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What Is an Event for Goethe?

2019; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/gyr.2019.0033

1940-9087

Fritz Breithaupt,

Visual Culture and Art Theory

What Is an Event for Goethe? Fritz Breithaupt This special section is devoted to the peculiarity of the narrative events in Goethe's texts, including his novels, novellas, and ballads. In general, narrative events can be described as irreversible, unpredictable, and meaningful in the larger plot, and as marking a transition from a state A to a state B.1 Narrative events—and that also means real events that can be described by means of narratives—are powerful and leave their marks. There probably would be no narrative without an event. The papers in this section focus on Goethe's remarkable avoidance of such events and his careful rendering of events. The goal of this section is to develop a theory of narrative events according to Goethe's literary texts. This Goethean theory of the event focuses on the "event-that-should-not-be" (or the event-that-should-not-have-been), meaning it focuses on strategies for avoiding events, or on strategies for understanding the many subtle consequences of such events—including how they initiate chains of repetition and trauma, and the possibilities of healing affected people and undoing the long-term damage such events can inflict. In particular, the papers examine the hermeneutic, therapeutic, and aesthetic dimensions of events-that-should-not-be and events-that-should-not-have-been. The Event-that-Should-Not-Be When one considers the narratives and storylines in Goethe's plays, prose texts, and ballads, we first notice the absence of a clear, powerful, and paradigmatic event. In fact, there are not that many events at all. Yes, there is Werther's suicide, there is Iphigenie's refusal to go along with the sneaky plan by Pylades, there is Wilhelm's act of joining a (broke) theater company instead of fulfilling his father's wish to become a merchant, and there is Faust's wager. However, these events reveal more a negative structure of a refusal or nonaction, rather than some clear action or event. Unlike Friedrich Schiller, Goethe mostly does not write tragedies in which someone risks everything and heroically loses, with Götz von Berlichingen and Egmont being only partly exceptions. Unlike Theodor E. Lessing, Goethe does not usually build meaningful dilemmas that ask for solutions, as he does in Der Mann von funfzig Jahren (The Man of Fifty). And unlike Heinrich von Kleist, Goethe does not resort to "unheard-of" events, unless one wishes to count the little oddities of the Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Refugees). In fact, Goethe himself coined the [End Page 41] very notion of the unheard-of event when characterizing what he saw as problematic in the works of Kleist and the new novella. And while his scientific work features fulfilled moments of kairos,2 such moments are largely absent from his narratives. The first point to consider is this relative absence of events in Goethe's narratives, as Christopher Chiasson does in his essay in this volume.3 Still, there are things that can be called events in Goethe's text. Many of these events are precisely the happenings that the reader (and narrator) hopes will not take place, and they range from actions, the unintended side-effects of actions, and moral transgressions to accidents and social or natural catastrophes. Some of these events thus only exist in the mind of the reader as counterfactual events. In fact, my first proposal will be, as indicated, to describe the event in Goethe's texts as the event-that-should-not-be. An event-that-should-not-be includes natural catastrophic occurrences and social upheavals, but also accidents and individual actions; the event can be real or imaginary. We can list some of these events-that-should-not-be (or events-that-should-not-have-been once the narratives progresses) that define the plot, or at least some large segment of their texts, in a radically abbreviated fashion: • Götz is not a heroic knight who falls victim to the corrupt modern empire, but rather he himself is a villain who continues to plunder and is an obstacle to peace.4 The events that should not take place are both his defiant acts...