The Specular Moment: Goethe's Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (review)

Abstract

Goethe Yearbook 393 Reflexion auf das Ende der deutschen Zweistaatlichkeit, die ja gerade auf dem Gebiet der Goethe-Forschung nicht ohne Bedeutung und weitreichende Folgen war, hier fehlt. Einige Worte über die Implikationen dieser historischen Zäsur für den künftigen Umgang mit Goethe wären hier am Platz gewesen. Eine verpaßte Gelegenheit! Es ist wohl unvermeidlich, daß ein Kompendium dieser Art zur weiteren Monumentalisierung seines Gegenstands beitragen wird. Auch diese eindrucksvolle Bestandsaufnahme unseres GoetheWissens macht "unser Knirpstum" (J. Burckhardt) offenbar. Und doch könnte dieses auf den ersten Blick einschüchternde Nachschlagewerk aufgrund seiner benutzerfreundlichen Darbietungsform und seines unprätentiösen Stils sehr wohl auch dazu dienen, Goethe zu entmonumentalisieren. Es ist zu wünschen, daß sich dies besonders für die jüngeren Benutzer bewahrheiten möge. Auf jeden Fall aber wird sich das neue Goethe Handbuch bald und auf lange Zeit, für Kenner wie für Liebhaber, als unentbehrlich erweisen. Smith College Hans Rudolf Vaget David E.Wellbery,The Specular Moment: Goethe's Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. xv, 467 pp. What a wonderful welter of words! And how expansively the author demonstrates the extraordinary difficulty we encounter in discussing poetry. Here is what he has to say: Perhaps the most intractable problem the critic dealing with lyric poetry faces is that the object of study resists, by virtue of its discursive constitution, the very project of critical construction.The lyric is a momentary, and, as it were, aphoristic form, a rupture of the world of continuous speech. Criticism, however, aspires to discursive continuity , be this in form of an argument (systematic linkage) or narrative (historical linkage). Hence the critic's dilemma: either respect the singularity of the lyric text and thereby abandon the critical project of narrative-argumentative synthesis or work toward establishing such synthesis and thereby occlude the movement of selfdifferentiation that distinguishes every lyric text of merit.The lyric, tendentiously stated,is the genre of contingency, and of contingency, as Aristotle noted, there can be no science. (27) David E. Wellbery is clearly no fainthearted critic, despite all awareness of the difficulty of his task, for already by this point he has 394 Book Reviews pressed ahead with his problematic endeavor, having dealt at some length with two Goethe poems ("Ob ich dich liebe . . ."and"Maifest") as an advance on/rejection of the idylls of Salomon Geßner. Having noted some similarities in sentiment and vocabulary between selected idylls by Geßner and these early lyric texts by Goethe, he has progressed to two specific discoveries, one negative, one positive. First the negative: Goethe did not write his post-Anacreontic poetry "as an act of unmediated creativity,"Geßner's idylls being"an anterior discourse from which the lyric [here = Goethe's early poetry] derives" (9).The positive finding is expressed as follows:". . . the juxtaposition of these texts by Goethe and Geßner enables us to read the fault lines of a discursive event: the lyric emerges across a series of borrowings and displacements, distortions and transformations, a process that in Nietzsche's genealogical theory carries the name 'reinterpretation' "(9). Much is not what we think it is or have thought it to be up to this point, and Wellbery takes considerable pains throughout his study to help us understand the extraordinary difficulties with which we are dealing. We read on: The idyll, in Geßner and elsewhere, is the utopia of perfect communication . In Goethe's reinterpretation, this utopia is absorbed into the very movement of lyric speech. . . . The lineaments of this reinterpretive process come into sharper focus -when we consider the continuities linking the juxtaposed texts. [Both make much of the fond gaze of the beloved.] Their filiations are most evident, of course, on the level of linguistic surface structure.The texts employ identical lexical and syntactic forms to such an extent that a conscious and deliberate borrowing on Goethe's part seems likely. But I don't want to belabor this question of authorial intention, which is probably undecidable anyway. Far more significant from a discourseanalytical perspective is the stylistic fact to -which these verbal echoes point: the stylistic register of...