歌德作为创伤叙事的“世界文学”观

点击上方“外国文学研究”可以订阅哦

内容摘要

比较文学界近来所推崇的“行星系”形态的文学在该学科过去二十年的发展中一直处于升温态势，并由此将歌德推至总工程师的位置。当下，部分学者忽略了歌德所处的时代与当今时代的重要差异，用歌德关于世界文学的思考来推断其特定的地缘政治。为了避免这种“伪装为全球主义的民族主义”，有必要讨论促使歌德提出世界文学“课题”的个人与集体的创伤因素。无论是作为一名作家还是作为一名德国人，歌德在当时都面临困境。这是他为什么在两种身份下都视跨越边界的结盟为处理困境的最佳方式的原因，我们也有必要详细探讨歌德的世界文学思想中诸如此类的个人与国家因素。

作者简介

弗拉基米尔·比蒂，奥地利维也纳大学讲席教授，《阿卡迪亚：国际文学文化学刊》主编，主要从事世界主义、创伤理论、文化批评、叙事理论等领域的研究。

Title

Goethe’s Weltliteratur as a Trauma Narrative

Abstract

The recent comparatist celebration of literature in the shape of “planetary system,” which is on the rise in the last two decades of the discipline’s development, promoted Goethe to the status of its chief engineer. Disregarding important differences between Goethe’s and our age, recent interpreters placed his idea of world literature at the service of their particular geopolitical projections. In order to avoid such “nationalism masquerading as globalism” (Spivak), I will focus on both personal and collective traumatic constellations, which generated Goethe’s “project” of world literature. He felt stranded in his present as both a writer and German. This is why he, in both capacities, envisioned transborder alliances as the best method of coping with these frustrations. The paper investigates this personal and national investment in his idea of world literature in more detail.

Author

Vladimir Biti is Distinguished Professor at University of Vienna, editor of Arcadia:  International Journal of Literary Culture. His research interests include cosmopolitanism,  trauma theory, culture criticism, and narrative theory.

 Email: [e-mail]

The recent enthusiastic reception of Goethe’s literary-political concept of Weltliteratur appears to have adapted it to diverse investments and compensatory projects of its interpreters. For example, the U.S.-American comparatist Franco Moretti praises it, along with its resumption by Marx, as the fnal revelation of literature in the shape of a “planetary system” (54). However, at closer inspection, both Goethe’s and Marx’s ideas of world literature are deeply resilient to their smooth deployment for planetary purpose.

First of all, the very merging of these two figures into a homogeneous thesis of a substantially new world order is misguided. For Marx, world literature was an unavoidable corollary of the formation of the world market and as such an instrument of the expanding bourgeois capital, which destroys national industries, economies and cultural self-suffciency. Unlike Goethe’s Weltliteratur as we will come to see, Marx’s concept was directed against the nation-states by opposing a statist nationalism that was unknown to Goethe. But even though Marx was certainly critical of nationalism, associating it with the manipulative politics of nation-states, his stance on cosmopolitan world literature, as an instrument of the bourgeois suspension of all differences, was far from being clearly affrmative (Cheng 28). In his view, cosmopolitanism does not solve the problem of nationalism but reinvigorates it. The homogenizing pressure of this cosmopolitanism spawned the proliferation of nationalisms in the second half of the nineteenth century and it is pretty obvious that today’s globalization produces exactly the same effect. One of the lessons that might be drawn from Marx’s characteristic ambivalence regarding “globalization” of his time is that the annihilating national fragmentation follows the triumphant integration of the world like a shadow. In the form it has taken, globalization is not so much the enemy of humankind’s compartmentalization but in fact its involuntary ally.

As regards Goethe, who is Moretti’s second chosen foothold for the justifcation of his “literary world systems theory,” he is completely unambiguous with regard to the accelerated economic, traffic and communicational uniting of the world of his time. Far from offering praise, he is deeply concerned by it and thus develops a consistent defensive strategy against this abundance of superficial impressions. This does not mean that Goethe rejects cosmopolitanism as such but argues against what he takes to be its aberrations. His subtle critique of these, which curiously escapes his recent U.S.-American and French interpreters (Pascale Casanova) was twofold.

Its first target was the national malformation of cosmopolitanism as exemplified in Friedrich Schlegel’s vision of German literature. From Goethe’s point of view, expressed in the polemical articles he published in his journal Über Kunst und Altertum from 1805 onwards, the Romanticist neo-Catholic euphoria of violent national purifcation was doomed to fail from the moment it was launched in Schlegel’s Parisian journal Europe (1802). Having banished from German culture everything that was secular and allegedly non-German, it not only effectuated this culture’s regrettable impoverishment, but disqualified Germany outright from serious international competition. In order to become truly competitive, German literature had to accept the hybridity of its origins and historical destiny, rather than retreat into a utopian and compensatory self-isolation (Koch 241–47). Only an identity that generously acknowledges the others within itself, Goethe argued, can confront the others outside itself with the necessary dignity. This envisions a completely different kind of interlocking with foreigners than the one proposed by Johann Herder and Friedrich Schlegel. It does not forge domesticating alliances with the foreigners to strengthen one’s own national spirit①but, on the contrary, interrogates, advances and extends one’s own national spirit by exploring in depth these foreigners’ otherness. This goes directly against the grain of Moretti’s market-driven vision of world literature that translates everything into the parameters of U.S.-American globalization.②

Indeed, Goethe requires from his compatriots not only that they “read every poet in his own language and the peculiar discourse of his time and habits” and “strive to approach the foreign as closely as possible;” he also demands “heightened attentiveness” that protects one from “easy familiarizing projections” practiced by the ignorant mob. Such attentiveness pertains of course only to the works of the great West European literatures. If one wants to truly understand them, meticulous and patient translation of their genuine otherness has to penetrate what is untranslatable in them (Beim Übersetzen muß man bis ans Unübersetzliche herangehen, 308). Such attentive and prominent literary exchanges push German literature in the process of incessant making, as testifed by Goethe’s constant concern for the participation of Frenchmen, Englishmen, Scots and Italians in its shaping. Without such permanent mediation, negotiation and exchange with other national literatures, German literature cannot become part of world literature. Goethe refuses its xenophobic self-isolation as advocated by German Romanticists.

Left to itself, every literature will exhaust its vitality, if it is not refreshed by the empathy (Teilnahme) of a foreign one. What nature researcher (Naturforscher) does not take pleasure in the wonderful things that he sees produced by refection in a mirror? Now what mirroring (Spiegelung) in the field of morals (Sittliche) means, everyone has experienced in himself if only unconsciously, and once his attention is aroused, he will understand how much in the formation of his life he owes to this mirroring. (Goethe, Schriften zur Weltliteratur 245)

Even from the perspective of individual writers, it makes no sense speaking of someone’s originality if one considers that the world leaves its imprints on the human being from his beginning to his end. “If I were able to mention everything that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, very few things would remain.” What would remain is only the energy, power, and the will to go through others in order to fnd out for oneself (Goethe, Schriften zur Weltliteratur 226–27). Indeed, as Goethe learns by reading his Faust in French translation, one cannot affrm the self without encountering the other, and the same goes for the refections of German literature in the mirror of French or English criticism. “Like individual man, each nation also relies on what is ancient and foreign much more than what is its own, inherited or self-made,” he writes in 1820 (188). No modern national literature can erase the old Greek transnational fundament, which is why Goethe prefers an international redemption of its cultural legacy. “In the evaluation of the foreign (literatures) we must not stick to anything specifc in wishing to regard this as exemplary,” he tells Eckermann on January 31, 1827; “if we need something exemplary, we must always return to the Ancient Greeks” (250).

But the Ancient Greeks are gone forever. After their definite departure, their legacy lost its binding power, henceforth fguring merely as a regulating idea. As the Lord was now irrevocably absent for his descendants, His throne became empty and was up for grabs. In order to expose its improper usurpers after the historical dissolution of the Antique pattern, i.e. French and English literatures, Goethe invented Weltliteratur as a permanent supervising negotiation between national literatures. In his opinion, literary sovereignty is imaginable merely in terms of a “joint venture” of many national literatures, which have to patiently learn to know each other in order to somehow put together the scattered fragments of Greek antiquity. Appropriating the universal Greek cultural legacy solely for themselves and occupying for their petty purpose its constitutively “empty throne,” modern national agencies falsify its universality. The task of the creative writer is instead to courageously confront the turbulent worldwide flux and to stubbornly drive his spirit through its mess if he wants to achieve representative status in the ongoing European competition. 

A proper writer speaks on behalf of the whole of humanity rather than his “natural community.” He engages humanity in its entirety, which means that he goes beyond his immediate neighbor who provides him the ready security of “house piety” to embrace the true amplitude of “world piety” (FA I 10: 514).③ In a letter to Thomas Carlyle from 1827, Goethe states that the endeavor of the best poets of all nations has for some time been concerned with that, which is universally human by trying to transcend the selfshness of earthly human creatures. In a world literature deserved of such a name, an uncompromising universality shines and shimmers through the particular. The true artist aims at a proper representation of nature beyond what just comes as natural. He undertakes meticulous comparative study of worldwide cultures to discover a deep unity beneath their confusing diversity. Hence his attentive exploration of others does not amount to an abandonment of his self by merging into the others but, on the contrary, improved self-acquisition on a higher level. To put it in a nutshell, a creative writer’s strategy is a tireless self-propelling. “You have to incessantly change, renew, rejuvenate yourself,” Goethe claims in 1830, aged no less than 80, “in order not to ossify” (291). If we take the tripartite process of a writer’s development outlined in his essay Simple Imitation of Nature, Manner, Style from 1789 (BA 19: 77–82) as a criterion, Goethe obviously placed himself, in opposition to his German contemporaries, at the highest level of “style.” This level renders the writer capable of capturing the unique essence of the object represented unlike pure imitators, who simply reproduce its externally visible surface.

Here we come to the second target of Goethe’s critique of cosmopolitan aberrations next to its national distortion. Induced by the accelerated economic, traffc and communicational uniting of the world, this is the worldwide dissemination of a mediocre culture, which familiarizes everything by its uniform and trivial projections (WA IV 39: 216). First, such dilettantism requires swift and powerful effects from literature (Goethe, Schriften zur Weltliteratur 173–75). Second, superfcial literary consumers prefer to always hear and read the same thing, expecting the writer to tell them only what they would like to hear (302–3). Faced with such worldwide vulgarization of literary taste, Goethe reacts to it by defending the exclusive right of the creative writer to speak in the name of the whole of humanity (die ganze Menschheit) against the grotesque distortion of its universal substance (das allgemein Menschliche) carried out in the name of elementary habits. Yet under the pressure of the mob that expects everything to ft its habits and prejudices and thus ruins humanity, true works of art remain unrecognized and unacknowledged (303). Goethe was literally overwhelmed by the insight that barbarous times of market-infuenced literature had arrived. New barbarians misapprehend true art as that which is exemplary (Vortreffiche) for humankind, i.e., precisely that to which he was at pains to remain loyal to throughout his literary career (letter to Zelter on the same day; 297).

He accordingly distanced himself from the “the parochial and self-enclosed type of petty bourgeois readership” that, to his deepest disgust, was increasingly taking command of the literary market of the time (Goethe, Schriften zur Weltliteratur 298). To defend himself from this flood, in The Epochs of Social Formation (1831), he takes recourse to the unity of all educated circles across the globe. His intention is to write for this noble kind of readership. Regarding a somewhat frustrated late remark, it makes a huge difference whether one reads instinctively for pleasure and reanimation (Genuß und Belebung) or refexively for insight and instruction (Erkenntnis und Belehrung) (308), even if readers who prefer the latter, profound beneft of literature are extremely rare. But only those who are able to enjoy this beneft can claim to be reading with regard to what is universally human (as one is obliged to read world literature). All the others read in the leisurely manner of the most deluded part of humanity (as one normally reads trivial literature). Such capable (tüchtige) people who really care about “the true progress of humanity” by striving to shed their narrow intellectual skin are certainly few and far between, but in their rarity they are nevertheless scattered all over the world. Step by step, the initial distinction between the true (or world) and the false (national or trivial international) works, writers and readers turns into a stark opposition. Along with its international position, Goethe’s literary oeuvre consolidates its pretensions to universality.

Ultimately, Goethe does not hesitate to introduce a clear-cut division to literature, placing the benighted majority of its agents on one side, and the select minority on the other: “Yet the route they take, the pace they keep is not everyone’s concern.” Their sublime task is to rescue the world from descending into narrow-mindedness or barbarity. They belong to the

quiet, almost chastened church (eine stille, fast gedrückte Kirche) of the serious-minded (die Ernsten) who, because it would be futile (vergebens) to oppose the wide current of the day (die breite Tagesfuth), must nonetheless steadfastly (standhaft) try to maintain their position till the fow (die Strömung) has passed. (FA I 22: 866–867)

Their solitary position, removed from the silly worldwide crowd orientated toward immediate consumption, is tantamount to “aesthetic autonomy.”

However, one might ask whether the aesthetically autonomous world literature, if it must be restricted to the initiated circle of intellectuals walled in against the masses of simple consumers, really warrants the name of world literature. How encompassing can a literature that rests on the exclusion of the great majority of readers be? In order to answer this question, one is well advised to recall the paradoxical character of the relation between the superiors and inferiors in the Greek polis, in Hannah Arendt’s interpretation:

Wherever the few separated themselves from the many, they obviously became dependent on them, that is to say, in all those matters of coexistence which have to be really negotiated (in allen Fragen des Miteinander-Lebens, in denen wirklich gehandelt werden muss). [...] This is why the realm of the freedom of the few is not only at pains to maintain itself against the realm of the political determined by the many, but is dependent on the many for its very existence; the simultaneous existence of the polis is existentially necessary for the existence of the academy. [...] [I]t becomes a necessity that opposes freedom on the one hand, and is its precondition on the other. (Arendt 58–59)

Therefore, the reintroduction of freedom into the imposed political space on an elevated level unavoidably implies an introduction of the others’ bondage on the lower levels. It seems as if compliant subalterns doggedly accompany free agencies, inducing ever-new attempts on the part of the latter to purify their sublime freedom from the pollution by trivialities.

Goethe’s personal investment in his delineated elitist reasoning can hardly be overlooked. Although it is fully ignored in the recent U.S.-American interpretations (unlike the German one), it is an important mobilizing ground of his idea of world literature. Besides his narrow-minded provincial audience and the worldwide rise of bad taste, he had to fight fierce battles against the misunderstanding of his nationally infamed Romanticist contemporaries (Mandelkow 57–65). Against all these bitter disappointments, he found a welcome consolation in the reception of his work by some distinguished French and English Romanticists once Mme de Staël’s influential book De l’Allemagne (On Germany) had been published in England (1813) and France (1814). Using categories like double force, double light, play and foating, the French exile writer portrayed him as a protean, mobile, contradictory, and ironic poet, who in the presentation of his self and others tends to maneuver incessantly back and forth, establishing and destroying identities in the same move. A couple of years later, structuring his West-Eastern Divan [conversation] (1819; expanded second edition 1827) in a deeply polyphonic way, Goethe readily recognized himself in her categories in order to distance himself from and defend himself against his inimical and provincial German milieu (Koch 187).

Far from holding the representatives of this milieu in high esteem, he constantly expressed the opinion that they might be crushed in their intellectual misery by such impressive foreign talents like Shakespeare or Calderón. Each of the latter “is too rich and too powerful” to be taken even as the mirror of their self-identification. Shakespeare for example forces the rising German talents to reproduce him mechanically while they falsely believe to be producing themselves (Goethe, Schriften zur Weltliteratur 289, 282). “How many excellent Germans have been ruined by him and Calderón!” In the same conversation with Eckermann conducted in 1825, Goethe highlights the grotesque effect of Shakespeare’s plays on his compatriots, who put their potatoes into his silver dishes (228). The magnifcent Calderón drives the young Schiller to madness, threatening to erode his humble virtues, while the unprecedented Molière becomes desperately weak in German treatment (226). No matter how much German novels and tragedies imitate English models, they nonetheless pollute and pervert them (December 3, 1824; 223). It is no wonder that Goethe warns Eckermann himself to beware of great undertakings and inventions of his own: they are almost destined to fail! One cannot expect a real sense for what is true and capable (echter Sinn fur das Wahre und Tüchtige) in German petty circumstances. The masses who dominate them abhor whatever is truly great, tending to banish it from the world (227) (including the great Goethe himself, we might add, to elucidate his obvious bitterness): “For, we ordinary people (kleine Menschen) are not capable of retaining (bewahren, also in the sense of ‘making true’) in us the greatness of such things” (226).

This is a simulated modesty of course: Goethe surely (and of course rightly) did not perceive himself to be an ordinary man, at least not the sort to which he thought the majority of his compatriots belonged. He recognized himself much more in another “we” applied in a diary note from 1827, which enthusiastically comments on the rich French reception of his play Torquato Tasso. He famously writes, “a universal world literature is emerging in which an honorable role is reserved for us Germans” (243). However, with this “us” he obviously means just himself, since no other German writer enjoyed comparable international attention at that time. Probably the most exemplary proof of this is the huge success of his Young Werther far beyond his national borders. Lord Byron dedicated one of his works to Goethe, Manzoni adored him, Gérard de Nerval translated Faust and Delacroix illustrated it, Walter Scott translated Götz von Berlichingen, and there were much more fruitful refractions of and refections on his work, for instance those of the French literary critic Jean-Jacques Ampère and the translator Albert Stapfer, not to mention Thomas Carlyle.

Whereas contemporary British, French, and Italian intellectuals recognized themselves in Goethe, other German writers recognized themselves in foreign writers and translated them passionately. With regard to these modest but diligent compatriots, Goethe found himself in the comfortable position of being able to beneft, in the medium of the German language, from the extraordinarily rich and fruitful translation work of two previous generations (Günther 113; Wiedemann 545ff.). So despite the rhetorically or prudently deployed “we,” Goethe was clearly aware of the real division of labor and prominence among the German writers and intellectuals of his time. The majority of them only provided the background and sources that enabled the expression of the whole splendor by a select few. Being regarded as too provincial, they were prevented from entering the latter’s “hall of fame.”

In sum, Goethe does associate Weltliteratur with a mutually enriching interaction, but he means an interaction among a number of initiated agents who exempt themselves from the mob at home and abroad. If one takes into consideration that this elitism induced by the aggressive pressure of common sense and bad taste, that was more or less habitual in the select social circles of the day, is inherent in the idea of Weltliteratur, such a literature was anything but projected from below as David Damrosch claims in order to emphasize its all-encompassing character (Damrosch 9-13). Quite the opposite of being truly all encompassing, Goethe based it on the retaliating exclusion of the “ignorant crowd” that surrounded him. He enthusiastically engaged with world literature because of the undeserved isolation and the narrow-minded neglect of his work at home (Bohnenkamp 2000; Koch 2002).

When read against this traumatizing background, his elitist choice, aimed at international self-expansion, uncovers a self-rescuing maneuver. He signifcantly hopes that “the differences which prevail within a given nation will be corrected by the perspective and judgment of others” (Letter to Sulpiz Boisserée from October 12, 1827; WA IV 43: 106). In the letter to Reinhard from 1822, we fnd the following remark:

I have a general impression that nations learn to understand each other more than ever; misunderstandings seem to be residing within each of their own bodies. (WA IV 36: 61)

This biting comment is clearly addressed at his compatriots after the publication of the four-volume French translation of his dramas (Bohnenkamp 197). Far from being a “provincial writer” as David Damrosch presents him (13), in the 1820s Goethe was, to his great personal satisfaction, an author who was widely internationally acknowledged. As a complete foreigner in the nationally infamed petty German circumstances, he attentively and effciently established numerous international coalitions and foreign alliances to outmaneuver homeland pressures and suppress domestic foes.

However, simultaneously with the healing of his personal injuries, he undertook the maneuver of the self-exemption of German literature from its dominant international surroundings. We are here addressing an aspect of his cosmopolitanism that is completely skipped in the German reception. This consoling self-glorifying maneuver of turning the lack of an autochthonous literary tradition into an advantage in comparison to France or England was almost a commonplace in the culturally inferior Germany around 1800 (Herder 551; A. Schlegel IV 26; Wiedemann 545ff.; Koch 234; Albrecht 308). Following this domestic habit, Goethe wittily employed a slightly derogatory French image of Germans as “a not complete … people, striving and involved in controversies” to counteract the French national-universal tendency to instantiate global cultural uniformity. Defending his elitist cosmopolitanism, he resisted the French imperial one. Yet as is often the case with such compensatory revolts, this initial opposition between the inferiors and superiors gradually turned into substitution. Imperceptibly, the German inferior adopted the imperial behavior of the French superior.

In Goethe’s understanding, world literature implies an ongoing dialogue of equals. Far from being a universal trait, equality requires merits. Unlike the French or the English, the Germans of Goethe’s time had not yet succeeded in accomplishing this equality; they were the only nation-in-making among the prominent Europeans. This is why, in proposing a world literature, Goethe allocated the Germans a completely different role from being just one of its national participants. To avoid misappropriations, his Weltliteratur refuses to adopt the national model as the basis of its identity but searches instead for its identity in an open process of permanent mediation, exchange and negotiation. Since only the shaky German identity was at that time engaged in such a self-fnding process among the select few, Goethe ultimately expands the ongoing German search for identity to the dialogic becoming of world literature. Other nations were thus expected to participate (or, in the case of non-European or less than-European literatures, to serve) with their particular national currencies in an open exchange set up on the German identity pattern, which considered itself to be on the permanent move.

In such subtle fashion, self-exemption turned into expansion not only on the individual level (i.e., Goethe’s personal) but also on the collective level: the Germans were surreptitiously appointed as the only appointed guardians and dialogic mediators of the Greek transnational legacy. Developing his idea of Weltliteratur, Goethe invented a reconfgured cultural space, which allocated his compatriots the prestigious role of being the legitimate custodians of the Holy Archive. Additionally, they were presented as self-denying agencies acting in the name of the forgotten Greek model who, beyond any selfsh interest typical of the French and English pretenders, merely foster a reunion of fractured literatures and cultures. The media of this mutually enriching intellectual trade between accredited European literatures that were expected to reunite in the interest of Greek legacy were “journals and books, correspondence, and translations, the journeys and encounters of writers as well as an expanding book market” (Meyer-Kalkus 106).

At the beginning of the 19th century, “impersonal” German literature could not produce a typical classical author infused by a national spirit (Pizer 22–24). It was bereft of recognizable national agency, decentered through its enduring exposure to foreign influences, marked by sub-national disunity and immersed in the dialogic process of national self-finding. Yet precisely this dialogic profile made it suitable as the model for the establishment of world literature and world classical authors. Goethe privileges German humble and modest mediation of the scattered Greek legacy over the bellicose competition between the strong, nationally infused French and British literatures. Of course, he was too skeptical to hope the world will by means of literature achieve “a universal peace”, but was nonetheless somehow confdent that “the unavoidable quarrel will gradually subside and the war will become less cruel, the victory less imperious (übermuthig)” (FA I 22: 433–334). Nobody can expect that nations will suddenly reconceive themselves,

but they must become aware of one another, grasp each other, and if they are unwilling to love one another (wenn sie sich wechselseitig nicht lieben mögen), learn to tolerate each other (FA I 22: 491).

For “if we have to communicate in our everyday life with resolutely other-thinking persons, we will find ourselves moved to be on the one hand more cautious, but on the other more tolerant and lenient” (FA I 22: 868). Nevertheless, a core motivation behind these scattered remarks is not so much “the desire for productive and peaceful coexistence among the nations of Europe” (Pizer 21). Rather, beneath his cosmopolitan proclamations there lurks a compensatory raising of the German nation into the moderator of international intellectual traffc. While the prestigious neighbors defend their national cause, Germany is envisaged as becoming the invisible promoter of world literature.

In this regard, Goethe was, after all, just a loyal inheritor of a number of his reputed domestic predecessors. In 1793, Herder had stated that Germans should

appropriate the best of all the peoples and in such a way become among them what man became among his fellow creatures (Neben- und Mitgeschöpfe) from which he learned his skills (Künste). He came at the end, took from every one of them his art and now he surpasses and rules all of them (Herder 551 [emphasis mine]).

Several years later, Novalis, in the equally cosmopolitan project Christendom or Europe (1799), put forth the thesis that, while other European countries are

occupied by war, speculation and partisanship (Parthey-Geist), the German makes himself with all diligence into an associate (Genosse) of a higher epoch of culture. This preliminary step must give him, over the course of time, a large predominance (ein grosses Uebergewicht) over the others (Novalis 519 [emphasis mine]).

In the same vein, Goethe entrusted the German language with the role of the medium of permanent translation or commerce of one with another literature. German is called upon to set the course for everybody’s national currency (Münzsorten) “not by repelling the foreign but devouring it” (Goethe, Schriften zur Weltliteratur 243; italics mine). What Goethe ultimately envisioned was “the take up and complete appropriation (das völlige Aneignen) of the foreign” (238), which is tantamount to the full assimilation of the foreignness inherent to French imperial cosmopolitanism.

By tacitly shifting from his self-exempting attitude to the French imperial one, Goethe ultimately disregarded, if not disqualified, any individual or collective identity reluctant or unable to adopt his and the German self-propelling behavior and standards. In his famous letter to Thomas Carlyle from July 20, 1827, he states:

The Germans have long contributed to the mediation [Vermittlung] between individual and national particularities [das Besondere der einzelnen Menschen und Völkerschaften] and their mutual recognition. Whoever understands the German language fnds himself in a market where every nation displays its merchandise, plays the translator while enriching himself. (265)

Being himself an internally dialogic author, Goethe wanted to apply the German “dialogic principle” of self-fnding to the historical emergence of humankind. He envisioned it as an unlimited process of perfection. In an address to a society of nature researchers and physicians from 1828 he stated that what is of real concern in world literature is that 

vivid and striving men of letters become acquainted with one another and fnd themselves stimulated for social action through their mutual inclination and common sense (Neigung und Gemeinsinn). (FA I 25: 79)

The works of world literature concern us only inasmuch as they concern each other (Günther 124). It is only if their joint action creates such select common sense that they substitute what is characterized by a true world horizon (Weltfähige) for what is simply the way of the world (Weltläufge). An interpreter of his work comments:

Given Germany’s own lack of a strong, immanent, infrangible national identity in his time, it is not surprising that Goethe was particularly aware of and open to the possibility of a super- or transnational literary modality. Perhaps Goethe’s insights into the contemporary impossibility of creating a “classical” (national) German literature made the formulation of a Weltliteratur desirable as the only possible alternative to cultural fragmentation. (Pizer 24)

Goethe’s Weltliteratur was undoubtedly a trauma narrative: coming up “from below” (i.e., both from an unrecognized Goethe in the German literary space and from an underrated Germany in the European political and cultural space), it therapeutically reconfigures the existing political, literary and cultural space. His Weltliteratur narrative, in short, testifes to a personal and a collective traumatic experience. Yet no trauma narrative can achieve necessary public recognition without instigating “new rounds of social suffering” (Alexander 2). At the very moment at which it predicates the equal dignity of all participants of the imagined community that it instigates, it produces “the zones of indistinction” within this same community.

In his notes from the Makariens Archiv (1829), for example, Goethe leaves no doubts concerning the inequality of world literatures:

Chinese, Indian, Egyptian antiquities are always just curiosities; it is recommendable to make oneself and the world acquainted with them; but they would be not especially fruitful for our moral and aesthetic education/formation (Bildung). (Goethe, Schriften zur Weltliteratur 284)

This is the reason why “Orientals” can never stand in comparison with the Greeks and Romans or the Nibelungen with the Iliad for that matter (174); they simply belong to different categories, since the former represent false or transient values and the latter those that are true or deep. Because of the “Oriental predilection” to lump together what is most remote, contradictory and incommensurable (169), Goethe also rejects the literary work of his younger contemporary, the Romanticist Jean Paul (175–77). Instead of trying to distill from the world’s diversity its underlying true equivalent (wahres Äquivalent) patterned according to the Ancient Greek model, Jean Paul uses this diversity as a coin for momentary rhetorical effects. Such “Oriental” literary rhetoric only degrades poetry, bereaving it of its true substance (178). Poetry is therefore no longer a universal human matter: all Oriental literatures, the Serbian and the old Germanic epic as well, as Romantic mannerists like Jean Paul, are expelled from its blessing. They are not completely inapplicable, admittedly, but of restricted use in the envisioned world literary community of elective affliates. Oriental culture can be used just as a “refreshing source” to “strengthen the peculiarity of our spirit”, but certainly not as its law-giving pattern (FA II 6: 642). “Goethe has never abandoned Shakespeare in favor of Nizâmî” (Birus 19).

The same holds for Naturdichtung: original but primitive as it is, oral poetry can be reasonably exploited only as a raw material. Even if Goethe urges his compatriots to apply the Herderian empathic ability (Einfühlungsvermögen) in their approach to Serbian folk poetry, when he accordingly advises them to pay the Serbs a “personal visit” he describes the Serbian “rough land” as if it is somewhere backward, “several centuries ago” (FA I 22: 686). And when he was indeed once invited, during his journey through Italy, by the Prince of Waldeck to cross the Adriatic Sea and pay the “Morlacks” a “personal visit,” he declined with uneasiness, “distinctly not interested in travelling across the Adriatic” (Wolff 192). The imagined geography refuses to be embarrassed by the real one. Once confronted with it, it would cease to perform its self-complimenting operations. Even if he recommended “to read every poet in his own language and the peculiar district of his time and habits” and “to strive to approach the foreign as closely as possible”, he himself read the Chinese novel of manners

Yu-chao-li – a “marginal Chinese literary work of minor importance” (Wang 296) – in a free French translation and adaptation (Les deux cousines, 1826). In the same way, he retranslated the Serbian epic from the poor Italian translation. This is a neat example of how unconcerned he was about translations of “barbaric” literary products. It seems he did not exactly expect the translation of such marginal literary works to be of the highest order that gives up its own language in order to closely stick to the original. An informative, plainly prosaic translation, which is the lowest sort in his hierarchy, completely suffces. The “heightened attentiveness” that protects one from “easy familiarizing projections” practiced by the ignorant mob is not exactly necessary here. Oriental non-European or indeed European literatures all serve merely for rude orientation. From the Western perspective, they make up “the rest” which “we must look at only historically; appropriating for ourselves what is good, so far as we can” (250). The non-European or less-than-European literatures and cultures, in a way, remain up for arbitrary grabs for their prominent European counterparts; what counts are their motives, certainly not their language, discourse or style. 

This imperial system of world literature sees in every horizon of difference new peripheries of its own centrality, new pathologies through which its own normativity may be defned and must be asserted (Smith 54). It regards the other as a slightly deformed extension of its noble breed. Goethe’s adaptable and steadily contextually fed movement of world literature that swallows up ever-new participants gradually acquired such profle. He as the engineer of world literature and the Germans as its collective beneficiaries systematically capitalized the “reiterated mirroring” and “mutual illuminations” (Bohnenkamp 202–3) provided by this literature’s numerous adherents. Goethe’s world literature was from the very beginning meant as a “meeting point of many references, a center of diverging perspectives: formulated as a mission” (ein Aufgegebenes; Curtius 46; Bohnenkamp 202), it accumulated profit as capital does by its very definition. Yet contrary to Damrosch’s celebration of the allegedly universal operations of circulation, transformation and translation, only their carriers could really beneft from them. The remaining unft candidates (like the non-European, less than- European, pre-modern or indeed Romantic mannerist literatures for that matter) were pushed into their much less mobile marginal zones. In this unilateral rather than coequal mutual traffc, they were relegated to the category of subalterns, the indistinct residue of all systemic normative operations. This amorphous surplus follows the triumphant rise of world literature like an uncanny shadow, which doggedly confronts it with its unacknowledged histories.

【Notes】

①In fact, Goethe consistently interprets such a swift adoption of the foreign that unconcernedly accommodates its foreignness to one’s petty domestic universe as vulgar cosmopolitanism, from which he clearly distances himself.

②According to Spivak, Moretti’s “authoritative totalizing patterns” (Spivak 108) in the fnal analysis amount to “nationalism, U.S. nationalism masquerading as globalism” and, according to Apter, they are forged to “dominate the literary world system” (Apter 49).

③ I will be quoting, in the following, various critical editions of Goethe’s works (Weimarer, Berliner, Frankfurter Ausgabe) according to the following principle: division (here I), volume (here 10), page number (here 514).

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此文原载于《外国文学研究》2018年第5期

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