Goethe's Allegories of Identity

Part II. Experiments in Subjectivity

Pa r t I I Experiments in Subjectivity This page intentionally left blank the preceding chapters have discussed Goethe’s efforts to come to terms with rousseau’s new subjectivity in moral terms. The three chapters in Part II address his efforts to deal with the representational problems it posed. For if the interior self is unknowable even to itself, the poet has no ready way to represent its interior dynamics. Yet how else can one represent it, since its interior dynamics are what it actually is? So effective was Goethe’s solution to the problem that the central figures of his mature works seem self-evidently to have fully developed interior lives, beginning already in Friedrich Schiller’s review of Egmont in 1788 (Sämtliche Werke, 5:932–42). This impression arises, I think, because Goethe’s classical plays, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, and Faust all appeared in the same decade from 1787 (Iphigenie) to 1796 (Wilhelm Meister ; much of Faust, part 1, appeared in the form of a fragment in 1790). Nevertheless , even though all had long gestations, mostly dating back to the early and mid-1770s, the order of publication allows separation into three stages that reveal distinguishable steps in representing interiority. Since Egmont was begun right after the publication of Werther, and it and the other two classical plays, Iphigenie and Tasso, were completed before Goethe returned his full attention to Faust and Wilhelm Meister, they constitute an initial stage, to be discussed in Chapter 4; the epistemological problems of the interior self are imbricated in Faust with Goethe’s scientific thinking and reception of Kant in the eighties and nineties, so it appears as its own stage in the Chapter 5. With Wilhelm Meister, the beginnings of which also date to the 1770s, the return from drama to narrative prose receives separate treatment in Chapter 6. as it turns out, the detour through drama that Goethe made between Werther and Wilhelm Meister is crucial to the allegorical technique Goethe developed for representing the interior self. This page intentionally left blank ...