“Lebensmärchen”: Goethes Dichtung und Wahrheit als poetischer und poetologischer Text (review)

Borrowing her title from Goethe's 1811 reference to the first books of his autobiography as "Lebensmärchen," a comment that is far from isolated among Goethe's remarks on Dichtung und Wahrheit, Gabriele Blod argues in her excellent study that it is the product of a sustained literary co-operation between the genres of autobiography and fairy-tale. Both genres, as she points out, emerge as increasingly "literary" over the course of the eighteenth century, and interrogate, though from different standpoints, the following dualisms subtending Goethe's autobiography (as of course its title evinces): orality versus textuality, truth versus fictionality, femininity versus masculinity. Blod's central concern is to reread Dichtung und Wahrheit as a thoroughly poetic text, not as a poeticized rendering of a life.

If Dichtung und Wahrheit began to receive sustained critical attention only in the 1970s, this is, as Blod shows, the outcome of a shift in definition of the autobiography itself, as a fictional rather than a factual genre. Blod's investigation opens with a chapter reviewing the history of criticism of autobiography in relation to questions of truth and authenticity, a tradition that has assumed Dichtung und Wahrheit's paradigmatic status. This book situates itself against earlier readings of the work that take referentiality for granted, such as that by Wilhelm Dilthey, and also takes issue with Philippe Lejeune's definition of the "autobiographical pact" made by an author with his or her reader to secure the book's meaning in the world. Lejeune anchors referentiality in the self-naming by the author: but Blod brilliantly shows the fragility of the pact by demonstrating the strategic evasiveness of self-naming (along with other apparently stable references such as dates, places and historical figures) in Dichtung und Wahrheit. As she points out, Goethe only inserts his name once, in the middle of the book, when it appears in a comic verse by Herder that identifies the origins of the name as "von Göttern," "von Goten," or "vom Kote." Another significant name for the work is Goethe's grandfather's name, Textor, with its connotations of weaving and textuality. (Blod herself refrains from referring to the autobiographical persona as Goethe.) Rather, in response to the school of autobiographical criticism inspired by Derrida, Blod argues that across several different levels of this work the notions of truth and authorship are under fictional construction: Goethe's is a poetic challenge to the reader, not a pact. Reviewing the place of the fairy-tale in Germany around 1800, Blod emphasizes the identity of the Kunstmärchen with aesthetic reflexivity. It is the fairy-tale, she concludes, that opens up the possibility of reading the autobiography as a fictional text.

A particularly rewarding section of the book, which draws productively on Gérard Genette's narratological concept of the paratext, is devoted to Goethe's open-ended and reversible title; to the preface, in which Goethe stages himself as both sender and recipient of a letter occasioning the autobiography; and to the mottos. Close readings of several fairy-tale incursions into the text follow, with a focus on the role of the body, art, and ideology. The inset fairy-tale "der neue Paris," putatively the creation of a precocious seven year old, receives deserved attention and is positioned as Goethe's response to the contemporary debates on mythology. Far from a straightforward appropriation of the Homeric narrative, Blod suggests, the story of the "new Paris" blends elements of antique myth, biblical narratives, and oriental fairy-tales with references to Werther and the Farbenlehre and to artistic disagreements (with Heinrich von Kleist). Elsewhere, personal and historical events in Goethe's life are also conjoined under the sign of developmental phases termed "Märchen" ("Knabenmärchen," "Jünglingsmärchen," etc.) A second focal episode in the text, the Sesenheim idyll, is described in Dichtung und Wahrheit as a "Märchen" transforming art (The Vicar of Wakefield, "der...