Alterity and Criticism

Tracing Time in Modern Literature

Wiliam D. Melaney

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786601513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

How does the theme of the other–-as person, experience or alternative conceptual scheme—allow us to reassess the role of the self in literary texts? This book employs phenomenology and semiotics to argue that modern literature is strongly concerned with the role of time in the construction of the self. Alterity and Criticism: Retracing Time in Modern Literature argues that the role of time in canonical literature underlies the experience of alterity and requires a new hermeneutic to clarify how the self emerges in literary texts. Romantic poetry from Goethe to Shelley and the modern prose tradition from Flaubert to Butor constitute different traditions but also indicate, on a textual basis, how alterity performs a crucial role in reading, thus encouraging us to interpret literary texts in terms of the related concerns of self, other and time. The author examines the phenomenology of Emmanuel Lévinas and Wolfgang Iser, as well as the cultural semiotics of Julia Kristeva, to argue that modern literature provides the occasion for a new understanding of the self in time and, in this way, addresses some of the pressing literary problems of our own period.

Part I

ROMANTICISM AS BEGINNING ALTERITY

Chapter 1

Time in Goethe’s Faust I

A Poetics of Disruption

Goethe’s Faust is universally recognized as a major literary work in the history of European Romanticism. The tendency to identify both the work and its protagonist with attitudes that are assumed to be Romantic in some sense is enshrined in the critical tradition, but the place of self-reflectivity in the construction of the Romantic text remains largely unclarified. In this chapter, I will argue that Goethe’s poem enables temporality to be assigned a meaning that is inseparable from a new inquiry into the nature of the self in time. My purpose is to focus primarily on Faust, Part I, a text that enables us to rethink the role of time in Goethe’s most famous poem on the basis of four interrelated moves: first, this work is linked to Romanticism as a hermeneutical event that registers a profound disruption in the European tradition; second, this same work is compared to Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), a novel that was completed by the author almost concurrently and invites an “allegorical” reading of literature that complicates our reading of the poem; third, the place of Faust as a character in literary history is examined as a sign of modernity itself; and fourth, the conclusion to Faust I is related to the phenomenological task of examining how human identity is invariably pervaded by time, rather than enclosed in its own solitude.

FAUST I AND ROMANTICISM

The first appearance of Goethe’s Faust in 1808 is inseparable from the ascendancy of Romanticism as an event that would acquire increasing importance during the ensuing decades. Rousseau in France, as well as the small group of writers who are often identified with early Romanticism in Germany, contributed in different ways to a movement that usually claims Goethe as a major representative. The indelible features of Romanticism had a lasting impact on subsequent literary history, but the intellectual milieu that embraced Romanticism was composed of diverse arguments, some of which are not always easy to relate to what came later. Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgement, 1790) is generally assumed to have been constructed outside the sphere of preparation that leads up to and includes Romanticism, but the thrust of this work underscores how experience is irreducible to either pure cognition or moral systems of conduct.¹ The generation that succeeded Kant and ultimately produced the system of Absolute Idealism was soon to lose the spirit of detachment that prevented the world of appearances from merging with the hidden essence of human Reason. Nonetheless, Kant’s work not only prepares us for the Romantic reaction to eighteenth-century discourse but also contributes in crucial ways to the development of modern aesthetics. In discussing the prehistory of modern aesthetic theory, Ernst Cassirer cites Wilhelm Windelband as remarking that Kant’s Critique of Judgment “constructs, as it were, a priori the concept of Goethe’s poetry, and that what the latter presents as achievement and act is founded and demanded in the former by the pure necessity of philosophical thought.”²

What philosophical accounts often fail to clarify, however, is how Romanticism enables us to reflect on how the self is intrinsically interactive. The question of the self is not only important to the construction of literature but also suggests how authors interface with the characters that they themselves have created. From this standpoint, Paul Hamilton has suggested that we might read Goethe’s work as an example of “metaromanticism,” since it presupposes a level of self-consciousness that allows for discursive insight without denying the subjective value of its own reflexivity.³ The model that is implied in this notion of self-consciousness demonstrates how a plausible reading of Faust, perhaps in its entirety, would allow us to discover subjective dimensions in the work on a critical level, while also indicating how the author’s life and thought processes have been transformed into a new form of reflexivity. Hamilton returns to the moment of Kant, who no doubt becomes a distant precursor, in discussing how the “new aesthetic” demonstrates the connection between art and self-reflection. Aesthetic reflection thus becomes an activity that pertains to both art and its reception “in which their common being, the being of art and its critical understanding, are identically perpetuated.”⁴ This identification of the literary work with reflection on art’s deeper significance allows us to link reading to criticism. Criticism in this frame would no longer be an external activity but an invitation to view the literary work as an implicitly reflexive account of a transformed life. Such an account would allow us to read the work as expressing a peculiar relation to the author’s reflectivity without being reducible to strictly biographical concerns.

Nevertheless, from this perspective, the reader of Goethe’s Faust I immediately notices that Romanticism initially figures through a rupture with tradition, rather than as a perpetuation of it. This rupture is concerned with language, rather than linked in obvious ways to the writer’s subjectivity, to the degree that it indicates how a sense of instability is more crucial than whatever can be said about the human ego as a stable point of reference. When Faust appears at the beginning of the poem, we quickly learn that he is perpetually frustrated, volatile, and bored. No form of understanding is adequate to his desire for total knowledge. Two signs emerge as he attempts to conjure separate representatives of the spirit world. Signs of the macrocosm initially enthrall him until they come to resemble a form that is amorphous and intractable. The Earth Spirit then appears in a red flame; it not only speaks to him, but it also emerges far above a terrestrial being who cannot retain the light of its image. Faust in this context is prevented from mastering the opposition between the two realms. After engaging in a series of conversations near the city gate, Faust returns to his study and ultimately revises the opening of the Johannine Gospel to read, “Im Anfang war die Tat!” [In the beginning was the deed! F, 1238].⁵ This simple utterance hardly substitutes for the series of interpretive options that preceded it. And yet, two separate readings are suggested when Faust offers us his own interpretation of scripture.

We might come to terms with this moment as indicating that interpretation itself has been radically destabilized in Faust’s reading of scripture. Textual destabilization casts light on Faust as a poem, which is so often concerned with revision in the strong sense. The Faust legend has been revised by Goethe in his literary attempt to rewrite and update a medieval tale. Perhaps more crucially, Goethe’s text constantly reinscribes various traditions of reading, whether biblical, Greco-Roman, medieval, or Romantic-modern, in a text that alters our relationship to what comes earlier. Kenneth D. Weisinger has discussed how retranslation could upset our reading of the poem as a whole:

Faust’s translation of the Bible becomes in fact a model act of modern literary criticism and interpretation that draws the critic-translator so far from the original text that it becomes unrecognizable. Can this be regarded as a model for interpretation of the Faust text as well? Is the critic who attempts to interpret Faust forced to be as bound by the limitations of his own perception in reading Faust as Faust is in interpreting the Bible?⁶

When viewed in its critical implications, Faust’s reading of scripture sets the stage for our own reading of a literary text that not only breaks with past traditions but also invites us to embrace modernity as a hermeneutical event that is inherently discontinuous and unstable.⁷

This revisionary formulation also signifies Faust’s resolution to behave in a bold and decisive manner that demonstrates little concern for its human consequences. From this standpoint, we might compare Faust I to Shakespeare’s Hamlet through character and historical setting. On an obvious level, Hamlet’s decision to correct a political injustice follows a long period of doubt and uncertainty. Once this moment has passed, Hamlet embarks on a course of action that ironically leads to his undoing. The ghostly command is a crucial turning point in the drama to the degree that it introduces a voice from the past that never ceases to inform Hamlet’s deliberations concerning his future acts. In apparent contrast, Faust adopts the standpoint of action very early in Goethe’s poem, but in choosing to act in a manner that is more impetuous than serenely contemplated, he also remains bound to a spectral figure who cannot be left behind as the protagonist perpetuates a dark legacy. In both cases, the reader misinterprets the literary narrative if the movement into the future is adopted as a positive value that establishes a standard for judging the protagonist as “heroic” or praiseworthy. What is crucial about the poem and the play is not the reader’s impression of the impetuous rush forward but the structural division that the two narratives mark and sustain. In the case of Goethe, this structural division invites us to place the whole issue of self-reflexivity as it pertains to the writer’s relationship to his own work, in a new literary context.

GOETHE’S ALLEGORICAL TEXT

In truth, the author of Faust I is already on the verge of publishing Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809), a remarkable novel that provides a record of how the passage of time can announce the unexpected and the unknown. Commentators are not in agreement concerning the ultimate significance of a novel that would be difficult to read apart from Goethe’s own life and literary background. Strongly opposed interpretations of the novel seem to be equally plausible, just as they suggest that it might be read in ways that are less sharply antagonistic. On the one hand, Stuart Atkins can be identified with the position that the novel stages Goethe’s own growth through the instability of Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) to the threshold of his own maturity. From this standpoint, this novel can be related as well to what is commonly assumed to have been Goethe’s critical preference for symbolism over allegory.⁸ Atkins emphasizes the author’s apparent admiration for Charlotte and his dislike for Eduard, while contending that the novel’s Protestant setting establishes a clear limit to allegorical readings.⁹ From this point of view, Ottilie’s association with religious tradition does not constitute a serious challenge to a secular community with a broadly ethical orientation.¹⁰ In contrast, Victor Lange has explored a more Romantic reading of the novel in which Ottilie’s uncanny appearance dramatizes “the disruption of social discipline and responsibility by uncontrollable, natural forces that undermine the assumptions of civilized communication.”¹¹ Due to the novel’s acknowledged importance, we might briefly compare these two rather accessible readings—even if they are inadequate in themselves—in terms of the system of values that operates in the literary work as a whole.

Atkins has certainly provided a plausible case for a neoclassical interpretation, which would allow us to read the novel as the author’s farewell to his own youthful excesses. His view of Goethe’s interest in eighteenth-century decorum and civility argues that Charlotte, rather than Ottilie, represents the ethical values that Goethe himself finally came to accept as central to his own life as a person and work as both poet and novelist.¹² Charlotte’s consistent defense of continuity in time and interest in social stability imply the perspectives of an older writer. Ottilie’s sudden appearance in a comparatively well-ordered household is replete with signs that do not always achieve symbolic coherence. Atkins feels justified in contending that the scenes in which Ottilie performs different roles are little more than contrived moments, rather than evidence of genuine emotion. The tragedy of Ottilie is fundamentally a failure “to advance from one stage of development to the next,” and thus to achieve increasing maturity.¹³

For Victor Lange, in contrast, Die Wahlverwandtschaften can be read largely in terms of Ottilie’s emergence against a backdrop of social hypocrisy. From this standpoint, Goethe’s novel extends his early Romanticism into the realm of fiction, particularly when it poses interpretive questions by using an ambiguous but all-pervasive symbolism. Lange is interested in the novel as Goethe’s “most symbolic work” in which insights into the natural order “are here stated in a coherent world of images which refer to what must remain inexpressible in discursive speech.” He refers to the “symbolic density” of the novel, while indicating that Ottilie’s diaries “do not so much as explain or justify her inner motives as, through coincidental reflection, cast them into sharper relief.”¹⁴ Nonetheless, Ottilie’s resistance to communication, particularly as it emerges after the drowning of young Otto, serves a higher artistic purpose. Instead of merely demonstrating the inadequacies of a specific society, Ottilie demonstrates on a tropological level that Goethe could employ “symbolic depth without obliterating the realistic surface” in producing a fully realized work of fiction.¹⁵

And yet, while each of these readings can be defended to some degree, we might consider how both overlook a fundamental paradox that Goethe’s text announces in form and content. This paradox is related to the literary meaning of a novel that includes allegorical elements at crucial moments to dramatize a situation of nonclosure. While his own statements on the subject are inconclusive, Goethe argued in favor of an opposition between symbolism and allegory that became canonical in criticism during the Romantic period.¹⁶ In distancing himself from a rigid use of allegory, Goethe championed the value of the literary symbol as hermeneutically open and aesthetically replete. From this standpoint, we might be surprised to notice the prevalence of allegorical names, riddles, and scenes in Die Wahlverwandtschaften, a novel that presumably ought to be consistent with the author’s own critical principles. For Atkins, Goethe’s use of allegory can be explained primarily as a device for focusing on Ottilie’s failure to achieve genuine autonomy, rather than as a rhetorical strategy that has a meaning of its own. Lange’s emphasis on artistic unity would only allow us to interpret allegory as a special case of symbolic expression.

What both Atkins and Lange fail to acknowledge is the complex function of temporality in structuring Die Wahlverwandtschaften as a text that employs a vast range of rhetorical devices to promote aesthetic ends. First, this masterful but difficult novel unfolds in a literary framework that is quite different from what a purely Romantic conception of art would permit. One paradox of the novel derives from the discrepancy between Goethe’s reputation as a Romantic critic and his practice as a novelist. Goethe’s critical rejection of allegory, while applying less clearly to literature than to the visual arts, does not allow us to account for the role that allegory performs in this novel. On the other hand, if the novel is read symbolically, we are often hard-pressed to interpret privileged scenes and complex actions that have the power to disrupt what comes before. Is it possible to read the novel as reducible neither to traditional allegory nor to categories of symbolic meaning?

Walter Benjamin’s highly influential essay on Goethe’s novel provides a critical basis for transforming the older concept of allegory into a more fluid notion that integrates an awareness of how a mythic residue exerts a powerful influence on events that take a fateful turn as the narrative proceeds. Precisely because the novel lacks grounding, the reader is often in the uncomfortable position of trying to bring together irreconcilable elements that cannot be harmonized either on an abstract level or through a guiding intuition. In his remarkable Die Farbenlehre (Theory of Color), Goethe assumes that the attentive spectator can discover the life of nature even beneath the metal crust that circles the earth, whereas Benjamin explains that irony must be taken into account if we are to relate the characters in this novel to a special feature of the ecosystem: “Mit dieser Kraft haben Goethes Menchen Gemeinschaft und im Spiel mit dem Unten gefallen sie sich wie in ihrem Spiel mit Oben” [Goethe’s characters are in league with this power, and they are as pleased with themselves in playing with what lies below ground as in playing with what lies above]. In opposition to standard sociological readings, Benjamin argues that the landed gentry who occupy the household are both supported and imperiled by a power that lies beneath the surface of daily life. Within this framework, the discrepancy between higher and lower orders ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Alterity as a Literary Problem
• PART I: ROMANTICISM AS BEGINNING ALTERITY
• PART II: ALTERITY AND THE PROSE TRADITION
• PART III: CRITICAL DISCOURSES OF ALTERITY
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author