The Limits of Truth-Telling. An Examination of theVenetianische Epigramme

Abstract

THE VenetianischeEpigramme can probably claim to be Goethe's least read and least appreciated work. Goethe himself was aware that his contemporary public would take exception to many of the attitudes expressed. This is why he adopted the ruse of anonymity when he published 103 of them in Schiller's Musenalmanach in 1796, and acted as his own censor by withholding more than fifty of the cycle from publication or even from circulation except in his immediate circle. Nevertheless in spite of this hesitancy in publishing what he had written Goethe deliberately conceived the cycle as a challenge to a public which sought to restrict their view of art and their notions of life as a whole to what he saw as the rigid, life-denying norms of contemporary middle-class society. In these poems Goethe adopts a variety of comic and serious masks to promote the cause of truth-telling, one of the traditional functions of the epigram as a literary genre. He sets out to attack the notion that there are appropriate and inappropriate subjects for poetry and challenges his readers to rethink the arguments against free speech, free thinking and the free expression of love. His polemic is often light-hearted, occasionally savage, and it ranges across the whole of eighteenth-century society with its comments on sexual, religious, social and political life. Goethe saw the subversive nature of such writing, and defended it on the grounds that it was part of a critical tradition dating back to the Roman satirists and continued within the French and German Enlightenment. His classical model is Martial, his immediate antecedents Voltaire and Lessing. Further, this critical stance is one he shares to some extent with Schiller, and it constitutes an important aspect of Weimar classicism too often lost sight of in the emphasis on the timeless rather than the topical elements in that tradition.! Much of the criticism which has grown up around these poems is prescriptive rather than descriptive and rests upon several misconceptions: it shares the Romantics' dislike of the satirical epigram as an 'unlyrical' fonn; it is wary of literature with an overt topical reference and prefers to widen rather than narrow the gap between historical and imaginative fictions;