NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Ossian on the Bank of the Lora, Invoking the Gods to the Strains of a Harp, 
by Gérard, François Pascal Simon, 1801

In a snappy review of Peter Ackroyd’s new biography of Edgar Allan Poe in today’s Ottawa Citizen, Peter Simpson concludes: "Today, a happy pill would have fixed all of Poe’s erratic behaviour, but would probably have taken his talent as well. (Happy artists are all alike: unhappy artists are each unhappy in their own artistic ways.) Which leaves the reader to decide: is a shortened life, endured in misery, a fair price for literary immortality?"

I suppose, because we have the option to medicate and mitigate misery these days, this is a valid question, however, as it pertains to dead authors, the more interesting one, kicked around of late by among others Stephen Mitchelmore, Dan Green, Dorothy W , is: Does or should knowledge of that short, miserable life influence the reading of what it produced? Affect its mortality?

Which leads me to Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, and reports (most of them admittedly anecdotal) that it prompted the suicides of many a miserable young man. None of them had the benefit of knowing Goethe’s later work. As Auden puts it in his foreword to the Vintage Classics edition: "Werther can still fascinate us, but in a very different way. To us it reads not as a tragic love story, but as a masterly and devastating portrait of a complete egoist, a spoiled brat, incapable of love because he cares for nobody and nothing but himself and having his way whatever cost to others."

This is how I read the book, with perhaps a tad more sympathy for the delusional Werther. Sympathy for his circumstances I might add, certainly not his taste in poetry. In the buildup to Werther’s rejection by Lotte, Goethe has him reading literally tens of pages of tripe from the fraudulent Ossian. It’s as bad as the lacunic, novel-wrecking whale descriptives that stall, and almost sink Moby Dick.

Two points here in favour of outside the text reading: As Auden says, knowing an author’s entire oeuvre can significantly affect the reading and interpretation of early works. Two: reading text without context, without reference to explicitly voiced author intent, can be fatal. As John Armstrong reports in Love, Life, Goethe: a Frankfurt city councilor once told Goethe that Werther was dangerous. "Dangerous!" says Goethe, with Stephen Mitchelmore, " What do you mean dangerous? It’s beasts like you who are dangerous, who contaminate everything around you with putrification, who beslobber and besmirch everything that is beautiful and good, and then try to convince the rest of the world that nothing is any better than their own excrement."

But Werther is dangerous. Many of its readers misunderstood, and emulated its protagonist, some, reportedly, even topped themselves, even adopted a passion for the awful Ossian. This is serious stuff. Stuff avoidable through reference to points outside the text. Knowing that Goethe himself lived something very similar to Werther’s experience, and that the last, epistolary part of the novel is lifted directly from the letters of an actual suicide, may not add a huge amount to the reading of Werther; knowing however that Goethe, though intimately sympathetic with the despair of unrequited love, did not hold Werther’s brooding, ultimately fatal response up as either glamorous or noble, does. It would have saved, if not lives, then at least masses of heartache and pain. As Armstrong puts it, Goethe believed that we are better off getting on with life, that we should commit to overcoming rather than wallowing in problems. Werther was written as a warning; an example of how not to react to loss of one’s heart. If Goethe could have informed his readers of this he would have. Sure, he may not have wanted to sully his art with explanation, but its reception caused him much grief, a lot of which could have been avoided had his overly romantic readers realized what he’d intended. Then too, perhaps, because Goethe clearly (after an initial flirtation) was no fan, that pathetic balladmonger Ossian would have remained dead, his rhymes buried, where they belong, under a pile of rubble.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 11:26 AM and is filed under Literary Criticism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.