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A review by lee_foust
The Sufferings of Young Werther: A New Translation by Stanley Corngold by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
5.0
For two weeks now I've been letting this novel resonate around in my head, hoping to come up with something new or at least interesting to say about it, but I'm still at a loss to do so. Obviously it's very, very good, or it wouldn't have the place in literary history that it has, marking, like no other novel I can think of, the passage from the novels of social realism to the possibility of writing in the more personal Romantic mode in prose. Even now, more than two centuries on, it still packs an emotional wallop--even with this 59-year-old. Werther took me right back to my younger, more emotional, melancholy and uncertain twenties, the years in which the injustices of life and romantic disappointments often led me to suicidal thoughts and aborted attempts to end it all.
Interesting too the literary apparatus that now surrounds the text, the history of the generation the novel seems to have provoked to copy the hero and heroine's dress and even prompting copycat suicides. I can certainly see why. Werther's struggles are fairly universal among sensitive and smart-above-their-station-in-life young people, I think, and his solution, although tragic on the one hand, is also, in its own way, pure and noble. He makes, in a sense, what Dante called "the great refusal." Of course Dante presents abdication of duty with that phrase and damns the character he's speaking of to an eternity of buzzing around the gates of hell, cast forever out of heaven and never admitted into hell; but what better way to think of suicide than that? Those neutral souls who refuse to either win or lose the game we've socially made of life but rather overturn the table and walk away from the game disgusted by it.
I posted, only semi-speciously, on facebook that I was glad I'd not read this novel when young, impressionable, and suffering similar disappointments. Back then, however, I was obsessed with my own generation's greatest poet of melancholy, Ian Curtis of the band Joy Division. For many years I considered Ian's suicide to be a kind of vindication of the songs he'd written about alienation, disappointment, and the futility of it all. Years later a friend disabused me of this notion, saying that, for him, the songs were the proper response to the horrors of life on Earth, that they represented the soul crying out against all these things, a therapy of sorts, a way to overcome. For him Ian's death represented a surrender, a giving in, and therefore a betrayal of the songs he'd written.
Today I don't really hold either viewpoint--at least not exclusively. I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself. Still, sensitivity and intelligence are partially a curse on those of us who feel and think too much. But maybe the world needs us--it certainly does if our species is ever going to consider life beyond the game of getting/not getting all that we desire.
Interesting too the literary apparatus that now surrounds the text, the history of the generation the novel seems to have provoked to copy the hero and heroine's dress and even prompting copycat suicides. I can certainly see why. Werther's struggles are fairly universal among sensitive and smart-above-their-station-in-life young people, I think, and his solution, although tragic on the one hand, is also, in its own way, pure and noble. He makes, in a sense, what Dante called "the great refusal." Of course Dante presents abdication of duty with that phrase and damns the character he's speaking of to an eternity of buzzing around the gates of hell, cast forever out of heaven and never admitted into hell; but what better way to think of suicide than that? Those neutral souls who refuse to either win or lose the game we've socially made of life but rather overturn the table and walk away from the game disgusted by it.
I posted, only semi-speciously, on facebook that I was glad I'd not read this novel when young, impressionable, and suffering similar disappointments. Back then, however, I was obsessed with my own generation's greatest poet of melancholy, Ian Curtis of the band Joy Division. For many years I considered Ian's suicide to be a kind of vindication of the songs he'd written about alienation, disappointment, and the futility of it all. Years later a friend disabused me of this notion, saying that, for him, the songs were the proper response to the horrors of life on Earth, that they represented the soul crying out against all these things, a therapy of sorts, a way to overcome. For him Ian's death represented a surrender, a giving in, and therefore a betrayal of the songs he'd written.
Today I don't really hold either viewpoint--at least not exclusively. I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself. Still, sensitivity and intelligence are partially a curse on those of us who feel and think too much. But maybe the world needs us--it certainly does if our species is ever going to consider life beyond the game of getting/not getting all that we desire.