Text as Image and Self-image: The Contextualization of Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit (1810-1813)

DEIRDRE VINCENT Text as Image and Self-Image: The Contextualization of Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit (1810-1813)1 Man tries to make for himseU in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and inteUigible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience , and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative phUosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional IUe, in order to find in this way the peace and security he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.2 I IF EINSTEIN HAD HAD GOETHE SPECIFICALLY Ui mind when he was expressing these views, he could not have made a more relevant or perceptive statement about him, for Goethe was a poet, a painter, a natural scientist, and a phUosopher, aU roUed into one. Multi-faceted Ui his creativity, his lifelong task was Ui aU things the same: to explore and construct the Ufe he led in such a way as to produce for himself an inteUigible picture of the world around him. At aU times his underlying goal was to ensure for himself, as Einstein proposes, an inner harmony that was neither given to nun by Providence nor afforded him by cücumstance or bis contemporaries. Füst and foremost he was a poet, next a dramatist and novelist, last and least a phUosopher. In between, though rather closer to the last than the first, came his work as both painter and natural scientist. He clearly sought to make an "inteUigible picture of the world" for hünseü throughout aU the spheres of his activity , reflected in the fabric of aU his texts of whatever kind. These texts were of enormous importance to him as the means by which he estabUshed and secured his sense of self. From Götz (1771-73) to the 126 Deirdre Vincent Wanderjahre (1808-29) and Faust (1772-1832) he wrote and rewrote them, creating and recreating a whole corpus of imagined images and self-images at one and the same time in order to create, explore, and test that self Ui relation to the world around. Interesting above aU in the mixture of fiction and autobiography that prevaUs everywhere throughout Goethe's oeuvre is the balance between these two kinds of writing, as weU as the increasing predominance of autobiography, always a major (though hidden) factor Ui his fiction. As I mean to show, the primary motivation behind the writing of Dichtung und Wahrheit appears to have been quite different from what we have long beheved and to have had a significant impact on the completed text. The chief reason for writing it seems to have derived düectly, if only graduaUy, from a cumulative, complex mixture of negative emotions Ui Goethe—a sense of hurt, disappointment, anger, and fear, as weU as the awareness of personal transitoriness. This deserves attention for three interrelated reasons: such motivation is Unportant first of aU because of its significant Unks with the rest of the oeuvre Ui terms of Goethe's mode of writing; secondly because it helps us to understand how very careful we must be Ui dealing with the autobiographical writings as a source of potentiaUy useful insight into anything else that Goethe ever wrote, or into how and why he did so. The thud reason is undoubtedly the most interesting: I beUeve, and hope to be able to show, that Ui setting out to write Dichtung und Wahrheit Goetiie sought—Ui part deUberately, Ui part Uituitively—to execute a magnificent sleight of hand vis-à -vis his readership that would inform and düect the subsequent readings of the rest of his oeuvre. "For writer and for reader," says Patricia Spacks, "autobiography meets the desüe that Ufe should make sense, a yearning far more fundamental than any wish that one particular thing or another should happen to the protagonist of a Uterary work."3 Of this Goethe had become aware by the time he came to write Dichtung und Wahrheit and it was an awareness...