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Chapter 11 - Faust
- from Part II - Literature
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- By T. J. Reed
- Edited by Charlotte Lee, University of Cambridge
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- Book:
- Goethe in Context
- Published online:
- 16 May 2024
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- 23 May 2024, pp 104-112
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Summary
Chapter 11 traces the development of Goethe’s Faust, from the first scenes drafted in the 1770s, when Goethe was in his twenties, to the end of Part Two, completed shortly before his death in 1832. The chapter highlights the at times uneasy combination of antiquated material and modern intention within the work, and the contradictions that resulted from its protracted genesis. At the same time, attention is drawn to the sheer power of Goethe’s language, to its rhythms and the characters that it creates. Goethe’s Faust, the chapter argues, is a masterpiece with flaws.
Investigation of Proton Beam-Driven Fusion Reactions Generated by an Ultra-Short Petawatt-Scale Laser Pulse
- Marius S. Schollmeier, Vahe Shirvanyan, Christie Capper, Sven Steinke, Adam Higginson, Reed Hollinger, John T. Morrison, Ryan Nedbailo, Huanyu Song, Shoujun Wang, Jorge J. Rocca, Georg Korn, Dimitri Batani
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- Journal:
- Laser and Particle Beams / Volume 2022 / 2022
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 January 2024, e4
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We present results from a pitcher-catcher experiment utilizing a proton beam generated with nanostructured targets at a petawatt-class, short-pulse laser facility to induce proton-boron fusion reactions in a secondary target. A 45-fs laser pulse with either 400 nm wavelength and 7 J energy, or 800 nm and 14 J, and an intensity of up to 5 × 1021 W/cm2 was used to irradiate either thin foil targets or near-solid density, nanostructured targets made of boron nitride (BN) nanotubes. In particular, for 800 nm wavelength irradiation, a BN nanotube target created a proton beam with about five times higher maximum energy and about ten times more protons than a foil target. This proton beam was used to irradiate a thick plate made of boron nitride placed in close proximity to trigger 11B (p, α) 2α fusion reactions. A suite of diagnostics consisting of Thomson parabola ion spectrometers, postshot nuclear activation measurements, neutron time-of-flight detectors, and differentially filtered solid-state nuclear track detectors were used to measure both the primary proton spectrum and the fusion products. From the primary proton spectrum, we calculated (p, n) and (α,n) reactions in the catcher and compare with our measurements. The nuclear activation results agree quantitatively and neutron signals agree qualitatively with the calculations, giving confidence that primary particle distributions can be obtained from such measurements. These results provide new insights for measuring the ion distributions inside of proton-boron fusion targets.
Impact of in-furrow fertilizers on winter wheat grain yield and mineral concentration
- B. A. Finch, V. T. Reed, J. E. Williams, R. L. Sharry, D. B. Arnall
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- Journal:
- The Journal of Agricultural Science / Volume 160 / Issue 6 / December 2022
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 06 September 2022, pp. 493-501
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Placement of fertilizer in the seed furrow to increase nutrient availability is a common practice in row-crop production. While in-furrow application of fertilizer is widely utilized in the production of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), there is a lack of work evaluating new formulations and nutrient combinations that are available. The objective of this study was to quantify the effects of in-furrow fertilizer products and combinations of products on winter wheat grain yield, nitrogen and mineral concentrations. Trials were conducted across five site-years in central Oklahoma using 11 fertilizer formulations placed in-furrow at the time of planting. In locations that soil test phosphorus (STP) levels or potassium were above sufficiency, the use of in-furrow fertilizers did not improve yield over the control. Inconsistency of response was noted at locations where STP levels were below the critical threshold. While one location showed no response to the addition of P regardless of source, two other locations had significant yield responses from three or more P-containing fertilizers. The addition of both sulphur and zinc resulted in increased yield over the base product at one low STP location. Nutrient concentrations were also influenced in nutrient-limited soils; however, no trends in response were present. Based upon the results of this study, the application of in-furrow fertilizer has the potential to increase winter wheat grain yield and nutrient concentration, when soil nutrients are limiting. As expected the addition of fertilizer when soil test levels are at or above a sufficiency did not increase grain yield.
Risk factors for severe disease in patients admitted with COVID-19 to a hospital in London, England: a retrospective cohort study
- J. W. Goodall, T. A. N. Reed, M. Ardissino, P. Bassett, A. M. Whittington, D. L. Cohen, N. Vaid
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- Journal:
- Epidemiology & Infection / Volume 148 / 2020
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 13 October 2020, e251
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COVID-19 has caused a major global pandemic and necessitated unprecedented public health restrictions in almost every country. Understanding risk factors for severe disease in hospitalised patients is critical as the pandemic progresses. This observational cohort study aimed to characterise the independent associations between the clinical outcomes of hospitalised patients and their demographics, comorbidities, blood tests and bedside observations. All patients admitted to Northwick Park Hospital, London, UK between 12 March and 15 April 2020 with COVID-19 were retrospectively identified. The primary outcome was death. Associations were explored using Cox proportional hazards modelling. The study included 981 patients. The mortality rate was 36.0%. Age (adjusted hazard ratio (aHR) 1.53), respiratory disease (aHR 1.37), immunosuppression (aHR 2.23), respiratory rate (aHR 1.28), hypoxia (aHR 1.36), Glasgow Coma Scale <15 (aHR 1.92), urea (aHR 2.67), alkaline phosphatase (aHR 2.53), C-reactive protein (aHR 1.15), lactate (aHR 2.67), platelet count (aHR 0.77) and infiltrates on chest radiograph (aHR 1.89) were all associated with mortality. These important data will aid clinical risk stratification and provide direction for further research.
12 - Knowing and Partly Knowing: Paul Celan's Mission
- T. J. Reed
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- Book:
- Genesis
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 16 September 2020
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- 15 September 2020, pp 220-230
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Summary
As It Happened
ONE OF THE CLEAREST of genetic accounts concerns a now celebrated poem from Paul Celan's last and posthumous collection, Schneepart:
DU LIEGST im großen Gelausche,
umbuscht, umflockt.
Geh du zur Spree, geh zur Havel,
geh zu den Fleischerhaken
zu den roten Äppelstaken
aus Schweden—
Es kommt der Tisch mit den Gaben,
er biegt um ein Eden—
Der Mann ward zum Sieb, die Frau
mußte schwimmen, die Sau,
für sich, für keinen, für jeden—
Der Landwehrkanal wird nicht rauschen
Nichts
stockt.
[YOU LIE in the great listening,
Embuscht, enflaked.
Just you go to the Spree, go to the Havel,
go to the meat-hooks,
to the red Äppelstaken
From Sweden—
Now the table is coming with the gifts,
it bends round an Eden—
The man became a sieve, the woman
had to swim, the sow,
for herself, for no one, for all—
The Landwehr Canal will not murmur.
Nothing
stops.]
The poem is a work of extreme concision and allusiveness, a spare sonnet (rhymed abcd dece ffea [-] b ) ending with a bleak historical reflection. It isn't one of the most obscure poems of a difficult poet—at least it has some obvious real-life references, to Berlin with the rivers Spree and Havel and the Landwehr canal, to winter and Christmas, to something Swedish, to some kind of Eden, to the implied deaths of two people. But what joins these things to make an overall sense isn't immediately clear. Light is however thrown by a report of the experiences that lie behind the poem, as provided in some detail by the critic Peter Szondi, who was one of Celan's companions on his only ever extensive visit to Berlin.
Celan was there in December 1967 to give readings, in the Akademie der Künste and the Comparative Literature Department of the Free University. He was put up in the Academy's accommodation in the Hansa Quarter, in a room whose large windows looked out on the bushes of the Tiergarten. During the day, he met friends, was shown round, and took in the Advent atmosphere. The market had traditional Swedish wreaths decorated with candles and apples on sticks.
11 - Atomic Beginnings: Brecht, Galileo, and After
- T. J. Reed
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- Genesis
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 16 September 2020
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- 15 September 2020, pp 209-219
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Summary
Orbiting Ourselves
SCIENCE IS THE CENTER of educated modern awareness, the source of the most reliable knowledge about what and where mankind is. When Karl Marx declared religion was the opium of the people, he followed it up with a scientific metaphor urging people to concentrate instead on purely human concerns. Disillusioned by the critique of religion, Man was to “move around himself and thereby around his real sun. Religion is only the illusory sun, which moves around Man all the time he does not move around himself.”
The metaphor is decidedly hit-and-miss. Orbiting ourselves is hard to visualize—we have to be simultaneously the sun at the center and the earth going round it. And it never was an illusory sun, only ever the real sun, of which there were illusory perceptions. But the metaphor remains striking, and its reference is clear, to Copernicus and Galileo who set the sun at the center of the universe in place of the earth. That revolution became (to stay with astronomical metaphors) a fixed star in the history of science, enlightenment, and human progress, emerging in the seventeenth century, but in principle timeless. Science was a bridgehead in the campaign to replace religious and philosophical dogma with a tenable, testable worldview, often at great personal risk to the innovator. Scientific discovery was damned as religious heresy. Accordingly, the monument to the Polish astronomer Copernicus in the church of St Anne in Kraków is dedicated to “the man who dared (auso),” which picks up the motto “dare to know” (sapere aude) from Kant's great essay of 1784, What is Enlightenment? Aptly so, since not just science but specifically astronomy was consciously a model for Enlightenment thinkers because of its diametrical reversal of a set way of thinking.
The two astronomers naturally figured in the pantheon of Marxism. Their example was once again timely when science and freedom of thought came under attack in Nazi Germany, driving intellectuals, writers, and scientists (among them fourteen Nobel laureates and twenty-six professors of theoretical physics) into exile. The life of Galileo was an obvious dramatic subject.
1 - Homer's Audiences: Shaping the Iliad (and the Odyssey)
- T. J. Reed
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- Genesis
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 16 September 2020
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- 15 September 2020, pp 19-36
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Starting
THE STUDY OF LITERARY GENESIS begins in ancient times with the founding cases of scholarship and controversy, Homer and the Bible. This chapter touches on motifs that will recur later. It also suggests a modest alternative answer to some long-standing Homeric questions.
The Iliad and the Odyssey mark the genesis of a genre. Homer is the first great epic author in Western literature, the first whom people identified, or perhaps they simply created him, a legendary and symbolic poetfigure, old, blind, but richer for that in grand and compelling visions. At all events, nothing is reliably known about a real person. Homer—I stick nevertheless to the traditional name—was also the first to suffer the death of the author (a rather different kind from the once alleged death of modern authors) when his role as the sole creator of the Iliad and Odyssey was questioned. Doubts arose from inconsistencies, irregularities, contradictions that stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. It has never quite healed, but has at best been awkwardly plastered over.
The epics attributed to Homer certainly had a complex and confusing genesis; it has been called “a long process about which we know nothing.” That is too sweeping, since it overlooks a lot that we do know about an enormous cast of people involved in the creation and afterlife of the Iliad and the Odyssey: an unknown number of unknown authors of earlier oral poems; an unknown number of unknown live performers from before and after the epics were given written shape; a large number of scholars and commentators, ancient and modern, known (Aristarchus, Eustathius, and Zenodotus; d’Aubignac, Perrault, and Wolf …) or unknown, who purified, criticized, cut, censored, and bowdlerized the texts. In sum, enough knowns and unknowns to make a fair body of knowledge. Roles are clear, though names and dates are largely lost. Their relation, to the texts and to each other, still leaves wide areas of uncertainty that have nourished controversy for centuries, keeping generations of scholars busy down to our own day trying to see through the complexities to the true substance. So the genesis of Homer's epics is also the genesis of genetic criticism.
8 - Writing on the Run: Georg Büchner's Revolutions
- T. J. Reed
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- Genesis
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 16 September 2020
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- 15 September 2020, pp 163-173
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Summary
Agitator
THE YEAR IS 1834: he sits at his manuscript, fearing arrest at any moment. The Darmstadt police were his Muses, he would later say, a sardonic angle on the urgency of this genesis. He needs money. He is still at home, but there's a ladder against the back garden wall for a quick getaway. Some of his fellow-conspirators are already safely over the border, in nearby Strasbourg or in Switzerland. The less lucky ones are or soon will be in jail, betrayed by informers and agents provocateurs, facing years of confinement, interrogation, sometimes torture. His closest collaborator, the pastor Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, defiant in adversity but finally despairing after three years of solitary confinement, will slash his veins; the authorities soon find him, but they leave him to bleed to death, a judicial murder.
Büchner has been involved in plans to free some of the prisoners, which is one reason why he has stayed on in Darmstadt, but the plan has collapsed: the bribed guard has been withdrawn from service. The imprisoned colleagues will haunt Büchner's conscience and his imagination— he knows that such pressures would have slowly broken him. Once safe in exile he will write to the family of his relief that the constant threat of arrest has been lifted, though Darmstadt has requested extradition in a “wanted” notice now in circulation. Phantasies of imprisonment will visit the typhus delirium of the young man's last days, which will be very soon.
The present manuscript apart, he is hardly yet a writer. He has coauthored with Weidig an inflammatory pamphlet, which is mainly what has got him into this trouble. Otherwise he is just a medical student in his early twenties, with two years at the University of Strasbourg behind him and a third more locally, at Giessen, Justus Liebig's university. Now he is working at home for his examinations and doing some private teaching for would-be medical students; there are anatomical diagrams all over his desk. These also served, his brother Ludwig would recall, to hide the manuscript from his father, a respected senior medic whose social standing helped keep the police at bay.
9 - “The Best-Laid Schemes…”: Thomas Mann Unplanned
- T. J. Reed
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- Genesis
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 16 September 2020
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- 15 September 2020, pp 174-190
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Out of Himself
IN A SUBLIME PUT-DOWN, Bertolt Brecht once said of Thomas Mann, author of some of the most monumental and highly regarded novels of the twentieth century, “I always found his short stories really quite good.” In his beginnings Mann did indeed think of himself as no more than a short-story writer with no higher formal ambitions. A favorite author and model was Maupassant. Mann's first major work had to be drawn out of him by circumstances to which his talent responded with amazing sophistication (he was still in his early twenties). The pattern repeated itself. Throughout his career ever larger undertakings grew out of initial small-scale plans. In contrast, a phase of career-conscious grand designs through which he hoped to confirm his early success proved arid—the desired masterpieces couldn't be written to order. Fortunately, these grand projects became superfluous when an unforeseen impulse took over.
In 1897 the young Thomas Mann succeeded in placing a piece with Samuel Fischer's Neue Rundschau. Fischer, then the publisher of the avant-garde, was impressed enough to reprint it as the title story for a volume with five other already published stories of Mann’s. Little Herr Friedemann appeared in the “Collection Fischer,” gratifyingly alongside some then-esteemed names—Herman Bang, Hermann Bahr, Peter Altenberg. It was well received, was even compared with Chekhov's beginnings. It was no best-seller—by 1900 there were still 1597 copies left from a printrun of 2000. Still, Fischer kept faith with his beginner. He had already invited him to write a novel, “even if it's not so long.” That was intended not so much to set a limit as to encourage Mann to go beyond his present range. A longer work could incidentally pay higher royalties.
It was an offer a beginner couldn't refuse, but it posed problems besides just length. Mann's early stories were grotesque and pathological cases of human oddity, of suffering and social exclusion, all narrated with a cool detachment that suggested (was surely meant to suggest) a maturity beyond the young author's experience. It had sources in the ironists who had shaped Mann's outlook—Heine and, especially, Nietzsche.
Part II - Early Modern
- T. J. Reed
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- Genesis
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 16 September 2020
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- 15 September 2020, pp 55-56
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Bibliography
- T. J. Reed
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- Genesis
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 16 September 2020
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- 15 September 2020, pp 281-294
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6 - Occasions: Goethe's Lyric Poetry
- T. J. Reed
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- Genesis
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- 16 September 2020
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- 15 September 2020, pp 125-145
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Summary
Fulfillments
GOETHE IS AT CROSS-PURPOSES with the conception of Faust in yet another way and even more fundamentally. Faust will lose the wager with Mephistopheles if he ever admits to contentment with an individual moment. His certainty that this will never happen is a dismissive judgment on all possible experience. Yet Goethe the poet declares, and his lyrical poetry embodies, the flat opposite. Over a long lifetime he repeatedly captures experiences of fulfillment with an intensity matched by no other German poet—moments of love, of beauty, of insight and pleasure in the natural world, of sheer exuberance in his own felt existence, often closely traceable to their originating moment. In the late poem “Vermächtnis” (Legacy) there is a paradoxical suggestion of permanence, that “der Augenblick ist Ewigkeit” (the moment is eternity.)
Not that Goethe's captured moments are grandiose. They arise from everyday occasions too familiar to be exciting (though he did once in young years have to throw himself from a bolting horse) and too obvious to be poetic—until, that is, they are transformed through the poet’s fresh and vigorous vision. When Goethe in old age comes to survey what he has all along been doing, “occasion” (Gelegenheit) becomes the central concept of an uncomplicated poetics.
Historic change pivots on the term. Where once it meant moments of public significance—births, marriages, victories, deaths—for which the worldly great, and later also citizens of substance, commissioned poems (Casualcarmina), it could now mean anybody's moments, experiences from the common life made memorable by feeling or insight—hence the other standard term “Erlebnisdichtung” (poetry of experience). It was a democratic appropriation.
That did not mean its range was narrowly private. On the contrary, it opened up the wider world to a lyrical realism:
The world is so large and rich, and life so multifarious, that there will never be a shortage of occasions for poems. But they must all be occasional poems; that is to say, reality must provide the motive and the material. A special case becomes general precisely because the poet treats it. All my poems are occasional poems, they are stimulated by reality and have their ground and roots in it.
5 - Cross-Purposes: Goethe's Faust
- T. J. Reed
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- Book:
- Genesis
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 16 September 2020
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- 15 September 2020, pp 103-124
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Summary
NO WORK BY A SINGLE AUTHOR ever had so long a genesis as Goethe’s Faust: over thirty years from the young poet's first drafts at some point in the early 1770s down to the publication of the completed Part One in 1808, then a further quarter-century until the last of twelve thousand lines were written in 1832, just in time before the poet died. Over that sixty-year time-span, organic change and external chance were enough by themselves to undermine any consistent conception and final unity. But from the very start the writer was at cross-purposes with his chosen subject; and when a second story-line forced its way into the plot, the two strands were at cross-purposes with each other. This never-resolved dual disharmony complicated the genesis and shaped the text right to the end.
A Problem Subject
Why should the rising star of German literature in the 1770s have chosen to revive the old Faust story at all? Goethe's early successes were firmly contemporary and he was firmly secular. The Shakespeare-style history play Götz von Berlichingen fed a growing present interest in the German past and had a message for the political present. The novel of unhappy love and suicide, The Sorrows of Young Werther, captured the younger generation's emotional and social unease and became a European sensation. Goethe was also writing poems, as yet unknown to a wider public, celebrating earthly existence with an intensity never before achieved in the German language and never surpassed since. In contrast, Faust belongs to an already fading scene of fears and fables, where the destiny of a sinning soul is played out between heaven and hell, with damnation his inevitable end. This deeply Christian moral tale was narrated in Spiess's chapbook of 1587 and dramatized in the same spirit in 1590 by Christopher Marlowe as The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.
But by the late eighteenth century, Germany as one center of the European Enlightenment was slipping the bonds of Christianity and the constricting view of the world it imposed, Goethe as much as anyone. Brought up in a household no more than conventionally Christian, he was a born free spirit with an impulse to see and think for himself, central principles of the Enlightenment in whose atmosphere he grew up.
Introduction: Processes
- T. J. Reed
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- Genesis
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- 16 September 2020
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- 15 September 2020, pp 1-16
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TO THE SYMPATHETIC OBSERVER, there is pleasure in watching something of beauty or value being made or coming spontaneously into existence. A blossom is a highpoint in a plant's evolution and a single year's cycle. Parents watch a child grow in the womb into what from the moment of birth will be a distinctive person. Literary works are likewise the product of a human organism and come into being in an analogous way, containing “a potency of life as active as that soul was whose progeny they are.” The metaphor of procreation will recur. More than one writer thinks of his work as his child, himself even as its mother, not so much a male attempt to appropriate woman's unique role as a sense that literary creation too is an unstoppable process from deep within.
So works are not just there like objects in a landscape. They have to begin and gradually grow into what they are. Not that objects in a landscape are “just there,” either. Eons of geological activity have created mountains and valleys, folds and faults. Everything has a history, and coming at it through its genesis is a way of understanding it in depth— understanding how a form has been shaped by traceable forces, so that even when it is the object of a discrete aesthetic perception, it is only one possible “still” within a continuous movement. Following that movement locates and illuminates the final form from many sides.
A work may take time and undergo all kinds of inner and external pressures and accidents on the way to its eventual form, assuming it ever finds one—for “ars longa, vita brevis.” Pascal's Pensées are a mass of slips left at his death, halfway to thematic ordering. Short of mortality, anything is possible—vision, revision, addition, deletion, alternative drafts considered and discarded, even abandonment as a fragment or a frankly admitted failure; everything is in flux. In an insight of Goethe's (who coined the term morphology for the science of evolving forms), “State is a foolish word, because nothing stands still, and everything is in motion.”
At the everyday level, readiness to understand another person's viewpoint is sometimes expressed as “I see where you’re coming from”—not simply where you now stand, but more illuminatingly how you reached that position, from what assumptions and principles and through what experiences.
4 - Beginner's Luck: Shakespeare's History Cycles
- T. J. Reed
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- Genesis
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- 16 September 2020
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- 15 September 2020, pp 78-99
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Near-Oblivion
THE GENESIS OF SHAKESPEARE'S dramatic oeuvre is rooted in the materials of history and—as with the Iliad—in the tastes of his first audiences; but the material circumstances of its production meant that much of it might never have survived to become history itself. For a long time, Shakespeare's amazing nonchalance about the fate of his plays left the final phase of fixing the texts in print to chance, with the consequence that some were never printed in his lifetime at all. There is no sign that he did anything to further publication. Since he left no record of his actions or omissions, his motives can only be guessed at.
Direct traces of Shakespeare's writing career are few. Signatures apart, only one small piece of text thought to be in his hand is preserved, a section of the drama Sir Thomas More on which he is known to have collaborated: three pages, only a part, albeit a vital part: More’s speech to xenophobe rioters appealing for a humane response to political refugees.
There exists, though, a striking account of how Shakespeare wrote, from men who knew whereof they spoke. The actors Henry Condell and John Heminge, who in 1623 put together the First Folio after Shakespeare's death, had been for years his fellow-shareholders and collaborators in the troupe for which he both acted and did virtually all his writing, the Chamberlain's (later the King’s) Men. The two editors were concerned “to procure [for] his Orphans, Guardians,” a variation on the metaphor of paternity common in writers, in this case remedying a neglectful kind. Condell and Heminge laid the foundations of Shakespeare's later fame by rescuing the half of his dramatic production that had never yet been printed—eighteen plays, including several of his finest, which would otherwise certainly have been lost—and by republishing the others, which had earlier appeared in haphazard sequence, some of them in a form not designed to last. The already published titles did at least include all but one of the histories (discounting the minor King John and Henry VIII). They were his significant early successes, although not yet labelled as “histories” to distinguish them from any other genre.
Index
- T. J. Reed
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- Genesis
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- 15 September 2020, pp 295-301
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Transition—Tradition
- T. J. Reed
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- Genesis
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- 16 September 2020
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- 15 September 2020, pp 100-100
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There is less of a gap than might appear between the two main sections of this book, the wider European and the specifically German. The introductory chapters, besides being large-scale examples of genetic process, are linked in substance with what follows, indeed are in large measure its precondition. Homer, the Bible, and Shakespeare were live forces in the minds of modern European writers, in German no less than in the other vernacular languages. Montaigne too, with his innovative, rich picture of a single private world, surely emboldened later explorers of human character and experience.
From the rediscovery of Antiquity in the Renaissance and onward, Homer was its central literary symbol. Homeric epic was a source of mythical figures and actions and of the very conception of narrative, recognizable even as it mutated in the eighteenth century into the new phenomenon of the novel, which for Hegel was “the modern bourgeois epic” capturing a new prosaic reality—increased psychological and social complexity in place of violent action and tribal custom. The Bible, for its part, was a treasury of story and myth alternative to the classical heritage and, in its Protestant translations into English and German, a shaping influence on the literary language of those cultures. Bertolt Brecht of all people, the enfant terrible of the 1920s, when asked about the sources of his style, said “You’ll laugh: the Bible.” Serious- to-solemn German literary occasions fell instinctively into Luther's syntax and rhythms, as English ones did into the structures and rhythms of the Authorized Version; their presences are subliminally felt, and no less powerful for that. Shakespeare reigned over literature at large as an object of reverence and a challenge to creative emulation. Goethe's revolutionary first drama Götz von Berlichingen took over Shakespeare's formal freedoms and an immunity to the constricting classical “unities.” Büchner's and Brecht's plays moved in the same broad stream. Poets down to Paul Celan tempered their style on translations of Shakespeare's sonnets. “Shakespeare without end,” the motto Goethe set over his working life, helped to shape the German national literature of the later eighteenth and the nineteenth century. Shakespeare’s plays became virtually part of it, in repeated waves of translation, especially the masterly interpretative versions of August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck.
10 - Description of a Struggle: Kafka's Half-Escape
- T. J. Reed
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- Genesis
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- 16 September 2020
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- 15 September 2020, pp 191-208
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The Wound Breaks Open
AS THESE STUDIES GO, Kafka is a case in the diagnostic sense. Perhaps not just all unhappy families, as Tolstoy wrote, but all unhappy individuals are unhappy in their own way. Kafka's misery was complex, each strand having its own pathology and paradoxes: a deep feeling of physical and psychological inferiority and of exclusion from common human contact; dissatisfaction with his body and appearance, although he was tall, good-looking, and always elegantly dressed; uneasy family relations, especially with his dominating father, a powerful self-made businessman; a feeling that he lived among but not in his family, stranger than a stranger, lonelier than Robinson Crusoe on his island, yet also not wholly belonging to the traditional Jewish world, or Zionism; a sense of intellectual failure from the time of his schooling onwards; the frustration of an unloved office job, and the responsibility for a rashly launched further family enterprise, both of which consumed time and energies that might have been used for writing.
Writing was a yearned-for compensation, but also a further source of misery when, as so often, it failed to flow. Even so, it dominated his life, in childhood as a premonition, later as a hope, later still as despair. Was he a writer? He was sure he was nothing else. Reflections on that status and attempts to achieve it fill his diaries. Rather than everyday events, they record his creative starts (overwhelmingly unsuccessful) and the ebb and flow of his self-confidence. The above chapter title, borrowed from an early collection of his sketches, exactly fits Kafka's life-long struggle to prove himself.
Not that the creative fulfillment Kafka hoped for would have made for a happy life. As a writer, he would still be left with loneliness and exclusion. An early piece, the delicate prose-poem “An unhappy bachelor,” movingly foresees the realities of a solitary life. Marriage and family were in his eyes an ideal fulfillment, just not for him. He came as near as being engaged—twice—to Felice Bauer, and over six years wrote her 400 eloquent love-letters (they make 750 closely printed pages) but twice broke off the engagement. His writing routine, deep into the small hours, would have made him an unsociable husband.
2 - Fourfold Genesis: The Bible between Literature and Authority
- T. J. Reed
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- Book:
- Genesis
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 16 September 2020
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2020, pp 37-54
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Summary
Odd One Out
DOES THE BIBLE BELONG HERE? Is it a literary work? It isn't even a “work” at all, but a collection, an anthology, a positive library— Carolingian catalogues listed it as “bibliotheca,” and its modern name derives from an ancient Greek plural. Each of the sixty-six constituent books—Old Testament thirty-nine, New Testament twenty-seven—has its own genesis. So far from being the single voice of God, as people once believed, the Bible is now taken, not just by secular minds, to be the work of many human hands, authors, part-authors, redactors, working from multiple sources, leaving problems of coherence and consistency that make the Homeric situation look positively simple. For example, the Pentateuch is made up of four constituents; the story of Jacob and Esau is said to be “stitched together” (that metaphor from accounts of Homer’s epics) from three documents; there are late additions to 2 Samuel; Isaiah has at least three distinct strands; the last speaker in Job is thought to be an insertion; the book of Numbers is made up of sources with long and complex histories of their own; the Psalms are an anthology spanning seven centuries; there were once three versions of Mark's gospel; a further source lies behind Matthew and Luke, with possible links to the discovered gospel of Thomas.
Duplications are evident. There are two Creations in Genesis; the making of Man and Woman happens twice; light is created and only later the light-giving heavenly bodies; money that Joseph puts back in his brothers’ sacks as they leave Egypt is discovered twice; David is twice presented to Saul; there are two reports in close sequence of the miracle of the loaves and fishes (Matthew 14 and 15). None of these texts show authorial awareness of their own reduplications. Uncertainty in the dating of the Hebrew Bible texts is measured not just in centuries but in whole civilizations. Not surprisingly, there is “widespread disagreement about practically every biblical book's unity, authorship and historicity.”
The arguments surrounding them are based on scholarly conjecture, stylistic intuition, hypothetical reconstruction—necessarily, for want of documents.
Part III - Goethe
- T. J. Reed
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- Book:
- Genesis
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 16 September 2020
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2020, pp 101-102
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