The Emergence of the Poetic "Wanderer" In the Age of Goethe

THE EMERGENCE OF THE POETIC WANDERER  IN THE AGE OF GOETHE

A STUDY OF THE WANDERER,AS A WORD (SUBSUMING DERIVATIVES OF THE VERBS WANDERN AND TO WANDER) AND A MOTIF, IN THE POETRY OF GOETHE AND HIS ROMANTIC CONTEMPORARIES

Drawing in such Topics as the Pied Piper of Hamelin and the Issue of Mimesis in Literature, Autobiographical Notes and Personal Reflection

By Julian Scutts

In Respectful Memory of Professor Elizabeth Mary Wilkinson,

a World-Renowned Scholar and Specialist in Goethe Studies

From a Former Student at University College London

© julianscutts_2014

Expanded and revised 2017

ISBN 9781365984136

CONTENTS

Introduction (3)

1: In Principio Erat Verbum (11)

A. The Word in Language Theory

B. The Confines or Scope of Comparisons between Words of Similar Form in Literary Texts (with Special Regard to Words Derived from the Verbs to wander and wandern)

C: Words, Words, Words The Application of a Logocentrically Based Method to Works by Shakespeare

2: Goethe the Wanderer (49)

A: Der Wandrer as the Word that Marked the Culmination of  Eighteenth-Century Trends

B. On the Problem of Two Wanderers in Goethe’s Pre-Weimar Years and How Goethe Met its Challenge

C. From the Heights of Parnassus to the Artist's Humble Workshop in Rome

D. The Pivotal Role of Der Wandrer in the German-English Cultural Dialogue

E. From Werther to Faust Part II or The Wanderer's Short and Long Road to Eternity

F. The Dialogic Essence of Wandrers Nachtlied

3: Wandering in Romanticism (143)

A. I wandered lonely as a cloud, The Myth of Narcissus and Milton’s Muse

B. All Wandering as the Worst of Sinning: The Miltonic Background of Don Juan by Lord Byron

C: Romantic Treatments of the Wandering Jew and the Prodigal Son / with Reference to Robinson Crusoe, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Queen Mab

D: London by William Blake and Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust by Wilhelm Müller:   Contexts in Poems that Belong to a Cycle

4: Taking Stock   (213)

5. My Wanderings in the World of Academe  (249)

Has the Age of Goethe Passed? (254)

Bibliography  (257)

INTRODUCTION

The very mention of Goethe’s name will surely evoke a great many responses in the minds of  potential readers of any book that bears Goethe in its title. As this book is not meant to resemble a dissertation in any way  I see it as my present task to frame this introduction in such a way that it will not scare off those for whom Goethe has so far meant  little or nothing or bore those who are well versed in German literature.

    The reference in the title to the age of Goethe  carries the implication that Goethe in some way represents a historical epoch and implies that he exercised a great influence on the course of history and European culture. And what about the word Wanderer? Whatever else one might take  this wanderer to be, whether as a concept, image, symbol and so on, one has no need to fear contradiction on  stating that wanderer is a word, just that, in German as well as in English.

I know of  only one scholar who  has published  a comprehensive study of the  the Wanderer in Goethe's writings, albeit in an article that appeared way back in 1951. I refer to  Professor Willoughby and his article  entitled The Image of the ‘Wanderer’ and the ‘Hut’  in Goethe's Poetry. [1] It was primarily on the basis of his recognition that the word Wanderer occurs with insistent frequency throughout the body of the poems, dramas and novels written by Goethe that Willoughby  justified his concern with the Wanderer regardless of any clear definition  or theoretical premise.

I do not propose to attempt  any  in-depth analysis  of this article  at this juncture but would rather simply point to the salient aspects of his findings that appear to me relevant to the study of literature in general.

The word Wanderer crops up in Goethe’s writings  at vital junctures and turning points in his literary career. Goethe’s essay or speech entitled Rede zum Shakespeare Tag (1771) expresses Goethe’s boundless adulation of Shakespeare, the greatest of all Wanderers. The essay is tantamount to a declaration of independence from what Goethe at the time deemed to be  the outworn conventions of neo-Aristotelian rules regarding drama. Wandrers Sturmlied (1772) testifies to the hangover Goethe suffered after his euphoric discovery of artistic freedom. Though shot through with humour and self-mockery, the poem is a poignant confession of the poet’s failure to sustain his ambition to reach the Parnassian  heights on the imaginative level as he plunges into a stream of mud on the literal level in a poem that describes a wayfarer’s trudge through a forest during a storm. However, the dramatic fragment entitled  Der Wand(e)rer, composed in 1772, reveals the strategy Goethe employed to release himself from the trauma of isolation and self-doubt. The dramatic representation of the wanderer, here a cultural tourist exploring the remains of ancient buildings in southern Italy, offered a shield against the effects of hypersensitivity. In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship Years), the motif of wandering informs a long narrative account of events in the lives of actors, artists, entertainers and musicians who belong to a company of itinerant stage performers following a Wanderbuehne (wandering stage). Here the emergence of a divide between erratic and purposeful wanderers comes to light. The novel played a major part in establishing the precondition for the emergence  of the Romantic movement in Germany - more on this subject a little later. In the novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), which made Goethe a celebrity in Europe, the distraught hero laments that he is only a Wanderer on the path of life.  Even towards the close of Goethe’s life   the Wanderer returns, for  Faust, named Wanderer in the last pages of Faust Part II, gains admittance to the realm of Heaven.

Willoughby sought an overriding explanation for the recurrent pattern formed by the closely linked words Wanderer and Huette (cottage, hut, humble abode) in the domain of C. G. Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, in accord with which the wanderer symbolizes the libido, the questing male instinct in the human mind, while the hut symbolizes the object of the libido’s quest, the domain of the anima, the female counterpart of the libido. For Goethe the libido and anima were not limited to being abstract and isolated psychologic forces with no power to affect the lives of human beings and the workings of society, quite to the contrary. The hut stood for the family hearth in private life and the forum of civic responsibility in the wider world. Inevitably, Willoughby was  at odds with proponents of objective school of literary criticism who deny any vital connection between the inner domain of literature and all that lies without. Such critics should really have arraigned  Goethe for committing heresy, for Willoughby could hardly have studied the writings of Goethe without being swept up by  Goethe’s trail of thought. Besides, objective critics are wary of an unhealthy interest in the word wanderer, which in and of itself connotes the freedom to cross lines of division and enter into reciprocal relationships. The etymological origins of the root of the verbs wandern and to wander point to the sense of turning and changing, thus the alternation of positions and states, without necessarily referring to physical motion at all.

Despite the fact that Willoughby’s  article has not been superseded   for over sixty years, it leaves important question unanswered and offers wide scope for further inquiry. By introducing the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious into his discussion Willoughby opened the way to extending the ambit of his discussion far beyond that  of Goethe’s poetry. Indeed, any attempt to demonstrate the workings of the collective unconscious demands that  comparisons be made between works by various authors, even those who lived in far-flung  epochs and locations. However, Willoughby did not even take account of the fact that the German Romantics emulated Goethe’s frequent and prominent use  of the word Wanderer  in their own literary works, and did so subject to, or in reaction to, Goethe’s powerful influence. Of course, Willoughby wished to focus  his main attention on Goethe’s works but with no regard to Goethe’s Romantic  contemporaries he  was in danger of misjudging Goethe’s treatment of wanderers of his own invention. To clarify this point, I outline the following case.

Willoughby suggested that Goethe showed his strong disapproval of two romantic characters depicted  in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,  by seeing to their early demise. I refer to Mignon, a childish and dreamy Italian artiste  and the distraught bearded  harp player, who teeters on the brink of lunacy. In referring to these romantic figures, Willoughby either lent the term a very loose and imprecise   sense or else  implied that Mignon and the harper had something to do with the Romantic movement, which at the time of Goethe’s  writing Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre did not even exist. Indeed, the  novel, once completed,  was one of the main catalysts that set  the Romantic poets rolling. The Romantic authors  Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) and Joseph von Eichendorff did indeed empathize with Mignon and the harper as fellow spirits, accusing Goethe of doing them in out of spite; however, there are good reasons to question Willoughby’s explanation of the untimely deaths of Mignon and the harper. Goethe was too liberal and generous a man to vindictively punish his own intellectual children for impropriety. In any case, longevity was no seal of approval in Goethe’s thinking.  as the fate of   Egmont, Goetz von Berlichingen  and Gretchen makes plain. The renowned scholar  Professor Friedrich Gundolf, a brilliant Jewish scholar from whom not even his student Joseph Goebbels could withhold admiration, argued that both Wilhelm Meister and the Mignon-Harper duo were grounded in the depths of Goethe’s psychology and complemented each other according to a certain dialectical logic and quest for the balance of contraries. [2]

The anachronism that resides in alleging that Goethe chided romantic characteristics before the time for such a reproach was ripe points to the absence of an adequate  historical frame in the methodology Willoughby employed when treating the subject of his article. He might have done well to take a leaf from the book of linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure who have pointed out that specific occurrences of words lie at the intersection of two planes, the diachronic (historical) and synchronic (contemporary). In such terms the sudden and conspicuous break-out of the word wanderer in the works of  Goethe and the Romantic authors posed the culmination of a tendency that had been gaining momentum throughout the eighteenth century, for this induced a loosening of literary form and abandonment of classical conventions. In fact Willoughby did not really sort out his thoughts about the nature of the Wanderer. The title of his article includes the word image, but in what way is it meaningful to apply this term to the Wanderer?

Ezra Pound and the Imagistes promoted the image to a status much higher than that of the word, for Pound merely the means of placing labels on flat concepts. [3] The term of image may well capture the sensation generated in the mind by the incandescent vision of an imagined object but can do little to epitomize the history of a journey or the course of life. It is difficult to see how such a wanderer as Faust presents an image. If one wishes to find a metaphor that does justice to the dynamic implicit in any description of a journey or life story, one could not do better than to seek it in the domain of the allegory.

Modern critics tend to look askance at allegories, dismissing them as artificial and contrived rhetorical devices harking back to the Middle Ages. However, if we take Dante’s  concept of the allegory as a basis for exploring its potentialities, it may be seen in an altogether  different light.  The four aspects of the allegory consist of the literal, allegorical in a narrow sense, moral and anagogic, corresponding to the plain meaning of a narrative, its hidden message, the conversion of the penitent and the soul’s entry into the hereafter at death.  The word Wanderer in Goethe’s writings touches each of these categories.

(i)                Goethe associated the term Wanderer with himself,  the private person, known among his circle of friends as the Wanderer on the strength of his doughty walking excursions, who agonized over the  gap that separated him from his genius, also a Wanderer as described in the Shakespeare speech.

(ii)             Goethe availed himself of the allegorical figures that go by the name of Wanderer, -  Cain, Ahasuerus, the pilgrim through life, the Prodigal Son and the guiding Muse.

(iii)          Willoughby himself fully establishes the existence of  an inextricable interrelationship  between Goethe’s life and the course of his literary career.

(iv)           Faust is renamed the Wanderer at the point at which he dies and passes into eternity.

To get to grips with the Wanderer in Goethe’s poetry we need to find support in a method that accommodates and integrates a historic frame within which to place the Wanderer in Goethe’s poetry, a well-founded theory of language and  a  knowledge of Jung’s theory of the Unconscious. With regard to all these factors I find in Jurij Tynjanov’s article The Meaning of the Word in Verse a sound basis for investigating the subject announced in the title of this book. [4] We will look a Tynjanov’s findings in the following chapter at some length.

Armed with a recognition of the relevance of various disciples to the task of studying the wanderer in the age of Goethe, we will be in a position to widen the ambit of investigation to works by English authors in which words based on the verb to wander appear. I foresee the objection that for the purposes of translating a passage in prose from German to English, or vice versa, various words come into play, wayfarer, vagrant, journeyman and hiker among them. However, in poetry we consider the overall effect of words. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translated the title of the poem Wandrers Nachtlied by the words Wanderer’s Night-Songs.

It is also noteworthy that G. H. Hartman and other literary critics who have taken a special interest in the English Romantic poets employ the term Wanderer in references to the oppressive sense of self-consciousness that afflicted Coleridge and Byron no less than Goethe during the 1770s. [5] Bloom asserted, as did Willoughby, that the quest of the libido to achieve unity with the anima was the driving force of poetic creativity, though Bloom considered this quest to be internal with no connection to the poet’s personal life. [6] In his monograph entitled The Music of Humanity [7] Jonathan Wordsworth has emphasized the central importance of William Taylor of Norwich’s translation of Goethe’s Der Wand(e)rer as a conduit of German influence on William Wordsworth. Like Longfellow, William Taylor translated the German Wanderer by  wanderer, again a pointer to the common pool of associations and resonances shared by words which, outside poetry, would not be exact equivalents.

[1] L. A. Willoughby, The Image of the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry (Etudes Germaniques, 3, Autumn,1951).

[2]  Mignon und der Harfner stammen aus einer andren Schicht von Goethes Wesen und Leben als alle andren Figuren des Meister." (Mignon and the Harper spring from a quite different level of Goethe's being and life than do all the other characters in the Meister novel), Friedrich Gundolf,  Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung, Goethe (Berlin, 1916) 345.

[3]  Ezra Pound, Vorticism in Fortnightly Review. Sept. 1914.

[4]  Jurij Tynjanov, The Meaning of the Word in Verse,  Readings in Russian Poetics / Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Mateijka and Krystina Pomorska (Michigan Slavic Publications: Ann Arbor, 1978) 136-14.

[5] Geoffrey H. Hartman, Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness,' Romanticism and Consciousness Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1970).In this Hartman names the Ancient Mariner the Wanderer or Wandering Jew.

[6]  Harold Bloom, The Internalization of Quest-Romance, The Yale Review, Vol. LVIII, No. 4 (Summer, 1969). Later in: Romanticism and Consciousness / Essays in Criticism (New York, 1970. Harold Bloom calls the phase of development preceding full internalization the Promethean stage of Romanticism when the poets identified themselves as poets with an immature aspect of their  personalities incorporating a rebellious attitude to social injustice and repression. Full internalization was achieved by Wordsworth and Blake when the catharsis that attended their strivings in poetry afforded a clear perception of the false selfhood in all that prevented or delayed a perfect state of harmony in all the mind's questing and emotional energies; this Bloom likens to Freud's picture of a marriage of the libido and the object of its love.

[7] Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity, New York / Evanstone, 1969.                       

CHAPTER 1: In Principio Erat Verbum -A Review of Theories and Attitudes to the Word in Verse

Followed by an Application of Findings to a Closer Examination of the Potential Residing in the Verbs Wandern and To Wander

Is the Word or the Image the basic Entity in poetry? In this study special reference is made to the function of verbs, in particular to wander, in poetic texts.

A:

The Word in Language Theory

Geschrieben steht: Im Anfang war das Wort!

Hier stock ich schon! Wer hilft mir weiter fort?

Ich kann das Wort so hoch unmöglich schätzen,

Goethe: Faust, Der Tragödie Erster Teil, Studierzimmer I, 1224-6

It is written: In the beginning was the Word!

Here I falter! Who can help me continue?

That highly I can never consider the Word to be,

Goethe: Faust, The Tragedy, Part I, The Study I, 1224-6

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The winged words on which my soul would pierce

Into the height of Love's rare Universe,

Are chains of lead around its flight of fire.

Weak verses, go kneel at your Sovereign's feet,

And say,- "We are the masters of your slave,

What wouldest thou then with us and ours and thine?"

Then call your sisters from Oblivion's cave,

All singing loud "Love's very pain is sweet,

But its reward is in the world divine 

Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave."

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Epipsychidion, 588-597

Though usually categorized as an atheist or agnostic, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his answer to Peacock's pronouncement on the death of poetry (one of the first of many), averred the sanctity and prophetic nature of the art in A Defence of Poetry. The declining prestige of poetry and a commensurate and related decline in regard to religious and biblical authority amounted to a dethronement of the Word. In this connection it is surely significant that, when pondering how to translate logos into the language of his day, Goethe's Faust rejected the Word (das Wort) in favour of the Deed (die Tat) as an adequate rendering of Logos in the first chapter of St. John's Gospel. This change of word reflected the zeitgeist of Goethe's, not Faust's, epoch. The Word seems to have absorbed the mustiness of libraries and the aridity of a recluse's study, and lost its sense of an originating power; the Deed implies action and motion, which in Goethe's age were being treated as virtues in themselves (Faust set the condition for the forfeiture of his soul in his becoming resigned to a bed of idleness).

Faust contrasts Word and Deed as irreconcilable antitheses. These do not appear absolutely irreconcilable in a possible inference from the Latin words rendering the passage that exercised Faust's skills as a translator: in principio erat verbum. The verb is both a word and often an indicator of a deed. Kenneth Burke recognizes parallels between theology and the domain of language, when stating in The Rhetoric of Religion[8]:

What we say about words in the empirical realm will bear a notable likeness to what is said about God in theology.

The transition from the belief in direct inspiration to a modern perception of the originality of the poetic genius entailed a deep sense of trauma. In their dilemma, Goethe and later the Romantics tapped the power inherent in verbs of motion, the most notable of these being to wander and wandern, the bases of the common derivative Wanderer. Not only are these verbs indicators of action and movement: they are incomparably rich in allegorical associations.

John Frederick Nims notes a connection between descriptions of motion and allegories when stating in Western Wind, a handbook for students of poetry:

A mountain may be a symbol of salvation, a traveller may be a symbol of a human being in his life. But it the traveller takes as much as one step toward the mountain, it seems that the traveller and the mountain become allegorical figures, because a story has begun. [9]

Paradoxically, John Frederick Nims reiterates a common prejudice among critics that the allegory is an outmoded and contrived form of figurative language. In effect Nims confutes his own argument in attesting that the very use of a verb of motion produces a story, an allegory, irrespective of the author's conscious purpose. We may extrapolate from the words I have just cited that the use of a verb of motion engages some faculty of the mind subject to the influence of an unconscious element of the mind.

The expression logocentric is a significant item in the modern critic's list of basic terms. A logocentric approach to the study of poetic texts emerges in the following discussion of theories put forward by Jurij Tynjanov. Together with Roman Jakobson, Tynjanov was a member of the group of critics and linguists known as the Russian Formalists. This movement arose in the early l920s before its suppression by Stalin. Trotsky alleged that the Formalists had succumbed to the superstition of the word. When repudiating the Formalists, Trotsky echoed the lines (quoted above) in Goethe's Faust in the statement:

The Formalists show a fast-ripening religiousness. They are followers of St. John. They believe that In the beginning was the Word. But we believe that in the beginning was the deed. The word followed as its phonetic shadow. [10]

The logocentricity manifested by Tynjanov and other Formalists does not fully square with mainstream criticism in the West, which perceives the essential basic elements of poetry as images or quasi-musical effects. It was probably the Romantics who set the trend for interpreting characteristics of poetry in terms of analogies with the non verbal arts of painting, sculpture and music, perhaps because the word as such had apparently lost its ancient vitality and authority. Shelley, though a doughty defender of poetry, agonized about the heaviness of words when composing the lines in Epipsychidion cited at the beginning of this chapter.

In the domain of literary criticism, as formerly in that of ecclesiastical controversy, the word and the image pose contrasts arousing intense debate