I went to Chapterhouse for a break and a coffee the other day, and started rereading the Sorrows Of Young Werther. I distinctly remember the first time I read it-- in the tiny Art Student's League library when I was around fourteen. The cover had this insufferable pudgy guy on it, looking Intense. I'll never forget him:
KLOPSTOCK!
Even then, at my most insufferable and Intense stage of life (though not the most pudgy) I recognized it as being a bit silly. It's Sturm und Drang* at its most unabashed, overwrought, thunderstorms-and-heaving-bosoms best. Very briefly, Young Werther falls in love with a spoken-for lady who likes him back but not quite enough and winds up marrying her intended anyway, whereupon Werther shoots himself in the head after a great deal of whining.
Most of the book is taken up with Werther rhapsodizing about stuff. He gets excited about dewdrops, cows, his own excellent artistic ability, common people, pretentious poetry, etc. He's pretty terrible, but so relatable. After I read the book the first time I happily diagnosed Young Werther Syndrome in all my younger male friends, and myself. Had I been a little older, I might have agreed with the previous owner of my current copy:
Yup.
I'm glad Werther led me on to Steppenwolf and Narcissus and Goldmund and other better Romantic German Books. There is something fatally, inescapably attractive about the sense of dreadfully overwrought oblivion all these characters share.
Speaking of oblivion, much of the final pages of Young Werther are taken up with him translating Ossian, who was an Ancient Gaelic Poet. It's mostly vague emotional exposition with some mist and bogs thrown in. I looked up Ossian, and discovered that he was an invention of an eccentric Eighteenth Century Scottish politician. Its oddly fitting that Werther should be pouring out his self-involved soul in the words of a hoax. Goethe didn't know this of course, and was merely hopping onto the already highly popular Ossian bandwagon. Ossian (or rather, his creator MacPherson) certainly taps into the wistful yearning and wanderlust and cliffs so dear to the romantics, but the poems themselves really aren't very good.
And now, apropos of nothing at all, may I present a hillbilly dancing with a raccoon:
CHAIN CHAIN CHAIN!
That totally made my day.
Isis
