Goethe’s Visual World by Pamela Currie (review)

Pamela Currie, esteemed Goethe scholar and for many years a Fellow and Tutor in German in the University of Oxford, died in 2012, just before the book under review was published. It is on Goethe, visual art, and visual theory exploring how Goethe was deeply influenced by scientists and painters and how he in turn contributes productively to certain aspects of science and to the visual arts, even today, despite the fact that he was interpreted as anti-Newtonian and falsely framed as anti-scientific. The book entails interdisciplinary approaches to art, philosophy, cognition, and psychology, among other matters engaging with theorists on color, such as John Gage and Jacques Le Rider. Chapters 1–3 and 5–7 appeared earlier in Oxford German Studies and Chapter Four is reprinted (with permission) from the Goethe Yearbook. It is helpful and exciting to see these contributions now together as a single unit, with a stimulating introduction by T.J. Reed, who conceived this book and completed it. It is an impeccable and beautiful volume.

In her first chapter, “Goethe’s Mental Images,” Currie links Goethe’s notions of Urphänomen and Einbildungskraft with her studies in psychoanalysis, arguing that “if Lacan himself showed a ‘Cartesian mistrust of the imagination as a cognitive tool’ and was followed in this by the structuralists, then nevertheless other French thinkers who came to fame in the years immediately following 1968 adopted his categories while reversing his evaluations of them” (7). Curry sides with these, including Deleuze and Guattari, arguing Goethe would have too. For them entrance into society and structure is seen rather as a tragedy and only a return to the imaginary, to a “pre-Oedipal state, could spell the end of sociopolitical repression, of the ‘Dictatorship of the Symbolic’ ” (7). When in Rome in 1787, Goethe talked of the necessity that one should “Sachen in sich sehen” and in a letter to J.H. Meyer he wrote about the problem that many people see “sich nur in den Sachen” (9) so what they see are projections only. Goethe was then trying to find alternative ways of looking and according to Currie, his subsequent ideas can well be compared to modern cognitive psychology and neurobiology, especially the book The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul by Paul Churchland in his quest for prototypes and in exploring the cognitive priority over the verbal (15). Goethe and Churchland seem to offer in their own comparable ways the possibility of training oneself to see by looking at objects without being restricted by prototypes or Urphänomene.

In her second chapter, “Ambiguous Figures in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” Currie explores gender ambiguity as “particularly noticeable in the women loved by Wilhelm: Mariane, Aurelie, Therese and Natalie” (20). Currie finds that ambiguous figures of perception, such as the Necker cube, Boring’s “My Wife and My Mother-in-Law,” and Jastrow’s “Duck-Rabbit,” make us realize that by looking again one may become aware of a “Gestalt shift.” Goethe’s novel seems to experiment with similar cognitive shifts. She relates this to the Propyläen where Goethe wrote: “Was man weiß, sieht man erst,” so that only knowledge can lead to accurate seeing and that on the other hand all seeing must be somehow informed by knowledge, or continually revised.

The third chapter “Specular Moment: Moment for Reflection” is a thorough review of recent Freudian criticism, specifically David Wellbery’s The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism, in which the subject’s relation to the mother is of particular importance and which further involves arguments from semiotics, structuralism, and discourse analysis. Currie reads Goethe’s Werther through Wellbery’s lens who, as she claims, uses Lacan’s ideas on narcissistic fixation and mental images as counterpart to the mirror stage, but then Currie turns instead to Deleuze and Guattari, arguing that Goethe showed signs of sympathy with the Imaginary as reflected in his portrayal of Eduard and Ottilie. She thus claims that Goethe did not...