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The Sorrows of Young Goethe... I mean Werther
--by Goethe
He was a romantic boy of 24 when he wrote this in 1774, before not only the French Revolution but the American one too. It would be most accurate to say that he wasn’t yet “Goethe” at this point.
This is such a different Goethe than the one I’m used to from Faust. So Romantic it reminds me of Marianne Dashwood.
P32 Describing a drawing he’s made, ...I sat down on a plough across from them, and took great pleasure in drawing this brotherly picture. I added the fence that was near them, a barn door and a few broken cart-wheels, all simply the way it was, and after an hour I found I had produced a harmoniously correct and arresting drawing without putting into it anything whatsoever of my own. This confirmed me in my resolve to keep to Nature alone in future. Only Nature has inexhaustible riches, and only Nature creates a great artist. A good deal can be said of the advantages of rules, much the same as can be said in praise of bourgeois society. A man shaped by rules will never produce anything tasteless or bad, just as a citizen who observes laws and decorum will never be an unbearable neighbor or an out-and-out villain; and yet on the other hand, say what you please, the rules will destroy the true feeling of Nature and its true expression!.. You ask why the torrent of genius so rarely pours forth, so rarely floods and thunders and overwhelms your astonished soul? -- Because, dear friends, on either bank dwell the cool, respectable gentlemen, whose summer-houses, tulip beds and cabbage patches would all be washed away, and who are therefore highly skilled in averting future dangers in good time, by damming and digging channels.
p33 The particular mention of sugar and white bread is interesting. What does this tell us, mid-18th century?
The hero has at last met his soul mate... or, apparently, his second soul mate, as he was missing a previous one a bit earlier. Reading this I get a better idea of why Goethe was so popular in his day. This Romantic (now in both senses) young Goethe is indeed appealing and not as difficult as the Goethe of Faust. I can see that he would have been the Hermann Hesse of his time -- the writer that especially appealed to the young 10%. Especially the ones eager to escape from the bourgeoisie and realize their full artistic/intellectual potential.
I needed to read Faust, and I’m glad I did, but it’s a mistake to start Goethe with Faust.
P47 [Werther, at a family gathering]... ‘let us consider ill-humor a disease, and inquire whether there is no remedy for it.’ -- ‘I should be glad to hear of one,’ said Lotte. ‘I for one believe a great deal depends on ourselves. That is how it is with me. If something is annoying and dispiriting me, I leap up and sing a few country dance tunes in the garden, and feel better in no time at all.’ -- ‘That is exactly what I was trying to say,’ I replied. ‘Ill-humor is just like indolence; in fact it is a kind of indolence. We are inclined that way by nature, but if we only have the strength to pull ourselves together our work goes wonderfully and we take real pleasure in what we are doing.’ ...
Does Goethe mean to be ironic here? I ask knowing how this story will eventually end.
Yes, I keep thinking of Marianne Dashwood and John Willoughby. Marianne, I think, plays the part of Werther in their romance. We’ll see if that observation holds up.
P53 ...There is a melody, a simple but moving air, which she plays on the piano, with angelic skill...
...How that simple song enthralls me! And how well she knows when to play it, often at times when I would gladly put a bullet through my head! The darkness and madness of my soul are dispelled, and I breathe more freely again.
I think this is the first Goethe has let us see the tortured romantic soul inside our enthusiastic hero. On a whim, I just did a search on “goethe bipolar” and found this:
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Goethe: A bipolar personality? Periodicity of affective states in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as reflected by Paul Julius Möbius.
This paper aims to investigate the character and etiological basis of German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's mental disorder. From 1898, German neuropsychiatrist Paul Julius Möbius developed the hypothesis that Goethe's work provided several hints for the notion that the German poet suffered from a distinct bipolar disorder. The paper investigates Möbius's psychopathographic study on Goethe and his hypothesis of a mood periodicity in Goethe against the mirror of modern concepts. Möbius came to the conclusion that Goethe's illness was bipolar in character and became visible at intervals of seven years and lasted for about two years. The majority of Möbius's contemporary psychiatric colleagues (Emil Kraepelin, Max Isserlin, Ernst Kretschmer, Josef Breuer) supported this view which has still not been convincingly challenged. In present-day terms, Möbius's hypothesis can be best mirrored as a subclinical foundation of mood disorder. Furthermore, with his extensive study, Möbius disproved the common notion that Goethe had suffered from an illness as the result of a syphilitic infection.
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P55 ...The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs leads him to do so, will always be a fool.
The Romantic Creed or an 18th century version of “follow your bliss.”
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P56 Albert, the "intended" of Lotte, has arrived..
P57 ...I cannot help esteeming Albert. His tranquil evenness of manner is in marked contrast to the turbulence of my own disposition, which I cannot hide. He is a man of feeling, and knows very well what Lotte is worth. He seems to be almost free of ill-humor, which as you know is the human evil I loathe above all others.
P61-63 Less than half way in and Werther is having a heated argument with Albert over suicide, arguing for, of course, and making it clear that this is a subject he thinks about a lot. If you view Marianne’s actions while at Cleveland as a suicide attempt, and I think this is how we are meant to see it, she is a perfect example of Werther’s argument for suicide. And since Werther uses illness as his metaphor, Austen does an even better job, as she shows us rather than simply telling us. Except that in Marianne’s case, her reason at last comes to her aid -- if it isn’t merely her animal vitality -- and she finds she does have another option. It would be interesting to know what Goethe thought of Austen and her Marianne.
I now try to keep in mind the Marianne (and the Mrs Dashwood) of the 2008 mini-series, but the written Marianne is a much more annoying creature, and the written Werther is just as annoying. This book needs an Elinor. And I do wonder how close Goethe is to his Werther. Is he exaggerating at all? He at least lived to write the tale, but was he really such a dervish of sensibility? I give the author credit for letting us see that even Lotte seems to find him a bit much at times.
Book Two
At this point, a little more than half through the book, the story shifts from being a fictionalized account of Goethe’s own experience to being based on the life of someone else -- Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, by name. Or this is partly true as we still are hearing about his love for Lotte. The plot outline is based on Jerusalem but it is filled in with Goethe’s emotion.
P80 Werther has had an embarrassing run-in with the snobbish nobility. They were offended to find a commoner in their company and so demanded that Werther’s noble friends send him away, which they did. This is interesting to me because we see why the bourgeoisie tended to be so careful and correct, in an attempt to blend in with and be accepted by noble society. Or failing that, to show that their bourgeois society was not inferior. Marcel, the protagonist of In Search of Lost Time, is certainly a descendant of Werther (and Goethe?) in this respect. And so is Swann.
P103 Werther, while out for a walk, runs into a man who has lost his senses. After hearing his story from himself and then from his mother who comes to fetch him, “...Dear God in heaven, was this the Fate Thou hast ordained for Man: that he should only be happy before he has yet attained his reason, or after he has lost it again?...”
Again the notion that it’s reason (individuation) that isolates man from his bliss.
P106 We have come to the exciting (and heavy handedly foreshadowed) crisis of this story. This is signalled by our dropping out of the flow of letters into a passage of narration. But before we get to that, I need to say something about Werther’s passion -- which is so like Hans Castorp’s passion in some ways. It would be strange to mention Lilith here, as this was before Goethe wrote those lines, but one gets the feeling that Werther may as well be the victim of Lilith. Goethe depicts him as being helpless to resist his Lotte. This was just emphasized by the account of the person above who lost his reason, we are subsequently informed that he too developed a passion for Lotte, revealed it to her, lost his position and then his reason. While Werther says nothing bad about Lotte (she is from all we can tell the perfect woman) she seems to have the effect on men almost of the succubus described in Doctor Faustus. The gender-bending surrounding Adrian and Hans makes all this truly confusing, but just at face value, Mann and Goethe seem to be giving “woman” a demonic power over men.
P110 “...his own remarkable sensibility and way of thinking...” is commented on here by the narrator.
P111 Back to his letters, ...”my beloved valley was flooded!... It was a fearful spectacle: the raging torrents were crashing down from the crags in the moonlight, flooding the fields and meadows... the broad valley, upstream and down, was a turbulent lake whipped by a roaring wind!... the flood before me rolled and thundered and gleamed with awesome majesty, a shudder of horror shock [shook?] me -- and then longing seized me again! Ah, there I stood, arms outstretched, above the abyss, breathing: plunge! Plunge! -- and was lost in the joyful prospect of ending my sufferings and sorrows by plunging on with a crash like the waves!... May that rapture not still lie ahead for this imprisoned soul?”
Again, I can’t help seeing Marianne Dashwood here.
P118-119 We are finally given a peek into Lotte’s mind. Well, we are shown what Werther/Goethe would like to have seen there. It would be hard to say if the reason for this was purely selfish -- like all the love songs that include the “you’ll miss me when I’m gone” line -- or if this is solely to increase the tragedy of our tale. If Lotte and Albert’s feelings at the end are solely relief, then Werther was merely a pest who had overstayed his welcome and made a mess of his exit.
We are given a sample of Ossian here, which brings up another question about translation. Originally, the writings of Ossian were understood to be a translation into English from the Gaelic (in fact they were a contemporary fraud). Goethe translated Ossian into German and here we seem to have his translation translated back into English. (Or did our translator just go back to the “original?” But that would seem to lose whatever tone Goethe gave his translation.) I wonder how many times you can go back and forth like this before the text is reduced to gibberish?
There is a surprisingly lengthy reading, by Werther for Lotte, from Ossian on what is, in the terms of TMM, their Walpurgis Night -- right before his suicide.
Finished! Sensibility run riot. Driven to the grave by sensibility. Anyone blessed with sense would prescribe sense to Werther, as he himself has mentioned, but alas! “Sensibility,” here, also stands for mental illness. Advising someone to be not quite so ill is not all that helpful. At least Goethe had more sense than poor Jerusalem. Goethe lived to write the tale and then so much more besides.
There are some similarities, I can’t help mentioning, between the final, passionate, meeting of Werther and Lotte, and the Walpurgis Night meeting of Hans Castorp and Clavdia. Though I can’t see all that much similarity in the two relationships -- even including what I know is to come with Herr Peeperkorn. Though, thinking of how that triangle resolves in the end, I may have to return to this in the final chapter of TMM.
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