1. April 22 1999 Lecture on Die Leiden des Jungen Werther

  2. Context of Romanticism
    1. Movement is pan-european and american; 1770 to 1850
      1. Subsumes all our readings from Blake to Keats
      2. Goethe's Werther was earliest of these and extremely influential source
      3. also recurrent--late 19th c and 1960's
    2. rejection of Enlightenment rationalism
      1. against materialism, scepticism, atheism--Urizen
      2. celebration of folktale, myth, religion, spiritualism
    3. praise of feeling, imagination and spirit
      1. traditional and new age religions and mythologies
      2. the irrational and unconscious, the inspired
      3. sublime; the infinite
        1. Reflections on landscape and wandering--distance and the future...WANDERLUST, Sehnsucht...but there is here(!) 43
          1. these are his sentiments at the height of romantic passion--inspired
      4. passion and desire: sex and death; Romantic love and "romances"
        1. Courtly love; Tristan; medievalism
        2. passionate early tragic love affairs as defining moments in the artist's life
          1. Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Spenser
          2. glimpse of divine--unattainable
          3. similar to religion which it either strengthens or replaces
    4. genius and non-conformity vs. the bourgeois
      1. extreme individualism and hero worship and glamorizing criminals
        1. Genius vs the Philistines:
          1. finding his place in village of Wahlheim; sketching the little boys
          2. "rules and regulations ruin our true appreciation of nature and our powers to express it "
          3. "the sober gentlemen...who know so well how to build dams and divert all such threatening danger..."31
      2. transgression; going beyond limits; wierdness; artistic talent; imagination; exploration
    5. youthfulness--Blake's Youth of Delight
      1. Celebration of childhood--44
      2. rebellious and interested in I and E
      3. revolutionary period--Orc energy
      4. punk, goth, youth culture in general
      5. Sturm und Drang--turbulence; the Sublime
    6. nature vs. civilization--country vs. court--primitivism
      1. the calendar, pastoral, SC, my book as another artifact
        1. season of bursting; season of despair
        2. April to December
        3. Virgil's eclogues--celebration of innocence and its destruction
      2. love of springtime nature--exultant innocence--he's an artist, painter--too ecstatic to produce art--25
      3. Sees mother and children--romanticizing their poverty32
    7. celebration of tragic
      1. the blues; the beauty in the tragic, suffering, sacrifice and martyrdom
        1. beautiful losers; Leonard Cohen's book and songs
  3. Goethe--Biography and History
    1. b. 1742, d. 1832--German Shakespeare:
      1. renaissance human being: journalist, painter, theatre manager, politician, educator, scientist--14 volumes of scientific writing--dramatist, novelist, song writer, poet
      2. totally disciplined, vulnerable to love and grief
        1. life and art are coterminous--romantic idea--opposite of Shakespeare or Bach
    2. Life and work spans Enlightenment and Romantic period
      1. Homer vs. Ossian
      2. incoporates and alternates between contrary states
        1. progression and growth--acceptance of temporality and change
        2. Contrast to Wordsworth or Rimbaud, whose visionary qualities die early, or to Keats who, like Werther and Schubert, die young,
        3. like Blake or Dylan for whom change and Re-vision creates continuing harvest
        4. Most famous work is Faust--descendant of the Dr. Faustus of Marlowe and the tradition of Magician who makes a pact with the devil to attain knowledge and power--the romantic artist
          1. he worked on that play for 60 years, adding and changing
  4. The book framed historically
    1. first edition 1774, revised 1787
    2. Goethe writes about the book in later autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, 1814 at a young 72--included in Signet edition
      1. framing introduction like M. Shelley's empahsizing Romantic composition
        1. "the decision to let my inner self rule me at will...drove me into the wonderful element in which Werther was conceived and written." 133
        2. I had written this little volume almost unconsciously 149
      2. source of the love story
        1. in 1772 [age 30] fell in love with Charlotte Buff, parson's daughter in small town where he was apprenticing--she already engaged--kept up relationship with her until she married
        2. "they became accustomed to being three quite unintentionally...a glorious summer passed by, a true German idyl."135
        3. "if....our greatest happiness rests in our longings, and if true longing may have only what is unattainable as it s goal, then all thngs certainly had come together ..."137
      3. heard about the sucide of young diplomat Jerusalem who was also in love with married woman
        1. dressed in style North Germans had copied from English
      4. needed to deal with the problem of youthful suicide--
        1. always current--today's weapons of choice--drugs and guns
        2. "this weariness, this disgust with life is born fo loneliness" 141 [isolation, alienation]...more common in thoughtful introverts...
        3. nothing can further such a weariness of life as much as the repetition of love. First love is truly described as the only love...the idea of forever and eternal--which is what realy sustains and uplifts love--is destroyed and becomes a transient thing like all events that are repaeated. The separation of its sensual and moral aspects, which in our confused civilization has split our loving and desiring sensations, also produces harmful exaggerations." 142
        4. what makes senstive youth most fearful is the irresistible repetition of his errors...
        5. add to all this the turgid blood of youth
        6. external inducement ....offered by English literture...the excellencies of which are accompanined by a profoundly melancholy that it seems to pass on to anyone studying it." 143
          1. it was left to Ossain to lure us to a final Thule...In such an atmosphere...tortured by unsatisfied passion....we began to think kindly of departing this life 146
        7. sentiments such as these were so universal that Werther...touched every heart and depicted the nnermost workings of a sick youthful madness openly and comprehensibly
        8. suicide...demands everyone's sympathy...people who are weary of life from a lack of activity...through the exaggerated demands they make upon themselves.
        9. ... I found myself in sucha condition once...I tried to reconstruct the events that had oppressed and frightened me most....
        10. I wrote W. in 4 weeks without ever making a plan of the whole or previosuly putting any of it down on paper 149
        11. I had saved myself from a tempestuous element with this composition...I felt like a man after confession--happy and free again, with the right to a new life 149
      5. Paradox of public reception; Goethe's retrospective distance--the black light of experience
        1. I had succeeded in tranforming reality into poetry, my friends were confusing themselves by beleiveing that thye had to turn poetry into reality, enact the novel and shoot themselves. What actually took place now among a few, happened later en masse, and this little book that had done me so mcuh good acquired the reputation of being extremely harmful. 149
        2. friend Nicholae wrote a parody--the Joys of Young Werther..."just when the deranged fellow is taking his last fatal step, this judicious psychic doctor lets his patient use a pistol that is loaded with chicken blood, which makes for quite a filthy mess but unfortunately does no further harm. Lotte marries Werther and the whole thing has a happy ending." 151
    3. Transition
      1. this is the Enlightened Goethe speaking about the book; the mature rationalist.
      2. book presents itself quite differently with another frame, the epigraph
  5. The book framed personally
    1. Epigraph
      1. "and you my good man who may feel a similar urge, take comfort in his suffering and let this book be your friend if, through fate or your own fault, you can find none better"
    2. book as friend of isolated reader; confidant
        1. Tragedy of Youth in which pain of growing up acknowledged, celebrated and consoled
      1. "Werther" was carried on his campaigns by Napoleon--in his inside pocket, next to his heart.
      2. Frankenstein's Monster--
        1. "I thought Werter himself a more divine being that I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretention but it sunk deep...I inclined towards the opinions of the hero whose extinction I wept without precisely understanding it" p. 91
    3. Book as my friend
      1. The artifact--Reclam copy in German--inscribed 1960, Columbia College, when I was 18, about Werther's age
        1. read it in a German class--a sophomore in New York City where I had grown up
        2. romantic and moony innocent--still a virgin
        3. Look back from 39 years later and read the inscription:
        4. "und du, gute Seele, die du eben den Drang fuhlst wie er, schoepfe Trost aus seinem Leiden und lass das Buchlein deine Freund sein..."
        5. first discover, from the new perspective a difference in the text--Seele, Drang, Buchlein are all mistranslated
      2. It was for a while such a friend--
        1. one that kept me company but also helped plunge me into a sophomore crisis of depression and despair that came from awakening in ways weve been reading and hearing about--
          1. despair like the Monster's--and I felt like a monster--arising from my own need for love, my "ugly" and "beautiful" sexual frustration--pining away like the sunflower and the youth--
          2. my isolation and loneliness and my disgust at the hypocrisy and horror of the world of experience I was entering as a full citizen.
      3. There were other books that had functioned like that for me--
        1. Voltaire's Candide, Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, J.D. Salinger's catcher in the Rye, Tomas Mann's Tonio Kroeger--
        2. books about coming of age, passing from innocence to experience--classified as "Bildungsroman" from the Germans who dominated the field
      4. Buchlein--"little"[like Bachlein]
        1. Reclam Verlag books--like those Dovers--a dollar or less---A library of world literature for everybody--1867--a german institution
      5. The Germans--
        1. Goethe had called them the nation of Dichter und Denker--of poets and thinkers--the nation that produced Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, Hegel, Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Einstein and Freud--the people who idolized culture--Kultur
        2. Works of Goethe and Schiller--sitting there in my home--like Shakespeare...unread but enshrined--
          1. my mother told me Sunday that she used her first paycheck to buy the complete works of Goethe
        3. But also the people of Goering and Eichmann and Adolf Hitler, who between 1935 and 1945 had murdered six million jews, including many of my relatives, eleven million victims overall and who had forced my parents into exile in the USA
        4. Learning about details of this holocaust was another component of that sophomore crisis of education--like the monster's awareness of the fearful symmetry, the awful pairing of beauty and terror, like Werther's and Lotte's confrontation with confusion, darkness and despair:
          1. Love and faithfulness turned to violence and murder [93-4] on the grand scale of history
          2. "You are doomed...we are doomed" 105-6
          3. Ossian
          4. Like Blake's narrators and F's monster learn not only about the family, but the whole human genocidal family
  6. The book framed esthetically
    1. Transition
      1. Reading it this time in a different stage of life, closer to Goethe's in 1814 as he looked back than to Werther's, also with detachment.
      2. On first rereading I sometimes found it embarrassingly gushy, slow moving, repetitious, but also remarkably powerful and engaging--much as I did the movie titanic or various versions of Romeo and Juliet--a great example of Romantic literature in the sense of Romance like True Romance or Harlequin romance
      3. On second rereading I searched for overall structure and theme and found interesting patterns I'd like to lay out for you.
    2. Most broadly, there's the structure of Book 1 and Book 2--laid out symmetrically, like songs of Innocence and Experience.
      1. Within both parts there's a subsidiary structure created by the succession of the months dated in the letters, providing a remarkable sense of organic, temporal flow, metamorphosing feelings, the experiential cycle of growth and death.
    3. Book I
      1. goes from the sense of freedom in Springtime wandering, arrival in the pastoral Utopia of Waldheim, artistic flowering and joy in nature to the early summer of falling in love to the autumnal movement brought on by the realization that the happy threesome cant work, and Werther's September departure.
      2. This book of innocence, though it curves downward, ends in Blakean optimism as Werther Lotte and Albert sit in the moonlight recalling the death of Lotte's mother surrounded by her children together confident that all three of them and she and all the departed will be happily reunited some day in the hereafter.
    4. Book 2
      1. begins in October with Werther's departure from Waldheim and his taking up employment in court, where he spends the Winter trying to fit into a society he holds in contempt and finally failing miserably.
      2. In Spring he leaves, and after a nostalgic to his childhood home returns to Waldheim despite knowing that in the meantime Lotte and Albert have married.
      3. The summer there is a hopeless effort to recapture the previous years happiness, as his love for Lotte sickens into jealousy, sexual desire, and morbidity.
        1. perhaps an expression of that hopeless and limiting aspect of experience that Goethe described as resulting from repetition
      4. Autumn is a deepening and self aware descent into almost complete isolation, suicidal fantasies, identification with a rapist and a murderer, drunkenness, and conflict with both Lotte and Albert.
      5. The darkness is rendered aesthetically beautiful by the intensity of feeling, the sound of the language and flashes of redemptive relief in prayer and contact with Lotte.
      6. As the year's end approaches, the structural patterns carried through so far are interrupted on p. 103 by the narrator's voice which replaces Werther's voice in the letters to his friend Willaim, and tells the final part of the story from a point of view that includes the texts of Werther's letter to others, including Lotte, as well as his own almost clinically objective though sympathetic perspective, that analyzes as well as narrates events to their tragic Winter Solstice conclusion for a general audience of readers.
        1. this final shift occurs as Werther's own perspective is becoming most distorted and diseased, after he screams at Lotte while she plays the piano and then on p. 102 he his obsession with her eyes.
        2. On one hand this intrusion distances and to some degree protects the reader, as Goethe claimed he intended, allowing us to see how far gone Werther is.
        3. On the other hand, the events narrated in this last section are much more dramatic and exciting than anything that has come before and hence draws us further in to the story.
      7. Book 2, then, like Blakes Songs of Experience, appropriately has a more complex and inclusive form that seems to transcend Book 1's innocence, but it also cycles back to and reaffirms it as well.
      8. I'd like to read and discuss a few passages from this final section of the novel to get a sense of some of that drama and complexity in relation to the work as a whole.
    5. The last section begins with an acrimonious conflict between Albert and Werther over the issue of the murderer. The brief threesome harmony of the last summer--the respectable and responsible family man, his fiancee, and the passionate artist--has broken down into the extremes of the rigid bourgeois judge and the wild instinct-driven maniac, leaving Lotte embarrassed, frustrated and tragically bullied by both men who previously respected her.
      1. Werther's sympathy for the murderer, goes together with his fantasies of murdering Albert,(113) and his preparations for suicide as a sign of his monster-like distortion.
    6. As morality and sanity fade, intensity and energy of the story increases, despite the dampening efforts of the narrator, and we are more caught up in the pure fascinating drama of the experience, as the events narrated are given greater detail and length.
      1. p. 108--looking into the abyss; hearing the storm; dreaming of sex--what's been most suppressed, murder and lust, come to the fore, as Werther, having decided to kill himself, no longer has anything to lose, and as Lotte sensing the failure of her attempts to control the situation is caught up by passions she cannot recognize or name
    7. Then comes the final meeting. Albert is gone, having been promised that Werther will not be there till Xmas.
      1. "Suddenly she felt the pressure of a melancholy to which all prospects of happiness were closed. She was depressed, a dark cloud obsucured her vision. It was half past six when she heard someone come up the stairs and she recognized W's step, and his voice asking for her. Her heart began to beat wildly, and I think we are safe in assuming that she received him in such condition for the first time" 115
      2. W. arrives; she sends for neighbors who arent there; she's afraid, but sits next to him and says read Ossian--she cant play the minuet--light to darkness
        1. I havent found any writer or reader who likes the quotations from Ossian here, I think there absolutely necessary to prolong this climax--a respectable form of their forbidden being together--love/death doom, contrasted to earlier Klopstock, extending the moment and leading to the touch and the kiss that climaxes and concludes their relationship--a fitting love-death
          1. Salgar's song--woman mourning death of her lover and brother; brother killed lover because he was enemy of family--RJ scenario
          2. Alpin's song--mourning for the death of heros and bards
          3. Songs for the death of children...helpless grief
            1. authentic replication of Anglo saxon texts--just recently discovered
            2. mythology--authentic and made up; the primitive; the gothic and pregothic heroic sublime; the ruined abbey--"The Ruin" of anglo saxon poetry
            3. the weather of cold rain, ice and sea: The Titanic movie
      3. "They experienced their own misery in the fate of these noble people...their tears flowed as one...she became confused and pressed his hand tightly against her breast and with a plaintive motion moved closer to him. Their burning cheeks touched and the world ended for them..." 122
    8. Like Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, this is another version of the total loss of innocence
      1. Adam is punished for transgression with death. In Werther's case the wages of death is sin. In fitting Blakean Romantic style, he insists
        1. I have tasted sin in all its divine rapture!
        2. Admits his sin, affirms it and prays with confidence that God will reward him 124 just as he is confident that what happened with Lotte proves that she loves him.
      2. And he may be right. She is utterly changed from the woman [to some readers, insufferably passive and pure] that she has been
        1. Lotte's blood in feverish turmoil--no longer chaste and calm
          1. did she feel passion
          2. resentment of boldness
          3. loss of innocence
          4. how deal with husband
          5. how lose Werther 125
    9. The narrator pops back in with what at this point seems bizarre moral reassurance when he laments
      1. if only they had not withdrawn from intimacy--all three--and had been able to communicate, Werther might have been saved 126
    10. Then he moves to what for me is the most gripping moment of the book, one that discloses the ultimate fall into a world of experience of the kind suggested by Blake's poem, The Poison Tree:
      1. "Another strange circumstance"
        1. Albert knew of Werther's suicidal tendency
        2. He comes home irritable
        3. Lotte wants to love him, but he ignores her, especially after she mentions Werther's visit; her melancholy and isolation deepens
        4. Werther's groom embarrasses her more
        5. Brilliant narrative 127
          1. He gives note to Albert "who turned to his wife and said casually, "Give him the pistols." "To the boy he said, "Tell your master that I wish him a pleasant journey."
          2. The words fell like a thunderclap on Lotte's ears. She swayed as she rose to her feet; she didn't know what to do. Slowly she walked over to the wall and with hands that trembled, took the poistols from the rack, dusted them, hesitated and would have hesitated longer if Albert had not forced her with his questioning eyes to go on...

        (3) Lotte trembles and hesitates because she knows that sending him the pistols means sending him his death, but instead of intervening she polishes them and hands them to the servant.

      2. This leads into W's ritualistic and self satisfied preparations for death and his final, final, final utterly Romantic letter
        1. "...granted the good fortune to die for you, to sacrifice myself for you" 129
        2. this completes Werther's earlier identifications of himself with Christ--the crown of thorns, the despair on the cross and now the idea that his death is a sacrifice
      3. But the ending itself, once again reverses soberly, soberly, soberly--providing an ugly contrast to the Innocent vision of a reunion in the afterlife at the end of Book I. Werther shoots himself in the head above the eye, but instead of a beautiful and clean death, he ends up living another twelve hours thrashing around in his splattered brains and blood. And though children surround the death bed kissing his hands, neither Albert nor Lotte attend the funeral: "Workmen carried the body. There was no priest in attendance." 131.