhurried pace of narrative and dialogue, the reiteration and retardation — all this gives ironic epic breadth to an incident that takes up no more than a single day.
During his classical years, however, he returned to a narrative form that recurs throughout his career: The ballads of not only display a sophisticated formal structure; they are also more extended, more sententious and more didactic than the earlier ballads. If Goethe had sought in his Strasbourg and Frankfurt ballads to introduce the popular idiom into the literary canon, in the later ballads he and Schiller were both exploring the contemporary potential of the narrative genres and seeking to popularize their own literary and ethical values. Goethe returned to the ballad many times, and well after Within this external structure, critics have struggled to discern a pattern of complementary contrast and mirroring, question and answer, parallel motifs and echoes; but the principal feature of the Divan is its very unpredictability, the threading of the most diverse material onto the axis of East and West.
The collection is by no means a pastiche of Persian poetry, for all that Goethe exploits all manner of Oriental reference. This enigmatic poem, about which Goethe made no recorded comment, begins and ends on the theme of separation, and perhaps also of death. We should also bear in mind that there is much of his poetry in which he expresses himself with anger, contempt, ribaldry and abuse. This is not the Goethe of the love poems, the nature poems and the existential poems, but the Goethe of the epigrams, invectives, satires and polemics — the savagery of which is, to be sure, consistent with these genres, but which at times betrays a bitterly mordant personal animus.
Goethe could attack mercilessly those former friends and allies whom he came to despise, like Lavater, or those like Kotzebue and Werner with whom he had a close but often uneasy relationship. And in 57 john r. In the published and unpublished Venetian Epigrams, the Xenien and other invectives, Goethe returns time and again to attack Lavater, Nicolai and Kotzebue, Newton and the Newtonians, the Christian Church, the academic, political and literary establishment, egalitarianism, press freedom, philistinism and dilettantism.
There are also more obscure targets: Goethe was capable of writing exquisite lyric poetry in the most eloquent and compelling language; he was also capable of expressing his most deeply held convictions or prejudices in the most coarse and brutal language. We should not lose sight of the irreverent, at times even malevolent, Goethe behind the received image of the serene lyric poet. Rather the sense will always give the lead to sound or metre, while sound and metre will in turn reinforce and complement the sense with an aural or rhythmic dimension; this relation connects even modern lyric poetry with its historical origins in song and performance.
They are consistently of three stresses, four feminine lines followed by four alternating feminine and masculine lines; but the steady alternation of Hebung and Senkung stressed and unstressed syllables is broken by the dactylic rhythms of the even lines 14, 16, 18 and Strophically the poem is almost symmetrical more obviously so in the printing of the second version , but metrically it has a subtle asymmetry 59 john r. Goethe knew these structures perfectly well from his reading of Pindar and the Greek tragedians — and he was to return to them in the classicizing prosody of the third act of Faust II.
Moreover, the correspondences are reinforced by verbal repetitions and echoes, as in the following four examples of corresponding lines: He thus preserves the alternately rising and pentameter as: The Romance forms of terza rima, ottava rima and the sonnet are used occasionally by Goethe.
The Cambridge Companion to Goethe (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
The sonnet itself had been a major form for German Baroque poets, whose preferred metre was the alexandrine. By that time, the alexandrine was perceived as alien, oldfashioned and stilted, and was no longer a serious verse form in German literature; Goethe used it in his very early work, and thereafter only for parodic effect. Both he and the Romantics wrote Petrarchan sonnets in hendecasyllabic lines — that is, effectively in iambic pentameter with feminine endings. Goethe had used this form in his very earliest poems in Annette and the Neue Lieder; he uses it frequently in his later poems, and in the Divan for a wide spectrum of lyrical expression: But the Divan exploits a whole range of forms: See pages 59—64 for explanations of metres and their use.
Goethes Samtliche Werke, ed. Eduard von der Hellen, 40 vols. Cotta, —19 ; Gedenkausgabe: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Ernst Beutler, 24 vols. Artemis, —71 ; Berliner Ausgabe: Publications of the Goethe Society of North America 7 , —9. Erotische Gedichte Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Strophe and antistrophe have an identical or nearidentical metrical pattern; the epode is metrically distinct. But even if we isolate the major dramas, we are again struck by their diversity. A closer examination will show, however, that each work has its own unique features.
For Goethe each dramatic work represented a fresh challenge to discover the appropriate vehicle for his immediate needs. Goethe varies this formula in each of the major plays, though not to the extent that it is ever completely submerged. But his play is more than a technical exercise, it is also a personal achievement. Though the visit ends innocently enough, Soller, hidden behind a curtain, is forced to hear his wife pouring out her contempt for him. The work, which is loosely based on the autobiography of an actual knight from the time of Luther, is the outcome of the 67 david v.
But it was a revolution that had been in the air for some time; Lessing had called for a Shakespearian German theatre as early as , and prose translations of Shakespeare by C. Eschenburg had been appearing since the s. The task was to be Shakespearian and authentically German at the same time. Goethe breaches the neoclassical unities of time and place; the action lasts a number of years and is spread over many different places.
Instead of the handful of characters customary both in neoclassical drama and in the domestic tragedy championed by Lessing, we have a cast of over thirty people and a stage that is often crowded with soldiers, peasants or gypsies. Gone are the heavy alexandrines, replaced by the prose of the Shakespeare translations. Although we might have reservations about a way of life in which feuding plays such a prominent part, the text does not really support such reservations. Gotz on the stage, and he is resolute in the action scenes.
But if the drama thus runs the risk of nostalgia and hero worship both of them highly un-Shakespearian qualities , a more interesting reading is also possible. Time is working against Gotz, and it is notable that he ages in the latter parts of the play faster than anyone else. On losing his real hand, Gotz that Weislingen would henceforth be his right hand. Such is their variety that it seems as if Goethe had taken a deliberate decision to use a different dramatic form each time. The two acts of Prometheus written , published are a different matter.
Goethe adopts here the free rhythms that had been pioneered by Klopstock, but in his hands they combine with odd diction and syntax to produce an unprecedentedly dense and harsh effect that is intended to approximate the Greek of Aeschylus and Pindar. Goethe also rewrites the myth. Finally, we see Prometheus teaching his creatures how to cope with the earthly existence that he has given them. Goethe later interpreted the fragment, and the ode he extracted from it, in the context of the religious controversy associated with Spinoza.
A series of scintillating satirical sketches dating from between and bears witness to a talent that Goethe was later, regrettably, to restrain. The structure here is given by the comings and goings of people at a fair, and the language is blunt and down-to-earth. The dialogues frame a play within a play, as two acts of a biblical drama that parody contemporary religious themes are performed on a stage at the fairground, and at the end a shadow show depicts the biblical story of the creation. The satyr of the title is an enigma. As Goethe wrote later, he was based on an actual person, but scholars have not been able to identify him.
While in some passages Goethe is merely promoting crude Storm and Stress values, at others he manages, despite his genuine respect for Wieland, to show up the limits of the writers of the previous generation. An adequate commentary on the dramatic texts that Goethe designed for setting to music would require a lengthy survey of the musical context. I shall thus merely mention two works dating from the pre-Weimar years. Similarly, Erwin is urged by Bernardo, an older man, to refrain from melancholy and self-torment and to grasp the happiness in which he cannot believe.
In Miss Sara Sampson , Lessing had offered a sentimental version of this new genre, while in Emilia Galotti he explored more assertively the contrast of court and private life, producing a play of a more political character. Clavigo, which Goethe wrote in a week, is a dramatization of an actual event from the life of the French dramatist Beaumarchais. In Act iii Clavigo persuades Marie to forgive him, and his eloquence leaves us in no doubt that, when he denounces the vanity of ambition, he is speaking sincerely.
The force and artfulness of the dramatic dialogue here cannot be overstated. Clavigo emerges as a man who is not only indecisive but actually seems able to inhabit two contradictory mentalities at once. The result is a play that is long on emotional outpourings but short on action and characterization. Recent critics have described the play as a male fantasy about female submissiveness, and it is hard to disagree with them. As with Gotz, uses the historical genre in part out of genuine interest in the period, but in part also as a way of exploring the situation of his own contemporaries.
Like Gotz, is a nobleman and a defender of the traditional constitution against the new force of absolutism, but in both cases Goethe suggests a paradoxical unity of this conservative position with a sense of personal freedom that can be of value for the modern bourgeoisie. And, as in the earlier play, the fate of the noble characters is placed in a wider context by the inclusion of characters from the lower ranks of society.
But there are also major differences between the two plays. This national element caused Goethe to lavish great care on the crowd scenes, for this crowd must be a worthy correlative to the protagonist. Here, however, the liaison is presented in a positive light. It seems that a riot must break out, when Egmont suddenly enters.
A more personal letter prompts Egmont to 73 david v. True, he performs well in the debate preceding his arrest, but in Act v his role is largely restricted to recovering his freedom from care as he awaits execution. While it is unclear how we are to interpret this, it is certainly not a political or a national goal, more a personal hope for a life without worry. As Schiller wondered, are we really supposed to admire Egmont for risking not just his life but the freedom of the Netherlands for simple pleasures like this? Beyond this, the play which he derives a rhetorical power that Gotz avoids a simple antithesis of court and nature, for there are two representatives of culture here, the Duke of Alba a surprisingly articulate spokesman for absolutism , but also Oranien, the leader who will later win Dutch independence.
The completed work remains an odd mixture of genres, but Egmont retains its classic status for its portrayal of a magnetic hero, for its splendid dialogue, and for its subtle interplay of public and private themes. The prose version of the play, which survives, was performed by this group in , with Goethe in the role of Orestes. The verse version was completed in Italy in Die Geschwister Brother and Sister, is a prose play in one act, written in the mode of the sentimental domestic tragedy but with the unusual theme of the love between siblings.
In Iphigenie auf Tauris Goethe starts from the plot of the play by Euripides on the same subject: There is also a religious theme, which hinges on an ambiguous oracle: This motif is the occasion for an exploration of the 75 david v. The poetry is a unique achievement, for Goethe creates a synthetic language that mimics the aphoristic compactness and the solemnity of Greek tragic verse without stretching the German beyond tolerable limits.
We can also note the masterly use of stichomythia dialogue in one-line exchanges and the repetition of a few key words that serve to bind the work into a unity of sound and idea. In Iphigenie, Goethe achieves a balance between character and action that surpasses all his other plays. In part the curse is interpreted psychologically, in part ethically, for the play systematically contrasts openness with dissimulation. Iphigenie alludes to her rescue at three key points as she struggles with the alternatives facing her.
But beyond this, the play suggests a continuity between the old stories and the new moral issue that Goethe introduces into his play. For Iphigenie is convinced that if she escapes by deceit she will lose the purity of hand and heart without which she cannot lift the family curse. The play thus fuses the bloodstained old myth with a modern moral consciousness. Even more remarkable is the closing theological modulation. When the meaning of the oracle is revealed, we feel that, in some sense, Iphigenie and her brother have actually become Diana and Apollo.
The plot of Iphigenie auf Tauris is thus neither a piece of classicistic pedantry nor a showcase for an admirable but static character. The events are real, and they hurl credible characters into crises which threaten their beliefs and their physical survival. Most daring, perhaps, is the transformation that Iphigenie undergoes in Act v.
Her admission of the truth to Thoas has no primness about it. Perhaps so, but the criticism is beside the point. Each play has the poetic power to make us believe, each time we see or read it, in its vision of hope, and that is surely enough. It is precisely this awareness that makes the outcome of the drama so moving. He resumed work on it in Italy, but it was only completed in summer after his return to Weimar. When Tasso is not on the stage, the other characters talk about him. Thus the play has little that can be called action. Affairs of state, the normal sphere of action for noblemen like Alfons and Antonio, appear only at the margin.
The use of tragic stichomythia for the dispute of the two Leonores in Act iii over who should entertain Tasso is a blatant mismatch of content and form. At the end, as the aristocrats depart leaving Tasso by himself, it is unclear whether the estrangement is to be temporary or permanent. But the modern reader may well be reluctant to accept this perspective, not least when we consider what was happening in France as Goethe completed the work. How 78 Goethe the dramatist benevolent a patron is this Duke?
Is she exploiting him for some private emotional purpose, and why does she do nothing to help him in Act iii? In all these areas the play fails to deal satisfactorily with the issues that it raises. Particularly the later parts of the play seem to be written on the premise that courtly patronage offers Tasso the ideal conditions for his writing, and that the only source of disharmony is his own undisciplined and suspicious nature.
And yet his two alleged outrages — drawing his sword on Antonio Act ii and embracing the Princess Act v — can equally well be seen as responses to provocation, unwise perhaps but not incomprehensible. At the end we do not know what Goethe intends us to think, for he appears at once to be glorifying courtliness and also providing reasons for viewing it with suspicion.
The society of Belriguardo, moreover, is a very long way from being identical to society as such, and Tasso provokes the hostility of Antonio not because he is an artist but because he is a rival for female favour. On the one hand, the work harks back to the tradition of Renaissance pastoral, to which it contains several allusions. Despite all reservations, therefore, Tasso still deserves to be called a great play, although one of a demanding and elusive kind, and its stature is revealed only if we avoid all attempts to reduce it to a formula. The play follows the events of the scandal in a rather literal manner, but the comic mode prevails and the political questions that the play raises are quashed at the end by the arrest of the culprits.
The plot of Die Aufgeregten is more wide-ranging, and it is one of the few works by Goethe in which we glimpse the reality of the German society of his time. The play shows how, in the revolutionary age, a typical dispute between gentry and peasants over feudal dues can become the spark for political violence. Emerging from these plays is a view that revolution is the outcome of foolishness in the lower class, self-importance in the middle class, and arrogance in the nobility. The plot is taken from a French memoir that appeared in and which Goethe read in the following year.
Goethe intended to tell her story against the background 80 Goethe the dramatist of revolution, and to use the central character, whose name he ironically changed to Eugenie well-born , to bring about a redemptive restoration of the social order at the end of the trilogy. In the last two acts we see Eugenie escape banishment and likely death by agreeing to marry a provincial Gerichtsrat legal counsellor on the understanding that the marriage will remain unconsummated for consummation would annul her claim to noble rank.
On the other hand, with its severe symbolic language and its abstract action the country in which it takes place is never named , the play also looks forward to the Symbolist drama of a century later and to authors such as Maeterlinck and Hofmannsthal. They are of interest in part for the light they throw on Faust II, but also intrinsically, since they demonstrate the artistic path that Goethe took in the latter part of his life. As we have seen, he was already in —86 required to plan courtly entertainments, a task that he sometimes accepted with ill grace.
Some texts from the masques of these years survive — see FA v, — True, these works are a product of courtly culture as it had developed in Europe through the 81 david v. Such obstacles to appreciation notwithstanding, the allegorical works still represent the climax of a historical style. They may contain none of the human drama of Egmont or Iphigenie, but their artistry is still of a high order.
We should note three completed works and one fragment. Palaeophron und Neoterpe, written for the birthday of the Dowager Duchess Anna Amalia in , explores the relationship of permanence and change. The poetry is notable for its use of a wide range of metres, and in its austere symbolic language the work looks forward to the world of the young Hofmannsthal. See Karl Maurer, Goethe und die romanische Welt: Schoningh, , pp.
Bowes and Bowes, , pp. Whether or not one fully agrees with these characterizations, Faust is undeniably one of those rare works that capture some major turning point in our history. To understand Faust as modern one must thus read it against these various revolutions. Goethe watched the French Revolution, career 84 Faust of Napoleon, and Restoration with profound ambivalence, and his concerns saturate Faust. More profound yet is the theme of revolutionary subversion implicit in the importance of Mephistopheles, the spirit who always denies and who always steals the show HA iii, line Even where Faust operates with imagery of the older God-centred cosmos, its rhetoric betrays the presence of the new.
By the end of Part II Faust himself has for all practical purposes replaced the Emperor as the ruler of active millions, and he was celebrated in this role by the Communist state in East Germany. Goethe represents various stages of the shift in economic power from landowning classes to bourgeoisie in the Industrial Revolution, which was just beginning in the early nineteenth century. Part I is set in the pre-industrial world of the German small town as it survived into the late eighteenth century.
Act 4 sketches in passing life in the capital of a petty eighteenth-century German princedom, but then the newly restored Emperor grants Faust huge tracts of swamp which Faust drains and has settled, becoming himself the ruler of a productive people: At the same time the last act contains prescient warnings of the dangers and potential inhumanity of the new regime. Goethe completed Faust I at a time when he often discussed literature and philosophy with the active Romantic circle in Jena, which included, among others, Hegel shortly before he wrote his Phenomenology of Mind.
At the same time history became a part of all disciplinary thinking in unprecedented fashion. No longer simply a repository of past information or a model to be emulated, history was now understood as an assemblage of cultures, each of which had its unique character and course of development. Classical antiquity, the ideal of European culture at least since the Renaissance, was now understood to have a history that could be studied, but never relived or recreated.
The sixteenth-century setting so effortlessly created by Goethe in Part I becomes increasingly in Part II a gateway through which the play leads us ever further into a cultural past that is itself not static, but receding yet deeper from our view. In Faust time is measured, as the hero himself 86 Faust recognizes at the beginning of Part II, by the throbbing pulse of human life In the Historia von Dr. It was substantially revised in , and again in Brought back to Germany by itinerant English players by , the play was soon translated into German and became a standard among travelling troupes, and, in the eighteenth century, in ballet and puppet theatres — a form in which Goethe is also known to have encountered the material as a child.
In the Middle Ages the church had demonized whatever aspects of antiquity it had not absorbed. The Renaissance successfully absorbed the classical material that came west after the fall of Byzantium in , but still drew the line at magic as the work of the devil. Protestantism, with its increased emphasis on faith, only strengthened this tendency: Biblical material appears so consistently and with such complex ironies that the drama constitutes an extended critique of the place of Christianity in European culture.
Almost as pervasive are the allusions to classical antiquity, beginning with Virgil in the earliest stages of the play; in the later stages, particularly Part II, the canon expands to include Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Lucan and Ovid. At times the allusions extend to opera, painting primarily of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and sculpture from ancient Egypt to the 88 Faust seventeenth century.
By anchoring his play so thoroughly in the European tradition, Goethe claims it for Germany, which had previously played but a marginal role in the classical revival in Europe, and simultaneously claims for Germany a place in that tradition. Faust is a comprehensive synthesis of European culture and as such is largely responsible for the widespread perception that Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had reached the pinnacle of cultural development.
Ein Fragment in In the summer of he sealed the completed manuscript of Part II for publication after his death, but made a few minor corrections the following January. The incompleteness of the Urfaust and Fragment has contributed to the sense of incoherence, although the unity of tone in the Urfaust has made it a favourite of critics since its recovery. Much work in the last generation has demonstrated the fundamental coherence of the text, but it is still helpful to understand the different stages of composition, for succeeding layers of the text elaborate and interpret their historical predecessors.
The Fragment and even more so Part I transform the events of the Urfaust by recontextualizing them, so that a coherent document of the Storm and Stress movement becomes an equally coherent, if complex, document of the age of the French Revolution and German Idealism. Part II further elaborates, interprets and reinterprets the text of Part I from the point of view of the older and wiser survivor of the Napoleonic wars and their aftermath.
Given 89 jane k. Given that Faust does not observe the traditional unities of action, time and place canonized by Aristotle, it is worth considering just what kind of tragedy it really is. Its length and scope have prompted many readers to regard it as an epic rather than a drama. Three kinds of evidence support this thesis. First, Goethe never staged the play during his tenure as director of the Weimar theatre.
Third, the play constantly evokes milestones of European verse narrative. Allusions to the Bible, the Aeneid and Homer occur so frequently that many go unrecognized. Milton evidently marks for Goethe the crucial dividing line between ancient and modern, and epic underpins the history of the European tradition even as Act iii explicitly traces the history of tragedy. Scholars who regard Faust in epic terms emphasize the generic uniqueness of the play, but it is wise to remember that Milton himself hesitated between writing Paradise Lost as classical epic or as baroque dramatic spectacular.
Goethe was more aware than we are of the degree to which French neoclassical polemics had narrowed the options available to serious dramatists, and he himself still wrote numerous court masques and libretti. If Faust fails to observe the Aristotelian unities of time, place and even action, and 90 Faust ignores the simplest categories of causality, its tendency to represent the world in thematic, allegorical terms derives from the religious and court drama that was still vital everywhere in Europe in the seventeenth century and in remoter outposts of Germany into the late eighteenth.
World theatre represents not what is real in the ordinary sense, but cosmic or eternal truths. Hence its audience judges the illusions on stage not for their reality, but as instruction about what is beyond human sight. Faustus to help shift English drama out of this allegorical mode into the form of drama more familiar to us, in which we focus on the psychology of the characters more than on their place in a larger context.
Writing as he was in a world in which God had withdrawn from daily affairs, Goethe lacked the fundamental underpinnings for the genre. At the same time he had at his disposal all the techniques of the tragic tradition of the inner self Marlowe helped to establish. It must be regarded here rather as a challenge to rethink our presuppositions about dramatic genre. Issues in interpretation In order to take account of both the inherent unity and the layered process of composition, it makes sense to approach each stage as a separate entity with its own agenda and thus treat Faust as four concentric texts, each of which encloses its predecessor in a web of elaboration and reinterpretation.
Most scholarship has considered the stages as three distinct texts with Faust. Ein Fragment taken as a slight variant of Part I , so that by reading the stages separately we shall be in one sense following a traditional model, yet diverging from it in seeing the stages, especially Part II, as elaborations of one another. As such, its central concerns are psychological. Faustus, Faust rejects book learning in favour of magic.
The more obvious aspect of her tragedy is that she is seduced and abandoned by a lover above her in rank. Faust is another of the well-meaning but undependable heroes of the bourgeois tragedies popularized in Germany by Lessing particularly Emilia Galotti of , and indeed the Gretchen tragedy is the most compelling example of the genre in Germany. Faust became more objective in a variety of ways.
The late s is precisely the period in which he created his great blank-verse dramas of German classicism, and when he revised Iphigenie auf Tauris into verse he calmed, indeed repressed its more extreme emotions and even reduced the number of personal verb-subjects. Second, Goethe simply dropped the most pathetic scenes of the Urfaust: Both change the course of the drama and also the meaning of much of the Urfaust. The new scene marks a point of balance between two courses of action for Faust, indeed between two Fausts — the scholar and the seducer.
But something more important happens to Faust: Faust reacts to it in the same language of transcendence and excessive emotion he uses with the magical signs and with Gretchen. Here is an explicit image of Faust projecting his vision of ideal beauty — or of the Ideal per se — onto something outside of himself; and the something onto which he projects it is a framed image. As Mephistopheles and the apes present a play within the play — a framed dramatic image — about nature, Faust creates his own image of the Ideal.
Because Faust is magically rejuvenated in this scene, in effect costumed for his encounter with Gretchen, all that follows, namely the Gretchen tragedy, is effectively transformed into a play within the play. Drinking is now an image of perception, and the terms in which the Ideal is to be perceived are explicitly classical. Goethe wrote this material mostly in the late s in a period when Jena, where he spent several months of each year, was the centre of German philosophy.
It is thus natural that Faust in this form is the representative text of German Idealism. The three prologues frame the play to come in terms of the central epistemological issues of the period. Mephistopheles will now mediate, or eventually provide Faust with the wherewithal to mediate for himself, between his desire for knowledge of the unknowable Other what the German idealists called the Absolute and his desire for participation in the real world.
Ultimately, the play shows us, the Other can be perceived only when embodied as nature or art. Under these circumstances the traditional pact with the devil is impossible, and Goethe substitutes instead a bet: The bet articulates both the instability of any knowledge of the Other and also its dependence on an insight projected from within. Subjectivity is less a problem, as it was in the Urfaust, than a necessary component of knowledge. History is now temporality. The shift from pact to bet thus advances the idealist critique of the possibilities and dangers of the now virtually complete secularization of European culture: The dilemmas to which Rousseau and Kant had brought their century are here writ large.
In accordance with this shift, supernatural features take on greater prominence and become at the same time less shocking. They also are a shorthand to express the basic relationships in the play: Even though God is ineffable, language and art in Faust carry meaning of the most important kind.
Faust II repeats structures and episodes from Faust I, but simultaneously broadens them as it unfolds their implications. The simplest way to recognize the analogies to Part I is to think of Part II as consisting of two parts: Act i repeats in the person of the Emperor the frustrations Faust experiences at the beginning of Part I in connecting his intense desires with a reality outside of himself.
If the Faust of the s focussed on the individual, Part II focuses on the social implications of idealism and historicism, and thus offers a sociological rather than anthropological perspective. Now Faust acts in the great world of the imperial court rather than in his narrow room or the imprisoning structures of the German petty bourgeoisie, and the drama offers various covert critiques of the state of European politics after the Restoration. Similarly the theme of striving, the essence of being human, is elaborated from seeking knowledge and comprehending the Other to seeking the well-springs of creative force within oneself.
Part II is full of graspers: Representation replaces perception as the central concern: The remainder of the Helen sequence explores in detail how such representations, which include money as well as art in all forms, can be produced and how they are to be understood. In the last two acts the opportunities Faust generates for others to create their own world become the most concrete example of how human creative vision, which has replaced the visions of transcendent truth from Part I, can be realized in the world. Goethe confronts and complicates his own conviction of the autonomy of art with profound insights into the representational nature of all social existence: History is no longer solely the real world in which the Ideal can be perceived in the Real, but, as a realm of successive illusions, is also the relentless destroyer of all human achievement.
Because historicism had called into question the eternal classical ideal inherited by the eighteenth century, Goethe recreates his Helen by setting her into the context of the development of antiquity from ancient Egypt on, and by dismissing her to the underworld when she has served her purpose. She is both the great achievement of nineteenth-century philhellenism and a monument to its transience. Part II differs from Part I in its more openly allegorical style and its indifference to the unity of action, tone or style.
The tendency towards complicated allusions to other texts runs riot: So complex is the web of irony, parody and allusion in the 99 jane k. The problem, of course, is the deliberate use of cosmic religious imagery, including paintings of the Assumption of the Virgin, to represent a world that is thoroughly secular, and in which the principles of physical and biological development have replaced the Christian God. In the spirit of human creativity celebrated in the play the older imagery takes on new meaning, and yet, as throughout Faust, the new necessarily and not always happily destroys the old.
Heinrich Hubert Houben Leipzig: All translations are mine. Ticknor and Fields, , The German Tragedy Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, The individualism inherent in creative writing is turned, in an extraordinary act of mutual tolerance, into understanding and cooperation.