The Eye and the Gaze: Goethe and the Autobiographical Subject by Evelyn K. Moore (review)

Evelyn Moore explores the evolution of Goethe's autobiographical "I/eye" through the lens of a poetics aimed at creating a new way of seeing and being in the world. Moore focalizes her argument through passages that emphasize visual moments in Goethe's oeuvre. Contrasting Goethe's "lebendige Anschauung" with dictatorial ways of viewing the world exemplified by thinkers like Lavater and Newton, who both sought to fix external reality through the categorical determinations of fundamental inner truths, Moore lays claim to neither a biographical nor a post-Freudian psychoanalytical interpretation of Goethe's works. Instead, she focuses on scenes that contain metareflections on language and vision and that have constitutive ramifications for subjectivity. Here Moore adopts Jacques Lacan's visual epistemology, connecting Lacan's ideas about the construction of the subject to Goethe's use of visual moments to construct selfhood.

Her first chapter accordingly begins with an analysis of Die italienische Reise; she understands Goethe's sojourn in Italy as engendering a rebirth of the self through a change in perspective. Her scholarship not only demonstrates a solid grasp of Goethe's correspondences and those of his contemporaries but also incorporates close readings of visual documents—such as paintings by Tischbein and by Angelika Kaufmann and Goethe's own sketches—which enliven her analysis greatly. Moore not only examines Goethe's reactions to being portrayed by Tischbein but also understands a Lacanian dilemma of an observing subject being captured by the gaze of others in several scenes of Die italienische Reise. The lack of an ability to control the meaning of the image, as an object fixed in the gaze of the painter, as Moore argues, becomes a locus of anxiety for Goethe, where language and (narrative) masquerades provide a prophylactic means for self-determination. In the same vein, the second chapter investigates Dichtung und Wahrheit as a kind of autobiographical masquerade. Her close reading adroitly examines how narrative deceptions underlie Goethe's anticonfessional project, and she convincingly elucidates the overarching sentiment that fiction (Dichtung) is necessary in order to arrive at truth (Wahrheit).

Chapter 3 presents a novel reinvestigation of Goethe's relationship to Lavater and his physiognomic project. Via scenes in Die italienische Reise and Dichtung und Wahrheit that she introduces in the first two chapters, Moore neatly relates how Lavater's physiognomy research was intimately connected to Goethe's fear of being observed. Indeed, Moore rightly contrasts Goethe's way of seeing with Lavater's physiognomic gaze. Lavater's pseudoscience aimed to unmask human deceptions and reveal an inner "truth," as Lavater attempted to elevate a "divine" language of natural signs above the tainted veil of the arbitrary. In this sense, Moore's reading would certainly profit from Richard T. Gray's discussion of the relationship between Lavater and Goethe in About Face (2004), as Moore misses Goethe's praise of the active imagination of the individual—via clothing and masquerades, as an expression of the inner self—which Goethe already lays out against Lavater's predeterminism in his appendix to the first volume of Physiognomische Fragmente (Gray 144–50). Visual documents continue to provide useful points of reference and often act as poignant counterweights within Moore's exposition, and she compellingly argues that Goethe uses language and fictive masquerades as a means for unmasking Lavater's physiognomic eye as subjective and as socially contingent.

In the fourth chapter, Moore explores Goethe's reactions to "Werther fever" in Campagne in Frankreich, which describes his meeting with Friedrich Victor Lebrecht Plessing in 1776, and Briefe aus der Schweiz (1779). Moore seems less interested in psychoanalyzing these texts, instead exploring how Goethe's texts reveal an evolving understanding of the complex web of identifications that serve to construct an individual's identity. In her analysis of Briefe aus der Schweiz, Moore brilliantly reads the narrative against Lavater's physiognomic eye and builds on Alice Kuzniar's famous Lacanian reading of Werther. She expounds on how Werther's...