Meistersänger als Beruf : The Maieutics of Poetic Vocation in “Erklärung eines alten Holzschnittes . . .”

Abstract

There are at least two stories to be told about Goethe's poetry According to one, power of artist (and we all know is consummate artist) grows from passions and drives that are crystallized in and expressed in art. This hermeneutics of experience produces myth of unmediated expressivity1 that is central to biographical story about (or, more recently, about Goethe.O,2 a story that nonetheless persists in different forms, on different premises, in various considerations of Goethe as a coherent unit, author with a project who produces a certain discourse.In second story about this author-person's poetry, a story told by David Wellbery in his pathbreaking study The Specular Moment, presents a recodification of intimacy (Wellbery adapts Niklas Luhmann's language of encoding and recoding here) in form of the lyric. More than poetry in usual sense,the lyric is a new discourse, and its reader is held to operate differently from reader of previous poetic discourse by an effort of projection onto speaking subject that amounts to grasp[ing], through of divination, the. subjectivity that alone gives text its coherence.3 From Erlebnis criticism to a partially Luhmann-inspired discourse analysis, from idyll to as a particular formation beginning in 1770-71, this story posits and performs decisive breaks with tradition in claiming for and itself a modernity that begins in now of subjectivity and critical subjectivity that would project former onto or into latter.In what follows, I want to tell yet a third story. My story, however brief, focuses on step in lyric-critical from empathetic projection to act of divination and challenges identity of those operations as well as Romantic paradigm that implicitly underwrites this identity. In his early Weimar period, so well after beginning of period in 1770-71,1 want to suggest, is dealing with or dealing in multiple versions of subject at same time, commonalities among which, however, constitute a specific poetic structure that challenges of divinatory criticism.In both Wellbery's story and mine, subject is not just a poetic figure but also a poietic figure, not just a first-person seer or speaker in poem but also a maker, one who engages in poiesis. While central poems in his model of Lyrik, such as Willkommen und Abschied, emphasize autonomization of poetic subject in itself, without regard to end in sense of Zweck or telos, Wellbery concludes his study with notion of poetic vocation, implying that creation follows autonomization. This link is most evident in Prometheus, in which Ich now makes people:Hier sitz ich, forme MenschenNach meinem Bilde,Ein Geschlecht das mir gleich sei,Zu leiden, weinen,Geniesen und zu freuen sichUnd dein nicht zu achtenWie ich! (FA 1:204)4The moments of autonomy, creativity, and identity are joined in Promethean self-reproduction, a neat encapsulation both of tendencies of what would become Romantic poetics and of a certain account of selfhood presented in theological terms. While former stress role of mirror, latter constitutes a set of arguments about subjectivity evidently thematized in Goethe's poem, with its interchange of ich and mein with du and dein, and highly formalized in Wellbery's study, which puts a fine Romantic point on Promethean logic of poiesis. This model evokes three essential acts: seeing, being called, and receiving. These steps form subject, who is also poet, in terms of a specifically modern, autonomous subject. While a more skeptical reading might see this as of influence on part of toward his poetic forebears, anxiety that fabricates autonomous subject simply for sake of poetic one-upmanship, Goethe's Promethean moment in fact calls such a subject performatively into poetic being in three steps. …