"Faust" and the self

Yolanna has once again made me the recipient of her garden's bounty. First the flowers, then a bag of greens, including the beautiful chard. The lovely piece of salmon comes from Don and Sue. With my limited pantry, I was able to prepare half of the fillet with a lemon-maple syrup glaze. I have plans for the other half with the large zucchini Yo gave me.

I continue to make my way through Jane Brown's Goethe's Allegories of Identity. The chapter “The Scientific Self: Identity in Faust” is an analysis of role playing. It continues her examination of Goethe's literary responses to Rousseau, in the case of Faust the representation of the lack of fixed identities. Jane Brown is an expert on Faust, and her rapid fielding of textual examples that “reflect” (which includes mirrors) the instability of identity follow one another as rapidly as the shifting cloud shapes (another reflection of instability) in that play. Even the shifting forms (“schwankende Gestalten”) of the opening lines of the play announce the theme of instability. One must read the chapter slowly.

Let me quote Brown herself here: “The process of recurrent destabilization is largely driven by theatricality, the primary mode of representing the world in Faust.” Everyone “plays a role” in this drama, even God in his opening scene with Mephistopheles, who first appears to Faust not as “himself” but as a black poodle. Faust thus becomes not simply a case study of shifts of identity, but also of the instability of identity. Throughout, there are “parodic or collateral versions of Faust the striver.”

My first salmon "catch" of the season

As I am not quite half way into he book, I hesitate to make any judgment on a larger argument (or one of her arguments), namely, that the “true self,” as Brown writes in this chapter, drawing on Goethe’s reading of Kant, “like the thing in itself, is the equivalent of natural law.”  Both are fluid, existing in time, but also mirroring “something more permanent than themselves.”

In the previous chapter, “The Theaterical Self,” in which Egmont, Tasso, and Iphigenie were analyzed in regard to this instability of self, Brown mentions in passing the mixing in Egmont of an 18th-century neoclassical political tragedy and a sentimental tragedy. As she remarks, the play separates the two genres into separate scenes. This subject interests me very much, as I have written on the poetic mixing of genres in a similar play, Clavigo. My essay (Goethe Yearbook, vol. 8 [1996]: pp. 1-27) addressed the range of Goethe’s literary efforts of the 1760s and early 1770s, when Goethe was clearly more imitative. Yet, while experimenting in a variety of traditional forms (e.g., pastoral, anacreontic), he was not necessarily faithful to his literary models. Clavigo, as I argued, received its “existential weight” by such poetic contamination: the introduction into a classicist play of a non-heroic (i.e., bourgeois) character literally altered the character’s self-conception. Clavigo, almost literally, did not know “who he was.” The drama Faust, of course, is a mixing of the most diverse poetic genres and meters, of which Brown's reading reminds us anew.

Goethe and interiority

Goethe Girl prepares to launch

Last weekend, my first in Vancouver, was spent mainly on neighboring Comorant Island, where I took part in the annual Alert Bay 360. There were 105 paddlers. The fastest time was 55 minutes; I circumnavigated the island in 1:41, which was not the slowest time. Not too bad for someone who has been out in her kayak this summer only twice. Back in Sointula, I have settled into my cottage. It’s a great thing about traveling to places one already knows: there is not the feeling of alienation in foreign places. Indeed, a sight familiar from last August is a local deer in the backyard eating up the plums that fall on the ground. (Click on photos to enlarge.)

Looking for plums

And of course I have finally got down to work. Aside from finishing my own book, I read every day a bit of Jane Brown’s Goethe’s Allegories of Identity.

Getting ready for the starting gun

Brown’s engagement with Rousseau seems new on her part, although the title indicates a continued interest in the subject of allegory, as in her previous work, The Persistence of Allegory. I will delve later into her main argument, but a slow reading of the first several chapters indicates that we have here a typical Brown approach: close reading of texts and good use of sources. She does not wander off into ungrounded speculation. I don’t know enough about Goethe–Rousseau studies to evaluate how much  new ground is being broken here, but the literary and biographical parallels she makes in the first major chapter (on “Passion”) are exciting to read. This excitement (for me, in any case) continues in the following chapter (on “Social Responsibility”).

First Nations boat

In both cases Goethe is portrayed as responding directly to Rousseau and correcting him as well as completing or reversing his intentions. Sometimes, Goethe sounds practically intentional, e.g., when Brown writes of Goethe’s “efforts to relive and correct the moral failures of Rousseau’s marriage.” An example, however, of Goethe’s “interaction with Rousseau’s morality in his own life” is indeed illuminating. The relationship with the aristocratic Mme de Warens, who was Rousseau’s benefactor and tutor, was apparently not sexual; later, however, he had a non-intellectual domestic partnership with  the laundress and chambermaid Thérèse Levasseur. Similarly, as Brown writes, “Goethe’s long and significant relationship with Charlotte von Stein, a (married) court lady with whom Goethe began a rarefied love affair shortly after he settled in Weimar in late 1775, and his mistress Christiane Vulpius stand out as analogues to Rousseau’s –– the first with an older aristocratic and idolized woman who educated him, and the second with a woman beneath him in social status who kept him happy” (25).

While Brown insists that she is not tracing causality, the “parallels, underlying patterns, and conversations among texts” that she identifies will support her thesis, namely, that there is a line of transmission from Rousseau to Goethe to Freud in conceptualizing and representing interiority and “modern selfhood.” Stay tuned.

Photos: Alert Bay 360

On vacation, sort of

I am once more in my blue cottage in Sointula on Malcolm Island for the month of August. It is a time of writing, reading, and relaxing. I have discovered that getting out of New York City for two months every year, in winter and summer, is the way to go. My house is at the corner of 13th Avenue and 3rd, as indicated on the map. (Click on photos to enlarge.)

 More news to come, but among the things I have brought with me is a copy of Jane Brown's Goethe's Allegories of Identity, of which I have a review to write.

Goethe and granite

Granite (1968) by Isamu Noguchi (Yorkshire Sculpture Garden)

I have been thinking about Goethe and nature since reading Jason Grove's article on "petrofiction" in the current volume of the Goethe Yearbook. (See my posting on that article.) It strikes me that natural phenomena, e.g., granite, always represented something to Goethe, but it was a stand-in. Thus, my earlier question: did Goethe's heart leap up when he beheld a rainbow in the sky? My answer was no: I do not believe that he was an enthusiast of rainbows or of other natural events. The earth was simply the theater –– the Schauplatz –– of such phenomena, but the production itself stood for something greater, for the workings of so-called Nature. He collected "the rocks of time," as Heather Sullivan put it in a 1999 article in the European Romantic Review, but it was his very collecting activity, with thousands of mineral specimens and rocks stored in neatly labeled boxes, that distinguishes Goethe's interest in the natural world from that of, say, Wordsworth.

Isamu Noguchi (1929) by Winold Reiss

I was led to the image above of Isamu Noguchi's 1968 work Granite after reading a review of a biography of  the Japanese-American sculptor: Listening to Stone by Hayden Herrera. There is a lovely Noguchi Museum in Queens, which I visit at least once a year, visits inspired to some extent by my interest in the subject of Goethe and granite. Noguchi's "aesthetic," especially the simplicity of his works, seems at first glance Japanese-influenced, which can be seen in the gardens in which his works are frequently situated as lone, solitary objects, as in a Japanese garden. At the same time, because of my experience of living in Japan for several years, I always felt that there was something un-Japanese about Noguchi. The review of the biography explained why that is the case. Although his father was Japanese, his mother was a "bohemian" American lady who raised him on her own. And although he spent several years as a child in Japan, he did not grow up there and in fact did not speak "adult" Japanese.

If it speaks to you, it is a metaphor

I have to admit that rocks (like rainbows) do not really "speak" to me. But they clearly spoke to Noguchi, and the reviewer of the biography revealed that it was not Japan that provided Noguchi with inspiration: "It was [Constantin] Brancusi who first revealed to Noguchi the incalculable metaphorical richness of stone, an intuition upon which so much of his subsequent career would be based."

The reference to metaphor reminds me of what Denis Donoghue wrote in his 2014 book Metaphor: "Metaphor, more than simile or metonymy, expresses one's desire to be free, and to replace the given world by an imagined world of one's desiring." This desire is a very modern one, and the more I learn about subjects like ecocriticism, the more I am struck by the influence of Romanticism, by the way that  nature –– the earth –– has become "an imagined world of one's desiring." But did Goethe ever, like Noguchi, "listen to stone"?

Image sources: Nigel Homer; American National Biography; Photius

Goethe and his scribes: addendum

After my previous post on Goethe and his scribes, I came across a delicious image of Voltaire, already dictating as he rises from bed, which I wanted to contrast with Goethe's more decorous procedure.

Goethe dictating to his scribe John

Voltaire Dictating at His House in Ferney, by Jean Huber

Picture credit: AKG-Images UK

Goethe and his scribes

Francesco Clemente, "History of the Heart in 3 Rainbows," from Palimpsest

I have been wanting to post something on Albrecht Schöne’s new book, Der Briefschreiber Goethe. It deserves several posts, but a recent review in Book Forum gives me an opportunity at least to mention it (vorübergehend, let us say, since I will return to it later). The BF review (by Clive Thompson) concerns Palmipsest: A History of the Written Word by Matthew Battles, who is also the author of Library: An Unquiet History.

The reviewer notes that writing has often been associated, “in the West, anyway, with the rise of interiority and the individual … It is by sitting in solitude with our thoughts, pen in hand, that we develop our most profound ideas about society, ethics, and ourselves.” As Battles points out, however, none of the writers in the Western literary tradition sat down in solitude to write. Instead, they dictated, often to slaves (in Greece and Rome).

One of the major benefits of having taught “Great Books” to undergrads while I was in grad school was the chance to read works I might otherwise have bypassed. These included Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates opposes writing on the grounds that it promotes forgetting, in contrast to orality, which encourages memory. As with gossip, however, oral transmission encourages a distortion of the original message, to the point where the original is no longer recognizable. Similarly, the oral transmission of "literature," such as the epics of Homer or other “ancient” writers, produced varying versions. The production of a standard text has been the task of philologists from the time there have been philologists.

To return to writing itself, which is the subject of Palimpsest (how I love that word: I must bring it into my spoken vocabulary), writing originally served commerce and statecraft, of “tallying just what was in the coffers of the state and the grandiose one of expressing the might of rulers.” Scribes thus wrote “at the king’s bequest.” On the other hand, as I remember from grade school so many years ago, it was Phoenicians, early tradesmen par excellence, who originated the script that is the basis of our alphabet.

Writing for purposes that were purely literary, on the other hand, was “a victory.” Thompson quotes the Canadian poet and translator Robert Bringhurst: “Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.”



And Goethe? As we know, he preferred to dictate, not only his literary works, but also his correspondence. The letters discussed in Schöne’s volume (there are nine “case studies”) were subject to much thought, though interiority as we understand it was not at issue. Rather, it was process of coming up with the correct rhetorical strategy for the person being addressed. His earliest letter to the 16-year-old Ludwig Ysenburg von Buri, dated May 23, 1764, when Goethe was 14 years old,  displays “heitere Souveränität … über das rhetorische Instrumentarium.”

Moreover, as Schöne adds in a footnote, this early letter in which Goethe presents his case for entry into the "Gesellschaft derer Arcadier zu Phylandria,” was not, aside from the signature, in his own hand. The scribe was Johann David Clauer. Goethe's father was the guardian of this mentally ill man, who was in any case a “Dr. jur.” He resided in the Goethe family home for 30 years, during which time he took dictation and also executed written documents for Goethe’s father. In several essays on Goethe, I have stressed that rather than drawing on his own “experience,” he was calling on established literary forms when he drafted his literary works, just like all poets before the 18th century. Goethe's genius, I have always thought, lay in disguising his literary forefathers, but in dictating to an amanuensis (another great word I have to make more use of) he was following in a venerable tradition.

Picture credits: Schirn Kunsthalle; Jonnie Miles/Getty Images; Crystal Links

Goethe in Chinese

This morning, while canvasing the internet for Goethe images, I came across an article in the Global Times (scroll down to read) dated March 15, 2015, with the following report: "A specialist team at Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) will translate the complete works of German writer Johann Wolfgan von Goethe into Chinese.

 All of Goethe's novels, poetry, dramas, memoirs, autobiography, letters, diaries, treatises and literary and aesthetic criticism will be translated into 40 to 50 books containing around 30 million Chinese characters. 
"

I have not yet seen any reports in German newspapers. 歌德

According to the article, "one group of experts" will be responsible for the translations, including annotations, and will be under the direction of Wei Maoping, dean of SISU's School of Germanic Studies and the program's director. Here is a link to an interview with Professor Wei, who published in 1999 A History of Chinese Influence on German Literature. He is also an editor of the journal Literaturstraße.

"Goethe" in Chinese characters: 歌德