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Parody: Re-Visioning Goethe
Special GSNA session at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Diego, December 2003. Organized and chaired by Angela Borchert, University of Western Ontario.
1. “A Lover’s Self-Parody: Discrediting Romanticism while Creating Its Mythos”
(Erich Denton, Wheaton College, Norton)
In this paper, I would like to reexamine the mythos of the romantic—the erotic and the melancholic—in Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun as applied to the self-parody of the early Goethe. In one sense, I am looking for the missing link between Rabelais / Montaigne and Werther / Satyros in Goethe’s parody of himself as proto-Romantic. In another sense, I am after a refutation of myths of feminine parody in recent work by David Wellbery and Benjamin Bennett.
Throughout his pre-1781 work, Goethe resorts to parody to resolve issues of polymorphous identity and sexuality. From Eridon in Die Laune des Verliebten to Oronoro in Triumph der Empfindsamkeit, Goethe has a habit of gutting and disemboweling the very romantic heroes he creates or inherits by way of literary influence. For this paper, I would like to focus on two works, a playlet and a mock-epic poemlet, Satyros and “Lilis Park,” in order to analyze radical “voice changes” within such microscopic contexts. In Barthes’ or Kristeva’s terms, one might say we are dealing with manifestations of temper, temperament, and distemper as forms of parody that mask melancholy. In Wellbery’s and Bennett’s terms, one might say that we are dealing with parody as disfigurements of the feminine. It’s voices that one more often identifies with Heine than Goethe. My paper suggests that Goethe uses parody to work out issues of gender, identity, and sexuality that remain polymorphous without the intervention of that parody.
2. “Constructive Parodies of Goethe’s Deconstructed Hero: Egmont, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, and Dantons Tod” (Raleigh Whitinger, University of Alberta, Edmonton)
Close consideration of how the theme of artistic activity imparts to Egmont (1788) a dimension of ironic reflection on its own idealistic visions of heroic and poetic triumph is the point of departure for approaching a more differentiated grasp of the allusions and echoes with which Heinrich von Kleist’s Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (1810) and Georg Büchner’s Dantons Tod (1835) evoke Goethe’s play—and thus for locating those dramas in the field of modern parody with its combination of homage and critique, with its acknowledgement and rethinking of an earlier work’s ideals (Hutcheon, Tynjanov).
Specific allusions in the two later plays suggest that Goethe and his Egmont are part of the idealistic tradition that both Kleist and Büchner take up to ponder and question. These evocations draw attention to further similarities and parallels—highlighting above all the way the later two plays echo the basic plot line of Goethe’s drama, with the one prominent result being their parodically ironic, even subversive reflection on the idealistic vision of hero and poetry that dominates the foreground of Goethe’s play. Like Egmont, each depicts its creatively gifted title-figure, though incarcerated and doomed in his collision with historical and political reality, indomitable in his struggle to find words and visions to resurrect a heroic image and mission that transcend his death. Yet the Kleist and Büchner plays increasingly twist and subvert the heroic and poetic ideals so prominent in Goethe’s play. The Homburg drama begins where Egmont leaves off—with a dream scene—but emphasizes throughout that wilfully read dream’s distance from the complexities of reality (“Ein Traum! was sonst?”). The Danton drama opens with a title-figure already cynically aware of the seductive lie of the heroic persona (“Man möchte sich in die Lüge verlieben”). Yet closer consideration of the way appearances of heroic and poetic triumph are ironically subverted in all three plays suggests something other than a black-white contrast between Goethe’s idealism and the cynical irony of Kleist or the nihilism that many see in Büchner’s pessimistic view of history—and thus the more complex nature of the parodic relationship involved, the later two plays not so much parodying the idealism of Goethe’s drama as paying homage to its pervasive irony. Essential to this consideration is the irony with which Goethe’s drama treats its own visions of heroic and poetic mastery—its every move towards closing visions of triumph paired with subversive signals about the efficacy of its protagonist’s identity and visions. In addition, the Kleist and Büchner dramas, as they take up and intensify this critical dialogue with the illusory artfulness behind the appearance of heroic and poetic triumph—his ironic deconstruction of the resurrected hero—pay constructive homage as well to Goethe’s intimations of the positive potentials that exist apart from the discourse of heroism, each later play too a monument to the poetic capacity of hero and poet alike to capture, in the face of downfall, the moments of beauty in life’s eternal stream. Thus with their complexly parodic re-thinking of Egmont, Homburg and Danton too express essentials of the modern German drama’s first century of development from Goethe to Nietzsche: their intensification of Goethe’s irony compels us to say of the heroic ideal “Es ist ein Traum!”; their ongoing homage to the indomitability of the poetic impulse invites us to exclaim “Ich will ihn weiter träumen!”
3. “Parodies, Pastiches or Deconstructive Plays? Botho Strauß’ Der junge Mann and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz as homages to Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Helen Finch, Trinity College, Dublin)
Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre has spawned a tradition of interpretation that idealises it as a perfect model for a select and élitist literary genre known as the Bildungsroman, which in turn spawned a German discourse of Bildung. My paper will analyse the ways in which Strauß’ Der junge Mann and Sebald’s Austerlitz play on this discourse, and how they relate to the hypotext of Wilhelm Meister. My paper reads this relationship by exploiting the definition of parody suggested by Linda Hutcheon, according to which parody occupies an uneasy space between polemic and respectful imitation that adds to, rather than detracts from, the status of the hypotext. Der junge Mann is easily recognisable as a parody of Goethe’s novel; its naive protagonist tries to realise himself as an aesthetic subject as a theatre director, but fails miserably due both to lack of talent and to the historical condition of West Germany in the 1980s. Here, parody serves a culturally critical function, using the hypotext to turn satire outwards on contemporary society. Thus, the Tower of Goethe’s idealised Turmgesellschaft becomes for Strauß a dystopian supermarket of banal and threatening German identities. However, in Der junge Mann the putatively linear narrative of the Bildungsprojekt breaks down into a fragmented polyphony of narrative voices, indicating that Strauß not only is using parody to criticise contemporary society, but is also mocking the totalising aspirations of the discourse of Bildung. In this context my paper also examines Austerlitz, which can be read as a(n) (anti-)Bildungsroman in reverse. Here, the protagonist returns to his city of origin and his first educator in an attempt to heal the division that the Holocaust and exile have created in him, yet fails to establish an “authentic” identity. In a melancholy and traumatic play on the discourse of the autonomous subject, Sebald plays the plot of Wilhelm Meister backwards, and calls into question the reductive tradition that would interpret Goethe’s novel in terms of an ahistorical ideal of aesthetic education. As in Der junge Mann, the tragic events of German history and the culture of late capitalism make it impossible for a unitary subjectivity to be rescued. Austerlitz is far removed from the satirical or humorous aspects of parody, but it is informed by a melancholy irony, thus opening up new possibilities for a mourning parody which addresses the profound ruptures in the German inheritance of its Goethe-saturated canon. My paper will examine the extent to which these anti-Bildung narratives can be seen as a direct parody of Goethe’s novel, in the sense suggested by Simon Dentith when he speaks of the parodies of a culture that feels itself to be belated. Such parodies, according to Dentith, approach their hypotext in a way that adds to its aura rather than diminishing it. As Wilhelm Meister is in itself a dialogic, unstable metafiction which, according to Margaret Rose’s concept of parody as critical metafiction, is thus in a sense already a parody of itself. My paper examines how the modern texts play on this autoparodic hypotext and to what extent they are thereby doubly parodic, engaging with Wilhelm Meister’s internal tensions to examine the pervasive ideologies of aesthetic subjectivity, ahistorical ideals of education, and of the pedagogical function of the hypotext.
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Original Call for Papers (October 2002)
The Goethe Society of North America invites proposals for a panel on the forms and functions of parody in and of Goethe's work at the 2003 MLA Convention, 27-30 December in San Diego.
Goethe still provokes. 250 years after Nicolai remodeled the sorrows into Die Freuden des jungen Werthers, Enzensberger wrote Nieder mit Goethe! Eine Liebeserklärung. Parody challenges authority while reinscribing it. No wonder that Goethe, who himself was an avid practitioner of parody in his early career, later judges such subversive transgressions ambivalently.
Parody seems to mark the intersections between invention and critique, adaptation and revision, combination and competition, similarity and difference. This panel is interested in re-visioning Goethe by examining parodies in diverse media and from a broad range of theoretical orientations and methodological approaches.
With a view to Goethe, papers might focus on the pragmatics of parody: on effects ranging from ridicule to reverence, on forms from the comic to the ironic or on contexts from the 18th to the 21st centuries. Papers might consider Goethe in regards to a variety of parodistic discourses including pastiche, travesty, satire, caricature or burlesque. Papers might also explore more theoretical perspectives such as those of Schlegel, Bakhtin, Deleuze, Genette, Kristeva or Hutcheon in relation to Goethe and parody.
Panelists must be MLA members. Please submit 1-2 page proposals by March 15th, 2003 to:
Angela Borchert
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
University College 256
The University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario
N6A 3K7, Canada
E-Mail: borchert@uwo.ca (paste-in message preferred)
Fax: (519) 661-4093
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