Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewGoethe’s Allegories of Identity. Jane K. Brown. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. xviii+232.Paul BishopPaul BishopUniversity of Glasgow Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe chief context for this study is the role played by Goethe in the emergence of psychoanalysis. While Freud represents one historical pole of the discussion, the other is Rousseau, described by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1958) as “the first articulate explorer and…even theorist of intimacy” (quoted on 3).1 Arendt’s critique of Rousseau in that work illustrates, Jane K. Brown argues, Goethe’s own “tense relationship” to Rousseau (43). For Brown, Faust (1808; 1832) exemplifies what was to become the central problem of nineteenth-century European revolutions: the tension between the “imperative of nature” to self-development and the “imperative of society” to the renunciation of self (48). In turn, Faust then functions, it is argued, as a “major subtext of Arendt’s analysis of the human condition in modernity” (50).In Brown’s account, the problem of subjectivity in Goethe resides in the following dilemma. If the interior self is “unknowable even to itself,” then the poet cannot represent its “interior dynamics,” yet how else can one represent it, since “its interior dynamics are what is actually is?” (55). Brown traces three different experiments in subjectivity in Goethe’s writings: a “theatrical” conception of the self in Egmont (1788), Iphigenie auf Tauris (1779; 1786), and Torquato Tasso (1790); a “scientific” self in Faust; and a “narrative” self in the Wilhelm Meister novels (1795–96; 1821–29). Yet these textual analyses serve as a prolegomenon to a third, more speculative part of this book, where Brown examines Goethe’s writing from a decidedly psychoanalytic perspective. She begins with an exploration of the theme of Angst or, more accurately, Sorge in Goethe’s writing, such as in the remarkable little poem “Meeres Stille” (1796). Brown compares and contrasts this text with the more well-known ballad of 1778, “Der Fischer,” but she also goes on to discuss the motif of the mermaid or nixie in another very different work. For in Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774; 1787), the main character’s bond to nature emerges through his fixation on a well, described as a place haunted by spirits. What in this work and in the eighteenth century in general is simile and metaphor becomes in the depth psychology of Romanticism—allegory. This shift is anticipated in Goethe’s remarkable text of 1795, “Das Märchen.” Brown tries to demystify this baffling tale by considering it in relation not so much to the Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten but to Goethe’s earlier novel; “cut off the story just before the sacrifice of the green snake,” she writes, “Das Märchen” is “Werther retold as a fairy tale” (156). In turn, Brown reads Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) not just as a rewriting of Werther but also as “Gothic fairy tale,” highlighting how the novel engages some central motifs of the Romantic fairy tale (163). To put it another way, what is (in the Freudian sense of the term) “uncanny” about the Wahlverwandtschaften resides in its proliferation of symbols, the sense of allegory “running wild.”And allegory, a subject previously treated by Brown in The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner (2007), emerges as the major theme of this book, as its very title, Goethe’s Allegories of Identity, signals. Moreover, the significance that accrues to allegory is an eminently existential one. In her earlier work, Brown had traced the interplay of dramatic allegory (descended from the morality drama) and the fashion for Aristotelian mimetic drama, explaining how Goethe was one of the last European writers in an allegorical tradition that focused on “truth made concretely via allegorical representation” (9). But in the Kantian world of the eighteenth century, however, the transcendent cosmic order (or “the absolute”) was regarded as, by definition, unknowable. Yet the older form of allegory was revived in Goethe’s hands under the guise of the symbol, which Brown glosses as the combination within a sign of its concrete reality and its ineffable referent (10). For Brown, what had earlier been a cosmic referent now becomes the inner self, or what we call the unconscious. As Iphigenie tells Thoas, the gods can only speak to us through the human heart.So in Brown’s study we find a focus on that coincidence between allegory and psychology that made Goethe such a figure of interest for Foucault in his lectures of 1981–82 at the Collège de France, subsequently published under the title The Hermeneutics of the Subject (2001), as well as for Norbert Elias in his psychosocial history of Europe, The Civilizing Process (1939; 1969). As Brown perceptively observes, “healing and civilizing are the twin concern of Goethe’s classicism” (187), and her conclusion might well be compared to that of Pierre Hadot in his 2008 study, N’oublie pas de vivre: Goethe et la tradition des exercices spirituels—whose title alludes to the motto found on the scroll held by the marble effigy in the Hall of the Past in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. It is ironic, then, that Goethe’s contribution to the creation of language of subjectivity should be gradually recognized precisely at the same time as his work is disappearing from the curriculum: surely this forgetting or even repression of Goethe is an occlusion of our own identity? This crisis aside, our chances of fully understanding the extent of the debt we owe to Goethe are greatly enhanced by reading Brown’s insightful study.Notes1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1958), 38–39. 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