Goethe reviewed

Coetzee wears a safety helmet

J.M. Coetzee is an author whose novels I have never read, but at a local library branch the other day I pulled off the shelf of new non-fiction the volume Late Essays: 2006-2017. Among all the illustrious writers listed on the front cover were Goethe, along with Hölderlin, Kleist, and Robert Walser. I quickly checked it out and looked at the essays right away. I spent more time with the Goethe "essay" (why I put this in quotes will be revealed) than the others, but I intend to read them all more closely.  Coetzee shows himself to be very knowledgeable about German literature.

The Goethe piece appeared in The New York Review of Books (April 26, 2012), ostensibly in connection with Stanley Corngold's translation of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. I say ostensibly because, although Coetzee is very knowledgeable about Goethe and the publication history of Werther, he does not discuss the merits of Corngold's translation. It is a fault of many reviewers to devote the lesser part of a review to the book under consideration. Anyone who has picked up an issue of the NYTBR or the London Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement discovers that a reviewer often spends a lot of time on the "back story" of the book, which, especially in the case of non-fiction, is necessary. I mean, a new book on dinosaurs will bring the reader up to date on the field of dinosaur studies, or it might deal with cultural impressions of the vanished species over the past several centuries, before, finally, the book being reviewed is discussed. So, nothing new here.

 Coetzee's subject, however, is nothing less than a synopsis of the novel, the relationship of Goethe to his subject, the relationship of Goethe with the Kestners, the composition history, the relation of the fictional character to Goethe's own personality ("the passionate side of himself that he sacrificed to his own cost"?), Goethe's reaction to the endless interrogation about Werther in succeeding decades. There is a good passage in which the lack of a guiding authorial voice is addressed, as well as what Coetzee calls the "long run" of the story of Goethe and Charlotte Buff, as set down in Thomas Mann's 1939 novel Lotte in Weimar. Moreover, Coetzee gives the background to the Ossian letters, Goethe's translation of same, the reading of the poems preceding Werther's parting from Charlotte, and the success of Macpherson's forgery in creating a desire for "a new poetic speech." And while Goethe claimed to have written Werther in a "somnambulistic trance in four weeks," the novel absorbs pre-existing material like Ossian, not to forget his own diaries and letters. Strangely enough, Coetzee does not mention the episode that would seem to have been the inspiration behind the novel, namely, the suicide of Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem.

Toward the end of the review he introduces the Sturm und Drang movement, again very swiftly blending in the advent of Romanticism, Herder, and Rousseau. One thing I never paid much attention to in connection with Werther is the influence of Laurence Sterne. Coetzee: "The first pages of Werther bear all the signs of Sterne's mercurial narrative style." From Sterne, Coetzee writes, Goethe "absorbed the technique of illuminating the interior by bringing up fragments of involuntary memory."

In the final paragraphs Coetzee does mention that Werther has attracted many distinguished translators (but without mentioning whether he considers Corngold to be one). Instead, it is the first translation of Werther that interests him, by Daniel Malthus, father of Thomas, which appeared in 1779. Malthus, translating from a French translation, omitted passages that might have been felt to offend the public. Coetzee is intrigued by Malthus's translation of the word "Leidenschaft" in the first Werther letter, when Werther remarks on the "passion" forming in poor Leonore's heart. Malthus writes "tenderness," undoubtedly under the influence of the French "tendresse." This choice, writes Coetzee, must be deliberate: a performance of an act of cultural translation, one informed by his "embeddedness in the cultural norms of his society, including its norms of feeling." We moderns, in the face of the "tender passions," "see passion predominating," whereas Malthus's 18th-century readers would see "tenderness."

Coetzee channeling Jesus

It is an excellent piece, in fact the kind of piece that a student might be tempted to copy or plagiarize in place of doing the research on the novel. On reading a bit on Coetzee's background, I discovered that he has a Ph.D. in English literature (dissertation on Samuel Beckett), so clearly he understands research. What the piece is not is a literary essay. It is literary journalism -- of a superior nature, it should be noted, outfitted with footnotes and page references. The difference can be seen within the pages of this very book. At random, let me quote a passage from Hermann Melville, writing about The Scarlett Letter, that appears in Coetzee's piece on Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel:

"For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne's soul, the other side -- like the dark half of the physical sphere -- is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black ... Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effect he makes it to produce in his lights and shades; or whether there really lurks him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom -- this I cannot altogether tell."

That is a great writer writing about the mystery of another great writer. Or take this passage in Henry James's biography of Hawthorne, also quoted by Coetzee:

"It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, warmer, richer European spectacle -- it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist."

This last is something that Coetzee must know something about, having published quite a few novels, but his literary "essay" on Goethe, in any case, suggests nothing so profound. I just looked online of a review of Late Essays that appeared in The Spectator. The headline says it all: "J.M. Coetzee's Essays Are Filtered Through Boundless Reserves of Knowledge, Wisdom, and Reading." I can't imagine, however, that the piece I have described would make anyone long to read The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Image credits: Books Live; Wesley Merritt for the Telegraph