Lessing on Liberty: The Literary Work as Autobiography

Lessing on Liberty: The Literary W ork as Autobiography FRANK G. R YDERqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA This e ssay ,which urge s a rad ically unorthod oxvie w of Le ssing as man and write r, also take s autob iography in a some what “liberated” sense, to include any self-revelation of the subject’s essential attitude toward the central issues of his life and times.1 Of life and times it concentrates on the latter, being part of a larger study devoted to questions of social justice and human rights, of personal liberty and the claims of authority, as they occupy the attention of writers in Germany of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Lessing serves as a case in point, but directly comparable approaches lead to similarly heterodox views of Goethe, Schiller, and other literary figures of the period. Not only because the devotion of such writers to formal autobiography varies—only with Goethe is it extensive—but be­ cause autobiographical statement is, like other kinds of language, camouflage as well as communication, we need to widen the frame of evidence to encompass the lines, and the spaces between the lines, in letters, in recorded casual utterances, and especially in literary works—whatever the difficulties inherent in treating the last as autobiography. We will not profit much from the tradi­ 229 230 cbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA / F R A N K G. R Y D E R tional identification of the author with one of his fictive heroes. True, Werther is somehow Goethe, Posa speaks for Schiller, Nathan is Lessing on the rivalry of religions. But these evocations of personality are tenuous and unreliable. They are often adulter­ ated by pathos—the persona as idealization of the self—or obscured by the tension between revelation and mask. The work of biographers is too often distorted by their attitudes, usually hagiographical, toward such ambiguities. What we are after in the case at hand, is the surest possible access to the “deep structure” of the writer’s mind, the deep structure which generates, at any given time, all the explicit utterances at the surface level. Remarkably, we will find ourselves turning often in such a search to the literary work, relying (with due caution) less on ostensible meaning and the received interpretation, more on the elusive but genuine evidence of contradictory stances in related works or inconsistencies in the inner logic of plot or character, inconsistencies which can be explained only by reference to the author’s own divided mind or to feelings he might overtly deny. Even the fact that a work is left fragmentary may reveal the threat of a similar, more palpable inconsistency, as if the author had found himself in danger of taking or seeming to take a position he was not prepared to sustain, of revealing more than he had intended to reveal. Above all, and especially in the case of Lessing, we shall have to question both traditional pieties and modern apologetics. I see Lessing (at least in the present context) neither as the staunch hero of Reason engagee, “Streiter fur Wahrheit,” exemplary scion of yet another of the obligatory Lutheran pastorates, nor yet as the cool tactician of the mind—Alan Menhennet’s Lessing as the “intellectual’s intellectual,” for whom discussion and controversy are all and whose plays are problem-solving. I should rather see him as a man complexly involved in the essential political and social divisions of his time, aware of the discontinuity between the demands of reason and the practices of society, but himself of seriously divided convictions and allegiances, on the one hand Lessing on Liberty IYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 2 3 1 qponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPO d e d icate d to the principle s of fre e d om,on the othe r still pe r­ suad e dof e ithe rthe rightne ss or the ine vitab ility of the ab solutist state and prince ly rule . Inste ad of re pre se nting e ithe rposition in more or le ss unalloy e d form he te nd e din his e arlie r writing to le ave the state me nt unfinishe d , in his mature work to maintain b oth positions in...