Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels are a primary text of the work of enchantment.
We turn to them last of all. While Adorno, who we encountered at the start of this book, helped provide some conceptual coordinates with respect to the importance of enchantment and the historical “moment” of it, now, with Goethe, we find a theoretician of enchantment itself—or one who was virtually so. We will see here and in the next chapter how enchantment compasses us about.
In something that is enchanting, our inner sensibility for it, our sensitive capacity for it, comes together with that thing. It might be a thing literally, as in Rilke, who valued craftwork and loved objects, such as dolls, or it might be a person; but, whatever the case, that person or that thing come together in a time of enchantment.
Ultimately, enchantment is a quality of time. From childhood, we are predisposed to enchantment; but it is only as adults that the really erotic quality of enchantment and the work of enchantment may be fully formed. And then it is the work of a lifetime—this reading, this listening, this gazing. It is principally what we should work at to give our time to. If we have time, it is what we should have time for, because, if we give it time, later we would not come to look back and regret lost time but, rather, we will come to have found eternity in time, which is to die in peace.
We need to develop, that is, enrich and deepen, our soul, the unison of our inner sensibility and sensitivity, for a time of enchantment; and this is precisely what the work of enchantment does: it leads to that enrichment, it is that enrichment. Reading, listening, and gazing, far from being time-filling activities, are what, more than ever in a workaday world governed by consumerist greed and nonchalance, are required for health and flourishing, and you cannot buy them. All you can do is give them time.
So we move sideways again—this time, from Rilke to Goethe—to stand in front of yet another icon, through which the lineaments of our subject of enchantment and the concomitant work of enchantment look different again. However, to appreciate this, as with Proust and Rilke, in my comments here on Goethe I presuppose no prior knowledge of his work. My comments then will have the secondary advantage of providing some introduction to it.
Enchantment can never be fixed; we see it differently through different apertures. To demonstrate this, the present chapter and the one to follow will be longer than previous ones because, this time, we are interested in the narrative whole, which was not the case with Proust or Rilke. Also, I need to intersperse my comments with my description of the narrative as we go. But at the end of each chapter I will repeat in summary form, as I have on other occasions, what is to be learned by entering into the deep worlds of enchantment supplied by our chosen icon—in this case, Goethe’s mature writings.
The Wilhelm Meister novels are not merely a series or a cycle, but a unity, although it is arguable which particular texts comprise that unity.1
In this chapter I will only say a brief word about Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship because I want to focus on enchantment in a way that extends our discussion, and Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years will do this more richly.
However, as background information, let us note that Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship shows the young Wilhelm turns away from the life of the bourgeois, and, to some extent, from bourgeois capitalism, to the way of the artist and the outsider—in this case, the life of the wandering theater troupe. The theater troupe still depends on financial patronage from the system and so is not, of course, completely outside the economy, but, as Wilhelm’s businessman brother constantly reminds him—“come back”—, he is in danger. He is sufficiently an outsider to be in danger of homelessness, complete penury and, indeed, of losing his life. As it is though, mostly thanks to Wilhelm, the theater troupe is successful, and he meets “salt of the earth” types; and he ends up engaged to marry the woman of his dreams, the beautiful Natalie.
In the background of the story told in the Apprenticeship are the rumblings not just of civil strife, but of changing times. The theater troupe is committed to change: different towns, different plays, different relationships; changing roles and costumes on and off stage. The world they pass through is ostensibly stable—only it is not. And this, the reader can note, is like the instability of our own times and societies. At the simplest level: every act has consequences, foreseen and unforeseen; multiply this by the population and by the number of social acts in a day and already you have a colossal number of sequelae, and a presentiment that life, even in stable centers of commerce, is on the move and changing. Leaders may endeavor to keep a lid on change and preserve stability but any modern understanding of subjectivity tells us that this is not how the world turns, or how values operate. Impermanence is of the essence; in this sense, the actor’s precarious existence is closer to the truth, or, at least, a reminder of it. As Shakespeare declared, “All the world’s a stage/ And all the men and women merely players.”2
The success of Wilhelm’s troupe is not brought about by pandering to the “lowest common denominator,” as we might be accustomed to today, in order to attract the advertising dollar. Wilhelm introduces Hamlet in a central part of the novel and there is detailed discussion of the importance of Shakespeare’s work and of Hamlet in particular.3 There is a sense, then, that these outsiders, this little acting troupe, on the edge of a world on the boil, are carrying inestimable goods: the transmission of true culture as instanced by Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The true center of the world, therefore, we are led to think in the novel, is not the “business district” of town or the “banking sector” of the economy, but here among this motley crew at the margins of decent society. This is to remain the “bohemian” and avant-garde ideal for European artists for the next 200 years. And Hamlet as a work of art outsmarts all attempts to “encapsulate” it once and for all, to “appropriate” it, as we say in postmodern jargon. It is a true work of art that continues to speak, and to speak of humankind’s wisdom and folly. Moreover, it is in just such a work of art, through time and across place, that we continue to see ourselves reflected. This is the only way we can see ourselves: by just such a gaze into just such a mirror. Hamlet is one such mirror, the Journeyman Years another, and Faust yet another.
In the Conversations of German Refugees, a fragment related to the Wilhelm Meister cycle, the Germans are fleeing the French. It is the aftermath of the French Revolution, presumably “when the Frankish army burst into our land through a breach in our defenses.” The Baroness, one of the interlocutors, says what people might have said in Germany under National Socialism—and surely did: “I don’t know what has got into us, how all civilized behavior can so suddenly disappear.”4 Well how does it disappear? Goethe’s answer—and the Conversations are demonstrative in this regard—is that the loss of good manners, of simply being polite, augurs worse things to come. While, as André Comte-Sponville says, a polite Nazi is still a Nazi, but if you take it that there are no natural virtues, so that we must become virtuous, then morality must start somewhere. Politeness is a formal quality that is supposed to pave the way for virtue.5
Good conversation is impossible, virtue is impossible, diplomacy is impossible, without the pre-condition which consists in civilized, good manners, which underscores the importance of social ritual. The assault on manners in contemporary society, Goethe would think, is not what it seems, that is, harm-free; and it certainly is not “progressive” in any sense at all.
War starts within us. “At the present time among a huge mass of unfortunates hardly anyone, whether through temperament or education, by accident or by effort of will, enjoys peace of mind,” the Baroness says to her little band.6 This is what comes to the surface first when good manners are removed. At the same time, there is a turn to “the news.” Hence, from these conversations all mention of the news is forbidden. Later we learn why. “What makes news attractive? Not its importance, not its consequences, but its novelty. For the most part only what is new seems important, because it is without clear context, it arouses amazement, momentarily stirs our imagination, just grazes our emotions, and requires no mental effort whatever. Everyone can take a lively interest in such new things without the least trouble to themselves. Indeed, since a series of news items continually pulls us from one subject to the next, most people find nothing more pleasant than this stimulus to ceaseless diversion, this convenient and never-ending opportunity to vent their malice and spleen.”7
Goethe puts what we may take to be his own wisdom into the mouth of his interlocutor. The more that manners abate, the more news interferes in every area of our life. Translate this to today. In our society, thanks to the communications industry, the news industry can trawl the web for the most titillating stories of horror and disaster and line them up back-to-back to present as “World News.” The refugees in Goethe’s story refuse (this is their renunciation) to talk about the news. They talk about all manner of other things, eventually settling on storytelling as the most worthwhile form of conversation and, in particular, stories about the way that our inner sensibility and sensitivity can affect our physical health, and love in particular: we have all heard of love-sickness; we have all been in love. And so stories of love have a very personal bearing for each of the speakers.
The attack on “the news” (which both Schopenhauer and Hegel were later to disparage) continues in the section of aphorisms in the Journeyman Years. “To my mind, the greatest evil of our time, which allows nothing to come to fruition, is that each moment consumes its predecessor, each day is squandered in the next, and so we live perpetually from hand to mouth, without ever producing anything. Do we not already have newspapers for each part of the day! Some clever soul could probably insert one or two more. The result is that everyone’s deeds, actions, scribblings, indeed all his intentions are dragged before the public. No-one is permitted to rejoice or sorrow except to entertain all the rest; and so everything leaps from house to house, from town to town, from empire to empire, and finally from continent to continent, always express.”8
Reiterating this same point in postmodernism, Michel de Certeau describes the mind-forged manacles that pass for the news as follows: “Narrations about what’s-going-on constitute our orthodoxy. Debates about figures are our theological wars. The combatants no longer bear the arms of any offensive or defensive idea. They move forward camouflaged as facts, data, and events. They present themselves as messengers from a ‘reality’. Their uniform takes on the color of the economic and social ground they move into. When they advance, the terrain itself seems to advance. But in fact they fabricate the terrain, simulate it, use it as a mask, accredit themselves by it, and thus create the scene of their law.”9
Why this attack on the news is important with regard to enchantment will become clearer as we proceed, but we can say straight away that it is because “news” in this sense commodifies time and commodifies moments of time. In a news and instant communications environment, enchantment is impossible. Goethe foresees this in the eighteenth century, not because he had “second sight” or anything like that, but simply because it logically follows from what he could already see going on in his day. News, current affairs, celebrity gossip, and the like come to comprise a lifestyle of idle reading, listening, and gazing so, instead of being conduits to enchantment, which they should be, they become means of consumption.
Another interesting topic which can be traced in the Journeyman Years is the difference between men and women. The essence of woman is to be enchanting; this is within woman’s power, and not man’s. We will take this up later. On men, the Baroness comments how, although for there to be society there must be manners, and therefore people must practice self-control as a basic precondition for manners, the culprits are not women, but men. “How easily men can deceive themselves especially where self-control is concerned!”10 It is men who make wars, not women; but women and children—those who are most enchanting of all—are the major sufferers from war. “I have never in my life met one single man who was capable of controlling himself in even the smallest detail.”11 The current tendency of western society is to mingle or confuse male and female: the masculinized woman of the “workplace” who is the same as a man—or should be, or the domesticated woman “at home” who is supposedly pitiable by contrast; the man in touch with his feminine side, or the “alpha male” in denial of it. Between these four, femaleness as enchanting is lost, and the woman as enchantress becomes an impossibility. There can be no enchantment in a society where the women are not enchanting and where the men are either too “wet” or too “hard” to be enchanted. But Goethe paints a different picture for a world almost deafened and blinded by war, and its subtle preconditions of the soul, in which all of us are refugees.
Goethe’s German refugees are the first “wanderers” and “renunciants”; they wander through “the enchanting countryside” 12—all themes which will play out in Journeyman Years. The first thing to say about Journeyman Years is that it is technically complicated, even by more modern literary standards. The novel masters and integrates instances from a huge range of genres: narrative, flashbacks, story-within-the-story, diary, letters, drama, fairytale, address, poetry, a drawing, aphorisms, an “interpolation” or narrative break right in the middle13; and the book ends before the end just as it begins before the beginning. The whole story is told through all these means to form a whole which is not sealed in and can never be final, but only always open to interpretation.14
At the start of the Journeyman Years, Wilhelm is on his way from Natalie, his love; he has delayed their marriage. This is the first renunciation: Wilhelm’s personal consummation is put at the disposal of a greater collective consummation, although he is not exactly sure (and neither is the reader) what this is. At the end of the novel, a group of émigrés led by Lenardo are setting out for America, as for a Promised Land. These émigrés at the end are a counterpart of, on the one hand, the refugees in the story, present from before the novel’s beginning, and, on the other, Wilhelm’s renunciation of making a life and home with Natalie, at the beginning of the novel. In between, all is movement, process, unpredictability. Just like life really. Wilhelm, we learn, is part of a mysterious brotherhood who later become the émigrés and meantime vow not to remain in one place more than 3 days. This way Wilhelm is forced to keep on the move and to renounce whatever bounty one place or one day has to offer.15 This is the key renunciation of the title. The renunciation of the moment is the negative side of the striving for the next moment which binds Faust in Goethe’s work of that name and which Goethe was writing at the same time.
The spirit of a time is the result of the collective renunciation and striving. If we look at our world we can ascertain the spirit of our collective renunciation and striving because the world is the objec-tification of it. Civilization strives for peace and harmony; but there is a contradiction because peace and harmony seem to spell stasis, permanence, no further development, our collective self-totalization, and the end of history. Renunciation and striving, however, keep changing things and stay dynamic.
The start of the Journeyman Years is bold to the point of fanciful in drawing the reader into an enchanted world. Wilhelm meets Joseph and Mary—she is with child—riding on a donkey in idyllic mountains. It might be imagined that Goethe is painting an idyll for us or romanticizing like a second-rate novelist. As it turns out, in their naming there has been a sense of ironic self-consciousness, even a sense of fun and humor, along with a conventional explanation. The feigned allegory vanishes behind an emergent realism as the characters take on identity for the reader.
Every reader will no doubt have their own favorite set pieces which are to them the most enchanting. One of mine is the young lovers Flavio and Hilarie ice-skating on the frozen lake. This story starts romantically, turns ironic, humorous, and then melodramatic, when Flavio’s father interferes. Flavio’s father is under a double misapprehension. He wrongly believes Flavio does not love Hilarie, but another girl, and he wrongly believes that Hilarie, who is an adolescent, is actually in love with him. Well, Flavio’s father is quickly shorn of his illusions, and it is all written with such a graceful, light touch by Goethe that, for a moment, a reader might well have felt it was they who were skating by moonlight on ice. The enchantment here, as in many other places, leaves us with a sense of festive wellbeing, for a moment.16
Not only is the countryside enchanting, and the people, so are buildings and things. The whole novel has characters speak and relate to things in the way Rilke would have us do. As Joseph says to Wilhelm in their first conversation: “For if the inanimate is full of life, it can bring forth something alive.”17 Wilhelm adds, “… even from amidst these ruins.” The past itself is brought back to life. There is an emphasis throughout on the animate properties of stone.
There is a sense that things, down to every rock, are consecrated. As it says in the Gospel, rocks and stones have so much “within” them that is hidden from us; according to the story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, from stones God could even raise up children of Abraham. For Goethe, this has not to do with the “paradoxical” or “magical” power of God to draw the most animate of creatures from the most inanimate of dead objects, but has to do with the potential of stone and that, in the scheme of things, even the “people of God” should not deem themselves superior to a stone. The geologist named Montan is enchanted by stone. Where in the Journeyman Years the characters visit old monasteries or villages, or pubs or way stations, and chateaux, the stone, and the human seem to co-inhabit a place. All this is done with enchanted realism, which is a heightened realism that we also find more or less accomplished in the nineteenth-century novel.
Goethe puts none of this enchantment down to Nature herself. He is not naïvely “natural” about nature, like some later writers; he does not depict a “state of nature” prior to culture. The point in Goethe is that the enchanted countryside is cultivated; even where there are deep mountains we find order and beauty, which is never just of nature per se. In fact, what is moving the émigrés away is the sense that it is all so cultivated there is not “room to move,” and America, the utopia they envisage moving to, is the only uncultivated pure wilderness, although we learn that others have arrived there well before our émigrés and begun cultivation.
Wilhelm wanders through an ordered world. Culture means ordering aright (fittingly), listening, and gazing in and at the world so as to establish things as they should be. Culture is like a vehicle that is stable while moving. It becomes more ordered, and the order becomes more detailed or sophisticated; there is almost a Mandarin quality about Goethe’s philosophy.
The beautiful woman, whether younger or older, is the central figure of enchantment here. This is not an idealized beauty that can be represented; it is intensely individualized and representable only by the proper name of the woman: Natalie, Hilarie, Makarie, and so on.
If philosophy is the wisdom of love, love is desiring, it is erotic—by which I mean, in the broadest sense, relational. Erotic desire is central to the plot and the movement of the novel. It is the particularity of desire that counts and of which the novel tells. And yet, like Narcissus, we find ourselves looking into a mirror in which we are surprised to see ourselves. Or perhaps it might be like looking in a glass darkly, if we do not recognize ourselves. Goethe shows us a purified desire, which is not virginal or sexless, but reverent. Reverent desire strives and renounces. Reverent desire radiates out from the enchantress to all things—so it seems, at least, to the man.
Wilhelm sends Felix for education at a Pedagogic Province, which is a highly organized, managed, and socialized environment, although not totalitarian, as reverence interrupts the possibility of closure necessary to “the system.” In the school where Felix will remain for most of the rest of the novel, a threefold reverence is taught: to God above, as manifested in parents, teachers, and superiors; to the earth beneath, from which we are nourished and also suffer; and thirdly for the neighbor and friends.18 Religions are judged according to their capacity for reverence, and are to be rated and ranked accordingly. The humanistic secular society depicted is “post-religious” in the confessing sense and can tolerate any religion that validates reverence, which it may do at one of three levels, as one of the three Principals explains to Wilhelm.
But one of the Principals goes on to explain: “From the three reverences springs the highest reverence, reverence for oneself, and the others are born once again from this latter, so that the individual can arrive at the highest attainment of which he or she is capable, so that he or she may view themselves as the finest thing that God and Nature have produced, yes, so that he or she can remain at this height, without being dragged back down again to a common level by presumptuousness and self-centeredness.”19
Wilhelm responds that this all sounds like commonsense to him. “This profession of faith is already articulated by a great portion of the world, albeit unknowingly,” he says.
What is being expressed is simply a sense of common humanity. Yet, the point is that this has to be learnt, and that, once learnt, it may be lost. Also, once the sense of common humanity is learnt, or “naturally” known as the result of being born into a culture which allows these reverences, it has to be re-learnt, so that the three reverences “are born once again” from the point of view of a sense of subjective self. What this suggests is that culture comes before nature as far as we human beings are concerned, and what we call “nature” is not simply and straightforwardly “natural,” but is a product of culture. Culture gives us to see this or that, which we now assume to be natural, as nature, and understand it as natural. It sounds counterintuitive, but I am saying that nature is not something in and of itself, nor is it natural. Both are rooted in our culture and therefore our history; for culture is a creature of time.
But more closely examined, man is not the measure of all things, as in classical humanism or in the philosophy of Protagoras, as explained by Plato in the dialogue of that name; rather, the terms “God,” “world,” and “humankind” (or simply “man”) have to be understood apart from one another and only in relation to one another—that is, if they can be understood, which, in the case of the first of these terms, however, is impossible. Otherwise, if we try to understand God in terms of the world or in terms of man, or if we try to understand ourselves in terms of the world and the measurements we make there, we set off on the wrong foot and will never arrive at the destination of understanding that we set out to reach. Enchantment arises from the “rub” due to the “gap” between “God,” “world,” and “humankind.” This “friction” and “spacing” between the three co-ordinates may also be described as a knotting; as they are always somehow knotted; and we are caught in such knots, as it is our culture that makes them; and it is this that Goethe primarily draws our attention to, using enchantment as a primary value by which to tell one kind of knot from another: old tangled knots from new ones only now being made.
The three reverences—to God, world, and humankind—are three, not one, because they are fundamentally different reverences; they have dues that need to be paid differently. Only then can the fourth reverence come into play—that soulfulness, being the inward and upward dynamic of being—and the possibility therefore of enchantment.
This frame for enchantment is not a motif within the work, but what, in manifold ways, the Journeyman Years, the work itself, is expressive of—if we look at it philosophically and from a distance as a work of art.
The experience of enchantment happens within this frame of reverence. And the experience of enchantment happens in the moment. The book is a veritable catalog (if we look at it unimaginatively for a moment) of enchanted moments. And, of course, the reader can draw the conclusion for herself. These moments are not just that of a book, but of a life. This book wakes us up to that life. We find these successive moments of enchantment not just in good books, but in life. There—in books or life—enchantment is “immortalized” in people or places; for instance, the disused monastery where Joseph based his carpentry business, or the beautiful gardens, orchards, fields, and little lakes, the “natural world” which has been domesticated by cultivation over time, and where, now, men, women, and children can feel “at home.”
At the heightened moment of enchantment, say of love, it may be rapturous. Enraptured, we go beyond the enchantment of, say (for a man), the woman of our dreams, toward a realm of the soul nearer obsession, to a dark enchantment, with God or the world. And then, God, world, and humankind seem to coalesce. This is an illusion of enchantment. An example from the Journeyman Years of what I mean here is the sexual experience of Wilhelm’s youth, which he recalls and describes in a letter to Natalie.
The older of the boys, however, only a little ahead of me in age, the son of a fisherman, did not seem to enjoy this fooling with the flowers. He was a boy to whom I had been especially drawn as soon as he appeared, and he now invited me to go with him down to the river, which, already of considerable width, flowed not far off. We settled down with fishing rods in a shady spot where scores of little fish darted back and forth in the deep, still, clear water. He kindly showed me what to do, how to bait my line, and I succeeded a few times running in jerking the smallest of these delicate creatures against their will up into the air. As we sat there calmly, leaning against each other, he seemed to grow bored, and called my attention to a sandy spit that stretched out into the water on our side. It would make an excellent bathing place. He could not resist the temptation, he exclaimed, leaping to his feet, and before I knew it was down below, undressed, and in the water.”20
Wilhelm continues: “A very strange mood came over me. Grasshoppers danced around me, ants scurried about, colorful beetles hung in the branches, and gold-glittering dragonflies, for so he had called them, hovered and fluttered, phantom-like, at my feet, just as the boy, pulling a large crab from a tangle of roots, held it up gaily for me to see, then skillfully concealed it again in its old place, ready for the catch. It was so hot and sultry all around that one longed to be out of the sun and in the shade, then out of the cool of the shade and down into the cooler water. So it was easy for him to lure me down. He did not have to repeat his invitation often, for I found it irresistible and felt, despite some fear of my parents, as well as wariness toward the unknown element, extraordinary excitement. But once I undressed on the sand, I cautiously ventured into the water, though no farther than the gently sloping bottom permitted. He might let me linger there, moved away in the buoyant element, then swam back, and as he climbed out and stood up to dry off in the light of the sun, I thought my eyes were dazzled by a triple sun: so beautiful was the human form, of which I had never had any notion. He seemed to look at me with the same attention. Quickly dressed, we still faced each other without veils. Our hearts were drawn to one another, and with fiery kisses we swore eternal friendship.”
From this passage the sense of an enchanted world and the experience of enraptured enchantment are palpable. These “fiery kisses” are not metaphorical, they are mouth to mouth. But his “eternal friendship” is doomed not to last the day. His friend drowns later that same day with five others in a swimming accident where, trying to save younger children from the strong current, they dragged him under with them in their panic and they all got carried away.
The passion of love is a danger for enchantment, as it leads towards rapture and the collapse of the three distinct reverences into one obsessive or fundamental reverence. Perhaps this is why Christian love is not eros but agape. Agape is dispassionate but relational.
While love is the fabric of enchantment, Goethe’s novel shows that passionate loves tend to be lost, such as that just described, or, more elaborately, that between Flavio and Makarie, or between Flavio’s father and Hilarie, Flavio’s intended. However, events conspire (and, in an enchanted world, with enchanted people, events do conspire) to bring Flavio and Hilarie happily together. On the other hand, the basis for Wilhelm’s love for his intended, the beautiful Natalie, gradually wanes, to be replaced by his love for Hersilie, although why this is so we are not told. A bit like Proust’s novel, the Journeyman Years has different perspectives within it, but no overarching explanation (no total theory) under which it all may fit. Wilhelm himself, as the main character, seems to be replaced by Lenardo halfway through Journeyman Years, and it is not made clear to the reader whether Wilhelm will join the émigrés in the end or stay behind. In this, the book mirrors life, where we too are left with a whole clutch of things that ultimately are incomplete, as if life is composed of fragments of love.
What we have, then, in the Wilhelm Meister novels is a work of art to frame all possible theories of enchantment and also, in Goethe’s wisdom, to guide us. True love, we may extrapolate, is not true if it is not enchanting and it is only enchanting if it is framed by the three reverences: to God above, the earth beneath our feet, and to those around us. And these reverences are not merely attitudes. We recall from the novel that Wilhelm discovers them only by asking about the physical postures of the boys he saw in the Pedagogic Province. This is significant because it means the reverence must be embodied, or it is not reverence. In other words, it is essentially an action, not an attitude. As such, it requires learning and self-mastery.
But is true love possible on this earth even for enchanted souls? Goethe, in the Journeyman Years, would appear to raise this question. And another question: how true is true love without true society in which it can, as it were, be as much part of the landscape as the “holy family” were at the beginning of the novel? A society is not true if it is out of step with God above, or the earth beneath; these things too need to rise up invisibly within us even as they gain visibility in our actions. We see the earth in our actions, in the Journeyman Years, from the dedication so many of the characters have to craft, and hence the elevation of craft alongside art; both are reverential in the sense we have been speaking about here. God, of course, rises up invisibly within us but becomes visible in our actions in the light that our deeds bring into the lives of others. The God of Love in Journeyman Years is a practical postulate, not a metaphysical being.
The Journeyman Years is like a frameless mirror mirroring enchantment, and where enchantment is not mirrored it is simply out of the frame. In one of the stories within the story, entitled “Who Is the Traitor?” Lucidor is in love with Lucinde. They are enchanting characters in an enchanted setting. Enchantment puts power into eros and moves it toward the real presence of its desire. Lucidor is totally captivated by Lucinde. But the whole world seems to conspire in the wisdom of love. “A country setting has considerable advantage for sociability, particularly when the hosts are thoughtful, sensitive individuals, who have been impelled over the years to come to the aid of the natural potential of their surroundings. Such had been done here.”21 A vivid and fresh description of the surrounds is given, then:
Adjacent to the residence and the utility buildings lay pleasure gardens, orchards, and mowings; thence one wandered unexpectedly into a wood, through which a lane broad enough for driving wound back and forth. At its centre, at the highest elevation, had been constructed a hall with adjoining chambers. Entering by the main door, one saw in a great mirror the finest view the entire region had to offer, then quickly turned around to recover with the help of reality from the unexpected tableau. For the approach was artfully designed and everything ingeniously hidden to achieve this surprise effect. No one entered without turning with pleasure back and forth from the mirror to Nature and from Nature to the mirror.
This is a description from the novel of the novel and the way it mirrors the world. But there is a discrepancy, or an illusion, for we do not find the world in the mirror any more than we can find such a mirror in the world—except for Goethe’s work in this instance. And so the mirror operates as an inverted symbol; Goethe has it hold an image in its reflection that does not reflect the world, but may enchant us, but may call reverence forth from us. Although the mirror is pictured in the novel, the novel itself is the mirror. Perhaps we may learn the three reverences—and the fourth, soulfulness—by reading, listening, and gazing. What other way of soulfulness is there? In any case, it is by something like this “mirroring” that the novel frames enchantment. And it is a metaphysical experience to which reading gives access.
And so to return to our story briefly, “Who Is the Traitor?” It is about lovers at cross-purposes, each of whom is mistaken about the heart of each of the others. But when, at last, Lucidor holds Lucinde, his true love, in his arms, they are in the room just described, in front of the mirror. In this image, following our interpretation of the novel as framing enchantment, both Nature and the mirror share the same testimony to true love in the center of the whole landscape, real and mirrored. In this love the three reverences are realized in their actual created beauty; they come together, God, Nature, and the lovers lost to love, and that embrace is itself embraced by all the world and presumably, God himself.
Finally, I will recapitulate the main points of the discussion in this long and involved narrative, with its off-cuts and caesurae. My description has been all too brief, I know, but we may see quite clearly, I think, from what I have said, that enchantment occurs in the cultural knotting of God, world, and humankind. Goethe tries to show us the conditions of a different knotting, if we can see ourselves in his work; and if we can measure ourselves by what he mirrors that is of quite another order. Goethe points to a new style of reverence within science and within religion, which does not tie science to objectivism, which only cuts subject from object, and does not tie religion to metaphysical knowledge, which is only false abstraction, beyond the intuitions of experience.
A new culture is conditional for Goethe upon renunciation and striving, in which we must include our reading, listening, and gazing in the sense I have given them. Goethe’s literary work perhaps illustrates better than anything ever written, the hope of a world in which enchantment is a living part of life, a world within a world in which to be reasonable is not an impossibility, and a world no less of renunciation and striving. He portrays the possibility, despite the vicissitudes of war and strife, of a culture of enchantment which is neither idyllic nor idealistic and thus a pastiche. Goethe envisages renunciation and striving of this kind to create an artistic, scientific, and religious culture which is western—with Christian and pagan presuppositions and foundations—but which is an alternative to a culture led by self-interest, the happiness of the masses, authoritarian or evangelical religion, pragmatism, historicism or utilitarianism—in short, the mirrors in which we are framed and caught today. Goethe gives us an enchanted hope which is different from, on the one hand, the hope of ethical humanism, in which Christianity and secularism collude these days, and from, on the other hand, the hope of ideological humanism, which we see on both left and right in politics. Goethe’s alternative is a futuristic humanism based on enchanted hope, but one based practically on solid education in the arts and sciences. Goethe gives us a vision of another world as the potential of our world.
The ideas arising from the Wilhelm Meister novels that I have recapitulated here may now be complemented by a reading of Goethe’s Faust. Goethe was writing and rewriting Faust at the same time as he was writing the Wilhelm Meister novels—at the end of the eighteenth and the start of the nineteenth centuries. In turning to Faust in the next chapter, we will work through it in a similar way to here, that is, by following the narrative flow. This will serve again as an introduction to what is otherwise one of the most complex literary texts in the canon of world literature.
Notes
1. Here, by Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister novels,” I mean: Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796); Conversations of German Refugees (1795); The Fairy Tale (1795); Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years or The Renunciants (1821), including both sets of aphorisms, and the poems Vermächtnis (“Legacy”), after the first set of aphorisms at the end of Book Two, and Im ernsten Beinhaus (“In the Charnel House”) added in 1829 after the second set of aphorisms at the end of Book Three. As a bibliophile, where more is better, I have a “maximalist” view of the Wilhelm Meister corpus. A minimalist view would include only the Apprenticeship and Journeyman Years, without the aphorisms and two poems. However, my comments hold whichever view one takes. The maximalist view is Goethe’s own, according to the edition of his collected works that he compiled in preparation for his death.
2. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII.
3. As an aside, Shakespeare was a little-regarded playwright in England in Goethe’s day, but it was in fact Goethe who was most significant in bringing about Shakespeare’s recognition in England and, indeed, across the world.
4. Goethe, Journeyman Years, 23.
5. André Comte-Sponville, A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Vintage, 2003), 7-15.
6. Goethe, Journeyman Years, 24f.
7. Goethe, Journeyman Years, 25-26.
8. Ibid., 298.
9. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California, 1988), 185–6.
10. Ibid., 22.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 18.
13. Ibid., 266.
14. But the matter is more complicated still. Through most of these genres the novel is playing with: parody, rewriting (both others’ work as well as Goethe’s own), and burlesque. Sometimes these ironic modes of writing are sympathetic to their sources, even Oliver Goldsmith and Laurence Sterne, authors, respectively, of The Vicar of Wakefield and Tristram Shandy, novels Goethe admired. At other times, Goethe ridicules his sources, usually by bettering them. A specialist reader of Journeyman Years will find traces of homage to Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Cervantes, Dante, Shakespeare, and Calderon, as well as to less-known contemporaries of Goethe.
An aphorism from the first group, entitled “Reflections on the Spirit of Wanderers,” reads: “Aptness, effectiveness and grace reside not in language itself but in the spirit embodied in it. Thus, it is not left to the individual to confer these desirable qualities on his calculations, speeches, or poems. It is a question of whether Nature has endowed him with the requisite spiritual and moral qualities. Spiritual: the gift of sight and insight; moral: that he may fend off the evil demons that could prevent him from paying honour to the truth.” These words seem to apply well to Goethe himself, it seems to me: in the novel, despite the diversity of perspectives it holds (though we can only guess the number of them) and the porous quality of the text (so that the different genres bleed into one another, even while they stand distinct; and so that the history of world literature is allowed into the text from outside, as it were), the hand of a single artist prevails. We always feel we are reading Goethe. Part of the reason for this is enchantment; a spirit of enchantment illuminates the multiplicity, as if from within.
Upon reading the aphorism just quoted, we, like Pontius Pilate, might ask: “What is truth?” Truth is not scientific correspondence with reality, although science and scientific truth is everywhere evident in the text with regard to the enchanted awe by which various characters are held in thrall by Nature. Another aphorism from the same group tells us: “Truth is constructive.” Truth is what builds peace and harmony, what makes for beauty and sublimeness. Truth is something we must work for, and work together for. The opposite of truth is error, and error leads to the death of beauty, and, ultimately, the state of war. But the problem with error is that, unlike mathematical error, which is simply incorrect, soul error—disruption or discord in the unison of inward sensibility and sensitivity—entangles the soul in such a way that one’s inner sensibility and sensitivity is rendered immune to the fact. So we persist in our indigence, or, in religious language, our “sin,” a term which in Greek literally means “missing the mark.” Truth is the constructiveness which “hits the mark.”
Truth happens, then, as part of a process or development, if it happens at all. The end is peace and harmony. The starting point at the social level is polite conversation and good manners, and, on the basis of this, real virtue is built up which becomes the truth of a life. If truth is constructive, two forces of the soul underlie it: renunciation and striving. The first of these is at the heart of Journeyman Years; the second, of Faust.
15. Goethe, Journeyman Years, 101.
16. Ibid., 245.
17. Ibid., 103.
18. Ibid., 203–4.
19. Ibid., 205.
20. Ibid., 286f.
21. Ibid., 159.