Goethe Etc.

Young Goethe in love

2012-01-28T18:06:00.000-08:00

A reader of this blog emailed me this morning a YouTube link to the movie Goethe! I immediately prepared my morning tea and settled in to be entertained.

After an opening scene in which Goethe is seen making a mess of his legal examination at the university in Strassburg, the action moves to Wetzlar, where Goethe went in May 1772 to continue his training at the Imperial Cameral Court. From a physical point of view, Alexander Fehling gives a good impersonation of Goethe, matching very much the following description of Goethe by a contemporary:

"He possesses what is called genius and a quite extraordinarily lively imagination. He is forceful in his emotions. His cast of mind is noble. ... He loves children and can long occupy himself with them. He is bizarre, and there are various things in his deportment, his exterior that could make him disagreeable. But he is nonethless well regarded by children, women and many others. He acts as it occurs to him to do, without concerning himself whether others like it, whether it is fashionable, whether convention permits it."

The person making this observation was Johann Christian Kestner, engaged since 1768 to Lotte Buff. He is portrayed in Goethe! by Moritz Bleibtreu (above), who is such a masterful actor and whose performance as Kestner is so touching and so dominating that Goethe (as portrayed by Fehling) began to seem very silly and not very deep.

It's not surprising that the movie takes liberties with the "historical record," indeed quite amazing liberties. For instance, in real life Goethe knew Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem only in passing, yet in the movie the two are bosom buddies, sharing a desk at the cameral court, getting drunk together, and racing through the countryside on horseback. Goethe is even shown as present at Jerusalem's suicide. The biggest liberty is in the relationship between Goethe and Lotte Buff. As mentioned above, Kestner was long engaged to Lotte when Goethe appeared in Wetzlar, yet the movie portrays Goethe as having been there first and, moreover, having sex with her. Yes, bare bodies and all.

Right from the start, however, I was struck by how much even a Goethe scholar like myself tends to view Goethe's life in these months through the lens of the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. The screenplay makes the most of this tendency, leaving in certain scenes from the novel, e.g., the iconic one of Lotte slicing bread for her brothers and sisters.

And it transforms other scenes from the novel, the most compelling one of which is the famous thunderstorm scene with Lotte and Werther. In the novel this scene echoes the scene in Book 4 of the Aeneid, in which Dido and Aeneas, having taken shelter in a cave from a storm, make love. (As portrayed below by Goethe's friend Johann Heinrich Tischbein.) In the movie, Goethe and Lotte take shelter from a storm in a cave, where the sex scene takes place.

Emilia Galotti, a copy of which is found on Werther's desk after his suicide, is shown in the movie to be Lotte's favored reading. The movie even tries to tell us where the name "Werther" comes from: we see Lotte writing Goethe a letter beginning "Mein Werther" (i.e., My dear one).

Still, the movie was lots of fun, mostly because of its wonderful recreation of 18th-century life. You really get the feeling for the roughness and debauchery of ordinary life, the public nature of even private moments. The house in which Lotte lives with her many siblings is wonderfully re-created, as are the restrictive circumstances in which that family lives. Clearly, however, the director is trying to illustrate the sources of artistic inspiration. There is a wonderful scene of Goethe and Jerusalem at the market in Wetzlar, getting drunk and cavorting with ladies of the night, that suggests a re-creation of Walpurgis Night; they even watch a performance of a Faust puppet play.

Goethe's Venetian epigrams

2012-01-26T13:08:00.000-08:00

I have wanted to continue the previous postings, on Goethe in Venice, and I spent some time in the past couple of weeks reading the so-called Venetian Epigrams. At first glance, I was not too impressed. They seemed to me to be rather sterile. The meter also didn't seem natural (Goethe was experimenting with classical forms), and the attempt to imitate Latin grammar meant that you often have to read the poems several times to figure out which noun goes with which verb. Moreover, the mythological apparatus sounds false. There is also the offputting cynicism, which, however, is part of the conventions of the genre.

Yet a deeper immersion proves more interesting. At the same time, there are some problems in discussing the epigrams as a poetic "product" or collection.

The stay in Venice, from March 31 to May 22, 1790, inspired Goethe to write "several hundred" epigrams, which he began to assemble in a Libellus Epigrammatum on his return to Weimar. Twenty-four such poems appeared, under the title "Sinngedichte" (the German poetic term for epigram), in Deutsche Monatschrift in 1791. It is a fairly innocuous effort. At Schiller's encouragement Goethe made a larger selection, of 103 epigrams, which appeared in Musenalmanach fur das Jahr 1796. The Munich edition of Goethe's works includes these 103 poems, under the title "Epigramme. Venedig 1790," but it also publishes (alongside the "Sinngedichte") "Epigrammen Erstes Buch Venedig 1790" and "Epigramme Zweites Buch," containing 136 in total.

There are various manuscripts of Goethe's epigrams, but none can be taken as definitive. The Munich edition is clearly trying to demonstrate that there is some kind of structural principle. The collection containing 103, for instance, and that of 136 show many duplications, but the poems also follow a different order. Compounding the problem is that some of the people who handled Goethe's manuscripts after his death went through them and literally used a razor to excise offensive passages. I mentioned in an earlier posting on this subject that one of the themes of the epigrams was religion. I was quite taken aback at the animus toward Christianity in "Epigrammen Erstes Buch Venedig 1790." At least in formal terms, this animus in toned down in the collection of 103 epigrams.

It strikes me that these problematic aspects are irresolvable, and as I read and reread the poems it seemed that the greater problem is that Goethe's epigrams seek to accommodate material that is not appropriate to the genre. The overriding theme is the felt tension between the present situation of Venice, a place that draws travelers and is therefore to be savored, and the longing for home, where the beloved is.

I think that there are two ways that Goethe might have solved the problem. The first would have been to restrict himself to composing a cycle of poems based on the love for Christiane and their child. These are, in my view, the best in the collection (see e.g., nos. 95, 96, 98-102). Here, for instance, is David Luke's translation of the first four lines of no. 102:

It is such joy to hug my beloved so close, to desire her,
And in her heartbeat to hear her first confession of love:
Joy still greater to feel life coming, another life pulsing
As it moves, as it thrives, in her dear nourishing womb!

Goethe, however, took his Martial along with him on the trip, evidently intending to be inspired by the ancient genre. In his attempt to be "symbolical," these lovely poems about the beloved jostle uncomfortably alongside very cynical observations on Venice, many about prostitutes and other low life. Since the beloved is Christiane Vulpius, a woman to whom he was not married but who had just borne his son out of wedlock, the juxtaposition of her with prostitutes is jarring, not to mention not very complimentary.

A second method, and more interesting, would have been to have used the material in the epigrams as the basis for a short novel. In that way, the observations on politics and religion and street life would have served as the realistic background for the traveler's musings about what has been left at home. In fact, I may write this novel myself!

Picture credits: Démodé; National Gallery of Art (UK); Sunday Observer; Amazon

Goethe in Venice

2012-01-15T06:35:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in an earlier post three important things that had happened to me in New York. I should have mentioned a fourth, which is my association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not only am I so fortunate as to live just across Central Park from the museum, but I have also been an editorial consultant for many, many years. Before I got my Ph.D., I had been a scholarly editor at the University of Texas Press, which led to my work in Tokyo at the University of Tokyo Press. Later, while writing my early novels and doing my doctoral studies in Manhattan, I continued to work on a part-time basis at the Met. It was while I was writing my dissertation that I met Rick. Though I did teach at local universities while a doctoral student, and later enjoyed my role as chair of the Columbia University Seminar on 18th-Century European Culture, my relationship with Rick precluded my accepting an academic appointment outside of New York. Meeting Rick was the best thing that has ever happened to me; I can't imagine now that I would include a tenured university position as among the important things in my life.

To return to that fourth important thing, my association with the Met. Not only do I enjoy the privilege of a close-up view of the workings, indeed the innards, of a great museum, but the steady exposure to works of art constantly prompts me to think about the issue of "taste," which was such an 18th-century concern. I have written on this subject in various posts (e.g., here and here). A small exhibit at the Met, Art in Renaissance Venice, 1400-1515, made me think anew about Goethe's taste in painterly subjects.

According to the Met's website, the exhibition "presents a comparison of the two primary artistic dynasties, the Bellini and the Vivarini, and explores their workshop practices and specializations in the context of the Venetian art market." Goethe mentions the Vivarinis in the essay Ältere Gemälde. Venedig 1790 (published in 1825 in Über Kunst und Alterthum), commenting (WA I, 47, 213) on their placement of small human figures in the painting of Saint Roch in his coffin.The essay begins with comments on the "oldest examples of the newer art," represented by mosaics and "Greek paintings." Of the former he has seen nothing that is worth devoting his attention to. The "old Greek paintings" (die alt-griechischen Gemählde") are to be found in the Greek Orthodox cathedral, and he opines that even the face of the Virgin appears to be modeled on portraits of the imperial family, e.g., Constantine and his mother. I am not sure whether Goethe was aware that these paintings date to no earlier than 1500. In any case, this is a narrative of progress, in techniques and subject matter, culminating with Goethe's favorites: Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese.

His comments on the techniques of these painters, for instance, the reason for the darkening of the colors over time, shows Goethe at his pedantic, art-student best. He even devotes two sections of this essay (again, illuminating for art historians) on the workshop in the monastery of Saints John and Paul ("eine Art von Akademie der Gemählde-Restauration"). Among other things, he describes the painstaking work that is carried out to repair holes in the canvases of older paintings.

He also seeks to show the emancipation of these artists from religious conventions. I think it is probably true that most of the works we now associate with them are of non-religious subjects, their luscious paintings of the earthly surface of life being heavily represented in public collections today. It's hard to know how many of such paintings Goethe ever saw; clearly in Venice he was viewing paintings in churches and monasteries, many of which are still in situ. The gorgeous photo above by "Maurizio 51," of the interior of the Church of San Giorgio dei Greci, reveals how Goethe probably viewed much of the art he saw in Venice.

His comments on Tintoretto's painting of the appearance of the angel to Saint Roch in prison are interesting. In order to render the "repulsive subject" more tasteful (schmackhaft), Tintoretto has drafted "beautiful female witnesses." (Detail at top of post.) How else to explain the presence of these courtesan-appearing women in such a setting? Really, should one have trapped a saint and females of bad reputation (Mädchen eines übeln Lebens) in the same cell with other criminals?

I posted earlier on Goethe's dislike of religious art, because of the "repulsive" or "gruesome" subject matter. The Met exhibit had a nice little painting of such a subject, by Antonio Vivarini. It is entitled Saint Peter Martyr Healing the Leg of a Young Man, from about 1450. It depicts the Dominican saint (as per the label) "healing a young man who cut off his own leg in penitence for having kicked his mother"! Since it was probably commissioned for a Dominican church or confraternity, Goethe may have even seen it. The notion of sin was becoming passe obviously.

Painting credits: MMA, Robert Lehman Collection (1975.1.81); MMA, Gift of Samuel H. Kress Foundation (37.163.4)

Goethe in Venice

2012-01-13T07:27:00.000-08:00

I mentioned earlier that friends had vacationed in Venice before New Year's and sent me the reminder in the photo at the left (click to enlarge and see the sign indicating "viale Goethe") that Goethe had left his mark on the city. Today I will write a bit about the city's mark on him, which is one of the lesser fields of Goethe scholarship.

Travel accounts of the past two centuries are often records of desire, particularly the attempts of travelers to discern the past in the milieu of the present. Thus, 17th- and 18th-century travelers to Italy sought to resurrect the vanished classical past from the ancient ruins. For northern European travelers, especially Germans, Rome in particular occupied an outsized role in the imagination.

Goethe had longed since his youth to visit Italy, which he finally did in 1786, spending two years there. As Nicholas Boyle writes in his biography of Goethe, however, the real Italy itself was merely confirmation that "the object of his desires had a place and habitation on this earth." Those two years in Italy were not really spent on the ground, but "in Arcadia, in a creation of his mind and heart." Goethe devoted little attention to the actual Italy (unless it was geological or plant in nature), exploring few of the customs of the land, the very thing that most of us look forward to experiencing in foreign countries. The difference can be seen by comparing Goethe's Italian Journey with the diaries and memoirs of Friederike Brun, who spent considerable time in Rome and southern Italy exploring both the past and documenting the present. Her writings of these years were published before Goethe's Italian Journey, and I suspect he studied them closely. (My account of Frederike Brun as a traveler can be found in this publication.)

Goethe had passed through Venice on his first Italian journey, but it was in 1790 that he returned, on a quasi-official Weimar mission: the Duke's mother had been in Rome for the past two years, and Goethe was to accompany her on this stage of her return trip to Weimar. Her delay in leaving Rome, however, meant that Goethe stayed longer than expected. By now, Goethe had settled in Weimar with Christiane and had a small son, a domestic situation that was clearly satisfactory. Thus, the epigrams record disappointment at what is not in Venice: the snowy mountains of the north and the German Faustina left behind in Weimar. The erotic vein of the Roman Elegies is abandoned. In contrast, Italy on this second journey was more clearly observed than on the first, "imaginative," visit. It was now, writes Boyle, "a place of dusty roads and dishonest hotel keepers."The literary product that emerged is the Venezianische Epigramme, a "cycle" of 100 or so short poems that drew their formal inspiration from such ancient precedents as Martial.

This collection occupies a secondary place in Goethe scholarship, probably because of the seemingly unmediated character of the reflections in the poems. Boyle writes of this being a "distempered time" for Goethe. What is unprecedented about this work is that they are "full of Goethe's opinions. ... Never before in his writing have views been expressed in so undramatized a form, so unattached to any persona other than of Goethe at a particular time and in a particular place." Boyle also adds that "the image of the traveler, of the man who is not at home, is fundamental to the collection." Thus, Goethe would seem to exemplify the flâneur (see also here), before being a flâneur became a literary and artistic subject.

Though the subjects are wide-ranging and, unlike in the Roman Elegies, contain quick sketches of Venetian daily life, Boyle identifies three thematic areas: political, cultural, and sexual. The effects of the French Revolution was in its early stages, and Goethe's references to street-corner revolutionaries contain some interesting observations, including, I was interested to see, the following two lines on the nature of freedom of speech. (The epigram itself, however, went unpublished in his lifetime.)

Leider läßt sich noch kaum was rechtes denken und sagen
Das nicht grimmig den Staat, Götter and Sitten verlezt.

(Unfortunately it is hardly possible to think or say anything right that is not savagely wounding to the state, the gods, and morals.)

Sex seemed to preoccupy Goethe at this time. For instance, he devotes some lines to Venetian prostitutes, whom he had seen in his wanderings in the labyrinth of Venice streets. Of these epigrams Boyle writes that their character was so explicit -- nudity, erections, masturbation, sodomy, venereal disease -- that they were not published for over a century.

The third theme shows Goethe, as Boyle writes, at his most "explicitly and violently" anti-Christian. "Christianity is presented as a series of illusions," while the epigrams consistently focus instead on "Epicurean materialism," which offers "the unadulterated truth" about God, man, and the world.

According to the Goethe-Handbuch, Goethe failed to mention ("with a single word") the grand palaces on the Canal (seen above in the gorgeous photo above by Todd Landry), and the Byzantine and Gothic influences on the architecture simply passed him by. He had the following to say about St. Mark's: "The architectural style is commensurate with every manner of nonsense that was taught or perpetrated there." Goethe did not, however, neglect the paintings to be found in Venice, and he and his companions, Friedrich Bury and Johann Heinrich Meyer, made a systematic tour of practically every church and public collection in the lagoon city and, in this way was Goethe's understanding of the history of Venetian painting enriched.

This post is becoming very long. Thus, I hope to devote the following post to a continuation of Goethe in Venice, in particular to his impressions of the paintings he saw there, reflected in an essay from 1825, Ältere Gemälde. Venedig 1790.

Picture credit: Visual Culture; Todd Landry (as above)

Versatile Blogger award

2012-01-05T05:24:00.000-08:00

Since Christmas, when I got an email from friends who were visiting Venice, I have been contemplating a posting on Goethe and Venice. Today, however, I will do something different, though it begins with kayaking, which is not foreign to this blog. One afternoon seven summers ago Rick and I were walking along the Hudson River when we noticed a sign advertising "Free Kayaking." We had the choice of two singles or a double. We took a double, the last time that ever happened: Rick liked to call doubles "divorce boats." Thus began our adventure with the Downtown Boathouse organization. We became volunteers in the 72nd Street program and kayakers. Of the two of us, I was the more avid; Rick took up biking four years ago, but he was always on hand at the end of Sunday afternoon to close up the program.

I always like to say that three important things happened to me in New York that would surprise folks back in Louisville. First among them was that I met and married Rick. The second was that I was published (book reviews) in The Wall Street Journal. The third was that I kayaked in the Hudson River. There is not a single Goethe scholar among the folks I kayak with. But though we have come together from very different backgrounds, united by our love of the water and the craft of kayaking, I have discovered in my recent troubles some very staunch supporters, like XL and Derick (at left) and Larry (pictured with me below at the Boathouse).

Also among them are Vlad and Johna, kayakers extraordinaire. Finally I am getting around to the subject of today's post, the Versatile Blogger award. I was nominated for it by Vlad and Johna's blog "Wind Against Current." I love their blog for several reasons. First off, Vlad and Johna are always describing kayak trips that I wish I were on, e.g., a circumnavigation of Staten Island. (And I remember when the height of my kayaking achievements was to kayak across New York Harbor to Governors Island!) Their descriptions communicate the fun and joy that one has in kayaking. And they offer fabulous photos (taken by Vlad) of the trips. Summer, winter, whenever: the weather doesn't stop them.

Among the qualities for consideration for the award, Versatile Blogger mentions "the quality of the writing, the uniqueness of the subjects covered, the level of love displayed in the words on the virtual page ... [and] the quality of the photographs and the level of love displayed in the taking of them." Wind Against Current certainly exemplifies these criteria, but there is another facet that I suspect often emerges in the course of doing a blog: even though one starts a blog with a certain subject (i.e., kayaking), you find yourself venturing into the world. Thus, Vlad recently documented his Christmas tree lighting preferences. Or ice skating in Central Park.

I was very flattered that Vlad and Johna thought I was a versatile blogger. This could have been "only" a Goethe blog, but I was prescient enough to call it "Goethetc." I mentioned in a long-ago post that, when I used to live in Asia, I would write long letters to friends back home telling them about what I was doing. In the electronic age, the blog serves the same function. Those letters took me a long time to compose, and the same goes for the blog. That's why I don't post every day. If I did, I wouldn't have time to do anything else in life.

So, that's the long and short of blogging for today. Versatile Blogger recommends nominating 15 other blogs. Well, I don't follow that many blogs, but I would like to pass on the names of two blogs that I love. The first is Geographic Travels. The force behind it goes by the name "Catholicgauze." He takes us all over the earth, including Iraq and Afghanistan, connecting geography with current politics, most recently on Iran and the straits of Hormuz. He is also something of a cultural anthropologist, and I recently learned that there were not 13 original colonies, but 15. (Check it out.)

The other blog is First Known When Lost, which is one of the most perfect virtual spaces I have ever inhabited. It always features a poem and at least one painting. The title of the blog tells much about the contents. It is a place to stop and contemplate, to reflect on the things that matter -- and that have always mattered. Enough said. Go and look.

Midcult and the Intellectuals

2011-12-29T12:54:00.000-08:00

The name of this blog (i.e., the "Etc." in the name) indicates that it is not solely restricted to discussions of Goethe. I have ranged pretty wide in some of the subjects I have treated, but the majority does focus on the milieu of the "Goethe period," which for me is what we in the discipline call the "long 18th century." It is the century in which the rise of the Enlightenment takes place and in which occur the incipient beginnings of Romanticism, often regarded as a reaction to the sterility and rationalism of the Enlightenment.

I have not yet discovered a specific connection between Goethe and my recent work and publication on the history of freedom of speech in the 18th century. That work was in a sense a detour for me, carried out in my role as chair of the Columbia University Seminar on 18th-Century European Culture. Still, my research on the subject certainly expanded my knowledge of the 18th century generally. In a negative way, the absence of reflection on Goethe's part concerning the rise of "the public" and of democratic institutions, all of which are essential to the development of freedom of speech, is evidence that Goethe is not quite the "modern" that, say, Benjamin Constant is. (See the chapter by Helena Rosenblatt on Constant in my book.) Still, Goethe had met Constant in Weimar and may have been aware of the trends that Constant so presciently discerned.

On this blog I also swing into current cultural issues, which in truth have their roots in 18th-century preoccupations. As I wrote in the conclusion of the free speech volume, all of the anxieties we have today concerning speech can be found in the writings of the great thinkers of the 18th century. While those great minds -- Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, etc. -- were in favor of freedom of expression, if was for freedom for men like themselves. They considered the mass of people too stupid to have any sensible or valid opinions.

But it was in the 18th century that ordinary men and women began to participate in spheres of activity formerly reserved for the high and the mighty. This was the effect of the growth of commerce, which emancipated people from the bonds of tradition. Even in the arts, which continued to enjoy aristocratic patronage, writers and painters began to emerge who sold their wares as best they could. Goethe was one of these. In the non-artistic realm, others were quick to see the possibilities of transforming the new scientific discoveries into profitable and necessary inventions and manufactures.

As boundaries fell, so did the old standards. It was the beginning of "taste." People became more interested in goods, less in the Good. That process has simply rolled along, encompassing more and more people. It is not powered by ideas so much as by the progress of capitalism, which allows people to sell their labor, turn a profit, and live the life they prefer to lead. Some of them even aspire to the life of the mind. That is the class that Rick and I came from. We were privileged, only in the sense that we came of age in the U.S. on the cusp of the greatest prosperity the world has ever known, in the 1950s, enabling us to go to college and to follow intellectual pursuits. We were not out of the ordinary, as there were and still are lots of such ordinary Americans.

A habit I picked up in high school was listening to the live Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on the radio, not so much to the opera itself, beyond perhaps the overtures to ones like La Traviata. While kids my age in the New York suburbs were wandering to Washington Square Park to hear the Beats, I timed my ironing for the coming week to the Opera's intermission program. I knew that Americans could be "cultured": Van Cliburn's success had proved that. And panelists on "What's My Lines?" were certainly witty, as were Jack Paar and his guests. But my love of talk began here -- not with the Free Speech movement -- with the Opera's witty and cultured panelists, who could actually speak, extemporaneously it seemed, in full sentences on musical and literary subjects. Those programs were the start of an attempt to fit my own life within some large -- and less immediately personal -- conception of things.

In this connection, I was interested to read the recent review in The New Republic by Franklin Foer of the reissue of a book of essays by Dwight Macdonald. The most famous of these essays, published in 1960, was "Masscult and Midcult," which denigrated the marriage of commerce and high culture that was such an inspiration for people like myself. According to the reviewer, Franklin Foer, Macdonald thereby imported "one of the ugliest tropes of the politics of the time into the analysis of culture, ... the enemy within, ... a pernicious new species of culture ... called midcult." The trope may have been new, but the diagnostician could have been Voltaire or Condorcet.

Foer writes that it is hard not to feel nostalgic for a time when "you could look down your nose" at the Museum of Modern Art as a gateway to rampant philistinism: "We should have such philistines"! He concludes that one cannot but be annoyed that "the greatest cultural critic of his era spent so much time and energy writing his hands about how the middle class was too eager to consume weightier forms of culture. ... What is so terrible, exactly, about broadcasting Don Giovanni into movie theaters around the country?"

Foer misses the larger point, however: Macdonald's destructive temperament was actually aimed at the temerity of the middle class for having aspirations at all, beyond their sphere. In this, he was like Rousseau, who was one of the few philosophes who seemed to recognize the future effects of commerce and the rise of democracy. Rousseau thus theorized a way to contain the masses with his "general will." Such vitriol as Macdonald's is alive and well today in liberal political and cultural opinion, which, in my view, is not liberal at all, but postmodern. Anyone who reads the editorial pages of The New York Times today cannot deny that the middle class remains under assault by the intellectual class, in the "overwhelmingly nullifying" manner of Macdonald. The assault is no longer on the grounds of culture, but rather on the resistance of ordinary people to the impositions of government and elite opinion.

This posting is in tribute to my darling husband. Anyone who has read this blog over time knows that Rick and I were both of a conservative bent, grateful for having grown up in America when we did. We realize its limitations, but, principally, its capacity for good. We have been most sorry to see what the destructiveness of "intellectuals" like Macdonald has done. May the country start to get its feed back on the ground in 2012.

Picture credit: Amazon UK

Life before Goethe

2011-12-27T06:24:00.000-08:00

Clearly no one is born to be a Goethe scholar, and there was little in my background to suggest that would be the case with me. My path toward studying German was the most accidental in the world, though I would also say serendipitous. In my final year of high school I was fortunate to have one of those teachers who are celebrated in fiction, Ruth Braeutigam. Much later, after I had become a teacher myself, what constantly struck me was the effect of small, seemingly inconsequential things on a student's intellectual growth, for it was not the subject of U.S. history for which she was my teacher that Ruth Braeutigam had an effect on me. From the start, what intrigued me about her class was the arrangement of the room, one that was already more adult than any I had encountered in school. Miss Braeutigam sat on a stool before a podium on which her notes were spread and to which she would occasionally refer, while the students' desk were set out in rows of half-circles around her. Obviously, unlike in other high school classes, the slow students could not hide in the back of the room.

Miss Braeutigam herself was the first spinster, aside from my maiden aunts, I knew close up. The Catholic sisters, strictly speaking, could not be counted among the spinsters: they, like the married, had a special calling. Though I had loved the sisters who had taught me as a child, I had not been attracted to joining a religious order.

Miss B. must have already been in her fifties when I was her student, and in terms of outward appearance she had probably never been the attractive feminine type of teacher who turns adolescent schoolgirls into acolytes. There was indeed something masculine about her, though, again, after I had become a teacher myself, I better understood her manner: one that gave a student room, that did not seek to ingratiate, that revealed enough of an individual personality -- what a booming laugh she had! -- without false or inappropriate confidences. After three years of being sunk in adolescent narcissism, I seemed to be jolted awake by her clear-eyed way of relating to the world and to the unencumbered life that she radiated.

One day I asked her about her name and learned of her German ancestry. "Braeutigam," as she informed me, meant "bridegroom." Not long afterward she gave me a copy of my first German grammar, a thin book in which all the German words appeared in the funny script known as "Fraktur." As a sign of my own eccentricity, I desired to known things that no one else in my milieu knew or even cared about. So it was that I spent more time deciphering those strange German letters and memorizing German words than on anything I had done in the previous three years of high school.

Such small influences, principally the use of my brain on something besides boys, prompted me to think about my future. My female role models (this was the early 1960s), mostly products of Hollywood, had "careers": Doris Day or Edith Head, dresser to the stars. With no one in my milieu offering guidance, I would have needed a lot more self-direction to chart such a remarkable course, and it was absolutely for lack of any alternative that I began to consider college, where, after all, I could study German. As I said, could there have been anything more accidental and more exotic -- considering my white bread background -- in my becoming a German scholar?

I was thinking of these things yesterday. I am spending the holidays with my sister and brother-in-law in Louisville. Until I went to college, my life had moved back and forth across the Ohio River, whether we lived in Louisville or in southern Indiana. The most memorable thing about the river for me was the huge Colgate-Palmolive clock that stood on the Indiana side of the river. Though I had crossed the Ohio back and forth for years, such was the lack of my parents' resources that I had never ridden a boat on the river. My appreciation for natural beauty was still in nuce, and my sense of the history of the region was undeveloped. I knew that Indian tries had once populated these shores -- Algonquian, Shawnee, and Cherokee -- because the Louisville city parks carried their resonant names.

Well, yesterday I learned more about this local history, especially of the Ohio River, than from living here for years. We went on an outing to Falls of the Ohio State Park. The exhibits at the park tell of the important role of the Falls area. For instance, George Rogers Clark established the first permanent English-speaking settlement in the Northwest Territory on Corn Island and then founded the town of Clarksville, a town in which I had once lived (again, without taking note of this illustrious history). John James Audubon was a storekeeper in Louisville and began his career as an artist with his sketch of bird species in the Falls area.

A more interesting discovery, however, because of my later work on Goethe and geology, was that the Falls area had been covered by a shallow tropical sea about 387 million years ago. It turns out that the fossil record goes back to the Devonian (i.e., pre-Cambrian) period. (That's me standing in front of a re-creation of the ancient sea.) The impulse for this work was not purely scientific on my part. It seemed to me that Goethe's writing on scientific subjects sounded a lot like his writing on literary subjects. Thus, my theory was that Goethe's aesthetics influenced his approach to science. My work was enriched by the assistance of by my dear husband, who was a physics teacher for several decades. We used to take long walks along the Hudson River, where I would pick up stones. He would then explain what they were.

Well, that's the long and short of my life pre- and post-Goethe.

The historical postcard of the Falls and the link to Clarksville above are from the wonderful blog of Frances Hunter. Another blog, Louisville Fossils, describes fossil tours of the Falls park. The picture of Edith Head is from Robert J. Avrech's blog.

Trust

2011-12-19T05:39:00.000-08:00

In connection with the Annunciation, the priest spoke yesterday on the theme of trust. He referenced this beautiful painting by Domenico Veneziano, saying that it departed from the canonical representation of the scene by focusing on Mary's reaction, which he described as "troubled, but trusting." I think this is one of the loveliest images of the Annunciation I have ever seen, but the priest must have been thinking of a different painting, as the painting is very canonical in its "mise en scène." The larger point, however, is correct: we trust, even though we may be troubled by what we are being asked to trust in.

Picture credit: artbible.net

"Remember"

2011-12-15T14:41:00.000-08:00

I wish Goethe had written something like the following, but he did not.

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Then that you should remember and be sad.

Christine Rossetti (1862)

"The Sob"

2011-12-12T19:17:00.000-08:00

It is hard to know what to do with the grief one feels at times like these. Distraction helps, in lieu of tearing one's brain out. Today I went with a friend to MOMA to see the de Kooning retrospective. I was particularly struck by the very late paintings of the artist, from the 1980s when he was suffering from dementia. Rather lyrical and spare, with lovely colors, absent the clutter of structures and scaffolding. They were almost soothing, especially the corals.

Then we went wandering to another floor, looking for some comparisons, which is when I came across this painting by David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Goethe and Grief

2011-12-03T11:55:00.000-08:00

Goethe is known to have felt a great sense of revulsion (Abwehr) when facing the death of loved ones. Thus, when Carl August died in 1828, ending a friendship that went back to the 1770s, Goethe fled to Dornburg in order to avoid attending the duke's funeral. Afterward, for distraction, he immersed himself in his scientific pursuits. His revulsion was probably the result of feeling too much, and in at least three instances Goethe revealed himself to be overcome with grief. The first occasion was at the death of his sister Cornelia in 1777. Goethe speaks of himself, in a letter to Charlotte von Stein, as being "speechless" in the face of her death: "I received a letter at 9 informing me that my sister was dead. At the moment I have nothing further to say." Some months later he wrote to his mother: "With [the death of] my sister a strong root that held me to the earth has been cut down; the branches above, which had their nourishment from this root, must perforce die."

The death of Schiller in 1805 also hit him very hard. He wrote to Zelter in 1806: "I thought myself lost and lose now a friend and with him the half of my existence" (Ich dachte mich selbst zu verlieren, und verliere nun einen Freund und in demselben die Hälfte meines Daseyns).

When his wife, Christiane, passed away in 1816, he first wrote to Sulpiz Boisserée that "his darling wife had "left them." Some days later he wrote him that he could not lie: his condition "bordered on despair."

Goethe of course had the gift of being able to transform grief into poetry. A beautiful example is found in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (book 4, ch. 11). In an earlier version Mignon had sung this song alone, but in the later novel it is presented as a duet between Mignon and the Harpist. The German begins by referring to "longing" or "yearning" (Sehnsucht), though an English translation I found translates this as "grief":

My grief no mortals know
Except the yearning!
Alone, a prey to woe,
All pleasure spurning.

Up towards the sky I throw
A gaze discerning.
He who my love can know
Seems ne'er returning.
With strange and fiery glow
My heart is burning.
My grief no mortals know,
Except the yearning!

At this time my favorite words by Goethe on the theme of grief are to be found in The Sorrow of Young Werther, from 1772: "Ich habe verloren, was meines Lebens einzige Wonne war, die heilige belebende Kraft, mit der ich Welten um mich schuf."

Picture credit: Folsompastor

My darling is gone

2011-11-29T06:58:00.000-08:00

Du kamst, du gingst mit leiser Spur, ein flüchtiger Gast im Erdenland.
Woher? Wohin? Wir wissen nur: Aus Gottes Hand in Gottes Hand.

(Ludwig Uhland)

Goethe on sacred art

2011-11-20T10:02:00.000-08:00

How do so many magazines pile up unread beside the bed? Today I'm trying to go through them quickly and toss them out. As always, there is at least one article or essay that I linger over, thus not getting through the stack at all. Today it was an article on Christ's genitalia by Dianne Phillips in the December issue of First Things. Entitled "Leo Steinberg's Artistic Vision," it reviews the somewhat radical publication on this subject, in 1983, by Steinberg. "Radical" in the sense that no art historian had ever written on it, despite the fact that there are a number of Renaissance paintings in which Christ's genitalia are depicted. Thus, the title of Steinberg's book: The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion.

According to Phillips, Steinberg (a Jew, but very sympathetic to Catholic theology as "probably the greatest, most coherent, most elaborate, most wildly imaginative system for the human mind") not only drew attention to an under-explored topic, but also attempted to re-theologize our understanding of Renaissance art. As Phillips writes, Steinberg was interested in the positive theological meaning that could be conveyed by a virile Christ." Though I was raised Catholic and imbibed a great deal of religious art, most of my experience has been in museums, not in churches. Indeed, that is the experience of most Americans, which facilitates, Phillips writes, the "aestheticization" of medieval and Renaissance art and makes us incapable of understanding them "as religious objects with precise theological meaning."

How does Goethe fit in here? Phillips writes that Goethe plays a major role in such aestheticization. It was a review by Goethe of a book on Leonardo's The Last Supper by the very learned Giuseppi Bossi that "established the modern interpretation" of that painting: "the sacramental significance of the meal was deemed incidental" to it.Here is a link to that review. Because the review is by Goethe, it comes off as incredibly pedantic, and in truth it could have been written by any art history student today. Goethe begins with Bossi's background and his suitability as restorer. He then tells us about Leonardo and his genius. We also learn that Leonardo's abilities were bestowed on him "by nature" and that his penetrating mind

soon began to be aware that behind the outside of objects, which he succeeded so well in copying, there still lay concealed many a secret, the knowledge of which it would be worth his utmost efforts to attain. He, therefore, set about enquiring into the laws of organick formation, the ground of proportion, the rules of perspective, the composition and colouring of his objects, the effect of light and shade in a given space.

When Goethe finally arrives at a discussion of the painting, it is to discuss the setting: "The place where the picture was painted is first to be considered." This is the Dominican refectory at the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. Goethe's description makes it sound as if the painting was part interior decoration.

Opposite to the entrance, at the bottom, on the narrow side of the room, stood the Prior's table on both sides of it, along the walls, the tables of the monks, raised, like the Prior's, a step above the ground; and now, when the stranger, that might enter the room, turned himself about, he saw, on the fourth wall, over the door, not very high, a fourth table, painted, at which Christ and his Disciples were seated, as if they formed part of the company. It must, at the hour of the meal have been an interesting sight, to view the tables of the Prior and of Christ, thus facing each other ...

And so it goes, with analyses of the gestures of the hands and heads, of the postures of the disciples, and so on. It is thorough, but it leaves out of consideration any sacred meaning that even Leonardo surely intended.

Thus, Steinberg addresses, according to Phillips, such sacred meanings, in this case the theological paradox represented by the representation of the genitalia: namely, Christ's dual nature, both human and divine. Phillips ends by saying that Christian conversion has often been said to mean "falling in love with Christ." Thus, Catholicism (unlike the iconoclast Protestants) always recognized that "beautiful pictures and sculptures of Christ can be both a prompt and a magnet for the lover's gaze." At the same time, the eros that leads us to the divine "requires purification and healing to fully realize its telos." While the Renaissance imagery relates to concupiscence, it is concupiscence that is purified because "the innocent naked baby is vulnerable." The same can be said of images of the dead Christ that show traces of the genitals. Herewith a couple of paintings by Mantegna on this subject.

Now that I have said something about Goethe's all too familiar aversion to much Catholic art, what remains to be explored are the sources of this aversion.

Freedom of speech

2011-11-15T17:55:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has followed this blog knows of my interest in the above topic. My book on the history of the subject is due out any day now. One of the events that precipitated the book was the so-called Mohammed cartoons protests. Today I came across the following article, "Nausea in Paris," on the interesting "Signandsight" website. The magazine Charlie Hebdo, one of the few publications to publish the cartoons when they first cause such a furor, has been attacked, this time for a special issue on "sharia law." (The picture above shows the publisher of Charlie Hebdo.) Read and take note of the pusillanimous reaction of Western reporters, especially Time's Paris correspondent Bruce Crumley. Pretty sad stuff.

I am not familiar with the author of the signandsight posting, Frederik Stjernfelt, but his point is well taken. It's not very brave for Western "intellectuals" to get in such a lather about protests by Catholics at some work of art of which they disapprove. When it comes to Muslims, however, the same intellectuals cannot disgrace themselves enough with their chatter about "cultural sensitivities."

Photo credit: Focus.de

Victor Klemperer on world literature

2011-11-07T08:48:00.000-08:00

In off moments I liked to dip into a wonderful volume of essays by Clive James. An Australian by birth, he has lived in England since the 1960s. The volume is Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. James' cultural reach is extensive, and the volume includes essays on quite a few German writers. This morning I read the one on Ernst Jünger, who, as James writes, "was incomparably the most gifted writer to remain on the scene," meaning in Germany, during the course of World War II. The Nazi impact on German society was in every way disastrous, no more or less so than on the learned professions. Those who could got out, including Erich Auerbach who secured a post at a university in Ankara.

James writes that had Victor Klemperer, professor of Romance languages in Dresden, secured such a post, rather than being forced to remain in Dresden, where, as a Jew, he was denied access to pen, paper, newspapers, and radio broadcasts, it was unlikely that he would have produced Mimesis. "Fated to stay where he was," writes James, "he was granted the dubious reward of experiencing from close up what the Nazis did to the German language." James is referring here to Klemperer's book LTI, or Lingua tertii imperii, which documents the "officialese of slaughter." For those who can, I recommend reading it in German, but here is a link to selections from it in English. (Of late, Klemperer belatedly became known for the diaries he managed to keep during World War II.)

Actually Klemperer might have written an important study of world literature had he not been denied access to libraries during the Nazi era. In my research on the "prehistory" of Fritz Strich's groundbreaking Goethe und die Weltliteratur, I have come across an article written by Klemperer on this subject from 1929, during the very decade when Strich was first grappling with Goethe's concept. Unlike Strich, who is notorious for not footnoting, Klemperer does indicate the sources of his thinking on the concept of world literature.

As a note to James's essay and the posting of Auerbach to Ankara, several years ago -- at a conference at the Graduate Center on Erich Auerbach -- Jane O. Newman gave me a small article she had written concerning Fritz Strich's March 26, 1928, letter to the chancellor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on behalf of Walter Benjamin, who was hoping for a posting there. Strich was the author of an essay in 1917 on German Baroque poetry, which Benjamin had cited repeatedly (according to Professor Newman) in his own study of German Baroque theater.

So many connections.

Picture credits: Sigmar Polke; Maira Kalman

Goethe and world literature

2011-10-30T07:29:00.000-07:00

I have not stopped blogging, but matters close to home have kept me otherwise occupied. God willing and the creeks not rising, however, I will travel to Chicago this coming Thursday to attend the triennual conference of the Goethe Society of North America, where I will be chairing a panel on the above subject. My thoughts are also turning to my long-delayed essay on Fritz Strich and the "prehistory" of his study of world literature. For today, let me note two things concerning this prehistory.

First, though Strich's study (Goethe und die Weltliteratur) appeared in 1946, he had begun reflecting on the subject much earlier, as can be seen in an essay that appeared in 1927. The essay emerged from a lecture he gave in London in 1926, in which he addressed Germany's place among the nations. Many of us are familiar with the voices after World War II who sought the answer to this question: how did the nation that produced Bach, Goethe, and Beethoven unleash such barbarism on the world? (One might consider that those eminent figures were produced when Germany was not yet a nation and that a "qualification" for serious nationhood used to be an imperial war. But that is another matter.) Fritz Strich had already sought an answer to this question after World War I. Simply expressed, his answer was that the world had not yet taken cognizance of the healing message of conciliation and toleration among the nations as expressed in Goethe's concept of world literature.

Strich was drawing here on some of Goethe's pronouncements, which suggested that the nations of the world -- more specifically, of Europe -- were getting to know each other in a new way. Literary criticism, periodicals, travel, and so one were making us more familiar with the cultural products of other lands and, what was more, revealing a new appreciation for these products.

Second, the foundation of Strich's views on world literature rests on something that is the case: from the time they began writing in the vernacular (which coincides to a great extent with developing national consciousness) the countries of western Europe were constantly engaged in intellectual and artistic exchange, during which one country or the other originated a cultural product that was then assimilated by the others. For instance, the sonnet began in Italy but rapidly made its way through all the lands of western Europe. While such receptivity indicates a universal human tendency (according to Strich), the expression of what is borrowed is specific to each country. Thus, the Petrarchan sonnet is not that of Shakespeare, and the French Gothic is different from the Flemish and so on.

The differences are what interested Goethe. In a letter to his friend Zelter (May 1828), for instance, he mentions different performances of "Helena," in Edinburgh, Paris, and Moscow. (Apparently the episode from act 3 of Faust II, published in 1826 as "Phantasmagorie," had been staged in these three cities.) It is, Goethe writes, "very instructive in this way to get to know three different ways of thinking" (drey verschiedene Denkweisen).

What I Saw in D.C.

2011-10-20T07:04:00.001-07:00

I go to Washington, D.C. whenever I need a few days of R&R. Very good and long-time friends live in or near the District. They even have things like back yards, and we drive to restaurants. It's a great change from Manhattan, which seems to be getting louder and more crowded every day. Those of you familiar with Monet will recognize that the picture at the left is not from D.C. It was a present from my friend Suzanne Langsdorf, with whom I stayed during my visit. She calls it "Glorious Giverny." (Click on image to enlarge.) She colorized the photo, which she took last year on a trip to France, with colored pencils and printed it on an Epson color printer. The result gave me much to think about in connection with my recent posts on Goethe's ideas on art and nature.

Suzanne likes to get up very close to interesting patterns and snap. Then she goes home and gets down to work. Here she is at the Phillips Collection. The detail below is what she was interested in.

We also saw a cool series of photos at the Phillips by Allan deSouza, who, emulating The Migration Series of Jacob Lawrence (also on display at the Phillips), has created "The World Series." It has nothing to do with baseball, but deals, as per the Phillips brochure, "with the phenomenological aspects of reality expressed through sense experience and revealing the uncertainty of the historicizing process itself." Got that?

DeSouza mixes images of airport terminals, runways, waiting rooms, street signs, etc., depicting transit. People, however, are generally absent. Irony is not in absence, as can be seen in the above.

"Weltpoesie" and "Weltliteratur"

2011-10-17T08:55:00.000-07:00

I am trying out some ideas here concerning Goethe's notions concerning the above subjects; if anyone notices errors or misleading judgments, please let me know.

The art instinct, in particular poetry (Dichtung), is common to all people. This instinct is innate. One might say a natural endowment, and its products, in their most archaic or original form, are not those of the educated or elite class, but derive from the common experience of people. All men have similar dispositions, needs, etc., the expression or fulfillment of which is modified or enriched according to the environment, in the widest sense of that term. The Volksdichtung (folk poetry) of various peoples will be diverse in the reflection of ethnic peculiarities -- Herder spoke of "Stimmen der Völker" -- but will manifest a common existential content: love, war, pieties, and so on, as experienced within the archaic or primitive milieu.

World literature is an expression of advancing civilization, but it is also concerned with what Fritz Strich (in his study of Goethe's concept of world literature) refers to as "geistige Genossenschaft" (intellectual comradery), not in the universalist way of "Weltpoesie," but between and among modern classes of people. Goethe's concept sounds Eurocentric to 21st-century ears, but Goethe could hardly have envisioned in the early 19th century that non-European peoples would take their place among the moderns. His interest in non-European literature was as an expression of Weltpoesie. He certainly recognized that Persian and Chinese poetry were not instances of folk poetry, the purest form of Weltpoesie, but of advanced civilizations. They emerged (I am extrapolating here) from a different source from the literatures of Europe. The source of the latter, for Goethe, was classical literature. He also acknowledged that "the Orient" (Old Testament and New Testament) was part of this European foundation.

Goethe's animus against the German Romantics had much to do with what he saw as their undermining of this foundation. According to Ernst Behler, Goethe believed they were too attracted to emotion, subjectivity, formlessness, dilettantism, fantasy, false piety (Frömmelei), and antiquarianism and nativism (Altertümelei und Vaterländelei). Though Brentano and Arnim, for instance, were talented, what they wrote was without form and character. As Goethe wrote (in a letter to Zelter in 1808) concerning the poetry of this younger generation, they fail to understand that the highest and unique operation of nature is that of endowing with form: "Gestaltung." Form must in turn be "specific," not vague or amorphous, as he thought the case with Romantic poetry.

Picture credits: Inner Mongolia News; BigFoto

Goethe and the Greeks

2011-10-11T09:37:00.000-07:00

The title is a bit too specific for what follows, but let me go ahead anyway. My work on the free speech volume is over, since the book will be appearing by the end of October (according to the publisher). Thus, after a long break, I am finally turning back to Goethe, looking at his "aesthetic writings." His literary criticism, in particular, seems unsystematic, but there is a method behind his judgments.

First off, Goethe disliked "rules." This prejudice was instilled in him and the Sturm und Drang writers early on by Herder. He nevertheless came to theorize -- yes, Goethe did have a theory, though he would not have called it such -- about something called "Eigengesetzlichkeit": the individual lawfulness of things. The Greeks or the classical inheritance was the model for Eigengesetzlichkeit. The Greeks were not to be imitated, however, but to be emulated. Our estimation of a literary work proceeds from its success in representing the nature of man, for which the Greeks gave us the model. "Jeder sei auf seine Art ein Grieche. Aber er sei's." So Goethe wrote in 1818 in the essay Antik und modern.

Art is not imitation of nature, but its highest expressions, like Nature's phenomena, nevertheless follow laws. A work of art represents a world, imposing unity on phenomena. Though he rejected naturalism -- "Nur-Wirklichkeit" -- the work of art must not be such as simply to titillate the imagination. It must be "plastisch" in its representation, falling between naturalism and fantasy. "Plastische Dichtung" (three-dimensional literature) -- Homer was a preeminent exemplar of this type -- has a definite and finite form that nevertheless allows the imagination to perceive the eternal nature of things. Romantic poetry, in contrast, tempts the imagination into uncharted regions. Goethe was very much opposed, because it meant that poetry was abandoning the "Urgrund" (the source) of European culture.

Goethe speaks very little about formal qualities in literary works. Indeed, for the most part his conception of the literary work ignores its constructedness, its facture. Because of this absence -- and Goethe is partly guilty here -- it is common to say that Goethe wrote "from experience." And, indeed, there is much in these aesthetic writings that assert that the artist must proceed from his experience: "der Künstler [muss] von innen heraus wirken ..., indem er, gebärde er sich wie er will, immer nur sein Individuum zutage fördern wird" (Ein Wort fur junge Dichter). In other words, the artist must bring to light or reveal his own "individual." This sounds a bit like Romanticism, doesn't it? Next time I would like to go into this area a bit more.

Picture credit: Mlahanas.de

And now for something different

2011-10-09T17:41:00.001-07:00

The weather and the water conditions (note how brown the water is in the above shot of Yours Truly) have been lousy this summer, the worst in my memory since I began kayaking seven years ago. I had despaired of getting out for a long trip on the Hudson before the end of the season, but meteorological and water conditions conspired to make this a great weekend. We went out yesterday and today at 10, which meant we were paddling against a building current. Today, after two hours we still had not reached the George Washington Bridge.

If it weren't for the darn cigarette boats, it would have been a perfect day. At one point we were buzzed by about dozen of them.

Photo credit: T.H. Williams

The Man of Fifty Years

2011-10-07T11:13:00.000-07:00

I saw an object at the Metropolitan Museum the other day that prompted me to think about the above-mentioned tale by Goethe. It is the beautiful toiletry case above.

As the title telegraphs, a man of fifty, known only as "the Major," learns that his beautiful niece is in love with him. At first he finds this preposterous, but the flattery inherent in such a situation soon has him thinking it not so preposterous at all. At the same time, he is suddenly aware of his advancing years.

Previously he had been perfectly happy with both his person and his servant; now, standing before the mirror, he did not like what he saw. He was no longer able to ignore the grey hairs, and even a few wrinkles suddenly seemed to have appeared. He brushed and powdered more than usual, but in the end he had to leave things as they were. Even the cleanliness of his clothes was no longer satisfactory, as he suddenly noticed lint on his coat and dust on his boots.

His general well-being is really disturbed, however, when a friend comes to visit. This friend, though 10 years older, actually looks younger. An actor who had made his reputation in playing youthful roles, he has continued to maintain his youthful appearance. He criticizes the Major for neglecting his appearance:

It is irresponsible that your temples are already grey, that here and there your wrinkles are beginning to join up and that the crown of your head is threatening to grow bald.

We learn that the secret of his youthful looks is contained in the toiletry case (Toilettenkästchen) that he carries with him at all times, a secret he would be happy to share with the Major if they only had two weeks to spend together. Unfortunately, the friend is leaving the next day. As a compromise he leaves his valet behind, who has been initiated in all the secrets of the art of rejuvenation. The valet procures containers -- Schächtelchen, Büchschen und Gläser -- into which some of the friend's magic potions (Tinkturen, Pomaden und Balsamen) will be kept.

As can be imagined, the make-over is more complicated than it seems at first glance. Already before the Major goes to bed he must put with the valet's ministrations. And then one can't go down to breakfast without a couple of hours of preparation. In the end, the ridiculousness of trying to deny his age becomes apparent when the Major loses a tooth.

The beautiful toilet set here, from 1874, was made in England by the firm of Jenner & Knewstub. It is part of a small display at the Met entitled Thinking Outside the Box: European Cabinets, Caskets, and Cases from the Permanent Collection (1500-1900).

Translation credit: Hesperus Press

Portraits again

2011-10-01T11:09:00.000-07:00

Some months ago I did a couple of posts on portraiture, inspired by a new book by the philosopher Cynthia Freeland. Last evening I read an article about the portraits of the painter Lucian Freud, which made me think about this subject again. The author of the article, Ian Marcus Corbin, writing in the current issue of First Things, traces the "gruesome sort of candor" of Freud's style to the 19th-century French realist Gustave Courbet. A major difference between the portraits by Courbet and those by Freud is that the latter's subjects generally have their eyes closed. These closed eyes refuse to reveal the inner life of their subject, and indeed that may be Freud's point. The article is entitled "The Heavy Eyelids of Lucian Freud."

Corbin stresses Freud's relentless focus on the physical, biological body. And, while Freud was "in theory at least, deeply committed to capturing the flesh of his subjects, where flesh meets consciousness, he stepped lightly, if at all." Corbin traces this approach to Freud's profound anti-metaphysical attitudes, which the artist shared with many of his contemporaries. Thus, he is "commended for his courageous willingness to look grim reality, again and again, in the cheeck, navel, and nipple. His mature work is a modern memento more, a hard-eyed stare at the way of all flesh."

I have never cared for Freud's work and quickly passed by the recent homage now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His attitude toward his subjects was too unsparing for me, as if they were being attacked by the very brushwork Freud wielded. But, to return to portraits and especially to Freeman's ruminations in her book: we are drawn to portraits because of what they reveal of the person. As Corbin writes, Freud failed to answer the question: what is the particular point of painting humans? His decision to paint his subjects with their eyes closed was "philosophically weighty, because, for a portraitist, the eyes are not just one organ among many. They are where the psyche, or soul, can seem most visible." Ultimately, Corbin gives Freud credit for avoiding a "homogenized fantasy world," even if his work is plagued by the "postmodern taste for what Saul Bellow called 'the harshest or most niggardly explanation' of human phenomena."

In describing Goethe, his contemporaries frequently alluded to his eyes. His fellow student Heinrich Stilling in Strassburg, in 1771, spoke of Goethe as an excellent man with "big bright eyes, splendid forehead and fine build" who, moreover, dominated the company he was in. (By the way, Stilling's autobiographical novel, Heinrich Stillings Leben, is a precious and revealing document of this period.) Heinrich Christian Boie, who met Goethe in Frankfurt in 1774, spoke of "a heart as great and noble as his mind," and of the intelligence revealed by his "bright brown eyes." In Karlsbad in 1785 Goethe was said to stand out at the spa because of his beautiful eyes.

Picture credit: Art History Archive; Recherche

World lit versus global lit

2011-09-24T06:36:00.001-07:00

What prompts me to a digression on the above subject is a novel I just finished reading, Seven Years (Sieben Jahre) by the Swiss writer Peter Stamm. (Michael Hofmann provides an impeccable English translation.) It has echoes of Albert Camus, absent the worldly heft that gave weight to the novels of Camus and even of Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus and Sartre, after all, had lived through a world war and French colonialism, whereas the characters in Seven Years have lived through times of plenty, until the end, when they encounter the economic downturn of 2008. But before that happens, during their architectural studies in Munich, their travels to Marseilles, the success of their business, they are plagued by existential anomie.

The subject of Stamm's novel, as can be guessed from the title, concerns a marriage. Besides the echoes of Camus and Sartre (particularly in the pared-down narrative style), I also thought of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Again, Bergman made a movie about individuals who were rooted in a historical place and time. History -- in particular war, during which the civilized nations of the world had turned their vast arsenal of "progress" on each other -- had let people down, so to speak, and their anomie was, to an extent, understandable. (Wonderful portrait here of this state of the soul by Richard Cronborg.) The dissatisfaction felt by Mariane and Johan, with their marriage and their lives, related to the disparity between the ideals with which they had been raised and the compromises of everyday reality. The couple in Stamm's novel, Alex and Sonia, are similarly suffering from this disparity, though neither one has a deep historical consciousness. The novel takes place in contemporary time -- the fall of the Wall is mentioned -- but no one has much interest in what that fall represents, aside from the opportunity to make money in the East.

What does Stamm's novel have to do with world literature? Goethe thought of world literature, particularly the work of translators, as a way of allowing us to understand other cultures and peoples and, if not to love or even like them, to appreciate the differences. Goethe lived in a time in which, materially, people in the advancing West were becoming more alike, but Goethe thought that national differences would remain. Goethe's love for the literature of other lands certainly speaks to appreciation of "difference." Yet the fact is that the worldwide commerce that was making people's material lives similar in his time has also led to the uniformity of their moral life. The people in Stamm's novel might be Americans.

This point is made by Tim Parks in his write-up on Stamm in the New York Review of Books: "If you didn't know Stamm was Swiss, nothing in the English translation would betray this blemish." As Parks writes: "Stamm is one of a growing group of writers ... who, whether consciously or otherwise, have evolved a style to suit the requirements of a global literary market. None of these authors writes exclusively or even first and foremost for the country they live in. ... What we are seeing, then, is the development of styles of writing that are no longer to be understood in relation to the literary tradition the author grew up in, but to the new world of international fiction, books translated no sooner written into a dozen languages." I would only add that Stamm's stories and novels of what Parks calls "ordinary emptiness," of "lives without coherence or direction," is a Western phenomenon, again the result of the spread of material affluence with which the West was beginning to be rewarded in the early 19th century.

Picture credits: The Criterion Collection; Richard Cronborg

Goethe and the Beloved

2011-09-17T07:34:00.000-07:00

The subject of my dissertation so many years ago concerned Goethe's "escape from the idyll," by which I was referring to his abandonment of one of the literary forms he most loved in his youth, namely, the poetic idyll. Traditionally the idyll was inhabited by shepherds; thus, this form is also often called a pastoral. Goethe wrote many idylls, sometimes seeming to shed the pastoral element, though I contended in my dissertation and later in an article that the pastoral did not really go missing but was instead represented as endangered. For instance, the character of Werther in The Sorrows of Young Werther represents a pastoral shepherd. After all, the chief occupation of poetic shepherds is falling in love, and one of their chief activities is dancing. And where does Werther meet Lotte and fall in love with her? At a dance. His pining for her is also characteristic of poetic shepherds.

As in The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe's idylls are always shadowed by something dark. Though lovers in pastorals often fade away in love, they don't commit suicide, as does Werther. My argument concerning this short novel was that the idyll represented for Goethe a poetic suicide and that, to free himself and become the giant of German letters, he had to free himself from this poetic form, something that Werther failed at. Nevertheless, Goethe did not quite abandon his fondness for the poetic inspiration of his youth; instead, his works feature many idylls in which, however, it ends up being destroyed. One only has to think of one of the final scenes of Faust II, when the idyll of Philomen and Baucis is destroyed.

Love, as said, represents the chief occupation of poetic shepherds, and love is, I dare say, the most prominent theme of Goethe's literary works. Yet rather than the wholehearted poetic-shepherd embrace of the experience, the lover in Goethe's poetry seems more enamored of the recollection of love, from a distance. For instance, a very early poem entitled "The Night." The first two lines in its original version, from 1768, are as follows: "Gern verlass' ich diese Hütte,/ Meiner Schönen Aufenthalt." This is of course a paradox: he is happy to leave the abode of the beloved? Goethe seemed to recognize this paradox, for when he published the collection Neue Lieder in 1789 he changed the first line to read: "Nun [now] verlass' ich diese Hütte."

Love in absentia also characterizes a later and very beautiful poem, "Nähe des Geliebten," from 1795. As has been noted, Goethe wrote this poem after reading a similar one by Friederike Brun, entitled "Ich denke dein." In Brun's poem one has the feeling that the person being remembered has died, which is not the case in Goethe's poem. Here is a translation (from 1844) by William Edmonstoune Aytoun:

I think of thee when'er the sun is glowing
Upon the lake;
Of thee, when in the crystal fountain flowing
The moonbeams shake.

I see thee when the wanton wind is busy,
And dust-clouds rise;
In the deep night, when o'er the bridge so dizzy
The wanderer hies.

I hear thee when the waves, with hollow roaring,
Gush forth their fill;
Often along the heath I go exploring,
When all is still.

I am with thee! Though far thou art and darkling,
Yet art thou near.
The sun goes down, the stars will soon be sparkling
-- Oh, wert thou here.

Interestingly, Aytoun did not translate the title as per Goethe's title -- "Nearness of the Beloved" -- but as "Separation." The poet feels the nearness when the beloved is elsewhere. Of course, it should be added that the poetic voice in this case is feminine, as in Brun's poem.

Picture credit: Bonza Sheila

Reflections on catastrophe

2011-09-11T08:11:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago the U.S. homeland was attacked by Islamic terrorists. The Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C. were the targets of airliners, while a fourth plane failed in its target and went down in a field in Pennsylvania. I went through photos yesterday, looking for something different for this blog, and discovered the one above highlighting another NYC icon, the Statue of Liberty. No matter how many times I am downtown, and sometimes I am even on the Hudson River in a kayak, my eyes always seek out the statue.

To signal this tenth anniversary of the attacks, I will not dwell on my response, which I recorded at the time and sent to friends. Maybe on the 20th anniversary, I will dig it out and look at it. There is a lot of controversy concerning the U.S. response to the attacks, and I feel that it is still a bit soon to be able to properly assess them. I want to talk here about another catastrophe, not of men's making, but a natural one, namely, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Goethe wrote about it over half a century after the event, in his autobiography Poetry and Truth.

It seems to me that the advanced thinkers of the 18th century would have had little difficulty in responding to the attacks of 9/11. Clearly, these were attacks of war, similar to Pearl Harbor, if not backed up by the military resources of any particular nation. It is a different kind of army that is waging this war, but the 18th-century thinkers had given lots of thought to war. Mostly they thought that religious conflicts were behind wars, though even in the case of 9/11 it is not only religion that propels the terrorists. The 9/11 terrorists, after all, were not products of madrasas but of Western education. Nevertheless, for 18th-century thinkers, a military response to an attack like 9/11 (as in the invasion of Afghanistan) would not have been considered intelligent or rational. War was bad.

The memory of the Thirty Years' War was still fresh in the early decades of the 18th century, when Bodmer began his literary career. In his Critical Observations of 1741, he talks about the effects of certain phenomena on the emotions, the first two of which are beauty and grandeur. Both of these are "natural" phenomena and can be said to be universal in their operations: as humans, we all respond to beauty and to grand objects like the starry skies above. He included a third group, however, which turns out to fit oddly with these two phenomena, namely, the effects of what he calls "das Ungestueme" (or violent). Among these are violent storms, plagues, shipwrecks, and so on, in a sense "natural" phenomena but ones that cast us down rather than elevate our emotions. He also mentions in this category wars and the operations of "Pulver" or weaponry.

This last, however, cannot be considered natural in the same way as a tsunami, but Bodmer was not engaging in philosophical reflections here. He was writing about the effects of the representation of these phenomena in poetry. Thus, his examples of the category of "das Ungestueme" are all taken from literature. For instance, he begins by discussing the shipwrecks in the Odyssey and the Aneid. On the effects of the representation of war he introduces his favorite poet, Martin Opitz, who was alive during the Thirty Years' War. I haven't looked at his work in years, but Opitz did, in a sense, poeticize about contemporary events (for instance, the marriage of his princely patron), perhaps even about the battles that plagued Germany before 1648. (Although I think Opitz may have spent many of the years in Holland.) But even Opitz drew his literary inspiration from earlier poets, and his treatment of contemporary battles was saturated with earlier literary representation.

By the time Goethe wrote his observations on the Lisbon earthquake, however, even poets were reflecting on natural phenomena and trying to give voice to their reaction to them, stripped of mediated literary garb. In doing a little research for this post, I was surprised to discover that Kant had written three texts on earthquakes, inspired by the one in Lisbon. Earthquakes, of course, were a subject of reflection on the sublime, but Kant seems to have been interested in the geology. Goethe's response to the earthquake, like that of many in the 18th century, was to question the supposed providential design of the world. Here is a portion of the reaction of his six-year-old self. (Goethe was born in 1749.):

God-fearing persons were moved to wise observations, philosophers offered consoling arguments, and clergymen preached fiery sermons. ... [T]he demon of terror has perhaps at no other time spread its chill over the world as quickly and powerfully.

Having to hear all of this repeatedly, I was more than a little disconcerted by it in my boyish mind. God, the Creator and Preserver of heaven and earth, who had been presented to me as so very wise and merciful in the explanation of the first article of the Creed, had shown Himself by no means fatherly when He abandoned both the just and the unjust to the same destruction (transl. Robert R. Heitner).

Goethe is here documenting the contemporary philosophical and theological reflection concerning the causes of the Lisbon earthquake. As Theodor Adorno wrote concerning Voltaire, the earthquake caused him to abandon his Leibnizian theodicy. Goethe's response is slightly different, accusing God of having been wrathful. The latter response, however, seems normal or usual; people are always inclined to think things might have been different had they only acted differently and to consider bad things a judgment on them. I am not so sure we should get over our feeling of connectedness, even if we don't really influence the course of natural phenomena.

I notice, however, that the occurrence of catastrophic natural events -- tsunamis, etc. -- always brings out the skeptics and cynics who make fun of people who do believe a divine hand is at work. These cynics introduce the theodicy argument: why would a benevolent God allow such bad things to happen, to the just and unjust alike, as Goethe wrote? These skeptics have a point, but I notice that when the catastrophic event is not natural, but is rather mad-made, as in the case of 9/11, the skeptics are the first to say we should not start casting blame. As with violent natural phenomena, there must be an explanation. This is a legacy of the Enlightenment, when we began to understand the workings of the natural world and even to have some control over them. I can't help thinking that the current fears about global warming tap into our belief that we might have some control over nature, if we just change our bad ways.

Photo credits: The Jawa Report; Fine Art America; Victorian Web; NOAA

Thinking about the poor

2011-09-04T06:56:00.001-07:00

A book I began reading this summer is entitled How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read. It is by a Frenchman, Pierre Bayard, a professor of French literature at the University of Paris. The title is facetious, in the French way, since it is actually a serious book, and Professor Bayard has clearly read all the books he discusses. I bring it up, because I have been asked to write a review of a new biography of Charles Dickens for a national magazine for which I occasionally write literary reviews. I am not a scholar of Charles Dickens or of the 19th century, but in Bayard's terms I clearly know how to talk about Dickens. That is to say, I know how to find my bearings "within books as a system" and to understand how a writer or a work is situated in relation to other writers or books. Bayard's example in his first chapter is James Joyce's Ulysses, which he claims not to have read. And though its content is foreign to him, its "location" is not, and he can situate it "with relative precision" in relation to other books, for instance, Homer's Odyssey, and thus, as he writes, he often finds himself alluding to Joyce "without the slightest anxiety."

Well, I am not one to write a review of a biography of Dickens without at least consulting other biographers of the Victorian novelist. Suffice it to say that I have also read a number of novels by Dickens, back in my youth. Recently I have paged through some of those novels -- Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Old Curiosity Shop -- and I have asked myself whether anyone over the age of 18 can possibly bear to read Dickens today. George Orwell, a great writer who has some splendid insights on Dickens's novels, has said that he read all of them in his boyhood, but could our present crop of high-school grads get through Dickens' outsized loquacity and verbal inventiveness? It says much about the intelligence of early 19th-century readers that they seemed to have understood Dickens without any problem at all.

George Gissing, well worth reading though a now rather overlooked 19th-century writer, published a study of Dickens in 1898. Gissing, a man of socialist leanings, admired Dickens, and in his opening chapter he sketches the economic transformation that began to turn England into an industrial power in the early 19th century, one that bred a larger population and a larger class of poor and indeed impoverished people and resulted in, for instance, the employment of children as young as five or six in coal mines. Gissing would like to make Dickens a champion of reforms with novels that pointed out the "stupidity and heartlessness" of the age. Orwell, however, points out in his essay on Dickens that, while Dickens condemned a "gifted child working in a factory" (David Copperfield), he nowhere writes that no child should work in a factory 10 hours a day."

For Orwell, Dickens is a "radical," in the sense that he is instinctively against "the system," but with no practical solutions for improvement; he only has a perception that "something is wrong" with society. Dickens' idea of progress, according to Orwell, is moral in nature: Dickens does not suggest socialism. He does not want for workers to be rebellious, but for capitalists to be kind. He seemed to be reaching for what Orwell called "an idealized version of the existing thing."

This feeling that "something is wrong" with the world as it is can also be heard in the 18th century among the philosophes and other enlightened minds, as I mentioned in my recent postings on Franco Venturi's Utopia and Reform. In the 18th century there was a steady and increasing chorus of vociferations against "the rich" and "the powerful," coupled with denunciations of the treatment of "the poor" and otherwise disadvantaged. I can't help thinking that in the course of the transition to the 19th century, the attacks on the well-off became a kind of trope, what Venturi refers to as one of those "mental forms which, once they are fixed and shaped, will never yield without long and difficult trials and struggles." He is writing here of the expansion of the traditional utopia in the Enlightenment to the determination to create paradise on earth, in other words, the passage to the communist ideal. This determination is always accompanied by something like loathing for "what is." Gissing writes, for instance, of the mid-19th century: "A time of ugliness: ugly religion, ugly law, ugly relations between rich and poor, ugly clothes, ugly furniture." Social progress, as envisioned by reformers like Gissing, is always accompanied by hatred or repugnance for what went before.

Of course, one only lives when one lives, and it is hard to get a handle on whether a preceding age was as abominable as it is portrayed post hoc facto. I think Dickens remains a powerful and important writer because, through his very inventiveness and vibrant imagination, he "fixed and shaped" (in Venturi's words) a view of the Victorian age that allows later ages to believe that they have "morally progressed." It is only anecdotally that we are able to cite progress, and I have not yet seen the attempt by any statistician to quantify progress as such; the variables would be too numerous. My own feeling is that, even in the worst of times, people find ways to be comfortable, if not happy. Thus, another reason why Dickens remains an important writer. According to G.K. Chesterton (in his study of Dickens), Dickens "knew well that the greatest happiness that has been known since Eden is the happiness of the unhappy. ... Nothing that has ever been written about human delights, no Earthly Paradise, no Utopia has ever come so near the quick nerve of happiness as his descriptions of the rare extravagances of the poor." One only has to think of the Cratchits at their Christmas feast. (A Christmas Carol, by the way, is the one book by Dickens that I read once a year.)

Maybe someone can instruct me on this, but wasn't it Nietzsche who was the first to critique that mental form that denounces the rich and idealizes the poor?

Picture credit: I am a child

Utopia and Reform

2011-08-30T06:08:00.000-07:00

I want to add a few more comments to my earlier posting ("Intellectuals and Power") on Franco Venturi's book, and in particular Goethe's reason for staying in Weimar. Goethe's interest in working for political reform shows the penetration of ideas within Europe by the 1760s, in which Paris and the circle around the Encyclopedists played a major role. There was, writes Venturi, a "great convergence of those who were ahead of the times, and those who were behind, of those who had shown the way, and those who had tried to follow." A determination to change things was spreading, "however diverse the problems in various parts of Europe were." And it was believed, among these forward thinkers, that they should be the ones to guide society. Thus, I return to quote that led me to look at Venturi in the first place: "Power and philosophy seek each other." By the 1780s, the philosophes in France had "advanced" beyond reform and were instead "preparing for revolution." Not so in Weimar, by which time Goethe had abandoned government service and the revolutionary effects on German lands were still a couple of decades in the future.

Venturi's goal in his book was "to put the problem of the impact of republican tradition on the development of the Enlightenment." The importance of the ancient Roman republic in the symbolism of the French revolutionaries can be seen, for instance, in the paintings of Jacques-Louis David, but there were contemporary republics in Europe that produced lots of ink. One of these was Geneva, and it was this city that formed the centerpiece of Rousseau's ideas in the Social Contract. And here we find a nice link with Bodmer, who was a great fan of Rousseau's ideas and whose dramas of the late 1760s reflect the virtuous republic that Rousseau espoused.

According to Venturi, in turning to Geneva Rousseau envisioned a kind of utopia. To survive as a republic, Geneva would have to go back to the period of its origins, even before the Protestant reformation, because it was there that Geneva "would discover that just division of political power which had been lost in the 16th century under the rule of a few noble families. ... [T]he image of a city in which virtue was rooted in a long tradition never left him."

Bodmer was a professor of Swiss history for nearly 50 years, and during this period he inspired a number of young Swiss for republicanism and against the undemocratic politics of contemporary Zurich. Notable among Bodmer's disciples were Lavater and Henry Fuseli, who went into temporary exile in Germany in 1761 because of their exposure of an unjust magistrate whose family was set on revenge. Moreover, Bodmer's dramas, published in 1768-69, exemplify the corruptions of republics and the choices of virtuous citizens desirous of maintaining ancient privileges of liberty. No doubt because of censorship, they are set in ancient times and bear such titles as Thrasea Pätus, Marcus Brutus, Tarquinus Superbus, and Die Tegeaten. As Jesko Reiling points out in his recent study, these dramas were much maligned in their own time, as being too full of ideas and too empty of aesthetic attraction. Bodmer shares with Rousseau a certain humorlessness, and he even went so far as to defend his dramas by saying that the theater as it was developing in the late 18th century, especially its emotionalism, served the goals of absolutism by making citizens unpolitical. Do I hear intimations of Bert Brecht?

Even before David painted his Oath of the Horatii (1784), Fuseli had already drawn on Swiss republican tradition, that of the ancient Swiss Confederacy, in his 1780 painting. (See my earlier post on this.) Bodmer is now receiving much scholarly re-assessment, and his connection with the republican tradition is waiting to be drawn. (Interestingly, Venturi mentions him in the introduction to his Utopia and Reform, along with other neglected German-language thinkers.) The influence of his republicanism can be seen in another work by Bodmer's disciple Fuseli, a defense of Rousseau at the time of the latter's quarrel with Hume.

Goethe on Google.de

2011-08-29T05:22:00.001-07:00

World Literature

2011-08-28T08:45:00.000-07:00

David Cornwall, aka John le Carré, has just been awarded the Goethe-Medaille 2011, along with the Polish writer Adam Michnik (both pictured above) and the French avant garde theater director Ariane Mnochkine. The ceremony took place in the "Residenzschloss" in Weimar. They were distinguished for their contributions to German letters as well as in connection with the focus of this year's awards, namely, "the cultural future of Europe."

According to the account in the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, Michnik is optimistic about such a future, while Le Carré is more skeptical, sounding a note that I often invoke. He is quoted as saying that a united Europe remains a project of elites, its institutions far removed from the concerns of citizens and dominated by economics: "What is needed is a peaceful revolution of the middle classes."

I think it was the advent of a "united Europe" in Goethe's time, which was not so much cultural as economic, that determined Goethe's own thinking about the prospects of what he called world literature. Goethe didn't imagine that the nations of Europe would give up their individual destinies or particular character; he hoped, as he wrote, that they would simply learn to get along, which he thought would be helped by acquaintance with the various literary products of the nations. Franco Venturi, in the book on which I posted yesterday, writes that a characteristic of the surviving republics in pre-revolutionary Europe -- e.g., Holland, Venice, Genoa -- was the desire for for peace and harmony. Though he mentions the commercial nature of these republics, he does not stress the connection between a "spiritual ideal" -- harmony, tolerance, etc. -- and the material conditions -- economic prosperity -- that make this ideal possible. Thus, though I would agree with Le Carré concerning the elite nature of the project of united Europe and its appalling "democracy deficit," I think he underrates how much affluence and prosperity make Western ideals possible. Well, as far as I can discern he remains an unreconstructed Leftist.

A year ago, while doing research on my world literature project, I discovered that Le Carré had become acquainted while a student in Berne with Fritz Strich, the "father" of modern studies on this subject. Until Strich's 1946 work Goethe und die Weltliteratur, this aspect of Goethe's oeuvre was practically neglected; starting in the early 1950s, however, that work begat an industry in world literature. As I posted earlier, our understanding of world literature would be assisted by studying the background of how Strich came to his subject. Thus, I was interested in whether Le Carré had any particular memories of Strich and wrote to him. His response, which I am paraphrasing, was as follows:

While he was pleased to learn that the work of Strich was of interest to Germanists, he could not help me in any meaningful way. He was barely seventeen when he attended Strich's seminars, and his German was "indifferent," and much of what was said "went over" his head. However, Strich had "the humanity to notice this" and allowed him to stay behind at the end of his seminar for a few minutes, instructing him in the groundwork of German literature that might enable him to rise to Strich's own level. Le Carré followed his instruction, and by the time he left Bern was equipped with the tools with which he could one day appreciate Strich's eminence. In his note to me, Le Carré confessed that he was a "broken reed" when it came to "the finer points of his [Strich's] theses, or indeed the substance of them" -- meaning world literature. His lasting impression was of "an elderly, distinguished gentleman who had spotted a student who was completely out of his depth" and to whom Le Carré found himself greatly indebted when he returned to German literature.

The substance of this response has been reported in other newspapers and reports in Europe in recent years, including here, on the occasion of the speech Le Carré gave in 2009 at the celebration of the 175th anniversary of the University of Berne. In it he again gives due credit to Fritz Strich.

What particularly touched me about Le Carré's response was its similarity to mine at the age of seventeen, when I too went off the university. I come from a really white-bread American background. For instance, before college the only plays I had ever seen performed live were high school productions (though back in my day they were quite professional), and I had never been to a museum. My decision to study German in college was solely determined by my fondness for a history teacher in my last year of high school, who had the intriguing last name of "Braeutigam." I started making up for my intellectual deficits in college, but probably the most formative experience was the year I spent studying in Marburg as a junior in college. Though I didn't study with anyone as eminent as Strich, I had the same experience, not only with professors but also with German students, who went out of their way to assist me in the fine points of the German language and its history. And, of course, they took me into their homes and their activities. For instance, I learned to drink beer and wine!

Photo credit: Breitbart; Modern Alliance; Trübe-Linse

Intellectuals and Power

2011-08-27T09:52:00.000-07:00

A scholar from whom I much profited while writing the introduction to my volume on the history of freedom of speech was J.G.A. Pocock, especially articles on the problematic nature of the concepts of "Europe" and "the West" generally. As Pocock wrote in the article "Some Europes and Their History," Europe is a word used to denote "a great many things that are important in human experience." It was in another work, Pocock's multivolume study of Edward Gibbon, however, that I came across an interesting quote: "Power and philosophy seek each other." It comes from the book Utopia and Reform by the Italian historian Franco Venturi. Recently I got Venturi's volume out of the library and read it in several sittings, finally finding the quote in the last chapter. I will say more about this work in succeeding postings, but I wanted to mention something today because it sheds some light on why Goethe chose to stay in Weimar.

Venturi's starting point, as the title indicates, was the perceived need, beginning in the early 18th century, for a solution to a felt political crisis. The absolutist states, with their desire for expansion and power, were placing intolerable burdens on the population and on the functions of government, while the still existing independent republics had insurmountable problems of their own. As Venturi writes, ideas of reform and utopia were linked by the attempt to modify aspects of society inherited from the past and to bring about practical change. The absolutist governments of Prussia, the Hapsburgs, and Russia were in this sense top-down reformist. Catherine the Great, for instance, ordered the translation of Western works in the 1760s. There was, as Venturi writes, a "determination to change things," which derived from a common language and center in France, in particular the writings of the Encyclopedie circle.

In this reform of existing institutions, the philosophes, according to Venturi, were asking to be allowed to act as guides: "Everywhere in Europe, one finds this pretension, this determination to lead and guide society." I will try not to get ahead of myself -- by the 1770s, especially in France, reform of existing institutions had been abandoned in favor of a total transformation -- and now turn to Goethe.

Goethe went to Weimar in 1775, as the Duke's guest, and initially played a role that fit in with the cultural policies of Anna Amalia. Weimar was becoming a literary center, one of the most important signs of which was the Teutscher Merkur, established by Wieland. Still, Weimar was remote and backward, even in comparison with Goethe's native Frankfurt. Moreover, as is well known, the first decade in Weimar was a backwards step in Goethe's literary production, something Goethe himself acknowledged by fleeing to Rome in 1786.

His reasons for remaining in Weimar touch on the very issues that Venturi mentions. In "enlightened Europe" of the 1760s and 1770s, the new intelligensia became conscious of its own strength in "speaking truth to power." Indeed, Goethe's Sturm und Drang works might be said to voice these challenges to traditional authority -- church, state, or otherwise. Within Goethe's first year in Weimar, Carl August had appointed him as one of his privy councilors. Did it seem to Goethe that he might be able to help transform a small, impoverished duchy through "enlightened" reforms?

Nicholas Boyle, the most recent biographer of Goethe, thinks so. As he writes: "Weimar offered him an entrée to the court life that he had hitherto seen only briefly and from outside, and like any other autocracy, untrammeled by constitutions and traditions, it offered to young, ambitious, and gifted men the prospect of far more rapid advancement in the exercise of administrative power than could be hoped for in the cautious city-states, where promotion came essentially only with age ... Goethe saw in Weimar's offer the possibility of doing something -- perhaps even useful to his fellow men ... certainly of fulfilling the ambitions that his father had had perforce to renounce when the door closed on his own political career."

In the end, the experiment failed, and in 1785 Goethe withdrew from his governing duties and ended his political career. His one success at "reform" seems to have been in helping the Duke to subdue, according to Boyle, "both the martinet and the playboy within" and making of him "a benevolent despot." In this respect, Goethe was more successful than Voltaire had been with Frederick the Great. (See Lytton Strachey's entertaining account of that relationship.) Power and philosophy sought each other, to paraphrase Venturi, and the result was disillusion on both sides.

Picture credits: Felix Petruska; Helmut Roewer; Roger Payne

Goethe on Schwanau

2011-08-21T06:59:00.000-07:00

I came across this charming postcard on the Goethezeit-Portal website. The date on the card would seem to refer to a visit by Goethe on the island of Schwanau on July 17, 1775. The visit would have occurred on his return from the so-called first Swiss journey, which Goethe undertook from Frankfurt with the Stolberg brothers in May of 1775. Goethe was supposedly fleeing from the pressure of his amorous entanglement with Lili Schönemann. The poem "Auf dem See," recording an outing on Lake Zurich, recalls this relationship. (Here a translation by the singer Tomoko Yamamoto.) While in Zurich he stayed with Lavater, who introduced him to some of the local eminences, including the now aged Bodmer. Though Goethe had dreamed for years of making a journey to Italy, he went only as far as the Gotthard Pass, which he reached on June 23.

I have looked through all of my reference books and can find no indication that Goethe was actually on Schwanau, a small island in Lake Lauerz. There is today an inn on the island that has a "Goethe-Stube" that can accommodate (according to the inn's website) 30 guests. As can be seen in the photo above, the room, with its windows and ceiling, looks just like the one in the postcard.

Goethe's visits to even the most obscure locations are pretty well documented. For instance, a year earlier, in July 1774, Goethe made an excursion on the Rhine and the Lahn with Lavater and Basedow. According to the plaque picture on the postcard, Goethe and his companions left their ship and had a "Mittagsmahl" at the "Wirtshaus an der Lahn" near Coblenz.

It was already fashionable in the 18th century to travel in the footsteps of beloved authors. In 1791, for instance, Friederike Brun visited another Swiss island, the Isle of Saint-Pierre on Lake Biel. It was made famous by Rousseau, who described his idyll there in 1765 in the fifth promenade of Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Rousseau, when the lake was not calm for rowing, liked to find a charming, isolated nook, where he could dream undisturbed and where the view, he wrote, was limited only by the distant range of mountains. After enjoying lunch in the humble room in which Rousseau stayed, Brun, in a nice inversion, refers to the prospect outside the window, hemmed in by the peaks of glaciers: "The view is limited, but vast for the imagination." The title of one of her poems gives an idea of her sentimental itinerary: "Die Insel auf dem Bielersee (An Rousseaus Schatten)."

So, the visit to Schwanau remains mysterious. Maybe someone reading this has information on the visit there?

Indexing

2011-08-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

One of the things that kept me busy last month was the task of indexing my book. Indexes are one of the arcana of scholarship, along with footnotes. In most cases today the footnote has lost its former position at the bottom of the page of text and has been relegated to the back of the book, thus becoming an "endnote." The footnote has even been the subject of an impressive academic study by Anthony Grafton, who specializes in the arcana of scholarship. According to Grafton (this is a quote from a review of The Footnote: A Curious History), the footnote is "critical to the scientific nature of historical writing and therefore reflects both the ideology and technical practices of the craft. The footnote confers 'proof' that the historian has visited the appropriate archives, dusted off the necessary documents, and consulted and exhausted the secondary literature. It is, in short, a badge of legitimacy." Okay.

I have not yet come across a scholarly study of the index, but it too has a history. The most famous index is of course "the Index," the list of books prohibited by the Catholic Church. I was raised Catholic in the years before Vatican II so the Index was not an unfamiliar term to me as a child. I didn't associate it with Descartes or Galileo but with certain scandalous movies.

In contemporary publishing of course the index is not a separate entity, but goes to the back of the book. I am certain that everyone reading this knows what an index is. Suffice it for me to say that the index has received literary treatment. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle includes a character who is an indexer who claims (I am taking this from Wikipedia) to be able to read an indexer's character through the index. I look forward to hearing what people think of my index. I have prepared indexes before -- I had a career in scholarly publishing before turning scholarly myself -- but this one was a hair tearing-out experience. Had I read Cat's Cradle I might have taken the indexer's advice never to index one's own book. Nevertheless, the work made me appreciate even more the general excellence of the book. Perhaps a reviewer will even note the excellent index!

There is a parody of an index in Nabokov's novel Pale Fire, reflecting the narrator's insanity. A final literary example is the novel House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, which, among other unconventional attributes, includes a 200-page index of words in the novel. The Guardian reviewer called it "a satire of academic criticism." Well, at 709 pages, I am unlikely to read it.

Picture credits: Indianetzone; Avesta Archives

Catching up, a bit

2011-08-14T07:21:00.000-07:00

I have fallen behind in my posting. Overload is the only way to describe the past couple of months, not least because of health issues involving my husband. We persevere.

Another bit of overload was preparation for my talk at the New York Public Library, which actually went swimmingly. It took place at 1:30 of a Thursday afternoon, and there was a very large crowd. My aim was to demonstrate how current anxieties regarding speech have their origins in the 18th century. For instance, people worried back then not only about offending the feelings of what were considered the "disadvantaged," but there was also the tendency to categorize non-Europeans as large ethnic or racial groups, thus effacing the differences among individuals. This tendency, I would suggest, is part of the "universalizing" narrative of the Enlightenment, whereby we are all "humans," rather than individuals affected by history, tradition, custom, convention, etc. In fact, it is all those historical and traditional traces that one must jettison in order to be "enlightened."

Thus, even some of the most "advanced" thinkers of the Enlightenment, those men Jonathan Israel (a contributor to my book) has referred to as belonging to the "radical Enlightenment," had reservations about "public opinion." They argued for the freedom to publish and to voice their own opinions, of course, which they believed would lead to the discovery of what they called "truth." Truth, however, is not the standard of modern liberal societies, where the free flow of information and opinion drives material progress.

It is not their fault that they could not foresee the advent of a garrulous public square. Among the philosophes, I believe it was only Rousseau who saw this coming. He was very uncomfortable with dissent and disagreement. His solution was to suggest that we all give up our opinions to a "General Will," which we arrive at by avoiding the opinions of others and listening instead to "the voice of duty."

You can imagine that the subject of my talk could have been somewhat arcane for a non-academic crowd, but I livened it up with a remarkable visual presentation. The Mac has its own version of Power Point, which offers some really wonderful effects. I don't think a single person fell asleep.

It's Entertainment!

2011-08-06T07:51:00.000-07:00

Various matters have kept me from posting lately, but I saw something this morning that seemed to require comment, especially since I have posted on this subject already, namely, the Alexander McQueen exhibition. In fact, I have posted on it twice.

I live on the West Side of Manhattan, directly across Central Park from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since I am there frequently, I saw the McQueen show early on, when it was still possible to view it without much of a wait. Something about the exhibition really caught on, however, and gradually the lines began to lengthen. If you go to this link, the exhibition space for McQueen is the orange area at the top on the second floor.

The lines for the show soon snaked out down that narrow hallway parallel to the 19th-century galleries (in light purple on the map). They then began to extend further, making a 45 degree turn and continuing through the Ancient Near Eastern galleries (the part that is indicated by blank space above the three green rooms, 175, 174, 173), all the way to the Great Balcony (which you can see labeled on the map). It wasn't long before the lines went down the Great Staircase itself and down into the rotunda of the museum. This morning, as can be seen in the above photo, the lines are now outside the museum and snaking around the back up to the east drive of Central Park. One of the guards told me people had started lining up at 6 a.m. The museum will be open until midnight tonight and tomorrow.

So, why did this exhibit catch on? Well, I am not going to spend much time analyzing it. As I wrote earlier, novelty has much to do with the crowds. Novelty produces a certain desperation; people don't want to think they missed something new. Of course, we are an age saturated with the continuous production of the new. In fact, the brightest minds of the generation under 50 years of age are engaged in producing entertainment. I'm not immune to good entertainment. Though I don't have a TV, I gladly watch Burn Notice on my iMac.

McQueen, whatever one thinks of his couture creations, was highly gifted, though the "vision" thing was a little offputting to me. I remember saying to myself as I looked at some of the clothes: "I can see why this guy committed suicide." Very morbid mind. (See example above. Amazingly the collection is called "ready to wear.") It is probably this morbidity that also drives people to the show. We want to see extreme things. Maybe because we are banned from extremities in our speech. Being honest nowadays, after all, is often called hate speech. Politeness has been expunged by McQueen.

All that is novel passes. According to the Drudge Report yesterday, the most recent episode of Jersey Shore was a "bust": only 9 million viewers! (Full disclosure: I have never seen it.) Will people talk about Alexander McQueen a year from now? Or will they only talk about the fact that they stood in line for two hours?

Photo credits: Wall Street Journal online; Oodora; NJ.com

Birth of "the modern liberal state"

2011-07-23T10:22:00.000-07:00

The phrase in quotes above is from the very end of Rory Muir's review (in the July 1 Times Literary Supplement) of several new publications (re)evaluating military strategy of the Napoleonic era. In his summation of the five books under review, he mentions the "diversity" of those who fought against Napoleon: the rank-and-file British soldiers under Wellington; the peasants and ordinary people, especially in Spain, who took to the hills to resist the French; the Austrian Joseph Radetzky and his polyglot army; and Clausewitz and the Prussian officer corps. Thus, the portrait here of a Cameron piper urging on the Highland Line at the Battle of Waterloo. And, Muir writes, "it was this very diversity that was at stake in a struggle to preserve local traditions and differences in the face of an intrusive modernizing government that was intervening to an unprecedented extent in areas of life and belief that had hitherto been private."

In the end, the battle was won -- Waterloo -- but the war was lost. As Muir writes, the battle was won only by copying Napoleon's methods: "Income tax, conscription and the gendarmerie became permanent fixtures of European life. The modern liberal state was here to stay."
At a glance, I can't quite see what income taxes, conscription, and the gendarmerie have to do with the "liberal state," which for most us probably rests principally on the rights and freedoms guaranteed by law. It is true, however, that modern law is "universal" and, indeed, in its application is by its very nature contemptuous of local traditions. For instance, all men (make that "humans") are "equal." The insistence on equality means that all of us must be reduced to the same common denominator, without allowance for local sentiments, traditions, and the like.

But our so-called liberal values and rights are not "universal." I agree with the postmodernists in this respect. Those values and rights have been historically achieved, the outcome of centuries of attempts by peoples all over western Europe to carve out different realms of freedom for themselves: to own businesses, to make a profit, to worship as they chose, to exchange cultural and scientific information, to pay less in taxes, to hold the powerful accountable. And it was the intercourse among all these different peoples that gradually produced, by the beginning of the 19th century, a very similar way of life among the elites and well-to-do of these different cultures and the belief among them that their way of life was "natural." And, so, though they were products of different cultures, they all ended up producing legal systems that protected this way of life.

Clearly, there is something about "Western" institutions that is attractive, especially to people from nations inimical to individual rights, but one should not think that there is anything "natural" about these institutions. As I point out in the introduction to my new book on the history of freedom of speech, our values seem natural to us, because they are "our" values. And because they are "ours," a legacy from previous generations, they should be cherished like any precious object that we inherit from our forefathers and foremothers.

When I was doing research for my introduction, I came across an interesting quote from the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. His response to the doctrine of natural rights was that it was, "from beginning to end so much flat assertion." Islam, after all, also claims universality for its doctrines, and its adherents believe these are self-evident. For instance, the women above probably believe it is natural to be fully covered at all times, even in 104 degree heat. Or maybe 120 in Afghanistan. But Islam and other world religions are also powerful traditional and institutional entities. The current "return of religion" does not necessarily indicate revanchism, as some claim; rather, it affirms the power of institutions and traditions, not just religious, but also social, political, cultural, and so on.

Thus, the modern liberal state and the values it enshrines are not merely an abstract construct, but, in a multicultural world, represent an authentic cultural product, one that is the work of generations. Knowledge of how this product was created -- and imparting that knowledge is the aim of my book -- will also help us to preserve it.

Manhattan circumnavigation

2011-07-20T17:22:00.000-07:00

The past week has been busy with reading proofs for my new book, communicating with the contributors to the volume, and, now, getting ready to prepare the index. Still, it has not been all work. Last Saturday I went on a kayak circumnavigation of Manhattan. The photo at the top shows part of our group launching from Pier 40 in Manhattan in the early a.m. That's my friend Rose in front, with whom I often kayak, and New Jersey across the Hudson River in the background. And the glorious photograph and the others below (including one of myself) is by kayaking pal David Gottlieb, who is also a photographer extraordinaire. Last year I did another circumnav, and David's photos were just as splendid. I wish I could take pictures like that myself, but I've learned my lesson. Last year, landing at South Beach on Staten Island, my kayak was caught in a rip current and turned over, drenching me and everything that was not in the hatch, which included my non-waterproof camera.

Kayaking is something I only got involved in about six years ago, and there is no way I will ever reach beyond my current BCU2 level. I simply don't have the time, and, if I had my druthers, I would really prefer to spend lazy afternoons on a lake or lazily paddling down a quiet river, as in the small figure in the painting here, which I saw in Chelsea this spring -- and, unforgivably, I don't know the name of the German painter. I will find it, however, and correct the omission, but suffice it to say at the moment that the river in question in the Fulda.

Paddling in an urban area like Manhattan, however, you get kind of tough and macho and push yourself to newer feats. Last year, several of us paddled to the Verrazano Bridge and beyond, hoping to land at Swinburne Island, but at a certain point past Staten Island you start to feel you are really in the ocean, and there was no way we were able to put in on the island. That's when we turned back and landed instead on South Beach, where I had my encounter with the rip current. This year, my goal is to paddle north to the Tappan Zee Bridge, about a forty-mile paddle. The trip has to be timed to catch the currents right, and what makes the trip more unpredictable in summer is that, even if you have the current on your return -- and the ebb current is really stronger in the Hudson than the flood -- you are likely to encounter south winds, which means you can face gigantic swells.

That's what happened on the circumnav on Saturday. According to Phil, another kayak buddy who keeps a track of these things by GPS, we covered 30.1 statute miles, with an average speed of 4.7 mph -- and a maximum speed of 9.6 mph. All was well through the 27-mile mark, but at 125th Street, about a mile south of the George Washington Bridge, we crashed into strong south winds that pushed three- to five-foot swells against the current. The picture below gives an idea of how rough the river was.

Before those swells set in, however, there were sights to see, and even a break at Hallets Cove in Queens. By the way, I should add that I have fond memories of Pier 40, where we launched at 7 a.m. on Saturday. Pier 40 was where, as a girl of eighteen, I caught a ship of the Holland-American Line, for my first trip to Europe. I had come to New York, where I actually stayed in a hotel by myself. I had a friend from college, with whom I had gone to see a Broadway play the night before, Oliver! The next morning, leaving my hotel, I caught a cab and told the driver, "Pier 40." It was like saying, "Grand Central Station." Everyone knew what Pier 40 meant, and I often think of that first European trip when I bike past Pier 40. The ocean liners don't berth there anymore, but it is the site of various boating activities, including the Downtown Boathouse, where I am a volunteer.

UPDATE (9/9/11): The painting above of a kayaker on the Fulda River in Germany is by Silke SchÖner, whose exhibition I visited back in May at the Dillon Gallery in Manhattan. Sometimes it helps to clean off one's desk.

Freedom of Speech: The History of an Idea

2011-07-12T17:27:00.000-07:00

Well, that is the official title of the book, and the publication date, according to Amazon, is September 16. No wonder I am sitting at home in this warm weather proofreading. If I say so myself, this is a great volume; I assembled a really excellent group of contributors. I am giving a talk in August at the New York Public Library on the subject, trying to tie together current anxieties concerning speech -- particularly the vexed issue of "hate speech" -- with similar anxieties among 18th-century thinkers, including the most "advanced" thinkers of the time, the philosophes. As I read proofs I keep encountering various nuggets that could have come right from the mouths of contemporary public intellectuals. Herewith some examples, with various rationales for denying the right of freedom of speech to ordinary folks:

"Enlightened monarch" Frederick the Great (below), responding to Baron d'Holbach's System of Nature (1770), argued that Holbach was wrong to want to enlighten all the people and give them freedoms and rights, which instead should be only the privilege of the educated. Frederick disagreed with Holbach that errors in thinking would be erased by a gradual advance of reason. Superstition and credulity were in any case proper to ordinary folk and helped to maintain the "moral and social order," by which we may infer he really meant the power of monarchs like himself.

I love the picture above of Holbach, one of the granddaddies of the French Revolution. (Too bad he died in January of 1789: I wondered what he would have said about its excesses.) He asserted that "the truth" should be accessible to all. But whose truth? And did one have the freedom to make mistakes? Not at all: there needed to be legislation to prevent the arts, for instance, from harming the morals of citizens and also to direct the taste of artists so that they would produce more useful works. Writers, after all, according to Holbach, must always keep in mind "what they owe to virtue, to morals, and to their fellow citizens" (Ethocratie ou le gouvernement fondé sur la morale, 1776).

The anxiety about the "feelings" of others is present in a writing by Herder. He asks who will be hurt if "blasphemous, voluptuous, and scandalous writings" are allowed. Certainly not the thinking man, but, rather, society's marginalized: "the vain milksop, the weak woman, the inexperienced youth, the innocent child." And it is the role of the state to protect these: "The state is the Mother of all its children; it must see to the health, strength, and purity of all."

Rousseau was not only an advocate of censorship (close down the theaters!) but of the suppression of public opinion and open dissent. Among the philosophes, I would venture to say that, pre-French Revolution, he was one of the few who seemed to discern the rise of democracy and of widespread difference of opinion. He did not celebrate such diversity, however; the so-called General Will would not emerge from the discussions of citizens, but from a popular assembly in which the members did not have communication among themselves. In his extremely popular novel Julie, or the New Héloise (1761), the communication between Julie and her lover, Saint Preux, is one that avoids words. As Saint Preux recalls: "How many things were said without opening the lips! How many sentiments were transmitted without the cold agency of speech!"

Such distrust of speech was common among philosophes, who feared the disagreements that speech caused. The desire for unanimity seems to be an accompaniment to the belief that something like "truth" can be discerned. As Benjamin Constant later wrote, "Truth is not just good to know; it is good to search for." It was the search that was important. And search involves error. As I write in the conclusion to this volume, despite all we owe to the philosophes for first articulating the arguments about rights, they were anchored in past intellectual traditions that valorized the pursuit of truth and, ultimately, agreement.

Truth, however, is not the standard of liberal democracies, which function not by imposing a few grand ideas handed down from on high, but by encouraging a marketplace of diverse, competing, rapidly changing, and unrestrained opinions. The marketplace of ideas was already a fact on the ground, before freedom of speech was legislated in the U.S. and France in the late 18th century, in the veritable tide of scientific and technical knowledge that traveled freely across Europe. The unfettered proliferation of theories and opinions, even of crackpot ideas -- and there were certainly many -- unleashed individual risk-taking, ingenuity, invention, and the historically unprecedented wealth that created "the West."

Picture credit: Coach Ben;

The Discontents of Intellectuals

2011-07-05T07:02:00.000-07:00

I just read a book over the Fourth of July weekend that was appropriate to the holiday, Crane Brinton's The Anatomy of Revolution. The American Revolution is one of his four cases, along with the 17th-century "Glorious Revolution" in England and the French and Russian revolutions. Brinton's initial thesis is that the financial/economic inefficiency of the government hinders the economic activity of citizens (high taxes and other onerous financial impositions) in societies that are themselves growing economically. As he writes, the four cases do not reveal a picture of "the old regime as an unregenerate tyranny, sweeping to its end in a climax of despotic indifference to the clamor of its abused subjects." In all cases, the bankrupt governments were actually working to "modernize," but the attempts at reform were part of the process that issued in revolution.

What interested me was the role of intellectuals, who, in the modern world, are a particularly disaffected lot, but whose disaffection (think Victorian England) does not always rise to the level of demands for a total transformation of society. In 18th-century France, however, the "roll" of intellectuals convinced that the world, and especially France, needed making over, "from the tiniest and more insignificant details to the most general moral and legal principles," was quite long. As Brinton writes, "Literature in late 18th-century France is overwhelmingly sociological." But, as he adds, throughout "Enlightenment Europe" there are few "active literary conservatives like Samuel Johnson or Sir Walter Scott, or even literary neutrals, men pursuing in letters a beauty or an understanding quite outside politics."

This is the case even with Joseph Addison and Johann Jacob Bodmer, on whom I have posted much lately. Both men used "letters" in the cause of social transformation. Addison's Spectator essays and Bodmer and Breitinger's Discourses of the Painters had the aim of improving people's conduct by being "entertaining." I think that after the 1720s Bodmer became more "actively literary," if one considers the critical treatises of the early 1740s, but certainly his later dramas and epics were explicitly in the service of social and moral transformation.

Where does Goethe fit in? Certainly in the Sturm und Drang period there is much criticism of existing social arrangements. The Sorrows of Young Werther, aside from its literary charms, makes the case that bright young men of merit have little chance of social ascent because they are excluded by the hidebound aristocratic class. Moreover, the institution of government itself, as portrayed in Werther, seems equally sclerotic. Of course, one might say that Werther finds pushing papers beneath him, that he is a pathological case unwilling to adapt himself to the demands of reality, for instance, working and thereby having an income to marry and raise a family. "Pathology," however, is exactly what Brinton is describing in the case of pre-revolutionary France. The hatred of government and of the ruling class was intense.

There is another characteristic of the such intellectuals that Brinton mentions, namely, "the deliberate espousal of the cause of discontented or repressed classes -- upperdogs voluntarily siding with underdogs. ... Such upper-class mavericks must be relatively numerous as well as conspicuous in a society in disequilibrium." Again, one sees signs of this "decadence" in the Sturm und Drang writings, for instance, in the dramas of Lenz and Klinger. Goethe, of course, introduces the "repressed" classes, most notably in the figure of Gretchen. (Drawing above by Peter Cornelius.)

Germany (insofar as one can speak of "Germany" in this period) was of course different from France. One thing that distinguishes Goethe from the French intellectuals is that he actually went to work in government. He was also pretty dedicated. At close hand, however, dealing with the governed, he must have recognized the limits of what government is able to do. His literary work after his move to Weimar certainly becomes less "sociological," even more so after Rome. Schiller, it must be said, did want to transform society, and his literary works and writings on aesthetics were in that service. (But even Schiller became skeptical of the French Revolution.) Goethe, in his relationship with Schiller in the 1790s, was coopted in this effort, but after Schiller's death Goethe seems to have become even more a man "pursuing in letters a beauty or an understanding quite outside politics." Think The East-West Divan. Which is not to assert that political conditions are not reflected in his later writings. Even the Divan is an attempt to escape the pervasive demands of contemporary politics. This pervasiveness is a curse of modern intellectuals.

Picture credits: Cardillowiki; Goethezeitportal

"Novelty" and Romanticism

2011-07-03T07:37:00.000-07:00

To return again to F.L. Lucas and to The Decline and Fall of Romantic Poetry, this time to his comments on "novelty" in poetry. "The goddess Novelty," he writes, "is one of the immortals. Her handiwork is everywhere." As an example he notes finding, "in a remote part of Cornwall," a new kind of tea cup, with a square base instead of a round one, fitting into a square depression in the saucer. Later he writes that "novelties may tickle the conscious curiosity; but deeper levels are stirred by older impulses -- things whose echoes go back to the childhood of the individual and the race. Modernity may bring new awakenings; but one wine and old memories bring dreams."

One has to keep in mind that Lucas was writing in 1936 and also that he was one of the few English academics (R.G. Collingwood was another), who were warning against the Germans. In a footnote he mentions receiving an "ungrammatical" and "unprintable" letter from Ezra Pound, who is "a total stranger to me," threatening violence, "because I had written to the press on behalf of the unfortunate Abyssinians."

Thus, though Lucas loved Romantic poetry, especially its wealth of images and its ability to express "less conscious levels of the mind," he deplored what he saw as the excesses of this liberation as they were manifest in the politics, society, and culture of the early 20th century. It strikes me that he might have gone a step further and linked Romanticism and Novelty. Let us see how Addison and Bodmer treated this subject of "Romanticism avant la lettre."

You may recall that Addison had written that "every thing that is Great, New, or Beautiful, is apt to affect the Imagination with Pleasure." Of the new or uncommon he wrote that "it fills the Soul with an agreeable Surprise, gratifies its Curiosity, and gives it an Idea of which it was not before possest. We are indeed so often conversant with one Sett of Objects and tired out with so many repeated Shows of the same things, that whatever is new or uncommon contributes a little to vary human Life, and to divert our Minds, for a while, with the strangeness of its Appearance" (Spectator, 412).

Bodmer follows Addison closely in respect to the Great and the Beautiful. For instance, he imputes the effect of beauty to the human desire for reproduction. Thus, the sight of a country house surrounded by woods, meadows, and so on arouses desire for possession. Likewise, the the effect on the imagination of grand natural phenomena, which fill the soul with amazement. Our response to these phenomena are grounded in our nature as humans.

Novelty, however, Bodmer rejects precisely because it is not grounded in human nature, but in the sentiments. Bodmer uses the term "Gemüthe," which is a notoriously difficult term to translate, but let me say that "Gemüthe" is characterized by its fickleness. It is culture-dependent, responding to passing things, a product of changing fashions, unlike the beautiful and the great, which affect people equally, at all times, no matter their different cultural interpretation of those categories. Think East and West, Tahiti and the France of Louis XIV. Thus, in place of novelty, Bodmer introduced the concept of the turbulent (das Ungestüme), which include such violent phenomena as shipwrecks, tsunamis, the Flood, plagues, and, of course wars. All affect humans equally.

Lucas writes in a similar vein of "universals": "There are ... certain qualities that we have learned spontaneously to value because life has proved them valuable. This instinctive admiration is like the instinctive pleasure we taken in other wholesome things; but more distinterested, more aesthetic. Vitality, strength, courage, devotion, pity, grace -- these move us, as directly as beauty moves us." For Bodmer and Addison, those values were incorporated in great literature, representing "the very Spirit and Soul of fine Writing " (Spectator, 409). As Lucas recognized, no one in 1936 could agree on such values, but he was certain that "the qualities by which men have survived are hardly irrelevant to the survival of literature. One may doubt if it is to 'hollow men' that the future world belongs." (Did I mention that Lucas was also a critic of T.S. Eliot?)

Let me tie all this together by returning to Alexander McQueen, on whom I posted earlier, wondering how to classify his "creations." One cannot doubt the excellence of his craftsmanship, and certainly craftsmanship is something to admire, especially if one has visited the galleries in Chelsea lately. However, as Addison might have written: "our Thoughts [are] a little agitated and relieved at the Sight of such Objects as are ever in Motion, and sliding away from beneath the Eye of the Beholder." Thus, despite the fact that many of McQueen's "dresses" are cringe-inducing, one cannot deny that they are exceedingly and successfully novel. Otherwise, why would there be lines snaking all the way across the second floor of the Metropolitan and crowds inside the exhibit? People are curious. As Addison writes, novelty "serves us for a kind of Refreshment, and takes off from that Satiety we are apt to complain of in our usual and ordinary entertainments."

I hope the above does not suggest that I am retreating for my earlier approval of "Spiel" in art, on which I posted several times, including in connection with McQueen. However, I think that Lucas brings up an important point about excellence in craftsmanship, writing of the neoclassical aesthetics of the 18th century: "if it had become easy to say what was good in poetry, it had become strangely rare to write it."

(As can be seen from the pictures above from our recent outing to visit our friends Steven and Martina, we are also in favor of "Spiel," even while discussing such weighty matters.)

Romanticism vs. Classicism revisited

2011-06-23T18:31:00.000-07:00

Here is a sentence from F.L. Lucas's book The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (see previous post) that throws light on Goethe's "Romantic" tendencies: "The Odyssey seems to me ... a standing proof of the superiority of work that, with all its Romantic dreaming, yet maintains to the end Classic sanity and self-control." Lucas might seem to be talking about Goethe here, whom he quotes on occasion, mostly with that misleading judgment of Goethe's concerning the "diseased" nature of Romantic poetry.

The second chapter of Lucas's book concerns the "pasts" of Romantic literature, which he defines as a "dream-picture of life; providing sustenance and fulfillment for impulses cramped by society or life." This is the most prosaic thing Lucas writes in what is otherwise a fascinating excursus into ancient and modern literatures. In this chapter he begins with the Romantic tendencies of the Greeks, for instance, the imaginative nature of Greek mythology, which has "turned our heavens to a constellated tapestry of the stories of Orion and Andromeda and the rest." Indeed, as he writes, "few things are more romantic than 'classical' mythology."

At the same time, the Greeks did not fall prey to the excesses of imagination exhibited by Goethe's Jena contemporaries. As Lucas writes, the "Romantic" elements seen in classical writers, such as the golden bough by which Aneas gains entrance to the underworld in Virgil's Aeneid, "surprise, like strange plants sown by some wandering bird or wind in fields far from home." The ancients always had a guardian standing at the portals of the dream world to turn back shapes too fantastic. Of interest to me was the objections of Longinus to the fantastic elements of the Odyssey, which he thought made Homer less great. His objection to the shutting of the winds in a bag, or Circe's turning men into swine show, according to Lucas, "how over-wakeful and over-sober, here as always, is the Classic sense of fact!"

He goes on to talk about the Hellenistic era, in which the countryside of Theocritus looks forward to that of Wordsworth, and of the late Greek romances (The Golden Ass), in which the classical sense of reality and grasp of character have totally faded. The latter also characterize much literature of the Middle Ages, in which "Romance blooms everywhere, like the mistletoe in the orchards of Normandy." It was in the Middle Ages, before the modern attitude to the world was born, that imagination really ran riot. "Men believed what they read, and what they believed, they embroidered."

Lucas's exemplary case is Aucassin and Nicolette. Like Homer's Achilles, Aucassin will not go to battle because the woman he loves has been taken away. "But Homer hardly tells us how Briseis looked, or how Achilles felt for her. She remains in his hands a dazzling shadow -- 'fair cheeked,' 'like golden Aphrodite.' ... How vividly, by contrast, Nicolette looks out of her prison window in Beaucaire, or clambers down from it by her rope of sheets and towels!" Reading Lucas reminds me of why I first studied literature.

And, finally, another insight into Goethe, as Lucas writes of the reason for the "lasting triumph" of Greek literature: its balance of classicism, realism, and romanticism. Sappho writes, he says, with a heart of madness, but her hand does not shake. I think that describes Goethe, after his encounter with Italy, but this combination is lacking in 18th-century neoclassicism.

I had not encountered F.L. Lucas before a week ago, but he has a breadth as impressive as Curtius or Auerbach. And what an impressive oeuvre, both critical and literary.

Romanticism vs. Classicism

2011-06-20T08:23:00.000-07:00

No matter how often one tries to pin down what Romanticism is all about, or the difference between Classicism and Romanticism (in the critical, not the historical, sense, since, as has been pointed out, many of the canonical Greek and Roman writers were deeply "Romantic"), one's ideas on this subject are always in the process of growing or taking on added dimensions. Some things you simply have to repeat to yourself over and over. For the most part, I think it is extremely difficult to transport oneself mentally to the era in which "Classical" standards reigned. Emotions, fantasy, inspiration, even egoism were all harnessed, encased in form or ritual or convention. Such restraint is evident today mostly in politics, in conservative thought.

I have been reading a slender but rich book on this subject by F.L. Lucas, from 1936, entitled The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal. Lucas is quite ecumenical, opening in highly satisfactory fashion by quoting a poem by Heine, the one beginning "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam/ Im Norden auf kahler Höh." Besides English poetry, Lucas ranges widely into other European languages and is also not restricted to the turn of the 19th century. Not only Wordsworth and Chateaubriand, but also, e.g., Housmann and Baudelaire.

I think there is a connection between the rise of Romanticism in art and literature in the late 18th century and the sublime, on which I have posted frequently. The connection is the rise of taste and of individual "judgment" in the arts. Power passed from the former arbiters. Initially criticism sought to anchor judgment in reason, which was a universal human capacity, but in time there was a revolt against reason's seeming dictates. Lucas introduces charming figurative language to distinguish between classicism and romanticism. Of the former he writes, elliptically: "Grace, self-knowledge, self-control; the sense of form, the easy wearing of the chains of art hidden under flowers, as with some sculptured group that fills with life and litheness its straitened prison in the triangle of a pediment." Of the latter: "Remoteness, the sad delight of desolation, silence and the supernatural, winter and dreariness; vampirine love and stolen trysts, the flowering of passion and the death of beauty."

He then goes on to explore what the "psychological differences" between the two. Drawing to an extent on Freud, he writes of the reconciliation by the "art of life" of two conflicting forces: the instinctive impulse of the human animal versus the influences of other human beings, the latter of which become second nature, so that "A man not only likes or dislikes certain things; he likes or dislikes himself for liking or disliking them." Romanticism is an attempt "to drown this difference and liberate the unconscious life." Venturing an "Aristotelian definition" of Romantic literature, he writes: "a dream-picture of life; providing sustenance and fulfilment for impulses cramped by society or reality."

I am trying to fit Goethe in here, since there is so much that fits with Lucas's exposition, and I speak not merely of the Goethe of the Sturm und Drang years, when he was affected by Herder's ideas concerning the priestly character of primitive poetry and the delights of common, realistic detail. Lucas mentions the dependence of Romantic writers on inspiration and their disinclination to revise. It is true that Goethe went back and revised his early works, in particular The Sorrows of Young Werther, in the period when he was beginning to work against his Romantic tendencies and to exercise more control over his imagination. Otherwise, however, Goethe was not a great reviser. He simply added on, as in the case of Faust. He hated "correcting" -- or being corrected.

While Goethe recoiled from "fantastic" in the productions of contemporary German poets and their pilgrimages to the Middle Ages, he wrote much poetry set in distant times and places, the West-East Divan being the most prominent example. And "vampirine love": how about The Bride of Corinth? There is also something lacking in Goethe's other three novels, namely, a plot. Lucas writes of "the quiet sympathy a writer needs in order to observe and delineate characters other than his own or shadows of his own." Goethe, unlike Jane Austen, lacks that sympathy.

Goethe was, however, vigilant against excess, against the "airy-fairy." If he thought reality left much to be desired, he relentlessly came to terms with that lack. He was able to create beautiful poetry while wearing, as Lucas writes, "a stiff shirt front." A Romantic in the shape of a Classic.

"The figure under the carpet"

2011-06-13T06:18:00.001-07:00

The phrase is from Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James. He uses other, similar figures of speech: e.g., "reading the reverse of the tapestry." The biographer's task is to get behind the mask that a subject presents in order to discover what Edel calls the "life myth" or "the inner myth we create in order to live." I suppose Edel was speaking of the subconscious or perhaps the unconscious of an artist. He indicates that we are not satisfied with the work that an artist presents us; we insist on figuring out the workings of his mind. I remember back in graduate school attending a lecture on Thomas Mann. Someone offered Thomas Mann's own opinion of a certain work, to which a young professor made the seemingly scandalous comment that Thomas Mann was simply one of many interpreters of Thomas Mann's works.

Autobiographies by writers and artists have also become suspect, though I have to admit that they seem to offer insight that the works don't, at least as far as the life goes, into the workings of the mind. One of my favorite books is Stephen Spender's memoir, World Within Worlds. Goethe's autobiography, Poetry and Truth, was much mocked in its own time by Romantic writers, on the grounds of its absence of "revelations" about the self. Still, I think it is a pretty fine "tapestry," to use Edel's term. The problem, I think, is reading too deeply into Goethe. He may have been more superficial than one has been led to assume. Or he may have been moved by other things.

I was thinking about this yesterday at the Museum of Biblical Art in Manhattan (MOBIA), the last day of the exhibition Passion in Venice, which does not feature paintings of luscious Venetian females but, instead, of the mortified, crucified body of Christ, half-risen from his tomb, an iconographic motif known as The Man of Sorrows (or Schmerzensmann, according to Panofsky). This particular motif allowed artists to use all their craftsmanship to portray Christ as "the most despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53:3). It is quite amazing how this one Biblical verse inspired so many artists of the most varying temperaments. At the same time, it is evidence that a small number of themes is all an artist needs. Goethe wrote somewhere (and I have to trace this) that subject is all important. Well, before the modern period the subject was given, and artists ran with it.

Goethe might have approved of some works in the show, but I suspect very few, especially not the depiction of the gory details. Goethe is notorious for wishing to avoid suffering. I would like to have seen his reaction when faced with Crivelli's gruesome rendering (in Philadelphia Museum of Art) of the Man of Sorrows. Look at Christ's left hand and see if you don't cringe. And all the blood dripping from his wounds in Michele Giambono's painting (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

While visiting Bologna in October 1786, Goethe saw works by Guido Reni, of whom he wrote:

While you are attracted by Guido's beatific intent, by his brush, which should have painted only the most perfect things that can be gazed upon, at the same time you want to avert your eyes from the disgustingly stupid subjects, for which there are no words bad enough, and thus it is throughout. We cannot get away from the dissecting room, the gallows, the abattoir, and the sufferings of the hero ... Nothing is there to suggest humanity! (Robert R. Heitner translation, p. 88)

By "hero" I believe Goethe is here referring to Christ or other religious figures. To my ears, such a term is harsh; it bypasses what has been considered the redemptive nature of Christ's suffering. Goethe is of course indicating that he thinks Western art took a wrong turn in terms of subject. I think Goethe's "life myth" is pretty evident. Part of our problem with Goethe is not taking him at his word.

Freedom of speech: its history

2011-06-09T07:18:00.000-07:00

Well, it must be summer, because I have become lazy about posting. Here in Manhattan we are in "Hochsommer." I went out early this morning for a bike ride along the Hudson, trying to beat the heat. A nice river breeze. It's funny how the beginning of summer makes me think I have time to accomplish many things. One thing I have to do this summer is to give a talk, on August 4, on the history of freedom of speech at the New York Public Library. What I hope to get across in my talk is that the discomforts we are now experiencing in connection with speech -- especially the issue of "hate speech" -- were already present in the 18th century. Despite the claim that is attributed to Voltaire -- "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" -- I can't think of a single philosophe who imagined that freedom of speech should apply to ordinary citizens.

Thus, Condorcet was not saying anything controversial when, in 1776, he defined public opinion as "that of the stupidest and most miserable section of the population." Condorcet was one of the godfathers of the French Revolution. And though freedom of opinion and the communication of ideas were included in the National Assembly's Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (articles 10 and 11), Condorcet became a victim of the revolution, dying in prison in 1794 after having been a fugitive from the revolutionary authorities.

Rousseau's "general will" is a problematic concept, but one thing it is not is majority opinion. In fact, Rousseau was against debate and dissent, which indicated "the ascendence of private interests and the decline of the state" (The Social Contract, 1762). In the general will citizens should surrender their private interests and opinions, a surrender that happens in silence. The general will, he wrote, can only emerge from a popular assembly, "provided its members do not have any communication among themselves."

Most philosophes thought the government, with their assistance, should guide the public's minds. In their demands for "progress," the philosophes failed to see the emergence of a society of individuals who would be free to pursue their own self-interest, regardless of the claims of truth, and in the process produce the plethora of competing claims and viewpoints that characterize the public square today -- all the while managing to live together amidst the clash of conflicting opinions, without the society descending into the Hobbesian chaos so many philosophes feared.

Ordinary people in the West, where notions of individual freedom are something like second nature, manage to live amid competing opinions, even if many opinions offend their sensibilities. It is one of the prices we pay for living in a society in which we can go about our own business without the meddling of authorities. Unfortunately, too much "enlightened" opinion today would like things to be more orderly. Like the 18th-century philosophes, our 21st century commentariat is uncomfortable when ordinary citizens have different priorities. Thus, the commentariat's claim, like Condorcet in the 18th century, that the public is "stupid."

Picture credit: BLU

Memorial Day 2011

2011-05-31T06:29:00.000-07:00

I did no work today. Amazing. Rick got me out of the apartment early to attend the ceremonies at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, which is just around the corner from us. I have been living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for a long time now, and the Memorial Day events have grown from year to year. I can't help feeling that the country is on a course correction, which (to my mind anyway) is a good thing. Mayor Bloomberg gave a very good (and short) speech. The main speaker was Lincoln historian Harold Holzer. From him we learned that the first New Yorker to die in the Union cause was Elmer E. Ellsworth. Serving in the White House with Lincoln, he espied a Confederate flag across the Potomac, flying above the Marshall House Inn. He went there directly and toward the flag down, only to be shot by the inn's proprietor.

From there we biked down to the Battery and caught the ferry to Governors Island. I hate to be one of those people who talk about "how things used to be," but the truth is that, the first time we went to Governors with our bikes, hardly anyone was there. (Actually the first time I went there was in a kayak, with a group of paddlers from the Downtown Boathouse.) We had to wait an hour to get on the ferry. Nevertheless, it was fun to be there. So, we did Memorial Day in true American fashion.

Keeping up with new fiction

2011-05-27T09:08:00.000-07:00

This is somewhat off-topic, but it is prompted by spending a couple of hours this morning going through about six months of the New York Times Book Review. As a scholar of 18th-century literature, and especially of Goethe, there is a drawback: one often doesn't know what is going on, literature-wise, in one's own time. Goethe certainly kept abreast of new developments, whether literary, artistic, even political. A friend of mine regularly channels her finished copies of the NYTBR to me. I am reminded anew of why I stopped reading the so-called paper of record years ago: boring. Make that BORING. It's hard to image why anyone would be interested in most of the new novels it reviews. Here are some outtakes from reviews read this morning:

"Solitude at Twilight: A widow's quiet life is altered when she buys a car and find herself open to the world anew"

"Only Bitterness Remains: In David Vann's first novel, isolation and an Alaskan winter take their toll on a marriage"

"Growing up Fast: As this novel's 14-year-old narrator looks on, her affluent suburban family disintegrates"

"Power of Recall: A writer recollects her long-estranged mother, and her own long-estranged childhood"

"Child Catcher: In this memoir, Margaux Fragoso rememers her relationship with the man who molested her"

I do not intend to make light of the emotional pain experienced or portrayed by these writers, but why are revelations of self-laceration and dysfunction so "popular" with publishers? Pleasures are always small, but epiphanic (the widow buys a car). There is nothing to get enthused about anymore, so we are told. People are invited to reflect on sadness.

The news pages of The New York Times are also infested with downbeat "narratives." News stories on the front page, for instance, no longer consist of facts, but, instead, of stories. Thus, an article on poverty always begins with, say, a single mom living in a trailer in some rural outback. These articles are unashamedly manipulative. Though I haven't read the Times for about three decades, I bet they haven't run an article in that time in which hard work triumphs. The paper has a relentlessly negative tic. Some people call the newspaper's slant "liberal"; I call it postmodernist. Bodmer would disapprove. So would Goethe.

Just for the record, here are some novels I have read in the past couple of years, with "grades": The Lost Books of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason (C); The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson (A-); Foreign Bodies, by Cynthia Ozick (C); The Imperfectionists, by Tim Rachman (B+); Serious Men, by Manu Joseph (A-); Generosity, by Richard Powers (A-); The Short Day Dying, by Peter Hobbs (A-); Cooking with Fernet-Branca, by James Hamilton-Patterson (A); Me and Kaminski, by Daniel Kehlmann (A); Loving Sabotage, by Amelie Nothomb (B+); My Revolutions, by Hari Kunzru (A); A Person of Interest, by Susan Choi (A); The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker (A).

By criterion for an "A" is based more on finding the book entertaining or enjoyable than in literary merit. Now it is time to go back to the 18th century.

Picture credit: Harold's Planet

It is art

2011-05-26T07:47:00.000-07:00

We went to see Werner Herzog's newest film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. As the title indicates, the movie is steeped in the hocus pocus that pervades Herzog's excursions. Entering the cave at Chauvet with him, we are supposed to feel awe, perhaps even religious tremors. That said, the movie was tremendously interesting, though the relentless focus on the "mystery" of the cave -- and the supposed "dreams" of its paleolithic artists -- meant that the movie totally neglected how the paintings were executed.

Until seeing the movie, I had never paid much attention to prehistoric art. The examples I had noticed almost in passing, especially engraved or incised representations of animals, certainly show expertise in rock carving. They cannot have been "thrown off" in an afternoon. They were obviously consciously intended, for what purpose the archaeologists have not yet discerned, yet they do seem communal and perhaps representative of social values -- as at left, from Sweden, showing three men perhaps performing a ritual. An interesting point in Herzog's movie is that Neanderthal man, though he made tools, did not produce "symbolic representations." That distinction belongs to homo sapiens. Humans seem to have wanted to preserve memories.

According to the movie, the paintings at Chauvet date to at least 30,000 years ago. There is some controversy concerning that dating, despite the "scientific methods" (e.g., carbon dating) used, because the analysis has been carried out in a single French lab, one that also has sole jurisdiction over the cave. I would suspect also that the paintings were made in various stages. Perhaps some were begun on June 7 30,000 years ago, and others in 29,000. If so, we are talking about the difference between, say, the Book of Lindisfarne and Jacques-Louis David. Judith Thurman, in The New Yorker, calls the Chauvet painting of of horses and rhinos at the top of this post a "frieze." It strikes me, however, that the individual elements -- the horses, the rhinos -- might have been done at different times and by different hands.

The row of horses certainly seems "advanced" in comparison with other paintings in the same cave. Note the use of perspective with several of the horses on the same plane. According to the British sculptor John Robinson, the "panel" (as he called it), smudging had been used to produce shadow. The painter had also highlighted the outer edge of the drawing by chiseling into the white rock surface. I have also learned that, after sketching outlines in charcoal, in some cases red ochre (as in the painting of a horse from Lascaux) or charcoal would be spit, sometimes using a narrow tube, to create the infill. (For more information about Chauvet go to Don's maps.)

Nevertheless, whether they were painted 10,000 or 30,000 years ago, one has to say that the Chauvet horses are "art." They seem to have no utilitarian purpose, but are there for themselves. Their value, as Roger Scruton, has written in his small book on beauty, resides in them and not in their purpose. The technique for creating these works suggests they were not done in the laborious and time-consuming manner of rock carvings. Thus, there was more play involved.

But is it art?

2011-05-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

In the last post I addressed the shortcomings of Bodmer's literary efforts, which were widely considered by his contemporaries to be little more than moral tracts. These works were written in the 1740s, after his large critical treatises, and indicate the transitional position Bodmer occupies. From Plato onward, there were many critics who were uncomfortable with the power of art to affect the imagination, and thus poets themselves were often quick to point out that instruction went down better when it was dressed up with pleasing language, imagery, characters, and so on: docere yes, but don't forget movere. Bodmer's contemporary Salomon Gessner also presented exemplary portraits of humanity in his idylls, but they were widely popular, even up into the 19th century, as indicated by translations.

But I continue to think about this question of what constitutes art, and I continue to incline toward the importance of playfulness (of which there is plenty in Gessner's idylls, by the way). Thus, I was struck by something I read in a recent (April 15, 2011) Times Literary Supplement "Commentary" on the 100th anniversary of the birth of the novelist Sibylle Bedford. I had heard Bedford's name, but have not read any of her novels. In the "Commentary" by Caroline Moorhead, Bedford is quoted as saying the following: "There does exist ... an absolute standard of artistic merit. And it is a standard which is in the last resort a moral one. Whether a work of art is good or bad depends entirely on the quality of the character which expresses itself in the work. ... That virtues is the virtue of integrity, of honesty towards oneself."

With this in mind, how is one supposed to react to new works on view at the Metropolitan Museum? The Met has gone out to produce a truly glamorous exhibition (Savage Beauty is the title) of some of the exotic creations of fashion designer Alexander McQueen. The lines are as long as might be imaged for such a blockbuster. One of the first works you encounter on entering is the dress at the top of this post, made of thousands of razor clam shells. It is really gorgeous and, yet, I can't see any moral purpose that it serves. Well, McQueen didn't call himself an artist, but the exhibition is supported by the Museum's textiles department.

The English sculptor Anthony Caro produces "public art." I like public art, especially when it is playful. I don't know what to make of the works on the roof garden at the Met. There is certainly a lot of craft here, which is, for me, an important criterion, but the works leave me cold. They leave little to the imagination. McQueen, in contrast, works better because of the employment of the flourishes. I can't say that his creations "move" me, but there is an element of delectation (delectare).

Neither McQueen nor Caro has made works that are useful or even instructional, and I suspect that is an aspect that underlies the work of many successful contemporary artists.

Picture credit: Walking Off the Big Apple

But is it art?

2011-05-16T17:08:00.000-07:00

Having finished my article on the "pre-Kantian" sublime, I have now turned to a long overdue book review. The book in question, by Jesko Reiling, is entitled Die Genese der idealen Gesellschaft: Studien zum literarischen Werk von Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698-1783). Yes, I seem not to be able to get away from Bodmer. There is not much in Reiling's treatment on the sublime in Bodmer (though he did give me a few ideas). The subject, per the subtitle, is Bodmer's "literary work," in particular the epics Bodmer began to write in the 1740s and his "political dramas." Nevertheless, there has been so little scholarship on Bodmer's literary work that Reiling spends the first half of his book filling in Bodmer's intellectual and cultural background.

As I already noticed when I began working on Bodmer's early criticism, in the 1720s, it was clear that Bodmer was interested in the improvement of "manners." He had been much affected by Joseph Addison's Spectator essays and hoped that The Discourses of the Painters, the "moral" journal he founded with Breitinger, would play a similar role in shaping the manners of the newly emerging bourgeoisie in Switzerland. And, like Addison in England, he was rather lighthearted in imparting "lessons" to his readers and in his treatment of socially backward customs and practices. As I learned when I began reading Reiling, however, Bodmer became decidedly heavy-handed in his literary works, especially in the Noah epic and in the political dramas. Critics have judged them harshly, speaking of "Tugendterror" (virtue terror) and "Totalitarismus der Sitte" (totalitarianism of manners).

In the Old Testament the story of Noah begins with his birth (Gen. 5, 28). At the age of 500 (so Gen. 5, 32) he becomes father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The next chapter opens with the increasing wickedness of humankind, while supplying very little detail. The Lord, regretting that he had created men, simply decided to wipe out all life on earth, sparing only Noah and his family, who had found favor with Him. Though there is very little "back story," Bodmer nevertheless provides one, as Noah, in a dream, travels over the earth with the angel Raphael and views all the evil ways of men. As contemporary readers noted, the vices on display were those of European men and women over the past several centuries. The desire to turn a profit or to make oneself better than one's neighbor existed in the antediluvian world as well. Noah and his breed, on the other hand, were perfect in every way, untouched by jealousy, envy, greed, lasciviousness.

I must admit that I have not slogged through any of these works by Bodmer. It was enough to slog through Reiling's descriptions. In Bodmer's defense, however, he was simply adhering to an earlier tradition concerning the purpose of art, namely, that it was supposed to be edifying. I wonder what Bodmer would make of the exhibition now on display at the Metropolitan Museum: "Reconfiguring an African Icon." On display are what are called "highly creative reimaginings of the iconic form of the African mask."

Two of the artists are Africans from Benin (which has a rich sculptural tradition in any case), Romuald Hazoumé (mask at top of post) and Calixte Dakpogan (at the right). Among the materials they use are discarded plastic containers, shells, computer wiring, hair brushes, and lots of metal scraps. All very inventive and delightful. They remind me of something I have posted on before, namely, Schiller's notion of "Spieltrieb." There is nothing useful, nothing to be gained even morally from these objects; they are simply playful, and play is fun. A child's game is fun, but it is not art, not made, whereas these contemporary masks are made and, as Roger Scruton writes, are "consciously intended."

Writers' rooms

2011-05-12T08:50:00.000-07:00

I posted a couple of years ago (how time flies!) on writers at work, focusing on their environment. In connection with my recent posts on the exhibition "Rooms with a View" at the Met, a reader has asked if Emily Dickinson may have been influenced by such paintings.

Well, above is a photo of Emily's own "work space," a room with a view. I love the lack of clutter, something I wish I could emulate.

I have also come across this interesting painting by Georg Friedrich Kersting (well represented in the Met show) of Faust in his study. I had not seen it when I did my last post on the painting of the Werther-like figure by Kersting.

Werther at his desk

2011-05-06T13:14:00.000-07:00

Whenever I pick up a book I always look in the index to see if Goethe is mentioned. Eighteenth-century studies invariably include him, if only incidentally. The exhibition catalogue for "Rooms with a View" has Goethe in the index and also refers to his influence on certain of the painters included in the exhibition. One of the painters, Carl Ludwig Kaaz, is said to have had a close friendship with Goethe. As Sabine Rewald writes, Kaaz gave Goethe instruction in gouache and watercolors when he was in Karlsbad. More important perhaps was Carl Gustav Carus, who was also a professor medicine and whom Goethe invited to collaborate with him on his morphological publications. Unfortunately, Carus did not think highly of Goethe's color theory; Goethe thus broke off their correspondence.

The above painting, though not in the exhibition, is included in the catalogue. It is by Georg Friedrich Kersting, whom I mentioned in my first post on this exhibition in connection with the portrait of Louise Seidler. As Rewald writes in the catalogue: the figure's "artfully disheveled blond hair is in tune with his 'Werther'-inspired costume": blue jacket, yellow vest, and grey pants.

"Im Herbst"

2011-05-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

There are so many charming paintings in "Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century," an exhibition now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work at the left, however, painted by Anton Dieffenbach (1831-1914) in 1856, reminded me immediately of a poem by Goethe. The poem is "Im Herbst" (In Autumn) and, as in Dieffenbach's painting of Window in Sunlight, describes grape leaves climbing up a trellis outside the window.

Fetter grüne, du Laub,
Das Rebengeländer,
Hier mein Fenster herauf.
Gedrängter quillet,
Zwillingsbeeren, und reifet
Schneller und glänzend voller.

Euch brütet der Mutter Sonne
Scheideblick, euch umsäuselt
Des holden Himmels
Fruchtende Fülle.
Euch kühlet des Monds
Freundlicher Zauberhauch,
Und euch betauen, ach,
Aus diesen Augen
Der ewig belebenden Liebe
Voll schwellende Tränen.

("Autumn Feelings": Flourish greener, as ye clamber,/ Oh ye leaves, to seek my chamber,/ Up the trellis'd vine on high!/ May ye swell, twin berries tender,/ Juicier far, -- and with more splendour/ Ripen, and more speedily! O'er ye broods the sun at even/ As he sinks to rest, and heaven/ Softly breathes into your ear/ All its fertilizing fullness, While the moon's refreshing coolness/ Magic laden, hovers near; And, alas! ye're watered ever/ By a stream of tears that rill/ From mine eyes -- tears ceasing never,/ Tears of love that nought can still.)

Goethe wrote the poem in 1775, shortly before he left for Weimar. "Autumn Feelings" of the English refers to the title Goethe gave the poem in 1789, when he first published his collected writings, at which time he also did some revisions to the earlier texts. According to Metzler's Goethe-Lexikon (one of my favorite reference books), the poem is typical of Goethe's early lyric work, especially the "intimate relationship" it suggests between "I" and nature. The "cosmic powers" of the sun and the moon cause the grapes to grow, but also the tears of the poet, watering them with "the creative natural power [Naturkraft] of love." The last word of the poem -- Tränen (tears) -- adds an elegiac note. Though the title of Dieffenbach's painting is Window in Sunlight, a rather dark mood is suggested, which makes we wonder if Dieffenbach knew Goethe's poem.

"Real life is not a theater"

2011-05-02T06:38:00.000-07:00

I was familiar with the name Ronald Blythe from reviews in the London Times Literary Supplement, but I recently picked up a small book of his, The Bookman's Tale, as part of my Lenten readings. Blythe, from Suffolk in England, is known as "Britain's greatest living rural writer," and The Bookman's Tale consists of short chapters in which Blythe relates the progress of his work (often having to do with the poet and Anglican priest George Herbert), his friendships, including with the writer Vikram Seth (who bought and is renovating George Herbert's house), Marina Warner, Imogen Holst (daughter of the composer), and lots of local folks. Blythe reports of evensong, of house calls by plumbers and other workmen, of books he is reading. His thoughts on the letters of W.H. Auden (like Blythe, an Anglican) made me want to order them from Amazon. I learned where T.S. Eliot got the inspiration for Little Gidding. He writes of Chaucer's pilgrims as if they were Suffolk neighbors. Well, no doubt Chaucer portrayed real people.

A couple of days ago I read his chapter on "The Great Essex Earthquake" and was thinking of a way to post something about it. A month ago I had posted on earthquakes, drawing on Bodmer's problematic category of "the turbulent" (das Ungestüme) as it relates to the sublime. Earthquakes and other catastrophes, as I wrote, are unlike "the great in nature." The latter refers to natural phenomena the extent of which is too large for us to grasp at first sight. These would include the heavens above, the oceans, natural grandeur (e.g., the Grand Canyon, the Swiss Alps). Despite our inability to get hold of their extent, they don't literally knock us over. Moreover, these phenomena are accessible to study by us, as modern science shows. The turbulent, however, literally disarms us and indeed is occasionally annihilating. Thus, earthquakes, such as recently occurred in Japan and New Zealand. The turbulent allows us no freedom, unlike the great and the beautiful, to which we are free to react or even to ignore.

The events of the morning of September 11, 2001, represent the turbulent. The very issue of freedom arose after the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen called the attacks "the biggest work of art that there has ever been." In comparison with the attacks, he said, his own compositions were as nothing. Of course, as he also said, the people affected (the ones, for instance, jumping from the Towers) had not "come to the concert." Thus, the difference between art -- a realm of freedom -- and real life. Such catastrophes are not theater. In real life we are often affected by things over which we have no control.

So, what did Ronald Blythe say about the Great Essex Earthquake of April 22, 1884? He mentions that a local photographer happened to be around on the "lovely spring day" and was thus able to record the after effects. No deaths, but the property damage was extensive. "A thousand roofs slid to the ground; 20 churches were in ruins. Three entire villages went to wreckage. Boats were thrown from the harbours on to the shore. There was a noise that nobody would ever forget. There was a blinding dust, and there was the pathos of what would later be the exposed interior, the wallpapered rooms hanging in the air, the fires blazing in the suspended grates, the unmade bed."

Mr. Damant, the photographer, "hurried around with his fine plate camera." Ronald Blythe writes that one of his favorite photos shows an "elegantly grouped picture of the Rector of Langenhoe and his friends standing in the ruins of his church clasping umbrellas and gently smiling." There then follows a paragraph that seems apropos to today, a reminder of the fragility and also the resilience of our civilization. Perhaps it is this fragility to which Bodmer was presciently alluding with his category of the turbulent:

"They had curiously prophetic expressions, which would appear again and again during the next century, shaken looks that hid the shock, the automatic grin. And the strange stench of fallen architecture. All this would repeat itself -- all over the world. And human beings would stand and stare at the swift demolition of their achievements as the dust settled, and would look so differently from how they felt."

Picture credit: Hornbeam

Rooms with a View

2011-05-01T08:18:00.000-07:00

There is a lovely, small exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, "Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century," curated by Sabine Rewald. According to Rewald's essay in the catalogue, it was two sepia drawings from about 1805 by Caspar David Friedrich that inaugurated the motif of paintings and drawings of open windows, a "potent symbol" for Romantic-period artists. (The other "potent" motif was that of the moon, which fascinated many writers and philosophers as well.)

One of the paintings in the exhibit (above), by Georg Friedrich Kersting, portrays a woman embroidering. Since the appearance of her memoir in 1873, we know that the sitter here was the painter Louise Seidler (1786-1866), daughter of an equerry at the university in Jena. Her memoir, according to Rewald, "offers a fascinating account of the artistic life in Jena, Dresden, Weimar, Munich, and Rome between 1786 and 1823." I have not read this memoir, but would certainly like to do so. Rewald calls this painting "a study of contemplation and morning light."

Louise Seidler seems not to have been a particularly great artist, excelling in portraits of young women and girls, e.g., Minna Herzlieb (at the left; see my post on Minna), endowing them with "ein liebliches Dasein" (a charming presence or existence), according to Goethes Weimar. Though Goethe himself liked her pastel of him (below), from 1811, Goethes Weimar is not impressed with it, calling it "weichlich-verblassen" (effeminate-pale).

Rewald makes a strange claim, asserting that Kersting portrayed Louise Seidler pursuing a feminine activity, embroidering, instead of painting, "most likely because the image of a woman pursuing a man's profession would have raised more than one eyebrow in Germany at the time." That claim, however, goes against the facts on the ground. Goethe was a friend of Seidler's -- he had known her since she was a child and a playmate of his own son August -- and, since she was otherwise without means, later promoted her career, which included having Duke Carl August award her funds to train in Munich and then in Rome, Naples, and Florence between 1817 and 1823.

She seems to have had a charming personality -- Goethes Weimar speaks of her "Liebenswürdigkeit" -- which opened many doors to her, especially in the Romantic circles of Jena. She was a frequent, welcome visitor at Goethe's house am Frauenplan. When she returned from her studies, Goethe arranged free lodging for her, with atelier, and then obtained a position for her, with a yearly salary of 100 talers, teaching drawing to the duke's daughters and managing the collections of the "free drawing academy" (founded by the duke in 1776). It doesn't seem to me that anyone would have been affronted (or "raised an eyebrow") by a portrait of a woman painting.

By the way, Rewald mentions in her catalogue essay "a curious and riveting precedent" to Friedrich's painting of Woman at the Window: the water color of 1787 by Tischbein of Goethe at his window on the via del Corso in Rome. (See also my post on this water color.) According to Rewald, Friedrich did not know of Tischbein's drawing, despite the similarities in the two works: "the emptiness of their settings and the near symmetry of their compositions." Both, according to Rewald, may have as their precedent a work of 1654 by Jacobus Vrel, a painting of a servant woman (above left) at a window, though this "plump model" is unlike the "large, erect, centered figures" in Tischbein's and Friedrich's works.

Dutch painters seem to have made a specialty of women at windows. Think, for instance, of Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at the Open Window, which, according to Rewald, was on view in the painting galleries of the Dresden museum when Kersting painted his images of "hushed rooms."

Natural Beauty

2011-04-18T07:21:00.000-07:00

My last post, on the natural sublime, contained two images: one was a photograph by Ansel Adams, the other a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe. Both were of the same subject -- a leaf -- but the difference between the two shows that there can be no "objective" view of even an ordinary object. Of course, we all recognize that a leaf is being represented. To that extent, we all possess (as Kant might say) a common cognitive apparatus. The representation, however -- the photograph or the painting -- is evidence of the artist's "distinctive soul" (as Roger Scruton says, in his book Beauty). All of us, likewise, when viewing nature, see something different. Thus, according to Kant, the subjective aspect of our view of nature or of art. As Scruton notes, for Kant the appreciation of arts became a "secondary exercise of aesthetic interest." It is our appreciation of nature -- even the most utilitarian people respond to their surroundings -- that is the "primary exercise of judgment."

The lovely image at the top is of a species of butterfly, Kallima inachus, that mimics dry leaves for camouflage.

The Natural Sublime

2011-04-16T17:48:00.000-07:00

I have occasionally read articles by Roger Scruton over the years, but recently my friend Maureen Mullarkey posted an item on her blog about his book Beauty. Maureen has great taste in writing and in artists, so I immediately acquired the book. Scruton writes the clearest, most accessible prose, breaking down really big ideas into portion athat non-philosophical minds (like mine can grasp. Herewith an example, from the chapter "Natural Beauty," in which he distinguishes our experience of, say, the songs of birds and the colors or shapes of flowers from works of art:

"Works of art are expressly presented as objects of contemplation. They are framed on a wall, contained between the covers of a book, installed in the museum or reverently performed in the concert hall. To change them without the artist's consent is to violate a fundamental aesthetic propriety. Works of art stand as the eternal receptacles of intensely intended messages. ... Nature, by contrast, is generous, content to mean only herself, uncontained, without an external frame, and changing from day to day."

I also like his use of the term "apartness" to speak of natural phenomena, "their capacity to show that the world contains things other than us, which are just as interesting as we are."

Now, it was in the 18th century that people discovered nature as an object of aesthetic interest. Starting with the English critic John Dennis and then expanded on by Joseph Addison, the experience of the natural sublime was practically synonymous with an encounter with grand mountains (and also with the starry skies above and so on). In the essay I am writing on Bodmer, I have posed this question: Why in none of his treatises on poetry did Bodmer consider natural experience or natural beauties as potential poetic subjects? Surrounded his entire life long (1698-1783) by the mountains of Switzerland, about which otherwise so much ink was spilled in the 18th century, he never even mentions them when writing of "the Great" in nature, a notion he took over from Addison. Bodmer never uses the term "sublime" in reference to nature's effects. "Sublime" is reserved for the portrayal of noble and grand actions. Even the actions of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost can be described as sublime, exceeding as they do in evil. When speaking of the grand in nature he resorts to stock formulas that are repeated by almost every writer on the sublime in the 18th century -- mountain gorges and abysses, violent storms, shipwrecks -- all drawn from literary accounts. The real world of nature does not interest him.

Bodmer's late essay on the sublime of 1746 indicates that he was aware of the connection that was being made between the sublime and personal encounters with nature. Reading Scruton, I seem to see that Bodmer's conventional references to nature, whether of natural beauty or of grandeur, are attempts to "frame" nature, to place it in a poetic world of its own, where the imagination can, as Scruton writes, "wander freely, with our own interests and desires in abeyance." Thus, his literary examples came from Homer and Virgil and even from some early 18th-century German poets (e.g., Brockes). Whether it is scenes of nature or of human action, the works of those poets, as Scruton writes, "come to us soaked in thought." Art is thus "freed from the contingencies of everyday life."

Scruton doesn't mention it, but it may be that freedom "from the contingencies of everyday life" is what attracts us to nature, whether to walks in the country or, in my case, kayaking on the river in the summer. (Kayak season starts in exactly one month, when the water temperature reaches 55 degrees.) Just being lazy, without any purpose.

Aesthetic Impressions

2011-04-07T06:50:00.000-07:00

The essay on Bodmer and the sublime ("Where Are the Mountains?") is reaching a conclusion. I had hoped to finish it by the end of January, and here we are in April. Well, this week I am working on the footnotes, so that must mean I will soon be finished, right?

I was going through Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment this morning, trying to locate a reference he had made to Bodmer's "Lockean sensualism." I haven't found it yet, but I came across this gem: "The observation of an object under the microscope may reveal to the naturalist its composition and thereby its real objective nature, but its aesthetic imrpession becomes a total loss." This comes up in the section on Alexander Baumgarten and "the new science of aesthetics," which, as Cassirer writes, "abandons itself to sensory appearance, without attempting to go beyond it to something entirely different, to the grounds of all appearance." For example, a geologist could tell us about the composition of a landscape, from which we would gain much "scientific insight," but "not the slightest trace of the beauty of the landscape would be preserved."

Cassirer quotes a very early poem by Goethe (from his Leipzig student days), which gives poetic expression to the difference between scientific observation and aesthetic impression:

Fluttering the fountain nigh
The iridescent dragonfly
An hour mine eye has dwelt upon;
Now dark, now light alternately
Like the chameleon;
Now red, now blue,
Now blue, now green:
How would its hues appear
If one could but come near!

It flits and hovers, resting not --
Hush! on a willow bough it lights;
I have it in my fingers caught,
And now I seek its colors true
And find a melancholy blue --

Such is thy lot, dissector of delights!

Wherever one looks, Goethe is always there!

Photo credit: Butterfly blogspot

America and the Enlightenment Project

2011-03-31T12:26:00.000-07:00

I just received from my friend Ellis Shookman an offprint of an article, "Attitudes to North America in Wieland's Teutscher Merkur," which is appearing in Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (vol. 34 [2011], pp. 81-100). Ellis gave a talk on this subject a year or so ago, when I was still chair of the Columbia University Seminar on 18th-Century European Culture. Reading it today led to some reflections about attitudes among Europeans toward America, and in particular the U.S.

When I went to study in Germany as a very young woman (ages ago), Germans were very helpful and kind to me. Nevertheless, especially when among older people, I couldn't help noticing that they thought America somewhat backward. This was especially the case in the matter of "culture," which supposedly Americans had none of. I would not say that I was particularly resentful at their attitude. Like many Americans first facing a foreign culture, I felt my deficiencies, intellectual and otherwise, and was in any case trying to become "cultured." At the time, of course, I did not ask them why people as cultured as the Germans had started World War II -- though it did occur to me. To imagine that any nation or culture is superior to others is now considered in bad taste, so I will simply say: where do you prefer to live if you have a choice? Obviously, if we have a choice in the matter, we think we live in the best place on earth.I see from Ellis's article that, in the late 18th century, some Germans already had the attitude that America was a place without "culture." At least that is what can be discerned from his thorough investigation of issues of Der Teutscher Merkur (and later Neuer Teutscher Merkur) appearing between 1773 and 1810. This quarterly publication was one of the most important intellectual organs of the time. Goethe was not a regular contributor, though a few poems and reports by him did adorn its pages.

One of its subjects was the events of the American Revolution, both before and after, in which the German correspondents of the journal were very interested. The journal published some correct news as well as misinformation, often relying, for instance, on the reports of sailors. It was obviously difficult to follow events on the ground, especially after hostilities broke out, but there was an attempt to cover them. Whatever the outcome between the British and the colonists, Germans, like the rest of Europe, saw important implications for the balance of power on the continent. As Ellis writes, most of these articles "were largely non-committal accounts of political or military developments, ... conveyed their authors' knowledge that new of the events they related was not always reliable, their apparent distaste for war and preference for peace and their sympathy for both sides." They were even "nuanced and balanced"!

The reporting changed after the United States came into being. Clearly, some Europeans had utopian aspirations for the new republic. Well, these were men of the Enlightenment, and soon the articles began to decry "Americans' commercialism and lack of culture." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Ellis mentions several writers who struck this note. One was a baron, Gustav Anton von Seckendorff (1775-1823). The little information to be found on him on the internet (not even a picture) indicates a very cultured person. Therefore his comments, published in the Merkur in June 1797, that people in Philadelphia "were too busy making or spending money to write or read books. Acquiring and enjoying, he explained, were the two pivots around which all striving and urging of North Americans revolved." Interestingly, after returning to Europe, he came once more to America, dying in Louisiana "in poverty" (according to Wikipedia).

More interesting to me were the reports of Karl August Böttinger, who was a staple of Weimar society (and in fact took over the publication of the Merkur in 1807). In November 1793 he wrote an admiring article about the building of Washington, the "youthfully beautiful, emerging capital city." One can just tell from the title of the article -- "Neu-Rom in Amerika" -- that he would end up being disappointed with the U.S. By 1796 he was writing, according to Ellis, "that utopian conceptions of North America were exaggerated." In further articles, he warned against emigrating and considered the majority of Americans to be a "vile, money-making tribe."

As I said, Böttiger was a well-known Weimar notable. After receiving his "Dr. phil." in Wittenberg he came to Weimar in 1791, on Herder's prompting, and became director of the Weimar Gymnasium. He was a member of the "Friday Club" and among Goethe and Schiller's circle. He seems to have been very indiscreet, however, earning Goethe's eternal enmity. Böttinger is also the source of many rumors about goings-on in Weimar. Safranski in his book on the friendship of Goethe and Schiller says of Böttinger that he "had his ear in all places (überall seine Ohren hat). For instance, he reported that opinions were divided concerning Goethe's ballad "The Bride of Corinth." One side, according to Böttinger, called it "the most revolting of all bordello scenes [die ekelhafteste aller Bordellszenen] and are agitated by the profanation of Christendom; others call it the most perfect of all of Goethe's small works of art." And who do you think painted the portrait of him here? Tischbein, of course!

Picture credits: Griffith University; muttaQin

"Emotion recollected in tranquility"

2011-03-20T10:56:00.000-07:00

The above quote is from Wordsworth, from the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800). A fuller quote is that a poem, though a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," nevertheless "takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquility." I was reminded of Wordsworth's words by a piece in the March 11 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, about the relationship between the critic Kenneth Tynan and C.S. Lewis, who had been Tynan's don at Oxford from 1945 until 1948. Though the two men shared very different sensibilities, Tynan had always esteemed Lewis, and, in the 1960s, when Tynan produced a television program on the arts, he seems to have induced Lewis to appear on a program entitled "Eros in the Arts." Footage of the interview of Lewis by Wayland Young (who had written a book entitled Eros Denied: Sex in Western Society, "which came to be seen as something of a manifesto for a permissive society") has not survived, but there is a transcript, a portion of which was reproduced in the TLS piece.

Wayland asked Lewis whether literature could not have as one of its "intentions" "the arousing of thoughts of lust." Quoting Lionel Trilling, Young asked whether one of literature's functions was "to arouse desire" and whether there could be any grounds "for saying sexual pleasure should not be among the objects of desire which literature presents to us along with heroism, virtue, peace, death, food, wisdom, God etc." Trilling's comment appeared in his own essay on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, originally published in Britain in 1958.

Lewis disagreed with Young "about stimulating other things," and went on to say that he didn't think literature was "operating as literature when it is simply and directly stimulating these emotions in a practical way." And, then, referring to Wordsworth's definition of poetry, he said that "there are some things which can't very well be recollected in tranquility." Later, speaking of pornographic writing, he criticized the "appalling solemnity" of descriptions of sexual acts. "The Greeks," he said, knew that the goddess of love was the laughter-loving goddess, and this is what seems to be entirely crushed out by, what I would call, our modern aphroditology, if I might coin this nasty word, the serious worship of Aphrodite." One is always impressed by Lewis' insights. Of course, he wrote the seminal work on mediveal love poetry, The Allegory of Love. (I couldn't find an image of Lewis as a young man; he is always portrayed in his don period. Thus, the lovely photograph at the top of a monument to Lewis, in Belfast.)

The interview also made me reflect a little bit more on Bodmer's ideas on poetry. One of the predominant aims of poetry is to delight with its imitations, which appeal to the imagination, indeed to the passions. Unlike historians, whose aim is to instruct us and who thus use rather prosaic language, Bodmer, influenced by Longinus' treatise on the sublime, thought that poets should make use of striking, bold imagery, thereby producing surprise and delight. Indeed, referring to Longinus -- "the design of the poetical image is enthrallment" (§15) -- he writes that poetry has as its purpose "to astonish and awe us."

Bodmer, however, is not recommending the stimulation of emotions for "practical" effect. If we are reading a thrilling battle scene, e.g., in Homer, we are not to go out and get in a fight or even join up for war. (The latter would be an aim of rhetoric, which is to "convince.") He doesn't use Wordsworth's phrase, but he is getting at the same thing. The powerful emotion we may feel from a poem or another piece of literature is only the basic stage of our reaction; it should be followed by reflection on the causes of our feeling and of the situation the poet is describing. In the end, the effect should be one of "edifying delight" (erbauliches Ergetzen).

Wordsworth was encouraging poets to lay aside conventional poetic and rhetorical language and to search their hearts for the right expression. Bodmer also thought that poets should write "from the heart" and from experience, but he his conception of experience was one mediated by the writings of the best poets. Thus, if you wanted to learn about the emotions, indeed, if you wanted to find out how you "should" feel about things, your best guide would be writers like Ovid or Homer. Feelings had not yet been "naturalized" this early in the 18th century. That ordinary people had feelings and that these should become subjects of artistic representation were new concepts, and a vocabulary had to be invented to write about them. Part of the process was the "dialogue" between individuals and the natural world, as numerous poets took walks (or imaginative ones) in the countryside and explored their reaction to nature. Poetry on sublime subjects (the starry skies above) expressed awe; graveyard poetry allowed one to feel melancholy; and so on.

Still, until Wordsworth (and indeed long after), most of this "experiential" poetry was heavily mediated by other poetry. A good example is to be found in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. When Werther falls in love with Lotte, his favorite reading material is Homer's Odyssey: his favorite scene is the return of the hero to hearth and home. (Tischbein, painter of the iconic portrait of Goethe, executed the above painting of that sentimental scene.) When he is depressed and becoming suicidal, he reads Ossian, in which the scenes of gloom and doom foreshadow his own end.

Picture credits: John Mooney; I Like Nice Life

Earthquakes and the Sublime

2011-03-14T17:58:00.000-07:00

I had thought of posting on earthquakes after the one that took place in New Zealand in late February. Goethe relates an episode in his autobiography concerning the reaction in the 18th century to the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which destroyed most of the center of the city and also produced a tsunami. Maybe it was because the churches were crowded that morning for the All Saints Day mass that so many Enlightenment thinkers questioned why God would allow such a terrible catastrophe -- as if catastrophes hadn't been going on for millennia. Though Goethe was only six years old at the time, he later wrote of this feeling: "God, the Creator and Sustainer of heaven and hearth, whom the First Article of Faith had portrayed as so wise and merciful, had allowed the just to suffer the same as the unjust, thus in no way proving to fatherly.In vain the young mind sough to come to grips with such observations, but this was all the less possible because even sages and scholars could not agree on how to interpret the phenomenon" (Peter Boerner translation).

Let me turn to Bodmer. I don't know what his reactions to the 1755 quake were, but he did write about the effect of catastrophic events on human emotions. In 1741 he published his Critische Betrachtungen über die poetischen Gemälde der Dichter (Critical observations on the poetic "paintings" of poets). In it he analyzes the three sources of our reaction to events in the "material realm," meaning the world in which we live and have our existence. These sources are the beautiful (das Schöne), the great (das Große), and the violent (das Ungestüme). In the presence of the beautiful we feel delight. The great or grandeur in nature produces astonishment, followed by "a delightful Stillness and Amazement in the Soul." That last quote is from Joseph Addison, whom Bodmer is pretty much following here.

Bodmer seems to have rejected Addison's third source, Novelty. In fact, he says in Crit. Betr. that what is new or novel does not have its grounds in the material world but in our emotions. It is a combination of elements of which we have not heretofore taken notice but with which we are otherwise familiar. Instead, his third source is the violent, which represents danger and fills the soul with terror and fear. Bodmer was writing of the effects on our emotions of poetry and art, in particular of descriptions of war or of the storms that assailed Aneas as he made his way to Italy, and not of real life.

Addison also discussed the effects of poetry on the imagination, but he thought that nature had a stronger effect on us than did works of art. Thus, his initial examples come from the natural world, and the pleasures we derive from the observation of the Beautiful, the Great, or the New in nature are what he calls "primary." Those produced by art are the secondary pleasures of the imagination. Bodmer, however, despite living surrounded by the Alps his entire life, seems not to have factored them, or indeed any other natural phenomena, into his reflections on the Great in nature, even though he quotes Addison's description of Greatness, namely, that the "Mind of Man naturally hates every thing that looks like a Restraint upon it," and thus such prospects as "an open Chamian Country, a vast unculitvated Desart, ... a wide Expanse of Waters," and so on give an "Image of Liberty."

Longinus had described the feeling produced by the sublime as one almost of tyranny: one was overcome with powerful emotion in the presence of greatness. Bodmer's category of the violent suggests such a passivity of the person experiencing a crushing event, be it war or a natural disaster like the present earthquake in Japan. Unlike in the case of the Beautiful or the Great, one is not free in relation to violence. Bodmer seems to have straightened this confusion out in his last writing on the sublime, in 1746, in which he confined the sublime to the free acts of humans. Terrible catastrophes are not sublime. They are simply terrible or, if man-created, evil.

The scenes of Japan after this earthquake are ones of devastation, almost like the scenes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atom bombs fell on those cities. A similar event in our own time, also caused by the hand of men, are the attacks on 9/11. At the time the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen made the terrible remark that the attacks were "the greatest work of art ever." Stockhausen seemed not to understand the difference between art and life, which certainly Bodmer did. I was struck, however, by his succeeding comment, in reply to a journalist asking him if he was equating crime and art: "It is a crime," he said, "because the people were not agreed. They didn't go to the 'concert." That is clear. And no one gave them notice that they might pass away [draufgehen]." It is certainly the case that, when such events strike, that one has no freedom.

Since I lived in Japan for several years, I have been very absorbed by the news, which has led to these reflections on the sublime. It strikes me that the sublime is never a terrible catastrophe, certainly not the mass murder that took place on 9/11 (or, on a small scale but just as evil, the recent massacre of settlers in Israel). The sublime is all the processes, activities, and so on that make civilization possible, including the buildings that were destroyed on 9/11 as well as the tremendous material damage in Japan in recent days. One can't help but think how fragile existence is, yet, when the apocalypse has passed, most people pick up and build up their lives again. And, as in Lisbon in the 18th century, the "international community" has reached out to help the Japanese, including these dogs who came from Los Angeles with their handlers.

Picture credits: Hiroto Sekiguchi: dapd; Matt Dunham

Goethe and the Moon

2011-03-12T17:27:00.000-08:00

The current issue of The Weekly Standard has a review of what seems an intriguing book, Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight, by James Attlee. I went to my local Barnes & Noble this afternoon, hoping to have a look, but it had not yet hit the shelves there. Am I wrong to think that modern interest in the moon began with Galileo's observations through his "spyglasses" (the term "telescopium" not yet having been invented)? The moon, the stars, the planets, and so on have been perennial poetic elements in the West, but the heavens took on a new aspect from the 17th century. Before Galileo the moon had been thought to be perfectly round and smooth -- the Earth being the only source of imperfection in the universe -- with the dark spots on its surface the result of the differing absorption of light. Probably books have been written on the changes in the treatment of the moon in poetry, but I will wait until I see Professor Attlee's book.

Goethe wrote several beautiful poems with the moon as subject. In one, "To the Rising Moon" ("Dem aufgehenden Vollmonde"), he addresses the moon directly:

Willst du mich sogleich verlassen?

Warst im Augenblick so nah!

Dich umfinstern Wolkenmassen,

Und nun bist du gar dicht da

Doch du fühlst, wie ich betrübt bin,

Blickt dein Rand herauf als Stern!

Zeugest mir, daß ich geliebt bin,

Sei das Liebchen noch so fern.

So hinan denn! hell und heller,

Reiner Bahn, in voller Pracht!

Schlägt mein Herz auch schmerzlich schneller,

Überselig ist die Nacht.

Here is a link to the English translation; though the first line of the translation addresses the sense, what Goethe says is, "Do you want to leave me so soon?"

I especially like another poem by Goethe, "At Midnight," in which the moon features:

Um Mitternacht ging ich, nicht eben gerne,

Klein, kleiner Knabe, jenen Kirchhof hin

Zu Vaters Haus, des Pfarrers; Stern am Sterne,

Sie leuchteten doch alle gar zu schön;

Um Mitternacht.

Wenn ich dann ferner in des Lebens Weite

Zur Liebsten mußte, mußte, weil sie zog,

Gestirn und Nordschein über mir im Streite,

Ich gehend, kommend Seligkeiten sog;

Um Mitternacht.

Bis dann zuletzt des vollen Mondes Helle

So klar und deutlich mir ins Finstere drang,

Auch der Gedanke willig, sinnig, schnelle

Sich ums Vergangne wie ums Künftige schlang;

Um Mitternacht.

Again, here is a translation. For a really good translation, however, one must go to David Luke, who writes about "At Midnight": "Goethe stated in his diary, and again in a later essay, that this mysterious poem was one of which he was particularly fond, all the more so because, on the bright moonlit night of 13 February [1818], it had come into his mind unexpectedly and without explanation. ... It seems, however, to be an evocation of three successive stages of life and thus to be what Goethe calls a 'song of life (Lebenslied).' It may also be significant ... that all three stanzas are linked by an imagery of light, of brightness increasing from that of the stars to that of the full moon."

I particularly like the concrete imagery of the first stanza, the child walking home in the dark, a bit afraid, with only the stars guiding him. The poem also conveys the mood of many Romantic-period paintings, for instance, the two above by the English artist Samuel Palmer. The first, an etching in black ink, would seem even to portray the rural setting. I have been very fond of Palmer since encountering his work at an exhibition held by The Metropolitan Museum a few years back. Palmer seems to have been melancholic, which is appropriate for someone who painted so many moons.

The photo at the top of the post is of an Interstellar Light Collector from outside Tucson. According to The Weekly Standard review, it is a five-storey-high array of parabolic mirrors that, according to its builders, cure ailments by amplifying and directing moonlight at participants hoisted by a boom lift. For moonbeams closer to home, one might buy a moon jar.

Picture credits: Starlight Uses; William Weston Gallery; Trendir

"Joanna Sebus"

2011-03-06T10:34:00.000-08:00

I am continually being introduced to aspects of Goethe with which I was unfamiliar, in this case the above-named ballad. My husband is fond of music, so I perforce listen to a lot. The other evening the CD was "Die Berliner Sing-Akademie," featuring selections by Felix Mendelssohn-Barholdy, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, and Carl Friedrich Zelter. Goethe was acquainted with all three, and both Reichardt and Zelter composed music for works by Goethe. Zeller was one of his closest friends, even though he lived in Berlin, where he was director of the Sing-Akademie from 1800 until 1832.

There are two major phases of Goethe's interest in ballads. The first began in the Sturm und Drang period. Encouraged by Herder while he was a student in Strassburg, Goethe began collecting folk ballads. Among his own ballads in this folk vein are Der Fischer (1778) and Der Erlkönig (1782). Later, in 1797, he and Schiller entered into a ballad-writing competition. This competition occurred as the two were giving much thought to the "essence" of various literary genres, including the ballad. Among the ballads Goethe produced were Der Schatzgraber, Die Braut von Corinth, Der Gott und der Bajadere, and Der Totentanz (on which I posted some time ago). To my mind, they are very "thought out," removed from the seeming spontaneity of the earlier ballads. Still, on an intellectual level they are often pleasing.

Johanna Sebus concerned a real event, the heroic efforts of a young woman to save others after ice on the Rhein had broken and caused a dam to break, thereby flooding the village of Cleve in 1809. Reports circulated of her heroism and of her ultimate drowning. The reports were sent to Goethe by a friend who prompted him to write on the subject. After writing his ballad, Goethe sent it to Zelter, who sent the cantata to Goethe in early 1810. Schubert also attempted a composition, but it remains fragmentary. Obviously the heroism of Johanna, not to mention Goethe's memorial, led to many illustrations of the incident, including the "Romanticized" one at the top by Friedrich Bury (who also painted a portrait of Goethe, which I will post at another time).

In 1821, in Über Kunst und Altertum, Goethe compared the ballad form to "a living Ur-egg" that contains all poetic possibilities. The poet makes use of all three genres (Grundarten) in order to express what should stimulate the imagination as well as occupy the mind: "he can begin lyrically, epically, or dramatically and, as he wishes, continue by altering the form and rush to the conclusion or draw it out as long as he wishes. The refrain, the repetition of the same final sound, endows this poetic form [Dichtart] with its distinctive lyric character."

Picture credit: RP-Online

Goethe in Portrait

2011-03-03T17:09:00.000-08:00

I wanted to add a couple of my thoughts on portraits since my last posting. In the meantime I have also had an opportunity to look at Cynthia Freeland's book Portraits and Persons. In the second chapter, entitled "Contact," she discusses Roland Barthes' book on photography, Camera Lucida, which he was prompted to write after his mother's death. Reflecting on the past, he claims that photographs "preserve the past, bringing us into the direct presence of people who are long dead."

When looking at photographs of 19th-century people, especially ethnographic photographs like the one of Arapaho Indian men below, I have indeed felt that one "knows" them in a way that one doesn't know people from paintings, drawings, or any other earlier visual document. I have so often wished that photography had been invented a decade earlier; then, we might have had a photograph of Goethe.

Freeland mentions Barthes' discussion of the way a portrait captures a person's "air, which Barthes describes as follows:

The air is not a schematic, intellectual datum, the way a silhouette is. Nor is the air a simple analogy -- however extended -- as in "likeness." No, the air is that exorbitant thing which induces body from soul -- animula, little individual soul, good in one person, bad in another.

Got that? Actually, I would reverse Barthes' terms: not "induces body from soul," but "soul from body." And, indeed, Freeland goes on to say that there is something in great portraits from history "that holds our attention just because we do seem to see in them a person's essence, their 'air.'" Barthes himself goes on to say: "Perhaps the air is ultimately something moral, mysteriously contributing to the face the reflection of a life value."

Freeland mentions a couple of paintings that, she claims, reveal this "air," in other words, "someone's essential nature or their character in a very deep sense." One was the portrait of Queen Elizabeth by Lucian Freud. Frankly I find it so ugly that I didn't want to put it on my blog. Another is Velazquez' portrait of Pope Innocent X, who "has the air of someone cunning and ruthless." I think she is onto something there.

The drawing at the top of Goethe, by Tischbein, sketched shortly after Goethe arrived in Rome in 1787, is not a portrait. It is obviously something like a candid snapshot. There is not the "engagement" between artist and subject that, for Freeland, characterizes the true portrait. At the same time, as Freeland mentioned (see my previous post), adult humans are self-enacting, presenting themselves to the world, most of the time. From Goethe's relaxed "pose" here, as he stares out the window onto the Roman scene below, one certainly glimpses the charming young man that so many were attracted to. One has the impression that Goethe is not aware he is being observed; Goethe, however, seemed able to withdraw into himself, even when he was observed, a quality that Tischbein captured in Goethe in the Campagna.

Picture credits: Recherche; First People

Goethe in Portrait

2011-02-27T07:27:00.000-08:00

When I am wandering through Central Park I often listen to my iPod, mostly "podcasts." One of my favorite podcasts is "Philosophy Bites," a really cool program of short (15 minutes) interviews with philosophers. The subjects range from Plato to Nietzsche. Some people will talk about anything, and my only complaint is that the program features too much contemporary stuff: just war, vegetarianism, cosmopolitanism, etc. I would like to hear about Dun Scotus or Augustine or Boethius! Still, it is a great program, and recently it featured an interview with Cynthia Freeland, a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, who talked about the relevance of portraits to philosophy, especially what they might tell us about the human self. If that seems like an odd connection, she reminded Nigel Warburton, who was interviewing her, that philosophers interested in personal identity often cite novels or other literary sources.

Professor Freeland finds that the neglect of portraits by philosophers is puzzling since portraits "represent the serious efforts of some of the world's best artists to study people (others or themselves). Hence, portraits might reasonably be though to embody accumulated cultural wisdom about what it is to be human."

What is a portrait? She works up to the subject by discussing animals, which are often depicted in art, and arrives at three criteria: a portrait is a depiction of an individual living being; the being has internal emotional states; and the being poses. Animals, however endearing they are and even possessing internal emotional states, do not "enact self-representation."

She was asked about candid photographs. Adult humans, according to Freeland, are self-enacting most of the time. Even in a candid shot you can find this self-representation to the rest of humanity, which would make it portrait-like. A candid shot, however, lacks the element of engagement between the portrait artist and the sitter. Portrait artists have often described this situation as one of conflict and tension, since the artist wants one thing, the subject something else. Warburton suggested that the subject puts on a "theatrical mask," but Freeland insisted that that is not a bad thing: we are like that as human beings, self-aware creatures, and it is natural and ineveitable that we present ourselves in a variety of ways.

The discussion sent me to looking at portraits of Goethe. First off, one must admit that, while there are many portraits of Goethe, he was never portrayed by a truly great artist, one of the caliber of Van Gogh or Rembrandt. How great it would be to have a portrait of him by Caspar David Friedrich. Perhaps the best one and even the most representative is that by Johann Heinrich Tischbein at the top of the blog. I will try in the coming days to focus on a few portraits that I particularly like.

The one at the top of this post is by Georg Melchior Kraus (1737-1806). Like Goethe, he was from Frankfurt and got to know Goethe in the latter's "Sturm und Drang" phase. Kraus even went to Weimar at about same time as Goethe, becoming director of the drawing academy there in 1776. He was also Goethe's companion on the third Harz journey and prepared many of the drawings of rock formations that Goethe wanted for his geological investigations. Thus, he knew Goethe quite well from early on. The dress and style in this portrait is definitely "Genie" period. Note that Goethe's hair is not powdered.

Goethe seems to be studying a Schattenriss (shadow cut) that he holds in his lifted right hand, alluding to Johann Caspar Lavater's work on "physiognomic fragments," which was published with Goethe's assistance. According to Lavater our physiogomy was a key to our character, and to illustrate his theory he had his friends make silhouette portraits.

Goethe is very engaging in the portrait by Kraus, and one gets a sense of why people were so captivated with him in this period. Note the similarity in the pose with the one in the portrait by Tischbein. The relaxed pose might indicate a lack of the kind of artist-sitter tension that Freeland mentions as often characteristic of great portraits. In the latter portrait, however, Goethe is not studying anything that we can see. Indeed, his eyes appear to be contemplating some inward prospect. One also can't help but feel that in both portraits Goethe is very reserved and self-contained, qualities that will continue to be seen in future portraits.

Picture credits: Recherche; Paint My Dog; Artblart

Ossian

2011-02-23T10:44:00.001-08:00

A reader of this blog has alluded to a fondness for Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. In the first part of the novel, when Werther was feeling happy, his favorite reading matter was Homer's Odyssey. When his mind took its southward turn, he began reading the cycle of poems named after Ossian, supposedly the Gaelic bard in the Scottish Dark Ages. Like Homer, Ossian was blind, and he sings, among other things, of the life and battles of a warrior named Fingal. The tone is elegiac, reflecting, Götterdämmerung-like, the end of the warriors' way of life. Though it was discovered that the poems were a fabrication of the Scots poem James Macpherson, they were nevertheless the rage in the 18th century. No doubt the "rudeness" of the more primitive way of life appealed to the growing civilized habits of Europeans. Homer portrayed the world of gods and men; in Ossian a more elementary portrait of nature is conveyed. Herder called Ossian "Naturpoesie." Goethe, with his friend Merck, published an edition of The Works of Ossian (1773/77), and prepared the engraving for the title page himself.

Goethe also translated "the songs of Selma" (Gesänge von Selma) of Ossian, which he included in the Werther novel. The songs of Selma begins with an address to the evening star ("Star of descending night! fair is the light in the west!") and narrates of the days "when the king heard the music of harps, and the chiefs gathered from all their hills and heard the lovely sound."

Why does Ossian sing? Soon shall he lie in the narrow house, and no bard shall raise his fame! Roll on ye dark brown years; ye bring no joy on your course! Let the tome open to Ossian, for his strength has failed. The sons of song are gone to rest. My voice remains, like a blast, that roars, lonely on a sea-surrounded rock, after the winds are laid. The dark moss whistles there; the distant mariner sees the waving trees.

The moment of highest emotional intensity in the novel is preceded by Werther reading aloud from the poems to Lotte, which produces torrents of tears and an emotional embrace, followed by a farewell. Not long thereafter, Werther prepares for his suicide.

I love the painting at the top of this post, Ossian Sings His Swan Song. It is by the Danish artist Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard (1743-1809). Interestingly, Abildgaard became familiar with Ossian as a pictorial subject in Rome, where he was a friend of Henry Fuseli, Bodmer's disciple.

Picture credit: Thaumazein

The Sublime (again)

2011-02-20T07:55:00.000-08:00

I have been really remiss in keeping up with my "letter writing," which is my way of describing a blog. Long ago, I used to write long letters to friends. That was when I was living and working in far-away places (mostly in the Far East -- what a quaint term that now seems). The letters were a way of keeping friends and family up to date on what I was seeing and thinking about. If I sent out half a dozen letters at once -- and, indeed, I did have that many correspondents back then -- the content of the letters would be more or less the same.

How much could I vary my impressions of being totally overwhelmed by the subway stations in Tokyo? That was shortly after my arrival there. I had signed up for a Japanese-language course at the Naganuma language school (which a Google inquiry tells me is still in business). It was an evening class, and I went to Shibuya after work. (I was an editor at the University of Tokyo Press.) "Take such-and-such exit," I was told, "and walk up the hill. Fifteen minutes." Shibuya Station is one of the busiest subway stations in Tokyo, and at rush hour it was bedlam. (It was only later, when I had to navigate the train stations of India, that I encountered larger crowds at rush hour.) All the exit signs were of course in Japanese back then; in the meantime, so I've been told, there is much more English signage to be found in Tokyo. Still, even today I defy anyone who has just arrived in Japan and has learned very few Japanese characters to find the right exit at Shibuya Station. Perhaps it's a feature of the internet, but I notice that the Naganuma school tries to be access-friendly these days.

I digress. I wanted to write something about the sublime, with which I have been struggling for over a month, trying to write a decent scholarly article on the so-called "pre-Kantian sublime." Really, it's all about Bodmer and Breitinger again, with a dash of Goethe and Fuseli thrown in. Thus, it's not as if I don't have something to blog about, but the academic exercise demands a narrowness that is at odds with the freedom of posting one's thoughts.

It was a visit to Chelsea the other evening, however, in particular the sight of some really nausea-inducing works, that deepened my thinking about the sublime. These photographs, including the one at the top and at left, are by Coke Wisdom O'Neal. According to the gallery's propaganda, "O'Neal has become known for his monumental plywood boxes, where people are invited to climb in an be photographed." The new series, however, marks a "significant" change: "What was once a project about space, identity, and identification has become a venture exploring anonymity, constraint, and escape." Gallery-speak.

It was Edmund Burke who first associated physiology with the sublime, in particular feelings of pain, because of the danger the sublime object represents, for instance, such grand natural phenomena as the Alps. A tsunami or a flood wouldn't count, because both represent real danger, but the portrayal of such phenomena would evoke in us the feeling of danger, while at the same time we would be aware that we were safe.

On a gut level, the feeling of revulsion I experience with O'Neal's works would seem to corroborate Burke: looking at these paintings, one seems to feel the danger represented by situation the models are in. Of course, I am not trapped in one of the plexiglass boxes. On a reflective level, however, which is where Bodmer invites us to go in our contemplation of art, I am divided. I wonder to what purpose O'Neal chooses to represent such "human action." Is it to make us reflect about freedom, which would be commendable?

According to the gallery press release, the bodies on view in these photographs are "forever entombed in a static, yet performative, state." That is not much fun to think about.