Intimacy, Morality, and the Inner Problematic of the Lyric

Goethe’s post-anacreontic poetry “fundamentally alter[ed] the nature of poetic writing, inaugurating a type of literary discourse that, from a European perspective, can be called the Romantic lyric.” Thus argues David Wellbery in “Idyllic and Lyric Intimacy,” the introductory essay of The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism.¹ Wellbery does not read the Romantic lyric in the poetological tradition it generated, a tradition that is “in essence tautological, drawing on, and reinforcing, the mythical values—‘nature,’ ‘force,’ ‘youth,’ ‘unmediated song’—the texts themselves set into circulation” (7); rather he approaches Goethe’s early poetry as a particular discursive practice that produces the effects of which it speaks. A comparison of Goethe’s “Maifest” with passages from Salomon Geßner’s sentimental idylls reveals the “discursive mutations,” the changes in the pragmatic, the fictional, the temporal, and the semantic structures that generate the “new enunciative modalities and strategies of reading” (11) associated with the Romantic lyric. While the comparison with Geßner focuses on particular changes in literary writing, the epochal significance Wellbery attributes to Goethe’s poetry from the 1770s is not restricted to literary history; rather, Wellbery draws on Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Niklas Luhmann to recognize the broad social relevance of Goethe’s writing technique. It is said to have changed “the field of intimate communications” and to have helped reorganize intimacy itself (see 10–11). Furthermore, the structure of the lyric that “crystallize[s] into the signature of a historical emergence” (3) around Goethe’s poetry is not restricted to the Romantic period. As the argument progresses past the comparison with Geßner and turns increasingly abstract, Wellbery develops in nuce a theory of the modern lyric. In respect to what the essay identifies as “the inner problematic of the lyric” (22), Wellbery puts Goethe in proximity to the poetic concerns of one of the most progressive lyric voices of the twentieth century, Paul Celan.²

That Goethe’s post-anacreontic poetry alters the field of intimate communications (presumably for Western society at large) and that it already carries the seed for the modern lyric are two far-reaching assertions that should enthuse any Goethe scholar and make him or her forget that by the same token Wellbery reduces their genius to that of a gifted craftsman, the mere addressee of discursive changes that created effects that hitherto had erroneously been taken for expressions of a higher soul. In the following, I want to revisit both observations, not to remystify Goethe, but to expand on the sociohistorical context from which the Romantic lyric emerges. That is, I want to read the poetic changes that coalesce in Goethe’s poetry and produce a new discursive practice (and correspondingly a new hermeneutics) in the context of the larger reorganization of the field of intimate communication in the eighteenth century by picking up on a reference to Niklas Luhmann’s work that Wellbery’s essay makes merely in passing. It suggests that we understand the lyric as a “cultural technique”³ that helps redefine how intimacy is communicated. It presupposes that changes in the field of communication—rather than new poetic, psychological, or philosophical insights of exceptional souls—offer new possibilities for lovers to constitute and experience themselves in and through their intimate involvements, be they poetic or personal. A more extensive look at the sociohistorical context of this development reveals—this is my thesis—that the differentiation of this discourse in the eighteenth century is modulated by particular moral codes. These moral codes, which guide expectations of authenticity, immediacy, naturalness, originality, and singularity, produce paradoxes in communication that the Romantic lyric adopts for itself and that in turn come to structure modern notions of subjectivity.

Communication vs. Consciousness

I am, of course, aware that Niklas Luhmann’s work might not be the ideal tool to advance our appreciation of Goethe’s poetry or to satisfy our philological inclinations. If Goethe’s poetry indeed is essentially about “die Erkundung der Bedingung der Möglichkeit von Erleben,”⁴ one must wonder if the technocratic conceptual apparatus we...