Die Leiden des jungen Lesers

Der Werther ist tot; es lebe der Wertherismus! I may not have been able to fit in a movie on Sunday night, but at least I was able to tackle the last few pages of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. I'm indebted to Nuphy for his advice about avoiding the mistake of thousands of yellow-vested nincompoops and not taking it at face value. It was intriguing to find that I could simultaneously laugh at Werther's maudlin excesses and yet be genuinely moved by his suffering. After all, pain you cause yourself is still pain. So kudos to the German Genius for writing a novel that supports such contradictory readings. You still have a lot to answer for, but at least it's less your fault than I once thought.

As I suspected, I found Ossian much more palatable in Goethe's translation than in the original. It still feels derivative and repetitive, but at least it reads like real poetry. Still, six whole pages? What the hell, Wolfgang? "I went and translated this shit, so dammit if I'm not going to use it all." But I'm sure if one enlarged the two solid pages of commentary on it in the endnotes to the same font, it would be at least as long. Knowing that, once you include apparatus (or at least the parts I read) you're already up to twice the original length, makes me feel better for having taken nearly a month to finish such a relatively short work.

Of course, you could spend years exploring just a fraction of everything that has been written about, inspired by, or referred to in Goethe's novel. Thanks to a colleague at work, I learned that a puzzling mention of "den Hofmeistern" (which somehow escaped my voluble commentator's notice) is most likely a callback to Lenz' eponymous drama, one which arguably out-Werthers Werther. And via Wikipedia I discovered that Goethe's mostly-forgotten contemporary Nicolai wrote a satire with a happier ending (Freuden des jungen Werthers) which so enraged old Goethe that he not only snuck an insulting caricature of the man into Faust but blasted him with this poetic salvo:

Ein junger Mensch, ich weiß nicht wie,
Starb einst an der Hypochondrie
Und ward denn auch begraben.
Da kam ein schöner Geist herbei,
Der hatte seinen Stuhlgang frei,
Wie's denn so Leute haben.
Der setzt' notdürftig sich aufs Grab
Und legte da sein Häuflein ab,
Beschaute freundlich seinen Dreck,
Ging wohl eratmet wieder weg
Und sprach zu sich bedächtiglich:
„Der gute Mensch, wie hat er sich verdorben!
Hätt er geschissen so wie ich,
Er wäre nicht gestorben!“

(For those of you who are a little German-challenged, Nicolai is described herein as literally shitting on Werther's grave.)

I guess it's a sign of enjoyment that instead of going for a change of pace, I've decided this is the most opportune time yet to dive into Mann's Lotte in Weimar. So far I'm quite enjoying it; the Schachtelsätze aren't as horrendous as in some of his better-known works and the tone is humorous--by Mannian standards, almost frivolous. I was actually chuckling aloud on the shuttle this morning as I read the garrulous attempts of a provincial innkeeper to make a good impression on his distinguished guest. In particular, his request for her to sign the guestbook was so overwrought that I only determined the intent from the context. Can he keep that going without losing my interest for another 380 pages?