Goethe's Splitting Image: Male Sexuality and/as Writing in "Das Tagebuch" and Beyond

SVEN-ERIK ROSE Goethe's Splitting Image: Male Sexuality and/as Writing in "Das Tagebuch" and Beyond In fond memory of Charlie Bernheimer AT A1907 MEETING OF THE VIENNA Psychoanalytical Society, a .group of prominent early psychoanalysts discussed "a poem by Goethe.'" The poem, which they spoke about in connection with a paper Maximilian Steiner had delivered on functional impotence, was, unmistakably, Goethe's 1810 "Das Tagebuch."The same mis-ensc ène of sexual impotence that caught the eye of the psychoanalysts is doubtlessly responsible for the poem's effective banishment from its author's consecrated oeuvre. Goethe deemed "DasTagebuch" too controversial to publish in his lifetime, and it was not until 1861 that (a corrupt text of) the poem was published, in a limited edition, by the Berlin book dealer Saloman Hirzel. "Das Tagebuch" was withheld from the 1885 Weimar edition of Goethe's complete works, not to be included until 1910; and not until 1914 was a crucial , expurgated passage restored in a list of variant readings. "Das Tagebuch" has only rarely made its way into anthologies of Goethe's poetry and is not included, for example, in Erich Trunz's widely used Hamburg edition.2 This history of suppression and bowdlerization is exemplary of a self-perpetuating critical reticence toward "Das Tagebuch." As late as the early 1980s, Hans Rudolph Vaget was the first critic to elaborate a sophisticated reading of the poem's central concern of the interrelation of sexuality and writing.3 In light of the poem's preoccupations with issues of -writing and the psychology of desire , it seems doubly remarkable that no contemporary critic to my knowledge has followed the lead of the poem's early psychoanalytic appreciators and attempted to read it in meaningful dialogue with psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis provides, I would ar- 132 Sven-Erik Rose gue, the most subtle theoretical tools available for grasping the poem's particular engagement of (male) sexuality and—or as—writing . In elaborating, in the first part of this essay, such an eminently necessary close reading of "Das Tagebuch" my emphasis will be on the ways in which it—with comic ebullience—articulates the relation of writing and desire in terms of subjective fissure. The enjoyment, indeed sexual enjoyment, of the decidedly unheroic and non-integrated self that we encounter in my reading of "Das Tagebuch" is completely at odds with a long-standing interpretation of Goethe's treatment of sexuality as unproblematically harmonic in a holistic humanism. The current critical moment has witnessed considerable interest in reevaluating Goethe in light of theories of sexuality.4 These provocative readings draw upon new theoretical paradigms, often assimilating biographical and cultural evidence with textual readings . Given the current critical climate, the undervaluation of "Das Tagebuch" becomes especially regrettable. The poem, quite simply, constitutes Goethe's most direct meditation on the interrelation of writing and sexuality, his most concentrated and emphatic articulation of a poetics of desire. The perspective which Goethe's misplaced poem provides permits us to perceive moments in his writing that we would otherwise be apt to overlook or undervalue. Thus in the second part of my essay, I attempt to demonstrate a context for my reading of Goethe's treatment of writing and desire in "DasTagebuch" by reading related dynamics in the Römische Elegien and Die Wahlverwandtschaften. In tracing this under-remarked complex -which "Das Tagebuch" can serve to illuminate, however, my aim is equally to underscore the poem's singularity within it. Perhaps counterintuitively, I would argue that to bemoan the critical silence that has enshrouded "Das Tagebuch" and to strive to award it a more central place would be to squander the opportunity to exploit the historical contingencies that have pushed the text to the periphery of Goethe's oeuvre. I would rather propose— strategically—leaving it there. The poem's critical neglect indeed renders it a privileged site from which to look awry at Goethe's broader production, in particular his treatment of sexuality.5 Furthermore , "Das Tagebuch" resists integration into Goethe's consecrated canon for more profound reasons than the conditions of its editorial history. In other words, my critical interest in keeping the poem "peripheral" has grown out...