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Ich arbeite jetzt an einem Essay, der den Titel Geist und Kunst fiihren wird. Ferner beschaftige ich mich mit einer kleineren Erzahlung Der Hochstapler, die psychologisch eine gewisse Erganzung zu meinem Fiirstenroman bedeuten wird. Ich sammle, notiere und studiere fiir die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers. For a more detailed account of the work s genesis, see W ysling. Scherrer and Wysling, TMS 1, pp. The bulk of the documentary material that Mann collected for Felix Krull comes from Die Woche and was gathered between and It doesn t deal with crime at all, but with the universe in which Krull was to operate: While the earlier material went into folders entitled Coups Carlsson, Streiche, Gefangenschaft, the later material was filed under the following headings: Kur- und Lustorte, Hotel.

If he began by underlining sentences in articles about confidence men, soon he was underlining sections in articles with titles like Der modeme Dandy, Der Beruf eines Hotelkellners, Die Dame im Hotel, and Beim Fiinfuhrtee. In it, Pavlova talks about her first visit to the theatre, and the great impression which it made upon her. She describes the time in Stockholm when a crowd appears under her balcony and applauds her. Her maid tells her that she has brought a ray of sunshine into the lives of these people, and Pavlova realizes that this is the true meaning of her art: Ein Handbrevier fiir Hochstapler und solche, die es werden wollen [] Munich: For a discussion of this work, see Helmut Lethen.

University of California Press. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, , The dossiers for Felix Krull comprise double-sided pages of notes, and cuttings from newspapers and illustrated journals, and are held in the Thomas Mann Archive TMA in Zurich. They are described in W ysling. Even so, much of the documentary material still remains unpublished. W ysling, TMS 5, pp. Ola Alsen, Die Dame im Hotel', in: Pavlova], Aus meinem Leben, in: It seems that during the composition of the novel, the criminal theme faded more and more into the background, to be replaced by an exploration of the public nature of art.

This becomes clear when one considers the final published version of Felix Krull. In it, details of actual criminal activity have been kept to a minimum. This discrepancy between Mann s initial plans for the novel and the finished result is all- important. Mann s original idea was to explore the link between artistry and criminality, as Ignace Feuerlicht points out. No picaro worthy of the name would refuse Diane Houpfle s entreaties to call her a siibe Hure , or so nobly refuse the generosity of Lord Kilmarnock. And what sort of rogue would turn down the passionate advances of Eleanor Twentyman, telling her to overcome her confusion for the sake of decency so miissen Sie sie doch um des gesellschaftlichen Naturgesetzes und der guten Sitten willen iiberwinden.

The direction of the work changes: The most sublime expression of Krull s art is not the epileptic fit with which he escapes military service - it is his activity as a waiter in a grand hotel. He is an artist first and foremost and a rogue second. Felix Krull begins life as a sceptical attack on the figure of the artist, but it does not remain so. It begins by transposing the artist into the criminal, but it ends by transposing the artist into the social world in general. This pattern of development is perfectly in line with one of the basic premises of the novel, namely, that Krull is one of the happy few who have been blessed by fate.

There is an allusion here to an operetta that had a special place in Thomas Mann s affections: Mann attended a performance of it on the 24th May , and his review of this operetta was l ibid.. Als sich die Menge danach nicht zuriickzog, fragte ich mein Madchen, womit ich ihnen wohl die Kopfe verdreht hatte.

Ich vergab diese Antwort niemals. Das einfache russische Madchen, das sie mir gab, wies meiner Kunst ein neues Ziel. Thomas Mann und die Grenzen des Ich Heidelberg: Carl Winter, , p ibid. Krull ist, obwohl Mann und die Kritiker dies behaupten, kein picaro. Das ist ja formlich eine Parodie oder Negation des Schelmenromans. Nach den schweren Kunstgeniissen, die uns das Stadttheater im vergangenen Winter brachte, wirken die kleine Tivoli- und Wilhelmtheater-Amusements etwa wie ein Glas Selters nach einem groben Diner.

Wenn schon Blodsinn - dann schon gehorig. Das ist ein unstreitbar richtiges Prinzip. Daher geh ich auch nicht gem zur Schule. Das ist halber Kram. Im Sonntagskind aber ist der Blodsinn mit reizender Konsequenz durchgefiihrt, und darum ist es ein durchaus lobenswertes und asthetisch vollig unanfechtbares Stiick. Firstly, there is the metaphorical description of art as carbonated mineral water. This view of art as something effervescent and light-hearted paves the way for the dominant metaphor of sparkling wine Sekt in the opening section of Krull.

Secondly, there is the dislike of the drudgery of school, a trait shared by both Hanno Buddenbrook and the young Felix Krull. The early provenance of this text and its humour should not prevent us from taking it seriously. Mann is suggesting that an alternative aesthetic, an aesthetic of lightness, may sometimes have its place alongside the epic grandeur of Wagner. Mann is speaking of opera, but the lesson for literature is clear. Here, in miniature, is the idea that Mann will later formulate in terms of doppelte Optik.

This is the idea that at times art can express intense feeling, intense philosophical speculation, and that at other times it can be light-hearted and entertaining. This early review shows very clearly Mann s awareness that art takes place in a social context, and that artists create products for public consumption. And when Mann alludes to Das Sonntagskind in the early Felix Krull, he does so in the belief that comedy, just as much as tragedy, has a key place in the scheme of things.

Much of the secondary literature has portrayed Krull as a mythologist and as an illusionist. In doing so, it has failed to explore the highly socialized and sociable nature of Krull s performances. This relative absence in the secondary literature is, in my view, 22 And the piece continues in the same insouciant style: In den Couplets wird sogar Ibsen zitiert. Ich meine, mehr kann man doch nicht verlangen!

Examination of the dossier reveals an inordinate interest in the aesthetics of society. A study of the genesis of Felix Krull shows that it starts as an exploration of the artist as criminal and then tends more and more towards a study of art s involvement in the formation of the self and the community.

For example, it is highly significant that the first section of the novel that Mann chose to publish was the Muller- Rose episode. White has shown, modem novels tend to use mythological motifs in order to inflect the plot in a certain way or to make specific comments, but not to provide an overall structure. Instead, the remarks about Hermes being a prefiguration of Felix Krull are made in an ironic, secular context. The myth functions as a point of reference, adding a further dimension to the narrative - without, however, providing an overarching meta-narrative. Indeed, references to Hermes make up only a fraction of the novel.

Krull is a Hermes figure, but he is many other things as well: The insistence upon Hermes in the secondary literature has diverted discussion away from the text itself and how it operates. This is also true for the view of Krull as a Narcissus. First introduced by Hans Wysling in his impressive study of , and taken up by Hermann Kurzke27 and most of the subsequent secondary literature, this idea has dominated the research on Krull.

In my view, this is a pity, since the text itself contains no explicit reference to narcissism whatsoever. Beck, , p. Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull: It was published in Das funfundzwanzigste Jahr. Nelson, Portrait o f the Artist as Hermes: M ythology in the M odem Novel: Princeton University Press, , pp.

In fact, Krull s principal aim in life is to please other people - not what one usually associates with narcissism. Kurzke overstates his case when he claims that Krull wants applause rather than love. After all, this is the Krull who decides early on that it is better to regard other people as voll und wichtig , and who explicitly states that his attraction to Genovefa is unselfish nicht eigeniitziges Wesen war meine Lust This is the Krull who delights in Professor Kuckuck s description of Allsympathie, because it confirms what he already sensed as a youth die grobe Freude , As Jurgen Scharfschwerdt points out, Krull s yearning for the world is a vitally important part of his character and must be taken into consideration along with his other, more selfish tendencies.

The whole point of the conversation about Allsympathie with Kuckuck is that Krull may imaginatively expand his being in order to recognize his relatedness to other forms of life. Felix Krull is an important novel to get right because, as we have already noted, its composition spans almost all of Thomas Mann s creative life, from the first years of the twentieth century to Indeed, if one includes the text Das Sonntagskind, Krull goes back even further. This is what Hans Wysling means when he asserts that Krull s confessions form a summation of Thomas Mann s entire oeuvre, leading thematically to the very heart of his creative endeavour: Eckhard Heftrich, Helmut Koopmann eds.

Fischer, , Kurzke. Kohlhammer, , p. TMS 5, p Scharfschwerdt, op. The principal aims of this thesis are threefold: This thesis contains three main thematic sections. The first, Art and the notation of identity, studies the involvement of art in the articulation and cultivation of the self. Arising from Mann s early theoretical deliberations, Felix Krull is shown to elaborate a fluid and experimentally open model of identity.

The second section, Art and the notation of community, analyses the way in which Felix Krull explores interaction and complicity between Burger and Kiinstler. It reflects upon the novel s affinities with developments in the social sciences in the early twentieth century, and maintains that social interaction in Krull involves a series of aesthetically modulated negotiations. The third section, 'Narrative performance in Felix KrulV, explores narrative features including play of genres, interaction with the reader, and polyvalent realism, showing that the novel s form operates as a meta-commentary upon the thematics of the work as a whole.

In particular, the direct form of narrative address seeks to cultivate a community of highly self-conscious readers. Each of these three chapters concludes with a discussion of how these features relate to Mann s other major works. Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not yet urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings.

Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation. I would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance, or faces for the sake of masks, or the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else; all these phases and products are involved equally in the round of existence Constable, Chapter I - Art and the notation of identity In this chapter I will argue that the early work on Felix Krull represents a creative watershed in Mann s career.

It marks the moment when Mann realised that he could imaginatively expand his identity to the extent that he could identify with persons and characters far removed from his own experience and disposition. I will seek to show that Felix Krull offers a creatively adaptable model of identity, and that it presents art and aesthetics as being central to the development of the individual subject. Art has often been a key term in this debate, and the German Enlightenment in particular viewed the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility as a vital condition for the development of a mature selfhood.

Goethe and Schiller regard the project of self-realization as a task of the highest order, one in which art and nature would complement each other. Art and education are even related etymologically through the German word bilden, which can mean, variously, to form, to educate, to create. The increasing industrialisation and secularisation of the late nineteenth century brought a new urgency to these questions. For Marx, the subject is under threat from the forces of ideology and alienation.

Nietzsche, too, writes from an embattled perspective; he views the subject as agonistic, fragmented and contradictory, and prone to the dangers of nihilism and decadence. By the early twentieth century, modernism and the crisis of the subject had reached a new peak. The new psychologies of Freud, Jung and Mach boldly proclaimed the division of the subject, giving rise to a modernist literature which revelled 9.

In , in the preface to the Betrachtungen, he even defined the essence of his writing as a moral and intellectual effort about a problematic self: Schriftstellertum selbst erschien mir vielmehr von jeher als ein Erzeugnis und Ausdruck der Problematik, des Da und Dort, des Ja und Nein, der zwei Seelen in einer Brust, des schlimmen Reichtums an inneren Konflikten, Gegensatzen und Widerspriichen. Wozu, woher iiberhaupt Schriftstellertum, wenn es nicht geistig-sittliche Bemiihung ist um ein problematisches Ich?

XII, 20 2 Mann s writings of the first decade of the twentieth century bear witness to a complex meditation on his own identity. The role of his imaginative life - most particularly his existence as an artist - was central to this meditation. Time and time again, art is seen as both problematizing and articulating the self. In my view, these early texts form the theoretical background to Felix Krull, and so a thorough interpretation of the novel must take them into account.

By examining these early texts I hope to demonstrate that Felix Krull occupies a key position in the development of Mann s thinking about identity and the self. The novel is, after all, the first of Mann s works to be narrated in the autobiographical first person; whilst it adopts the problems and antitheses of the previous years, it also aims toward a more conciliatory position. The Krullian themes of acting and the conciliation between art and life can be traced back to Bilse und ich , Mann s polemical response to the charge that Buddenbrooks was a roman a clef.

In Bilse und ich, Mann sets out to justify himself by defining what kind of an artist he really is. At the heart of his creativity is a process which he calls Beseelung X, 15 or subjektive Vertiefung X, This kind of sympathetic identification will later reappear as the basis for Felix Krull s chameleon-like ability to empathize with those he meets. In Bilse und ich. But Beseelung involves projection as well as identification: Mann s creative writer is a multi-faceted composite, a kind of supercharged subject who creates art from the contradictions and tensions within his own being: Alle Gestalten einer Dichtung, mogen sie noch so feindlich gegeneinander gestellt sind, sind Emanationen des dichtenden Ich, und Goethe ist zugleich in Antonio und Tasso lebendig [ Like an actor, the poet assumes different personae or masks Maske which he then makes his own Aneignung X, And Mann contrasts the objective exteriority AuBerlichkeit of the mask X, 16f.

He is also careful to point out that the enmity between poet and reality is only apparent and is based on a misunderstanding X, 18f. The underlying implication is that art is born from a meeting of subject and reality, and if the artist wishes to create substantial works then he must adopt the forms of exterior reality. In other words, self-expression requires a borrowed persona or a mask.

This is hardly surprising. As long as subjective inner life is not expressed, it remains ethereal; only when it has taken on a concrete form can it be known. In its exploration of these issues, Bilse und ich sets out the terms of a debate about artistic identity which will continue for the rest of the decade.

Bilse und ich was soon followed by Mann s first extended essay on literary theory, Versuch iiber das Theater written , published The occasion was harmless enough: He thought the article would be finished in a couple of days, but it kept growing and ended up taking weeks to complete. Added impetus for the essay doubtless came from Mann s abortive experience with Fiorenza finished , performed But it went deeper than that.

In a letter to Moritz Heimann, Mann complains of the trouble which the essay had caused him, saying: The guiding context here is that of Nietzsche, and Mann cites an aphorism in which Nietzsche throws doubt upon the notion of character, calling it a superficial generalisation resembling the stage characters invented by a dramatist. According to Nietzsche, we credit stage characters with reality because in real life we remain content with a superficial impression of other people; we lack true insight X, Mann uses Nietzsche s aphorism to assert the One can trace this back to an earlier remark in Bilse und ich where Mann accords the title of Dichter' to the writer who works upon him self der an sich selbst arbeitet, wenn er arbeitet X, But there is an ambivalence here.

Despite Mann s repeated polemical assertions that the theatre is fundamentally distinct from serious literature, he is forced to admit the primal, fundamental unity between the actor and the author der erste Theaterdichter war der Schauspieler X, And Mann is even more explicit a couple of years later, in a note for the unfinished essay Geist und Kunst, where he describes the actor as the artist in the raw state [der] Kiinstler im Urzustand, gewissermaben. Now, what is Felix Krull if not an actor, an artist in the raw?

As a youth, his favourite activity is dressing up in costumes provided by his godfather, an occupation which earns him the nickname of Kostumkopf His first visit to an operetta begins a lifelong love affair with the theatre, and once installed in Paris he becomes a keen opera- and theatregoer There are numerous references to the theatre wie im Theater ; Theatersaison ; Szene , , ; das riesige Theater One of Felix Krull s favourite words is the camivalesque Darbietung which can be variously translated as routine, rendition, offering, or show.

The repetition of this word - it is used on several important occasions in the novel, often in the plural - tends to increase the general feeling of illusion, in particular the formulation [die] Welt und ihren Darbietungen Further use of theatrical vocabulary includes Felix Krull s description of his love affairs as die Stiickchen meines Lebens and his first appearance in the hotel dining hall as a kind of debut debiitieren before the eating public das Speisepublikum And the care with which he prepares his Toilette resembles that of an actor applying his make-up Maske-Machen des Schauspielers Felix Krull is essentially a performer, and he views existence in theatrical terms, as Donald F.

Darbietungen der Biihne , Darbietungen und W eltergotzungen The word is also used to describe the bullfight Nelson, Felix Krull or: All the World s a Stage, in: The Germanic Review 45 , no. As a consequence, he tends to perceive identity as being constructed through a process of role-playing.

But while most people act out the roles assigned to them by their social status, he feels able to improvise new roles for himself. In Versuch iiber das Theater, Mann had quoted Nietzsche to the effect that, in general, we relate to other people on a fairly superficial level as if they were actors in a play X, Felix Krull develops the idea further in order to show that social interaction relies upon the performance of prearranged, conventional roles.

Crucial here is Krull s description of his train journey to Paris and the conductors who check his ticket. The highly formal, ritualised nature of these encounters requires both parties to appear uninterested in the other. Both parties must behave artificially, almost like marionettes: Ich mubte mich stellen, als ob mir der Gedanke an seine menschlichen Bewandtnisse vollig femliege.

Having noticed the guard s wedding ring, he asks the guard to greet his wife and children for him. The guard is so embarrassed by this incongruity that he nearly falls over so sehr hatte die Menschlichkeit ihn aus dem Tritt gebracht The implicit suggestion is that people are expected to play different roles in different social spheres; an official transaction will proceed along different lines from more personal interaction. This is a dynamic model of identity as something site-specific and related to social context. The text does not claim that people are always conscious of their roleplaying; it implies, on the contrary, that such role-playing is usually unconscious.

The only characters apart from Felix Krull who manage to achieve such a conscious level of role-playing are Madame Houpfle, Professor Kuckuck and perhaps the Marquis de Venosta with his fake, affected pose of melancholy 8 and his theatralische Verzweiflungsgebarde By and large, however, it appears that social context is a 7 One of the texts which influenced Felix Krull, Heinrich Mann s Im Schlaraffenland, is even more direct in this respect, simply equating society with the theatre: Sie haben so etwas Gliickliches an sich, dab sie beim Theater, das heibt in der Gesellschaft, ungemein rasch fordem wird.

Claassen, , p. In comparison, Felix Krull is more finely nuanced, refusing to absolutize the concept. This truth appears self-evident: Felix Krull develops this idea even further during his time as a waiter in the Saint James and Albany hotel. There, he imagines that the rich hotel guests might just as easily be waiters, and vice versa. Wealth here is the deciding factor in determining one s identity, but this factor is based on pure chance and can easily change.

This leads to Felix Krull s idea of what he calls the interchangeability Vertauschbarkeit of social roles: Es war der Gedanke der Vertauschbarkeit. Den Anzug, die Aufmachung gewechselt, hatten sehr vielfach die Bedienenden ebensogut Herrschaft sein und hatte so mancher von denen, welche, die Zigarette im Mundwinkel, in den tiefen Korbstiihlen sich rekelten - den Kellner abgeben konnen.

Es war der reine Zufall, dab es sich umgekehrt verhielt - der Zufall des Reichtums; denn eine Aristokratie des Geldes ist eine vertauschbare Zufallsaristokratie. It implies that late capitalism has led to an unprecedented degree of social mobility, and that this has led in turn to a more fluid - and superficial - notion of identity as being dependent upon wealth.

But Felix Krull immediately qualifies his own analysis: Krull is the only waiter with enough skill to impersonate the most elegant guests. The fact that his thought experiments Gedankenexperimente only work sometimes suggests that personal characteristics are not always interchangeable after all: Darum gelangen mir diese Gedankenexperimente ofters recht gut, wenn auch nicht immer, da [ Zuweilen mubte ich geradezu mich selbst einsetzen und konnte niemanden sonst vom Kellner-Corps dazu brauchen, wenn der Rollentausch phantasieweise gelingen sollte In other words, identity is fluid, but not that fluid.

Some roles demand enormous natural talent if they are to be performed successfully. Here, the Goethean notion of a natural aristocracy rules out the possibility of identity being entirely open-ended. Felix Krull, then, takes the theatre as a metaphor for human interaction and exploits it to the full. In doing so, it offers a dynamic model of identity. Wysling traces the idea to J. Neither, however, does it see identity as completely fluid or malleable.

It is remarkable how much the novel anticipates the ideas of the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman. In his influential book The Presentation o f Self in Everyday Life , Goffman uses the theatre as an analogy for human interaction. In doing so, he elaborates a model of the self based upon performance, aided by the use of fixed props and settings such as houses, clothes, and institutions. Deliberate deception is much more rare since, in general, people will tend to notice inconsistencies in another person s behaviour.

Even Felix Krull stops short of a totalizing, Schopenhauerian model of illusion. If he is an actor, he is a method actor who draws upon his own potentialities, his own latent truths, in order to create his effects. In other words, he still believes in the notion of reality das Wirkliche: Nur der Betrug hat Aussicht auf Erfolg und lebensvolle Wirkung unter den Menschen, der den Namen des Betrugs nicht durchaus verdient, sondem nichts ist als die Ausstattung einer lebendigen.

Krull s Bediirfnis [ What they do offer is ways of looking at also points out ibid, p. Penguin, 11 ibid.. The arts of piercing an individual s effort at calculated unintentionality seem better developed than our capacity to manipulate our own behaviour, so that regardless of how many steps have occurred in the information game, the witness is likely to have the advantage over the actor 12 ibid.

In developing the conceptual framework employed in this report, some language of the stage was used. The claim that all the world s a stage is sufficiently commonplace for readers to be familiar with its limitations and tolerant of its presentation, knowing that at any time they will easily be able to demonstrate to themselves that it is not to be taken too seriously. This functionalist approach to identity is similar to Wittgenstein s approach to meaning and truth through contextrelated language games Sprachspiele.

In trying to understand a difficult concept like identity, it seems that the best method is to look at identity in the contexts in which it is articulated. Life is not art, but that should not blind us to the fact that life and art often interact. Of course, the theatrical metaphor can only be taken so far, but it certainly is one compelling way of looking at human identity.

And there are benefits to be had from a model which does not consider the personality as static and absolute, but rather as dynamic and evolving within a network of social interaction. Although this essay was left unfinished, it provided a wealth of material and laid the theoretical groundwork for later works such as Der Tod in Venedig and Doktor Faustus, as T. The periods of composition of the two works overlap; they were written almost consecutively.

The initial idea for Krull was noted in , in Mann s seventh notebook. Reed, G eist und Kunst. The note first appears in notebook 7, which was completed in , and was then copied into notebook 9 N II, In my view, both Geist und Kunst and the early Krull are bold experiments which point the way towards the controlled mastery of the later works. I will therefore begin by examining the relevance of Geist und Kunst for an understanding of Krull. Thus N 40 asserts the primal affinity between criticism and the lyric mode, claiming that the intellectual writer is the true artist der Dichter par excellence.

He now reflects upon two different conceptions of art, one Christian and Platonic, and one sensual and pagan. Mann then reformulates the dichotomy in Schillerian terms. Schiller, in his essay Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, had described two modalities of artistic creation: But rather as the final phase of Schiller s essay seeks a reconciliation between the two modes, so Mann s adoption of Schiller s terminology points the way towards the possibility of reconciliation: Undated letter to the Saale-Zeitung.

Auch mache ich die ersten Studien zu einem geplanten historischen Roman. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Hochstapler-Romans in: Blatter der Thomas Mann Gesellschaft, Zurich, no. Dieser Gegensatz in Goethe und Schiller nicht rein ausgedriickt. Schiller besitzt eine gute Portion sinnlicher Naivetat. N 49 22 The implication is clear: Just two notes later N 51 we have arrived at the kernel of Felix Krull: Aber doch nur ein menschliches Dokument, ein Stoff und Material nichtwahr?.

This is soon followed by a rush of Krullian motifs: Then there is a tentative shift in favour of the naiv mode, accompanied by a more tolerant attitude towards the theatre: Herr Fuchs soli [ But Mann is quickly drawn back towards the more moral figure of the critical writer: Vomehmste Entwicklungsstufe des Typus [des Literaten]: In N , on the other hand, Mann considers the modem trend towards a new immediacy with nature, and decides that he must somehow take account of it in his own work.

Geist und Kunst is unfinished, its tensions unresolved, but it remains a vital testimony to the evolution of Mann s own identity as an artist. The antitheses in Geist und Kunst are not part of some abstract debate, but form part of Mann s own attempt at self-definition. As Hans-Joachim Sandberg puts it: Goethe is increasingly viewed as an acceptable alternative to Wagner. Thus, in N 97, Goethe s decision to set Shakespeare above himself as an ideal is said to reveal a noble sensibility that contrasts favourably with Wagner s arrogance Wagner hat niemals emporgeblickt.

Universitets forlaget, , p. Reed , OGS 1, p. Here, the word is used to denote the boldly realistic effects achieved by the naiv artist. Thomas Mann considered his own novel Buddenbrooks to be a good example of Plastik. Mann quotes Schopenhauer to the effect that words are misleading and comments: Gerade der Schriftsteller, der dies nie vergibt, der also bewufit spielt, ist ein Kunstler so gut wie der Plastiker.

In other words, the intellectual artist s conscious scepticism about language enables him to manipulate ideas and concepts with 77 the grace and beauty of a poet. The formulation who plays consciously der bewufit spielt is another movement towards synthesis, since it unites both the spontaneity of the naiv artist and the consciousness of the intellectual sentimentalisch one.

This movement towards conciliation goes, in my view, to the heart of Felix Krull. He understood that plasticity could also have aspects which were performed consciously and intellectually. In other words, great art could arise from an admixture of unconscious and self-conscious elements: From this perspective, Felix Krull can be viewed as a deliberately playful approach to Goethe, a conscious experiment bewubt spielen N 68 in classical plasticity and form which takes Manolescu s memoirs as raw material Stoff N 51 and lends them a classical, Goethean form.

The juxtaposition is not as jarring as it first seems; after all, the trickster has been a central figure of the classical repertoire ever since Homer wrote the Odyssey. The engagement with Goethe in Felix Krull, however, is more than just a stylistic exercise. More than an approach to Goethe, it is in my view a deliberate attempt at rapprochement, a willed identification. Zuriick zur Buddenbrook- Naivitat! Reed , p.

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Reed , pp. Commenting on the conciliatory tendency of Geist und Kunst, Wysling remarks: Ein Akt der Selbstverteidigung zunachst: Thomas Mann will nachweisen, dab er nicht einfach unter die Literaten einzureihen sei, dab vielmehr gerade in seinem Falle die Kluft zwischen naiv und sentimentalisch sich iiberbriicken lasse, weil er durchaus nach eigenem Empfinden und Erleben zu gestalten in der Lage sei. Wysling , p Eric Wilson points out that Krull s Goethe imitatio immediately precedes and apparently initiates Mann s own.

Thomas Mann s Comic Artist Ph. Hofmannsthal betrachtet sich ohne Weiteres als eine Art Goethe. Wir haben das Bewusstsein der grossen Meister gewonnen Nietzsche. Hoheres, strengeres, emsteres Leben. Here, Mann describes the basic purpose of his whole work as an attempt to acquire the consciousness of the great masters: Wenn ich mich genau priife, so war dies und nichts anderes immer der Zweck meines Schaffens: Indem ich kiinstlerisch arbeitete, gewann ich Wissenszugange zur Existenz des Kiinstlers, ja des groben Kiinstlers, und kann davon etwas sagen.

Written in , in the period between Geist und Kunst and Der Tod in Venedig, it is an imaginative approach to Goethe, the apparent frivolity of which conceals a serious dialogue with the classical tradition. It is perhaps no accident that Mann decided to visit Weimar for the very first time in This visit may well have formed part of Mann s attempt to acquire das Bewusstsein der Meister.

In effect, this strategic move meant selecting and acknowledging Goethe as a literary father, just as Felix Krull develops himself by imitating the signature of his own father, Engelbert. In the following passage, Felix Krull employs the scientific vocabulary of his day, defining identification as a precondition for development: Ein Vater ist stets das natiirlichste und nachste Muster fiir den sich bildenden [ Unterstiitzt durch geheimnisvolle Verwandtschaft und Ahnlichkeit der Korperbildung, setzt der Halbwiichsige seinen Stolz darein, sich von dem Gehaben des Erzeugers anzueignen, was die eigene Unfertigkeit ihn zu bewundem notigt - oder, um genauer zu sein: Diese 30 TMS 1.

The relevance to Thomas Mann s later development of betrachtet sich Reed , p Hinrich Siefken certainly thinks so: Es liegt nahe, diesem Besuch eine ahnliche Intensivierung des Interesses an den Klassikern zuzuschreiben [ Goethe Ideal der Deutschheit, Wiederholte Spiegelungen, The book s comment upon itself is clear: Thomas Mann, in a bold act of literary hubris, is accessing and appropriating elements of the classical, Goethean tradition.

The early Felix Krull is thus arguably the beginning of Thomas Mann s conscious imitation of Goethe, an identification which was to sustain him throughout the later crises in his life. It is his first approach towards a more healthily balanced and classical style, one that would keep his earlier Erkenntnisekel firmly in check. If the work remains deeply ironic, this reflects Mann s persisting ambivalence and his refusal to adopt a facile synthesis. This new affirmation was always going to be reticent. Nevertheless, an affirmation it is - the sign of a new exuberant grace, one which had not been seen since the character of Antonie Tony in Buddenbrooks.

Felix Krull thus manages to achieve a new proximity, ease and informality with respect to tradition. In Lebensabrifi he described this approach as forming the essence of his mission as a writer: Es [Krull] mag in gewissem Sinn das Personlichste sein, denn es gestaltet mein Verhaltnis zur Tradition, das zugleich liebevoll und auflosend ist und meine schriftstellerische Sendung bestimmt.

Die inneren Gesetze, nach denen spater der Bildungsroman des Zauberbergs sich herstellte, waren ja verwandter Natur. XIII, To conclude: Felix Krull was a necessary act of hubris. It represents a bold imaginative leap which enabled Mann to relate to classical writers and themes on far more intimate terms than ever before. Thus it sets the scene and paves the way for Mann s new experiments with the classical tradition Munich: Fink, , p. On Mann s relation to Goethe, cf. Thomas Mann und Goethe Bern: Even though this passage anticipates the Freudian view o f the self as being created through a series of identifications, the vocabulary here is much more likely to stem from the vitalist, monistic theory of Ernst Haeckel , the German populariser of Charles Darwin.

Vatemachahmung, das Bewunderte, Bildung IX, f. The terms are the same, but ironic fiction has given way to explicit assertion: Goethe, famous for his love of nature, had placed experience at the centre of his art. In he told H. Laube that his genius would always be subordinate to the world s own genius: In Chapter II, the young Felix asks himself whether it is better to consider the world as being small or large Was ist forderlicher, fragte ich mich, dab man die Welt klein oder dab man sie grob sehe? The choice is essentially between a Schopenhauerian world-view and a Goethean one.

After carefully weighing up the pros and cons, he finally decides that it is more productive to view the world as something great: Eine solche Glaubigkeit und Weltfrommigkeit [bietet] doch auch grobe Vorteile. Denn wer alle Dinge und Menschen fiir voll und wichtig nimmt, wird ihnen nicht nur dadurch schmeicheln und sich sogar mancher Forderung versichem, sondem er wird sein ganzes Denken und Gebaren mit einem Ernst, einer Leidenschaft, einer Verantwortlichkeit erfullen, die, indem sie ihn zugleich liebenswiirdig und bedeutend macht, zu den hochsten Erfolgen und Wirkungen fiihren kann.

It implies moral feeling - surprising in such an apparently frivolous character. Felix Krull, then, is no ordinary con man. His conscious decision to respect the world makes him much more than an unashamed narcissist. Furthermore, this new attitude of respect and admiration for the world shows that Mann, in , is seeking - experimentally, at least - to distance himself from his previous Schopenhauerian distaste for the world. But to what extent does he believe in his recently acquired Goethean attitude?

It is clear at any rate that, in the years leading up to , 36 Goethes Gesprache, , ed. Biedermann, , p Cf. Die W elt grob oder klein sehen - was ist das Forderlichere? In his ninth notebook, Mann quotes Tasso Vergleiche Dich! Erkenne, was du bist! This definition implies the recognition that the intellectual German novel owes its existence to the supposedly naiv Goethe. So far, I have shown that Mann s principal concern in the period leading up to Felix Krull and especially during the composition of the notes for Geist und Kunst was with his own self-definition as an artist, and that this concern with personal development had led to an interest in the Goethean notion of Bildung and in Goethe himself as a potential model.

In light of this it is hardly surprising that Mann should have turned to Goethe s own autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit. Felix Krull owes much to Goethe s autobiography. Both texts begin with highly self-conscious justifications to the reader, and this is only the first of a long list of resemblances, both stylistic and thematic. A-y A parody it certainly is, but for Thomas Mann it was more than that: I shall discuss the use of Goethean style in Krull later in this thesis 43 What I intend to do here, however, is demonstrate how certain key thematic elements of Dichtung utid Wahrheit found their way into Krull, and in so doing transformed Mann s own understanding of himself as an artist.

Dichtung und Wahrheit is a book about education and the formation of Goethe s own character. It focuses on Goethe s early years in Frankfurt, Strasbourg and Leipzig, and describes his youthful adventures and misadventures from the comfortable perspective of middle age. Goethe sagt, dab die Poesie auf ihrem hochsten Gipfel ganz aeufierlich erscheine, dab sie aber, je mehr sie sich ins Innere zuriickziehe, auf dem Wege sei, zu sinken.

A few pages later, Mann reflects upon universal harmony in Goethean terms: Alles lost sich in die denkbar einfachsten harmonischen Verhaltnisse a u f N II, Lang, , despite being painstakingly researched, is at times distorted by its emphasis upon the more oedipal aspects of Felix Krull.

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While Sprecher accentuates Mann's ambivalence towards Goethe at this stage, I would be more inclined to see a conscious, playful attempt at rapprochement. Sprecher s study would have benefitted from a fuller appraisal of Felix Krull in the context of Mann s artistic and philosophical development. Goethe s description of his own Bildung is a fascinating account of how he sought out those persons and influences who would best be able to help him develop his own unique potential.

Much as Goethe s first contacts with art are through the painters in his father s employ, Felix Krull is introduced to painting by Schimmelpreester. Identification often forms an important part of this process, and Goethe regards the impulse to identify with one s superiors as a valid means of self-development. He even views the impulse to identify with characters in novels as permissible: Unter die lablichsten Versuche, sich etwas Hoheres anzubilden, sich einem Hoheren gleich zu stellen, gehort wohl der jugendliche Trieb, sich mit Romanenfiguren zu vergleichen.

Er ist hochst unschuldig, und, was man auch dagegen eifem mag, hochst unschadlich. Goethe, who presented himself in his own autobiographical fictions, himself becomes the raw material for fiction. In Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe talks of how he loves to disguise himself, most notably in Book X when he visits the family of Friedrike Brion in Sesenheim. Goethe, then, delights in playing roles - a characteristic which he shares with Felix Krull. But if Goethe demands this licence for himself, he is also very willing to extend it to others. It is characteristic of his generosity that he will take other people at face value, and allow them to pass for whatever they wish: Bei meiner Art zu empfinden und zu denken kostete es mich gar nichts, einen jeden gelten zu lassen fiir das, was er war, ja sogar fiir das, was er gelten wollte, und so machte die Offenheit eines frischen jugendlichen Mutes, der sich zum erstenmal in seiner vollen Bliite hervortat, mir sehr viele Freunde und Anhanger.

The key phrase in this sentence is gelten lassen let be, accept as valid. In other words, Goethe is willing to accept appearances, and this candid approach to life wins him friends. Felix Krull, too, makes it a point of honour to take seriously everyone he meets wer alle Dinge und Menschen fiir voll und wichtig nimmt [ ] ; and it is precisely this attitude which makes him so appealing to others [die] ihn zugleich liebenswiirdig und bedeutend macht Merck detests having to live and let live: Merck thus fails to realise an important On the other hand, it is often precisely his faith in nature - and in his own nature - that sees him through.

In the passage dealing with the necessary renunciations of life, Goethe states that nature preserves humanity by granting it the gift of frivolity Leichtsinn: Diese schwere Aufgabe zu losen, hat die Natur den Menschen mit reichlicher Kraft, Tatigkeit und Zahigkeit ausgestattet. Besonders aber kommt ihm der Leichtsinn zu Hiilfe, der ihm unzerstorlich verliehen ist. HA X, 77 Leichtsinn, then, figures in Goethe s thought as an antidote to the strenuousness of life: Perhaps it was this very mercurial quality which enabled him to sense his own inner necessity in and flee to Italy in order to develop his full potential.

Leichtsinn is, in any case, one of the principal attributes of Goethe s hero Egmont. Egmont is important here. It seems that Mann had not only Dichtung und Wahrheit, but also Egmont in mind while writing the early Krull. The first evidence for this is Mann s essay in praise of sleep, Siisser Schlaf XI, , first published in the Neue Freie Presse on 30th May , half a year before he began work on Krull. The title of the essay alludes to Egmont s soliloquy in Act V, where sleep comes to Egmont like a blessing after all that he has endured SuBer Schlaf! Du kommst wie ein reines Gluck ungebeten, unerfleht am willigsten.

Egmont s gift of sleep and his prophetic vision prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is a favourite son of mother nature. Similarly, Mann in regards the ability to sleep as evidence of mankind s connection with the natural world XI, L. Mir ist dann, als sei alles individuelle Dasein als Folge zu begreifen eines iibersinnlichen Willensaktes und Entschlusses zur Konzentration, zur Begrenzung und zur Gestaltung, zur Sammlung aus dem Nichts, zur Absage an die Freiheit, die Unendlichkeit, an das Schlummem XI, Others are likely to find that they must accept the individual on faith p.

So recht nach meinem Herzen war es zum Beispiel, wenn Mesmer die Moglichkeit betonte, dab der Schlaf, in dem das Leben der Pflanzen besteht [ There are a number of other connections between Krull and Egmont. Egmont, after all, forms the keynote and conclusion to Goethe s own presentation of himself in Dichtung und Wahrheit.

In the play, Egmont s charm arises from his insouciance and his desire to live in the moment carpe diem. This same carefree nature means that Egmont falls victim to Alba s treacherous plot, and he becomes a political martyr. If one compares Egmont and Krull, at first glance, the two works seem very different. It is true that Krull lacks the overtly political dimension of Egmont.

Nevertheless, Krull s existential attitude to life appears very similar to Egmont s. Perhaps the key feature of both characters is their Lebenslust, their joie de vivre. In a late monologue, Egmont talks of how he used to dislike the long political discussions at court. As soon as he could, he would rush out of doors, into the fresh air, and jump onto his horse: Da eilte ich fort, sobald es moglich war, und rasch aufs Pferd mit tiefem Atemzuge!

Und frisch hinaus, da wo wir hingehoren! Ins Feld, wo aus der Erde dampfend jede nachste Wohltat der Natur, und durch die Himmel wehend alle Segen der Gestime einhiillend uns umwittem [ In order to avoid it, he composes sick notes in his father s handwriting excusing him from school. When this strategy succeeds, he heads straight for the open fields around town: War dies gelungen, so hinderte nichts mich mehr, die Schulstunden eines Tages oder mehrerer frei [ Another quality which Egmont and Krull share is their commitment to freedom.

While Egmont is characterised by his love of freedom, Krull asserts that freedom is the fundamental condition of his existence so beruhte es [mein Leben] doch in erster Linie auf der Vor- und Grundbedingung der Freiheit In both cases, this commitment entails a defence of free-thinking, of fantasy. Warned by his secretary that his servants 47 For a discussion of Mann s development of the term Sympathie, see the concluding section of this chapter.

Ist ein FaBnachtspiel gleich Hochverrat? Sind uns die kurzen bunten Lumpen zu mibgonnen, die ein jugendlicher Mut, eine angefrischte Phantasie um unsers Lebens arme BloBe hangen mag? Wenn ihr das Leben gar zu emsthaft nehmt, was ist denn dran? Such sentiments are also shared by Felix Krull. His defence of fantasy is hardly less passionate: Welch eine herrliche Gabe ist nicht die Phantasie, und welchen GenuB vermag sie zu gewahren! Furthermore, both characters love dressing up.

Krull is a Kostiimkopf , and Egmont impresses Klarchen by wearing his court regalia, the 48 Golden Fleece. As critics of Egmont from Schiller onwards have pointed out, such behaviour is ill-suited to a politician, and even irresponsible. Nevertheless, this very insouciance is an integral part of Egmont s charm. Both Egmont and Krull charm all they meet: Indeed, the attractiveness of both figures borders on the supernatural. Mann knew Goethe s discussion of das Damonische at the end of Dichtung und Wahrheit. There, Goethe defines the Daemonic as a force in nature which can express itself in a variety of ways.

If it manifests itself in people, these individuals become irresistible: Eine ungeheure Kraft geht von ihnen aus, und sie iiben eine unglaubliche Gewalt fiber alle Geschopfe [ HA X, Much has been written on the subject of the Daemonic. For an excellent summary of the scholarship, I refer the reader to a forthcoming article by Angus Nicholls. Nicholls relates the genesis of the concept to Goethe s engagement with the philosophies of Kant and Schelling, arguing that Goethe uses the term daemonic in order to distinguish the epistemological limits of rational philosophy.

There may be a teasing allusion to this fact in a later section of Felix Krull. In any case, the preoccupation with the symbols of authority in both texts show an interest in the social power of imagemaking. It seems that even the later, classical Goethe was not beyond a touch of nature mysticism.

Are You an Author?

There is a sort of joyful fatalism about this attitude which appealed to Nietzsche, and it appealed to Thomas Mann as well. It seems to me that, for Mann, writing Felix Krull was a kind of thought experiment: Of course, the natural world per se barely features in Krull. One aspect of nature is, however, frequently discussed: The novel is remarkable for its celebration of sexuality, which, at the time was something quite new in Mann s work. I will discuss gender and sexuality later on in section vi; the point here is that the novel s relatively positive treatment of sexuality may well be a result of Mann s new preoccupation with Goethe.

Goethe s emphasis on nature as a key to development could well have given Mann a new confidence in himself. For Goethe, education had to be guided by nature to be considered valid. Bildung as portrayed in Wilhelm Meister is something elusive which is acquired by living, and not through reason alone. Felix Krull, too, views Bildung as an organic process, one which cannot be forced, and which requires a light touch: Bildung wird nicht in stumpfer Fron und Plackerei gewonnen, sondem ist ein Geschenk der Freiheit und des auberen MiiBigganges; man erringt sie nicht, man atmet sie ein; verborgene Werkzeuge sind ihretwegen tatig, ein geheimer FleiB der Sinne und des Geistes, welcher sich mit scheinbar volliger Tagedieberei gar wohl vertragt [ Felix Krull s own native confidence in himself, the belief that he is ein Sonntagskind, ein Vorzugskind des Himmels , is accompanied by the belief that there is such a thing as natural aristocracy, and that he is aus feinerem Holz geschnitzt Such an attitude implies faith in a providential, divine order: Seen from this Goethean perspective, a healthy dose of confidence is an essential condition for a happy life.

Later on, however, Krull has an inkling that this blithely fatalistic attitude could be portrayed as morally irresponsible. When the town priest Chateau praises him for the natural, innate quality of his voice, he realises that such praise sits uneasily with the protestant work ethic of the bourgeoisie, even implying paganism: DaB nun Stadtpfarrer Chateau es ganz einfach anders hielt, mutete mich wie etwas vollig Neues und Kiihnes an, [ What the narrative touches upon here is the old crux of faith versus works.

Faith, since it leaves everything up to the gods, flies in the face of admonishments to work: In Goethe, this tension is never quite resolved. Felix Krull signals the problem as Goethean by using the phrase angeborene Vorziige - a deliberate allusion to the Goethean phrase angeborene Verdienste innate merits. The basic question, according to Mann, is whether merit lies in being esse or in works operari. Goethe s phrase angeborene Verdienste pronounces judgement in favour of esse, to the detriment of operari IX, The problem is already there in the prewar Felix Krull, gently touched upon in the encounter with the priest and left unresolved Later, it is mentioned again and still left open f.

This is roughly the same happy conclusion that Goethe came to. In his early Sturm und Drang period, Goethe s violent attachment to nature produced ecstatic works of art, but threatened to destroy him Werther. Later, in his classical period, he was able to achieve a harmonious equilibrium between faith and works, nature and intellect. In other words, in Goethe, the pagan affirmation of life and the protestant affirmation of hard work coexist in a harmonious S'? Felix Krull allowed Thomas Mann to experience a hypothetical intimacy with Goethe for the first time in his career - but not for the last.

Indeed, the novel seems to have laid the groundwork for much of Mann s subsequent engagement with Goethe. The connections between Goethe and Felix Krull are particularly evident in Mann s short piece on the writer Erich von Mendelssohn, Vorwort zu einem Roman, which he wrote in for the Siiddeutsche Monatshefte X,.

XI, where Goethe describes Schopflin s great natural gifts: HA IX, 51 Und sehr schwer ist es hier wiederum, zwischen personlichem Verdienst und dem, was man als Gunst der Umstande bezeichnet, eine gerechte und scharfe Trennungslinie zu ziehen [ Already in this text we have the presentation of Goethe as Gotterliebling and the phrase angeborene[r] Verdienste X, ; we have a description of Dichtung und Wahrheit as the formation of a genius thanks to the guidance of beneficent fate.

Goethe s autobiography announces: Now I m dying, and night enshrouds my senses When the page and her king die in battle, Zauberberg] ist eine gewaltige Entgrenzungsphantasie Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Das Leben als Kunstwerk [Munich: The Meaning of Opera New York: Walter Ducloux New York: Stein and Day, , At their funeral they are bedded together before the altar in the church.

Love and death pervades pop psychology 15 and is everywhere in film, for example in Woody Allen s wacky Love and Death and Marguerite Duras s La maladie de la mort In High Noon Gary Cooper, must face the man who hates me In Duel in the Sun, branded lust in the dust when it was released , Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones shoot and wound each other from a distance at Squaw s Head Rock before her slow, tortured crawl up the rock toward him and their last rendezvous.

In Guilty as Sin , the adversaries in a deadly erotic game pull each other over the balustrade and fall four stories, but, landing on the back of his head, the villain cushions his intended victim s fall. The positions are reversed when the author of French Lessons, Alice Kaplan, tells of making love on Alice Bergstrand s gravestone, cool marble below; warm thick Ted above.

In The Skull beneath the Skin, P. James recalls that eighteenth-century whores had copulated with their clients on the flat tops of tombs in London s East End graveyards. Newsweek magazine takes its readers familiarity with the love-death topos for granted when reporting that in The Widow of St. Pierre, a proud French officer Katie Hafner s The Well: Love, Death and the Prom, 18 and finds space for a report about a wedding couple with a macabre sense of humor, the man wearing a skull-emblazoned T-shirt, black tux, and plastic skull scepter, the woman death-head earrings, a black dress, and black veil.

To their disappointment, this bride and groom were prevented from sealing their troth in the graveyard. People who owned lots in the cemetery found the couple s plans degrading. Shaken, the two went home; after a large glass of cognac each, The boy died instantly, but the girl was able to crawl a few feet and embrace her dead lover.

Their bodies lay in the heat for two days before they could be retrieved. They died on a bridge. Here the heroine agrees to have sex with her mother s boyfriend after he has run over a Labrador retriever and finished off the animal with a wrench. I pushed my forehead into the dashboard. We ll go back. And get into bed. For some reason I felt that if we actually did act it out, this seduction scene we had been pretending at, that would give the dog s death some meaning. Linking love and death is a vital, on-going tradition.

Thornton gives thirty-six poems under the heading Love and Death in his anthology Poetry of the Nineties. The theme has yielded numerous dissertations and scholarly books. It would exceed the bounds of an introductory chapter just to list titles bearing the words love and death. If yet another book on this subject is presented here, it is because none so far has adequately explored the epistemological or emblematic significance of the Liebestod; because there is no monograph on the theme of love and death in Goethe; because his appropriation of this theme links him to his younger contemporaries and underscores his pioneering role in the Romantic movement; and because the primacy of the theme in German literature has been overlooked by historians of culture.

What is a Liebestod, and when is a Liebestod not a Liebestod? For a lovedeath to count as a Liebestod what Bijvoet calls a double love-death A few additional examples: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture Love and death must coincide and, ideally, be seen as identical, as in the example from Goethe s Prometheus with which we began. Actually, lovers seldom die together, any more than Jacob and Esau were born simultaneously. Stefan Zweig and his wife took poison together in Brazil in Lovers can simultaneously undergo la petite mort, a common term for orgasm which explains the superstition, referred to in Donne s The Canonization, that each orgasm subtracts a day from one s life.

The Liebestod is a formula and a fiction an ideal that, like all ideals, is always only approximated, never fully realized. Literary linkings of love and death constitute a class best defined not as the sum total of particular events satisfying an essential criterion of inclusion such as the literal simultaneous death of two tightly embracing lovers which would be a class with no members , but as all of those instances that refer to this paradoxical concept, address it, and approximate it to a recognizable degree.

Category theorists speak of membership gradience the idea that some categories have a center of a rather vague extensity but no clear boundaries, allowing for degrees of membership. A Study in Evidence Berkeley: U of California P, , U of Chicago P, , De Rougemont disposes of German Romanticism in two pages, and Wind justifies his neglect of the love-death topos in post- Romantic German literature with the lame excuse that this theme, having passed through the denser mists of German romanticism, 24 is thereby made irrelevant.

Our concern here is with works in which love and death relate to each other, and with the paradoxical thematic link between love and death in the writings of Goethe in particular with his use of the Liebestod as a topos. To the extent that it confines itself to illustrations from Goethe, while cross-referencing others, this book s organization is loosely chronological. It examines works in which the theme of love and death or some isomorph of this theme is central, but it provides more than a catalogue of occurrences of its theme, exploring the significance of the love-death topos for Goethe s symbolic practice, his epistemology, and his place in literary history.

It aims to show what Goethe s use of a literary commonplace reveals about Romanticism, about the construction of meaning, and about an aspect of Goethe s distinctive orientation and genius. His awareness of the conventionality of language, thought, and creativity reflects both the thinking of the age in which he lived and his own personal doubts and beliefs, but it also shows that conventions may be used in creative and surprising ways, 25 especially by an author conscious of their conventionality. We will notice themes and structures that were popular in the literature and culture from which Goethe emerged, which he helped shape, and which have lost none of their vitality today.

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Even apparent arbitrariness may betray a convention at work. Instances of love and death that lack any discernible dialectic between the two, however, are beyond our scope. Love triangles that result in somebody s death but do not signify a union of lovers in death will not long detain us. An exception is Goethe s Stella, which only in the second and less convincing version ends with the death of the protagonists, the first version culminating in a state of happy three-in-one polyamory.

As noted, the Liebestod is an example of the paradox of unity in duality, one and double, often referred to as a coincidentia oppositorum and launched 23 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion ; rev. Norton, , n Every repetition is nicht nur re-produktiv d. The coincidentia oppositorum works its magic in Hegel, Marx, and every other dialectical philosophy and is the fulcrum around which Romantic rhetoric and thought revolve.

This term covers many pairs of strange bedfellows any bridging of opposition in which the sense of opposition hovers in unstable tension with a unifying counterforce. The sublation of contraries in a higher synthesis of man and wife in marriage, of creature and Creator in Jesus Christ, or of sulfur and mercury in the panacea that is actually a deadly poison 28 , is structurally homologous with the coincidental affirmation and denial of opposite meanings in the form of equivocation known as Romantic irony or in oxymorons such as the delectation morosa or Cusanus s doctrine of docta ignorantia.

Of these, Goethe, like Donne and Congreve, is conspicuously, almost self-indulgently, fond. His recourse to such formulations as offenbares Geheimnis, 29 when straightforward, linear logic falls short, links him with Cusanus and with Hegel, among other partisans of paradox. Because he saw no way of stripping truth down to its naked essence, his revelations contain an element of mystery. His Life and Thought New York: Singer explains that both Bruno and Nicolaus Cusanus hold to this doctrine.

They both cite Pseudo-Dionysius fifth century who held that God transcends all contraries. His work was commented on by Johannes Eriugena d. Thomas ; by Albertus Magnus ; by Meister Eckhart d. All these writers except Eckhart are cited by Bruno 80 The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, trans. Brooks Haxton New York: Viking Penguin, , With this combination Faust s father sought to cure people of the plague lines. The line to Nietzsche and to Heidegger is a direct one. A language is only symbolic, only figurative, and never expresses its objects immediately, says Goethe.

Thus one can only bring together a variety of formulas as a way of approaching them by analogy FA 1,23,1: We reach for truth and grasp soap bubbles. Goethe doubts that the thing in itself can be accessed through language, which is always insufficient in its anthropocentricity, conventionality, and ephemerality and always as much a barrier as a gate, arresting in its very concreteness.

We live among derivative phenomena, he was forced to conclude, and have no knowledge of how to reach the Urfrage FA 1, The love-death theme, noteworthy in its own right, is a metaphor for paradoxical approaches to the primal question. Attention to the theme of love and death illuminates Goethe s poetry and many of his longer works, including Faust, and provides support for the growing recognition that Goethe, by his self-conscious and sophisticated use of language and its tropes, coincides with his younger contemporaries the Romantics, whom he sometimes sharply criticized and with whom he is supposed to have been at odds.

The Liebestod is the Romantics favorite topos, and Goethe is foremost among them in the frequency and brilliance of his use of it. In his reliance on the coincidentia oppositorum, of which the Liebestod is a parade example, he is united not only with the Schlegels, Schelling, and Novalis and, later, with Nietzsche, who is soaked in Goethe 31 but with Herder, Hamann, Jacob Boehme, Cusanus, and, farther back, Heraclitus. We need to have a better understanding of why certain tropes and topoi become fashionable expressions of social and political reality at critical historical junctions.

Ernst Behler et al. Also Sprach Zarathustra, in Werke 2: The polarity of articulation and submergence, 33 for which Goethe coined the verb sich verselbsten, and its opposite, sich entselbstigen, has its own historical dynamic. An individual s physical separation from his or her mother at birth may be unaffected by history, but life generates agonies and desires that demand conceptualization in whatever materials history happens to provide, for example, the threat provided by the Dionysian substratum of Greek culture to the principium individuationis, which Nietzsche assigns to Apollo Werke, 1: It hurt his mother to behold Jesus on the cross, but not in the same way, and probably not as much, as it hurt Jesus himself.

The German Romantics exhibit serious pain at the individual s isolation. They are uncomfortable with the opposition between subject and object and long for unity. That the love-death topos mirrors their effort to highlight and bridge the chasm and allies them with Goethe will, I hope, become plain.

An articulated worldview is one thing; habits of mind and conventions taken for granted are something else again, and are at least as revealing. All readers and students of literature profit from paying attention to women or men whose reception and rearticulation of their cultural inheritance has a distinctive stamp and a lasting effect. Goethe was such a man an exemplary recycler and a fecund creator of culture. And largely through this one man, who coined the term Weltliteratur, the cultures of many lands were introduced to a broad German readership.

It is an understatement when Walter Kaufmann says, Nineteenth-century German philosophy consisted to a considerable extent in a series of efforts to assimilate the phenomenon of Goethe. Even the once skeptical T. Eliot eventually recognized Goethe s greatness and kept a drawing of him on his mantelpiece. The twentieth century neglected him, however in the Anglo-Saxon countries as the result of the two wars in which Germany was the adversary, and in Germany as a reaction to his having been made an 33 These terms are borrowed from Benjamin Bennett, Goethe s Theory of Poetry: Cornell UP, , passim.

Doubleday, Anchor, , The unparalleled impact of Goethe s personality, life, and works on nineteenth century German thought can hardly be exaggerated Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed. Princeton UP, ], n. All of us have been impoverished.

In the course of this study I explore a variety of matters that are associated with the theme of love and death lovesickness, venereal disease syphilis, AIDS , predatory women as targets of love and agents of death, the equation of womb and tomb Romeo and Juliet , the vagina dentata, woman as object, Frau Welt, the Charybdis, the Lorelei, Undine, the possible asymmetry between male and female attitudes toward the Liebestod as well as others less obviously linked to it but no less germane, such as Goethe s awareness of the split that semiologists identify in the sign and his understanding of this split as analogous to the split between self and other , linguistic alienation and iconicity, paradox, virtuosity, and Romantic irony.

Readers will see the similarity between Romeo and Juliet s dying together and the confluence of two drops of water on the petal of a rose as they combine and disappear into the blossom s calyx in Hebbel s poem Ich und Du. Octavian puts it this way to the Marschallin in act 1 of Der Rosenkavalier: Was du und ich? Readers may notice that the narrator s hope at the end of Die Wahlverwandtschaften for a joint resurrection of Eduard and Ottilie, buried side by side in the chapel, bears a resemblance to the immolation sought by the Bride of Corinth for herself and her Athenian lover.

Whether the narration of this tale is straightforward or ironic, whether the narrator is competent to interpret the events related, and whether the bride s rejection of Christianity represents Goethe s own views are also interesting and valid questions. But the conceptual structures Denkbilder or Sinnfiguren informing works of the imagination, or, as Goethe put it, the author s Vorstellungsart or way of thinking about things FA 1, Goethe, who has been accused of ignoring crucial differences when he makes no abrupt distinction between Idee and Erfahrung His unsystematic openness to a variety of configurations and arrangements of ideas is evident in his fiction as well.

In Die Leiden des jun- 35 H. Nisbet, Goethe and the Scientific Tradition London: Institute of Germanic Studies, , One thing may substitute for another to a greater or lesser degree and in one way or another. But many factors affect our belief that similarity or difference is more important in a given case or that one tertium comparationes is more important than another. In an analogy, the sensory properties of the analogon are not the same as those of the original, but they function according to a similar formal principle. Goethe views humans as having only mediate, that is, only symbolic access to such ultimates as God, truth, or immortality.

It was he who first defined humans as symbol-using animals, and his works abound in symbols of symbolism symbols of our dependence on symbols as mediators of truth. Since poetry is itself a medium, he features a symbol of mediation in the dedicatory poem to his collected works the veil, which conceals but also reveals. Elsewhere a serpent converts its arched body into a bridge from one side of a river to the other, a noblewoman s head is transposed onto the body of a bajadere or prostitute, which enables her to mediate between pariahs and the great god Brahma, and a child asleep on the carpet links the kneeling Wilhelm Meister and Natalie, the Beautiful Amazon.

Andrzej Warminski Minneapolis, MN: The widowed Marie is delivered of a baby boy who is held by Frau Elisabeth into the space gerade zwischen mich und die Mutter. There can be no unmediated relationship between opposites. The stairway enables twoway traffic between above and below, and suggests the reversibility of our own exit from unity into selfhood and back again. Next to the door separating this entryway from the main part of the house and in front of a statue of the Magna mater stand the twins Sleep and Death, proclaiming what Hannelore Schlaffer has called den unseligen Zusammenhang von Sinnlichkeit und Tod.

I try to avoid these mistakes through a judicious selection of examples and through inquisitive reading as well as through reflection on the larger cultural context and the function of conventions. I wonder what the Liebestod tells us about Goethe, about the works in which this theme occurs, about the discourse of which it is a staple, and about the culture it reflects. His use of a traditional theme also provides an occasion to reflect on the originality and the quality of the works in which love and death play a part, and to ponder originality as a literary value.

I do not refrain from making non-thematic, for example linguistic and aesthetic, observations about the works considered. Poems, in particular, are addressed as artifacts, not as mere nodes of intersection in an intertextual system. In them I look for cohesiveness, integrity of design, and special meanings and effects. On the other hand, no work of art is an atomistic organic whole, separate from its cultural history and context.

Gingo Biloba and evokes the unity in duality informing the love-death tradition. The Faust line, which might be rendered into English as Twin Natures Combined or into non-english as united twinature cf. The 41 Stuttgarter Zeitung, July 3, , Walter de Gruyter, ], lines.

Unbegrenzt , and his unity in love with Marianne von Willemer, who authored several of the poems herself. Love and death those twin enchantments of the romantic imagination 43 like body and soul, or creator and creature in the person of Jesus Christ, or like Tristan and Isolde united in a Liebestod, are themselves twins, and show that twinness implies opposition as well as unity. Some twins, such as Wiligis and Sibylla, are sexual opposites, yet narcissistically in love with themselves in each other, but all twins are opposed when they face one another or when they both want the same toy or lover.

Love and death, too, are at once opposites and an identity. Love creates life, death destroys it. To love is to live to experience an extreme of vitality at the farthest remove from the oblivion which is death. Lovers live and die on love. Only when in love is the individual truly him- or herself, yet when in love he or she is no longer a self at all, but part of a higher unity.

Editions du Seuil, , 7. Allen, The Femme Fatale: Erotic Icon Troy, NY: Plato calls Love a bitter thing, writes Ficino. And not wrongly, because anyone who loves, dies. The desire to possess, blend with, incorporate, or be absorbed in an other or a world of others informs the myth of Venus and Adonis and the stories of Hero and Leander, Orpheus and Eurydice, Admetus and Alcestis, Protesilaus and Laodamia, Pyramus and Thisbe, and Tristan and Isolde, all of which Goethe knew at a young age. In the hymns Prometheus and Ganymed, he articulates the polarity sich verselbsten and sich entselbstigen the contradictory urge in every human breast both to assert and to unself itself through self-submergence or self-transcendence in the ecstasy of love FA 1, Cotta, , 1, 7: Harvard UP, , While particulars are specimens of their class or genus, individuals generate and express novelty.

It would be a dull world that had only classes and particulars, but no individuals. Goethe is more interested in the existential predicament of the lone individual than in the logical or ontological status of the individual as a category. Wir benutzen s, aber wir lieben es nicht FA 1, He showed his admiration for the rugged individualist Kraftkerl in his early Sturm und Drang dramas and displayed his own personal individuality in original verse forms and in the mildly outrageous conduct of his early Weimar years.

Dirk Kemper advertises a forthcoming book on individuum est ineffabile: Suhrkamp, , A particular is an instantiation of ein Allgemeines a general. The features of an individual, however, are not inferable from its class. Ein aus einem Allgemeinen Ableitbares nenne ich ein Besonderes, nicht ein Individuelles This highest intensity of being is at the extreme of.

We seek a resting place and someone to lie down with, a union in which we are no longer guests or restless wanderers, but Liebende and in Ruh. Yet we fear this rest too, which is the peace of death, die unbedingte Ruh, 20 thus our ambivalence toward sex. Identity and absorption emerge as the threat of sex itself, 21 for the threat of sex is the threat of death, and has given rise to such bizarre myths as that of the vagina dentata, the vagina with teeth.

The Divan poem Selige Sehnsucht depicts the flight of a moth into the flame of a candle in search of a more sublime mating than the sexual union in terrestrial darkness to which it owes its existence. One may lose oneself temporarily, as in love, or permanently, as in death.

The Liebestod, the coincidentia oppositorum employed by Romanticism to encode the return from individuation or Spezifikation 22 into a primal unity, is all about erasing boundaries. Consume my body with spiritual fire, said Novalis, that I may mix more intimately and airily with thee; let the wedding night last forever Hymns to the Night, 1st hymn. Novalis equates the benefits of wine, benzaldehyde, and opium with the intoxicating allure of a maiden s womb individualism. Philosophical Library, ], Jenseits des Lustprinzips, SA 3: Eagleton says that we are driven by a desire to scramble back to a place where we cannot be harmed, the inorganic existence which precedes all conscious life, which keeps us struggling forward: An Introduction, 2nd ed.

U of Minnesota P, ], Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality: Problems in the Containment of Representation New York: Mai , in FA 2,6: The term comes from Samuel Richter, pen name: Studien zur hermetischen Tradition des deutschen Wilhelm Fink, , Openings to the self and the injection or infusion of natural fluids such as semen and blood ein ganz besondrer Saft or drugs, poisons, potions, and all kinds of substances with the power to penetrate the membranes and orifices of the self play a prominent role in the history of the lovedeath theme, which depends on someone s desire to cross the line between oneself and one s lover.

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For the self is neither indivisible nor impermeable; it allows a flow of fragrances, fluids, and fictions in and out of seemingly hard, impenetrable bodies, vessels, and ideologies of many kinds. Metaphors of flowing, confluence, influence, often linked with potions Tristan und Isolde, Faust , poisons Romeo and Juliet , and ointments are essential to the love-death tradition. What part of Donna Anna s essence is in the narrator s private box and what is still down on the stage from where her fragrance wafts up to him, in Hoffmann s tale about Mozart s Don Giovanni?

How much of Don Juan has flowed into Donna Anna if she has succumbed to him, as the narrator believes? What measure of Christ s spirit lives in Christian believers, and how much of them inhabits the body of the Church? To what extent are we always already in the world, and to what extent does the world always reside and preside in us?

Adelheid von Walldorf sucks her lovers into death with poison. Faust hopes the contents of his einzige Phiole will launch him on a flight through the ether line How do individuals come into being in the first place? Given Goethe s debts to Plato and Plotinus, we might expect the idea or the universal to be his basic reality, individuals emanating from it through a process of mirroring or separation, 23 and in one of his early Ephemerides February Goethe did declare his belief in the systema emanativum FA 2,1: Whether a given life trajectory flows out of a parent with which it was never identical or emanates from an original unity has been the subject of centuries of debate.

They dine an goldenen Tischen, oblivious to the sufferings of Erdgebornen Iphigenie s Gesang der Parzen. It is no skin off their nose if their creatures suffer torment or privation. Emanation impoverishes only the emergent individual, not the gods, even if the idea that the self could ever be separate and alone can only be an illusion. But insofar as subjectivity is defined by longing, only the creature, not the Creator, is possessed of subjectivity.

Though unpredictable, individuals, like particulars, do always refer back to their source or to their prototype, like variations on a theme, or to the community that defines their expatriation. En route they experience unforeseen encounters, dialogue and conflict, as in the second of Goethe s Orphic Primal Words. The self is enriched and transformed by contact with the non-self. The lamp awaits the flame that will ignite it.

There is an existentialist tinge to Goethe s neo platonism that resists the submergence of the individual in a crowd and denies the relevance of any general rule. This complicated his reception by the Nazis. We are not alone in our loneliness. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ], 3. An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation Princeton: Princeton UP, , 4 and passim.

In the last case, the individual would not come into being but always already be. Goethe draws an analogy to the conflict between the orthodox doctrine of the trinity, implying the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the Arian view of God s indivisibility, the Son and the Holy Spirit being offspring of the Father, not particles first embedded in, then dispersed out of, His essence.

Life s ringing play of colors results from the interaction of light and dark, positive forces both, just as individual selves are shaped and hardened by fortuitous accidents and obstacles met along the way. Error and superstition, too, interact with truth to yield the peculiar understandings and beliefs that mark a human individual. Emanation is a proceeding forth from a point of origin, but sometimes Goethe speaks of symmetrical division.

Erscheinung und Entzweien sind synonym, he says. Appearing as a phenomenon is synonymous with sich trennen, sondern, verteilen GA Beck, , Das Subjekt, in der Erscheinung, [ist] immer nur Individuum Was nebeneinander existiert, scheint nur zum Streit berufen zu sein To Charlotte v. Stein, 19 November The aim of Eros, by contrast, is to burn individuality away. Individual beings were but so many defects and eclipsings of the one and only Being; and as such none was susceptible of being really loved.

Darkness, declared the mother of light by Mephistopheles, finds herself in mortal combat with her ungrateful offspring, through whose agency bodies have a transitory being Faust, lines. She is independent of the things on which light shines in order to show itself. When they pass away light itself will disappear. The paradox that personal identity arises out of a loss of identity with the source is at the core of the Romantic world view and the premise on which all of its struggles are based.

Indeed, belief in the individual as a unique essence defined by self-consciousness is the founding error of all modernism, an error insofar as it is blind to the complex ways in which the self is embedded in a world and is a manifestation of its world. The desire to lose a sharply delineated selfhood in an enveloping liquid All informs Romantic yearning and explains the prominence of the Liebestod in its artistic expres- Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ], 75 Montgomery Belgion New York: Tausend Jahre sind nur eine halbe Nacht.

The individual s longing for love is ultimately satisfied not in sexual orgasm la petite mort but in the lovers death together, just as the merging of individuals into an identity entails their submergence in eternal love: In a variation on the ancient metaphor of the soul imprisoned in the body, Werther imagines selfhood as a Kerker whose walls the self longs to scale and surmount.

He tells of a noble race of horses who bite open an artery when the pressure becomes too great. Goethe s fusion of love and death reminds one of the romantic notion of the Liebestod but is really very different, says Hatfield. In Wagner or Novalis, the love-death expresses a longing for Schopenhauerian nothingness or for ecstasy gained by the Dionysiac loss of individuality.

For this, the sexual act as such is the appropriate symbol. For Goethe, the ecstasy has the aim of metamorphosis to a higher form: New Directions, , In Selige Sehnsucht death is followed by a rebirth at the level of accidence that masks a continuity of essence. The alternation of self-articulation and resubmergence was affirmed by the alchemists, whose writings Goethe studied in the months between Leipzig and Strassburg and whose great work is conceptualized as an ascending series of dyings and becomings. Uncomfortable with finality, Goethe sometimes depicts a reunion as only a bridge to subsequent separations and reunions, forays outward and returns at a higher level, in an ascending spiral.

At other times the paradigm seems static, his characters propelled by the desire to escape temporality in search of an enduring, timeless spatiality. In conflict with itself, the self seeks both selfpreservation and surrender to unity. The Liebestod, a Coincidentia Oppositorum The unity of love and death is manifest in the paradox of the Liebestod. Love unites opposed selves temporarily; death does so absolutely. Jahrhunderts, Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 18 Rudolph Drux, Wie reimt sich Lieb und Tod zusammen?

The union, which is the effect of love Aristophanes stated that lovers would wish to be united both into one, but since this would result in either one or both being destroyed, they seek a suitable and becoming union; to live together, speak together, and be united to-. Like an open secret, like the pharmakon that is both poison or potion and a panacea, 43 or like Jesus Christ, who is both creator and creature, large enough to encompass the universe and small enough to dwell in Mary s womb, they are antitheses but also an identity, a coincidentia oppositorum.

Benzinger Brothers, ], 1: But as concerning the Medicine that is made by it, it is certain that of all Medicines in the World it is the highest, for it is the true Arbor Vitae Ronald D. Cambridge UP, ], Mephistopheles says of theology: This is a topos. Es ist Arznei, nicht Gift, was ich dir reiche, says Lessing s Nathan in attacking his daughter Recha s pious superstition that an angel has rescued her from the fire 1,2. The philter drunk by Tristan and Isolde both restores them and destroys them as individuals. The Greek word from which pharmaco- and all its variants derive is pharmakon, which can mean drug, medicine, or poison Mark C.

U of Chicago P, ], Herder wie in seiner Zeit, in Herder Studien, ed. Holzner, 10 ]: Walter de Gruyter, , Mario Domandi New York: Yale UP, ; rev. Norton [The Norton Library], , , M. Abrams discusses the connections between Romanticism and neoplatonism in Natural Supernaturalism: Ann Arbor Press, , n. From the man s point of view it may compute differently for women both lovers, losing themselves in each other, gain something more valuable.

Catherine in Wuthering Heights declares, I am Heathcliff he s always, always in my mind not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself but, as my own being so, don t talk of our separation again it is impracticable. Erst als Liebende r ist ein Mensch ganz er selbst, aber zugleich nur der Teil einer Einheit in der Zweiheit. McGill-Queen s UP, Zur Ikonologie der Femme Fatale, Arcadia Litterarischer Verein, ; repr.

Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, SA 9: Wilhelm Dobbek defines thinking dialectically as the contemplation of opposed phenomena in their mutual interdependence. The unity of contraries is never simply a compromise, but a tense and productive interaction of genuine antitheses 17 It also exposes unitarian interpretations of Faust as reductionist attempts to simplify a great, unparaphrasable work. According to Dobbek, the Goethezeit combines the idea of immanence against transcendence with a dynamic conception of unification in time against a timeless unity in space.

Goethe s conception of individuation as a punctual splitting off adds force to this idea. It is hard to identify Goethe with either tendency, as though he himself were a timeless, unchanging identity and his thought an established, undeveloping and undialectical pledge to dynamic development from his youth in Frankfurt until his old age. Rather, each concept serves a local, limited poetic need and is not binding in a weltanschaulich sense. Yet he does rely on a fairly stable set of categories, while keeping an ironic distance from them and absorbing infusions from many sources. Dialectical thinking remains productive today, especially in non-anglo- Saxon philosophical discourse.

Paul Ricoeur assigns a strong meaning to as as not only the as of comparison oneself as similar to another but that of a consequence oneself as a result of being another. The femme fatale s strength her irresistible sexual power is also her weakness. She is powerless to control its effects.

In Grass s Katz und Maus Joachim Mahlke s too-large penis and Adam s apple cause an inferiority complex that he tries to offset with the ornaments he hangs from his neck, eventually the iron cross. The too much is, without an aufhebend counterweight, too obviously too little. U of Chicago P, , 3 emphasis added. The ever unfinished nature of the body was hidden, kept secret; conception, pregnancy, childbirth, death throes, were almost never shown. The age represented was as far removed from the mother s womb as from the grave.

As stereotypical but antithetical representations of woman, Mary and Venus are objects of a man s longing for, and fear of, submergence in the womb that is also a tomb. The desire for unity in love and death, then, follows from the fact of individuation, just as unity may derive from differentiation in logic. If, on the other hand, unity is prior and multiplicity secondary, 57 this may attest to the lateness and modernity of Romanticism.

For Goethe, in any case, the human tragedy is the tragedy of life apart from a primal center of significance and hence limited to eternal derivations. Every union, therefore, is a coincidentia op- 53 Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, 1 Oxford: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics [London: Methuen, ; paperback reprint ], Goethe allows for either originary unity or originary division.

Einheit und Mannigfaltigkeit [sind] U of Chicago P, , Clark S. Muenzer, Figures of Identity: Penn State UP, , n. Complete, unambiguous presence is as unattainable as it is desirable, which may explain the Romantics recourse to irony and paradox, and their fondness for oxymorons. Goethe s younger contemporaries share his passion for a unity that is more than the bridging of difference: It is hard to see why the prospect of an open-ended universe did not deny Nietzsche, who is otherwise so dependent on Goethe, his belief in the eternal recurrence of the same.

Implicit in the idea of organicism, it is a crucial, indispensable insight one not congenial to mechanistic world views. Other Explanations of the Link between Love and Death The pervasive link between love and death in the history of literature, religion, and philosophy has been explained in a variety of ways. As opposed forces, love and death are a near match for each other, love being strong enough to cancel out death.

The Song of Solomon says love is as strong as death. Many waters cannot quench love neither can floods drown it 8: Boney sees equal intensity as the common element in the fires of love and death, 61 while H. Munzer and Patrick Brady believe that love and death are paradoxically linked by their opposite effects, love tending toward activity, death toward stasis. This distinction originates with Schopenhauer, and is commented on by Freud: Love obstructs death s disintegrating power.

Routledge, , Elaine E. According to Norman O. Brown, Eros is the instinct that makes for union, or unification, and Thanatos, the death instinct, is the instinct that makes for separation, or division. Love and death both coincide and oppose each other; sie heben einander auf. Love fosters both the extinction and the preservation of the self, while the prospect of death may intensify someone s desire for love.

But what love and the death principle ultimately aspire to is neither survival nor self-perpetuation but rest and permanence, a timeless moment to which one might say, Verweile doch! Both love and death seek stasis and both express a wish for escape from time and temporal struggle into a lasting bliss. A moment of ecstasy so strong that he would want time to stop would be the death of Faust, which is not only a risk he is willing to take but a consummation he would gratefully embrace: Dann will ich gern zu Grunde gehn.

The oddest attempt so far to explain the link between love and death is that of Denis de Rougemont in Love in the Western World. De Rougemont provides a historical-psychological, and, at points, psychoanalytical explanation of the love-death topos, while searching for its existential meaning.

We want what we are denied an explanation entertained by Lotte for Werther s passion, which he dismisses as unworthy of her [20 December , FA 1,8: Since erotic passion is incompatible with marriage and a Frau Isolde unthinkable, according to Rougemont, the novel of adultery is the quintessential narrative of passion. The twists and turns of the story s plot are due to the principals psychological need for barriers, which the lovers themselves are sometimes obliged to erect. This is why Tristan places his sword between himself and Iseult in the forest, why he leaves Mark s court after Iseult s acquittal of the charge of adultery although her innocence, hence his own, has been proven by the God s Judgment , and why he marries Iseult of the White Hand although his love for Iseult the Fair keeps this marriage from being consummated.

The most serious obstruction is It is the one most suited to intensifying passion. Brown, Love s Body New York: Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the page number. Since society won t tolerate an overt desire for death, however, the absolute obstacle to love, the Todestrieb is expressed as a lesser passion love. The existence of a repressed wish is invariably manifested, though in such a way as to disguise the true nature of this wish De Rougemont perceives no identity, analogy, or homology between love and death, and views the relationship between them mechanistically.

Love is linked with death because it may eventuate in death. A passion may be fatal. Passion is a diminished and socially tolerable surrogate for death, since both passion and death are suffered rather than committed. To be sure, passion German Leidenschaft is suffering Leiden , but de Rougemont mistakes the terms of the traditional equations: The sword between Tristan and Iseult is a self-imposed chastity Passion triumphs over desire.

Death triumphs over life But death and dying are not the same thing. There is no such thing as death, only dying. Dying is part of life and living is dying. Both birth and dying are suffered. We are thrown into life and yanked out of it again by agencies greater than ourselves. Desire is a part of life, not a lesser death.

Nor is death a more intense passion, but release from passion. Harrison gets it right: For [Swinburne s] Rosamond, death becomes the only possible respite from the suffering intrinsic to passion We live until we are dead. Goethe can be counted on to use traditions logically.

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To him, an anxious, self-protective chastity would be equivalent to egoism. In resisting absorption in another we may hold death temporarily at bay. It is when we submit to love that we are lost. Only a daredevil who prizes love above life may fall in love: But love is life, as well as its opposite, so anyone s being, prior to the experience of love, is a kind of pre-life or a Beharren im Noch- Nichtsein a being not yet pregnant, or a pregnant non-being: Love will not tolerate separation and individual identity. In the paintings of Munch, Klimt, and Behrens, observes Horst Fritz, a kiss encodes die Verschmelzung der beiden menschlichen Gestalten zu einer neuen 66 A.

Harrison, Eros and Thanatos in Swinburne s Poetry: To die is to complete the cycle of life and return to the source ultimately to return to God. Ethical love is a renunciation of oneself for the sake of another, as in the psychology of Eric Fromm. Bataille includes the poetic with love and death as an expression of the desire of being for triumph over the contingency of individualism and for continuity, which is, finally, assimilable both to death and to the poetic. The quest for love and death devalues the human and the individual, for love and death mix the separate and discrete and usher in unity, disorder, and oblivion.

This anti-individualistic also anti-intellectual tendency for intellectual order requires the clear discrimination of ideas 71 in favor of the communal, the transcendent, and the confused accounts for Naphta s delight in pointing out to Hans Castorp that the higher degrees of freemasonry, which the humanist Settembrini so fervently admires, were once accused of obscurantism and waren Ein Symbol alchimistischer Transmutation, explains Naphta, war vor allem die Gruft Zu Literatur und Kunst der Jahrhundertwende, ed. Roger Bauer et al Frankfurt am Main: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ], Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, Chasseguet-Smirgel identifies denomination as the means of Trennung and unraveling of chaos: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ], xviii.

Intoxicated with love s heady liquor, death-hungry partisans bow to the influence of charismatic preachers and succumb to the psychosis of the crowd of which Baudelaire says C est un moi insatiable de non-moi In a flash of illumination, Charles Smithson suddenly Die Arche, , Novalis, Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, 3rd ed. Kohlhammer, , 1: Es wurde sehr stark empfunden und objektiv festgestellt: Goethe says of his friendship with Schiller: As Wellek notes, the concern for the reconciliation of subject and object, man and nature, consciousness and unconsciousness, the ambition for the reconciliation of art and nature, language and reality, the endeavor to overcome the split between subject and object, the self and the world, the conscious and the unconscious is what constitutes Romanticism.

This split is what produces romantic striving and accounts for the prominence of the Liebestod as the preeminent symbol of reunion in Romanticism. The very notions of subject and object in their modern sense come to be within [a new localization in which the subject is The modern sense is one in which subject and object are separable entities, whereas in antiquity as is evident in both Plato and Aristotle, despite their differences people accepted without resistance their insertion in a universe of meaningful order.

No chasm, no need to build bridges. Every age since Descartes has found its own way of articulating estrangement, twentieth-century modernism focusing on the individual s alienation from bourgeois society. The existential fact of individuation underlies all such permutations.

Thus the Liebestod has enjoyed a dramatic flowering in modern culture. Yale UP, , , The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History ; repr. Love-Death Topos a Male Construct? Verlag Roter Stern, U of Minnesota P, Freud observed that every female genital is the place where we have once been, is the home we as men long to go home to, is the mother.

Thus the reconstitution of the androgyne during intercourse, the union which reestablishes the unity, is a brief return to the primal state of completeness from which, as created and shaped matter, as self-aware, distinct individuals, we are otherwise in permanent exile. It is really strange, this pars pro toto; and strange how very deeply we dip when we dip into woman. As an adolescent I learned that just to place my nose into the warm and intimate shelter of my hand made me feel warm and sheltered all over, It was a foretaste of that other sheltering insertion which is equally partial in extent and even more total in effect, bringing with it a sense of peace and completeness comparable to immersion in a warm, long-forgotten ocean; a state of being before thought and before pain, an oceanic feeling less nostalgic than that which overcomes us in nature, but equally related to the mother: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender Berkeley: U of California P, Every boy, by contrast, must face his difference, and suffers a consequent discontinuity and generalized loneliness as well as the fear that he can never again know the sense of oneness and fusion that he knew as an infant.

Men can never recreate this state of total union, writes Cynthia Wolff. Adult women can when they are pregnant. Most pregnant women identify intensely with their unborn children, and through that identification in some measure reexperience a state of complete and harmonious union. Several female readers of this chapter have protested, however, that love carries no connotation of blending or loss of selfhood for them.

A separate female culture has survived male cultural dominance, they say. Vulnerable to rape and pregnancy, women want to fortify boundaries, not break them down. This may actually confirm Chodorow s thesis and lend paradoxical support to the idea that men are individualistic and women communal, that men have the martial talents and women the social ones, men showing a proclivity for self-destruction and a willingness to risk the destruction of the world, while women s sense of belonging prevents any rush toward the abyss and permits sympathy, and trust, and encourages both self-affirmation and affirmation of life.

The Oedipus complex is in the first instance a yearning for union on the part of the child, which may account for adversarial relationships among boys and men, the boy competing with his father for the affection of his mother. To the lonely male, woman is the goal and the instrument of his deliverance. Wolff, Thanatos and Eros: Jean Baker Miller, Nancy Chodorow, and Carol Gilligan suggest that men define themselves through individuation and separation from others, while women have more flexible ego boundaries and define and experience themselves in terms of their affiliations and relationships with others.

Men value autonomy, and they think of their interactions with others principally in terms of procedures for arbitrating conflicts between individual rights. Women, on the other hand, value relationships, and they are most concerned in their dealings with others to negotiate between opposing needs so that the relationship can be maintained Patrocinio P. Knowing sisterhood from the beginning, and becoming mothers while still in their childhood, women are and thus do not seek the matrix to which it is every man s desire to return.

Already embedded in a network that provides an anonymous security, women embrace independence. Men, on the other hand, who are essentially needy, long to return to the womb all the while anxious to preserve their individuality.

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Nothing illustrates ambivalence as vividly as does men s attitude toward women. Yet even this ambivalence is not unambiguously male. Ellen Greenberger found in a Thematic Apperception Test that romantic fantasies were found to occur significantly more often in women confronting death than in control patients. Episodes of rape, abduction, seduction, and infidelity typically involved a man whose identity was very nebulous. In considering the meaning of these episodes, and the identity of the male, it was suggested that perhaps Death itself was the mysterious lover. In sexual intercourse it is the man who is incorporated and the woman who incorporates.

Yet not only are these all works by male authors, but the dominant culture has projected onto women a desire for conjunction equivalent to that characteristic of men, which amounts to the absence of the female voice from literature. Although the Liebestod theme occurs in women writers and female mystics from as far back as Sappho and Hildegard von Bingen and is pervasive in the work of Margaret Fuller, George Eliot, Iris Texts, and Contexts, ed.

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Flynn and Patrocinio P. Johns Hopkins UP, ], 54 Metzler, , Ellen Greenberger, Flirting with Death: You preyed, or were preyed upon. Love and depredation went hand in hand. That is why Freud Henry Holt, ], James, this may be less an expression of native female experience than a manifestation of women s subjugation.

Is woman not only what men want from sex but what men have made women believe a co-option of their professional sisters into their own worldview and a projection of the male mind set onto the daughters of their imagination? The viciousness of these women is explicitly in the case of Lady Milwood or implicitly in the case of Marwood blamed on their male counterparts, which makes the femmes fatales themselves mere accessories to a bad faith dialogue in which men both engender vice and seek to divest themselves of responsibility for it.

After vicarious alienation through the medium of the male consciousness, can women ever regain their natural, unalienated attachment to their mother? Would women s desires be different in an uncontaminated female culture? We will never know. If the love-death theme is implicitly sexist, it must also be time-bound, ephemeral, a passing fancy, its hoary antiquity notwithstanding. We may someday see fascination with love and death as a mark of a particular broad era, of which Romanticism is the last full flowering and of which an implicit belief in the atomized self, accompanied by defensiveness and dread, is a defining characteristic.

The various postmodernisms are united in their acceptance of larger systems of order from which it is supposed to be impossible to disengage the individual. If so, we may be in the dawn of a new era. Perhaps, however, the root desire informing the love-death topos is the desire to escape the ravages of time, as is indicated by the time metaphors in Faust s wager. Being is time, and time is constitutive of being, while both love and death imply stasis, an endless, but eternally unavailable spatial presence. There is no indivisible now no present whose parts do 88 In Chopin s The Awakening, Edna s yearning for suffusion and indefinable ecstasy is as strong as the desire attributed to any female character by any male author.

The fundamental significance to Edna of an awakening, says Wolff, is an awakening to separation, to individual existence, to the hopelessness of ever satisfying the dream of total fusion Wolff, Thanatos and Eros,. Faust demands a moment so lovely that he will want it to stay. Thus Mephistopheles arranges the meeting with Margarete and the taste of an ecstasy available only in death. Is the womb-tomb-urn complex, then, intellectually insulting in its simplicity 90 or is it simply fundamental?

No search for meaning can be complete that does not explain why we use such conventions. Are they, like language in general, as Chomsky believes, a manifestation of human nature without practical utility, or do they represent a form of agreement that contributes to the survival of the social unit? The recognition that human intercourse is informed with topoi subverts the pre-romantic over-estimation of originality as a primary source of literary value.

The topos of love and death continues to be repeated. Why do we love it so much? We will not know what it means to love and die until we know what it means to be, perhaps not even then. Byatt s The Virgin in the Garden London: