Goethe's Mixed Media: The Entertainers in Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern

ERIC HADLEY DENTON Goethe's Mixed Media: The Entertainers in Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilem1 With his OWNWORKS, then and later, the early Goethe was famously cavalier , careless, forgetful, even incendiary. His autos-da-fé are the stuff of legend, and the unexpected reappearance of manuscripts like Satyros within his lifetime and, posthumously, of the Urfaust and Urmeister, seems equally phoenix-like and uncanny. A pronounced pattern of nonchalance and textual self-negligence indicates, among other things, a premedia approach to publishing in an age of pirating just on the cusp of the cult of celebrity. For those of us still wondering why Goethe went to Weimar, there might be a tell-tale clue here: a retreat into literary seclusion . There is less Byron and more than a little Salinger about the early Goethe.2 In the case of Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilem, Goethe was generous to a fault. This revue-like, carnivaleque farce was first published anonymously in 1774 in a collection entitled Neueröfnetes moralischpolitisches Puppenspiel. Goethe had donated the manuscript along with other works, including Pater Brey, to the penniless Sturm und Drang playwright Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, "möge er es zerreisen, hinlegen oder verkaufen wollen."3 It is worth noting that these farces, along with the Shakespearean Götz and the epistolary novel Werther, encompassed the published, public Goethe before 1775. Once his authorship was uncovered and acknowledged—or simply presumed from the outset—no lesser critic than Wieland compared them to Götz and Werther and praised the Puppenspiel collection as a miniature comic masterpiece: Daß ich Göthens ganze Größe fühle, habe ich Ihnen schon hundertmal gesagt. Es ist nicht möglich, stärker mit einem Menschen zu sympathisiren, als ich mit ihm sympathisirte, da ich seinen Götz, seinen Werther und sein Puppenspiel las, wovon jedes in seiner Art vortrefflich und herrlich in meinen Augen ist.4 What Wieland gives us is a pre-Weimar perspective on Goethe's balancing act between shifting comic and tragic genres; this perspective has often been overlooked in the critical tradition. Even the generic markers in these various and sundry tiu.es—puppet, puppetshow, market, marketplace, fair—advertise that Goethe deals in a different kind of theater than that of the conventional stage of his time. Goethe Yearbook XIII (2005) 20 Eric Hadley Denton Puppet and puppet show designate both an alternative model of theater and a storehouse of the theatrical past, in which Goethe rediscovered subjects and styles outdated and no longer fit for the stage: Fastnachtspiele, Hans Sachs, even versions of the Faust legend itself.5 But the designations market, marketplace, and fair pay homage to the economics of the theater , in contrast to theater as a moral, aesthetic, or national institution (Gottsched, Lessing, Schiller).This economic terminology also commemorates , historically speaking, a genre of theater associated with seventeenthcentury Paris. In this model, the high art of opera or the Comédie Française is parodied on the marketplace stage of the Théâtre de la Foire.6 In imitation, Goethe writes a kind of puppet-show, street-theater, and boulevard comedy for which a stage no longer existed; as his related experiments with Fastnachtspiel demonstrate, the early Goethe specializes in retrograde theater.7 I have two mixed-media theses that will come into focus from time to time in the course of this essay. One has to do with the use of the prehistory of technology on stage: Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilem documents the technologically motivated development of dramatic media circa 1773. Form is function; if this play has a subject at all, it is theater lighting. The other has to do with the mixing of media, technologies, and visual and verbal cultures on stage and off: Goethe transforms the marketplace into a theatrical feast celebrating mixed media, in which print and visual cultures, literary and visual genres, Hannswurst and technology are not contradictions. I also borrow liberally throughout from an amalgam of two methodological approaches that also might seem at first glance (and even afterwards ) to be contradictory: those of Mikhail Bahktin and Frederic Jameson. In carnival, Bakhtin traces cultural phenomena already dead, yet celebrated in comic effigy. In media, Jameson tracks the pre...