Goethe’s Allegories of Identity by Jane K. Brown

Abstract

Reviewed by: Goethe’s Allegories of Identity by Jane K. Brown Simon Richter Jane K. Brown, Goethe’s Allegories of Identity. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 2014. 229 pp. Toward the conclusion of Jane Brown’s previous book, The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner (2007), she states that Goethe was “the last great allegorical dramatist of the European tradition. His synthesis of allegory and mimes, opera and Greek tragedy, did not survive his own death” (221). But the end of allegorical drama did not spell the end of allegory itself. In her new book, Goethe’s Allegories of Identity, Brown mounts a powerful argument that it is precisely Goethe’s use of allegory, especially in narrative and in Faust, that undergirds what we take for granted as the [End Page 285] terrain of modern subjectivity, the rhetorical landscape, so to speak, of our inner selves. In other words, even if allegory explicitly died on the stage, it persists implicitly and powerfully up to our own time in the way we have thought about and experienced the self. In the space between Rousseau, the author of the primacy of self and irrational feeling, and Freud, the representative analyst of the unconscious, we find Goethe. But it is only because of the literary record of Goethe’s lifelong preoccupation with Rousseau and the twofold problem that Rousseau posed—the inaccessibility to reason of the deepest self and the question of how to reconcile the claims of the self with society—that this space is so structured that analysis of the depths of the self can take place. What Goethe did, Brown argues, is to adapt dramatic allegory into a distinctly modern mode of narrative that succeeded in representing interior depths of the self that are not subject to the rule of reason and in so doing fashioned the realm that would become the domain of depth psychology. If Brown is right, we are all of us “Goethean,” whether we have read him or not. Although the chapters in Brown’s book, beginning with Goethe’s reception of Rousseau and culminating with those aspects of interiority that are taken up by Freud and depth psychology, may give the impression that her argument proceeds chronologically, it is important to recognize that it does not. For sure, there is a terrain of dates when major works were published. Rousseau’s works—Julie and Emile or the Confessions and Reveries, for instance—are given as a starting point. And one does get a sense that Goethe’s classical dramas (Egmont, Iphigenie, and Tasso) mark a significant moment in Goethe’s deployment of allegory in the service of plumbing the depths of the self. But the primary way in which Brown sees Goethe engaging with Rousseau is through persistent recurrence, coming back to him time and again in order to rewrite Rousseau’s plot of the interior self and to expose and limn greater and more complex depths. Thus, she begins with Werther, “the originary text of German depth-psychological narrative” (144), and Die Wahlverwandtschaften, “the paradigmatic German psychological novel” (34), and ends with them as well, just as she recurs to Faust in chapters 3, 5, and 7 and concludes with a new interpretation of Faust’s final words about “Vorgefühl” in act 5. In other words, the psychic terrain that comes into view through her recurrent interpretations of Goethe’s works is as stratified as her readings. What makes Brown’s contribution to the history of subjectivity distinctly literary is the fact that she continues to rely on aspects of literary form, chief among them, of course, allegory. The component parts of the secularized, modern allegory of the self consist of recurring plots, hybrid or mixed genres, patterns of naming and character constellations, and a symbolic landscape. All of these are involved in processes of constant rewriting, where the primary text being rewritten is Rousseau’s Julie. Brown has an uncanny knack for seeing through the surface narration and recognizing core similarities between disparate texts. Thus, for example, not only are Werther and Die Wahlverwandtschaften rewritings of Julie and the latter Goethe novel a rewriting of the former (18), but...