The Very Late Goethe

Self-Consciousness and the Art of Ageing

Charlotte Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351539708
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachen

Goethe's career was an unusually long and productive one: he became a literary celebrity in the 1770s and remained so until his death in 1832. The distinguishing feature of his last works is their self-consciousness, their preoccupation both with the business of writing and with personal development. In the first cross-genre study of this period of Goethe's work, Charlotte Lee traces the theme in his last major poems and autobiographical writings, before turning to the two 'giants', 'Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre' and 'Faust II'. All these works share a tendency to allude subtly to earlier moments from Goethe's own literary output, but to fashion them into writing which is quite new - even though (or perhaps because) he himself is old. This book seeks to understand the unique perspective of one nearing the end of a long life.

CHAPTER 1

Poetry

Self-consciousness is peculiarly central to lyric poetry: it is more intrinsic than in the novel or drama, and more subtle than in autobiography. Language is pressed into an unnaturally tight space, and the lyric is wrought out of reflection on the possible senses of each single word. During the eighteenth century, moreover, the life of the subject became a familiar province for lyric poetry.¹ The work which Goethe produced at the end of his life is no less poetry of the subject than his early lyric, though the premises for its exploration of subjectivity are profoundly different. The perspective from which the very late poems are written, the perspective that comes at the end of a long life, is a singular one. No one can know in advance the day or hour of the ‘end’, of course, but the sense that it is near is in itself a form of recognition, a type of self-knowledge: it is the ability to say ‘I am old’. This is due to more than the simple fact of one’s age climbing into the seventies, eighties, and beyond, or physical reminders that one is old. It is above all the result of the accumulation of memories, which flood the present; and the self-consciousness of Goethe’s very late poetry is intimately linked with the handling of memory. The poems discussed here are all concerned, be it implicitly or explicitly, with the continuation of the self’s existence, and with the role that the past has to play in securing the subject in self-understanding.

Two very late poems

There are two slight and little-known poems which are particularly useful in establishing what is meant by the ‘very late’ perspective. The poem ‘Vor die Augen meiner Lieben’ [‘Before the Eyes of My Beloved’]² is the clearest indication that Goethe had reached this stage. This was written in March, 1831 to mark his decision to return letters which he had received from Marianne Willemer to her, lest (it is implied) they find their way into the hands of someone else, such as the executor of his estate; and it was finally sent, together with the letters, the following February.

Vor die Augen meiner Lieben,

Zu den Fingern die’s geschrieben, —

Einst, mit heißestem Verlangen So erwartet, wie empfangen —

Zu der Brust, der sie entquollen,

Diese Blätter wandern sollen;

Immer liebevoll bereit,

Zeugen allerschönster Zeit.

[Before the eyes of my beloved, to the fingers which wrote them — once awaited as received, with the hottest desire — to the breast from which they sprang, these letters are now to wander; always in loving readiness, witnesses of a time most beautiful.]

This is a poem about burying a private experience away from the public, in the anticipation of the near end of one of the (private) lives which nurtured that secret. The first six lines are concerned with the return of the letters to their source, and thus with the closure of that stream of experience of which the correspondence was a manifestation. Or perhaps it is truer to say that the stream has been diverted: directed back to its source, from where it may yet take another direction. For the anticipated death of one of the correspondents does not mean the death of both, or of the relationship. The word ‘wandern’, which is assigned to the letters, is active, and the eyes, fingers, and breast which will receive them are, it is implied, very much alive. Moreover, the word ‘einst’ in line three, which denotes an experience long since departed, is balanced in the penultimate line with ‘immer’, which seems to promise the persistence of that experience, or of something like it. The optimism of the closing couplet is cautious: the implications of ‘immer’ are not confirmed by a verb in the present or the future tense; the noun ‘Zeugen’ is left without a verb to partner it. Nonetheless, the final line makes it clear that, although the original experience has passed, it has become something else, a memory: and the letters are the material instantiation of it. Returning the letters to their author will assist the survival of that most private memory in the mind of the other who shared it; and it is that recognition which enables the poet to part with them.

Memory, then, is clearly a major preoccupation for the very late Goethe, and the 1830 poem ‘Erinnerung’ [‘Remembrance’]³ is a particularly interesting contribution to that theme:

ERINNERUNG

Er

Gedenkst Du noch der Stunden Wo eins zum andern drang?

Sie

Wenn ich Dich nicht gefunden,

War mir der Tag so lang.

Er

Dann, herrlich! ein Selbander,

Wie es mich noch erfreut.

Sie

Wir irrten uns an einander;

Es war eine schöne Zeit.

[He: Do you still think of those hours of our keen desire?

She: If I did not have you close, the day seemed so long.

He: Then, o rapture! to be together — even now it fills me with joy.

She: We were mistaken in one another; it was a lovely time.]

Though it is superficially a piece of fun,⁴ this poem is also a comment on the complexity of the relationship between the past and the present. ‘Vor die Augen meiner Lieben’ sets up a dialectic between ‘einst’ and ‘immer’, and, as we have seen, suggests that what has departed may persist in another form. ‘Erinnerung’ takes the same dialectic and treats it from a slightly different angle. On the one hand, the poem emphasizes the extent to which the past (indicated immediately by the opening words ‘Gedenkst du noch’) and the present (‘Wie es mich noch erfreut’) are bound up in one another. Just as the poem alternates between two interlocutors, so it is also concerned with another, implicit type of ‘Selbander’, namely the continuous flux between what was and what is. Yet the closing couplet, and — if we read this as a joke — the ‘punch line’, punctures the confidence, expressed by the male voice, in the persistence of what was. ‘Es war eine schöne Zeit’, the female voice contends in line eight, but that time was marked by error, which only becomes clear with hindsight. The deployment of ‘es war’ to correct the self-deception of the preceding couplet opens up a certain distance between past and present. Remembering, this poem suggests, is both about preserving the relationship between the two, and about detaching the one from the other. The past remains alive in memory — both Er and Sie are still talking about it — but memory is no buffer against the advance of time, and the development of different perspectives. Again, this suggests a degree of understanding unique to old age: for only in old age can one truly have the depth of experience, but also the courage, necessary to say ‘es war’.

Trilogie der Leidenschaft

‘Vor die Augen meiner Lieben’ and ‘Erinnerung’ are among Goethe’s last poems, and are therefore bound to display features typical of ‘very late’ style; but the phase begins, in fact, a few years earlier. It is well known that ‘An Werther’, ‘Elegie’, and ‘Aussöhnung’ were not originally conceived as a trilogy. They were written separately, between August 1823 and March 1824, and were only grouped together in 1826 for the Ausgabe letzter Hand (the definitive collected edition of Goethe’s works, supervised by him). Moreover, that new order, the form in which we now know them, is the inverse of the order of composition: ‘Aussöhnung’ was actually written first, ‘An Werther’ last. The reorganization of the poems is clearly a deliberate intervention by Goethe into their semantics, and it is important to ask exactly what he was doing. For Meredith Lee, the original sequence of their composition represents a ‘process of slowly regained distance and self-understanding’.⁵ This is a defensible point: if read backwards, from ‘Aussöhnung’ through ‘Elegie’ to ‘An Werther’, the poems evince an increased willingness or ability on the part of the poet to face the pain of the Marienbad affair, as well as ‘a sharpened sense of himself as a poet and as a man with a past and a future in “An Werther” ’.⁶ Yet the reorganization suggests that a still greater level of self-understanding had been reached in the two years that elapsed between their composition and the preparation of the Ausgabe letzter Hand. Now, in that revised version, the poems begin autobiographically: it is nothing less than the precondition of their existence that their poet ‘is a man with a past and a future’. They pass through the profound and painful self-searching of ‘Elegie’ to the cautious reconciliation of ‘Aussöhnung’.⁷ If, as Meredith Lee argues, the present moment described in ‘Aussöhnung’ in 1823 was ‘immobilized’, passive, not properly understood,⁸ the opposite is true in the 1826 version. Now the present is full of the past — both the immediate past of the preceding two poems, and the deeper past which stretches behind ‘An Werther’; and it is only the active recognition of that past that makes any sort of ‘Aussöhnung’ in the present possible.

The 1826 version of the poems represents the end of one phase in Goethe’s oeuvre, and the beginning of another. It records a biographical watershed: his love for the nineteen-year-old Ulrike von Levetzow, and her refusal of his offer of marriage, brought his annual visits to Marienbad to an end; indeed, he rarely travelled after that time, remaining in Weimar to concentrate on his work. On a more speculative level, it may be supposed that the experience forced him to confront the end of his life as a sexual being. In literary terms, the poems bear features which were to become characteristic of his very late work. Never again would personal circumstances be brought to bear as intensely on his poetry as in ‘Elegie’; but the poetic past and future represented in ‘An Werther’ continue to be essential to the renewed focus on the present to which we are brought, by way of ‘Elegie’, in ‘Aussöhnung’, and in the other lyric works which were to follow. In their revised arrangement, the poems run counter to the biographical reality of the last years: the pain which, in the world of the Trilogie, is soothed by the end, continued in Goethe’s own life after the writing of ‘Aussöhnung’. Yet the sense of reordering the poems for the Trilogie is not the outright denial of pain, nor its definitive healing. The effect of the new order is, rather, the Aufhebung, the acknowledgement and aesthetic transformation of suffering. Pain continues to shoot quietly but sharply through the apparently harmonious poems composed after Trilogie; but it coexists in those works with a modest confidence, which might be called wisdom, and a poetic playfulness, so that the general tone is not one of despair, but one of hope. These poems are both touched by life, by Goethe’s life, and are transformations of that life. Very late style thus begins with the reordering of ‘An Werther’, ‘Elegie’, and ‘Aussöhnung’ to form Trilogie der Leidenschaft.

‘An Werther’⁹ records an imaginary encounter between the poet and a character of Goethe’s own invention. The poet compares their fates, Werther’s early suicide as opposed to his own long life, and finds himself apparently unable to enthuse about his own career: ‘Zum Bleiben ich, zum Scheiden du, erkoren | Gingst du voran — und hast nicht viel verloren’ (ll. 9-10) [My lot was to stay, yours to depart, | And so on you went — and did not miss much]. The shadow of death hovers over the whole poem: in the first stanza, with the reminder of Werther’s untimely death; in the middle of the poem, with the assertion that the vividness of life is ultimately deceptive — ‘Doch tückisch harrt das Lebewohl zuletzt’ (l. 38) [Yet, in the end, the farewell lies cruelly in wait]; and in the final stanza, with the revelation that those who choose a different path from Werther simply become caught in a further labyrinth of passions before the inevitable departure catches up with them. Yet the poem is also about life. Lines 11 to 38 could be interpreted as a reflection on the different stages of human existence: from the blissful innocence and curiosity of childhood in lines 11-14, to the tribulations of adolescence in lines 15-20, when one feels at odds with oneself and the world by turns (l. 16); and from the ecstasy of first love (ll. 21-32) to the twists and turns of the emotional life after that:

Das Wiedersehn ist froh, das Scheiden schwer,

Das Wieder-Wiedersehn beglückt noch mehr

Und Jahre sind im Augenblick ersetzt [...] (ll. 35-37)

[Joyous it is to see her again, painful to be parted from her, it gladdens me still more to see her once again, and in a moment lost years are regained.]

The poem is evidently written from the perspective of someone who is in the position to look back over a life, and the mise-en-abyme of repetition itself in ‘Wieder-Wiedersehn’ indicates that one sense of that phrase is memory, the ultimate form of ‘Wiedersehn’. Thus the line ‘Und Jahre sind im Augenblick ersetzt’ is a reflection not just on the tendency of time to rush between the alternating posts of ‘Scheiden’ and ‘Wiedersehn’, but on the power of memory to summon up, if only for a moment, the feelings of long ago.

This theme of retrospection is intertwined with another. The opening lines ‘Noch einmal wagst du, vielbeweinter Schatten, | Hervor dich an das Tages-Licht’ [Once again, much-lamented shade, you venture up to the daylight] express a level of familiarity with the addressee that can only come from his creator: the words ‘wagst du’ [literally ‘you dare’] might be used by a parent to a child. Yet they also sound surprised, as if so much time had passed since the poet first dreamed up Werther that the character has almost taken on an existence of his own, and rises up in the manner of an involuntary memory. It is clear from the very title, ‘An Werther’, that this is a poem about being a poet, and specifically about being this poet, the one-time author of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. Poetry about poetry is not confined to this period of Goethe’s creativity. What is new, however — and is characteristic of this last phase of Goethe’s writing — is the allusion not just to the poeti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Poetry
• 2 Autobiography
• 3 Prose Fiction
• 4 Faust
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index