Monstrous Ruminations

The expansion of multifarious rationalities in the political, economic and social spheres of 18th century Europe radically transformed the constitution of humanity in relation to the world, marking the novel discontinuity termed modernity. In discordant opposition, Romantic literature emerged to expose sites capable of destabilizing modern rationalities. An apotheosis of the German Sturm und Drang movement, Geothe’s 1774 The Sorrows of Young Werther charts the peregrinations and perdition of the conflicted youth Werther. Traversing his subjective terrain and the German countryside in search of a space unfettered by modernity, Werther ascribes the villagers of Wahlheim as markers of all he lacks, utilizing them to anchor his bourgeois subject-position. Werther’s naïve egalitarianism masks his failure to acknowledge the other in her difference, silencing the subaltern and marking her for incorporation into the machinery of modernity.

Werther’s contempt for bourgeois society impels an assiduous identification with nature, evoking superfluous descriptions of immeasurable beauty. His enthrallment with the environs of Wahlheim is epitomized by the symbol of the garden: “The garden is simple, and as soon as one enters, one feels that it was planned not by a scientific gardener but a sensitive heart wishing to commune with itself alone” (Goethe 5). Werther believes his peregrinations through the German countryside draw him closer to the divine, in whose presence his creative faculty is elevated: “…could you only breathe upon paper all that lives so full and warm within you, so that it might become the mirror of your soul, as your soul is the mirror of the infinite God!” (Goethe 6). Werther perceives village folk to be in harmony with nature, in contrast to the calculated conventions of bourgeois society, and thus makes them the object of his representations.

Werther sketches the image of two village children, “without having added the slightest invention of my own,” because “Nature alone is illimitably rich, and Nature alone forms the great artist” (Goethe 14). When a young peasant shares the story of his love for a widowed woman, Werther is enrapt by the sincerity of his passion and considers seeing her firsthand, but concludes that “It is better that I see her through the eyes of her lover; she might not appear to my own eyes, in reality, as I now see her; and why should I destroy the lovely image I already possess?” (Goethe 20) Werther’s imaginary identification with the villagers inspires his paintings, poetry, and actions without reflection upon the violence intrinsic to his gaze. While Werther apprehends the residents of Wahlheim as a naturalized spectacle for his representations, the villagers’ attitudes towards him are structured by pathos of distance formed by rank and class distinctions. Werther depicts peasants as happy children in their propensity to live for the present, actualizing their will by spontaneous and raucous demands. When Werther recognizes the inequality enabling his lofty labor, his sentiments vacillate toward contempt for the divine faculty through which “we paint our prison walls with gaily colored figures and luminous prospects,” prompting him to recede into subjective interiority and subsume others through a nostalgic gaze (Goethe 12).

Werther’s visual consumption of girls fetching water is recoded by his perspective to substantiate patriarchal fantasies inspired by Homeric “cradlesongs”: “I see them, our forefathers, meet at the fountain and do their wooing, and feel how benevolent spirits hover around wells and springs” (Goethe 7). The fountain forms another central symbol in The Sorrows of Young Werther, indicating not simply an imaginary relation marked by resemblance and emulation, but an inimitable identification with the Other. After meeting Lotte Werther rejoices the divine verisimilitude of Wahlheim, irrupting in inordinate descriptions of natural beauty as he roams mountains and valleys; ultimately, however, he is unable to locate what he seeks:

"Oh, it is the same with the distance as with the future! A vast, twilit whole lies before our soul; our emotions lose themselves in it as do our eyes, and we long to surrender our entire being and let ourselves sink into one great well of blissful feeling. Alas, when we approach, when There has become Here, everything is as it was before, and we are left with our poverty, our narrowness, while our soul thirsts for comfort that slipped away." (Goethe 33)

Werther articulates a sense of spatial dislocation and temporal dialectic as he momentarily recognizes the disconnections between a gestalt of coherent singularity and his fragmented bodily experience. When he crosses this sublime threshold he is obligated to deplore the poverty of his language. His peregrinations have educed perdition.

However, he proffers an anxious effusion of nostalgia to mask his sense of lack: “So the most restless vagabond yearns in the end for his native land, and finds in his poor hut, in the arms of his wife, in the circle of his children, and in his labor to support them all, the happiness he searched the wide world for in vain” (Goethe 33). The impoverished vagrant haunts his speech, a symptom of Werther’s bourgeois subject-position, anchoring his sense of self through imitation of that which is absent and displaced. Werther revisits his desire for return to a point of origin, a sense of fullness that eludes him except in Homeric patriarchal fantasies, “which I can, thank God, weave without affectation into my own way of living” (Goethe 34). Werther fails to negotiate the creative potentialities of inimitable identification and returns to his construction of an idealized bower:

"How happy I am that my heart is open to the simple, innocent delight of the man who brings a head of cabbage to his table which he himself has grown, enjoying not only the cabbage but all the fine days, the lovely mornings when he planted it, the pleasant evenings when he watered it, so that, after having experienced pleasure in its growth he may, at the end, again enjoy in one single moment all that has gone before. " (Goethe 34)

The violence of Werther’s representations lies in egocentric identification with the peasants of Wahlheim while the ideological underpinnings of his gaze remain inconspicuously invisible. Citing egalitarianism in accordance with the Golden Rule, Werther abhors the material conditions that prevent him from freely interacting with who he pleases; yet his specifically bourgeois economy of desires is implicated in the structural violence producing an impoverished class of peasantry. Drawing his capital from others’ deprivation while refusing to acknowledge his privileged position, Werther’s hegemony is embodied by his self-representation as powerless, robbing the subjugated peasantry of even their language of protest.

The political implications of Werther’s naïve romanticism are illustrated through his damned love for Lotte. Despite his knowledge of her engagement to Albert, he convinces himself that she reciprocates his feelings. Finding her unobtainable, Werther’s descriptions of Nature’s immeasurable beauty give way to the sublime abyss of death:

"There is not one moment which does not consume you and yours, and not one moment when you yourself are not inevitably destructive; the most harmless walk costs the lives of thousands of poor, minute worms; one step of your foot annihilates the painstaking constructions of ants, and stamps a small world into its ignominious grave. Ha! It is not the notable catastrophes of the world, the floods that wash away our villages, the earthquakes that swallow up our town which move me; my heart is instead worn out by the consuming power latent in the whole of Nature which has formed nothing that will not destroy its neighbor and itself. So I stagger with anxiety, Heaven and Earth and their weaving powers around me! I see nothing but an eternally devouring and ruminating monster." (Goethe 66)

Werther decries the unforgiving world for its infinite violence, yet throughout the novel it is his monstrous ruminations that devour himself and the other. Werther’s ascetic self-denial, his consuming soul-searching, and self-representation through written discourse, constitute a subject rife with the traces and functions of power. Overcome with a sense of impotence in relation to the structural violence he unwillingly propagates, Werther desperately tries to assert his will upon the world. Yet his inability to understand the Other in her difference marks his inability to understand himself beyond the scope designed by discourse. The will turning against life, Werther instrumentalizes Lotte and calculates his doom by her hands.

Werther’s suicide affirms the inevitable assimilation and incorporation of romanticized spaces into the rationalizing processes of modernity. His failure to effectively undertake the Romantic project lies in egocentric identification with peasantry as a symptom and anchor of all that his bourgeois subjectivity lacks. His naïve desire to transcend modern social conventions denies the material privilege undergirding his perspective, and functions to rob the subaltern of her dissident language. While Werther is unable to endure the ineffable Real, his encounter with this sublime threshold exemplifies a radical alterity that continues to haunt the modern subject with the potential for destabilization, or the threat of destruction.