185. The Sorrows of Young Werther

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The Sorrows of Young Goethe... I mean Werther 
--by Goethe 

Book One 


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:

................................
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.
...........................
...

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.”
...

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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148. Uncle Tungsten - I. We begin

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Uncle Tungsten

by Oliver Sacks - Vintage edition 2001

My book club enjoyed Oliver Sacks' On the Move so much that we decided to add his Uncle Tungsten to our reading list. I thought it would just be autobiographical information about his childhood, I hadn't realized it was, in addition, a way of telling the story of the development of our current technological world, which is either based on science or, if you choose to view it this way, on the Mephistic Arts -- the un-natural powers Mephisto uses to assist Faust in his various adventures.

And I also hadn't anticipated that the story of Oliver Sacks' extended family would turn out to be the story of the bourgeoisie in miniature.  Despite Fernand Braudel's focus on the role of the Sephardic Jews in the growth of capitalism in the West, I tend to think first of the Calvinist contribution. But Sacks' Ashkinazi Jewish family is perfect in their outsider's isolation from the prior class structure combined with their amazing enthusiasm for science, technology, and participation in so many of the trends that left the old order behind and created a new order with so many unanticipated consequences. They are even entrepreneurial in advancing science.

The conclusion of all this is that I must blog this book as well. The challenge here is that Sacks uses his child self to recreate all the scientific steps that lead to our current understanding of the world. As readers, we learn things as he does which re-creates the steps of the great names of science in the very few scientific centuries leading up to our times. 

This is an inspired way to teach this history, but it is also frustrating because you can't discus the more profound levels of these subjects until the final secrets are revealed in the last chapters of the book. I am adopting yet another convention for this book, my comments will be color coded to distinguish notes made during my initial reading (in red) from notes made during this, second reading. 

I was also going to honor his method and refrain from going into the "electronic" aspects of chemistry (the ones that most interest me) until the end. Alas, that was too difficult. I will be explaining the phenomena he describes so that it makes sense to me -- when I can.


He begins with a description of his childhood home near Hampstead and all the questions about the world that he had as a strikingly inquisitive child. This is a sort of overture of the autobiographical and scientific topics that will be developed over the course of the book. (It would be possible to do a musical version of this book.) I'm going to skip his overture except to fill in the cast of characters: Besides his parents (both doctors) there are his brothers Marcus, David, and, closest to his age, Michael. Then the all important uncles: David (Uncle Tungsten), Abe (physics) and aunts, Birdie, Lina, Len, and more will be introduced later. Then his Landau grandfather -- no longer living.

These first several chapters do a wonderful job of depicting a comfortable, supportive, middle class life supported by family, the Jewish faith, and the science and technology of the age. And all this on the very cusp of the deluge as, with the start of the war in Europe in 1939, both Oliver and his brother Michael are evacuated out of London to attend a "safer" school in the countryside. 


Chapters 1-3.

p24 [Red indicates my original notes] Unrelated to what I'm interested in here, the teacher-turned-headmaster at the school the Sacks brothers attend seems to be unhinged by something relating to the new boarding school or the war. Or perhaps the power of his new position just brings out the worst in him. In any case, he is brutal to Oliver and Michael. Michael, as we know from On the Move, seems to be -- in his turn -- permanently unhinged by this experience and even Oliver is seriously affected.

The Greta the dachshund story seems to show, and I think this is what Sacks intends us to see, how young Oliver seems to have passed on his brutal treatment to the innocent Greta. This personal insight is very interesting. Child abuse, and child sexual abuse, is often passed down generation to generation. I've always been puzzled by the process or mechanism for this. 


p30 The other common consequence of abuse is dissociation -- and even finding refuge in a new personality. Sacks' creation of elaborate fictions that he passed off as reality makes it sound like he was pretty close to dissociation. And, of course, it was Michael who's personality was actually unhinged by this wartime exile experience. I have to say, given the long term consequences of the evacuation just on this one family, you have to wonder if it wouldn't have been better to have kept all the kids in London.

His extended family represents to a remarkable degree the bourgeois world order of science and trade. And being Jewish, they were in no way a part of the old Tory world order. Primo Levy (as we see him int The Periodic Table) is like this too, and I get the same feeling from Marcel's family in Lost Time, though that is supposed to be a middle class Catholic family. 

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101. TBK. Bk XII. 6, 12. & Architecture old and new

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The Brothers Karamazov

Book XII. 6.
p805 [The prosecutor's speech at the trial] “What, after all, is this Karamazov family, which has gained such an unenviable notoriety throughout Russia?” he continued. “Perhaps I am exaggerating, but it seems to me that certain fundamental features of the educated class of today are reflected in this family picture -- only, of course, in miniature, ‘like the sun in a drop of water.’ [Did he throw this in for Goethe?] Think of that unhappy, vicious, unbridled old man, who has met with such a tragic end, the head of a family! Beginning life of noble birth, but in a poor dependent position... A low person, a toady and buffoon, of fairly good though undeveloped intelligence, he was above all a moneylender who grew bolder with growing prosperity. His abject and servile characteristics disappeared, his malicious and sarcastic cynicism was all that remained. On the spiritual side he was undeveloped, while his vitality was excessive. He saw nothing in life but sensual pleasure. He had no feelings for his duties as a father. He ridiculed those duties... He was an example of everything that is opposed to civic duty, of the most complete and malignant individualism: ‘The world may burn for all I care, so long as I am all right.’ And he was all right; he was content, he was eager to go on living in the same way for another twenty or thirty years...”

p806 “...he was a father, and one of the typical fathers of today... Many of them only differ in not openly professing such cynicism, for they are better educated, more cultured, but their philosophy is essentially the same as his...”

I hadn’t realized until now to what extent Fyodor represented bourgeois values to Dostoyevsky. He really is the epitome of the new, middle class man -- without culture or values. 

“Now for the children of this father...”

p807 “The elder [of the younger two, Ivan] is one of those modern young men of education and intellect who has lost faith in everything. He has denied and rejected much already, like his father... [He then quotes Smerdyakov as saying,] ‘Everything in the world is lawful according to him, and nothing must be forbidden in the future -- that is what he always taught me.’ [And] ‘If there is one of the sons that is like Fyodor Karamazov in character, it is Ivan.’ ”
...
“Then there is the third son. Oh, he is a devout and modest youth, who does not share his older brother’s gloomy and destructive theory of life. He has sought to cling to the ‘ideas of the people,’ or to what goes by that name in some circles of our intellectual classes. He clings to the monastery, and was within an ace of becoming a monk. He seems to me to have betrayed unconsciously that timid despair which leads so many in our unhappy society, who dread cynicism and its corrupting influences and mistakenly attribute all the trouble to European enlightenment, to return to their ‘native soil,’ to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth. Like frightened children, they yearn to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother; to sleep there forever in order to escape the horrors that terrify them.

p808 “For my part I wish the young man every success. I trust that his youthful idealism and impulse toward the ideas of the people may never degenerate, as often happens, on the moral side into gloomy mysticism, and on the political into blind Chauvinism. These two elements are even a greater menace to Russia than the premature decay, due to misunderstanding and gratuitous adoption of European ideas, from which his elder brother is suffering.”
...

How often does an author get to openly explain the concept behind his characters? I still think it’s Pavel, not Ivan, who is most like the father, but otherwise this analysis is quite accurate. The degree to which “this” time in Russia differs from earlier periods is something I can’t comment on, but I do have doubts about. The myth of the “good old days” is so prevalent throughout history.

Ivan characterizes the bourgeois tendency toward nihilism while Alyosha shares the spirit that will lead to International Communism (and Fascism and even Islamic fundamentalism) -- the need to believe in something to make the world seem less meaningless. 

This may be random (even for me) but I’m going to quote a passage from God’s Hotel by Victoria Sweet that I happened to just read, 

p56 [Describing a patient at Laguna Honda whose life she had just saved by attempting to follow the example of Hildegard of Bingen  (1098–1179)] By the end of that week, she was opening her eyes at the sound of my voice and even at the sound of my footsteps... her face was beginning to acquire a shape, and when I sat down in the chair by her bed, she looked at me. Not only did she look at me; her eyes looked into mine with recognition and love -- a particular kind of love. Not the love of a parent for a child or a lover for the beloved, but of a subject for his ruler -- trusting, all will resigned. I recognized the look. It was the transference. 

p57 The transference is the name that the psychiatric profession, Sigmund Freud in particular, gave to the emotion that the patient transfers to the doctor during treatment. It is the love that he or she felt for his or her parents -- not the rational love, but the irrational love for the all-powerful father/mother in a three-year-old’s life. This transference was the key to psychic healing, the key to psychic change, Freud wrote, because it made the doctor what the doctor was not -- all-powerful. After the transference, the words, the nod, the blink of the doctor’s eyes would be all-important to the patient, would mean acceptance or rejection, pride or guilt, self-love or self-hate. And Mrs. McCoy, I saw by that flicker in her eyes, had fallen in love -- which is what the transference really is -- with me, her doctor. Not, of course, with me, the person, but with Me, the doctor-the being sitting in the chair by her bed.

It’s a lot of power, the transference. Mrs. McCoy’s transference to me meant she would wait, during the day, for my footsteps; she would stay alive for that reason. Her transference to me meant she would hang on my every word and try to please me. If I asked her, she would bestir herself; she would make an effort. She would sit up in bed and feed herself; she would exert herself and get stronger. She would go without complaint to rehabilitation; she would take her first steps, to please me. She would be pleasant to the nurses... She would participate in the life of the ward. Her transference to me meant she would live and not die. 

Isn’t this the same thing that Zossima and the monks were seeking with God? That the lost Germans of the Teens and Twenties were looking for in Hitler? That numberless people have found in their gurus or faith healers or cult leaders? 

[About Dmitri] “...While his brothers seem to stand for ‘Europeanism’ and ‘the principles of the people,’ he seems to represent Russia as she is. Oh, not all Russia, not all! God preserve us, if it were! Yet, here we have her, our mother Russia, the very scent and sound of her. Oh, he is spontaneous, he is a marvelous mingling of good and evil, he is a lover of culture and Schiller, yet he brawls in taverns and plucks out the beards of his boon companions. Oh, he, too, can be good and noble, but only when all goes well with him. What is more, he can be carried off his feet, positively carried off his feet by noble ideals, but only if they come of themselves, if they fall from heaven for him, if they need not be paid for. He dislikes paying for anything, but is very fond of receiving, and that’s so with him in everything. Oh, give him every possible good in life (he couldn’t be content with less), and put no obstacle in his way, and he will show that he, too, can be noble. He is not greedy, no, but he must have money, a great deal of money, and you will see how generously, with what scorn, he will fling it all away in the reckless dissipation of one night. But if he has no money, he will show what he is ready to do to get it when he is in great need of it...”

Dmitri has the attitude toward money of the dissipated gentry, not of the bourgeoisie. Grushenka, on the other hand, shares Fyodor’s bourgeois values when it comes to money. Who does he remind me of? Tolstoy’s Oblonsky in Anna Karenina to a small degree. I know there are literary English gentry perpetually in need of funds due to their spendthrift ways, but particular instances don’t come to mind just now.  

[Again Rakitin is quoted about the Karamazovs,] p810 “...‘The sense of their own degradation is as essential to these reckless, unbridled natures as the sense of their generosity.’ And that’s true, they need continually this unnatural mixture. Two extremes at the same moment, or they are miserable and dissatisfied and their existence is incomplete. They are wide, wide as mother Russia; they include everything and put up with everything...”

Book XII. 12.
p855 [Fetyukovitch, the defense attorney,  about Smerdyakov] “... He cursed and jeered Russia. He dreamed of going to France and becoming a Frenchman... I believe that he loved no one but himself and had a strangely high opinion of himself. His conception of culture was limited to good clothes, clean shirts and polished boots. Believing himself to be the illegitimate son of Fyodor Karamazov... he might well have resented his position, compared with that of his master’s legitimate sons. They had everything, he nothing. They had the rights, they had the inheritance, while he was only the cook and valet... 

Again, Pavel represents the “New Man,” the bourgeois spirit as opposed to the traditional gentry, peasantry, and clergy. He is striving and not happy in his “place.” He thinks he deserves better but is without “culture.” And this emphasis on his illegitimacy reminds me of John the Bastard in Much Ado About Nothing. The concept of “legitimacy” is interesting here.

I’m not really writing about the trial itself, but I have to say that Fetyukovich did an excellent job of casting doubt on the guilt of his client. From my experience as a juror on a U.S. criminal case, I’ll say that if I were on this jury I could not find Dmitri guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt, of murder and especially not of robbery. 

Another thought about Pavel and his parents. What does Dostoyevsky mean by having this crucial character be the child of the nihilistic Fyodor and the saintly (in a very unusual sense) Lizaveta? She is simple and holy in a way even Zossima and Father Ferapont couldn’t touch. He lives the “everything is lawful” philosophy Ivan merely talks about.

Architecture old and new
I’m sitting in an unusual location in the Bank Cafe -- one of the three really comfortable chairs, but this one is up on the mezzanine overlooking the main floor and the stairs down to the lower level, but also looking up a bit into the sky-lit lantern. This is a “new” architectural space; I can see the structure of the building including some massively reinforced moment frames; someone went nuts with a lighting catalog and included all sorts of trendy fixtures; there’s an area carpeted with Interface FLOR carpet tiles. From here I can see three variations on the Navy Chair. In the lower level there is a bleacher section next to the stairs where you can sit on beanbags or on the wood flooring. This isn’t fussy but is a tactile space that is comfortable and accessible. 

The building that houses my gym is in the same position as this building but in the diagonal block. It is a beautiful example of high end architecture from the early 20th century with the most beautiful lobby I’ve ever seen. But as much as I love taking people there to awe them with the space, it is a standoffish sort of beauty. As is only appropriate for a busy lobby, it is a place where you might glance at the beauty around you but where you are not encouraged to linger. 

I wish we had a good example of Richard Rodger’s architecture in the area just so I could get a feeling for how “comfortable” it is. Is the purity of the engineering just lovely to look at or does it make you want to hang out and really enjoy the space? 


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