The Fragment in the Sturm Und Drang: Goethe, Coleridge and Herder
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The fragment in the Sturm und Drang: Goethe, Coleridge and Herder Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ is often regarded as the classic example of a Romantic fragment in English literature. The prefatory note he attached to the poem when it was first published in 1816, nearly twenty years after the supposed event took place, tells a story about the partial composition of the poem under the influence of an ‘anodyne’, which was interrupted by the notorious ‘person on business from Porlock’. 1 The poem which follows is thus presented to the reader as a fragment and its fragmentariness is part of the meaning the reader is offered. This meaning is independent of the conclusions we draw from the subsequent debate over whether or not the story told in the prefatory note is an authentic account of an event that actually took place. Although the poem may have begun its life as an accidental fragment the form in which it was first published attaches it to a European Romantic tradition which saw the fragment – the awkwardly termed ‘planned fragment’ 2 – as a uniquely adequate aesthetic response to the transcendental. The ‘person on business from Porlock’ who interrupts the poetic vision is used to represent the banal, utilitarian world to which the vision of Kubla Khan’s world is an antithesis and which this vision aspires to transcend, while the ‘anodyne’ provides the mysterious link between human suffering (‘a slight disposition’) and the flights of imagination on which the poet can be borne. 3 A myriad of possible sources have been proposed for almost every phrase in the poem, beginning with Purchas, who is mentioned by Coleridge himself, but there has been relatively little discussion of what one might call the orchestration of the poem’s fragmentariness. There is however one piece of particular relevance that appears not to have figured in the extensive source-searching around ‘Kubla Khan’, and that is Goethe’s ‘Dritte Wallfahrt nach Erwins Grabe im Juli 1775’ (‘Third Pilgrimage to Erwin’s Grave in July 1775’), 4 which was published some forty years earlier and also depicts the interruption of a poetic reverie. It consists for the most part of a prose poem written in the first-person, taking the form of a 1 Collected Works , ed. Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen 75 (Routledge, Princeton UP: London, Princeton, 1969-) vol. 16, 1.1, p. 512. 2 Awkward because the term begs all sorts of questions about intentionality. 3 K. M. Wheeler gives a particularly sophisticated account of the roles or personae that are here brought into play: The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry (Heinemann: London, 1981), pp. 17-41. 4 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Der junge Goethe in seiner Zeit , ed. Karl Eibl et al. (Insel: Frankfurt, Leipzig, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 454-56, from which subsequent quotations are taken. A rough translation appears at the end of this essay. David Hill: The fragment in the Sturm und Drang 2 sequence of secular prayers which begin with a eulogy of Strasbourg Cathedral (itself incomplete, a fragment, and validated by Goethe as such in his earlier essay ‘Von deutscher Baukunst’) together with its supposed architect, Erwin von Steinbach. However, near the end, this outpouring of subjective feeling is interrupted. Three asterisks mark the threshold to a different narrative situation, and there follows a brief, sober paragraph in the third person and in the past tense in which the reader is told that the devotions of the writer who was the ‘I’ of the main section were interrupted by the arrival of a friend called Lenz. There is an autobiographical background to this, for the meeting between these two figures is a literary version of that between Goethe himself and his fellow-author Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz. A note written by Lenz to Karoline Herder on July 13, 1775, gives us a glimpse of the scene from another point of view when Lenz says that he cannot write at greater length because he must hurry to meet Goethe, who has already been waiting half an hour for him at the top of the cathedral tower. 5 The incident stems from Goethe’s third visit – or pilgrimage, as he liked to think of it – to Strasbourg Cathedral on his return from a tour of Switzerland, now on the threshold to his homeland and the love he had left behind, and he builds into his text reminiscences of the forces of nature that had impressed him on this trip. And in its form the text adopts – and then abandons – the device of using as a framework the kind of pilgrimage liturgy that Goethe had recently encountered on his travels. It is thus divided into sections, the stations of the pilgrimage, but these are secularised, corresponding to the stages of the climb up the cathedral tower, and the goal of the pilgrimage is the monument to a secular saint, an artist. Later sections contrast the genuine devotee of art with the philistine masses, and the arrival of Lenz leads to reflections on the nature of artistic creativity, but in an abstract, universalising language that is in sharp contrast to the earlier stammering enthusiasm: ‘die Empfindung gieng in Gespräche über, unter welchen die übrigen Stationen vollendet wurden’. 6 Both ‘Dritte Wallfahrt’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ are about creativity, and they present a vision of an ideal location within which a sublime human artefact is set, drawing the reader into a realm of poetic imagination. They use language in an associative way that makes the literal meaning of the sequence of ideas hard to follow, contrasting with the matter-of-fact language 5 Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, Werke und Briefe in drei Bänden , ed. Sigrid Damm (Insel: Leipzig, 1987), vol. 3, p. 323. 6 P. 436: ‘feeling gave way to discussions, during which the remaining stations were completed.’ David Hill: The fragment in the Sturm und Drang 3 used to present the intrusion from the outside world in Goethe’s epilogue and Coleridge’s Preface, an intrusion that leaves the poetic text a fragment. Goethe reflects indirectly on this experimental use of language in the comment he makes on his earlier essay, ‘Von deutscher Baukunst’, which could equally apply to ‘Dritte Wallfahrt’: ‘Wunderlich war’s von einem Gebäude geheimnißvoll reden, Thatsachen in Räzel hüllen, und von Maasverhältnissen poetisch lallen!’ 7 These terms all suggest a hidden meaning that transcends the normal, discursive use of language, and which must necessarily do so, for the experience is ‘unaussprechlich, und unausgesprochen’. 8 Moreover, these texts are not just fragments: they are suffused with fragmentariness. Each of the sections of ‘Dritte Wallfahrt’ is a separate piece of writing corresponding to a particular station on this secular pilgrimage, but there is no explanation of the link between them or of the different perspectives that each adopts. And within each section this non-discursive language is full of apostrophes and exclamations, as if reflecting individual moments of inspired enthusiasm, so that there is even something fragmentary about the individual sentences, whose connection to each other is implicit. ‘Kubla Khan’ is similarly presented as a fragment, but it also contains fragments. The logical connection between one idea and the next in the poem is not explicit, and the reader is left wondering exactly what the significance of a particular motif is. In particular there is a caesura after the incomplete vision of Xanadu, and the last eighteen lines of the poem turn without explanation to an apparently completely different scene, the poet’s vision of the damsel with a dulcimer singing of Mount Abora. On reflection the reader may make a connection between the two halves of the poem and may be able to link this song that the ‘I’ longs to recover with the earlier vision of Xanadu and, beyond that, with the Preface’s account of a vision lost. However, this is a task for the reader’s intuition or imagination. The two texts also appear within larger collections of texts, even though most modern editions of both are organised either according to genre or to chronology of composition and thus hinder us from reading them in their original contexts. ‘Kubla Khan’ was first published together with a companion-piece, ‘The Pains of Sleep’, which shares the same Preface, and 7 P. 455: ‘It was strange to talk in a secret language about a building, to conceal facts in riddles and to babble poetically about proportions.’ 8 P. 455: ‘unspeakable, unspoken.’ David Hill: The fragment in the Sturm und Drang 4 ‘Christabel’, which itself has been claimed as a planned fragment. ‘Dritte Wallfahrt’ was published in a collection of eight apparently disparate jottings, added as a kind of appendix to a friend’s translation of Mercier’s Du Théâtre and given the casual title Aus Goethes Brieftasche (From Goethe’s Wallet ). They include, beside ‘Dritte Wallfahrt’, an introduction, a commentary on the French sculptor Falconet, and five poems about art and love. None of these has any apparent connection with Mercier’s critique of neo-classical tragedy, nor do they have much connection with each other, but here are to be found, in their most sophisticated, but necessarily unsystematic, formulation, the aesthetic principles of the Sturm und Drang expressed in a provocatively disjointed, fragmented way that deliberately ignores the conventions of discursive prose. By contrast with the tradition of systematic writing about aesthetics, Goethe calls these pieces ‘Bemerkungen und Grillen des Augenblicks’. 9 It is in fact the discontinuity and disparity of the texts that is central to the argument Goethe develops in the introduction, namely that the coherence of a true work of art does not depend on an imposed formal structure but on a deeper coherence, what he calls its ‘innere Form’ (‘inner form’ or ‘inward form’).