Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and World Literature

Makarand Paranjape
The invitation to give the keynote address for the
conference organised to celebrate Goethe’s 250th Birth
Anniversary brought back the memory of the thrill that I
had experienced on first reading The Sorrows of Young
Werther almost twenty years ago as a graduate student,
far away from home. Werther, to me, was the window to
the whole predicament of the Romantic self: alienated,
self-absorbed, and fatally attracted to the sensuous, yet
seeking some sort of supra-sensuous permanence.' Of
course, I was not the first young man to be so possessed
by Werther. About 200 years ago, the whole of Europe
had fallen prey to what has been called ‘Werther-
sickness.’ In fact, Napoleon is known to have read it
seven times! More than any other single text, it was
Werther that was responsible for the creation of
European Romanticism (Strich 159-73). Recalling to
mind my slender, but eventful, acquaintance with
Goethe, I asked myself, what was the harm in
approaching Goethe in the spirit of a student, if not of
an expert? Albert Schweitzer’s famous tribute also came
to mind: ‘No one who comes to Goethe will go away
with empty hands, but will always take with him
something that is good for his own life’ (Qtd. Dasgupta
title page).
To my knowledge there are very few notable Indian
scholars of Goethe, nor is there a significant tradition of
Goethe scholarship in India. And yet the need for such
an Indian response to one of the great figures of
European literature is more than obvious. Because, as
we all know, Goethe had a special link with India. I
remember how as a very young child I had heard the
story of Goethe’s ecstatic response to Kalidasa’s
Shakuntala. ‘He put the book on his head and danced,’ I
was told very confidently by my now forgotten
interlocutor, no doubt as proof of the undying greatness,
even superiority of ancient Indian literature. Even if the
gesture and the theatrics attributed to Goethe are
apocryphal, who can forget the rich and fulsome praise
of his encomium to Kalidasa? It was in 1791, just two
years after William Jones’ English translation, that
Georg Forster published the first German version of
Shakuntala. Goethe wrote his famous quatrain on
Shakuntala in a letter to F.H. Jacob dated 1st June 1781:
Wouldst thou the young year’s blossoms and the
fruits of its decline,
And all by which the soul is charmed, enraptured,
feasted, fed?
Wouldst thou the earth and heaven itself in one sole
name combine?
I name thee, O Sakoontala! And all at once is said.
E.B. Eastwick’s translation
It is believed that it was from Shakuntala that
Goethe borrowed the idea of the Sutradhar for his own
masterpiece, Faust, where in the Prologue he uses the
theatre director to introduce the play.
Though Goethe’s enthusiasm for things Indian
waned with the years,2 that there was a distinctive
Indian moment in German Romanticism of the
eighteenth century cannot be denied. As is well known,
some of the leading literary and cultural figures of that
time, such as Herder, Heine, August and Friedrich
Schlegel, Habbel, were deeply influenced by India. This
German response, along with that of countless others
from William Jones to Kathleen Raine, might be
characterized as the Other mind of Europe, to use a
phrase by J.P.S. Uberoi. It is the Other mind because it
was different from the dominant Europe that we have
encountered from the beginnings of the modern colonial
era. The dominant Europe has been, I need not spell
out, imperialistic, hegemonic, oppressive, exploitative,
violent, predatory, and destructive. Of course, there are
links between the two faces of Europe as they are
presented to us; some have even argued that the softer
visage was merely a mask that hid the true face of the
conqueror. I need not add that even if there was this
Other side of Europe, it was not monolithic or
homogenous but diverse and, often, contradictory.
Indeed, a little reflection will show us how our view
of Europe will depend, to a large extent, on our view of
ourselves. There is, as I have said, a “hard” Orientalist
position that would paint all of Europe with one
imperialistic brush. From this standpoint Europe’s
contacts with the rest of the world were motivated only
by greed and lust for power. This position would deny
any redeeming or positive values to the contact of India
with Europe. On the other hand, there are those whom
we might call the “hard” Anglicists who might claim
that all of Europe’s impact on us was eminently salutary
and worthy of imitation. As the late Nirad Chaudhuri
claimed, ‘all that was good and living within us was
made, shaped, and quickened’ by British rule
(Dedication to The Autobiography of an Unknown
Indian). This hard Anglicist position would, it goes
without saying, reject Indian civilization and would seek
to reconstruct a brave new modem India along western
lines.
I myself would tend to assume a softer cultural
nationalist stance that allows for differentiation and
variety. I would argue that the European impact on
India was neither wholly beneficial nor wholly harmful
and that even its beneficial effects were not free of the
arrogance and taint of imperialism. But this is inevitable
of all encounters between unequals. Whenever power
enters into a relationship, it produces a distortion. So
whenever we read Europe, we have to take this
distortion into account. I have spent sometime in
elaborating, if not reiterating, the above framework
because I intend to use it as the groundwork for my
reading of Goethe. Without such a framework I believe
that most Indian responses to Europe flounder and
falter, ending up as little more than weak echoes of
Europe’s own self-understanding.
A little while back, I made a plea for an Indian
tradition of reading Goethe. This is needed not only
because of Goethe’s acknowledged greatness as a
literary artist, but because we in India need very badly
to break free from the stranglehold of Anglo-American
scholarship. Europe is much more than just England
and America. Without opening our eyes to other
European literatures, our understanding is bound to be
incomplete and inadequate. And of all other nations of
Europe, it is Germany that has had the longest and most
sustained interest in Indie studies. It is even more
useful to study Goethe and the German Romantics
because most of their views on India were untainted by
the kind of imperialistic blindness that infected a
majority of the British Indophiles. As Pramod Talgeri
says: ‘It is a peculiar phenomenon that the relationship
between the two countries in this context was free from
political or economic motives’ (14), whereas most of the
British Orientalists, let us not forget, were also
administrators and rulers of India. In Goethe and some
of his contemporaries, then, we get a rather fresh,
natural, and uncontaminated response to Indian
culture. Though mediated through colonialist
translations, the Indian texts that reached them made a
genuine impact on them and elicited a strong, creative,
and fruitful response.
Goethe is important to us for another reason. His
outlook on life, his worldview was holistic and in that
sense opposed to the emerging currents of modernity in
Europe. It is in this sense, too, that he represents the
Other mind of Europe. Goethean science, for example,
is totally different from the mainstream of modem
science, as we have come to know it. It is well known
that Goethe was the founder of comparative anatomy,
that his work helped considerably in the construction of
the theory of evolution, that he founded important
museum collections in botany, geology, and zoology, that
he made significant investigations in plant growth
processes, and that he propounded a profoundly
original theory of colour. Goethe’s scientific work was
not just overshadowed by his eminence as a poet, but
also rejected by most of his contemporaries. Despite
this rejection, he laboured with an inner faith in the
value of his work. In fact, Goethe scientific studies
continued right to the year of his death in 1832. Despite
what he himself called the prevalence of ‘esoteric
confessions’ in his scientific work, Goethe never
advocated a lax or mystical approach to the observation
of phenomenal reality. The only difference was that for
him empirical observation had to progress to intuitive
perception. As Douglas Miller says, ‘Despite the need to
categorize, Goethe remained convinced that nature was
a whole, and that it simply manifested itself through
individual phenomena’ (xvii). Goethe, like Vivekananda
and Tagore after, sought to reconcile science and
poetry: he looked forward to a time when ‘the two can
meet again on a higher level as friends’ (Qtd. Miller
xviii). As Rudolf Steiner points out in Goethe, the
scientist, Goethe was against the mechanistic
worldview. Similarly, Dennis L. Seppar in Goethe Contra
Newton argues that Goethe’s science was not only anti-
reductionist, but it also had an ethical dimension (187-
190). The most extraordinary dimension of Goethe’s
science was his insistence on the self-development of
the scientist: ‘Goethe realized that proper scientific
work should bring a change in the scientist himself,
especially in his mode of perception, and that this
change then affected the practice of science’ (Miller
xix).
It is a matter of special pride that one of the most
eloquent and forceful interpretations of Goethe the
scientist has come from an Indian sociologist, J.P.S.
Uberoi. In Science and Culture (1978), Uberoi outlines
two approaches to the development of science in
Europe, semiology versus positivism. Semiology was
pushed into the background by an ascendant positivism.
‘For the semiologist, the whole is always in some sense
superior and even prior to its parts,’ says Uberoi, while
the positivist system is based upon two dualisms,
between fact and value on the one hand, and theory and
practice on the other. Uberoi locates Goethe firmly in
the tradition of semiology. In The Other Mind of Europe:
Goethe as a Scientist (1984), Uberoi pushed these ideas
further. He argued that Goethe was operating in a
different scientific paradigm that gave importance to
the archetype and symbol, as against the science of
system and method. Tracing this tradition back to
Paracelsus and the hermeticists, Uberoi offered a new
defence of Goethe’s theory of colours and his work in
plant metamorphosis. Uberoi regarded Goethe’s science
as basically non dualist, while the whole edifice of
modernity is built on duality.
 Thus we see that not only do Goethe’s ideas go
against the separation of the subject and the object, of
value and fact, of morality and science, upon which the
whole edifice of modern civilization is built, but they
also refuse to accede to the emerging dominance of the
positivistic, the empiricist, and the instrumental attitude
to nature. It is therefore stunning to read the following
description of his own perceptive processes that Goethe
wrote in his review of Purkinje’s Sight from a Subjective
Standpoint (1824):
When I closed my eyes and lowered my head, I could
imagine a flower in the centre of my visual sense. Its
original form never stayed for a moment: it unfolded,
and from within it new flowers continuously developed
with coloured petals or green leaves. These were not
natural flowers; they were fantasy flowers, but as
regular as rosettes carved by a sculptor. (Qtd. Miller
xix)
To me, at least, this description resembles that of a
mystical vision or what Sri Aurobindo would call an
illumination which, not through the regular thought
processes, but in a flash as it were reveals the nature of
truth.
In a similar vein, Fritz Strich observes: ‘Goethe’s
devotion to the East is itself a kind of devout longing to
be transformed through self-sacrifice, to be purified and
born again out of the East to rise anew as a European’
(149). Of course, it would be too tempting and facile to
slide into any simple assertion of affinity or resemblance
between Goethe and Eastern mysticism. Quoting Erich
Truntz’s remark that ‘The oriental world was not
strange to Goethe,’ Talgeri warns against precisely such
an assumption:
In the secondary research literature Goethe’s
interest in the oriental culture and philosophy has
normally been attributed to the resemblance of his
views with the oriental way of life and thinking.
(‘Goethe’s perception of oriental culture,’ 171).
Talgeri says instead that ‘in fact not the familiarity
but the strangeness’ of Oriental culture appealed to
Goethe, that it was this Otherness that he sought to
incorporate into his own world view in works such as
The Divan: West and East in order to arrive at his own
“life coherence.” (Ibid.)
We shall have occasion to return to this idea of
absorbing diverse influences so as to form a sort of
composite coherence later—indeed, perhaps, this might
be what Goethe meant when he spoke of world
literature—a new literature which would emerge from a
new mind. But, right now, let us return to a remark that
Goethe made after he had written his Divan in 1818. He
wished to create a conceptual framework for an even
more ambitious work in the future which would contain
a kind of “observation which oscillates between the
sensuous and the super-sensuous, without however
clinging to only one of them” (ibid. 173).
In the foregoing discussion I have tried to show how
Goethe is a figure of special importance to us in India
because he represents one of the most coherent and
successful attempts within European tradition to attain
the kind of integral approach to reality which we have
always valued in Indie civilizations. What Goethe
achieved is really a fine balancing act, to invoke an
Upanishadic phrase, like walking the razor’s edge,
because he could be progressive and evolutionary
without denying the beauty and perfection of the past;
he could be scientific and empirical without giving up
the subjective, the poetic, the ethical; he could be
moved, inspired, and enriched by the treasures of other
cultures without giving up his own; in other words, he
could be German, European, and yet universal in a
uniquely rich and fulfilling way. In turning to Goethe’s
thoughts on world literature, it would be particularly
useful to bear this negative capability, this ability to
reconcile opposites in mind. I propose that it is out of
such a quest for a larger “life-coherence” that Goethe’s
idea of world literature emerges.
Goethe’s ideas on world literature were scattered,
not systematic. As Fritz Strich in the only book which
bears the exact title of our seminar, Goethe and World
Literature says, ‘at no point did Goethe himself
unequivocally state what he wished to be understood by
world literature’ (5). It is, nevertheless, what Strich
calls a ‘magical term’ which at once ‘brings to mind a
feeling of liberation, of such gain in space and scope’
(Strich 3). That is all the more reason that we bear in
mind that Goethe’s thoughts on the subject belong to a
specific time and place—the term itself was coined in
1827 (Strich 160), though Goethe had been thinking
along these lines earlier and continued to do so later. It
is therefore imperative that we do not wrench these
ideas out of their context and attempt to derive from
them some contemporary, even postcolonial idea of a
global literature. But before proceeding, let us briefly
recount some of Goethe’s observations.
1. “National literature is no longer of importance; it
is the time for world literature, and all must aid in
bringing it about.” (Gearey 224).
Lest we jump to the conclusion that Goethe was
suggesting a postmodern withering away of the nation-
state, we must remember that he was capable of saying
what seems like exactly the opposite thing: ‘Poetry is
cosmopolitan, and the more interesting the more it
shows its nationality’ (Gearey 228). Elsewhere, Goethe
says, ‘only from a real nation can a national writer of
the highest order be expected’ (Spingrarn 84). From
this one example, we can see that like all great men,
Goethe was wont to contradict himself now and again.
2. ‘I am convinced that a world literature is
beginning to develop, in which an honourable role is
reserved for us Germans.’ (Gearey 225)
3. ‘The world at large, no matter how vast it may
be, is only an expanded homeland and will actually yield
in interest no more than our native land.... The serious-
minded must therefore form a silent, almost secret
congregation, since it would be futile to oppose the
powerful currents of the day.’ (Gearey 227)
4. The phenomenon which I call world literature
will come about mainly when the disputes within one
nation are settled by the opinions and judgements of
others. (Gearey 228)
5. ‘For it is evident that all nations, thrown together
at random by terrible wars, then reverting to their
status as individual nations, could not help realizing
that they had been subject to foreign influences....
Instead of isolating themselves as before, their state of
mind has gradually developed a desire to be included in
the free exchange of ideas.’ (Gearey 228).
The fullest discussion of these ideas is found, as I
mentioned earlier, in Strich’s book, which was published
in 1945, but based on lectures that he gave as early as
1929. For Strich, world literature essentially meant ‘the
choice literature which has gained for itself a
significance transcending nationality and time’ (4). He
also identifies various other senses of the term such' as:
a link literature; the literature of/in translation; letters
between authors of different nations; a branch of
scholarship, especially comparative literature; and
world poetry as the essence of world literature (Strich
5-16). This shows us the multiple, overlapping, and at
times contrary meanings inherent in the term world
literature.
The only Indian scholar I know who has written in
some detail about this idea is R.K. Dasgupta. He begins
his brief essay ‘Goethe on World Literature’ by quoting
from a letter that Carlyle wrote to Goethe on 22 January
1831: ‘What I have named world literature after you ..
[is] to become more and more one universal
Commonwealth’ (Dasgupta 21). Dasgupta uses this
letter to argue that by world literature, Goethe did not
mean ‘airy cosmopolitanism’ or an ‘intellectual
internationalism’ that was a cover for ‘intellectual
rootlessness’ (21). Nor, according to Dasgupta, is
Goethe’s notion of world literature to be confused with
comparative literature, the study of ‘resemblances and
differences between national literatures’ (ibid.).
Dasgupta also clarified that ‘Nothing could be further
from his [Goethe’s] mind than to suppose that World-
literature was the total amount of literature produced in
the world’ (ibid.). Later, Dasgupta went on to say that
‘Goethe’s World-literature does not really mean the
production of a new literature which would be the
literature of the new universal man’ (22). Instead, for
Dasgupta, it was the discovery of ‘those elements in a
national literature which are universal and are,
therefore, capable of being appreciated by other
nations’ which makes for world literature: ‘The
discovery of this element of universality makes possible
the emergence of a World-literature’ (ibid.). Dasgupta
adds, ‘to appreciate the universal element in a literature
you must first understand its national peculiarity’ (22).
And finally that ‘World-literature involves the idea of a
world mind’ (21).
Frankly, I find Dasgupta’s positions somewhat
contradictory and, in any case, not properly elucidated.
Yet, it is useful to examine his comments because they
help identify the key features of the debate on world
literature. I tend to agree with Dasgupta that Goethe’s
idea of world literature is, first of all, not a sum total of
various national literatures. It is not, in other words,
what Sisir Kumar Das in his Introduction to A History of
Indian Literature calls ‘an arithmetical approach’ (vol.
8: 8). Nor does Goethe suggest that world literature is,
by definition, opposed to national literature. This
relationship between the local and the global, between
the national and the international is quite a tricky issue.
Indeed, Bhalchandra Nemade in his famous essay
‘Nativism in Literature’ (Sahityateel Deshiyata) argues
that what goes by the name of internationalism is only a
European colonialism in disguise. For Nemade, the
classics of world literature are nothing but classics of
certain native literary traditions which, because of
certain historical and cultural forces, become reference
points for the world community: ‘Certain historical
circumstances create situations in which literary works
produced by a particular civilization act as a central
reference code for the emotional problems of the world
community’ (Paranjape 245). In other words, these
works are not inherently international, but that ‘In such
historical moments, such an atmosphere is created that
the sensibilities of a regional group represent the
sensibilities of the whole humanity’ (ibid.). For Nemade,
then, the concept of a transcendental world literature,
above and beyond space and time, is a myth. All world
literature is also at once regional or native literature of
a peculiar place and time: ‘An “international” literature
without native reference does not exist’ (ibid. 246). The
real question, to me, is precisely this: if world literature
does not, by definition, oppose national or regional
literature, then how is it to be distinguished from the
latter? Is world literature that which is not
national/regional or is it a special type of
national/regional literature?
Perhaps, this may be the appropriate place to bring
in another nativist critic, G.N. Devy; after all, if Nemade
comes, can Devy be far behind? In a chapter called
‘Nation in Narration’ towards the end of his new book,
Of Many Heroes, Devy says that a literary history
cannot be written without ‘the institutionalized teaching
of history, and the emergence of a culture’s self
recognition’ (161). To illustrate his point, Devy says:
For example, millions of people all over the world
travel every day for various reasons; and often they
travel through towns, territories, nations which are not
their own. No one has thought of writing a history of
literature by and for travellers in the world. But as soon
as these people acquire a sense of sharing a common
fate, the sense of being a community, there will emerge
a need for the history of expatriate literature. (Ibid.)
Obviously, this process of the self-recognition,
empowerment, and institutionalization of migrants,
exiles, diasporics, and other displaced people is
precisely what the emergence of postcolonial studies all
over the world is all about. This is what Bhabha means
when he says that world literature is ‘an emergent,
prefigurative category that is concerned with a form.of
cultural dissensus and alterity, where non-consensual
terms of affiliation may be established on the grounds of
historical traumas’ (see “Introduction,” The Location of
Culture 1-18). But this is going to the other extreme, of
hegemonising alterity and difference, of privileging
dissent and dislocation, of rewarding displacement with
an ontological status. If this is the shape of world
literature, it is as much based on exclusive as the older,
more consensual and stable forms of self-formation and
identity seeking. The point is that the world is still an
idea, while the idea of the nation is a reality. Everyone
who lives in a nation also lives in the world, but it is not
possible at present to live in the world without living in
a nation. That is why the idea of world literature is still
emergent, not actualized.
Yet, Goethe’s idea has a definite resonance for us
today, partly because we are living at a time when
national barriers are breaking down, largely through
the force of technology and trade if not by wars and
disasters. We may recall that the time Goethe lived in
was also one of shrinking boundaries and
unprecedented crossings. As Dasgupta puts it:
When Sir William Jones’s English translation of
Shakuntala appeared in 1879 Goethe was forty years of
age. Forster’s German translation of Shakuntala
appeared in 1791. Six years earlier, that is, in 1785, had
appeared Charles Wilkins’s English translation of the
Bhagavad-Gita. Frederick Schlegel’s The Language and
Wisdom of India was published in 1808. Ten years after
this, in 1818, Frederick Schlegel’s brother A.W.
Schlegel was appointed Professor of German at Bonn.
Bopp’s Analytical Comparison of the Sanskrit, Greek,
Latin and Teutonic Languages appeared in 1816.
Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda was translated into English
prose by Sir William Jones in 1789. (23-24)
The idea that Dasgupta tries to convey, I think, is
that Europe and India, not to speak of the rest of the
world, were closer than ever before. You could read a
text from a distant land and period in the most fresh
and contemporary manner. Literally, a new world of
creative possibilities, a new cultural commonwealth was
emerging. It was out of such ferment that the notion of
world literature was born.3
Today, however, we see clearly that the vision of a
global world order clearly implies the continued
domination of the Western powers, militarily,
economically, and culturally. That is why some critics
wish to salvage the universal, that older enlightenment
notion, while still opposing the global. Of these, Aijaz
Ahmad is perhaps the most sensible and eloquent. In an
interview with the New York based Monthly Review, he
says:
world literature remains the horizon of universalist
desire. But the ground reality is that there really is no
alternative to picking up small chunks and doing them
well, whatever those chunks get called.
Ahmad arrives at this conclusion after warning us
that ‘world literature will always reflect the inequalities
of the imperialist system so long as this system lasts.’
Despite this drawback, Ahmad is unwilling to give up
the idea of universality. Of course, there is an even more
serious warning that Ahmad sounds:
One problem is how this world literature is to be
actually taught and read. The idea of world literature in
the traditional sense, a la Goethe, remains deeply
canonical, even Amoldian: all the best that has been
thought and written is now to be culled not from this or
that nation but from the world. If you think about it, this
way of reading “great books” produced in the various
continents in the world, assembled in a canonizing way,
is perfectly reconcilable with the intensified integration
of the upper classes of the world into something
resembling a world bourgeoisie. It is very easy for world
literature to represent this global integration and arrive
at an easy, even very glossy capitalist universalization.
In this area, we have to question the very idea of
literature and we have to be very suspicious of all texts,
certainly including the ones that arrive from the Third
World, insofar as they display the slightest potential for
canonicity. We have to begin, in fact, with a great
suspicion of the very fact that the category of world
literature as a pedagogical object is arising in the core
capitalist countries, whereas the poorer countries have
no means of their own to constitute such objects.
I agree with Ahmad that like the idea of the nation
or of national literature, we shall have to question what
kind of world literature we are talking about before
supporting or opposing it. If world literature is just
another name for imperialism, obviously we don’t want
it just as we don’t want nationalism if it is nothing more
than fascism. But if world literature points to the idea of
a universal culture or civilization that is egalitarian,
pluralistic, multicultural, then this idea, however
utopian, is worth striving for. I suspect that is what
Goethe really had in mind. In fact, it is an ideal that
might inspire spiritual people as it does genuine
Marxists. There are doctrinal and theoretical questions
at stake in Ahmad’s position which, of course, I need
not venture intojust now.4
What we have seen is that world literature is not a
realized entity, but as yet an ideal, a distant dream. As
Strich puts it, world literature is ‘Not merely that which
at any given moment actually exists, but also that which
is striving to be born’ (3). It is, moreover, an idea
predicated upon the emergence of a world community, a
world civilization that is universal without being
homogenous. Those who believe in the New Age hope
and pray for precisely such a perfected world, a new
Satya Yuga, which includes and exceeds all the four
previous yugas. Perhaps the most detailed and
persuasive formulation of this golden tomorrow is
available in the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother. Like Goethe, Sri Aurobindo had an evolutionary
outlook. He believed that the future of humanity is
luminous because encased in the human is the Divine
struggling to manifest itself in all its splendour. In the
idea of the Supermind, Sri Aurobindo saw highest rung
of the evolution of the cosmos before its merger into the
Absolute, Satchitananda, that is beyond name and form.
But in the Supermind, both the Ananda of creation and
the Perfection of the Absolute are present. The Mother
declared that the Supermind had actually descended
into the earth atmosphere on 29 February 1956.5
Whether or not we believe in such millennial
prophecies, that is the direction to which, I believe, our
study of Goethe’s idea of world literature will actually
take us. That, after all, is also the direction in which all
alchemical thought, from the earliest times, has
ventured. That Goethe was a part of this ancient
wisdom tradition should t>e obvious to anyone who
reads his work carefully. Both as a poet and as a
scientist, Goethe was passionately concerned with the
perfectibility of nature, of the wedding, so to speak, of
nature and supernature, the union of heaven and earth
Blake envisioned too. I trust that by such a reading,
though I might have brought Goethe closer to us in
India, I have not done the injustice of misunderstanding
him or of wrenching hitn out of his European, German
context. Because, ultimately, it is not merely as an
Indian that I should like to encounter Goethe, but as
one world citizen in dialogue with another on th£ stage
that he himself so aptly named as world literature.
Notes
1. Clark S. Muenzer, commenting on Goethe’s
characters in Figures of Identity: Goethe’s Novels and
the Enigmatic Self observes: “The aspiring individual in
his orientation toward substantive centres, first
establishes himself in relation to infinite hopes. But he
must also recognize these centres as possibilities of the
imagination” (145).
2. In a letter dated 22 October 1826 he wrote: i
have by no means an aversion to things Indian, but 1 am
afraid of them, for they draw my imagination into the
formless and the diffuse, against which I have to guard
myself more than ever before’ (Qtd. Dasgupta 28).
3. Strich makes a detailed survey of the European
origins of Goethe’s idea of world literature; see the
chapters, ‘Sources,’ 31-51, and ‘History’, 52-80.
4. For instance, what would be the role of an
international bourgeoisie in the formation of the new
world order. Are they to be treated as the enemy of the
emerging global proletariat or the agents of history who
have a valuable role to play? Besides, one may clearly
discern the emergence of a global bourgeoisie, but
hardly a global working class. Perhaps, one would have
to rethink the idea of class struggle itself.
5. For an introduction to Sri Aurobindo’s thought
see, Penguin Sri Aurobindo Reader, which I have edited.

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