Goethe’s Ghosts: Reading and the Persistence of Literature ed. by Simon Richter and Richard Block (review)

The objective of this essay collection is to examine how the institutional role of literature may or may not be affected by various “ghosts.” By “ghosts” the editors mean both the ghosts depicted in Goethe’s works and “the ability of literary ghosts through their haunting ways to convey meanings and forms of meanings long past” (3). Coeditors Simon Richter and Richard Block set the scene in their introduction by referencing Mikhael Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, in which an apartment houses multitudes of demons and ghosts. For Block and Richter this haunted apartment stands in for a “house of literature” in which “we can find entire and largely forgotten regions of non-normative representations and subject positions” (2). The contributors to this volume explore, each in his or her own way, these haunted aspects of literature, in particular Goethe’s literature. But the scene from Bulgakov’s novel also conjures up an eagerness to examine responses to literature in the spirit of Jane Brown’s research. According to Brown, Goethe recognized the cultural wealth about to be lost and strived to recover and preserve the old traditions. Most of the essays in this collection engage with Brown’s discourse, each taking on the issue of the persistence of literature and exploring the dark corners of the house of literature. Coeditors Block and Richter dedicate the volume to Jane Brown, whom they deem to be one of America’s most accomplished Goethe scholars.

The volume consists of fifteen essays by prominent scholars and is divided into three parts. The first part, “The Ghosts of Goethe’s Past,” deals with the effects of scientific advances on Goethe’s work (Andrew Piper); the influence of the Gothic on his perceptual experience of architecture (Clark Muenzer); the case of doubles in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Faust (Helmut Ammerlahn); and what Goethe accomplished while experiencing “sacred vocal music in the intimacy of his home” (Meredith Lee). The second part, “The Ghost That Keeps on Giving,” draws attention to the fictional ghosts found in Goethe’s works, with a heavy focus on Faust I and Faust II (Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard T. Gray, Robert Deam Tobin, and Peter J. Schwartz). Patricia Anne Simpson engages more closely with Brown’s theory of allegory by looking at the figure of Gretchen in Adorno’s readings and citations of Goethe’s female figures. In the third section, “Spirited Encounters,” the focal point shifts to other authors who wrote in the wake of Goethe. Two contributions engage with Hegel: Franz-Josef Deiters reads Hegel’s “effacement” of the “poetic origin of history” (240), while David E. Wellbery shows how Hegel and his notion of freedom “achieve a cognate poetic articulation in Goethe’s fragmentary Festspiel” (217). Further essays, however, discuss writers at a greater temporal distance from Goethe: Martha B. Helfer looks at Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, exploring the writer’s affinities with the early Romantics when it came to perceiving literature as theory; and Jürgen Schröder writes on Gottfried Benn’s letters to Friedrich Wilhelm Oelze and Benn’s double life as a military doctor and poet.

Will the haunted house of literature persist in the age of digital humanities? The editors certainly raise the specter of vanishing it entails by engaging, in their complex introduction, with Franco Moretti. He proposed a type of distant reading in the late 1990s, in order to learn how not to read texts. Moretti believes readers will have to accept less reading in order to survey more texts through other kinds of analysis (e.g., of literary corpora) and, in the process, “must accept losing something” (7). Because of digitization, we can now survey larger collections of works and in ways that were impossible just a couple of decades ago. (The recent Distant Readings, edited by Matt Erlin and Lynn Tatlock and to be reviewed in next year’s Goethe...