Monday, March 26, 2007
The Sorrows of Young Werther
I don't know why I bothered, since I hate Romanticism (with a big R or a little r), but at least it was very short.
What I principally can't stand, above and beyond the extreme self-absorption that seems to constitute the contemplative imaginings of self-style Romantics, is the extremely tight vocabulary one finds in their work. This is largely the case with the English poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron--who comprise virtually the entire mini-canon of the period and are almost always listed exactly in that order), but Goethe, at least in the translation I read, could be included. They employ a tiny battery of words, and always use them in superlatives. Lightning is always terrifying. A hideous peasant will invariably overheat some 'tremulous excitations of the soul.' Someone is generally imprison'd in a bower, or espying a glen. It reminds me of the playlist to a classic rock radio station. How many times can you turn on Q104.3 and think, "All right! 'Layla'!"? Yet Romantic literature presumes that everyone who came before them never fully appreciated just how beautiful a sunset is, even though they allow themselves recourse only to a small group of adjectives.
Moreover, while the emotions that the sublime inspires in these poets might have been almost new then, in hindsight they enjoy a surprisingly narrow emotional range. Werther, in self-imposed exile, falls in love with a woman who is engaged to one of his friends. His delirious emotional highs and despondent abysses are only complemented by noting how easily he can shift from one extreme to another. I don't think the literary merit of a text dissolves in diagnosing its author with bipolar disorder, but neither do I think it bespeaks some sort of genius. Mozart's The Magic Flute, for example, was written almost contemporaneously, and contains a love plot with very little in the way of reasons-why, but it's a much more beautiful story. Such truncated foreplay, as it were, is more of a convention of the time than a hallmark of love's purity or true essence.
As for purity--in that we have a real locus of pseudo-Christian body hatred. Werther exclaims that his love for Charlotte and his intentions are of the purest, as if that's supposed to win her over. I assume he means his desire is sexless, and therefore holy? This is why I can never get behind even the most watered-down religious ethic, because even a gentle pantheism that appears inimical to the crude, crusading violence of Christianity carries these strong metaphysical holdovers of body hatred masquerading as profundity, as an eternal truth. Werther/Goethe speak as if the epistolary text chronicles some raw emotional revelation. In reality, it's a series of cliches that aspire to a sort of middlebrow "poetricity." It's proto-emo.
Susan Sontag's essay "Piety Without Content" discusses the trend (which was in full force in the ecumenical mid-20th century and has subsided amid evangelical fervor and the proliferation of religions that don't fall within Western monotheism) toward making "religiousness" some kind of personal or artistic virtue. "For a believer the concept of 'religion'...makes no sense as a category," she writes, because people don't ascribe to "religion" when they accept the specific tenets of a particular faith. Catholics don't abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent because it's "religious," they do it because it's part of Catholicism. "To be religious is always to be in some sense an adherent (even as a heretic) to a specific symbolism and a specific historical community the believer may adopt. It is to be involved in specific beliefs and practices, not just to give assent to the philosophical assertions that a being whom we may call God exists, that life has meaning, etc. Religion is not equivalent to the theistic proposition."
She further criticizes the idea that all "serious" ideas contain some sort of religious valence, or that all major thinkers (including atheists like Marx and Freud) can be subsumed under the smug heading of "religious teachers" because the content of their writings overlaps with what religious traditions speak to. I think Goethe's book exemplifies an identical tendency with respect to poetry and what it does. There is a strong tendency to emphasize content at the expense of form. In a religious context, it's the insistence that everything important is somehow, some way religious. With poetry (or, better, Poetry), it's the idea that the only way to express these important or eternal verities is through a lofty style that's full of shibboleths so that everyone who hears or reads it knows perfectly well that the speaker has switched to the proper mode befitting the awesomeness of the ideas. The advent of free verse produced some of the best poetry in English (Stevens, Pound, Moore, Bishop) and then sort of declined into an excessive democratization and reduction of standards that, while maybe even necessary, totally sacrificed form and allowed the teenagers of divorced parents to whine their way closer to the canon. If there's any avant-garde left, it's going to be found in revolutions of form.
For the Romantics, at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the ability not to live a life of abject suffering, to maybe travel a little or spend most of your days in reflective contemplation was starting to trickle down to the haute bourgeoisie. That led to new art. But Adorno is right when he says that art is temporary. Frescoes fade, plays are lost, statuary corrodes, buildings burn down. And the relevance of a given piece or text for one time period will become muted--until, if it enters the pantheon, it's simply a commodity, something reprinted in textbooks and stored in the Louvre that you know all about way before you actually travel to see it.
People fall back upon Poetry for the same reason. They're terrified of the impermanence that is their fate and want some undemanding, unambitious absolutes to navigate by, and the enduring popularity of Romanticism is largely because it's a repository of post-Christian dictates about Life. There's always this impulse to install a certain swath of Art as an eternal set of texts or pieces that establish some absolute truths, and that seems to be to be a knee-jerk reaction based on fear. It probably terrifies many people to imagine a future where nobody reads Shakespeare, but I don't know if that would be so bad. It wouldn't be necessarily a dumbed-down dystopia. Even today, the most that non-scholars care about "the Bard" (eww!) is virtually lip service. I haven't seen one of his plays performed since college. Theater itself seems to be trapped in perpetual crisis mode. Nothing has unlimited staying power. Romanticism isn't just "unfashionable," or something you could breezily dismiss, but it's just not as interesting as more recent genres/styles. There's a sense of being dazzled that I don't even care to recapture. One could argue that we've been poisoned by our own acute self-consciousness, but that's just what characterizes this era and there's nothing we can do about it unless we're born as, say, Forrest Gump.
Goethe completely sacrifices form for dubiously Eternal content about 'the soul,' which, since it doesn't exist at all, can hardly be called words to live by. If I were a Stalinist, I would say "Burn this bourgeois crap." Instead, just don't read it.
What I principally can't stand, above and beyond the extreme self-absorption that seems to constitute the contemplative imaginings of self-style Romantics, is the extremely tight vocabulary one finds in their work. This is largely the case with the English poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron--who comprise virtually the entire mini-canon of the period and are almost always listed exactly in that order), but Goethe, at least in the translation I read, could be included. They employ a tiny battery of words, and always use them in superlatives. Lightning is always terrifying. A hideous peasant will invariably overheat some 'tremulous excitations of the soul.' Someone is generally imprison'd in a bower, or espying a glen. It reminds me of the playlist to a classic rock radio station. How many times can you turn on Q104.3 and think, "All right! 'Layla'!"? Yet Romantic literature presumes that everyone who came before them never fully appreciated just how beautiful a sunset is, even though they allow themselves recourse only to a small group of adjectives.
Moreover, while the emotions that the sublime inspires in these poets might have been almost new then, in hindsight they enjoy a surprisingly narrow emotional range. Werther, in self-imposed exile, falls in love with a woman who is engaged to one of his friends. His delirious emotional highs and despondent abysses are only complemented by noting how easily he can shift from one extreme to another. I don't think the literary merit of a text dissolves in diagnosing its author with bipolar disorder, but neither do I think it bespeaks some sort of genius. Mozart's The Magic Flute, for example, was written almost contemporaneously, and contains a love plot with very little in the way of reasons-why, but it's a much more beautiful story. Such truncated foreplay, as it were, is more of a convention of the time than a hallmark of love's purity or true essence.
As for purity--in that we have a real locus of pseudo-Christian body hatred. Werther exclaims that his love for Charlotte and his intentions are of the purest, as if that's supposed to win her over. I assume he means his desire is sexless, and therefore holy? This is why I can never get behind even the most watered-down religious ethic, because even a gentle pantheism that appears inimical to the crude, crusading violence of Christianity carries these strong metaphysical holdovers of body hatred masquerading as profundity, as an eternal truth. Werther/Goethe speak as if the epistolary text chronicles some raw emotional revelation. In reality, it's a series of cliches that aspire to a sort of middlebrow "poetricity." It's proto-emo.
Susan Sontag's essay "Piety Without Content" discusses the trend (which was in full force in the ecumenical mid-20th century and has subsided amid evangelical fervor and the proliferation of religions that don't fall within Western monotheism) toward making "religiousness" some kind of personal or artistic virtue. "For a believer the concept of 'religion'...makes no sense as a category," she writes, because people don't ascribe to "religion" when they accept the specific tenets of a particular faith. Catholics don't abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent because it's "religious," they do it because it's part of Catholicism. "To be religious is always to be in some sense an adherent (even as a heretic) to a specific symbolism and a specific historical community the believer may adopt. It is to be involved in specific beliefs and practices, not just to give assent to the philosophical assertions that a being whom we may call God exists, that life has meaning, etc. Religion is not equivalent to the theistic proposition."
She further criticizes the idea that all "serious" ideas contain some sort of religious valence, or that all major thinkers (including atheists like Marx and Freud) can be subsumed under the smug heading of "religious teachers" because the content of their writings overlaps with what religious traditions speak to. I think Goethe's book exemplifies an identical tendency with respect to poetry and what it does. There is a strong tendency to emphasize content at the expense of form. In a religious context, it's the insistence that everything important is somehow, some way religious. With poetry (or, better, Poetry), it's the idea that the only way to express these important or eternal verities is through a lofty style that's full of shibboleths so that everyone who hears or reads it knows perfectly well that the speaker has switched to the proper mode befitting the awesomeness of the ideas. The advent of free verse produced some of the best poetry in English (Stevens, Pound, Moore, Bishop) and then sort of declined into an excessive democratization and reduction of standards that, while maybe even necessary, totally sacrificed form and allowed the teenagers of divorced parents to whine their way closer to the canon. If there's any avant-garde left, it's going to be found in revolutions of form.
For the Romantics, at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the ability not to live a life of abject suffering, to maybe travel a little or spend most of your days in reflective contemplation was starting to trickle down to the haute bourgeoisie. That led to new art. But Adorno is right when he says that art is temporary. Frescoes fade, plays are lost, statuary corrodes, buildings burn down. And the relevance of a given piece or text for one time period will become muted--until, if it enters the pantheon, it's simply a commodity, something reprinted in textbooks and stored in the Louvre that you know all about way before you actually travel to see it.
People fall back upon Poetry for the same reason. They're terrified of the impermanence that is their fate and want some undemanding, unambitious absolutes to navigate by, and the enduring popularity of Romanticism is largely because it's a repository of post-Christian dictates about Life. There's always this impulse to install a certain swath of Art as an eternal set of texts or pieces that establish some absolute truths, and that seems to be to be a knee-jerk reaction based on fear. It probably terrifies many people to imagine a future where nobody reads Shakespeare, but I don't know if that would be so bad. It wouldn't be necessarily a dumbed-down dystopia. Even today, the most that non-scholars care about "the Bard" (eww!) is virtually lip service. I haven't seen one of his plays performed since college. Theater itself seems to be trapped in perpetual crisis mode. Nothing has unlimited staying power. Romanticism isn't just "unfashionable," or something you could breezily dismiss, but it's just not as interesting as more recent genres/styles. There's a sense of being dazzled that I don't even care to recapture. One could argue that we've been poisoned by our own acute self-consciousness, but that's just what characterizes this era and there's nothing we can do about it unless we're born as, say, Forrest Gump.
Goethe completely sacrifices form for dubiously Eternal content about 'the soul,' which, since it doesn't exist at all, can hardly be called words to live by. If I were a Stalinist, I would say "Burn this bourgeois crap." Instead, just don't read it.
