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2 Fathers and Sons in Italy The Ghosts of Goethe’s Past If the law of the father or of his terror is ultimately how one might phrase the legacy of Winckelmann’s journey to but never out of Italy, the first father to have really mattered had already been there and done that by the time Winckelmann began his sojourn. Johann Caspar Goethe returned to Frankfurt in 1742 after a “cavalier’s tour” through Italy had confirmed his manhood and charted a course for his son to confirm, with haunting similarity, his own manhood several decades later. 1 By coming in between father and son, Winckelmann instituted the law that was to stand in for the father. By the time the son repeated the father’s journey, Italy had, via Winckelmann, become a site to honor and enshrine surrogates. Goethe was finally on his way to meeting a father who was never “there.” By no means did Goethe have an absent father. On the contrary, his father was enthusiastically involved in his son’s upbringing . Italy fulfilled the son’s wish to confirm the father’s absence by visiting or recalling his absent father in Italy. 2 This was also a trip that Goethe could not undertake until his father had passed away or until his death had posited an absence that the son could visit. Since it is the law much more than the father that matters here, the father cannot be said to precede his son. His presence is only by virtue of the law that his son’s journey executes. Winckelmann displaces the older Goethe so that a law can stand in for him. The writing of that law, however, can only occur if the journey of the younger Goethe imitates 49 CHAPTER 2 50 the father’s—that is, if the moves of the son not only are predicted and accompanied by those of the father but also are destined to institute an order whereby the order of things is overturned. Despite every attempt by the Goethes to discover what the father called the “natural chain of being” (Johann Caspar Goethe, 18 March 1740) and what the son called the “Urpflanze” or “primal plant,” that looking backward to creation means that everything is, in fact, backward: the son’s trip gives rise to or resurrects the father’s journey. This odd logic is perhaps better understood by remarking how the law that Winckelmann installs reverses the apparent order of that installment as developed by Freud in Totem and Taboo. If for Freud ingestion of the father and the consequent internalization of his presence accounts for the law of the father, for Winckelmann castration installs the father, who, like the ideal of the ancients , is absent. In other words, only through a valorization of castration does the father come to be or does his absence obtain. Without castration there would be no antiquity to imitate, no father or father figure for Goethe and those who follow him to emulate. Even before one summarizes the effect of this law, it is apparent that the son’s upbringing sustains the father’s interest in Italy. For nineteen years—from 1752 to 1771, when the son was three until he was twenty-two, the father composed and rewrote an account of his own Italian journey. It seems the father could only begin to consider abandoning the project once the son moved on to Strasbourg and proclaimed “to Italy, Langer, to Italy” (Mandelkow, 29 April 1770). Other remarks in that same letter might well have convinced the father that the son would seek the father in Italy: “There is much that I still lack. Paris shall be my school. Rome my university. For it truly is a university, and once one has seen it, one has seen everything. Therefore I shall not enter it in a hurry.” The son recognizes a lack that renders Rome irresistible. The land of “il Papa” is the university that sponsors the son’s rebirth, and it is a rebirth that calls into question the need for any father save an absent one. The nature of the secrets housed in the archives of that university , which permitted the son to proclaim he would have seen “everything ,” are suggested in the previous chapter. Everything Winckelmann saw was no longer there. The concern of this chapter is how everything depends upon a deceased or absent father returning to or from ancient ruins. Goethe’s Italian journey demonstrates...

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