Fritz Strich at the MLA (in absentia)

Nordic elf

Until I hear from Na'ama Rokem, I will not know what transpired at our MLA session. I sent my paper, which was to be read by either her or John Noyes, who was also on the panel.

Here I would like to add something to that paper, which I only discovered yesterday. It does not affect my argument, but it helps to complete the picture I am attempting to create about the intellectual background of Strich's work on world literature.

In my paper I mentioned that Strich seldom footnoted or referred directly or even indirectly to his sources. Benjamin Bennett mentioned this "unscholarly" practice in a review on the reissuance of Strich's 1910 book Die Mythologie in der deutschen Literatur von Klopstock bis Wagner, which appeared in The German Quarterly in 1972. Bennett found a "disturbing element" in Die Mythologie, namely, "a tendency to mix criticism and paraphrase." Thus, it is frequently unclear "whether the point of view expressed is that of the author or that of the text under discussion." We modern scholars, writes Bennett, expect a writer to "quote a text and then talk about it, rather than attempt to talk from within the mind of the author being treated." Bennett thinks that Strich abandoned this approach in Deutsche Klassik und Romantik (1922), but my impression is different. In an earlier post I wrote that Strich is not so much talking within the mind of a writer as writing within the literary tradition itself. Goethe, after all, never footnoted his literary predecessors, but simply merged their influence into his writings. Similarly for all writers before the anxiety of influence.

In his 1932 article on world literature and comparative literary history, however, Strich did include a short bibliography, which for the most part references such early comparatists as Ferdinand Brunetière and Joseph Texte. It was only yesterday, however, that I was able to run down at 1928 article by the Romance scholar Karl Voßler on "Nationalliteratur und Weltliteratur" (Zeitwende, vol. 4, pp. 193-204). Voßler, by the way, was not only a major academic but also a friend and colleague of Heinrich Wölfflin, an important influence on Strich.

Voßler does not discuss Goethe's concept as such. He asserts that no one can tell us "wer denn eigentlich zur Weltliteratur gehöre, ... es sei denn, daß man ausweichend antwortet und auf eine Art unsichtbarer Kirche oder Gemeinde der Weltliteratur hinweist, auf einige wenige große Begnadete oder Auserwählte," and so on. Goethe, he writes, meant "eine stille, fast gedrückte Kirche" not a "steile" one, over which reigned a "hohepriesterliches Wesen."

Translation by Karl Voßler

So, not very much about Goethe's concept in Voßler's essay, but he had some interesting observations on what constitutes a national literature. Referring to Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe, this is what Voßler writes about "national literatures":

Diese bieten Schonung, Nachsicht und traulichen Schutz für menschliche und poetische Schwächen und ein Gehege, wo ungeübte Kunst und halbflügge Phantasie sich üben dürfen und gutherzigen Beifall und Ermunterung finden, wie das Klavierspiel des Haustöchterchens. Hier dürfen die Anfänger, ja sogar ermüdete Meister sich tragen lassen von der Muttersprache ... Volksgenossen und Landsleute, Stammesgefühl und vaterländische Gesinnungen und Interessen sind hier am Werk und schüren eine dichterische Begeisterung, deren persönliches Eigenfeuer vielleicht unsicher wäre.

There is more here, but I was struck by how much Voßler affirms comments made by Goethe in his 1795 essay "Literarischer Sansculottismus." Goethe, inveighing against a writer who complained about the lack of "classical" literary prose among Germans, wrote the following about the era in which he and his generation came to maturity as a writer:

Nirgends in Deutschland ist ein Mittelpunkt gesellschaftlicher Lebensbildung, wo sich Schriftsteller zusammenfänden und nach einer Art, in einem Sinne, jeder in seinem Fache sich ausbilden könnten. Zerstreut geboren, höchst verschieden erzogen, meist nur sich selbst und den Eindrücken ganz verschiedener Verhältnisse überlassen, von der Vorliebe für dieses oder jenes Beispiel einheimischer oder fremder Literatur hingerissen, zu allerlei Versuchen, ja Pfüschereien genötigt, um ohne Anleitung seine eigenen Krafte zu prüfen. ... Welcher deutsche geschätzte Schriftsteller wird sich nicht in diesem Bilde erkennen, und welcher wird nicht mit gescheidener Trauer gestehen, daß er oft genug nach Gelegenheit geseufzt habe, früher die Eigenheiten seines originellen Genius einer allgemeinen Nationalkultur, die er leider nicht vorfand, zu unterwerfen?

One feels here that Goethe is truly speaking from the heart.

Enough for today.

Picture source: Metro Postcards