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The University of Chicago Aesthetic Deception And THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AESTHETIC DECEPTION AND TOPOI OF MEMORY IN THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE BY MONICA M. FELIX CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2017 Table of Contents List of Tables……………………………………………………………………………………..iii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………….........iv Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: Goethe’s Poetics of Deception in Faust……………………………………………...20 Chapter 2: Metamorphoses of Flesh and Stone………………………………………………….53 Chapter 3: Demon of the Land and Sea………………………………………………………….80 Chapter 4: Symbolist Poetics of Correspondence………………………………………………111 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...139 Appendix: Poems Referenced in Chapters 1-4…………………………………………………143 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………........159 ii List of Tables Table 1: Epithets Ascribed to Mephistopheles in Faust, Part I………………………………….25 iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my chair and mentor, Robert Bird, whose guidance and insight have been invaluable in shaping this project. I am also enormously grateful to Boris Maslov for his advice, careful commentary on countless drafts, and support at every stage of my graduate studies. I would also like to thank Haun Saussy whose contributions helped strengthen the theoretical framework of this project. I am grateful to the University of Chicago as an institution for providing me with the time and resources to develop my research. I benefited greatly from the insights of my colleagues in the Poetry & Poetics workshop, the student colloquium of the Department of Germanic Studies, and the Affiliated Franke Fellows on various chapters. I would also like to thank William Nickell for his contributions at the early stages of this project and Cathy Baumann for her invaluable advice on teaching. My heartfelt thanks to my colleagues and friends in the Department of Comparative Literature, particularly Brian Berry, Nana Holtsnider, Chloe Blackshear, and Mollie McFee. Finally, special thanks are due to my dearest friends Stephen Parkin and Alia Breitwieser for their unconditional support and encouragement. iv Introduction In searching for resonances between two national traditions, my investigation draws upon representative texts from German and Russian literature in order to theorize traits central to a Romantic imagination. In the tangled skein of historical and cultural connections woven between German and Russian literature, I trace a motif which I term, following Goethe, Augentäuschung. Playing on the two semantic possibilities of this German term, which can be understood either as “optical illusion” or, more literally, as a “deception/confusion of the eyes,” I use it to identify the dynamics of perception in encounters with female avatars of antiquity within poetry and prose. I take the term Augentäuschung from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust where it arises during a minor interpretive debate: Faust spots a black poodle wandering outside the city gates and asks his companion, “Do you notice how it races around us in a great spiral, getting closer and closer? And unless I’m mistaken, an eddy of fire follows closely wherever it goes.” His protégé Wagner – a practical man of little imagination - observes: “I see only a black poodle. Perhaps you see only an optical illusion [Augentäuschung].”1 This brief moment of interpretation incited by supernatural intervention (for it is the mischievous demon Mephistopheles who appears before the pair in the guise of a poodle) is at the core of the Augentäuschung phenomenon with which I interrogate the Romantic imagination. In a minor way, Faust intuits the inner life of the poodle enough to perceive the ethereal fire of the demon’s presence. Wagner, as a pragmatic student of science, lacks this spiritual insight and sees only the physical surface features of the animal. This interpretive moment clarifies C.M. Bowra’s notion of the Romantic “imagination” to describe imagistic perception that extends beyond the mere identification of physical properties – promoted by Locke and Newton – to peer into the soul of the subject.2 1 Goethe Faust, 1152-1157. See chapter 1 for an extended discussion of this exchange. 2 See C.M. Bowra. The Romantic Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949. 1 Beyond Bowra’s observations on spiritual perception, I extend the category of a Romantic imagination to a metaliterary level to describe an inclination shared by authors of different national traditions and historical moments. Aisthesis, Vision, and Antiquity Twilight encounters with mystical feminine figures are featured in numerous Romantic texts: Tieck’s enchanted woman of the forest with marble-white limbs in The Rune Mountain; Novalis’s veiled Rosenblüthe taking the place of the statue of Isis; the white statue of Diana that captivates Maximilian in Florentine Nights; or Brentano’s siren Lorelei perched atop a cliff over the Rhine luring men to their deaths. When considered in aggregate, these tales present a constellation of recurring elements beginning with a sudden and unexpected vision of feminine beauty. The hero stops in voyeuristic fascination and is punished or irrevocably changed by the experience. The key features of the scene coupled with classical imagery suggest the tale of Actaeon from Book III of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a probable predecessor. Actaeon, weary after the day’s hunt, stumbles into an unfamiliar grove and sees the goddess Diana preparing to bathe in the waters. Overtaken with anger and shame, she takes up a handful of water and flings it over his head. “Go and tell them that you have seen me naked, if you can,” she challenges. As penance for his transgression, Actaeon is transformed into a stag and torn to shreds by his dogs. In appropriating the central figures from this tale, Romantic authors also inherited the themes of vision, transgression, and transformation. Classical works found new life as popular source material for 18th century fiction as well as inspiring philosophical reflections on art and aesthetic judgment. Johann Winckelmann spurred new interest in antique sculpture with his 1766 “Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture” which advocated imitating antiquity to create new works of 2 great beauty. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing countered Winckelmann’s views in his 1766 Laocoön, An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry by positing that art and poetry are subject to different rules. Herder later disputed Lessing’s stance by further distinguishing sculpture (a tactile art) from painting (a visual art) in his 1778 Sculpture. His research led him to the Walmonden art collection in Hannover, the Kunsthaus in Kassel, and the Antikensaal in Mannheim. The Antikensaal in particular attracted the attention of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who visited in 1769, and Friedrich Schiller as well who would later read Herder’s observations on sculpture with interest. Herder’s conclusions from his visits to the galleries develop a theory of the visual experience of sculpture that is surprisingly tactile. In his view, “the eye that gathers impressions is no longer the eye that sees a depiction on a surface; it becomes a hand, the ray of light becomes a finger and the imagination becomes a form of immediate touching.” Vision no longer occurs at a remove, but rather functions as a physical act that brings the viewer into immediate contact with the viewed object.3 Nevertheless, Herder ranks sight below touch when he declares that “sight gives us dreams, touch gives us truth.”4 Whereas sight is limited to illuminated surfaces, touch alone can “reveal bodies.”5 In moments of Augentäuschung, I observe a similar textual engagement with the limitations of vision in protagonists’ experience of sculpture-like figures. The hero cannot see through the fog or veil obscuring the figure, thereby creating ambiguity around the figure. In these moments, the moral crux of the narrative hinges upon the question of agency: is the hero the unwilling victim of a seductive siren or does he seek out the charming illusion of his own free will? Agency is central to the motif and acts like a fulcrum with the narrative tilting 3 Herder, Fourth Grove (4:64). 4 Herder 38, Fourth Grove. 5 Herder 35. 3 unpredictably towards tales of transgression or victimization. In every instance, the encounter triggers a conflict between the material present and the metamorphizing potential of the aestheticized memory object. In short, moments of Augentäuschung manifest a unique literary environment of fractured time (the hero at the boundary between past and present) and liminal space (the hero perched between land and sea, the geography of the real and the ethereal haze of the fantastic). I propose that the distinctive temporality, environment, and moral complexities endemic to such moments attest to an identifiable phenomenon reprised in diverse literatures and time periods. In exploring the features and range of this motif, I attempt to trace the genealogy of the Augentäuschung across two literary traditions in an effort to study the various adaptations, how it is communicated, and what social or historical factors influence its reemergence. This approach differs dramatically from traditional author-centered or periodic segmentations. By contrast, cornerstone works analyzing German-Russian exchanges have focused on direct points of transfer in the form of translations, political and
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