Joys and Sorrows of Interpretation (2024)

Werther himself is a paradigmatic reader. His literary diet illustrates the virtues and ills of appropriating classic works to highly idiosyncratic personal needs. In view of Homer’s Odyssey (8th or 7th century bce), the protagonist waxes poetic: ‘I need a cradlesong to lull me and this I find abundantly in my Homer.’1 Later, he remarks that ‘Ossian has superseded Homer in my heart’ (L 58) and partially translates a section of the faux-Gaelic epic into German. To Werther, reading and translating is an activity that soothes and intensifies his own sentiments. Although this form of assimilating literary texts should appear quite relatable to scholars of literature, his instrumental use of Homer and Ossian has attracted chiding criticism, sometimes even ridicule. His invocation of Homer was called ‘grotesque’,2 ‘askew’,3 and it was considered an indication of the author’s ironic attitude towards the protagonist.4 What is more, once the poems of Ossian replace Homer in Werther’s heart, his reading habits assume the status of Rorschach tests documenting his mood swings. Thorsten Valk sums up the critical consensus: ‘While reading Homer allowed Werther to advance his psychological health and regulate excessive passion, he consumes Ossian’s poetry like a tempting poison.’5 Does it follow that Werther fails at reading as he fails in love? As this chapter aims to demonstrate, this claim is hypocritical, for interpreters themselves unwittingly replicate the protagonist’s idiosyncratic reading habits.

Generations of scholars have proved their inclination to deliver ‘their Werther’ in a way that is reminiscent of the way the protagonist invokes ‘his Homer’. Since the book’s first publication in 1774, the text has produced a tide of commentary that, as the present study contends, is indicative of its tendency to proliferate in the hands of its readers, growing into shapes and colours that evince a strange correspondence with individual readerly habits and interests. Spontaneous orders of signification emerge from the interplay between a malleable text and overambitious readers who seek singularity of meaning. In contrast to those readers who can keep up the illusion of accessing the text as if one could read it for the first time, the self-conscious, belated reader encounters a paradoxical situation: faced with an impressive spectrum of readings that were assembled across 250 years and among different audiences, one is time and again faced with claims of singularity. Today, the discrepancy between such semantic abundance and obstinate claims has a sobering effect on reading hyper-canonical works such as Werther. It has become impossible to uncritically embrace other readers’ idiosyncratic ideas of ‘their Werther’, let alone to naively discover ‘one’s own Werther’.

In this vein, this chapter hopes to wrest the book away from its appropriation by narrow interpretations and to search for what Roland Barthes called the ‘plural’ of the classic text. According to the French critic, ‘[t]‌o interpret a text is not to give it a […] meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it’.6 That said, the quest for singular meaning is not dismissed as a pointless practice. After all, the isolation of meaning, even when it comes at the expense of the text’s richness, has produced readings that have inscribed themselves profoundly into the text. In a way, they have become an integral part of Werther. Now, the challenge is to forge a generous understanding of a text’s latency not by referring to a generic idea of plurality, following the formula anything goes, ‘the ultima ratio of postmodernist theorizing’,7 but by a careful distillation process. The hope is that contradictory interpretations will be placed on an equal footing, so they can form a striking ensemble within the Werther nursery.

In search of a fitting framework to address Werther in a way that appreciates its ‘plural’, I first review the interpretative attitudes that have fostered a reductive view of Werther. This begins with Goethe’s own account, including exemplary criticism from 19th-century Germany (Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Thomas Carlyle, Carl Gustav Carus) and those 20th-century analyses that have lastingly shaped how the book is read up to the present, as proposed by proponents of biographism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis and discourse theory. To illustrate how these methods work in practice, I dwell on seminal Werther criticism by Kurt R. Eissler, Hans Robert Jauss, Anselm Haverkamp and Friedrich Kittler to see how their literary analyses prevent the acknowledgement of the plural. Following this meta-analysis, I give an account of reading techniques by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida that seek to unlock the text’s inner plural.

Since it is no longer possible to read Werther for the first time, this chapter proposes a simple framework to address the contradictory uses of a text across time and cultures. The horticultural metaphor of ‘grafting’ is not meant to replace conventional ideas of interpretation and reception, but to place an emphasis on both the creative aspects of this process and its destructive ramifications; after all, every successful interpretation suppresses and elides specific aspects of the text. To illustrate the text’s independent interactions with different readers, I present five discrete Werther summaries that offer contradictory interpretations. This playful approach not only highlights the text’s propensity to cater to different readers’ needs, but also prepares the ground for the following chapters. The idea is that literary interpretation proceeds along a pathway that is also relevant to translation, interpretation and adaptation. The goal is not to formulate yet another rigid framework of literary interpretation, of which there already exist many, but to produce a mental map to better navigate the Werther nursery.

Polyphonic ideal and singular realities

Today, there is a growing consensus to suspend the imperative of fidelity. The introduction to an edited volume on adaptation observes ‘that there is not the one and only meaning of a piece of literature which a responsible adaptation will translate into a new work of art. To the contrary, the meaning of the “original” will be enriched and re-actualized by the adaptation.’8 This change of paradigm also applies to literary interpretations. A text can hold different meanings for different readers, a conviction that tallies with the fundamental tenet of liberal democracy: everybody is encouraged to form their own opinion.9

Consequently, the Bard’s oeuvre became emblematic of the plurality inherent to literature, an insight that Gary Taylor condensed in the formula: ‘We find in Shakespeare only what we bring to him or what others have left behind.’13

In this light, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Don Quixote appear as volatile entities. The tangible advantage of this approach lies in an epistemological generosity that places historical and contemporary, native and foreign readers on the same plane. When facing Shakespeare’s enigmatic plays and the adventures of the Knight of the Sad Countenance, they are all placed at the same distance from the text.

Can the same be said about Werther? Do we find in Werther only what we bring to him? Has this protagonist, too, resurrected himself, so he can go about the world ‘doing his own thing’? The early reception of Goethe’s book appears to suggest this is the case. Quite unexpectedly for a text that revolves around a young burgher’s love pains, the epistolary novel communicated across different social strata and gender divisions with surprising ease. In Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser (1785–90), for example, the poverty-stricken protagonist positively identifies with Werther’s situation as well as his ideas, namely his praise for solitude and his idea that life is but a dream.15 Meanwhile, English letters abound with female Werthers, whose refined sensibilities clash with the brutal demands of the everyday world.16 Even the great Mary Wollstonecraft is portrayed as a ‘Werther’.17

Drawing on such offshoots, Sandra Richter has pursued a Shakespearean approach to Werther. Richter emphasises the text’s appeal to different groups of readers, including the English Romantics and Chinese intellectuals in the 1920s, and concludes: ‘The text does not determine how it is perceived or interpreted; instead, it’s the readers, their interests and interpretative habits. Literary reception is comprised of disfigured and modified narratives.’18 Just as in the case of the Bard, all readers find themselves elevated into a position of equidistance to the text, regardless of their familiarity with historical context and access to sources. As a consequence, the art of interpretation finds itself reduced to episodes of spontaneous agreement between the text and its reader. The problem of unreliable reading, however, must not inaugurate a return to authorial intention, as proposed by E. D. Hirsch, who, ‘on purely practical grounds’, found it ‘preferable to agree that the meaning of a text is the author’s meaning’.19 Neither should unreliable reading motivate the smooth transition from author-centred analyses to similarly rigid frameworks, such as the one proposed by Umberto Eco: ‘a system of instructions aiming at producing a possible reader whose profile is designed by and within the text’.20 Instead, the production of meaning itself deserves due attention. Regrettably, the Werther nursery has rarely inspired such curiosity so far.

Mattenklott’s invocation of ‘obscure references’ and his emphasis on each generation’s tiresome attempts at another round of reinterpretation leave no doubt. The overabundance of interpretations does not draw Mattenklott’s attention to the text’s malleability but culminates in a parochial gesture that reasserts the legitimacy of some interpretative choices over others.22 Yet the critic’s ostentatious disinterest in ‘new or discrete discoveries’ is difficult to take at face value; after all, his overview only accounts for hand-picked examples of Werther scholarship and shies away from documenting more outlandish or exotic interpretations. Mattenklott’s preference to shield his own reading from destabilisation by incompatible viewpoints reiterates an interpretative routine frequently observed in the Werther nursery: the text is a highly curated entity, just as gardeners do not tire of trimming excess growth and cleaning the bark from moss, lichen and other pests. By pursuing this approach, Mattenklott follows in the footsteps of no less an authority than Goethe, who was also anxious to curate his own text.

Goethean singular

The most influential intervention against the text’s multiple appropriations is put forward in Goethe’s autobiography, Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und Wahrheit, 1811–33). Reflecting on a troubled period in his life, 1773 to 1774, the author recalls having thought about the best ways to end his life. Eventually, he sought to emulate Otho (32–69 ce), the Roman emperor who pierced his own chest with a dagger. Realising he was incapable of doing so, his mood underwent gradual transformation. The autobiographic subject explains: ‘Since I never could succeed in this, I at last laughed myself out of the notion, threw off all hypochondriacal fancies, and resolved to live.’23 This impressive gesture of self-assertion is quintessential for the ethos of renunciation, a recurring theme in the works of the mature Goethe, and represents quite the antithesis to how Werther handles his sorrows. Given to self-pity, he is haunted by indecision until he resolves to die after midnight on Christmas Day. Meanwhile, Goethe moves on to become a celebrated poet and ducal administrator in Weimar.

Drawing on the metaphor of super freezing, as this process is called, this account ostentatiously presents the genesis of Werther as a highly rational process. Hereby, Goethe fought back against the urban legend which had formed not long after the book’s first publication in 1774, suggesting that it was in fact based on the author’s love triangle in Wetzlar. This emphatically biographical stance fascinated audiences throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Poetry and Truth, however, avoids mentioning the ominous Charlotte Buff and Johann Christian Kestner, instead placing the focus on the toxic effect of English literature, notably Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–5), and Jerusalem, whose tragic biography indeed lends itself to a comparative analysis.25 Goethe’s belated interference emblemises the quest for literary singularity, even if it failed to satisfy Goethe folklorists such as Thomas Mann. What is more, the passage just quoted from Poetry and Truth consistently trims the richness of the text itself, as Goethe barely mentions the most significant legacy of the book, the protagonist’s subjective virtuosity.

For academic readers who enjoy tracing intertextual references and self-commentary, this passage from Poetry and Truth was a blessing and a curse. While it helped paint a comprehensive picture of Goethe first as a young man, then as a thoughtful autobiographer, this nexus also buried the text under the weight of the author’s narrative of self-conquest and renunciation. Consequently, Werther lost its autonomous status, instead becoming an appendix to the life of the author, who elevated himself above the emotional excess that the text so masterfully portrays. This self-interpretation was gladly taken up by the nascent field of literary criticism in 19th-century Germany, whose proponents had no use for Werther’s gloomy musings but who were anxious to elevate Goethe to the status of a national cultural icon. Between 1835 and 1842, in the decade after the poet’s death, Georg Gottfried Gervinus published one of the most influential studies of German literary history of the 19th century. His reflections draw on the cliché of Goethe’s double nature, where self-control trumps sensibility, and incorporates his evolution as a writer into a teleological concept of literary history. To Goethe, Gervinus argues, Werther represented nothing but a literary exercise in preparation for the culmination point of German culture: Weimar classicism. Consequently, the epistolary novel only holds documentary value to underscore the tendencies that Goethe learned to suppress in himself: ‘Its form and content not only belong to the disruptive and reformatory drive of youth, but also exemplify the restraint of a poet capable of taming exuberant material.’26 This interpretation founded an academic consensus that remains as valid today as it was then: Werther is a novel written about the fate of an unhinged young man, written by another young man who wasn’t unhinged at all but was in fact very much in control of his emotions.

This programmatic rehabilitation of Goethe’s persona across the Channel demonstrates how the serene self-assessment featured in Poetry and Truth bore fruit, rendering obsolete earlier interpretations of the epistolary novel, as seen in the wave of English female Werthers. Carlyle’s preface faithfully reproduces the German poet’s account of his spiritual maturation. Unsurprisingly, Goethe was immensely pleased when receiving a copy of his British admirer’s translation of Wilhelm Meister.29

The most curious example of a Werther–Goethe juxtaposition was put forward by Carl Gustav Carus, a highly versatile artist and writer of the Romantic period. In his study on Goethe from 1863, he pursued the idea of measuring Werther’s sickness against Goethe’s health through a medical lens. Irritated by his contemporaries’ contempt for the text, he encouraged them to change their perspective. The book, he argued, is less about a young man’s sorrows and more about an author who leaped over an abyss. Other authors would have failed at this task and succumbed to the temptation of committing suicide themselves. During Goethe’s Wertherian phase, ‘his arch-spiritual nature eventually ejected all miasma, unrelentingly quelling the war waged by those little demons of the earthly realm, who haunt every brave man. Never coming to rest, there was this energy within his inner self, resolved to build something even more meaningful, more beautiful and magnificent.’30 Since Carus regarded Goethe as an exemplary physiological organism, he speculated about the origins of the poet’s health and made a somewhat surprising suggestion: ‘Special attention should be placed on furthering our knowledge regarding the build of Goethe’s skull.’31 If his tomb were reopened, he insisted, this would present a great opportunity for craniological research.32 In spite of Carus’s recommendation, phrenology, then a burgeoning field of inquiry, did little to clarify why Goethe did not kill himself like Werther.33

Although this specific interpretation of the author–protagonist dilemma did not leave a mark on the further development of Goethe studies, it can serve as a caricature to exemplify the strange habit of placing author and protagonist in competition with each other – in order to produce singular meaning. This trope was not confined to popular biographies but was also common among the most distinguished commentators, including early readers of the novel such as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.34 Conversely, this antagonism was also gladly picked up by those intellectuals who were critical of Goethe. Ludwig Börne, a member of Young Germany, was not only one of the most fanatical polemicists against Goethe but also belonged to the few critics who invoked Werther in positive terms. To him, the sentimental protagonist serves as a reminder that the reviled poet had been a free-spirited young man once, ‘when he felt that he had a heart, that humanity existed around him, a God above him’.35 But realising that he took a different turn in life, ‘he was alarmed by his own heartbeat and panicked about the spirit of his abandoned youth’.36

In Goethe’s case, the hunt for the singularity of signification has frequently led to an overemphasis on the author’s biography at the expense of the protagonist. The underlying, somewhat contrived argument is that Werther’s Werther differs from Goethe’s Werther. The text’s sentimental self-indulgence, celebrated by hot-headed readers, stands in opposition to the calm perspective of the writer, whose stern voice holds great appeal for the cerebral demographic that pens studies on Werther.

Battlegrounds

Remote as the discussed 19th-century ideas of the novel appear, the further evolution of literary criticism did not quite break with the clichés established in early Goethe criticism. After the unification of Germany in 1871 and other historical caesuras had moved the Goethezeit into a distant past, the zeal that informed previous contests of interpretation continued unabated. Methodologically, biographism became an end in itself, as Goethe’s works were primarily seen as parerga to his exemplary life. This tendency shows in the popular Goethe biographies of the early 20th century, including those of Albert Bielschowsky (1895/1903), Houston Steward Chamberlain (1912), Georg Simmel (1913), Friedrich Gundolf (1916) and Emil Ludwig (1920). These hagiographies warrant a study in their own right but hold little value for the examination of Werther.37 During the second half of the 20th and the early 21st centuries, Goethe biographies continued to mushroom and, owing to their focus, reiterated familiar prejudices about Werther. Notable examples include the prize-winning biographies written by Rüdiger Safranski and Nicholas Boyle.38 Arguably, the general appeal of Goethe’s biography owes much to his exemplary double career as literary mastermind and administrator. After the original readership had disappeared alongside the author, readers hastened to reassemble the ‘thousand small stones’39 of his life, to use Bielschowsky’s expression, into a new whole.

Published at a time when Weimar classicism began to be exploited for propagandistic purposes, Georg Lukács’s Goethe study of 1936 attempted the rehabilitation of Werther as a text with socio-political significance.40 Accordingly, Goethe’s novel is a portrait of the German middle classes in the wake of the French Revolution. The study wrests the text away from its appropriation by bourgeois literary criticism, a line of inquiry which Lukács accuses of deliberately separating the epistolary novel from the political debates of the late 18th century. But instead of elaborating on the paradigmatic shift between biographism and historical materialism, Lukács dismisses the discrepancy between bourgeois criticism and his own, Marxist meta-analysis of Werther as a question of sheer intelligence.41 This polemical stance is deliberate. Instead of acknowledging the semantic nodes that allow Werther to simultaneously fork into a Marxist text and a bourgeois narrative, he naturalises the former as irrefutable truth. This attitude certainly owes much to the immediate political context of the study, yet it also exemplifies a recurring rhetorical device in criticism: the creation of truth through polarisation.

Like Lukács before him, Staiger demonstrates little interest in engaging with his rival’s methodology and, instead, simply asserts the implausibility of the entire notion.43

Singular meaning in the late 20th century

The following subsections give an overview of the critical analyses that treated the Werther nursery to a heavy dose of trimming and pruning, as the text’s richness gradually consolidated in the state that corresponds to Mattenklott’s ostentatious disinterest in ‘new or discrete discoveries’. The discussed interpretations may date from the 1960s and 1980s but are considered paradigmatic and remain influential. Methodologically they are divided into antagonistic approaches: classic psychoanalysis, hermeneutics and discourse theory. My questions are: how do different methodologies engage with an overinterpreted text such as Werther? What do they make of contradictory conclusions? How do they situate themselves within the vast delta of the Werther nursery?

Needless to say, this overview cannot account for Werther scholarship at large. The primary aim is to evaluate a generation of critics who have, in contrast to exotic or more recent contributions, left a lasting mark on how the book is read up to the present.

Classic psychoanalysis (Eissler)

In contrast to classic biographism, psychoanalytic theory has the freedom to safely ignore author-sanctioned views. Instead, this approach claims to inhabit a higher plane where literary outputs are discussed as symptoms of anthropological fixtures that point at meta-historical patterns of behaviour. In contrast to the bulk of literary production, however, psychoanalysis has elevated isolated literary texts into carriers of universal truths. Kurt R. Eissler, a psychoanalytic critic, published two substantial studies on Goethe, his two-volume biography (1963) and the essay ‘Psychopathology and Creativity’ (1966). Since the biography uses Werther primarily as a cue for a discussion of the poet’s encounter with Friedrich Plessing, this section focuses on the essay alone.

Eissler starts with the observation that while Sigmund Freud’s theory is much indebted to the insights provided by poets, it says too little about the genesis of creativity itself. To make up for this deficit, Eissler draws on Werther, which supposedly illustrates the complex interplay between memory, daydreaming and writing. From the outset, he emphasises the discrepancy between the text’s literary character and its ability to represent an action, as he observes: ‘Though Werther is written in what may be called lyrical prose, the effect is nevertheless that of a realistic encounter with the world, in terms of absolute despair and the incompatibility of human existence with the world as it is and ever will be.’44 The book’s virtuosity, he continues, stems from the author’s repetitive experience of denied love, commencing with the poet’s first exposure to a melancholic Italian song, as overheard in his family home during his youth, through to his first rejection by a girl, an episode dating from his student years in Leipzig, up to the famed love triangle in Wetzlar. Werther represents the culmination point of a time-consuming process that evinces how the mind of a genius departs from textbook psychopathology. Eissler’s idea is that all exceptional works are the products of a complex process that involves three stages: first, a trauma is consolidated through repetition; second, the final repetition triggers a phase of regression; and third, the writer’s mind sets free the forces that are indispensable to literary creation. At this point, Eissler conjectures that the poet’s conflicted episodes were ‘stepping stones toward the organization of highest order, just as the cacophony of an orchestra in process of tuning its instruments is the first necessary step toward the production of polyphony’.45

Eissler does mention the possibility that non-psychological factors also play a part in the creative process, as one must consider ‘the plurality of causative factors and the absence of a yardstick of completeness of explanation’.46 Ultimately, however, the decisive factor is not language, plot construction or characterisation, but the inclusion of psychoanalytical truth: ‘Without that autoplastic factor, works of art would affect us as beautiful but empty schemata, in the same way as we admire ornaments or the beautiful labyrinthine ambages of oriental tapestry, which arouse our aesthetic sense, without however introducing us into a new universe.’47 Written at a time when modernism had already reshaped literature, Eissler’s account shows how much psychoanalysis remains indebted to a late 19th-century bourgeois aesthetics. After all, Freud already stated that ‘all the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure […], and our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds’.48 It remains ruled out that the narrative gives away anything else than the story. It is only consistent that Eissler shows no interest in the work itself that allegedly produced ‘polyphony’. In contrast to Goethe’s letters and diary entries, the novel is not quoted from or referenced in any way. After all, its function is to serve as a token to attest Goethe’s autoplastic feat. This observation also extends to Eissler’s two-volume biography of the poet. Here, plot elements of Werther serve as documents of Goethe’s traumatic relationship with his sister, Cornelia.49

Classic psychoanalysis reduces literary texts to sophisticated riddles to be solved by the cognisant observer – but otherwise serve little purpose.50 That said, psychoanalysis underwent substantial transformation in the second half of the 20th century, notably in the hands of theorists who embraced post-structuralism. In psychoanalysis-inspired Werther criticism, this development shows in Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus’s Lacanian study from 1977, which ignores the text’s autobiographical elements in favour of a more general analysis. Accordingly, Werther’s fraught relationship with Lotte is caused by his projection of the mother imago onto her, a psychological tendency that is rooted in the epochal upheavals of the period.51 Despite such developments, Eissler’s Werther survives in recent contributions on clinical psychology, such as Rainer Holm-Hadulla’s argument that Goethe’s ‘life and work can […] serve as an excellent example enhancing our understanding of the relationship between anxiety, depression and creativity’. The writer’s therapeutic strategies should ‘reinforce and refine modern views’.52

So how does Eissler address the existing body of Werther criticism and the possibility of multiple meanings? While he tacitly inherits conventional ideas about the text’s genesis, the general assumption is that neither Goethe’s biography nor specific passages from Werther need further analysis. In a way, Eissler’s primary source is Goethe’s own autobiography, Poetry and Truth, from which he derives the insights that the author himself concealed from himself when writing the text, such as the tripartite genesis of his literary masterwork, and which he finally acknowledged in his autobiography. To argue that there is more to Werther than the interplay between conscious and unconscious processes would appear pointless to Eissler.

Hermeneutics (Jauss, Haverkamp)

In the post-war era, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics offered an alternative to plain biographism and the aesthetic disinterest shown by psychoanalysis. Gadamer rejected the idea that belated readers must put themselves in the place of the original audience of a work, let alone that of the writer. In fact, any work of art contains an essence which benefits from a gradual atrophy of meaning, an effect facilitated by temporal remoteness.53 At the peak of hermeneutics’ dominance of German literary criticism, Hans Robert Jauss presented his Werther study as part of his magnum opus, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik, 1982). Drawing on Gadamer’s epistemology, Jauss uses Werther to trace a literary dialogue across the French–German border, as Goethe’s work enters into a strained relationship with another seminal novel of the time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie (1761). Accordingly, the unsuspecting audience of Werther expected a text that would conform to the moral standards of Julie; instead, they encountered, to their great shock, a text that exhausted the tragic potential of romantic love and gave primacy to aesthetics over exemplary behaviour.

Drawing on this observation, Jauss not only takes issue with Enlightenment critics who argued in favour of more readerly guidance, but also reprimands Werther fanatics who idolised the protagonist and mistook him for a model of virtuous behaviour: ‘Perfect and vivid presentation inadvertently contributed to the idealization of Werther’s sorrows, thus creating the impression that the perfectly represented action is also perfect in itself.’54 The mistake made by early audiences, argues Jauss, was to ignore the implicit instructions that accompanied the text. In the history of art’s gradual movement towards aesthetic autonomy, readers of Werther found themselves exposed to a form of art they could not process adequately. This interpretation perfectly illustrates Gadamer’s idea that temporal distance can afford the critic a type of authority that asserts itself not only against unexpected audiences abroad, but also against a text’s initial readers. Both lack the ‘positive prejudices’ that facilitate ‘the most primordial kind of knowing’. In contrast to psychoanalysis, this kind of analysis ignores the writer by attributing supreme insight to the historian of literature. Jauss’s interpretation does not include any polemics against antagonistic contemporary interpretations as seen in those of Lukács and Staiger. His condemnation is reserved for the group of readers that could not take advantage of the atrophy of meaning, the precondition of true understanding.

Also published in 1982, Anselm Haverkamp’s analysis of Werther showed the compatibility between hermeneutics and deconstruction, an approach that had started to gain traction in German academe. In this vein, Haverkamp understands the text as an elaboration on the problem of transmitting and feigning emotion through writing. His Werther is not part of a ‘vivid and perfect presentation’ but is first and foremost a reader. Explicitly drawing on Jacques Derrida, Haverkamp regards Werther’s letters as supplements of a life that vanishes behind poetic representation, a dilemma that articulates itself in the observation that his feelings dry up as soon as he stops writing. Haverkamp’s rather hermetic description of this process reads as follows: ‘This epistolary novel presupposes […] an implicit reader as fictional reader who provides the reflexive figure of the implied reader, whose role is feigned rather than firmly established.’55 In other words, Werther’s letters are meant to give away the protagonist’s delusions, a process that corresponds to the letter-writing routines of Goethe and his literary colleagues.56 In a way, this insight rephrases established biographical insights in more abstract terms.

Regardless of Haverkamp’s merits as a bridging figure to connect German hermeneutics and French post-structuralism, his interpretation not only recycles a familiar view of Werther but also advances a highly idiosyncratic understanding of Derrida’s investigation into Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s childhood memories, as described in Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie, 1967). Here, the autobiographer’s erotic memories of his caretaker, Mademoiselle de Lambercier, introduce the notion of the supplement, a process that, applied to Rousseau’s memories, enforces the subject’s separation from the enjoyment of passions. In Jean-Jacques’s fantasy, the represented memory will forever outshine the actual erotic event in the past, an observation that Derrida paraphrases as follows: ‘I renounce my present life, my present and concrete existence in order to make myself known in the ideality of truth and value.’57 This stance emblemises a problem that lies at the heart of logocentric culture, in which real-life counterparts of the signified ‘have always already escaped, have never existed’.58 While Derrida’s supplement primarily addresses the relationship between speech and writing – a stance that culminates in his oft-quoted formula: ‘There is nothing outside of the text’59 – Haverkamp turns this wide assessment into a narrow psychological critique. Accordingly, Werther’s script-obsessed experience of life is nothing more than a personal pathology. One cannot fail to observe that this selective portrait of Werther is coupled to an equally reductive account of Derrida, whose notion of the eternally supplemented experience results in shaming Werther for getting caught up in a web of words. Arguably, literary history knows of many readers who encounter similar problems – one may think of Don Quixote and Madame Bovary – but who have encountered greater sympathy among critics. Despite such idiosyncrasies, Haverkamp’s interpretation informs the consensus among academic Werther readers today.60

In view of the central idea of the present analysis, both Jauss and Haverkamp are unsuitable candidates for the discovery of the text’s diffusion into a semantic plural. Both infer correct reading instructions, Jauss from a transhistorical and Haverkamp from a moral perspective on the text.

Discourse theory (Kittler)

In the case of Werther, discourse analysis affords the critic considerable freedom from the often self-referential cosmos of Goethe studies. Alongside Roland Barthes’s ‘The Death of the Author’ (‘La mort de l’auteur’, 1967), Michel Foucault’s essay ‘What Is an Author?’ (‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, 1969) contributed to a revaluation of literature, which is from then on conceived as a network of discursive statements rather than testimonies of heroic individuals. Applied to the Werther universe, this means that the poet’s self-interpretation no longer needs to be endorsed, corrected or contradicted.

Dating from 1980, Friedrich Kittler’s account oscillates between discourse analysis and media theory and has been characterised as ‘vintage early Kittler: ingenious, erratic, one-sided and intriguingly abrasive’.61 The analysis explicitly draws on Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (L’archéologie du savoir, 1969), in which the French philosopher argued that arrangements of the enunciative field determine sociocultural formations more than anything else.62 Taking the cue from this approach, Kittler elaborates on a historical rupture within the love discourse, which he exemplifies by the contrasts between a segment of Dante’s Canto V of the Inferno and Werther. Both texts tell of romantic pairs of readers: in Dante’s case, Francesca and Paolo, who read Lancelot; meanwhile, Werther and Lotte treat themselves to the poetry of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and James Macpherson. Kittler’s analysis embeds Werther within a wider network of discourse formation, in which symbolic, social and political dimensions overlap. Global literary themes such as love and self-expression, often invoked as universal themes, in fact conceal the inner contradictions between late medieval Florence and late 18th-century Germany, which materialise in Werther’s sexual habits and his medialised experience of the world. Kittler argues: ‘Everything is changed. The word love, despite its timeless ring, cannot bridge or conceal the discrepancies. The lovers have different bodies with different gestures, different organs and they pursue different adventures. Their encounters take place in different times.’63

Kittler highlights the importance of reading culture for Werther: to him, every experience requires representation through the literary form. In contrast to Jauss’s argument, this literary sphere is defined not by different reading techniques but by different codes of corporeality. Quite unlike Dante’s lovers, Lotte and Werther’s sexual encounter must be deferred, as the motifs of spiritual communion – linguistic expressiveness and the silent exchange of glances – suffice to exhaust their love. Yet this kind of disembodied love takes a corporeal toll on the letter writer. Since his only correspondent is the reading public and physical gratification remains unattainable, the letter writer’s soliloquy points to masturbation, a sexual practice that, interpreted in pathological terms, received much attention during the late 18th century.64

Having clarified the historical rupture that informs Werther, Kittler proceeds to deliver a polemical verdict on rival interpretations. He ridicules scholars who failed to see the masturbatory undercurrents in Werther and focused on other aspects instead: ‘Werther, a Christ-like figure. Werther, a thwarted revolutionary. Whatever perspectives are brought up in German studies, such apercus are squashed by how Werther appears in Albert’s cold gaze: as a loner and just as idiotic (in the Greek sense of the word) as any loner.’65 When Kittler calls Werther ‘idiotic’, he forcibly opens the semantic field that surrounds the Greek slang word malakas (μαλάκας), which also designates someone who masturbat*s. This is a remarkable interpretation. Lacking any text-internal hints, Kittler draws on the common idea that desire is pathological unless it leads to physical gratification. In Werther’s case, it leads to his suicide. Within the love triangle, Albert assumes the unexpected role of the representative of a bygone era of sexual prowess, in which the men of fiction still slept with their women instead of idolising them as Werther does. In diagnosing this historical shift between Dante and Goethe, Kittler puts forward a contrived argument that Geoffrey Winthrop-Young criticises as circular: ‘A partition is established and then everything that does not belong on one side – above all, the problematic connection between reading, mimesis and physicality in Werther – is transferred to the other.’66 What is more, Kittler also undermines his own horizontal analysis by heaping ridicule on Werther’s celibacy rather than seeking to understand it.

Although it is worthwhile to imagine Albert’s side of the story, Kittler’s idea of ‘squashing’ alternative interpretations destroys the hope that discourse theory might help activate the plurality of literature. Nonetheless, this iconoclastic interpretation left a lasting impact on Werther criticism. On the one hand, Nikolas Wegmann followed Kittler’s example without reproducing the latter’s polemics, thereby producing one of the most nuanced portraits of literary sentimentalism.67 On the other hand, scholars followed in his footsteps by tracing the protagonist’s sexuality, though in a more sympathetic way. Notable examples include Günter Sasse and Michael Gratzke.68

Uses of the text

Irrespective of their methodologies, individual Werther studies seek to displace each other instead of situating themselves within a specific section of the Werther nursery. Cursory attacks on rivals and self-assertive gestures choke off attempts to address a text’s plurality. The critical juxtaposition of the insights produced by biographism, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics and discourse analysis nevertheless reveals a shared outlook on interpretation: they assert a clear preference for the invocation of singular meaning. One may argue that their vastly different insights have little to do with the analysed text but owe much to the immediate context of the interpretation. There is no outsider’s perspective on the text, as interpretation is inevitably situated in circ*mstances that have led up to the act of interpretation and require the critic to broach the text from a certain angle.

In scholarship, to acknowledge the fundamental arbitrariness of literary texts is frequently met with sarcasm. Umberto Eco, for example, finds that the value of literature is compromised altogether once a text is invoked to ‘get something else, even accepting the risk of misinterpreting it. […] If I tear out the pages of my Bible to wrap my pipe tobacco in them, I am using the Bible.’69 For Eco, a firm believer in textual singularity, use implies desacralisation, even if his example, the Bible, in fact tells a different story. Like no other example of world literature, this text – or rather anthology – has become impossible to distinguish from its many uses, as reflected in its multi-layered genesis and historical transformations.70

While a more generous perspective on the use of literature is hardly controversial today, this approach must pay attention not only to the creative gains of such use but also to the neglect or damage that is inflicted on the original text. To understand the puzzling interactions between the text itself and the authoritative gesturing of belated critics, it is imperative to keep in mind a striking passage in Gérard Genette’s Palimpsests (1982). Here, the great narratologist conceives of reading as a process that reduces complexity in a manipulative way: ‘To read means to choose, for better or for worse, and to choose means to leave out. Every work is more or less amputated right from its true birth: that is to say, from its first reading.’71 And although this statement contrasts with Genette’s general faith in competent readers, who engage with texts in a nuanced manner, this observation fittingly describes the damage that is inflicted on Werther in the process of interpretation. This shows when certain aspects of the protagonist’s personality are ignored or when biographical details drown out the book’s stand-alone qualities. The book also suffers considerable damage when the letter’s passionate tone, arguably one of its most outstanding characteristics, is placed in a purely psychopathological context. In a way, the first step of successful interpretation includes the amputation of significant aspects of the text. Then, the truncated material is – sometimes smoothly, sometimes forcefully – integrated into a new network of meaning. The following paragraphs gauge the discussed interpretations with regard to the kinds of damage they inflict on the text and how they make use of the remaining bits of the text.

To begin with, the biographers took Werther for a hopeless case and had little patience for the lyrical despair of the suffering individual. Further, by taking the book as a mere by-product of fashionable sentimentalism, Goethe amputated all those elements that set the book apart from, say, less exciting examples of literary sentimentalism, such as Johann Martin Miller’s Siegwart (1776) or Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline (1788). Allegedly, the answer to Werther’s sorrows lies in the author’s personal maturation and abstinence from world-weariness and melodramatic moods. Understandable as it is for any writer to invoke their own life experiences – be they authentic or feigned – as intimately connected to their creative work, this narrative was also keenly reproduced by the poet’s adulators, such as Gervinus, Carlyle and Carus. In their eyes, Werther was not much more than an appendix to Goethe’s life. This biography-focused approach connects two highly unstable frames of reference, life and work, to forge the myth of the Great Man.

In Eissler’s study, biographism is exacerbated by a refusal to acknowledge the literary character of a text. Here, writing Werther is not a way out of one’s troubled life circ*mstances. Instead, emphasis is directed towards the epistolary novel’s role in documenting psychological healing through creativity. Once again, this instance of selective appropriation reduces the text to a token of the writer’s genius, as the lyrical quality of its prose, its character portraits and even the tragic end itself pale in comparison with the writer’s autoplastic healing. Eissler’s analysis culminates in the assertion that poetry and psychoanalytic technique are intimately connected. Not Werther, but Goethe is elevated into a position of authority right next to Freud, as psychoanalysis portrays itself as a technique not external to the Western cultural canon but in fact as continuing its commitment to self-knowledge into the 20th century.

Although uninterested in the person Goethe, Jauss also prefers to look at Werther from afar. In contrast to the text’s original audience, the critic knows better than to consider the protagonist a hero worthy of imitation; instead, he delineates the changed aesthetic norms between Rousseau’s Julie and Werther. This hermeneutic approach invokes a text-external contract that leaves little room for actual observations on Goethe’s literary style or Werther’s ambivalences. As ethereal as Jauss’s belief in temporal distance and semantic atrophy may appear, this methodological preference also reveals a utilitarian aspect: Jauss’s desire to establish a sovereign position for himself to avoid moral judgement.72 The supposed transcendence of immediate context turns out to be just as embedded in historical contexts as each one of Werther’s letters.

Haverkamp’s interpretation holds a conventional view of the text’s implicit manual, resulting in the portrait of Werther as a keen reader who is quite unable to establish any meaningful interaction with the external world. In contrast to his predecessors, Haverkamp’s insights prioritise the protagonist’s reading habits, a specific focus of attention that is inspired by a Derridian attention to the deferring function of linguistic signs. In a way, Haverkamp’s piece makes the case that deconstruction is not only a French methodology for French texts, but that it can be just as well applied to German canonical texts. Finally, Kittler further transforms Werther from Haverkamp’s reader into a solitary man to ultimately reject the protagonist’s alleged auto-sexuality as risible. The self-congratulatory undertones of this analysis are a product of the hopes that Kittler’s generation placed in sexual liberation for the renewal of gender relations.

The Werther nursery, as these examples show, is ruled by interpretative operations that inflict damage on the text. Understanding proper implies the restriction of meaning. When the amputated limbs go unnoticed, it is because an interpretation accords with the rules and conventions established by habit, cliché or a specific school of thought, be it biographism, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, discourse theory or another methodological orientation. It is only when they clash with each other, for example when Kittler scolds other readers for their unwillingness to accept Albert’s viewpoint, that readers give in to polemical attacks.

Admittedly, the present meta-analysis of Werther interpretations itself reproduces the same techniques that it critiques: the arguments put forward by Goethe, Eissler, Jauss, Haverkamp and Kittler were first selectively appropriated, then embedded into new arguments. To suit the present analysis, these accounts were reduced to their Werther-related argument, when it is true that all pursue a more comprehensive mission. Goethe’s Poetry and Truth, for example, aims to represent his life as a paradigmatic development of the human soul. Eissler advances an inquiry into why Freud stopped short of providing a theory of creativity. Jauss, Haverkamp and Kittler gauge the aestheticised reading experiences that emerged during the late 18th century. And yet there is some benefit gained by those reductive accounts: in isolation from the overall argument, the thinness of their engagement with Werther becomes apparent.

In praise of the plural

To accept the plurality of meaning as constitutive of reading and interpreting means to live with the loss of a basic assumption: the conviction that, crossing oceans of time, readers of Werther have the same text before their eyes. No matter how competent the readers, Werther will always be truncated and remixed. Since the resulting plural cannot be neatly fitted into a hierarchy with, say, modern interpretation on top and historical ones at the bottom, one has to picture them as coexisting on a horizontal plane.

While the idea of literature’s unrestricted use is uncontroversial in view of postmodern anything goes, the situation changes when remote audiences come into play, as the text’s original cultural frame is replaced by another one. What legitimacy do interpretations possess when they are articulated by individuals who are less knowledgeable about German literary history and its sociocultural specifics? Indeed, the resulting misunderstandings belong to the most frequently discussed themes of old-school comparative literature. Whether Spanish poets are said to have misunderstood Dante or whether Dostoevsky was mistaken for a proto-Sartre in the post-war era,73 cross-cultural encounters are prone to be dismissed as communication failures. As the geographic and cultural disparity increases, the situation becomes more severe. Sinic ideas of the West, for example, are then summed up as ‘failures of imitation or failures of understanding’,74 while their Western equivalents, such as Hegel’s idea of China, are compared to ‘a sinking raft whose passengers can never be sure what must be tossed overboard next’.75

A fabulous anecdote can serve to illustrate the challenge of envisioning literary interpretation in a global world. In I. A. Richards’s recollections about teaching English literature at Tsinghua University, Beijing, in the 1930s, the English critic mentions the students’ misreading of Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). When discussing the heroine’s love affair, her subsequent pregnancy and her cruel rejection by her father, Richards was astonished to see his students applying a completely different value system to the text. In contrast to the common understanding of Tess as a tragic heroine who deserves the readers’ sympathy, they showed disdain. To them, having been raised with Confucian values, she was an unfilial daughter who deserved her punishment.76 Their ignorance of Hardy’s ethics, goes Richards’s assumption, produced an invalid reading.

This unexpected reading demonstrates that cultural distance often results in a plural, if only accidentally. The students detached the text from its established context and applied it to another. But aside from the curiosity value of this anecdote, the students’ reaction brings to light a pertinent feature of Hardy’s text itself: that is, the narrator’s discretion in not recounting Tess’s rape in chapter 11. Researchers have already pointed out the resulting ambivalence, as readers are free to imagine the heroine as being either raped or willingly seduced.77 This case exemplifies one of the virtues of comparative research: once we strip a text from its canonised reception history, our attention is not necessarily directed at cultural essentials, but at a text’s semantic architecture.

Is it possible to apply the same perspective to Werther? In the absence of a comparable anecdote told by a German teacher in Beijing, Guo Moruo’s preface to his 1922 translation of Werther, quoted in the Introduction, may serve as a reference point. While Richards’s students advanced an ad hoc interpretation of Tess, Guo’s meditations on Werther are the product of an intense examination of its aesthetic appeal, resulting in an introduction, a full translation and Werther-inspired novellas. While Chapter 3 fleshes out the socio-political context of Guo’s reading, it must suffice at this point to note that his idea of Werther contradicts one of the fundamental tenets of Goethe studies, the sharp distinction between author and protagonist. While some observers would consider this an example of incompetent reading, others may appreciate Guo’s determination to explore the text on his own terms. Today, at a time when critical orthodoxy has turned Werther into a stale text, it seems worthwhile to take note of such interpretations that, owing to their unusual claims, were previously marginalised by literary studies. Another East Asian reader of Werther, Kamei Katsuichirō, went as far as conceiving of the protagonist’s suicide as a heroic deed. Writing in 1937, Kamei argued: ‘Werther alone wants to be the one who suffers. […] In fact, his love is an act of selflessness.’78 As Chapter 4 argues, this interpretation taps into a hidden stratum of meaning that was long obscured in criticism, the text’s affirmative stance towards death.

Without going into detail, it is safe to say that Guo’s and Kamei’s Werther readings repeat the same process that can also be observed in the interpretations by Eissler, Jauss, Haverkamp and Kittler. The question is not if an interpretation is guilty of deliberately using the text, only how it makes use of it. This realisation confronts the belated reader with an irritating challenge: is it conceivable to regard, say, Guo’s and Haverkamp’s interpretations as equivalent and equally valuable? Do Lukács and Staiger both speak the truth? If all those rival opinions turn out to be equally legitimate, what kind of text is Werther?

Target orientation

To some extent, comparative literature undermined its own raison d’être by excessively invoking the paradigm of misunderstanding. Today, it has transformed into one of the academic fields that have learned to live with the malleability of texts. This stance is best exemplified by David Damrosch’s influential book What Is World Literature? of 2003, in which the author characterises world literature primarily as the result of creative reception processes: ‘All works cease to be the exclusive products of their original culture once they are translated; all become works that only “began” in their original language.’79 What is more, world literature is defined as ‘writing that gains in translation’,80 thus elevating the products of transfer processes over hom*ogeneous intra-cultural appropriations. Texts legitimately change meaning in translation, but in a positive way. Damrosch’s approach is affirmative about the decontextualising uses of literature. When held against the paradigm of misunderstanding, this represents nothing short of a transvaluation of values.

For comparative literature with special consideration of Chinese letters, Haun Saussy’s Translation as Citation of 2017 exemplifies the virtues of directing critical attention away from the Original. This carefully argued book understands Chinese reception histories as autonomous creative feats in their own right. Saussy’s starting point is the moment when translation, understood as the search for equivalents, stops and facilitates the coupling of native concepts with foreign imports. Conventional reservations against such appropriations address the corruption inflicted on imported concepts by excessive concessions to familiar ideas. Disguising the foreign behind the familiar may actually result in eliding the foreign, thereby neutralising its disruptive force. In contrast to the expectation of linear flows, Saussy promotes a more generous approach on the basis of macaronic language. Accordingly, languages are never conceived of as being singular but are always mixtures of different languages from the outset.81 There are no neat boundaries, as Hafez’s poetry, sometimes alternating between Arabic and Persian, demonstrates. Such melanges point at the heterogenic composition of culture at large: ‘No language actually has a border or a center, although we speak as if they do when categorizing translations as “nativizing”, “foreignizing”, and the like.’ This observation ‘should provoke us to restore the macaronic to its rightful place both in literary language and in the process of language change’.82

This reassessment of Xu’s Baudelaire not as Baudelaire, but as a ‘Chinese Baudelaire’, protects the translated text from a patronising assessment that would paint the foreign appropriation as a corruption of the Original. Saussy views the inclusion of Zhuangzi into an interpretation of the French poet not as a case of a forceful interpretation that results in misunderstanding, but as a happy coincidence: ‘Accident, collision; nothing to see, no follow-up. On this account, Baudelaire and Zhuangzi, having met by coincidence in an elevator, tip their hats and depart.’84 Perhaps out of fear of deriving a new transcultural universal from this encounter, Saussy stops here and abstains from a more comprehensive assessment.85

Grafting

In exploring the target of a literary transfer at the expense of its source, Damrosch and Saussy inherit the convictions of post-structural literary criticism. Shifting the focus away from the Original, Roland Barthes’s influential study S/Z (1969) and Jacques Derrida’s notion of citational graft articulated an epistemology that frees texts from their commitment to fixed meaning. Aiming to discontinue a fixture of bourgeois culture, the cult of the Original,86 Barthes described the latter in purely negative terms: the reader is ‘plunged into a kind of idleness’,87 as the ideology of singular authorship ‘reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages’. Meanwhile, the conceptual opposite holds great promise: ‘To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it. Let us first posit the image of a triumphant plural, unimpoverished by any constraint of representation (of imitation).’88 The result, a cacophonic plural, defies orderly notions of meaning that can be successfully reproduced across the oceans of time, but is described poetically as ‘spread[ing] like gold dust on the apparent surface of the text’.89 The author fades into the background, while readers ‘gain access to the magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing’.90 Barthes exemplifies this approach by his lengthy running commentary on Sarrasine (1830), a novella by Honoré de Balzac. The text’s overabundance of codes prevents a conclusive interpretation, proving Barthes’s point that ‘the text is ultimately unconquerable’.91

Writing as grafting is not a means of passing on identical meaning but uses one element, the rootstock, to act as the foundation for another element, the scion. When pressed together and joined by tape or string, the two elements join their tissues and start to form a single integrated organism.

Applied to language, this concept draws attention to the rupture embedded into the structure of writing. At the bottom of language, Derrida argues, there lies not singular meaning, but citation: ‘Every sign, linguistic or non-linguistic, spoken or written […], in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.’93 As a consequence, literary interpretation opens a gate into the plural of signification rather than unveiling singular units of meaning. Intended meaning is replaced by the observation of how meaning emerges as an unintentional product of human cognition. As the author-persona disintegrates, there no longer exists a fixed self to be expressed.94 In literary theory, this approach continues to be discussed to this day.95

In transcultural studies, the divestment from the author-scriptor in favour of a text’s new audiences also resonates in Jin Huimin’s idea of cultural fluidity. Arguing that academe should break away from the ‘sedentarism’ derived from Martin Heidegger, Jin argues in favour of a fluid notion of culture: ‘Culture has never stopped flowing. Culture is always clashing, dividing, merging and looking for new heterogeneities to emerge. No national culture today is born independent, and no nation has one single origin.’96 According to Jin, once cultures engage in a dialogue, the involved parties are subject to mutual transformation, facilitating mutual exploration as well as self-negation and self-reconstruction.

As an antidote to previous disaffection towards creative reception histories, the strand of inquiry first proposed by Barthes and Derrida and later exemplified by Damrosch, Saussy and Jin can provide helpful examples that legitimise an inquiry into the plurality of Werther. In this light, the Chinese students’ reading of Tess is completely rehabilitated. Such interpretations deserve to be acknowledged as products of the essential drift of literary texts, a factor that orthodox readers consider a threat rather than an opportunity. Today, the epistemology behind literary criticism has changed in a fundamental way. Now the verdict of misunderstanding – just like the whole idea of linearity – appears like an invalid shortcut, put forward by scholars who did not take the trouble to engage with the messy details of reception processes.

The horticultural metaphor of grafting provides a useful image: an organism that is, after targeted manipulations, transformed into a new entity that interacts with its environment in different ways than the original one. Such focus on the fluidity of language, however, ignores the damage that is incurred in this process. To produce a rootstock, one must discard elements of the existing organism; likewise, the weight of the Original is perhaps discarded too hastily in target-focused approaches. Barthes’s appreciation of the triumphant plural produces an intricate index of connotation for Sarrasine, yet he cannot accommodate the wealth of Balzac interpretations that already exist. In lieu of recognising the prejudices that have clustered around the text, he uses the text as a mirror of allusions and connotations that he personally finds relevant. There is no regard for those interpretations that lie beyond his personal and cultural archive. Derrida’s notion of citational graft also has its shortcomings. While drawing attention to changed meaning, he leaves a pertinent question of the metaphor unaddressed: is there a natural limit to the scale of grafting? Should one distinguish between the theoretical possibilities of the grafted text, many of which will wilt before they bloom, and those that emerged as historically relevant? Finally, Saussy treats Charles Baudelaire and ‘Chinese Baudelaire’ as two discrete entities, without discussing the orthodox Baudelaire that goes missing in this process. Which elements does Xu appropriate selectively to produce this assimilated figure?

This disregard for the text’s history is accompanied with a hesitancy to pursue target orientation to the fullest extent. If world literature indeed indicates texts that ‘only “began” in their original language’, as Damrosch contends, why not concede to them the status of true autonomy? What hinders us from acknowledging Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Shaonian Weite zhi Fannao (少年維特之煩惱, the book’s Chinese title) and Juntei rō no hiai (准亭郎の悲哀, one of the book’s many Japanese titles) as unrelated texts? After all, a text – possibly even that of the author – changes every time it is inserted into a new chain of signification. Regardless of the sensible commitment to target orientation, there exist psychological or, perhaps, moral scruples to acknowledge their full autonomy.

Back to Werther: The Either–Or

Wilhelm’s well-intentioned recommendation triggers a word salad that appears defensive at first glance. Perhaps he wants neither to test Lotte’s love, as the first option suggests, nor to exert self-control, as the other option requires. Yet Werther’s answer is not necessarily evasive and deluded; after all, his response also addresses a question of formal logics that endows the Either–Or formula with a philosophical dimension. While in logic the Either–Or option represents an alternation, Werther interprets it as a gradual distinction: the distinction between actively pursuing Lotte or forgetting her is just as impossible as classifying an average nose as aquiline or flat. After all, there exist plenty of nuances in between, including hooked, bulbous and droopy noses. In Werther’s argument, his relationship to Lotte corresponds to a spectrum rather than an alternation. His hopes of obtaining Charlotte depend on circ*mstances that are subject to constant change, including her signals, Albert’s presence and Werther’s own mood. In the light of such instability, the Either–Or formula represents a conjunction, a situation when both logical operands can be true: he does have hopes, and he does not. He longs for Lotte, and he does not.

In philosophy, the possibility of double validity has met its most original analysis in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s commentaries on bistable perception.97 Famously, he meditated on the rabbit–duck, a schematic drawing that he regards as representative of ambiguity at large.98 The image shows a one-eyed head, with two extensions protruding that allow viewers to interpret them as rabbit ears first, then as a duck’s bill. Or vice versa. Since the simultaneous perception of both images is impossible, only one aspect ‘flashes up’ at a time, while the other one disappears. In Wittgenstein’s thought, the solution to this problem lies not in accepting one aspect and rejecting the other one, but in the realisation that perception is itself an act of interpretation. We not only see but also interpret sensory input.

In this scene, Charlotte’s bonnet resembles Wittgenstein’s rabbit–duck head. Werther awaits Lotte’s reaction but invests little energy to transform the bonnet into a decipherable sign of encouragement or rejection. Instead of forcing a reaction in Lotte, for example by waving frantically (or by giving himself an unaffected air) so that she notices him, he makes sure not to endanger this state of suspension. Lotte, too, is a virtuoso in creating the ambiguous signals that Werther so desires. On the one hand, her inviting behaviour features open flirtation with the protagonist, including touching his feet with her own under the table (16 July 1771), and, in the 1787 edition, exchanging indirect kisses via the canary bird (12 September 1772). Yet Lotte also rejects his advances several times and, after banning him from her home, provides Werther with pistols – which he ostensibly requests for a journey. There remains a tension between what could appear like her intention to ensnare Werther and her commitment to the life she leads as Albert’s wife. While such psychological complexity would not be unheard of in 18th-century fiction, the text rarely inspired equally complex accounts of the protagonists’ inner lives.

Only towards the end of the text does the protagonist’s commitment to Charlotte’s ambiguous bonnet give way to definitive resolutions. Now he dreams of possessing Lotte, of murdering Albert, and he abandons his detached attitude to worldly affairs, notably through speaking up in defence of the young farmhand who murdered his rival in love. Upon hearing the news, Werther is immediately overwhelmed with sympathy – not for the victim, but for the perpetrator. He even vows to save him from the hand of justice, as the editor explains: ‘Werther […] did not give in, and even suggested that the judge look away if someone tried to help the prisoner escape’ (L 68). A strange proposition coming from a man who had previously hardly considered eloping with his beloved! At this point, Lotte’s possession turns into the actual goal. In the text’s reception, however, this goal is often considered integral to Werther’s desire. The conflict that plays out on the novel’s superficial plane, Lotte’s marriage to someone else, has inspired many adaptations of the text that solve this impasse, starting with Friedrich Nicolai’s prosaic idea of Lotte’s divorce from Albert,99 through to Werther’s successors in Goethe’s oeuvre, who would ideally avoid rousing their passions excessively. Only recently, attentive readers have raised the radical possibility of Werther’s complete disinterest in Lotte’s possession. It seems perfectly possible to conceive of him as having never desired her in the first place. But that, one should never tire to point out, only represents one readerly option among many others.

In-betweenness

Before giving in to singularity, Werther positively accepts his suspended status between multiple options and has no intention of changing it. This stance not only contrasts visibly with the fixation on singular meaning as pursued by those who explore a text’s true meaning (Goethe, Eissler, Jauss, Haverkamp, Kittler), but also offers an alternative to tracing only those layers of meaning that a text produces among its remote audiences (Damrosch, Saussy, Jin).

As Werther’s Either–Or and Wittgenstein’s rabbit–duck drawing demonstrate, the reader can happily contemplate both options without having to force a choice. The difference is that with every additional interpretation, the observer can discover new shapes in the drawing. The careful evaluation of the tension between the textual root and its transtextual proliferation inverts the order between primary and secondary texts. Manipulations are performed, not only by invasive editors, unseeing translators and free-spirited literary successors, but also by those readers who firmly insist that they do not simply ‘use’ but understand the text. The idea that a text should correspond to one correct interpretation presupposes a coherent, immutable environment, one that corresponds with the ‘quasi-religious’100 quality of the Goethehaus, but hardly with the cycles of praise, critique and manipulation inflicted on classic texts such as Werther. In the end, the text was masterfully penned by Goethe but no less masterfully assimilated by its readers. Protruding like Charlotte’s bonnet in the mentioned passage, the text’s ambiguity facilitates the work of the reader, namely interpretation, translation and adaptation.

To accept the plural, however, takes effort. Contemplating the text, readers could find themselves sharing Werther’s fit of jealousy when, having just finished dancing with Lotte, he declares: ‘I vowed at that moment that a girl whom I love […] should never waltz with another, even if it should be my end’ (L 17). Mimicking Werther, the reader avows: ‘I should never waltz with another interpretation, even if it should be my end.’ It’s this interpretation or none. And faced with the text’s polyphonic qualities, the jealous reader would also experience Werther’s irritation when he complains bitterly: ‘[Women] can’t always succeed in keeping two rivals on good terms, but when they do, they are always the ones who benefit’ (L 29). While Werther’s statement reveals his latent misogyny, such chauvinism is not lost on possessive readers who cannot accept the text’s unique ability to keep multiple rivals on good terms – not only Lukács and Staiger, but also Jauss and Guo Moruo, and Kittler and Kamei Katsuichirō. In this light, Mattenklott’s angry statement that ‘[e]‌very new generation of Werther-readers claims to make new or discrete discoveries of obscure references, compositional devices or quotes’ must be understood as a case of interpreter’s jealousy. He sneers at a text that went through the hands of too many interpreters. Indeed, when accepting the text’s use, one must also learn to live with its wounded appearance.

The impossibility of naive reading reaps a great benefit, as it facilitates greater awareness of how textual transmission operates across time and cultures. A triad of factors plays out in the interaction between the original and its interpretations. The selection of the rootstock facilitates the selective appropriation of the text. This is not a simple case of some sections being addressed with more emphasis than others; instead, this process leads to the elimination of incompatible elements. At this point, the interpreter may resort to mocking those who take more interest in other parts. Simultaneously, the addition of a scion facilitates the text’s incorporation into a new context.

Five examples of grafting

Werther not only exemplifies the virtue of indulging in the plural but also demonstrates how grafting works in practice. Arguably, his most successful method of keeping the ambiguity of Lotte’s affection at bay is his cultivation of a material fetish. Since encountering her in person leaves him perplexed, he increasingly finds consolation in a material pars pro toto: her pink ribbon. Originally, she wore it during their first encounter at the ball,101 then on a later occasion, she and Albert gifted him an edition of Homer wrapped with the same pink ribbon. While it is unclear whether this gift is the result of their naive generosity or pure malice – why should they stir Werther’s passions with such a personal gift? – the recipient reacts joyfully to their complicated act of kindness: ‘You see how they anticipate my wishes, how well they understand all those little attentions of friendship.’ From then on, Werther possesses an item that is metonymic of Lotte, allowing him to experience the ecstatic fusion of past and present: ‘I kissed the ribbon a thousand times, and in every breath inhaled the memory of those happy and unrecoverable days which filled me with the keenest joy’ (L 38). Reminiscent of Lotte’s ribbon, the reader’s fixation on specific scenes also establishes a pars pro toto that attributes special signification to isolated segments of the text. They eliminate the perplexing presence of the object of study by establishing a hierarchy between the signifiers. Like dramas and epics, novels comprise dozens, sometimes hundreds of scenes that in sum form the kaleidoscopic plural of a work. The selection of a rootstock keeps such semantic abundance to a limit. When reduced to isolated scenes, the text can be successfully conquered.

The final section of this chapter experiments with a playful approach to literary polysemy that connects curated sets of quotes to grand interpretations. When isolated quotes coagulate into narratives, they result in biased plot summaries. Despite their alleged neutrality, practice shows that the brevity of summaries is afforded by the creation of dominant standpoints and moralising judgement.102 Consciously building on this distorting effect, the present analysis uses plot summaries as compasses to manoeuvre the ever-changing aspects of the text. The main themes of the following summaries start with irony and overidentification, two rather familiar views of the novel. Then the polyphonic range of the text is further explored with a focus on socio-political rebellion, metaphysical transcendence and romantic masochism. While rebellion can be considered a prelude to Chapter 3 of this book, transcendence and masochism are primarily experimental summaries based on isolated statements sourced from scholarship. Each case example balances the interplay between rootstock, discarded material and scion differently.

Graftage 1: Irony

These three quotes give away the protagonist’s delusional mindset. There is a discrepancy between the triviality of his actions, such as cooking sugar peas, and the heroic models he invokes. In the third quotation, Werther’s ludicrous claim suggests that his suffering exceeds the pain represented in ancient poetry – suffice to say that his situation pales in front of the dehumanising violence depicted in the Iliad. The note dating from 8 August is an addition to the 1787 edition, showing a Werther who appears cognisant of his deteriorating mental state but who stubbornly continues to treat, as he says, his heart like a sick child, gratifying its every fancy.103 The discrepancy between the invoked ideals and the triviality of his woes opens an entrance for interpretation that identifies with the editor’s perspective, who regards Werther from a commiserative but sceptical distance.

Although this summary is hardly intended to be provocative, it makes a factual mistake and several problematic assumptions. Lotte’s fiancé is not Werther’s friend to begin with but they make each other’s acquaintance at a later date. This summary also infers its own hypotheses that depart significantly from the text. The first is the assumption that Werther’s mental condition already existed before he moved to the countryside. This is plausible but speculative. Moreover, by characterising Lotte as an uncomplicated woman, the summary reproduces a common, simplistic idea of Werther’s beloved. It is only on her first appearance that she comes across as uncomplicated and innocent: when she slices bread for her siblings before leaving for the ball.

The Britannica summary indicates a perspective on the text that opens it to new fields of reference, thereby coupling the truncated rootstock with new scions. While Kittler draws a historical comparison to Dante, other scholars use the text’s irony to place Werther in the literary proximity of anthropological novels of the Goethezeit. In this light, Werther becomes an overenthusiastic, pathological character reminiscent of Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser and Christoph Martin Wieland’s quixotic heroes Don Sylvio and Agathon. Alternatively, ironic Werther complements the positive vision of renunciation, as articulated in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels, for example. Here, idiosyncratic pathological tendencies are ideally kept in check through self-cultivation and community guidance, two correctives that Werther lacks.

The subsequent works of Goethe are not the only scions that can be related to Werther. The ironic perspective lends itself to a whole range of literary adaptations, including Nicolai’s somewhat philistine mini-drama The Joys of Young Werther (Die Freuden des jungen Werther, 1775). Here, the protagonist’s woes are addressed as a problem with a simple solution: why doesn’t Albert magnanimously hand Lotte over to his rival? Broached from this angle, the epistolary novel is even compatible with the requirements of secondary school, for example, where students are encouraged to imagine alternative, happy endings to the text.105

Graftage 2: Overidentification

Like the Britannica entry, this blurb contains several tweaks. A martyr of love, Werther’s motifs are left unchecked. Equally, Lotte’s ‘sweet-natured’ appearance again simplifies the matter. Finally, the relevance of the legendary encounter between Goethe and Charlotte Buff is stated quite matter-of-factly, thereby reproducing a common cliché that overemphasises the author’s biography at the expense of the protagonist. Nonetheless, this Werther is a charming young man. His honesty, unbiased views and sympathy with his fellow human beings indicate a young man full of potential. But love, being a funny thing, causes his downfall. That said, there remains the idea that the fictional letters, as the editor hopes, will allow the reader to ‘take comfort from his sufferings’.

Such grafting was the precondition of Wertherfieber. As young fanatics of the text started to gather in cemeteries, where they read Goethe’s book in torchlight,107 even mature writers such as Wieland and Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart acknowledged the text’s mastery and the appeal of Werther’s personality.108 Even grey eminences such as the Enlightenment poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, then already in his fifties, praised the book in glowing terms. Among Goethe’s peers, the epistolary novel inspired a wave of congenial Sturm und Drang texts that are populated by like-minded protagonists, such as Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s novels and Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz’s dramas. Arguably, this Werther is a character who could also appear in a play written by the young Friedrich Schiller. Outside the German-speaking realm, this Werther also inhabits a densely populated literary landscape of successors. To limit this literary catchment area to only a few references, the neighbourhood of Werther hosts English predecessors such as Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768) and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771).

Graftage 3: Rebellion

The first quote introduces Werther as a person of rank who happily mingles with the lower classes, thus exhibiting the virtues of an unprejudiced man who seems ready for a return to a Rousseauian state of nature. The second quote is taken from an argument Werther has with Albert. The topic is one’s right to commit suicide considering that an unbearable life situation has no prospect of being alleviated. Rebutting his rival’s rational arguments, Werther invokes a powerful metaphor in support of his argument: every people has the right to throw off the yoke of tyranny, no matter at what cost. In view of the American Revolution (1775–83) and the forthcoming French Revolution of 1789, this statement is testimony to a new political norm that places emphasis on people’s self-determination instead of stability as an end in itself.

This summary portrays Werther, a nobleman, as a rebel at heart who breaks the social codes that segregate commoners from nobility and nobility from royalty. Like the assertion of Werther’s psychopathological disposition in the ironic interpretation, this summary forces the argument by endowing the protagonist with overblown revolutionary credentials; after all, the first quote (15 May 1771) in fact continues: ‘I know very well that we are not all equal, nor can we be’ (L 8). That being said, except for Moritz’s Anton Reiser, Georg Büchner’s Lenz (1836) and Heinrich Heine’s Germany: A Winter’s Tale (Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen 1843), it is still difficult to conceive of a comparable proto-classic or Romantic text that features a protagonist who so obviously suffers from social oppression. Meanwhile, one of the foundational texts of modern Italian literature, Ugo Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis (1798), connects Wertherian misery with the narrative of national humiliation, a trope that was further explored in Chinese letters in the 1920s and 1930s, for example in Yu Dafu’s and Jiang Guangci’s experimental prose. In criticism, this interpretation was first put forward by Grün in 1846, but to little avail, as Friedrich Engels heaped ridicule on Grün’s Goethe apotheosis. In the 20th century, however, Guo Moruo’s preface to his 1922 translation and Georg Lukács’s essay of 1936 made a strong case for the idea that Werther exhibits a quasi-revolutionary quality. Chapter 3 of this monograph is devoted to exploring this line of grafting in more detail.

Graftage 4: Transcendence

This perspective is mirrored in literary continuations that built on Werther. Miller’s Siegwart, for example, abounds with religious imagery and culminates in the lovers’ reunion in death – even physically, when they are buried together. Although few scholars arrive at the same conclusion as Anstett, the metaphysical saturation of Werther was indeed debated in research. While intertextual references to the Gospel of John are easy to detect, they raise more questions than they answer: does Werther’s story secularise the Passion of Christ in a quasi-blasphemous manner? Or does it simply reiterate narrative patterns coined by Christian mythology?111 Furthermore, the protagonist’s letters dating from 10 May and 21 June 1771 conjure a unique blend of natural observation and devotion. Consequently, Werther’s worldview was frequently linked to pantheism, which as a metaphysical concept is tantamount to atheism. As a vague feeling, however, it is compatible with institutional faith.112

Werther’s struggle to find meaning in this world testifies to his faith but can be considered in gnostic terms. Hermann August Korff, writing in the interwar period, regarded Werther as a tragic love story – not between Werther and Lotte, but between God and his Creation. The protagonist despairs of his miserable existence that cannot satisfy his demands, a diagnosis that allows Korff to read the protagonist’s suicide as a triumph: ‘Werther’s suicide condemns a world that, for all its limitations, cannot prove itself worthy of a truly divine life.’113 In the absence of any reliable metaphysical convictions, Korff’s view is difficult to distinguish from the kind of ecstatic nihilism that contributed to the text’s popularity in Japan during the early 20th century. Going far beyond the scope of religious transcendence, this line of grafting stands at the heart of Chapter 4.

Graftage 5: Masochism

Despite the unusual focus, this synopsis reiterates the selective appropriation seen in the conventional Britannica and Penguin summaries. In the original text, Werther’s philandering prehistory is only hinted at, and his desire to become Lotte’s slave is, while not implausible, a mere hypothesis. To assume Werther would enjoy her stepping on him, the ultimate gesture of submission, is a daring suggestion, but it does not exceed the speculative licence of Kittler’s interpretation. One should note that Goethe, in answer to Werther’s irritating sexuality, penned several satirical pieces, including a fragmentary burlesque,115 a travelogue, in which shy Werther hires a prostitute to finally see a woman naked116 and a comic drama on romantic fetishism.117 In research, Werther’s sexuality was addressed relatively late and usually in a negative way: his failure to engage in a normal physical relationship is seen as a deficit, a stance that is entirely compatible with the ironic approach discussed previously.118

As subtly coded as the treatment of Werther’s sexuality is in the text, modern Chinese adaptations considered it constitutive of his suffering. In Guo Moruo’s and Yu Dafu’s novellas, self-harm regularly appears as a coping mechanism of libidinally frustrated individuals. As Chapter 3 shows, this nexus forms part of the revolutionary grafting of Werther.

Conclusion

The present analysis holds that literature sets into motion a plural. Different aspects flash up at different times, an observation that Wittgenstein derives from the rabbit–duck head but which also applies to literary texts. Applied to our case, the question is whether Werther is still Werther after having gone through so many transformations, with new aspects flashing up time and again. In the light of this observation, it seems more beneficial to conceive of the dichotomy between the Original and its offshoots as the product of graftage, a horticultural practice that builds on the organism’s ability to heal, grow and proliferate, resulting in the integration of elements that originally formed part of another organism. The desired outcomes of grafting, better resistance against environmental factors or greater yield, however, create expectations that inevitably depart from what the original organism had on offer. Eventually, the manipulation and cultivation of the variant will obfuscate the memory of the original’s features. Tracing this process, botanists find themselves surrounded by a plethora of variants and controversial ideas about their genetic lineages.

In this tree nursery of literary manipulation, cultural goods clash, divide and merge. In novels, one of the greatest sources of ambiguity lies less often in single words than in their wealth of scenes. They represent different entrances, allowing the reader to ignore certain aspects while connecting with others. Although academe has given primacy to the idea of ironic Werther, the history of the text’s reception underscores its ability to invert established interpretations and to expand the book’s scope by including new paradigms. In one case, the author’s exemplary biography hijacks the text; in another case, the author takes up the role of a faint spectre that only reinforces the glowing ideas expressed by the protagonist. Outside German-speaking countries, this flexibility allowed Werther to undergo transformations that were unthinkable among his readers at home. Freed from the original scene of writing, the book allowed ‘essential drift’ to do its work.

The suggested grafts of Werther – irony, overidentification, rebellion, transcendence and masochism – represent just five possibilities among many. Additional entrances that this chapter could not accommodate include the book’s evaluation as a novel of manners, documenting the changing behavioural code of the bourgeoisie. This approach stands at the heart of sociological investigations into the 18th century put forward by Niklas Luhmann and Eva Illouz.119 Recently, it was proposed that Werther’s fatalistic view of nature evinces his struggle to come to terms with natural destruction. In her argument, Heather Sullivan concludes that this ecocritical approach ‘allows us to read Werther yet again with new eyes and also to find a possible textual framework for formulating environmental changes in the Anthropocene’.120 As long as Werther finds new readers, new entrances will emerge, perpetually to the annoyance of other readers. With regard to the following three chapters, special attention will be placed on the discrepancy between the possibilities of grafting Werther into new contexts, which are infinite in theory, and the grafts that have emerged historically and point to a limited plural. Which preconditions are necessary to read Werther productively and meaningfully? After all, literary texts are not free-floating entities that are suspended in a vacuum but are embedded into the limited horizons of historical readers.

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