2. 2
An Overview
The title of this study is likely to provoke two questions in the minds
of those who read it. What is "the poet's word," and why is there a reference
to its "contexts"? In the usual way we speak of understanding a word or
phrase by viewing it in its context. A poem itself constitutes the context of
all the words it contains and poems in turn may be the subject of
comparative studies that involve a regard for yet wider contexts such the
one determined by literary tradition.
The first section of this book lays down the theoretical basis on which
all subsequent arguments found in the book will rest. This basis is
furnished by the distinction which the noted linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure made to differentiate between langue and parole. Langue
signifies language understood as a system to be studied according to
certain rules of grammar and the definitions contained in dictionaries:
parole signifies language in any spoken or written form, whether in a book,
newspaper or a poem. In this section the main principles governing a
logocentric approach to the study of literary texts will be shown in action,
that is to say, by an examination of particular words such as "honourable,"
"breeze" and "cross" within their literary contexts. This procedure will
involve a study of the position of words within various contexts including
those set by the inner constituency of any poem, the entire body of all
works written by the same author and the ambit of literary tradition. The
wider the ambit of the contexts considered, the less likely it will seem that
a poet can precisely determine or predict patterns formed by all words
within so vast an ambit, for such a task would surely overload human
powers of memory and coordination, but if such patterns should emerge,
and we shall consider evidence that they do, the greater the problem for
critics and scholars seeking to understand why and how such extensive
patterns emerge without the support of some force resembling what C. G.
Jung called the collective unconscious, it being rather awkward these days
to invoke the assistance of a muse.
The second section investigates the phenomenon of "wandering,"
with particular reference to the term "Wanderer" much favoured by
Goethe and the Romantic poets by its inclusion in the titles of their
poems and other works, which might allow "Wanderer" to earn the honour
of being deemed "the Poet's Word." The word "Wanderer" subsumes all
form of the verbs "to wander" and "wandern" that give rise to the common
3. 3
derivative of the noun "Wanderer." The question as to whether "wandern"
and "to wander" share the same range of significance to English and
German poets, I repeat "poets," calls for attention. Suffice it to say at this
juncture that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translated Goethe's exquisite
"Wandrers Nachtlied" with the words "Wanderer's Night-Songs." Literary
critics and scholars have noted the importance of the "wanderer" as a key
word or concept in German and English poetry. Despite differences of
approach and the divergent scope of their enquiries, Professor Willoughby
and Geoffrey Hartman, the two literary scholars who have paid
particularly close attention to the area of our concern, agree that
wandering is rooted in what C. G. Jung and Sigmund Freud termed the
quest of the libido for union with anima, but they disagree on the issue of
whether this interior psychological process involved poets in any social
and moral commitment relevant to the exigencies of society and the
concerns of common humanity. Willoughby and Hartman do not raise
important questions that they could have tackled only by reference the
historical background of the sudden prominence of the word "Wanderer" in
the era of Goethe and the Romantic poets. Thus a considerable portion of
the middle section of this book is devoted to a survey of this background.
Wandering, it is to be shown, lies at the centre of a poet-to-poet dialogue
not only between poets in the German-speaking world but also between
Goethe and British poets, notably James Thomson, Edward Young and
Oliver Goldsmith. Initially Goethe assimilated influences coming from
England but in due time the flow of influence turned decidedly the other
way. In this two-way process we witness an interchange of ideas and
associations closely bound up with the phenomenon of wandering, and
language is essentially dialogic in character, both in literary domain and in
the marketplace.
The third section of this book serves to demonstrate that the
logocentric approach is relevant and applicable to the most diverse
questions that interest those engaged in the study of literature. We will
consider lines in Hamlet that incorporate the word "be," not only in that
most celebrated of quotations from the works of Shakespeare. It will also
help us to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding Dylan Thomas's
wilfully obscure poem "Altarwise by Owl-Light" and go some way towards
answering the question as to whether Godot turned up after all to keep his
rendezvous with Pozzo in Samuel Beckett's enigmatic drama Waiting for
Godot.
The concluding section of this book differs in tone and orientation
4. 4
from the preceding sections at least to the extend that it comprises a
committed statement about the abuse to which literature, though never
great literature, has been prone in recent history. This section reflects the
same concern with logocentricity shown by the other sections of this
book in as far it treats the "heart" as a key word without making it appear
obnoxiously symbolic. Mention is made of the fact that the dry and
unsympathetic Edward Casaubon in George Eliot's novel Middlemarch
dies of heart failure, and what is so symbolic about that? The very frame by
which a poem or novel encloses common objects and events such as
daffodils or the onset of illness elevates what seems commonplace and
unexceptional to the realm of immortality and the universal.
This book may well be seen as a challenge to the widely prevalent view
that poetic language and the language of daily intercourse are of an
entirely different order, for it broaches the question why we peruse and
usually forget newspaper articles, however well written, and why so short a
poem as "Wandrers Nachtlied" provides an inexhaustible wealth of
insights and pleasure. How is it that a poem written perhaps on the spur of
the moment can provide a limitless opportunity for reflection? Such
asymmetry poses no small problem to "objective" critics who wish to
balance the input of poetic creation with the output entailed by its
reception in the mind of an informed reader.
I: An Integrated Multi-Contextual Approach to the
Interpretation and Analysis of Poems and Literary Texts
How can a "logocentric," a word-centred, approach help critics to get
a handle on such a phenomenon as that manifested by the frequent and
prominent appearance of words based on the verbs "wandern" and "to
wander" in the poetry of Goethe and the Romantic poets of his time? Can
the same approach, the characteristics of which will be elucidated in the
following paragraphs, help towards locating and the remedying other blind
5. 5
spots in the area of literary criticism by exploring the concealed depths of
celebrated and yet underappreciated poems such as Robert Browning's
"The Pied Piper of Hamelin" and some of the more obscure poems by Dylan
Thomas? Can it even resolve the question whether Godot in Samuel
Beckett's most celebrated play turned up after all?
The reference to "the Poet's Word" in the title of this collection of
essays finds a close parallel in the title of an essay by the Russian
Formalist Jurij Tynjanov, namely “The Meaning of the Word in Verse.” 1 I
owe the theoretical basis on which this series of studies is founded to
insights provided by Tynjanov, at least to the extent that I have applied a
logocentric method to the study and evaluation of poems or other literary
texts in the course of my literary research, the results of which I present in
the following pages of this book.
Essentially Tynjanov's logocentric approach to textual criticism is
derived from Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between two basic
aspects of language, which he termed langue and parole, between the
system of language codified in grammar books and dictionaries, and the
language articulated in acts of speech and writing. The school of criticism
based on de Saussure's theory of language asserts that words provide the
basic stuff of poetry. This fact may seem obvious to many, yet critics of
literature, scholars and the Imagist poet Ezra Pound have voiced very low
opinions of words as the constituent elements of poetry in that they have
regarded words as mere fodder to be transformed into images, symbols,
quasi-musical motifs or whatever else could be deemed the real and vital
stuff of poetry. 2
6. 6
The distinction between langue and parole comes into focus if we
compare a word as defined in a dictionary with the same word located in
any form of speech or writing. The word in the latter case belongs to a body
of words and occupies within this its unique position. As a consequence, to
clarify the difference between this from the word in a dictionary we might
formulate the term "a single word occurrence" for want of a better
designation. Let us consider the following case taken from Shakespearean
drama to illustrate this point.
In Mark Antony's oration on the occasion of Julius Caesar's burial the
word "honourable" plays a key role. If "honourable" is understood as a
synonym for “decent” or “faithful to a high principle,” we can say with little
fear of contradiction that the same word is repeated several times in the
course of the oration. However, as a single word occurrence each
separately located instance of "honourable" constitutes a distinct and
unique particle within the oration, for the verbal environment of each
occurrence, once passed, can never be nullified or revised, the effect of the
progress of the oration being irreversible and cumulative. The flow of
words in a text resembles the river which according to Heraclitus no one
can enter twice. The final occurrence of "honourable" in the oration strikes
an altogether different chord than did "honourable" when it first passed
the speaker's lips. However, the audience must always keep the general
sense of the word in mind or else the irony generated by the disparity of the
official meaning of the word and the increasingly negative implication of
"honourable" throughout the oration will be lost. If language comprehends
the two indivisible aspects which de Saussure termed langue and parole, a
word located in a text unites the specific with the universal, the singularity
which it owes to its unique location with its inclusion within the greater
whole of the group of words that share the same form and sound. Does this
connection become severed in the language of poetry? Advocates of the
objective or contextualist schools of literary criticism would have us believe
so.
Clearly the reader of a poem will pay particularly close attention to
the location of words, their verbal juxtapositions and the alchemical
interaction of words clustered together producing a multiplicity of
resonances and associations. The reader of a newspaper, by contrast,
having ascertained what the subject of an article or report is about, will
regard only those meanings of words that accord with that particular
subject. In most cases the reader will discard the paper once it has been
read. For some reason this is not the case when those with a genuine
7. 7
interest in literature read a poem of their choice. On rereading a good poem
we can always expect to discover new depths of meaning and insights. Of
course, critics of the objective school are justified in discovering parallels
between a poem and an artifact, a painting or a musical symphony, but
should any resultant set of analogies lead to an attitude that would
radically separate poetry from all reference to the world around us?
Any analogy between poetry and sister arts is valid and helpful within
certain bounds. To take away or rearrange the words of poem would be
tantamount to committing sacrilege against art like chipping off parts of a
statue or removing a detail from a painting, for in a poem each word has its
proper place in accordance with the structural and aesthetic needs of art.
Hence Cleanth Brooks’ famous reference to the "Heresy of Paraphrase" in
The Well-Wrought Urn (1946) and Archibald MacLeish’s equally famous
lines. "A poem should not mean / but be" in "Ars Poetica "(1926).
Without wishing to deny that Brooks made a strong case when
dealing with the burning issue of what he called the "Heresy of
Paraphrase," 3 I personally see no objection to summaries of poems,
particularly long narrative ones, written for the purpose of aiding some
distressed student’s comprehension, as long as such a summary is not
taken to be a substitute for the poem itself and merely offers a platform for
discussing what is truly interesting about the poem in question.
However, the analogy between poetry and its sister arts can be taken so far
as to lead to conclusions that may strike the man in the street as lacking in
common sense.
Let us take the example of assertions made about Walt Whitman's
poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," a eulogy dedicated to
Abraham Lincoln, which Calvin S. Brown lauded as the supreme poem of
all time in his essay “The Musical Development of Symbols: Whitman” 4
Like others who strictly adhere to the objective school of criticism,
Brown l regarded apparent references to historical facts, beliefs and
personal concerns of the author of a work as external matters about which
a critic of literature should not enter into idle speculations when
discussing the intrinsic virtues of a poem.
In order to elucidate the complex development of Whitman's poem,
Brown's article draws an analogy between this poem and orchestral music,
an analogy that Brown takes so literally as to assert that the best in poetry
is “musical” in character, and, as with music, makes no direct statement
about people and events, save only to enrich the fusion and coordination of
the poem's "musical" qualities. Not only that: Whitman in Brown’s view
8. 8
was the first, and perhaps the only, poet to recognize that poetry consisted
solely of musical motifs and notations in the sense he indicated. Up to a
point the analogy between the poem and a musical symphony is helpful
and productive, corroborating conclusions about the irreversible and
progressive aspects of a literary or even a non-literary text. In a musical
symphony the audience recognizes motifs that pervade the entire work
because recognizable sequences of notes, chords and bars strike the ear as
the symphony progresses, thus condensing and enriching the overall
associative effect on every new recognition of the symphony's leitmotiv.
However, when Calvin Brown proposes that the poem is not about
President Lincoln at all but simply uses the name to promote the idea of a
great man in the service of the orchestration of the symbols and
quasi-music elements that compose Whitman's poem, I for one am unable
to follow him.
We now consider a further axiom in de Saussure's philosophy of
language. This proposes that language evinces a combination of its
so-called diachronic and synchronic axes. Language considered on the
synchronic axis exists in the present unaffected by substantial or
perceptible change. On the diachronic plane we consider the changes
affecting language during its history up to the present time. People
engaged in such activities as conversation, letter writing and listening to
the radio are unlikely to be much concerned with language as it has
developed on the diachronic plane. The same is not true of poets, for words
situated in poems recall earlier uses of the same or similar words that have
been recorded in poetic tradition and which mark points of interchange
between poets in a kind of trans-temporal dialogue, the nature of which
should become clearer with the help of the following example.
The word “breeze” occurs in several celebrated poems written by the
English Romantic poets, notably The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and "I
wandered lonely as a cloud" in the works of Samuel T. Coleridge or William
Wordsworth. A comparison of occurrences of this word reveals its
significance as a pointer to that vital factor which accorded poets the
stamina needed to sustain their creative powers in an age when the very
nature of inspiration was in doubt. The greatest fear of the Romantics was
the dread of the atrophy of their poetic powers. Surely this is no more
clearly evident than in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner where
the picture of the Mariner's becalmed ship poignantly represents the poet's
fear of artistic paralysis. The curse on his ship is lifted only when he
perceives a beautiful sea serpent in motion. Only then does a breeze
9. 9
suddenly end the motionless condition of the ship and propel it forwards.
The word “breeze” also appears in "I wandered lonely as a cloud," where it
represents the force that allows the daffodils to dance joyfully to the poet's
delight. As Henry Pottle notes in his article "The Eye and the object in the
poetry of Wordsworth," daffodils recall the legend of Narcissus, if not to the
florist then to the poet who intuits the deep resonance of words steeped in
poetic tradition. 5 As in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the breeze releases
the poetic spirit from the stasis produced by fear, the anguish of the
Romantic poet bereft of the assurance that some muse or divine power will
sustain him. In "I wandered lonely as a cloud" the word “breeze” is located
in close proximity to "wandered" and "cloud." This trio of "breeze,"
"wander" and "cloud" is found in the opening passage of The Prelude,
where these words in combination recall the poet's dedication to the
Muse and Spirit of Horeb, the Holy Spirit. 6 Wordsworth's reference here
to liberation from "a house of bondage," poses a clear allusion to the Egypt
represented in the account of the Passover story in the Pentateuch. The
reference to a "wandering cloud" must, in this context, pose an allusion to
the pillar of cloud in the account of the journey of the Israelites through
the wilderness of Sinai.
There is no obvious connection between "I wandered lonely as a
cloud" and the supplication to the Holy Spirit as the Muse in Paradise Lost,
but by side-stepping from "I wandered as lonely as a cloud" to another
work by Wordsworth, in our case The Prelude, we discover a missing
connection between "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and Milton's dedication
to the Muse in the opening passage of Paradise Lost.
A strict contextualist, that is to say one who believes that each poem
is a unique object to be valued without regard to such extraneous matters
as the mind of its author, could well object that the line of argument I have
pursued departs from a strict regard for the inner constituency of “I
wandered lonely as a cloud” as an enclosed object. There are other schools
of opinion that do not take so narrow a view as that taken by the
staunchest defenders of New Criticism. There is another context to
consider, that constituted by all the works written by the same author, for
all such works spring from the same mind, not only that part of the mind
that controls its logical processes but also that part which is often termed
the unconscious or subconscious. Is there a context that is wider still, that
which T. S. Eliot calls “tradition”? 7 Let us posit that all these contexts
interlock making any word in poetry the centre of a series of concentric
cycles and allowing us to understand the word as a unique entity and yet a
10. 10
part of the word in infinity, much as Ferdinand de Saussure and Jurij
Tynjanov concluded in the light of the distinction between langue and
parole.
Scholars have noted that a study of the entire body of a poet’s works
yields an insight into what one could term their verbal signature, their
personal habits in choosing and combining words that distinguish their
verbal signature from that of any other person. On this assumption,
Barbara Melchiori engages in a statistical survey of the key words in
Browning’s poetry adducing such an interesting fact that the most
frequent noun in the poet’s vocabulary of nouns was "gold," occurring 390
times all told. 8
I present specific examples drawn from Browning’s poetry to
illustrate a further aspect of observations made by Jurij Tynjanov in “the
Word in Verse.” The article points out that while the conspicuous
repetition of the same word in prose usually produces a discordant note, in
poetry its effect is often to enhance and deepen the power of language.
Though poetic language and ordinary language are of a different
order within the bounds of basic language, the mind of a reader or listener
processes pieces of ordinary language and pieces of poetic language in
much the same way, initially at least. The minds gleans those meanings of
words in a text that cohere in accordance with the general sense of what
one assumes the passage in question is about. What is disturbing for
readers of some of Dylan Thomas’s poems, particularly “Altarwise by
Owl-Light,” is the fact that no such storyline can be derived from an
apparent jumble of logically disconnected words and thus readers are
deprived of any convenient guidelines that would allow them to make
sense of Thomas’s more difficult poetry.
Most poems occupy an area lying between the poles marked by
newspaper to be read, ingested and set aside and a poem that seems to
yield no readily comprehensible meaning. In narrative poems we will tend
to understand the sense of words that accord with a readily
comprehensible storyline. Poetry however exploits words as words, warts
and all, with all their potential to form associations, combinations
irrespective of the logical coherence of any storyline or message. In a
narrative poem such as “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” words combine in a
manner that allows them to convey a consistent message and narrative
and yet beneath this surface there are powerful undercurrents and pulling
forces that have nothing to do with the poem’s open statements. 9 For this
reason poetic diction sometimes deviates from what we would accept as
11. 11
good style or appropriate word choice. In prose words should, like
well-behaved children, be seen but not heard. They should not draw
attention to themselves as things interesting in themselves but allow
themselves to be passed over once their part in the process of conveying
the message of a text has been accomplished. Let us note certain oddities
in poems by Robert Browning.
When we read the line "He never can cross that mighty top" in Robert
Browning's "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," we will assume that the word
"cross" has much the same meaning as that of “to traverse.” The word has
other meanings though, such as when understood as a religious symbol,
but such a meaning, if considered at all, is likely to be deemed irrelevant.
In the same poem there are the lines “Folks who put me in a passion find
me pipe after a different fashion.” In dictionary terms the meaning of
"passion" that best "fits the context" is "rage" and as such it ousts any
other meaning of the word such as that of suffering, dying or even the
Passion of Christ. The inclusion of the words “cross” and “passion” within
the context of Browning’s poem may seem in itself a matter of no
consequence and the fact that both also have religious implications could
be passed off as a coincidence.
Perhaps the ultimate context of a poem is the reader's mind with all
its powers of recollection and association. A truly "objective" interpreter of
verse must presumably be in a constant state of contention again his
knowledge of “irrelevant” facts such as items of background knowledge
about the author of the work in question. A person well versed in
Browning's poetry might find a correspondence between the possible
implicit religious implications of "cross" and "passion" with another
passage where the reader is made forcibly aware of an evidently
deliberate clash of meanings residing in the same word, namely “cross.”
The poem in question is “By the Fire-Side,” which recalls a walk Robert
Browning and his wife Elizabeth took in a mountainous region in Italy. The
manner in which the poet describes an incident during this walk is
somewhat quirky by conventional standards of good style.In stanzas
XXXIV, XXXV, and XXXVI there is a conspicuous repetition of the word
"cross":
Silent the crumbling bridge we cross, (line 166)
The cross is down and the altar bare, (line 174)
We stoop and look in through the grate
See the little porch and rustic door,
12. 12
Read duly the dead builder's date;
Then cross the bridge that we crossed before, (line 179)
Within the space of only thirteen lines the word "cross" occurs four
times, thrice as a verb meaning "to traverse" and once as a noun signifying
a crucifix. In logical terms this repetition appears to be accidental, yet the
fourfold occurrence of "cross" strikes the reader's attention, entailing
recognition that in some sense "the same word" is receiving emphasis.
Here we find a clear example of a divergence from prose diction to which
The Russian Formalist Jurij Tynjanov drew attention in "The Word in
Verse." 10
Should the reader have made a close study of the history of the Pied
Piper story he or she would know that the earliest accounts refer to Calvary
as the place to which the Piper led 130 children born in Hamelin. 11
The word “cross” in “The Pied piper of Hamelin” like any word found
in a poem is to be considered in the light of more than one context, at least
four, I suggest, and these I summarise at follows:
The Four Contexts Surrounding the Word in Verse
First, we commonly understand the context of a word or phrase in
accordance with its immediate environment in some sentence, utterance
or passage and this generates the general sense according to which we
understand the meaning of individual words, which may possess several
meanings in terms of their dictionary definitions. Thus, the noun “train”
usually denotes a form of transport that runs on rails and we expect the
sense of a passage containing the word to relate to transportation in some
way unless there is a clear indication that another meaning is to be drawn.
Such an indication must appear in the immediate verbal environment of
this word as in the case of a reference to a “train of thought.” A reader of
poetry, no less than the reader of a newspaper, cannot help applying the
normal process of identifying the immediately recognizable meaning of
words according the overall sense of a sentence, verse or story in the case
of a narrative poem. Whenever the meaning of a word fits the context that
lends a coherent sense to whatever passage is being read, one perusing of
a newspaper or some such non-literary text has no reason to reflect on the
other possible meanings of words encountered in the process of reading for
this would interfere with the flow of comprehension. However, the reader of
13. 13
a poem can never finish reading a poem as the reader of a newspaper
might finish reading an article or report, for poets exploit the polyvalence of
words.
2.The school of literary critics who term themselves "contextualists"
understand quite differently the "context" of any word, symbol or image
found in a literary work. For them the context is the work itself regarded as
a self-contained “object.” The normal function of words as the means of
making reference to anything in the domain of independently existent
external reality is now inoperative for a word in a poem serves only the
aesthetic and functional needs of the work to which it belongs. The more
radical proponents of internal criticism would isolate the work from any
“external” consideration, the role of influence, religious truth, the author's
personality and intentions and the facts of history.
3. Any talk of the subconscious as a factor with relevance to poetry is likely
to be disquieting to some critics including Northrop Frye, who once
described it somewhat disparagingly as "murky." Reasons for similar
suspicions harboured by New Critics will be mooted later in this
paragraph. However, there are critics who treat the word in a literary work
as an integral part of the entire corpus of the author's works. As we have
noted, in her monograph Browning's Poetry of Reticence, Barbara
Melchiori attaches great importance to the frequency of words in
Browning’s poetic works and derives significance from the fact that "gold"
is the most frequently occurring noun within this context. Frequency is
not the only measure of a word's significance to a person on a deep
subconscious level but also its typical associations with other words.
(Psychologists rely on this mental disposition when conducting the
technique of assessing their patients’ responses to one-word stimuli).
Professor Willoughby stresses the fact that the word "Wanderer" often
appears in conjunction with the word "Hütte" / in an essay we shall soon
consider at some length. 12
New Critics understand the words that make up a poem as elements
serving the internal functions of that poem and those alone. In his article
“Objective Interpretation,” E. D. Hirsch finds his way to excusing
cross-referencing words found in more than one work in particularly
difficult cases of ascertaining a word’s significance. 13 In general New
Critics, seeing a work as a well-wrought urn, credit poets with the capacity
to fabricate each intricacy of their works and predict and control their
effects so as to admit no discrepancy between the work itself and its
duplication in the reader's mind. The precise nature of this magic transfer
14. 14
leaves plenty of room for speculation. The complexity of word combination
produced by the mind at an unconscious level defies any such
micro-management of words seen as the pliant and obedient servants of
the poet as an infallable master craftsman. Indeed, subject to
subconscious undercurrents, nobody combines words in exactly same
way. Each individual has a personal signature when producing verbal
patterns over which they cannot exert total control by rational cogitation.
An approach based on the sole premise that some faculty residing in any
individual’s mind, perhaps the mysterious unconscious, governs the
organization of all words found in an author’s corpus of works harbours
certain dangers, however, as it may lead to a disregard of the interplay or
dialogue between poets reflected by the phenomenon of intertextuality.
There is also the possibility that critics indulge in amateur psychotherapy
at the expense of addressing literary issues. Here I have Holbrook’s
monograph entitled The Code of Night in mind. 14 The author scours
Dylan Thomas’s poetry in order to discover the root cause of that poet's
addiction to alcohol, possibly at the expense of doing proper justice to
exploring intrinsic worth of Thomas’s poetry.
4. The word in verse finds wider contexts than those discussed so far; now
we consider a fourth contextual plane of history and literary tradition.
Critics of various schools recognize this general truth, however greatly they
differ in drawing conclusions about them. Erich Auerbach recognized that
literary works of every age exhibit certain timeless attributes and
governing principles. The historicist school to which he belonged is
generally out of favour now, though M. Bakhtin, enjoying the status of a
guru in certain circles, owes much to this outlook, the rigidity of which he
mollifies by his belief in the carnivalesque and the element of spontaneity
this infuses into literature. T. S. Eliot saw no contradiction between
tradition and a poet's expression of individual talent and Northrop Frye
conceives of a vast organic corpus of universal literature within an
“anagogic” frame of reference but this supposedly lacks any vital link with
realities outside the literary domain. 15
The logocentric understanding of the word in verse takes full account
of the indispensable role of literary tradition in any examination of a
literary text in view of de Saussure’s regard of the diachronic dimension
of language. For Tynjanov words are the surface manifestations of
inter-subjective interactions which transcend the barriers that divide
poem from poem and poet from poet.
Though the Russian Formalists paid scrupulous attention to the
15. 15
internal structure and minute verbal composition of particular literary
works, they never denied that there was a vital and inseparable affinity
shared by the language of poetry and that of the language of non-literary
discourse. Here they adopted a position that is diametrically opposed to
the views of many who adhere to the tenets of New Criticism or the various
schools of thought that stress the "objective" and solely aesthetic aspects
of the poetic art. Words in poetry form a dialogue between poets of various
times. The unique setting of a word and its involvement in various contexts
assure its ability to harbour a wealth of significance beyond is immediately
recognizable meaning according to a dictionary. This we can judge from
the following investigation into the phenomenon we are about to consider.
Wandering.
16. 16
II: Wandering
A: The Worst of Sinning?
To my knowledge there is no chair in wandering studies to be found
any university or seat of learning in the world. This could be considered
surprising in view of the numerous references to wandering and other
derivatives of the verb “to wander” made by literary critics and scholars,
Geoffrey Hartman, Professor L.A. Willoughby and Northrop Frye to
mention those whose evaluations of wandering will be the subject of our
investigations in due course. More important even than the fact that
scholars and critics cannot help incorporating words such as "wanderer"
and "wandering" into their books and articles is the fact that poets,
particularly Goethe and the German and English Romantic poets, used
these words to characterize themselves and their art, while celebrating
their newfound autonomy as originators and creators on the one hand and
while suffering from the burdens of isolation and self-consciousness on
the other.
The suddenness with which the word "wanderer" came into
prominence, its widespread diffusion not only in the German-speaking
world but also in the British Isles and the high significance vested therein
amount to nothing less than a phenomenon for which an adequate
explanation has yet to be found. If one is to be found, the requisite
explorations will transcend any one academic discipline or field of study,
whether literary criticism, psychology or history but will rather require the
appropriate integration of all these disciplines. A rather daunting
assignment. It follows and one which in my view only a logocentric method
of textual analysis has any chance of completing.
Let us consider a passage in Don Juan by Lord Byron in which the
word “wandering” occurs and set this within the four contextual fields
which have been outlined earlier in this chapter. First, what is the most
obvious meaning of this word within the context set by the subject the
poets wished to discuss? Second, what function does this word serve as a
participatory element within the frame and internal dynamics of Don
Juan? To answer this question we should consider other locations in Don
Juan where derivatives of the verb "to wander" are found. Third, what
inferences can we draw from other instances of such words as “wanderer”
in Byron's works understood as a mirror of the author's psychology?
17. 17
Fourth, how do references to wandering recall used of the verb "to wander"
and its derivatives in poetic tradition and in particular in the works of
John Milton. To assume that wandering constitutes an overall unity
presupposes influences which transcend the limits of any particular
poem and even the mind of any particular poet, which means we need to
contend with theories proposed by Sigmund Freud and G. C. Jung,
particularly the latter in view of his theories concerning the collective
unconscious. 16
My way is to begin with the beginning;
The regularity of my design
Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning.
Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto the First, VII
"Wandering" here is not to be understood in the sense of physical
motion. In terms of the word's immediate contextual setting it refers to
what the speaker ostensibly intends to avoid, a failure to present certain
items of subject matter in an orderly and strictly chronological manner.
The speaker announces his intention of beginning his account of
Juan's life by informing his readers about Juan's parentage in a manner
consistent with "the regularity of his design." Even so, it is remarkable that
he disparages "wandering" as "the worst of sinning." As though even the
most censorious of preceptors would go so far as to discern in some badly
organised term paper evidence of gross moral turpitude! It is not out of the
ordinary for a person to use "wandering" as a synonym for immoral
behaviour or, in a different context, as a reference to incoherent or illogical
self-expression. Byron, however, contrasts both these meanings of
"wandering" within the space of the three lines of verse cited above. In so
doing he displays the poet's proclivity to play with words. Is this merely
indulging in a triviality? Let us consider the word "wandering" within the
context of Don Juan. Are there other passages in this work in which
"wandering" is associated with "sinning" or "beginning"?
A reference to "sinning" suggests some item of epic content. "Sinning"
implies the existence of sinners and sinners form the basis of a story.
There are certain hints pointing to the nature of the story in question.
Taken together, the words “beginning” and “parentage” could pose an
allusion to mankind's first parents, and there is a notable passage in Don
Juan which includes several occurrences of the verb to "wander" and
explicit allusions to Milton's version of the story of Adam and Eve. The verb
18. 18
"to wander" (in declined form) occurs three times in the passage describing
the shore-side walk taken by Juan and Haidée, the prelude of their sexual
and a spiritual union ("Canto the Second" The first line of stanza CLXXXII).
The words "And forth they wandered, her sire being gone" imply that
the young couple took advantage of the temporary absence of paternal
surveillance. The lovers' walk with its sequel recalls Milton's version of the
events that led to Adam and Eve falling from grace, a connection that
becomes explicit from what we read at the end of the eighty-ninth stanza,
for here it is asserted that first love is "that All / Which Eve has left her
daughters since the Fall". In the ninety-third stanza we find reference to
"our first parents." Like them Juan and Haidée ran the risk of "being
damned forever." Consciously or unconsciously (in my view probably the
former), Byron was influenced by Milton's use of "to wander" in a passage
in Paradise Lost in which there is an altercation between Adam and Eve
about Eve's yielding to what Adam terms her "desire of wandering." Eve
reminds Adam of this choice of words referring to her "will / Of wandering,
as thou call'st it" (IX. 1145,1146). Shortly we shall consider another
passage revealing Milton's particular interest in the word "to wander."
Byron not only betrays interest in that aspect of Milton's description
of Eve's walk though Paradise that involves "sinning," which for Byron
inevitably had a strong sexual connotation. Byron's reference to "sinning"
is at one level little more than a puerile jibe at certain attitudes towards
sexual mores. Byron's description of Haidée and Juan walking along the
shore also captures that sensuous and even voluptuous element in the
Miltonic description of a walk that culminated in Eve's emotional a
seduction by the serpent (who approaches his quarry with a mariner's
skill). Both Milton's description of Eve's walk and Byron's treatment of the
scene culminating in the lovers' union of Haidée and Juan inculcate a
sense of unity expressing a sublimated form of sexual or libidinal energy,
perhaps of a kind that psychologists of the Freudian or Jungian schools
believe to be the mainspring of all human creativity. Miltonic influence in
the respect just indicated also leaves a trace in the final passage in
Shelley's Epipsychidion describing a walk that leads to a lovers' union.
Significantly, this passage is introduced by the verb "to wander."
Let us consider another way in which "wandering" and "beginning"
are related to each other in Don Juan, and indeed in Byron's other long
poem incorporating his travels. An occurrence of the verb "to wander" is
juxtaposed to a reference to the Muse in the Dedication to Don Juan and
again in the first strophe of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. In the eighth stanza
19. 19
of the Dedication, the speaker refers to himself as one "wandering with
pedestrian Muse" in contrast to Southey depicted as one seated on a
winged steed. In the tenth stanza the evocation of Milton is not merely
hinted at, for the speaker alludes to a passage in Paradise Lost in which
there is a clear reference to Pegasus and "wandering" conflating the word's
associations with poetic inspiration and disorientation.
Up led by thee
Into the Heav'n of Heav'ns I have presumed,
An Earthly Guest, and drawn Empyreal Air,
Thy temp'ring, with like safety guided down
Return me to my Native Element
Lest from this flying steed unrein'd, (as once Bellephoron, though
from a lower Clime)
Dismounted, on th'Aleian Field I fall
Erroneous, there to wander and forlorn (12-20)
Again, as in the dispute between Eve and Adam, the word "wander" is
foregrounded, here in a brief exercise in comparative philology. Milton
recalls the original meaning of "erroneous" in the light of its derivation
from errare in Latin (to stray, to wander). Similarly, "Aleian" means "land of
wandering" in Greek. In this passage Milton seems to anticipate the crisis
in modern poetry centring on the nature of poetic inspiration and the
identity of the poet.
B: The Light Etymology Throws on the Inclusive and Specific Aspects of
Wandering
When we consider the line “All wandering is the worst of sinning" in
the light of the wider contexts the definitions of which were outlined
earlier, we have found reasons to draw into the ambit of our discussion
passages in Don Juan and Paradise Lost in accordance with the linguistic
theories of de Saussure and J. Tynjanov which state that language has
both a synchronic and diachronic aspect and their axes intersect in any
word found within a poetic work. Must the ambit of this discussion be
confined to works written English? The word "wanderer" straddles both the
English and the German Languages: can we speak of the same word
despite the participation of words that appear in the same form in two
20. 20
different languages? Is this a case of what is commonly termed "false
friends" or faux amis?
In terms of the definitions of words listed in a dictionary the German
"Wanderer" will be translated into English by "wayfarer," "hiker,"" migrant"
and somewhere down the list "wanderer" might appear. Similarly, "to
wander" in English would be translated into German by several words
other that the outwardly similar “wandern.” However, people usually
consult dictionaries when they are reading a text in prose in which the
meaning of each word is determined by its “context” demanding a one word
for one meaning equivalence. This is only the first kind of context in the
four-fold system of contexts discussed earlier. We are concerned with the
word in verse though.
Two notable translations of Goethe's poems into English retain the
word "wanderer" as the equivalent of the German "Wanderer" ("Wandrer"
according to the orthography of Goethe's time). The first of these in William
of Norwich’s translation of Goethe’s “Der Wandrer,” and this translation
exerted a powerful effect on Wordsworth with the result that the figure of
the Wanderer plays a leading role in The Excursion. In the second case H.
W. Longfellow rendered the title "Wandrers Nachtlied" as "Wanderer’s
Night-Songs.” The great American poet intuited the basic transcendent
unity of the word wanderer whose overall significance is the same in
English and German poetry. Intuition is not dependent on logic and reason
alone but on the powers and influences of the subconscious or what Carl
Jung termed the collective unconscious.
Jung frequently discussed the etymological origins of words? What
is the etymological origin of the word "Wanderer" and the verbs “wandern"
and “to wander” which give rise to the common form of the noun
“Wanderer”?
The scope of a word’s power of association results from the
cumulative effects of a word’s evolution over long periods of time. This we
can judge from words sharing this root such as "Wandel" ("change") and
"verwandeln" ("to change"). In earlier times all changes in nature were
attributed to unseen forces often deemed to be divine or spiritual in
character. Thus Odin received the name of the "Wanderer," and magical
powers attributed to a magician's stick became a "wand.“ In the Christian
era wandering designated those who turned from a certain course, either
as repentant pilgrims or moral deviators like Cain and Ahasuerus.
Wandering was also deemed an attribute of a guiding spirit, hence
references to a "wandering Muse“ found in Milton’s works and elsewhere,
21. 21
and to Odin the Wanderer, the Germanic deity of poetry. This implication
of a source of inspiration was readily transferred to guiding forces
belonging to the Christian concepts of truth. On a negative level wandering
became associated with error, madness and death (cf. Shakespeare’s 18th
Sonnet).
I anticipate a further objection based on a failure to recognize the
polyvalence of the word "wanderer." How could one blanket term acquire
such an infinitude of different nuances? This argument is yet again
predicated on the notion that a word in verse is subject to the limitations of
a dictionary definition. Even a great poet like Ezra Pound had a low view of
"words" as opposed to "images." In his view words are like numerals, each
with a precise denotation while images are like algebraic notations such as
x and y, which are capable of signifying an unlimited number of variables.
According to de Saussure words have just this algebraic elasticity that
Pound accorded to images because words, or more precisely singular word
occurrences, (see discussion of "honourable" lie at the centre of several
contexts.
"The Wanderer" was taken to be a cognomen of the quintessential
modern poet by Goethe and the Romantic poets of his day but the word
was also proved to become the basis of distinctions between poets, and
distinctions that sometimes aroused acrimony at that. Goethe introduced
the word "Wanderer" into the public arena and his use of the word in this
sense was taken over by Romantic poets and applied to themselves thanks
largely to the publication of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the novel that
acted as the principal catalyst that generated the Romantic movement.
The same kind of differentiation on the basis of shared commonality is
shown by comparing passages in English poetry.
Byron mocks Wordsworthian “wandering” in a passage in Don Juan,
where there is a reference to Juan as a youth who "wandered by glassy
brooks, / Thinking unutterable things." These words, found in the 19th
stanza of the first Canto, are followed in the next stanza by a pointed
reference to Wordsworth:
He, Juan (and not Wordsworth), so pursued
His self-communion with his own high soul.
Yet Byron's own brand of wandering is revealed in this passage from
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:
22. 22
There, in a moment, we may plunge our years
In fatal penitence, and in the blight
Of our own soul turn all our blood to tears,
And colour things to come with hues of Night;
The race of life becomes a hopeless flight
To those that walk in darkness: on the sea,
The boldest steer but where their ports invite,
But there are wanderers o'er Eternity
Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor'd ne'er shall be.
Wordsworth's and his fellow Lakers` preference for descriptions of
country walks and evocations of historical migrations earned them William
Blake's somewhat disparaging appellation of “cold-earth wanderers” in
"The Mental Traveller." Yet even in such an oneiric vision such as that
conveyed by Blake’s “London” the poetic wanderer must encounter
whatever sight, whatever symbol exciting joy or horror, might lie or lurk in
the speaker's path, whether the objects encountered originate in external
nature, like Wordsworth’s daffodils, or in the creations of the
subconscious as they enter the poet’s field of vision. In Wordsworth's
famous poem telling of the experience of his visual encounter with
daffodils the first two words form the past tense, the preferred tense of
historians and reporters. The first two words in “London” are “I wander“
in the present tense, one might say the ever-present transcending time
altogether. However, both poets use the same verb, which suggests some
affinity.
Wandering implies the reciprocity of the mind subject to external
impulses and the mind creating images that are no less palpable and
concrete than their external counterparts. Blake’s “London” speaks of the
real world and pronounces judgment on its social injustices no less
severely and tellingly that any poem by Shelley or Byron.
As Milton's self-appointed heir, Blake recognized what “wandering”
meant to Milton, the journey through the world of experience, through
post-Edenic history, as the final lines of Paradise Lost so resoundingly
declare. The last two lines of Book XII tell of Adam and Eve leaving
Paradise: "They hand in hand with wand'ring feet and slow, / Through
Eden took their solitary way.”
“London”, let us remember, falls under the general heading of the
Songs of Experience. Experience here entails exposure to the power of sin,
Satanic bondage and the ravages of adversity that inhere in the physical
23. 23
world but also mankind's passage through this world is an essential part
of its ultimate recovery and redemption. Experience can therefore be
understood as progress, a striving for a future New Jerusalem. Of this
Northrop Frye takes little account in his evaluation of the literary
archetype he perceives in the wanderings of the Israelites from Egypt
towards the primal state of Eden, and if to the Promised Land, then only to
some original state owing nothing to the experience of wandering, which he
sees only negatively as the labyrinth of the Law. 17 Perhaps too much
misapplied Pauline theology has spilt into his thinking. Goethe, on the
other hand, saw the wandering journey of the Israelites positively, and the
combined images of "the Wanderer" and "the Hut" has a biblical
foundation in the Festival of the Tabernacles.
Like Northrop Frye, most modern critics cannot get a grip on the
phenomenon posed by the word “Wanderer” in English and German
poetry. This they ignore, even though the word to wander slips into their
writings. To appreciate the significance of this phenomenon would mean
for them an abandonment of the prevalent view that literature is divorced
from the common needs of mankind, and devoid of any bearing on eternal
truth only to become some elusive, emasculated corpus without relevance
to history and biography -in other words – to LIFE.
C: A Comparison of Two Scholarly Essays Concerned with Wandering and
an Evaluation of their Shared Opinions and Differences
Our minds possess the capability of recognizing patterns in whatever
form and also the ability to construct theories that should explain the
underlying causes that give rise to patterns once recognized. Inevitably
there is a time lag between the first recognition of a pattern and the arrival
of a plausible theory to explain it, which might be irritating for tidy minds
that want a quick answer to everything.
Without necessarily being explicable within the present state of our
knowledge, recurrent patterns may arouse attention by the frequency of
their manifestations, the combinations they form with certain events or
sequences of events and their pervasiveness over a wide area. . On all these
counts the appearance of the word "wanderer" and words derived from the
verbs "wandern" or "to wander" in the works of Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe and the German and English Romantic poets constitutes a
phenomenon that is not easy to explain away or simply ignore, except
24. 24
perhaps by scholars and literary critics of a certain disposition. However,
two writers of academic articles have focused their attention on the
Wanderer as a literary phenomenon in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. They are Professor L. A. Willoughby, the author of "The Image of
the 'Wanderer' and the 'Hut' in Goethe's Poetry" 18 and Geoffrey Hartman,
the author of "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness'." 19
Professor Willoughby's article is almost exclusively concerned with
the word "wanderer" in Goethe's poetry and wider literary works; Geoffrey
Hartman's article focuses on the significance of "the Wanderer" as a term
that characterizes generically the modern self-conscious poet in the
Romantic era though it does include remarks on Goethe's two Faust
tragedies and the novel Willhelm Meisters Lehrjahre within the ambit of
discussion. Both Professor Willoughby and Geoffrey Hartman refer the
word, with its implications and ramifications to the same premise, which
they understand as being rooted in psychology, namely in the quest of
the libido to achieve union with its female counterpart, the anima, "das
ewig Weibliche" ("the Eternally Female") as expressed in the final verse of
Faust Part II.
Professor Willoughby's arguments rest on the Jungian version of this
theory with its postulation of the collective unconscious while Geoffrey
Hartman cites sources representing the Freudian position regarding the
relationship between the libido and the anima. Here the similarities
between the positions adopted by Professor Willoughby and Geoffrey
Hartman end. Professor Willoughby limits the ambit of his study to
Goethe, his life and works despite his reference to the collective
unconscious, the influence of which surely transcends any one person's
mind. He finds that only subconscious forces of the mind could coordinate
and lend unity to so vast a corpus of works as those written by Goethe
throughout his life, lending this continuity and an integral and consistent
course of development. Willoughby sees the destruction of the home of
Philemon and Baucis present in a scene near the close of Faust II as an act
that complements the destruction of Gretchen's cottage, a symbol of
domestic innocence and calm. He also relates the quest of the libido to the
practical matters of life, the need of a man to settle down, marry and make
a useful contribution to society, albeit after a certain period of
"philandering." Professor Willoughby notes the word "Wanderer" often
appears in the neighbourhood of the word ""Hütte," this denoting a hut,
cottage or other humble dwelling which represents the family hearth.in the
course of his later life crowned by success and recognition the image of the
25. 25
hut gives way to that of a house.
Geoffrey Hartman sees the libidinal quest purely as an inward
process leading to a sublime union between libidinal love and the object of
its longing, a union that, once attained, leaves no room for further
development and progress. He claims that Wordsworth and Blake
demonstrated that they had reached such a point of termination in the
process of composing The Prelude and Jerusalem. This meant not only the
cessation of any further progress in the poetic sphere achievable by
Wordsworth and Blake but the end of poetry itself, at least to the extent
that no future poet could supersede Wordsworth's and Blake's
consummate achievements. It seems to me that those critics who stress
the singular and inimitable quality of some poem of their choice in order to
promote the notion of "internalization" do so at the cost of any comparable
virtues they attribute to all other poetic works.
Though Geoffrey Hartman refers mainly to the English Romantics he
does include Goethe within the scope of his discussion and thus intrudes,
if only cursorily, into an area covered by Willoughby's study of Goethe's
literary works. Hartman sees in the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre a
historic turning-point marking the end of the age of poetry and its eclipse
by the age of prose. Interestingly, Willoughby takes this novel as a source
of evidence for his contention that Goethe censured "romantic" wanderers
in the person of Mignon, a young singer and artiste and the distraught
harp, whose vagaries and premature demise Professor Willoughby
contrasts with the robust and steadfast character of the protagonist
Wilhelm Meister. The latter's meandering life as an actor serves a prelude
to a socially useful career in the medical profession in Wilhelm Meisters
Wanderjahre, a novel written in Goethe's later years. With due respect to
Professor Willoughby, it should be pointed out that there were no
Romantics around when Goethe composed Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.
Indeed it was this novel that provided one of the stimuli that brought the
German Romantic movement into existence.
Professor Willoughby and Hartman approached the phenomenon of
the "Wanderer” via different routes; the former noted the frequency of the
words "Wanderer" and "Hütte throughout Goethe's poetry and thus,
unwittingly at least, applied a logocentric method to his enquiries, while
the latter discerned the essential characteristics of the "Wanderer" or
"Wandering Jew" in the person of the Ancient Mariner, whose nightmarish
experiences are recounted in T. S. Coleridge's haunting Rime of the
Ancient Mariner. Strange as it may seem, the word "wanderer" is nowhere
26. 26
to be found in this poem . It is only the resemblance of the Mariner to
archetypal wanderers such as Ahasuerus and Cain that warrants his
status of "wanderer."
In both the articles which we are comparing great stress in laid on the
fact that much of the symbolism found in the "Wanderer" is borrowed from
biblical characters and themes. Like Harold Bloom, the editor of the
collection of essays that includes "Romanticism and
'Anti-Self-Consciousness,'" Hartman denies the possibility any
remaining religious significance residing in such symbolic figures such
as Cain and Ahasuerus as these served only the aesthetic needs of
"internalized" poetry, which evinced no relevance to external realities
touching religion but lost all relevance to religious concerns and, for that
matter, all "external" domains such as history, society or the concerns of
common humanity. Willoughby does not go so far. He stresses that Goethe
availed himself of figures and themes rooted in religious tradition to
portray the artist-poet as creator or martyr, (even Jesus in Die Leiden des
jungen Werthers), but never denied a vital connection between poetry
and personal experience, between art and life to the exclusion of any
concern for common human needs. Wandering is a part of man's moral
education analogous to the wanderings of the Israelites towards the
Promised Land. The wanderer-hut association, Willoughby points out,
recalls the pilgrim Festival of Tabernacles. In Dichtung und Wahrheit
Goethe recalled how as a boy he had attended services held by the
Frankfurt Jewish community during Succoth, the festival in question. The
history of the Israelites from the Exodus from Egypt until the building of
the Temple in Jerusalem provides a sustained metaphor for Wilhelm
Meisters Lehrjahre, recording the wanderings of itinerant actors in
preparation for the founding of a German national theatre to be housed in
a permanent building. The Lehrjahre end on a somewhat sardonic note as
Wilhelm is compared to Saul before his promotion to royal status, for he
was searching for his father's donkeys and found a kingdom." Even the
Faust dramas evince a theological master plan for in “The Prologue in
Heaven” the Voice of the Lord prophesies that Faust, His servant, will
reach a divinely appointed goal, albeit after much meandering. It is as "the
Wanderer" that Faust enters Eternity.
Professor Willoughby and Geoffrey Hartman are concerned with one
and the same phenomenon. In general they concur that the Wanderer
represents the self-conscious poet adrift in an age when earlier
assumptions about the relationship between art, truth and life were no
27. 27
longer tenable, or at least when they were no longer based on generally
shared assumptions. They also allow that Goethe played a key role in
ushering in some fundamental change in the course of European literature
but they do not have anything to say about the propagation of this new
understanding of the poet qua "wanderer," which they could hardly do
without setting Goethe and the Romantics within their historical context.
To do that they would have needed to review the course of literary, and
indeed socio-political, developments leading up to the emergence of the
"Wanderer," the self-conscious modern poet.
D: Wandering in its Historical Context
In order to get a handle on the wanderer phenomenon we need a
coordinated approach integrating the disciplines employed by historians
and psychologists as well as literary scholars. In this we must establish a
probable causal chain of events, something which Willoughby signally
failed to do when taking the early demise of Mignon and the Harper as
evidence of Goethe's disapproval of "romantic" tendencies before
Romanticism had come into being.
We need to find a similar case in which one man contended with
issues of his age, found a formula with which to resolves conflicts and
anomalies of age and through this formula unleashed a massive
transformation with the help of the appeal of an idea or rather association
of ideas aroused by one word. We need to understand how this word
condensed vital associations in the word "Wanderer" and how these
accorded with the spirit of the age.
To facilitate a discussion of the wanderer in its historical context, let
us make a comparison between the situation in Goethe's age, which saw
the French Revolution and the rise of Romanticism, and the age of
religious turmoil that culminated in the Reformation. Developments of
this magnitude surface unexpectedly but the fundamental factors
contributing to them had long been in the making.
The great changes that have occurred in history have done so in
conjunction with the thoughts and actions of a leading personality.
Whether we are speaking of a Luther, a Rousseau or a Goethe, such a
person was acutely aware of the principal issues and controversies of his
28. 28
times and yet was able to offer a resolution of those conflicts and problems
that had emerged from what may have initially been a personal crisis. In
such terms Luther was appalled by many excesses committed in the name
of religion, grappled with an agonizing concern with his personal salvation,
formulated the doctrine of justification by faith alone, aired his opinions in
public, and, as they say, the rest is history.
Let us impute to Goethe a role similar to that which applies to Luther
as the initiator of the Reformation. What was the situation in Europe when
Goethe began his life as an author and poet? How did he contend with the
unresolved issues of his day as an individual and representative of his age?
Why did the word "Wanderer" play a central role in the formulation of his
resolution of the issues with which he contended? How did his promotion
of the word "Wanderer" strike the attention of the informed and educated
public of his day and what factors led to the widespread adoption of the
word among Romantic poets?
E: The Automatic Dynamic Effect of Verbs Denoting Movement and the
Exploitation of this Effect by Poets and other Writers
Let us consider what potential lay in the word "wanderer" and the
verbs "wandern" and "to wander" from which it is derived. These verbs
often, but by no means always, denote some act of movement such as
walking or travelling. John Frederick Nims points out that an allegory is
spontaneously generated whenever a statement in a poem, or in any
sentence for that matter, contains a verb of motion: In Western Wind, a
handbook for students of poetry, he writes:
A mountain may be a symbol of salvation, a traveler may be a
symbol of a human being in his life. But if the traveler takes as much
as one step toward the mountain, it seems that the traveler and the
mountain become allegorical figures, because a story has begun.
Western Wind, an Introduction to Poetry 20
The dynamic released by the use of any verb denoting motion posited
by Frederick Nims was life-giving oxygen to poets living in an age when an
unquestioning belief in a divine Muse was no longer a shared cultural
assumption and the conventions governing poetry were no longer tenable,
desirable and enforceable. The driving power of verbs of motion allowed
29. 29
poets to overcome a fear-induced paralysis of the imagination.
As we have noted, while any verb denoting acts of motion may serve
as a means to jump-start the process of verbal discourse but "to wander"
and "wandern" are especially well qualified to serve the needs of poetic
expression. Tradition has accorded them a wide range of associations with
allegorical figures that includes Cain, the Prodigal son, the Wandering
Jew. The last-named figure held an immense grip on the imagination of
poets after its appearance in Bishop Percy's Reliques. We find explicit
references to this haunting figure in Shelley's Queen Mab as in Charles
Baudelaire's "Le Voyage" with its evocation of "le juif errant," but beyond
these its presence, according to Geoffrey Hartman, pervades The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner and epitomised the mentality of the self-conscious poet
during and since the age of Romanticism. For C. G. Jung it poses a symbol
of the suppressed unconscious in western civilization no less.
Modern critics, including Frederick Nims, despite his words quoted
above, tend to look askance at the allegory as an artificial literary device for
they allege that its primary function is transparently didactic to the point
of becoming stilted and outmoded after services rendered as a useful tool
in medieval times. The allegorical mode lived on in the eighteenth century,
if not as a vehicle of received notions of truth then as a reflection of the
inner processes at work deep within the human mind. Allegories based on
representations of journeys expressed the quest for a new foundation after
the theoretical and moral foundation of the old order based on the
authority of the Church and divine right of kings, the recognized status of
court poets and neoclassical conventions had lost their credibility in
philosophical circles.
The allegory carried with it a heavy load of religious baggage even in
the increasingly secular environment of Europe in the eighteenth century,
and this, far from being a burden, proved useful, even necessary, to poets
and writers, whatever their ideological bent or religious persuasion. A verb
of motion supplies the dynamic needed by writers and poets, but what
about their need to draw on a force promoting direction and form? Here the
verb "to wander" and its German relative" wandern" proved their worth for
they convey two basic associations rooted in religious symbolism, namely
the circuitous meandering path of Cain and Ahasuerus and the winding
path of pilgrims and seekers leading to a destination and with this a
resolution of emotions and tensions. The shaping force of the pilgrimage as
a sustained metaphor becomes clear when we compare two works by the
same author. Let us take as examples John Bunyan’s The Holy War in
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contrast to The Pilgrims Progress and Byron's Don Juan in contrast to
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. While many to this day relish The Pilgrim's
Progress, considered by some to be the first novel, relatively few take great
interest in The Holy War with its essentially static frame of reference, a city
under siege. Don Juan, though thoroughly entertaining and sometimes
profound despite its flippancy, follows the path of an ever widening spiral
or series of concentric circles that some have seen as a reflection of Dante's
Inferno or Purgatory. This poem nowhere plumbs the depths of feeling and
serious meditation shown by Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The next case we
consider marks the transition from overtly religious allegory to the allegory
of an age no longer subject to the dominating influence of religious
doctrines and authority.
f: What has “Wandering” to Do with Robinson Crusoe’s Guilt Complex?
As the supposed editor of the second version of Robinson Crusoe
(1720) Crusoe remarks (I place in bold print words that appear especially
significant to me):
The story, although allegorical, is also historical… In a word, the
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe are one whole scheme of a real life of
eight and twenty years, spent in the most wandering desolate and
afflicting circumstances that ever man went through.
Three words in this citation are of particular interest from the point of
view taken in this study. As "history," Crusoe's story describes in plausibly
realistic terms the experience of a man who was forced to survive almost
thirty years of isolation from European civilisation. The "allegorical"
character of the story is not made explicit. The word "wandering" acquires
a negative tone by its juxtaposition with "desolate" and "afflicting. "The
negative connotations of the word suggest disorientation and a
punishment for sin or folly. The uncertainties surrounding these
references to "allegory" and "wandering" may be clarified if we inspect
occurrences of the verb "to wander" in the story itself.
In the opening paragraphs of Robinson Crusoe the verbs "to ramble"
and "to wander" are associated with "thought" and "inclination" in a
manner that is fully consistent with common usage. The third paragraph
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opens with the words: "Being the third son of the family and not bred to a
trade, my head began to be filled very early with rambling thoughts." The
fourth paragraph contains a sentence in which Crusoe states that he had
no reason other than "a mere wandering inclination" for leaving his native
country. Although any verb of motion may acquire a metaphorical
meaning in whatever form of language, some have become linked by usage
with such notions as digression, deviation, transgression and so on. "To
ramble" does not conventionally imply a moral judgment. When referring
to thought or speech, it suggests that one or the other of these is logically
disconnected or lacking in purposeful direction. The connotative range of
"to wander" finds no parallel in other verbs of motion such as "to ramble,"
"to stray," "to digress," "to transgress," "to roam," etc. The juxtaposition of
"wandering inclination" and "leaving my father's house" obviously recalls
the strong biblical associations of the word "to wander" with the wilderness
journey of the Israelites, the parable of the Prodigal Son and other
well-known motifs. A reference to "father's house" recurs in the story,
pointing to the central significance of the figure of the Prodigal Son. In fact
Crusoe refers directly to the parable of the Prodigal Son in the twelfth
paragraph in the first chapter of "his" book. Referring to his father the
author writes:
Now I saw plainly the goodness of his observations about the middle
station of life, how easy, how comfortably he had lived all his days,
and never had been exposed to tempests at sea or troubles on shore;
and I resolved that I would, like a true repenting prodigal, go home to
my father.
In one way this reference to the Prodigal Son is strange, as Crusoe
returns to England long after his parents' death. If we take Crusoe's father
to be a figure representing the patriarchal order of established society
rather than Crusoe's progenitor, the reason for Crusoe's being likened to
the Prodigal Son becomes understandable. Cut off from the civilisation of
his native land, Crusoe must establish a new social order based - let us say
- on the "Protestant work ethic." Certainly the novel's social and political
implications were immediately grasped by the reading public in England
and on the Continent of Europe, and those writers who were prompted by
Defoe's novel to write their own Robinsonades dwelt more on the idea of
establishing a new civilisation than on that of Crusoe's isolation and
loneliness and on the theme of isolated individual endeavour. Crusoe's
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sense of guilt and fear aroused by his crossing what he felt to be a
forbidden threshold might also by understood as the indirect expression of
feelings known to Defoe himself, for we may imagine that it was not
without great trepidation that the author, approaching the age of sixty,
ventured for the first time into the realm of pure novelistic fiction.
Defoe anticipated a later generation of poets that included Goethe
and the Romantics in exploiting images and allegories of biblical and
religious origin in order to contend with issues of an essentially
psychological or aesthetic nature. Byron and Shelley made Ahasuerus and
Cain symbols for "thought" and self-consciousness. In the figure of
Goethe's Faust, Cain and the Prodigal Son finally merge under the
influence of Goethe's concern with aesthetics rather than orthodox
religion.
Defoe's novel excited a bevy of so-called Robinsonades, not least in
Germany. In 1731 Johann Gottfried Schnabel published his famous work
known under its short title of Insel Felsenburg (Wunderliche Fata einiger
See-Fahrer, absonderlich Alberti Julii, eines geborenen Sachsen, auf der
Insel Felsenburg), which took its cue from Robinson Crusoe insofar as
Defoe's story deals with the establishment of a new society on a remote and
distant island with no regard to the motif of one individual's lonely battle
for survival under desperate circumstances. Robinsonades presenting the
perspective of various regional patriotisms throughout Germany became a
literary fashion and Goethe for one enjoyed reading them in his boyhood.
To what special factor did Robinson Crusoe owe its powerful impact?
What accounts for its success? It struck a chord. The world was ready to
receive its message; and so one could go on finding expressions that posit
the influence of some spirit of the age or zeitgeist. Whatever lay behind the
appeal of Robinson Crusoe to so many in Europe and whatever induced
writers to reinterpret the story in their own terms.
The zeitgeist is an animal that evades capture by any precise system
of analysis, and if in some sense it is to be captured at all then only
through a process involving leaps of the imagination and recourse to
appropriate examples, parallels and metaphors. At least some attempt
ought to be made to set the phenomenon of wandering in its historical
context if we are to resolve the contradictions that come to light in
scholarly discussions about the nature of "the wanderer" as a literary
phenomenon. We face the task of understanding how the specifics of the
history of the eighteenth century relate to general or universal history, as
the influence of subconscious influences so central to any discussion of
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"the wanderer" phenomenon transcends any one period of history. We also
need to understand how Goethe's mind mastered the divergent trends and
pulling forces in the world around him so as to utilize their energy in the
service of poetic literature in which the verb "wandern" played so vital a
part. We need to review the potentialities residing in the word "wanderer"
and view if effects and applications in their historical context.
F: Four Aspects of "Wandering"
Earlier we considered the four contexts that impinge on any word
found in a poetic text. our special interest is now focused onwards
subsumed under the rubric of wandering as derivatives
of the verbs "to wander" and "wandern." Let us consider the properties of
wandering in the service of poetic and literary expression in the following
sequence. First, its most common and obvious meaning in the most
important poems we shall review. What structural implications does
"wandering" have? This question was broached in an earlier consideration
of Byron's lines. "All wandering is the worst of sinning." What relevance
has wandering to any discussion of human psychology with special
reference to Goethe's exploration of what we now term the unconscious?
Fourth, what role does wandering play in the phenomenon often termed
intertextuality, a matter also broached in earlier discussions concerning " I
wandered lonely as a cloud," The Prelude and Paradise Lost as in
connections between the latter and Don Juan´?
1. In common speech "to wander" is not the dictionary equivalent of
"wandern" especially in regard to one of the concrete and typical senses of
the German verb "wandern." In modern German the word commonly bears
the meaning of "rambling" or even "hiking," that is to say engaging in the
physical act of walking. In Goethe famous poems during his Sturm und
Drang period, "Wandrers Sturmlied" and "Der Wandrer," the wanderer is a
foot-traveller. The journey itself, the itinerary and so forth are of secondary
importance in comparison with the mental transports that the act of
walking sets in motion.
2. The essential difference between travelling and wandering in its
sense pertaining to physical movements resides in the fact that
"wandering" never leads directly to a certain goal and it is questionable in
certain cases whether the goal is in any way important. At its core.
wandering means turning and changing with a strong implication of the
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involvement of movement and mental processes that result in a deviation
of some kind. The most inclusive form of wandering" does not lead to
endless rambling or submitting to the fate of lost souls but it does involve
delay, a postponement of the inevitable end that awaits a work of art as it
does human life. As the story of Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights brings
home, the two are inextricably connected. Conversely, poems about a dash
to a certain goal, usually on horseback or in a horse-drawn means of
transport, evoke notions of the brevity and transience of life, as shown by
"Der Erlkönig" and "Schwager Chronos." Wandering's very indeterminacy,
on the other hand, allows the poet to condense vast fields of associations
into very few lines, as is preeminently clear in "Wandrers Nachtlied."
3. The key to understanding why wandering is so central an aspect of
psychology insofar as this field concerns literature is the recognition that
the quest of the libido to achieve union with the anima underlies all the
great epics recorded in the annals of world literature from the epic of
Gilgamesh onwards to Goethe 's Faust Part II and doubtless beyond. Faust
enters eternity as the "Wanderer," so indicated in the marginal references
of the play. The words "das ewig Weibliche zieht uns heran" ("the Eternally
Female leads us yonder") is to my knowledge the first explicit formulation
of the cardinal notion that underlies the theories of Freud and Jung
concerning the human consciousness and the unconscious. Goethe's
discovery of the unconscious, so much bound up with occurrences of the
word "wanderer" in his literary works, was anticipated by Edward Young,
whose Night Thoughts deeply impressed not only Goethe but poets and
thinkers in his generation.
4. Taking a leaf from Professor Willoughby observation about the
frequency of the words "Wander" and "Hütte" in Goethe's poetry, in fact in
his works generally. Let us consider what patterns emerge when we
compare occurrences of the verb "to wander" and its derivatives in the
works of "the greatest Wanderer" himself, as Goethe called Shakespeare in
the "Rede zum Shakespears Tag." In the Eighteenth Sonnet the association
of wandering with "death's vale" is hardly a consoling. Puck, by contrast, is
that "merry wanderer of the night" in A Midsummer-Night's Dream. In
Julius Caesar Cinna the poet is caught somewhere between the lugubrious
side of "wandering" and it more sanguine aspect. A connection between
Wandering" and poetry is implicit here long before the connection was fully
recognized by Goethe and the Romantics. Cinna "wanders forth" on to the
streets of Rome but owing to the confusion based on his name being
shared by the conspirator Cinna he is lynched by an angry mob. His
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consolation? He dreamed that he could dine with Caesar in some realm
beyond death where life's inconsistences are resolved. The notion of a
partnership between ruler and poet found expression in Petrarch's concept
of the crown of laurels being the joint symbol of political power and the
honour due to the greatest of poets.
Does "wandering" present an incoherent assortment of contradictory
meanings? I believe we can discern an underlying system that coordinates
the occurrences of the verb "to wander" under consideration. According to
the theories of Freud and Jung "wandering" is rooted in the
correspondence between human consciousness and solar mythology
based on the quest of the libido to achieve union with the anima, the
female principle understood as a denizen of the night. The most felicitous
aspect of "wandering" finds its context in midsummer, its most chilling in
association to winter and its intrusion into spring. Cinna is caught in the
middle at a time just before the vernal equinox when both the negative and
positive implications of wandering interact. It is unlikely that Shakespeare
was aware of the different associations of "wandering" or deliberately
contrasted them, which is not to deny that the subconscious powers of his
mind played a role in the pattern we discern. An inter-personal
intertextual connection is open to discussion if we consider the following
passages, one found in A Midsummer-Night's Dream and the other in the
libretto of Die Zauberflöte ("The Magic Flute"), which Mozart composed with
the ancient Egyptian variant solar_mythology in_ mind.
Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough briar,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere,
*****************************
Der, welcher wandert diese Strasse voll Beschwerden,
wird rein durch Feuer, Wasser, Luft und Erden:
(Whoever wanders this path full of woes
becomes pure through fire, water, air and earth)
Schikaneder, who wrote the score of Mozart's opera, being a
Shakespearean actor, was well able to recall the passages in A
Midsummer-Night's Dream. 21 As in other cases we have considered,
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"wandern "and “to wander" mean the same to poets though not necessarily
to others for reasons already discussed. In Die Zauberflöte the wanderer
pursues the course of the sun according to the Masonic and ancient
Egyptian version of the solar mythology that seems to inform all cultures
and religious systems of belief. The image of one passing through water
and fire is also found in the Bible. (Isaiah 6. 43), New American Standard
Bible
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
And through the rivers, they will not overflow you.
When you walk through the fire, you will not be scorched,
Nor will the flame burn you.
G: The Eighteenth Century within Universal History
In antiquity wandering journeys posed the initial phase for the
foundation of a realm, a new political and social order in the great epics of
Homer and in the narrative of a wandering journey through the wilderness
in the Pentateuch. The solar heroes, so-called by Jung in his propositions
concerning the quest of the libido to achieve union with the anima, were,
apart from all else, those who established or re-established kingdoms and
theocracies - Gilgamesh, Ulysses, Aeneas and Moses. The excursions of
the Romantic wanderers retraced the great migrations of history in a
suitably downscaled and humble mode such as in the case revealed in the
opening dedication of The Prelude with the breeze replacing Milton’s
conflated Muse and Holy Spirit and a mere cloud of the kind we experience
day by day replacing the pillar of cloud that guided the Israelites on their
long path to the Promised Land. "I wandered lonely as a cloud" lies within
the same mystical and religious field of association purely on the strength
of the choice and alignment of words without any explicit allusion being
made to classical or biblical sources.
From earliest times, at least from the composition of the first epic,
Gilgamesh, literature has always recorded, reflected and interpreted the
various migrations, explorations and significant travels that have taken
place through the ages. This is no less true of the eighteenth century in
which knowledge of global geography and cultural tourism encouraged by
the works of Rousseau and Winckelmann broadened both spatial and
temporal horizons among the educated classes of Europe. Journeys as
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they are described in literature are no travelogues or chronicles. Like
words in poetry the contemplation of a journey set in the contemporary
world evoked the journeys and migrations important to the culture of
those writing about travels and journeys, their own included. Here we can
return to Professor Willoughby’s assertions concerning "the wanderer" and
"the hut" as a constant throughout Goethe's literary works, in particular
the observation that the wanderer-hut connection has an origin in the
history of Israel's wanderings through the wilderness of Sinai on the way to
the Promised Land. Goethe was not alone I tapping the imagery and
symbolism of the wandering journey and C. G Jung, whose theory
Willoughby himself adduced in furtherance of his arguments, posited the
universal and pervasive nature of the libido’s eternal quest for union with
the anima as expressed in the image of the sun and the solar hero as its
human embodiment travelling into the realm of nocturnal darkness, the
domain of the anima as mother-bride, hence the Oedipal fear of
committing incest and the need to sublimate this fear in art and literature.
Gilgamesh, the first solar hero known to us in literature, found
counterparts in Ulysses, Aeneas, and, down to more recent times, in Peer
Gynt. All these heroes enter at some stage during their travels the nether
realm of the Dead, in the case of Aeneas, to acquire the wisdom needed to
guide him on his journey to Rome and legitimate its status as the seat of
imperial rule. Thus a psychological paradigm whenever revealed in
literature, has needed, and presumably still needs, the flesh of history and
contemporary actuality to cover the bare bones of a deep-seated
subconscious abstraction. We have noted that Geoffrey Hartmann
proposed that the libidinal quest for the anima was a purely "internal"
process with no connection with religious, social, biographical or political
realities. He seems to ignore the fact that since time immemorial it was
been deeply involved in the search for cultural origins and for the
legitimacy of authority besides any personal quest for fulfillment. As we
can conclude from poems such as "Der Wanderer" by both Goethe and
Hölderlin the quest for origins and personal identity cannot be set apart
from a search for cultural and historic origins. Both kinds of search were
characteristic of the eighteenth century and terminated in the vision of a
new age, this term being used by William Blake in the introduction to his
poem, now hymn, "Jerusalem."
As this inquiry concerns principles governing history, we do well to reflect
on the phenomenon of historical cycles in the light of the theory put
forward by Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744). 22 He conceived of a
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threefold sequence beginning with the age of the gods, the age of heroes
and lastly that of the common man. The eighteenth century saw the
transition from the second to the third phase, a fact reflected by the
middle-class tragedy promoted by Lessing. Heroes no longer had to be
great princes or noblemen but could be members of the middle class or
even lower in social status. In Faust I a humble and devout Gretchen is
Faust’s consort, not Helen of Greece. The flighty queen had to bide her
time until Goethe wrote Faust Part II.
As an age in transition from one form of hierarchy to another, the
eighteenth century bears a resemblance to previous ages subject to the
forces of radical change, the dawning of Christianity, the Renaissance and
the Protestant Reformation. Common to all is an ideological focus on the
individual as the source of renewal. When religious belief ruled the minds
of men and women in periods of radical change, in the sixteenth century,
leading Protestant theologians accorded each individual soul the position
of having a direct relationship with God without the need for the mediation
of the presiding religious establishment. In the eighteenth century the
focus on the individual lost much of its religious force and drew attention
to the privileged yet isolated status of the artist and poet. Another feature
of these ages of transition has been a trend to downscale the great
founding migrations of the past to the walks and excursions of individuals.
Thirdly, in these ages of transition the use of metaphor undergoes highly
significant shifts of emphasis and priority. The historical core of some
great event becomes secondary to the allegoric import assigned to it, we
might say the truth that is deemed to underlie such an event. For example,
the description of the wanderings of the Israelites as a historical event
supplies the allegorical basis of a teaching about the Christian life, but the
same religious truths could be supported by parables with no claim to
affirmation on the basis of recalling historical facts.
In the Reformation the central issue revolved around the literal or
metaphorical interpretation of the body and blood of Christ. In the process
of translating the Bible into German Martin Luther confronted basic
questions concerning the nature of language and its various aspects:
semantics, comprehension as well as the use of metaphors. The story of
Dr. Faustus began as a Lutheran tract, and Goethe's Faust is shown in the
celebrated opening scene to be engaged in a very Lutheran pursuit, the
exposition of the New Testament. In this he ponders how he should best
translate the Greek "logos" into German. Instead of choosing "Wort"
("word") he decides on "Tat" ("deed"), but here Faust voices an attitude to
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"the Word" that arose in Goethe's age, not Luther's. For Luther, words were
vital, creative and challenging, not bookish and dry. It was in the
eighteenth century that philosophers began to doubt the validity of words
as adequate representations of reality and truth, which itself seemed
remote and unattainable. Strangely enough, the Russian Formalists
incurred the censure of Leon Trotsky, who asserted that the Formalists
were the followers of Saint John; thus he echoed the words of Goethe's
Faust and his assertion of that "the deed" should replace "the word." 23 The
battle against the validity of words rages on today in the areas of literary
criticism supported certain philosophical theories such as that proposed
by Jacques Derrida according to which any statement purporting to state a
truth carries the seeds of its own refutation.
H: Germania quo vadis?
The states and nations that composed the German-speaking
linguistic and cultural area underwent immense changes in the course of
the eighteenth century at every level, politically, socially and culturally. If
one were to name the most important shaping events affecting the
German-speaking nations, one would have to mention the rise of Prussia,
the Prussian annexation of Silesia, the union of Britain and the House of
Hannover under a joint monarchy and the French revolution with its
sequel, the French occupation of parts of the Rhineland.
During the war of the Spanish Succession, Prussia was a junior ally
of the French against an alliance between Austria and Britain. In the War
of Austrian Succession these alliances remained intact, but little more
than formally. Now that it was united with Hannover, Britain had little
stomach for a head-on clash with Prussia, any more that Austria felt great
enmity with France, a possible future ally against Prussia after the seizure
of Silesia. In the Seven Years War the old alliances were now fully reversed
with Britain and Prussia fighting against France and Austria,
For all the vagaries of war and national policy French cultural
influence over Germany remained strong, even dominant, in Germany as
elsewhere in Europe, at least up to the cultural repercussions that
attended the Sturm und Drang outburst in the 1770s . George I and
Walpole conducted their conversations in French as did Frederick the
Great with Voltaire. French neoclassicism set the standards for the
German theatre under the strict surveillance of Johann Christoph
40. 40
Gottsched until Lessing somewhat tentatively challenged his neoclassical
orthodoxy and instituted the so-called middle-class tragedy. This
development marked the process of emancipation of the middle classes
from aristocratic patronage and tutelage, revealing the increasing
influence of English literature, particularly in the form of the novel on
developments in the German-speaking world. Samuel Richardson's
portrayal of distressed middle class girls who ward off the advances of
lascivious aristocrats in Pamela and other novels added spice to a
contentious sociological issue and served as a vital element in Lessing's
plays Miss Sara Sampson and Emilia Galotti. Goethe's early days as a
university student were spent in Leipzig where Gottsched still enjoyed the
status of a leading authority on literary decorum. The shift from French
classical literary models to English ones reflected a general desire among
German thinkers and writers to achieve cultural emancipation by shaking
off what was felt to be an overweening foreign influence rather than
unadulterated admiration of modern English literature. Klopstock and
Herder felt aggrieved that the state of German culture had not been on a
par with that of France and England, the result of the setback of the Thirty
Years War and its aftermath. Klopstock even set out to outdo Milton by
writing Der Messias and Herder expected that Goethe's Goetz von
Berlichingen, and the new era in German drama it promised, would make
the the dramas of Shakespeare seem glorious relics of a bygone age. Poets
belonging to the Göttinger Hain recalled the days of Hermann the glorious
victor over the Roman legions in the Teutoburger Forest.
Among Germans from Goethe to Wilhelm Müller, an increasingly
acclaimed model for a future Germany lay in ancient Greece, the cradle of
democracy, and western art and culture. Some indications of this trend
can be adduced briefly as follows. An early manifestation of this interest
was the immense popularity of translations of Homer's epics by Johann
Heinrich Voss, an interest shared by the British as a result of Alexander
Pope's equally illustrious translations. In Die Leiden des jungen Werthers
the protagonist relishes his readings in The Odyssey, until he submits to
the allurements of Ossian, McPherson's supposed "translation" of an
ancient Gaelic saga. As Goethe pointed out to Eckermann, Werther's
dereliction of The Odyssey, which told of the hero's return to his family
and patrimony, and addiction to Ossian, marked the beginning of
Werther's descent towards despair and death. Wide interest in Greek
architecture received a powerful impetus from Winkelmann's literary
works praising the nobility and grandeur of the remains of Greek
