Becoming the Listener: Goethe's "Der Fischer"

Abstract

Becoming the Listener:Goethe's "Der Fischer" Deva Kemmis Und wie er sitzt und wie er lauscht,teilt sich die Flut empor;aus dem bewegten Wasser rauschtein feuchtes Weib hervor. [And as he sits and listens well,The billow breaks and parts,And from the waters' churning swellA dripping woman darts.] —Goethe, "Der Fischer"1 For the listener, who listens in the snow,And, nothing himself, beholdsNothing that is not there and the nothing that is. —Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man" Der Fischer" ("The Fisherman," 1779), a ballad about a fisherman's encounter with a mermaid written early in Goethe's poetic production, features prominently in the German Lied tradition.2 The poem was hailed by Herder as exactly the kind of text that German poets needed to be writing in order to usher in a golden age of literary achievement, and had its place as the first example of folk poetry characterized by Herder as German in his Volkslieder, among other texts within his larger project that aimed to unite the German states through a shared cultural, linguistic, and mythopoetic background.3 As befits the significance of sound in the Lied genre for Goethe, Herder, and their contemporaries,4 listening crowns the sensory hierarchy of this poem. The listener sits at the center of the poetic activity of "Der Fischer": the listener who is both the fisherman himself in the ballad, and, as Wallace Stevens writes in a very different poem, "the reader leaning late and reading there."5 The encounter between a human being, the fisherman, and the water woman, who has been depicted countless times in literature, folklore, and myth, be it as siren, water nymph, nixie, mermaid, Melusine, Undine, Lorelei, or selkie,6 is a poetic site that yields rich insights into the epistemological nature of knowledge creation, for in both literature and myth, this encounter often leads to knowledge outside of human scope.7 The meeting between a human being and a water nymph can be read as a poetic figuration of the epistemological dynamic between sight and hearing in the moment [End Page 31] of knowledge transfer. As sight has historically been credited as the main sensory avenue of knowledge creation, particularly since the European Enlightenment8—with Herder's argument as to the intermediary and therefore key role that hearing plays among the senses in the invention and use of human language as an important contemporaneous exception9—the question of interest here is: What roles do hearing and listening play in the knowing that comes about through this encounter? In particular, I am interested in how listening figures in the epistemology of this lyric, apparently penned by Goethe as nothing more than a poetic expression of the lure of swimming on a hot day.10 A secondary line of questioning will pursue the transformative potential of this encounter on both the textual and poetological levels,11 in order to explore the implications of aural knowing and the aesthetic experience for the reader. In "Der Fischer," the transfer of knowledge that comes about through the encounter between the fisherman and the water nymph is luminous, textually transformational, and acoustically driven. The ballad opens with the sounds of the water: "Das Wasser rauscht', das Wasser schwoll" (WA 1.1:169; The water rushed, the water rose, Zeydel 98). As the water laps and swells, the fisherman sits by and listens. The verb "lauschen" (to listen) connotes quietly paying attention, or even eavesdropping.12 This state of quiet attentiveness precedes the wet maiden sweeping forth and appearing before the fisherman. When she sweeps up from the moving water and toward him, her appearance is introduced through sound.13 The word used to describe the sound she makes, rauschen, is the same used to describe the sound of the water in the first line. She first becomes perceptible to the fisherman not as an appearance but as a sound—the sound of water. The only clue to the mermaid apart from the acoustic is the descriptor of her as a wet maiden, ein feuchtes Weib, which is neither acoustic nor visual. Ellis Dye reads this phrase as a heavily ironic and...