cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Trashing Goethe Well all right. The project to publish my children's books is well under way. I've been staying up til 4 am for these last few nights reading Goethe and finding him really fucking boring. I'm simultaneously reading 'Faust' and 'Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.' Both suck. Maybe its just the translation but these are both just terribly fucking dull. I don't understand why everything in Germany is named after either Goethe or Max Planck. I can already tell that I'm not going to finish 'Faust.' If it was a novel then I think I could stay with it. I just happen to find long poems to be dull and tedious in general. 'Wilhelm Meister' reads like a more tedious and pathetic Charles Dickens. I read a lot of Dickens when I was a kid and liked him well enough. I liked 'Great Expectations.' Maybe the problem is that I grew up reading gilded age authors. Or really literature from around 1840 through 1960. What I read, as a child, was largely what are now regarded as 'classics,' although at the time, to me, they were just books. Dickens, Alcott, Kipling, Stevenson, Twain, Daniel Defoe. 'Swiss Family Robinson,' various things by Teddy Roosevelt, cheap pulp novels of the 1930's that I would get for 50 cents at flea markets. I don't talk about any of it very often because no good comes of it. See, I didn't study most of those books in a formal way. I just read them again and again. And while I did take a bunch of classes on gilded age literature in college, I'm not an English major and didn't study literature for real. It is so very tedious to hear someone who hasn't really studied literature try to talk about it. The well-read layman is obnoxious as soon as he opens his mouth because he usually has a chip on his shoulder about how he has read all of these books even though he didn't go to college to study them. He generally comes across as dismissive of those who *did* study the material formally and he is certainly peevish about implied slights against his own knowledge from those with a formal education in literature. I don't want to be that guy. So usually I keep my reading very much to myself, this diary aside. If I were to announce over the dinner table that I find Goethe dull then it would just sound sophomoric. Yet Goethe *is* dull. His greatest error in 'Wilhelm Meister' is his constant habit of telling rather than showing. Here, look at this shit: "Wilhelm, on the other hand, soared serenely happy in higher regions; to him also a new world had been disclosed, but a world rich in the most glorious prospects. Scarcely had the first excess of joy subsided, when all that had long been gliding dimly through his soul stood up in bright distinctness before it. She is thine! She has given herself away to thee! She, the loved, the wished-for, the adored, has given herself away to thee in trust and faith; she shall not find thee ungrateful for the gift. Standing or walking, he talked to himself; his heart constantly overflowed; with a copiousness of splendid words, he uttered to himself the loftiest emotions. He imagined that he understood the visible beckoning of fate reaching out its hand by Mariana to save him from the stagnant, weary, drudging life out of which he had so often wished for deliverance. To leave his father�s house and people now appeared a light matter." The best thing would be to remove that completely and make the same point through dialogue and action. But if he must tell rather than show, I would have pared that paragraph down and edited it thus: 'Wilhelm, on the other hand, soared serenely in a world that seemed rich in glorious prospects. She is thine! She has given herself away to thee! She, the loved, the wished-for, has given herself away to thee and she shall not find thee ungrateful for the gift. Pacing alone, he talked to himself of the loftiest emotions. The visible beckoning of fate reached out its hand by Mariana to save him from a stagnant, weary, drudging life. To leave his father�s house and people now appeared a light matter.' Now isn't that much tidier? Nothing of value was lost. Perhaps Goethe was getting paid by the word. That would explain quite a lot. He does come out with a good line here and there. Like, �To finish is not the scholar�s care; it is enough if he improves himself by practice.� He is very quotable, is Goethe. Whether it is really worth wading through page after page of shit to find those little diamonds, I don't know. Oh, I don't go around trashing Goethe in cafes or anything. I don't hardly talk to anyone lately. I don't get out at all any more, what with being trapped out in the middle of nowhere with no transportation. And when I do I don't know many people who would even consider having a conversation about Goethe, or any other dead writer. 2:50 a.m. - 2011-03-31 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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