15 results
Abbreviations
- Martin Swales, University College London, Erika Swales, King's College, Cambridge
-
- Book:
- Reading Goethe
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2001, pp x-x
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Preface
- Martin Swales, University College London, Erika Swales, King's College, Cambridge
-
- Book:
- Reading Goethe
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2001, pp vii-ix
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
THIS BOOK IS MODEST IN SCOPE, size, and intention. Its aim is to offer English-speaking readers a short, critical, and by that token lively introduction to Goethe's literary achievement. We firmly believe that, for all the interest of his autobiographical, scientific, and journalistic writing, of his letters and indeed of his life, it is through the literary work that Goethe most richly and urgently speaks to us today. This is not to say that every item of his oeuvre is worthy of reverent attention. On the contrary: Many of his literary productions are flawed. But equally we are convinced that his finest works truly repay detailed study. And it is a measure of his creativity that they occur in all three major literary genres — poetry, drama, and prose narrative.
It may be helpful to highlight three interrelated aspects of that literary output at the outset: they are factors that explain why Goethe's works “travel” well, so to speak. One aspect has to do with his mastery of the German language. As we know, for English speakers, the German language poses particular difficulties. It is an inflected language, and it makes weighty demands in terms of structure and word order. But it is precisely these structures which, as we shall see, Goethe exploits to unforgettable expressive effect. This capacity is one all-important part of the revelation that he can offer us: what, on occasion, can seem an irritating linguistic property of German becomes experientially immediate in his hands. This is generally true, of course, of all the great writers of the German literary tradition. But it is particularly true of Goethe: On the one hand, he constantly draws on the ability of the German language to sustain a flexible and sophisticated discourse of philosophical abstraction and speculation; on the other hand, he capitalizes on colloquial registers, and stays close, even in written from, to the language in its everyday condition. This aspect points back to the legacy left by Luther's great Bible translation. Goethe can make the vernacular sing in a way that few other German or indeed European poets can. He puts us immediately in touch with the expressive force and range of the German language.
The second strand derives from the first, and it concerns his feel for the specifically lyrical potential of the German language.
7 - Conclusion
- Martin Swales, University College London, Erika Swales, King's College, Cambridge
-
- Book:
- Reading Goethe
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2001, pp 179-182
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
THIS BOOK IS ENTITLED Reading Goethe, and it is our hope that, whatever it may not have achieved, it will have served to encourage the reading of Goethe's works, not as an adulatory act, but as an exercise in critical reflection. Surveying that oeuvre and our attempts to assist in the reading of it, we inevitably find ourselves looking for some summary definition of why Goethe still has urgent claims to make on us today. Three reflections suggest themselves.
One has to do with his ability to address and express what one might describe as a central philosophical concern in human living, namely the issue of self-consciousness, of the relationship between mind and body. Faust is a central text in this respect, of course; but throughout the oeuvre one senses Goethe reflecting on the human ability, and need, to reflect. Time and time again he conveys the ways in which, and the extent to which, consciousness both problematizes and intensifies human experience. Goethe is one of the greatest philosophical writers of modern Europe, not in the sense that he has a preordained philosophy that he wishes to put across, but rather in the multiple ways in which he anchors the process of thinking, of philosophizing, in the dynamic of living.
Our second consideration in respect of Goethe's immediacy derives from his ability to interrogate and thereby define modern culture. As we have seen, Faust is again a key text in this regard. And it is worth reminding ourselves that all the central projects which claimed Goethe's attention more or less throughout his creative life — Faust, Wilhelm Meister, and the scientific work — are germane to the understanding of the modern world with its secular, individualist, scientific mindset.
The third aspect of Goethe's art that brings him close to us is somewhat more difficult to define: it has to do with what one can perhaps best describe as his tone. On frequent occasions, and especially in respect of the poetry, we have sought to draw attention to the intimate connection between Goethe's diction and colloquial speech. And, strikingly, such moments are not just throw-away remarks, not just fleeting concessions to everyday, even banal, experience. Rather, they seem to come from the very heart of his literary and spiritual concerns. A line from the end of Faust II will illustrate what we mean.
2 - Poetry
- Martin Swales, University College London, Erika Swales, King's College, Cambridge
-
- Book:
- Reading Goethe
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2001, pp 22-63
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
IN ORDER TO HAVE SOME MEASURE of structure, this chapter will address Goethe's poetry under various thematic headings: nature, divinity, love, reflectivity. However, we must stress at the outset that these thematic categories are anything but watertight divisions: more often than not, the nature poetry, for example, is inseparable from the love poetry and the love poetry is implicated in the philosophical poetry. This interrelation lies at the very heart of Goethe's poetic oeuvre and makes him perhaps the greatest lyric poet of modern Europe. For him, feeling and mood modulate into thought and concept, and vice versa. For this reason his poetry, taken as a whole, gives us powerful access to his experiential and imaginative world.
As far as his worldview is concerned, even the early poetry prefigures what was to become his mature philosophical stance. The Sesenheim and Frankfurt poems largely bespeak a sense of being at home in the world, being at one with nature. There are somber moments, but more often than not, affirmation gains the upper hand. Thus a poem's conclusion may typically turn its back on troubling reflectivity and assert a conciliatory “und doch” — “and yet.” In “Willkommen und Abschied” (1771, revised 1789), sorrow yields in the last two lines
Und doch, welch Glück, geliebt zu werden,
Und lieben, Götter, welch ein Glück!
[And yet what bliss to be loved,
And to love, you Gods, what bliss it is!]
A similar example is “Warum gabst du uns die tiefen Blicke” (1776), a love poem to Charlotte von Stein. The text abounds in motifs of suffering, yet it ends on a note of reconciliation:
Glücklich, daß das Schicksal, das uns quälet,
Uns doch nicht verändern mag.
[Happy that destiny that torments us
Cannot in fact change us.]
Such structures of affirmation are often accompanied by themes and images of oneness. In “Mahomets Gesang” (1772–73), we find the ever-recurrent image of water, the river merging with countless other rivers, seeking fulfillment in the sea. “Ganymed” (1774) is another famous example: Ganymed, beloved of the god Zeus, seeks union with divine nature. Like Werther, he is cradled by “Blumen” and “Gras,” but his spirit, driven by yearning, strives upwards: “hinauf, hinauf strebt’s.” And the spirit of the divine father responds:
Abwärts, die Wolken
Neigen sich der sehnenden Liebe,
Mir, mir!
In eurem Schoße
Aufwärts,
Umfangend umfangen!
Works Consulted and Works for Further Reading
- Martin Swales, University College London, Erika Swales, King's College, Cambridge
-
- Book:
- Reading Goethe
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2001, pp 187-198
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Frontmatter
- Martin Swales, University College London, Erika Swales, King's College, Cambridge
-
- Book:
- Reading Goethe
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2001, pp i-iv
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Index
- Martin Swales, University College London, Erika Swales, King's College, Cambridge
-
- Book:
- Reading Goethe
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2001, pp 199-202
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
4 - Drama
- Martin Swales, University College London, Erika Swales, King's College, Cambridge
-
- Book:
- Reading Goethe
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2001, pp 95-134
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
COMPARED WITH HIS great contemporaries Schiller and Kleist, Goethe does not strike one as a born dramatist. That is to say: he does not resolutely seek to define worldly experience in terms of endlessly proliferating moments of conflict. Indeed, many commentators have suggested that his was a primarily lyrical talent, one that found its finest expressivity in eavesdropping on the flux of mood and thought that constitutes the inwardness of the individual self. In this sense, there is something monologic about his voice. Yet the range and variety of his achievement in the dramatic mode is impressive. In a revealing remark of March 1775, he commented that he would perish if he did not write plays. Later he became involved in both the institutional and artistic management of the theatre in Weimar. In the original performance of his Iphigenie auf Tauris he played the part of Orestes, and in 1827, he described Torquato Tasso as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. In other words, there can be no doubt that he needed the theatre as an imaginative space in which he could work at the problems that troubled him. And, looking at his dramatic oeuvre as a whole, one can discern certain recurring preoccupations. One is the need to body forth in language and action the dynamic of the human self. His comprehension of that bodying forth is anything but solipsistic; in his dramas he richly and circumstantially depicts the context — historical, political, cultural, personal — within which his protagonist has to live. In that process, Goethe worries at an issue which is, no doubt, at one level a perennial debate within human experience, but which, at another level, is a particularly urgent dilemma raised by modern culture: how to negotiate the clashing imperatives of order, containment, morality on the one hand, and of vitality, energy, freedom on the other. It is admittedly true to say that Goethe's vision is not as uncompromisingly tragic as that of many of his contemporaries, mainly because he saw polarity, the dynamic interaction of opposed principles not as a destructive force, but as the creative heartbeat within human experience. Yet, by definition, that tenet of polarity was also generative of dramatic configurations and confrontations.
Notes
- Martin Swales, University College London, Erika Swales, King's College, Cambridge
-
- Book:
- Reading Goethe
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2001, pp 183-186
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
1 - Introduction
- Martin Swales, University College London, Erika Swales, King's College, Cambridge
-
- Book:
- Reading Goethe
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2001, pp 1-21
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
BEFORE WE COME TO detailed consideration of Goethe's literary works, we wish to explore three aspects which combine to constitute what one might call the “Goethe phenomenon.” They are: his life, his thought, and, for want of a better word, his image. All great writers tend to generate in the minds of their readers a sense both of the historical person who wrote the literary works and of the mentality, the creative persona from which these works emanated. Moreover, the thinking of great writers tends to play a role in the cultural (and even, on occasion, socio-political) traditions of their native land. As we shall see, all three propositions apply with particular force to Goethe. As regards the third aspect, his role as an icon within Germany's culture and politics has been both complex and, on occasion, problematic.
To convey a sense of the issues involved, let us begin with a quotation from Friedrich Gundolf's magisterial study of 1916, which is entitled simply Goethe. In the introduction he reflects on and justifies that one-word title in the following terms:
Das nachfolgende Buch ist betitelt “Goethe” ohne weiteren Zusatz. Es ist schon daraus zu entnehmen, worauf es wesentlich ankommt: auf die Darstellung von Goethes gesamter Gestalt, der größten Einheit, worin deutscher Geist sich verkörpert hat.
[This book is entitled “Goethe” pure and simple. From this fact one can gather what essentially it aims to do: to explore the whole entity that is Goethe, the greatest unity in which the German spirit has expressed itself.]
And, a few paragraphs later, we read the following:
Goethe ist das größte verewigte Beispiel der modernen Welt, daß die bildnerische Kraft eines Menschen, mag sie als Instinkt oder als bewußter Wille wirken, den gesamten Umfang seiner Existenz durchdrungen hat.
[Goethe is the greatest and most lasting exemplification in the modern world that the forming energies of a person, whether they express themselves as instinct or as a deliberate act of will, can permeate the full extent of his being.]
Here, Gundolf claims that a particular wholeness and centeredness informs every facet of Goethe's life, experience, thinking, writing. His key terms are “wesentlich,” “gesamte Gestalt,” “größte Einheit,” “deutscher Geist,” “das größte verewigte Beispiel,” “bildnerische Kraft,” “den gesamten Umfang seiner Existenz.” We shall return later to the particular issue of uses (and abuses) of Goethe within German culture.
Reading Goethe
- A Critical Introduction to the Literary Work
- Martin Swales, Erika Swales
-
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2001
-
At last an engaging and highly readable guide to the works and significance of Goethe.
3 - Narrative Fiction
- Martin Swales, University College London, Erika Swales, King's College, Cambridge
-
- Book:
- Reading Goethe
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2001, pp 64-94
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
GOETHE WROTE PROSE FICTION throughout his life; and, as we shall see, he explored the full range of narrative possibilities. In this context, we need to remember that, for much of the eighteenth century, prose fiction in general, and the novel in particular, had to fight hard to achieve respectability. Once the battle was won, the spoils of victory were prodigious: the novel became, and it continues to be, the dominant expression of modern bourgeois culture. And to this process Goethe was a key contributor.
Admittedly, the German novel is not exactly a force to be reckoned with in the company of great European novel fictions, at any rate not before the closing decades of the nineteenth century. For the most part, the running is made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the English and French novel traditions. The English novel begins early to register the shock waves of mercantile modernity and thereby to assert the possibility that bourgeois consciousness is worthy of treatment in the epic mode. Richardson discovers in the epistolary novel the appropriate form for the drama of intense, beleaguered subjectivity; at the more robust end of the spectrum, Fielding justifies the modern novel as a form of comic epic in prose, and other writers join him in not only asserting but demonstrating the combination of entertainment value and weighty human concern that can quicken the pages of the modern novel (Defoe, Smollett). It is a potent legacy whose presence can be sensed in the major achievements of the subsequent generation of writers: Jane Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot. The French novel of the eighteenth century also registers the potent energies of a new cult of feeling (Rousseau, Laclos). After the cataclysm of the French Revolution that voice of inwardness modulates into the urgent articulation of socio-political modernity, which, in novelistic terms, leads to particular attention being paid to the workings of social materiality and, by extension, of psychology (Stendhal, Flaubert), often with quasi-scientific pretensions to dispassionate accuracy (Balzac, Zola).
In this illustrious company, it has to be acknowledged, the German novel is something of a Cinderella. It is informed, as are its European contemporaries, by a bad conscience in respect of the popular forms of narrative art: adventure stories, romances, and so on. It too seeks to lift the rattling good yarn into some condition of thematic weight and seriousness.
Contents
- Martin Swales, University College London, Erika Swales, King's College, Cambridge
-
- Book:
- Reading Goethe
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2001, pp v-vi
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
6 - Goethe's Discursive Writings
- Martin Swales, University College London, Erika Swales, King's College, Cambridge
-
- Book:
- Reading Goethe
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2001, pp 160-178
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
THE VARIETY AND EXTENT of Goethe's expository writing is prodigious. Indeed, one is hard pressed to think of any other writer of modern Europe who has left such a voluminous corpus of treatises, essays, letters, memoirs, journalism, diaries, maxims, jottings, and so on. Given the fact that Goethe was clearly at ease writing in the discursive mode, it is intriguing to register both what he wrote and what he chose not to write. One extraordinary omission stands out: as we have already noted, he did not produce anything remotely resembling a systematic philosophy of life, a circumstantial inventory of his beliefs, convictions, hopes, fears, values. Nor — and this is the second fact that strikes one — did he set out to give an overview over his understanding of art, of aesthetics, of the significance of culture generally. Yet the need to reflect on these matters was a significant part of his creative make-up; it is not as though we have no idea of what he thought under these headings. But we glean what he thought from other contexts, from other modes of statement. Let us put this issue the other way round and ask: what did he produce within the discursive mode? In terms of the principal concentrations of his output there are three fields that consistently attracted his attention: autobiography, letters, and science. We shall look at his achievement in these three forms, particularly because this material gives us a sense of some of his deepest beliefs. These beliefs emerge within a context of considerable indirection, as part of a thinking, communicating process and not as a clearcut system. One feels, in other words, that Goethe is constantly in quest of an understanding of experience, and the dynamic of the quest is more important than the achieved goal: perhaps because the quest is the goal.
A glance at Goethe's fondness for maxims can help to illustrate the theoretical point we are after. It is interesting to note that the two great collections of maxims that spring to mind — the Maximen und Reflexionen and the Sprüche in Prosa — were both collected after his death. In other words: he himself refrained from publishing a volume of his sayings of distilled wisdom. During his life time he did bring out maxims; but he did so not only in his journal Über Kunst und Altertum but also, intriguingly, in the literary work.
5 - Faust
- Martin Swales, University College London, Erika Swales, King's College, Cambridge
-
- Book:
- Reading Goethe
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 November 2001, pp 135-159
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
COMMENTATORS ON GOETHE's dramatic work have often noted that he tends to focus on the workings of one particular sensibility and to explore whether that sensibility can be true to itself, can keep some kind of faith with the deepest promptings of his or her being. Although there may be an element of truth to this, plays such as Götz, Egmont, Iphigenie, and Tasso are dramas, not monologues. As the preceding chapter has suggested, the self has its antagonists, characters that are truly distinct, not mere extensions of the central subject. In other words: there is a world outside that self, a world of history, society, politics, institutions. Moreover, in his dramas, Goethe argues and understands through the medium of the theatre. In the discussion of Faust, we shall pay particular attention to this dimension.
To begin at the beginning: Goethe did not invent the Faust figure, nor did he invent the primary fable in which he appears. There was a real Faust, who was born some time around 1480. He seems to have made a living as a wandering scholar, practicing medicine, perhaps also hypnosis. He cast horoscopes and he no doubt dabbled in alchemy and magic. He was also a showman, a flamboyant and, in the eyes of many, disreputable, irreligious character. In a variety of ways, then, he was manifestly the kind of person to whom legends readily attach themselves. So, when in 1587 the prose chapbook Historia von D. Johann Fausten appeared in Frankfurt am Main, published by Johann Spies, it brought into narrative and psychological and theological focus a colorful cluster of stories, anecdotes, rumor, gossip that all had to do with the emergent restlessness of early modern European culture. The 1587 tale recounts how Faust, an arrogant intellectual and speculator of the elements and necromancer, sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for twenty-four years of service which give him access to all manner of erotic, social, and cosmological adventures. At the end of the allotted time he dies gruesomely, and his soul is forfeit. The story, not least because it concerned itself with a figure who was known to, and firmly anchored in, the popular imagination, caught on. It was translated into various languages, one being English, and came to the attention of Christopher Marlowe. It also provided the stuff of popular adaptations for the theatre and puppet shows.