The Intensification of the Body in Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9854738 |
|---|---|
| Authors | William S Davis (0000-0002-2359-0387, Colorado College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1994 |
| Volume | 69 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 106-117 |
| Publication date | 1994-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Germanic Review Literature Culture Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-8890 • E-ISSN: 1930-6962 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/19306962.1994.11787314 |
| OpenAlex | W2565070343 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size NotesIn addition to Kuzniar, see Abbott, Meyer-Kalkus, Caroline Wellbery, Forget, Kittler.“What I have called the mirror stage is interesting in that it manifests the affective dynamism by which the subject originally identifies himself with the visual Gestalt of his own body ... it represents an ideal unity, a salutary imago” (Lacan 1977, 18–19).“This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into history. The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic—and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development. Thus, to break out of the circle of the Innenwelt into the Umwelt generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego’s verifications” (1977, 4).“It is not an object that the subject imagines and aims at, so to speak, but rather a sequence in which the subject has his own part to play” (Laplanche and Pontalis 318; Silverman 6).A well-known passage from Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” also is apropos: “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Authorgod) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146).On this tendency of traditional Werther scholarship, see Meyer-Kalkus: “Die Literaturwissenschaft hat das erotische Begehren nicht anders als das Begehren des Todes auf die geniezeitlichen Selbstdeu-tungen des Textes reduziert: auf ‘angeborene Leidenschaftlichkeit,’ ‘genialen Subjektivismus,’ ‘Absolutismus des Herzens,’ und ‘unbedingte Subjektivität’” (78). I cannot attempt here to provide an overview of the practically countless interpretations of the novel. In addition to the humanistic readings to which Meyer-Kalkus refers, it has also been the subject of numerous Marxist/social, psychological, and psychoanalytic readings. See Jäger for a helpful Forschungsbericht. Blackall also includes a brief outline of what he considers the three major interperative trends (281–83).For a concise discussion of the significance of the body versus the subject in “post-hermeneutic” criticism, see David Wellbery’s foreword to Discourse Networks xiv–xv.Several recent critics read Werther as an indicator of a discursive transformation. Meyer-Kalkus sees the novel as the radicalization of tendencies in the sentimental tradition (84) influenced by changes in the bourgeois family. Kittler’s discourse analytic reading—similar to Foucault’s views on sexuality in this period—takes the novel as “eine der Stiftungsurkunden jener Macht, die wir als Sexualität anrufen und feiern” (147). Carotine Wellbery writes of a “cultural transformation, ... which gives subjectivity an entirely new form” (232). Kuzniar draws on Goethe’s own term, “Zeitgesinnung” (16), which she reads as the Romantic desire for “an unmediated communication between art and life” (17). Although focused to a certain extent on divergent concerns, all of these readings align Werther with social changes in the late eighteenth century that had ramifications for modern conceptions of the seif.David Macey also takes Lacan to task for failing to deal seriously with the question of gender in discourse and for supporting mystified stereotypes of “the feminine” (Macey 177–209).There are, in fact, 63 uses of the words Aug, Auge, and Augen in the novel, as compared with a total of 75 uses of these words in all of Faust, for example.Compare Meyer-Kalkus’s observations on Werther’s first vision of Lotte: “Die Szene schießlich erhellt, weshalb der ‘überraschte’ Werther von diesem Schauspiel gefesselt werden muß: die an Mutters Statt ihre Geschwister nährende und umsorgende Lotte verkörpert die Mutter-imago schlechthin” (98). See also Caroline Wellbery: “That Lotte’s images carries the meaning ‘mother’ for Werther is beyond doubt” (241).Jacqueline Rose refers to this desire of the subject, as it relates to the mask, as “imaginary captation”: “The screen therefore serves a dual function, as locus of the image off which the subject will play in an attempt to control its imaginary captation, and as a sign of the elusive relation between the object of desire—the look—and the observing subject” (192). Compare Kaja Silverman’s definition, which focuses on “play” as a possibility of political transformation: “By screen [Lacan] in fact means the image or group of images through which identity is constituted.... It seems to me crucial that we insist upon the ideological status of the screen by describing it as that culturally generated image or repertoire of images through which subjects are not only constituted, but differentiated in relation to dass, race, sexuality, age, and nationality. The possibility of ‘playing’ with these images then assumes a critical importance, opening up as it does an arena for political contestation” (149–50).William Wordsworth (1799). Strange fits of passion have I knownAnd I will dare to teil,But in the Lover’s ear alone,What once to me befell. (86) Concerning the face see Doane: “The face, more than any other bodily part, is for the other. It is the most articulate sector of the body, but it is mute without the other’s reading” (109).Caroline Wellbery identifies the significance of vision in this scene as an indication of the novel’s relation to the sentimental tradition (233).Friedreich Kittler also draws attention to the look and the eyes (“Wechselblicke”) in this scene. He reads Klopstock as an ersatz father-figure, one who can replace the absent pastor of the novel’s final sentence (145). I wish only to stress that from the perspective of Werther’s strategy of self, Klopstock achieves this patriarchal/phallic status only through Werther’s own manipulation of Lotte’s gaze.The doctor should be viewed in conjunction with Werther’s use of the word Philister in the letter of May 22. Werther describes the excesses of a young man in love, and the admonitions he imagines he would receive from the solid representatives of the social order: “Und da käme ein Philister, ein Mann, der in einem öffentlichen Amte steht, und sagte ihm: Feiner junger Herr ...” (HA 6: 15).In her essay on Narcissus as a model for western internality and reflection—quite applicable to Werther-Kristeva also evokes the image of Christ, although she locates Narcissus somewhere between Christ and Dionysus. Our western self-reflexivity, our meditating and musing—internalizations of a failed Platonism—also border on a certain sickness and insanity: Neither Dionysus nor Christ but tragic and immortal through floral metamorphosis, that lover of himself is strangely close to us in his everyday childishness. And yet he makes us uncomfortable, giving off a subtle uneasiness, a cold, sticky discomfort. As if at the start of a new era, the Christian era that led us to assume our humanity through the imposing suffering of Christ, insinuated in parallel fashion, not on the sacrificial heights of Calvary but in the dank, swampy, wastelands of human experience, that internality, that Psyche turned into psychicism, had a price—a new insanity. Human, all too human. (1987, 115)See Michel Feher, who describes the body as a “thoroughly historicized and completely problematic issue” (11). See also David Wellbery’s discussion of corporeality, in which he reads culture as “the regimen that bodies pass through” (1990, xiv–xv).Hegel expresses a similar view of the body, and of the face and eyes in particular: “Der menschliche Ausdruck in Gesicht, Auge, Stellung, Gebärde ist zwar materiell und darin nicht das, was der Geist ist; aber innerhalb dieser Köperlichkeit selbst ist das menschliche Äußere nicht nur lebendig und natürlich wie das Tier, sondern die Lieblich-keit, welche in sich den Geist widerspiegelt. Durch das Auge sieht man dem Menschen in die Seele, wie durch seine ganze Bildung überhaupt sein geistiger Charakter ausgedrückt” (1:419).It is indeed no secret that women did not particularly benefit from the bourgeois revolution, which, following Rousseau, aimed at helping them find their natural place.Compare Kuzniar on Werther’s need for the “literal sign” (16). She argues that Werther dies, in part, because he is unable to “accept distortion and deviance in the sign” (18). I agree, but would add that it is precisely the intensified version of masculinity Werther strives to maintain that drives him toward this form of semiotics.Werther’s language reveals this fear of insubstantiality from the beginning of the novel: “Daß das Leben des Menschen nur ein Traum sei, ist manchem schon so vorgekommen, und auch mit mir zieht dieses Gefühl immer herum” (HA 6: 13). Other examples include: “Die ganze Welt verliert sich um mich her” (HA 6:28); Werther’s repetition of “mich!” (HA 6: 37), alluded to above; his fear of symbolic castration (HA 6: 28); his inability to paint or draw (HA 6: 40, 53, etc.); his feeling of helplessness in the face of time: “kannst du sagen: Das ist! da alles vorübergeht?” (HA 6: 52), or, “Alles, alles ist vorübergegangen” (HA 6: 76); see also HA 6: 83; general feelings of loss of seif: “Wenn wir uns selbst fehlen, fehlt uns doch alles” (HA 6: 53), “Ich weiß oft nicht, ob ich auf der Welt bin” (HA 6:55), “Ich soll nicht zu mir selbst kommen” (HA 6: 88); description of himself as a “wanderer” on the earth (HA 6: 75). Perhaps these examples are best summarized by a letter from October 26: “Ja es wird mir gewiß, Lieber, gewiß und immer gewisser, daß an dem Dasein eines Geschöpfes wenig gelegen ist, ganz wenig” (HA 6: 83). Compare Meyer-Kalkus 97
Art · German Literature and Culture Studies · History · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy · Philosophy and Historical Thought
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |