Abstract
Although Mörike has long been considered Goethe’s successor in lyric poetry — a “spiritual son” who acknowledged his debt to the precursor openly — a comparison of Mörike’s “Besuch in Urach” with Goethe’s “Ilmenau” reveals the successor’s attempt to repress rather than imitate the “father.” The present analysis employs Harold Bloom’s reception theory to argue that Mörike’s defense against Goethe forms the origin of his creative impulse.
Zusammenfassung
Obwohl Mörike schon lange als Goethes Nachfolger in der Lyrik betrachtet wird — ein “geistiger Sohn,” der offen bekennt, was er seinem Vorläufer verdankt — verdeutlicht ein Vergleich von Mörikes “Besuch in Urach” mit Goethes “Ilmenau” den Versuch des Nachfolgers, seinen “Vater” eher zu verdrängen als zu imitieren. Die vorliegende Analyse verwendet Harold Blooms Rezeptionstheorie um zu zeigen, daß Mörikes Abwehr gegen Goethe den Grund seines schöpferischen Impulses bildet.
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Literature
Wilhelm Lang, “Rudolf Lohbauer,” Württembergische Vierteljahreshefte für Landesgeschichte, 5 (1897), 107f. Lang quotes from a letter by Lohbauer to his fiance, 27 September 1840.
Quoted from Harry Maync, Eduard Mörike: Sein Leben und Dichten (1913), p. 250.
Heinrich Ilgenstein, Mörike und Goethe: Eine Uterarische Studie (1902), pp. 2 and 4.
Benno von Wiese’s formulation of their similarities is typical: “… Goethesche Beseelung der Natur durch die Kräfte des menschlichen Herzens… und rein menschliche Anmut des griechischen Altertums.” And further: “… die Bindung an den sinnlichen Augenblick, die Freude am Sehen, die Abneigung gegen alles Zerfließende und Verschwimmende, die Nähe zum Volksliedhaften und zugleich zum Antiken, der untrügliche Sinn für das Echte, bei gleichzeitiger Abwehr alles Verkrampften, Unduldsamen und empfindsam Schwelgerischen.” Benno von Wiese, Eduard Mörike (1950), p. 17. Nearly every major study of Mörike makes at least the obligatory salute to the affinities between the Weimar master und his epigone. The following studies take up the problem directly, in varying degrees of depth
Ludwig Friedrich Bartel, “Mörikes ‘Vater Goethe,’” Goethe-Kalender auf das Jahr 1938 (1938), 101–154
Mary Crichton, “A Goethean Echo in Mörike’s ‘An eine äolsharfe,’” Seminar, 16, 3 (1980), 170–180
Kenzo Miyashita, Mörikes Verhältnis zu seinen Zeitgenossen (1971), pp. 47–54
S.S. Prawer, “Mignon’s Revenge: A Study of Maler Nolten,” Publications of the English Goethe Society, 25 (1956), 63–85; au]6e_Hal H. Rennert, Eduard Mörike’s Reading and the Reconstruction of his Extant Library (1985), pp. 26–35, 157–65, 170–98.
Emil Staiger, Die Kunst der Interpretation (1955), p. 206. This study culminates in a treatment of Mörike as Goethe’s principal epigone. Cf. pp. 205–214.
The word “vicarious” appears often in descriptions of Mörike’s intellectual life. Cf. Rennert, p. 2, and J.P. Stern, “Eduard Mörike: Recollection and Inwardness,” Idylls and Realities (1971), p. 77.
Gerhard Storz, “Eduard Mörike: Der Dichter zwischen den Zeiten,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schiller-Gesellschaft, 20 (1976), 492–503.
Max Kommereil, Gedanken über Gedichte (1943), pp. 171–73.
Cf. Hans Egon Holthusen, Eduard Mörike in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (1971), p. 59, where the author provides an exemplary rendition of this critical commonplace: “‘Besuch in Urach’… erinnert sehr deutlich an den reifen und den späten Goethe, an seine Lebensgedenk-Lyrik, seine ‘Marienbader Elegie,’ an gewisse Passagen im Faust, es setzt fünfzig Jahre Goethescher Poesie voraus, fünfzig Jahre sprachlicher Entwicklung im Zeichen Goethes voraus….”
Cf. Harold Bloom, “The Breaking of Form,” Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (1979), p. 15. Subsequent references to this and other writings by Bloom will appear in the body of the text, abbreviated according to the following code: (DC) Deconstruction and Criticism; (AI) The Anxiety of Influence (1973); (Map) A Map of Misreading (1975); (KC) Kabbalah and Criticism (1975); (PR) Poetry and Repression(1976); (Agon) Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (1982); (Breaking) The Breaking of the Vessels (1982); (WS) Wallace Stevens: The Poems of our Climate (1977). For metacritical commentary on Bloom’s poetics see
Elizabeth W. Bruss, Beautiful Theories: The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism (1982), pp. 288—362
David Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision (1985)
Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (1980), pp. 318—346
Jean-Pierre Mileuer, Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity (1985).
Cf. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (1981), pp. 100–118.
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood (1928), p. 53. Emil Staiger preserves this critical attitude in Die Kunst der Interpretation, p. 214, where he asserts with reference to Mörike: “Das Artistische, die subtile schauspielerische Begabung ersetzt die ausgeprägte Persönlichkeit, wie umgekehrt eine solche Wandelbarkeit des Stils, ein solcher Sinn für verschiedene Formen nur möglich ist, wo ein bestimmtes Dasein fehlt.”
Cf. Marianne Wünsch, Der Strukturwandel in der Lyrik Goethes (1975), pp. 41 ff. Wünsch treats in brief the most cogent attempts at a definition of Erlebnislyrik, coming to the conclusion: … der Begriff ist… zwar eingebürgert, doch herrscht nichtsdestoweniger kaum ein Konsensus über seine Definition.” And: “Eine wissenschaftliche Untersuchung, die die Entwicklung des Erlebnisbegriffs, seiner Implikation und Probleme einigermaßen erschöpfend beschreibt, steht unseres Wissens noch aus “Of particular interest for the discussion here is Heinrich HenePs analysis of the transition in German poetry from nature poetry to Dinggedicht, which he calls a “Copernican revolution” in the history of lyric poetry. As Henel points out, it was Mörike who inaugurated the so-called Dinggedicht.
Cf. Henel, “Erlebnisdichtung und Symbolismus,” Zur Lyrik-Diskussion, ed. Reinhold Grimm (1974), pp. 218–54.
Berhard Suphan, “Ilmenau,” Deutsche Rundschau, 11 (1893), 272.
Goethe’s “Ilmenau” and other texts by Goethe are quoted from Goethes Werke, ed. Erich Trunz (1948).
Mörike’s “Besuch in Urach” is quoted from Eduard Mörike, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Herbert Göpfert (1964).
One thinks of Novalis in this context, whose conception of poetry as music is said to adumbrate the semantic obscurities of subsequent “modern” lyrics. See Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik (1956), pp. 27–30.
Cf. Franz Germann, Mörikes “Besuch in Urach”: Eine Interpretation (1966), p. 60. Here and elsewhere in his valuable study of the poem, Germann tries to explain such references with biography. The reference here is said to be to Klärchen Neuffer.
See Jeffrey Todd Adams, Eduard Mörike’s “Orplid”: Myth and the Poetic Mind(1984), esp. chapters three and four.
Cf. Gerhard Storz, Eduard Mörihe (1967), pp. 94–95.
Novalis, Schriften, eds. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, 4 vols. (1929), II, 339.
See Friedrich Hiebel, Goethe: Die Erhöhung des Menschen (1961), pp. 33–35.
See Werner Danckert, Goethe: Der mythische Urgrund seiner Weltschau (1951), pp. 157–73.
In Lacanian terms we can also speak here of a “mirror stage,” in which the I posits its selfhood in relation to the not-I. That is, the infant’s (here ephebe’s) sense of self or autonomy originates from a “paranoiac alienation,” which Lacan calls a “miscognition” (méconnaissance). See Jacques Lacan, écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (1977), pp. 1–7. The importance of this notion for the present argument is that the ego emerges in error. The basis of self-perception is the specular mistake of substituting what is manifestly not the true self (a mirror-image) for an absolute identity enabling the ego to function. In the text of “Besuch” therefore, the process of daemonization manifests a specular seeking of self-identity which is repeatedly frustrated by the maturing poet’s realization that the Cartesian ego, the basis for the Goethean Sublime, is an illusion, predicated on a primal error of identification with the precursor.
Bloom derives his image of the precursorgiant from Nietzsche’s discussion of guilt and bad conscience as a culture’s “debt” to its ancestors in Zur Genealogie der Moral. Nietzsche contends that primitive tribes feel a kind of guilt and fear in relation to mighty forebears, without whom the tribe would not exist. In very powerful tribes, with illustrious antecedents, the burden of guilt becomes enormous, and the ancestors become godlike in the minds of their descendants. Cf. Nietzsches Werke (1921), VII, 385–87. See also Daniel O’Hara, “The Genius of Irony: Nietzsche in Bloom,” The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in Amerika, eds. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, Wallace Martin (1983), pp. 109–32.
Cf. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (1983), pp. 187–208.
Cf. Bengt Algot Sørensen, “Altersstil und Symboltheorie: Zum Problem des Symbols und der Allegorie bei Goethe,” Goethe Jahrbuch, 94 (1977), 69–85, esp. pp. 76–80.
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Adams, J. The Scene of Instruction Mörike’s Reception of Goethe in “Besuch in Urach”. Dtsch Vierteljahrsschr Literaturwiss Geistesgesch 62, 476–513 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376004
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376004