Goethe's Mirror of Art: The Case of "Auf dem See"

BRIGITTE PEUCKER Goethe's Mirror of Art: The Case of "Auf dem See" READERS OF GOETHE'S "Auf dem See" have often sensed a certain precariousness about the poem; they have had the feeling that its three stanzas—so distinct in meter and mood—threaten forcefully to detach themselves from one another. Sigurd Burckhardt describes the poem in terms of "a mood which threatens at any moment to lose its vital grasp on things," claims that it "strains at the limits of the permissible," speaks of darkly "disruptive forces," and even of "fissures."1 Emil Staiger justifies the poem's heterogeneity by describing it according to his idea of the nature of lyric inspiration; borrowing Fr. Th. Vischer's term, Staiger speaks of Goethe's "punktuelles Zünden der Welt": "Für einen Zyklus ist der Abstand der Teile zu gering, für ein Gedicht zu groß. Es sind lyrische Momente einer Fahrt."2 With its meter that changes so abruptly from stanza to stanza, with its subject matter only loosely framed and contained by its scene—"auf dem See"—this is a poem that seems willfully to point to its own fragmentation at a time, curiously, when the doctrine of aesthetic organicism was already established in Goethe's thinking. In Germany, ideas about aesthetic organicism had been in the air since Johann Georg Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste appeared in 1771,3 and the first version of Goethe's poem, "aus dem Tagebuch der Reise in die Schweiz," actually composed during a boat trip on the Zürichersee in 1775,4 was written three years after the essay "Von deutscher Baukunst" in which the young poet, following the teachings of Herder, had formulated the thesis that Gothic architecture was an organic art form. When Goethe re-wrote the poem—deleting the image of the "Nabelschnur" and thereby ridding the poem of some of its personal urgency—he split its last stanza into two parts. In 1789, then, when it was published, "Auf dem See" was even more seemingly discontinuous than its predecessor from the Tagebuch. In one sense, of course, the irregularity of "Auf dem See" might very properly 44 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA be rationalized from the point of view of an organicist theory of art. It is a poem that describes the process of inspiration by evoking a series of moments that lead up to actual inspiration, a process very much like that described by Sulzer as "Begeisterung": Nun ist es eine aus der Erfahrung bekannte, wie wol schweer zu erklärende Sache, daß die Gedanken und Vorstellungen, die durch anhaltende Betrachtung eines Gegenstandes entstehen, sie seyen klar oder dunkel, sich in der Seele aufsammeln, daselbst wie Saamenkörner in fruchtbarem Boden, unbemerkt keimen, sich nach und nach entwickeln, und zuletzt bey Gelegenheit plözlich an den Tag kommen. Alsdenn sehen wir den Gegenstand, zu dem sie gehören, der bis dahin verworren und dunkel, wie ein unförmliches Phantom vor unsrer Stirne geschwebt hat, in einer hellen und wolausgebildeten Gestalt vor uns.5 Thus the "fissures" of "Auf dem See" can be accounted for: they represent a gathering of seemingly unconnected perceptions, controlled only in an underlying way by the process of associationism, from which the unified aesthetic object finally springs like a plant. The real world—or, rather, the object of contemplation—is transfigured and appears in a new, clearly defined form. Just so, "die reifende Frucht," emphatically the culmination of the poem as well as its last words, springs forth out of disjointed, yet associated moments of personal and natural description. From this point of view, the poem documents the germinal "stages" in the emergence of the work of art—"die reifende Frucht"—and the art object is ironically yet appropriately returned to nature, in that the working of the imagination is itself shown to be natural, an associative mixture of conscious and unconscious impulses. If we continue to consider the poem in this way, it is hardly surprising, then, that the act of description in "Auf dem See" should first be portrayed as an act of self-discovery. In the first stanza of the poem, the experience of...