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Literary Review
A novel in love letters
RAVI VYAS
Two extravagances: to exclude Reason, to admit only Reason.
Blaise Pascal: Penses
FAIZ AHMED FAIZ, one of the great Urdu poets of the last Century, often quoted when he was down and out, the Persian poet Hafiz of Shiraz as saying nothing in this world was without barriers, except love — but only in the beginning. What, then, is this thing called love? Deep affection, respect, loyalty, reliability? Does love remain love when all passion is spent? At the end of what is called the sexual life, "is love that has lasted the love that accepted everything, every disappointment, every failure, every betrayal, which has accepted even the sad fact that in the end there is no desire so deep as the simple desire for companionship?" When a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, is it just a fantasy that allows the world to exist in a scenario written for it by the self but that is unable to distinguish, in the heat of passion, between cold facts and wish that is father to the thought? Does he succumb to the fallacy of confusing strength of feeling to the validity of feeling?
Goethe explores the many hidden corridors and the mysterious demands of love in a unique novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, first published in 1774, which has captured the imagination of all those who have loved and lost. Werther is the story of a young man of great sensitivity who is sent by his mother on a journey to a small town where he was to sort out some outstanding legacy. He is enchanted by the beauty of the surroundings. After a few weeks he meets and falls in love with Charlotte but she is already engaged to a man named Albert. Werther stays from May to September 1771 but tears himself away and takes up an administrative job in a small city. But he is snubbed there and hands in his papers.
Some months later he returns to the town where Charlotte lives. Werther is now totally dominated by his hopeless passion, and, seeing no way out of his predicament, commits suicide. All the events in the novel take between May 1771 and December 1772. Werther is a novel in two parts but it is not presented in the conventional narrative sense. Goethe employs the fiction that an editor-figure publishes, with an epilogue, the authentic letters of a young man who commits suicide. In other words, private documents (Werther's letters to his friend Wilhelm) are being made public. Part of the power of the book derives from the fact that it is written in letter form. We find ourselves seduced, cajoled and harried because Werther seems to be addressing each of us individually with an intimacy and informality that we find in personal letters. At times we may despise him or admire him, or perhaps, more accurately we do both. But we simply cannot remain indifferent.
With the exception of the pages of editorial narrative and commentary that form the concluding section of the novel, everything we know of Werther we gather from his letters. Indeed, the writing of letters is the activity on which he seems to expend all his energies. Above all else, Werther is a self who writes, who discovers and in part defines himself through writing. The drama in the novel is transmitted through the mood and style that chart the ebb and flow of Werther's feelings and his sense of himself. One of the most painful aspects of the book is that the psychological disintegration becomes palpable in the disintegration of Werther's discourse, like alcoholic sentences when the mind is not quite there.
For example on August 8, he writes:
Believe me, Wilhelm. I didn't mean you when I spoke so severely of those who advise resignation in the face of inevitable fate. I didn't think you would have any such ideas. Of course you are right. Only remember one thing: in this world it is seldom a question of "Either... Or." There are as many shadings of conduct and opinion as there are turns of feature between an aquiline nose and a flat one.
Thus, you mustn't think ill of me if I concede your entire argument and still find a say somewhere between "either... or".
But by August 20, the process begins to set in:
I'm such a fool. Why do I deceive myself? What is to come of all this wild, senseless passion? I cannot pray except to her. My imagination sees nothing but her, nothing matters except what has to do with her... Ah, Wilhelm, to what lengths does my heart often drive me!
Werther's mind swings from one extreme to another, like a pendulum's swing, which never rests because the mind tries to catch its own tail. With extraordinary ferocity and one of increasing isolation, Werther loses all control, even of the one entity he cherishes above all else: the self. As a last desperate act of assertion, the self becomes the agent of its own obliteration. It is one of the supreme ironies of the novel that Werther, in his reaction against the conditions which fetter his spirit imprisons himself even more terribly in an ever-narrowing world of his own making. The thought of suicide had always been present in Werther's mind even before he met Charlotte and is simply not the result of an unhappy love affair. The doomed love affair is only symptomatic of a more profound dislocation between Werther and the world around him.
Time and again Werther tries to combat the constriction of mundane circumstances but he is forced to supplant the outside world that is resistant to his wishes with a surrogate world that is made in his own image. In the process he loses all hold on reality around him and the measure of all things. The quest for authentic experience leads him to live in an invented world. All this becomes manifest in his last letters as he plans his suicide. This is the culmination of a sick fantasy that only allows the world to exist in a scenario written for it by the self. Goethe's imaginative understanding of this kind of sickness, and how the sickness grows from much that is fine and valuable in Werther's personality points to one of the basic themes of the novel that reason is never quite sufficient to explain why things go terribly wrong with otherwise perfectly sane characters who lead normal, everyday lives. Feelings and emotions matter as well, or perhaps there is a divinity that shapes our ends.
No single story is ever told, especially in the European novel, as if it is the only one. The second most important theme concerns Werther and his concept of love. There is a long scene that occurs immediately after the letter of December 20: "We can't go like this any longer," Werther mutters, walking up and down the room. Charlotte, seeing the violent state into which these words had thrown him, tries to divert his attention by all kinds of questions, but in vain. She gives up. "Be a man, turn this sad dependence away from a creature who can do nothing but pity you." And again: "Why me. Werther? Why me in particular, the property of somebody else? Why particularly this? I fear, I fear that it is only the impossibility of possessing me which makes the wish so attractive to you."
The implications of this seeming paradox that Werther loves her because she is unattainable means that he loves her as an image, as some projected ideal of wish-fulfilment but not really as a person, "wants and all." Werther persuades himself that Charlotte loves him, that her sympathy (for him) and (his) fate amounts to love. And he adds the revealing comment "How valuable I become in my own eyes, how I... I can say it to you, you can understand these things, how I worship myself since she loves me." Werther tries here to invoke the reciprocity of love but it is a delusion and entirely one sided as he cannot understand "how someone else can — may — love her, given that I alone love her, so fully, so intensely, and know nothing else, have nothing else but her." Here Werther expresses his sheer incomprehension that the self cannot legislate for the behaviour of other people. For Werther, there is nothing other than his feeling and knowing and therefore there is no otherness. As the ending of the novel makes clear, Werther takes his own life in a desperate assertion of the self that repudiates "all resistant otherness." What Goethe is saying is that love must recognise Otherness and to forfeit the Other is to forfeit the Self.
Because of the existential dilemma that it expresses, The Sorrows of Young Werther is more than the story of doomed love. It explores the particular workings of desire as manifested in one individual, the flux of desire itself. Very simply, happiness is not the realisation of desires or, the source of our happiness often becomes the fountain of our misery.
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