Joint Ventures: Authorship, Translation, Plagiarism

Joint Ventures: Authorship, Translation, Plagiarism

Fritz Gutbrodt

Peter Lang

Joint Ventures

Publications Universitaires Européennes Europäische Hochschulschriften European University Studies

Series XVIII Comparative Literature Reihe XVIII Série XVIII Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft Littérature comparée Vol./Band 108

PETER LANG Bern · Berlin · Bruxelles · Frankfurt a. M. · New York · Wien

Fritz Gutbrodt

Joint Ventures Authorship, Translation, Plagiarism

PETER LANG Bern · Berlin · Bruxelles · Frankfurt a. M. · New York · Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.ddb.de›. British Library and Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain, and from The Library of Congress, USA

The study was accepted as Habilitationsschrift at the University of Zurich in 1998.

ISSN 0721-3425 ISBN 3-03910-032-7 US-ISBN 0-8204-6266-7

© Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, Bern 2003 Hochfeldstrasse 32, Postfach 746, CH-3000 Bern 9, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany

For Rita, Bettina, Katrin, and Sebastian, who know why.

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Contents

1. Preface: Authorizing Authenticity

2. The Genius as Compositor: Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition

9

35

I.

From Young’s Original to Joyce’s Hypertext

36

II.

Genius, Encyclopedia, Automata

57

III. The Mechanics of Originality IV. Forever Young 3. The Worth of Werther: Goethe’s Literary Marketing

76 104 129

I.

Names and Silhouettes

129

II.

Lovers, Authors, Bureaucrats

157

III. The Genius and Its Monstrous Doubles 4. The Volatility of the Letter: Baudelaire Translates Poe

182 193

I.

Destination Paris

193

II.

D— ciphering

205

III. Pure Language, Pure Signifier

223

IV. King of Apes

237

7

5. Transplants: Poe, Plagiarism, and Les Fleurs du mal

249

I.

Nevermore

249

II.

Madman in the Library

264

III. Sisyphos, Slave

283

Appendix “Une Lettre volée” in Magasin Pittoresque 13 (1845) Bibliography

8

305 315

Chapter 1

Introduction: Authorizing Authenticity “That romantic disease, originality, all around we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original...Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be an original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way.” Gaddis, The Recognitions1

The chapters of this book discuss what Wyatt Gwyon, the counterfeiter of Flemish masters in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, calls the “romantic disease” of originality. His statement about the original has itself the status of a copy, for Wyatt faithfully repeats the words of Herr Koppel, the teacher with whom he studied in Munich. Thus his reference to a reverence for the great masters lives up to the aesthetics masterminded by his teacher: “When you paint you do not try to be original, only you think about your work, how to make it better, so you copy masters, only masters, for with each copy of a copy the form degenerates...you do not invent shapes, you know them, auswendig wissen Sie, by heart...” (89). The translation of the German phrase auswendig wissen into knowing by heart literally turns Koppel’s argument inside out. It is uncertain whether by counterfeiting great masters the artist can absorb or assimilate the shape of great art to make it truly his own or whether the skills he acquires are merely superficial, or auswendig. Is originality some intrinsic quality of art, or is it accidental? Are the artists that aspire to originality in “the mess they make” actually some kind of impostors? And how does it come

1

William Gaddis, The Recognitions (1955; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 89.

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to pass that what is called copy itself assumes the despotic authority of an original that demands imitation? The irony of a reversal is lying in ambush to attack and confuse the figures in the narrative as well as the reader at every turn of Gaddis’s postmodern novel about romantic misconceptions of originality. Wyatt’s apprenticeship in forgery is a case in point. His father had bought Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Seven Deadly Sins in Italy and smuggled it across the border. “How were you certain it was the original?” (39), Wyatt asks the Reverend Gwyon when one day he talks about the origin of the picture that holds a strong fascination for his adolescent son. “That took some...umm...conniving, getting it through customs,” the father replies. Years later Wyatt will find out about the true nature of that connivance. But first the painter starts his astonishing career: Every week or so he would begin something original. It would last for a few days, but before any lines of completion had been drawn he abandoned it. Still the copies continued to perfection, that perfection to which only counterfeits can attain, reproducing every aspect of inadequacy, every blemish on Perfection in the original. He found a panel of very old wood, nearly paper-thin in places but almost of exact size, and on this he started the Seven Deadly Sins: Superbia, Ira, Luxuria, Avaritia, Invidia...one by one they reached completion unbroken by any blemish of originality. Secrecy was not difficult in that house, and he made his copy in secret. (55)

Long before he meets old Koppel, young Wyatt already endorses the idea that originality is a blemish that mars the perfection of a faithful copy. For while in counterfeits every mark of imperfection reproduces something that is already present in the original and thus makes that blemish an integral part of the work copied, any defect in an original work constitutes a fragmentation of the integrity of ideal beauty. Wyatt seems to learn two things about art and creativity: You cannot be made accountable for a copy; and in order to produce an original you have to avoid the phantasy of originality. Ironically, the lessons he teaches himself come back with a vengeance. As it turns out years later, the one blemish in the original he faithfully reproduced is that it 10

is in fact a fake. His father lied to him. This lie was the “conniving” he was talking about at the time, and the border across which he smuggled the painting was that between original and copy. Deception becomes the eighth deadly sin added to the painting in the process of forgery. It is a heavy blow to the professional forger that the Bosch painting he counterfeited – “unbroken by any blemish of originality” – was not the original painting. The cheater is cheated: “And it was false all the time! He spoke with more effort than he had yet made to control his voice. – Copying a copy? is that where I started?” (381). His teacher’s warning comes home to him after all: “You copy masters, only masters, for with each copy of a copy the form degenerates.” Koppel’s admiration of masters is not really shared by the masters themselves, who have always practiced their art by making countless copies. “When artists do not copy others, they may copy their own work over and over to deepen ‘the idea’ of their original,”2 as Hillel Schwartz reminds us in her book on the cultural history of the copy. As she sums up this practical practice with a wonderful pun: “The history of art is the history of copy rites” (248). Ironically, Wyatt had financed his course of studies with Koppel by selling what he thought was the original painting by Bosch. Having sold a fake as an original Wyatt’s whole career is founded, in a symbolic sense, on counterfeit money. Money and art are the two inseparable master media of communication in Gaddis’s novel, and it is impossible to tell whether Wyatt is shocked by the revelation of the fake or by the sudden depreciation of the work that was sold for the ridiculous sum of fifty dollars. Aesthetic value and market value are closely linked in The Recognitons, and their interdependence reveals the truth of Koppel’s remark about the devaluation of a work that represents the copy of a copy. Throughout the narrative the discourse about the original and the copy extends into the area of coinage as one of the oldest cultural forms of mechanical reproduction. Adamo da Brescia, the counterfeiter of money suffering in Dante’s Inferno, is 2

Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 248.

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Wyatt Gwyon’s true patron. In his essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Benjamin writes, In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. [...] The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique and could not be mechanically reproduced.3

The passage neatly sums up the situation of the artist as forger in The Recognitions. Art is by definition reproducible, and one might indeed say that the the desire to repeat and reproduce works of art performes the mimetic relationship that exists between art and nature. As Benjamin writes: “The authenticity of a thing (Echtheit einer Sache) is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration (materielle Dauer) to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (221). In this sense authenticity is defined as the hallmark of copy. The reproduction of art is authentic because it reveals that authenticity – the “most sensitive nucleus” (221) of art – is the very element that can be transmitted. The original work itself, that is to say its originality, cannot be repeated. The reproduction produces a different work that takes place at a different historical moment, but the authenticity of art is the power by which art can recreate authenticity in countless new works of art. Thus Benjamin manages to separate the question of authenticity from the problem of identity that has marred any discussion of repetition, copy, and plagiarism in the discourse on art and literature. While identity and similarity play in the register of what Lacan calls the imaginary, authenticity is present3

12

Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, in Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), I: 474. The translation follows the text in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 218. Subsequent references to the translation will be cited in the text.

ed by Benjamin as an historical concept. Works of art are authentic because they enter the order of history and they remain authentic as long as they endure the historicity of the moment that produces them. This is where Benjamin locates the problem that the mechanical reproduction art encounters in the age of photography and film. It is no longer authenticity that is transferred from nature to art or from one work to another but precisely what once seemed impossible to capture and what modern photography and film manage to displace or cite as moveable property: time and history. “Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object” (221). What mechanical reproduction shatters, as Benjamin argues, is the aura of things and works of art, a term he describes at one point as “the unique phenomenon of a distance” (222). The telephoto lens and the speed of film shorten this distance and lead to what Paul Virilio has described as an aesthetics of disappearance.4 Benjamin’s essay maps out the threat to authenticity and authority that the discourse on art and literature faces and that Wyatt Gwyon faces in his acts of forgery. While certain crafts in art were, together with the minting of coins, the first instances of mechanical reproduction, painting as a performance of the hand has shown the strongest resistance to the kind of duplication that changed the face of literature with the invention of the printing press. This is why the emulation of great masters survived as the principal method of teaching in Herr Koppel’s school at Munich, where practice, citation, and counterfeit seem to exist in some kind of innocent relationship.5 4

See his Esthetique de la disparition (Paris: Editions Balland, 1980).

5

The history of copying masters for the purpose of an artist’s development and their use as citations is the subject of an exhibition catalogue by Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, ed. Creative Copies: Interpretative Drawings from Michelangelo to Picasso (New York: The Drawing Center, 1988). On counterfeiting in art history, see Otto Kurz, Fakes: A Handbook for Collectors and Students (New

13

However, Wyatt not only copies great masters but also fabricates, under their name, works they have never painted. Using genuine canvass and other material of the period he fakes their style to make an original, and he thus falsifies precisely what Benjamin calls the “historical testimony” of art. What makes those forgeries interesting is that they are unoriginal originals. One such case is Wyatt’s faking of an undiscovered work by the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Hans Memling, which John Johnston has described in terms of Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum: “Wyatt’s painting is neither an imitation nor an original but a simulation of a Memling or a simulacrum. It is not an imitation or copy because there is (was) no original, but it is not an original either since it was not painted by Memling himself.”6 What started in Munich as an investiture of the great masters to be emulated ends up in the narrative as a total destabilization of an aesthetic ideology founded on the assumption that one can tell the original from the copy, the genuine from the counterfeit. This is where we come back to money as the medium competing with art in Gaddis’s novel, for doing big business with pseudoauthentic works the ring of forgers in Gaddis’s narrative make big money. Money has the quality of a simulacrum. It is a signifier that has the authority of authenticity without the presence of what it authenticates. It also combines the two levels Benjamin distinguishes in his essay with regard to the origin and use of art: the “cult value” and the “exhibition value of the work” (224). While money has ritual York: Dover, 1967) and the exhibition catalogue by Mark Jones, ed. Fake? The Art of Deception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 6

14

John Johnston, Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis’s The Recognitions and Postmodern Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 11; on Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum, see 194–96. See also the collection of essays by John Kuehl and Steven Moore, eds. In Recognition of William Gaddis (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984). Information on historical and pseudo-historical or counterfeited figures and works in Gaddis’s vast novel is provided by Steven Moore, A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s ‘The Recognitions’ (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).

origins it is also the most exhibitionistic medium imaginable.7 In the passage cited earlier about the counterfeiting of Bosch’s Seven Deadly Sins we see Wyatt work in secrecy like the cavemen portraying the elk or the priests hiding their madonna described by Benjamin in his essay (225). Faking the pseudo-original Memling he works for the total exposure of a famous name that is going to be sold in the art market. In art and literature since the Renaissance the question of authority and authenticity has been played out in two registers that partake of both those levels of cult and exhibition at once: the signature and the performance. The Recognitions is the first novel in Gaddis’s massive and ambitious project on the discourse of art, economy, religion, and science in postmodernism. Jean-François Lyotard has described the postmodern world as a system that no longer relies on rules, models, and absolute precepts that would explain and, in the strict sense of the word, legitimize our contingent management of knowledge.8 Gaddis’s novel, published in 1955, presents something like an archeology of this world and a discussion of the ethics needed to live in it.9 Focusing on the question of authenticity and authority it provides a great 7

On the history of the ritual and religious origin of money, see Bernhard Laum, Ueber das Wesen des Münzgeldes: Eine sach- und begriffsgeschichtliche Studie (Halle: A. Riechmann, 1929), 33–66, which relates the religious origin of money to its connection with memory. Benjamin knew and admired the work. The symbolic dimension of money as a signifier is discussed by Jean-Joseph Goux. In particular see his book Les Monnayeurs du langage (Paris: Galilée, 1984), in part translated in Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990).

8

Jean-François Lyotard, “What is Postmodernism,” in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

9

His archeological project also lays bare the foundations that Joyce provided for his novel. Hugh Kenner’s, The Counterfeiters (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1973) can serve as a commentary on the counterfeiting going on in The Recognitions. On Gaddis’s ethical vision, see Gregory Comnes, The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994).

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narrative on why there are no longer any grands récits. In this narrative recognition and the shock of recognition become epistemological concepts that show the limits of the traditional models of representation that have determined our sense of authenticity and authority. In his excellent study entitled Recognition Terence Cave has offered anagnorisis (recognition) as a powerful alternative to mimesis, the master term in Aristotle’s Poetics that has informed Western thought on the representation of reality. His reading of the recognition scene in the Odyssey where Chariclea identifies Ulysses by the scar she sees in the course of her ritual washing of his feet challenges Auerbach’s reading of the same scene. While Auerbach turns the episode into an exemplary instance of mimesis as a closed system in which every mark can be attributed to an identifiable referent, Cave emphasizes the disruption that informs the effect of recognition: Anagnorisis seems at first sight to be the paradigm of narrative satisfaction: it answers questions, restores identity and symmetry, and makes a whole hidden structure of relations intelligible. Yet the satisfaction is also somehow excessive, the reassurance too easy; the structure is visibly prone to collapse. [...] Recognition may easily turn out to be an impostor, claiming to resolve, conjoin and make whole while it busily brings to the surface all the possibilities that threaten wholeness.10

Cave traces the impostor in the tragedies and comedies of mistaken identity that form our canon of literature from Sophocles’s Oedipus to Conrad’s Razumov in Under Western Eyes. As a concept anagnorisis opens up a perspective on the problem discussed in Gaddis’s novel of identifying the authenticity of the original in contradistinction to a mere copy or a genuine simulation. As Cave remarks, “Recognition is an activity taking place in a hall of mirrors where the only person present is a simulacrum” (21).

10 Terence Cave, Recognition: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 489.

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The impostors the following chapters identify and expose are the original genius, the translator, and the plagiarist. In their activities as authors they engage with a tradition and transmission of texts that makes them approach either the oedipal drama we witness in Sophocles or the conspiracy of foreign spies that we see plotting their schemes in Conrad’s novel. Focusing on the relationship between masters and disciples, owners and borrowers, the first-born and the belated, the chapters address problems that not only inform the literary texts under discussion but also the criticism that comments on them. Anthony Grafton has investigated how the search for historical and scientific truth has led to a duplicity in Western scholarship that gives political power an academic and institutional frame,11 and Michel Schneider’s book about plagiarism and psychoanalysis demonstrates how duplicity even entered the circle of Freud and his disciples that wanted to redefine the discourse of human and social sciences from outside the big institutions.12 That duplicity and that anxiety cannot be dissociated from the indeterminacy of the concept of authorship and originality that befalls the discourse of the writers whose texts are discussed in this book. The texts chosen for discussion are taken from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, but the questions they raise may be said to explore what Lyotard calls the postmodern condition. Postmodernism begins with Romanticism. This point is forcefully made in Crimes of Writing, Susan Stewart’s excellent book on the problems of authenticity and authorship. “The postmodern ‘problems’ of rapidity and fragmentation might be seen as either an inheritance of or parallel to eighteenth11 Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). The book deals with forgeries from classical to modern times. See also Karl Corino, ed. Gefälscht! Betrug in Politik, Literatur, Wissenschaft, Kunst und Musik (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1992), and the essays on the politics of scholarship in Lise Buranen et al., eds. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999). 12 Michel Schneider, Voleurs de mots: Essai sur le plagiat, la psychanalyse et la pensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).

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century cultural developments,” she writes at the end of a list of problems that I should like to cite for the project of this book: “The invention of a mass-market subjectivity of authorial ‘stardom’ within a context of deepening anonymity; the rapid production, dissemination, and disappearance of cultural objects; and the crisis in authenticity arising from various phenomena characterized by simulacral and nostalgic thematics and form.”13 Her point about the invention of “mass-market subjectivity” indicates that the modern subject is the effect of a highly competitive market in which the different stakeholders of society define their identity based on the roles they actually play and the roles they imagine for themselves. Authority is the principal new role the 18th century created for an increasing segment of society, and authorship a powerful tool to shape identity. In a cultural space dominated by a definition of subjectivity in terms of property rights and the rapid privatization of a newly created public sphere, the promise of the 18th century to create a community of free subjects that would be free based on their claim to speak their minds, or what Kant called their Mündigkeit, soon turned into a battlefield of ideology. The concept of authority inscribed as an instance of authorship initiated a self-representation and self-affirmation that Jerome McGann has aptly called the Romantic Ideology14 in which alterity, difference, and the voice of the Other was most efficiently and most effectively absorbed into a muted subjectivity. What Stewart calls the “context of deepening anonymity” started in the second half of the 18th century. This book focuses on authorship, translation and plagiarism as joint ventures. The Romantic concept of authorship, as will be argued, survives in modern and post-modern literature, philosophy, and criticism as the mark of a failed attempt to inscribe the “author” and the “signature” as agents of a stable identity. Translation and plagiarism 13 Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 5. 14 Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983).

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will be presented as activities that play out the stakes in the Romantic fascination or obsession with originality as the guarantor of subjective identity. Both translation and plagiarism are cultural practices that, as one might assume, have existed since the beginning of writing. Exploring the relationship between the original and the copy they question their status. To say this is to make a Romantic move, for it is only in the 18th and 19th century that those concepts and practices began to play a major role. It is a role literary theory has revived since the 1960s. With the advent of structuralism and post-structuralism and their interest in linguistic structures and intertextual relationships, translation studies have become a major field of research, addressing the relationship between “source text” and “target text” from diverse theoretical or philosophical perspectives.15 Although the complex 15 See the landmark essays by Jakobson and others in in Reuben A. Brower, ed. On Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); the collections of essays on translation and deconstruction by Joseph F. Graham, ed. Difference in Translation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985) and Alfred Hirsch, ed. Übersetzung und Dekonstruktion (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997), and the book on Derrida by Kathleen Davis, Deconstruction and Translation (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2001); the essays on translation and cultural politics in Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, eds. Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) and Anselm Haverkamp, ed. Die Sprache der Anderen: Übersetzungspolitik zwischen den Kulturen (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag, 1997). On translation and philosophy, see Andrew Benjamin, Translation and the Nature of Philosophy: A New Theory of Words (London and New York: Routledge, 1989) and Sándor Albert, Übersetzung und Philosophie (Wien: Edition Praesens, 2001). For an overview of different approaches to the theory and practice of translation, see Louis G. Kelly, The True Interpreter: A History of the Translation Theory and Practice in the West (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), William Frawley, ed. Translation: Literary, Linguistic, and Philosophical Perspectives (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984), Edwin Gentzler, Contemporary Translation Theories (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), and Radegundis Stolze, Übersetzungstheorien: Eine Einführung (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1997). On the history, see Douglas Robinson, ed. Western Translation Theory: From Herodotus to Nietzsche (Manchester and Northampton, Mass.: St. Jerome Publishing, 2001); and, with a focus on Germany, Friedmar Apel, Literarische Übersetzung (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1983).

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phenomenon of plagiarism has received less attention and has long been associated with the identification of sources or the history of motives that look back on a long tradition in literary criticism, recent investigations of copyright in new historicist and post-colonial criticism as well as legal studies have turned plagiarism from a moral or ethical issue into an important economic, political, and cultural debate.16 The chapter on Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition explores the origin of what in Gaddis’s Recognitions is called “that romantic disease, originality.” Young wrote his essay in the period that Robert Folkenflik has called the great age of forgery. As he points out, “There was a steadily developing fascination with the poet as person and a shifting emphasis from the work he produced to the poem as expressive of his personality.”17 Macpherson’s and Chatterton’s faked originals demonstrate that this shift of emphasis did not simply lead to an empowerment of the author and his or her 16 See the annotated bibliography of Judy Anderson, Plagiarism, Copyright Violation, and Other Thefts of Intellectual Property (Jefferson, N.C. and London: McFarland Publishers, 1998). A comprehensive history of copyright in England, France, Germany, and the U.S., with chapters on cultural and legal aspects as well as on the internationalization of copyright and authorship, is provided by David Saunders, Authorship and Copyright (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), which supersedes the earlier book by Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968). On the new historicist perspectives on copyright, see the important collection of essays in Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, eds. The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994). See also the essays with an emphasis on legal aspects in Brad Sherman and Alain Strowel, eds. Of Authors and Origins: Essays on Copyright Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) and the book by Rosemary J. Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Property: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998). Another interesting study is Marilyn Randall, Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit, and Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 17 Robert Folkenflik, “Macpherson, Chatterton, Blake and the Great Age of Literary Forgery,” Centennial Review 18 (1974), 381–82.

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name but rather produced texts by an allegedly unknown or anonymous author in order to express personality as the establishment of an idealized author figure. That figure is the original genius. In his “Essai sur la peinture,” written in 1765, Diderot complains about the teaching method in the academy that makes students endlessly copy models, forcing on them something foreign, a maniera, that prevents them from imitating nature naturally. At the end of the essay the original genius is presented as a figure that has direct access to nature. However, the talented genius gains singularity at the cost of being solitary and perhaps misunderstood: “De là l’incertitude du succès de tout ouvrage de génie. Il est seul. On ne l’apprécie qu’en le rapportant immédiatement à la nature.”18 Diderot’s conclusion gathers the major aspects of the art and cult of genius in the era of Romanticism. Breaking away from an interpretative community based on shared models and rules, the excellence of individual performance is threatened by an uncertainty of success. Everything depends on the creation of a deregulated market for a public that will buy into this success. Diderot managed to do this with his project of an Encyclopédie that gives the educated public an alphabet to construct or reconstruct the world of science and the arts. The chapter on Young discusses the encyclopedia as a model of thinking and writing that authorizes readers to be authors and gives them an almost divine power of knowledge, a power that takes on monstrous proportions in the case of Viktor Frankenstein, who constructed his creature from the kind of scholarly work that goes into handbooks and encyclopedias. New historicist criticism has indicated the importance of Young’s essay in contemporary debates about copyright that were instrumental in creating the market where the original genius must try to secure its success. The genius, as will be argued, is a compositor, and it will be important to demonstrate that the imagery of organic organicity Young deploys to describe originality is countered by the presence of the mechanical 18 Diderot, “Essai sur la peinture,” in Oeuvres, ed. André Billy (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 1170: “Hence the uncertain success of any work of genius. It stands alone. One can only appreciate genius by relating it directly to nature.”

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press and the mint in the argument of his essay. The discussion of the Conjectures approaches the problem of copyright and the construction of authorship in relation to Kant’s discussion of the author’s and the printer’s voice in his essay on piracy. Contrary to what Herr Koppel says about the faintness of the copy of a copy in fine arts, the press issues countless identical copies and makes a book speak to hundreds of readers at the same time, which makes it difficult for the author to control his or her voice and distinguish it from the voice of the printer. The chapter that follows the discussion of Young is about Goethe’s Werther, a novel that provides a radical example of how authors make their name by creating the readers they need. Goethe invented the diversification of literature, it will be argued, and he did so by introducing Werther as a brand name. His name embodies the question of value or Wert in both the economic and aesthetic sense of the word. Wherever Werther’s letters say something crucial about his identity and his position in relation to others the word wert (worth) emerges in the text. Peggy Kamuf has shown how the institution of authorship plays with the inscription of a signature.19 Werther is an author that transforms the politics of the signature into a fetishism of the proper name. Goethe’s novel about his sick protagonist is also an extreme example of that “romantic disease” we have been talking about. In a motto prefixed to one of the many editions of the novel the reader is asked to accept the book and its protagonist as a friend. As the history of the craze that developed around the work shows, Werther is not only host to the readers but also hostile. Hillis Miller has presented the double meaning of host, which means both guest and parasite, as a concept of reading and writing that opens up a perspective on the history of the novel’s reception: “One of the most frightening versions of the parasite as invading host is the virus. In this case, the parasite is an alien who has not simply the ability to 19 Peggy Kamuf, Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988). See also Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosphy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 307–30.

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invade a domestic enclosure, consume the food of the family, and kill the host, but the strange capacity, in doing all that, to turn the host into multitudinous proliferating replications of itself.”20 That virus is Werther, who invades Lotte’s home, and it is also the book that as a virus caused the Werther-Fieber, that strange and for some indeed fatal sickness that started with a proliferation of Werther and Lotte impostors wearing dresses in the colors of their cult figures. The second half of the book explores the relationship between Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire in the light of translation and plagiarism. The first of the two chapters devoted to their relationship explores what George Steiner has called the “hermeneutic motion“21 moving from trust to betrayal and finally aggression. What Douglas Robinson has described as the somatic and dialogical relationship between the original and the translation22 indeed takes an agonistic turn with Baudelaire. His translation of “The Purloined Letter” is not only the translation of a narrative about betrayal but itself performs that hermeneutic motion by presenting Poe’s American text in the original French language, as it were, of the narrator and the detective Dupin. “La Lettre volée” is a simulacrum in the sense discussed above with regard to Gaddis’s novel. Just as The Recognitions challenge Benjamin’s essay on the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Baudelaire’s and Poe’s texts fulfill his concept of translation offered in Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator.” For one might indeed say that the necessity of translation Benjamin postulates, the longing of texts to be translated, has the same structure as the reproducibility he introduces as the hallmark of the authenticity highlighted in his essay on art. Benjamin’s notion of “pure language” will be confronted with the “pure signifier” Lacan posits in his 20 Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” in Harold Bloom et al., eds. Deconstruction and Criticism (New Yorkl: Seabury Press, 1979), 221–22. 21 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2nd ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 312–435. 22 Douglas Robinson, The Translator’s Turn (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

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Seminar on “The Purloined Letter/La lettre volée,” a text that has given rise to an intense and at times aggressively hostile debate in the contemporary critical community. The last chapter is about Poe’s literary battles with Longfellow, in which the charge of plagiarism became something of an obsession. To Poe plagiarism is an integral part and the ultimate effect of an intention in language that makes all literary texts connect with each other. That this is not just a version of the nihil novi sub sole will become clear in a reading of his poetics toward the problem of plagiarism. Poe presents plagiarism as some uncanny pre-existence texts can lead in texts by other authors, a playful and at the same serious notion that is intricately bound up with the inability of some of Poe’s fictional characters to die. The problem of death connects Poe’s obsession with plagiarism to Baudelaire’s literary theft in Les Fleurs du mal, where a passage from Poe and one from Longfellow are appropriated, translated and in this sense transplanted into his poetry. Thus Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s detective stories finds some kind of continuation. In “Le Guignon,” which consists almost entirely of secondhand poetry, Sisyphos is addressed as a figure of repetition that suffers from the “solitudes profondes” in which Baudelaire finds his proper voice. Plagiarism is a sensitive subject, and most modern studies of the phenomenon get caught up in some kind of source hunting.23 This is not surprising, and the indignation at literary thieves is also felt in texts written about the subject in antiquity24 or the Renaissance,25 at a

23 Alexander Lindey, Plagiarism and Originality (New York: Harper, 1952). See also Edmund Bergler’s collection of deviant and devious behavior of authors, which includes sections on writer’s block and also plagiarism, The Writer and Psychoanalysis (Madison: International Universities Press, 1954), 183–210. 24 See Eduard Stemplinger, Das Plagiat in der griechischen Literatur (Leipzig und Berlin: Teubner, 1912) and Ludwig Adam, Über die Unsicherheit literarischen Eigentums bei Griechen und Römern (Düsseldorf: Schaubsche Buchhandlung, 1906). With reference to historiography, see also Hermann Peter, Wahrheit und

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time when the original genius had not yet assumed its position of authority and long before authorship was protected by copyright legislation. The plagiarized texts discussed in the chapters on Poe and Baudelaire have all been found out by scholarship, and in this sense there is nothing new to detect for the detective. While this may avoid trouble, it cannot avoid the question of what plagiarism says about the relationship between texts and the status of authorship. The following readings suggest that ultimately repetition is not possible. This should not be taken as a sign of shrugging off the ethical implications involved in the issue of plagiarism. As Poe’s accusation of Longfellow shows, the charge of having stolen someone else’s property is something extremely damaging, just as it is pernicious to enslave someone to work in the service of one’s text. Plagiarism is of specific relevance in the research and teaching conducted at the university.26 While it is important to know what a student’s individual performance or degree of originality is in a text submitted for grading or a degree, Neil Hertz has shown that the interest of professors in plagiarism may tell us something much more interesting about the phantasies teachers entertain about texts. Working out the implications of the self-righteous stigmatization of plagiarism in the academy his marvelous essay on a Cornell pamphlet about “A Writer’s Responsibilities” tells the story of a recognition scene. Kunst, Geschichtschreibung und Plagiat im klassischen Altertum (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1911), 416–55. 25 See Harold Ogden White, Plagiarism and Imitation during the English Renaissance: A Study in Critical Distinctions (1935; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1973) and David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 1– 31. 26 See, for example, Thomas Mallon, “Quiet Goes the Don: An Academic Affair,” in Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989), 89–113. See also the comprehensive account on plagiarism and research by Marcel C. LaFollette, Stealing into Print: Fraud, Plagiarism, and Misconduct in Scientific Publishing (Berkeley, New York, and London: University of California Press, 1992).

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The pamphlet denounces plagiarism as an act of corruption whose “disloyalty” and “baseness” must “inevitably leave an ineradicable mark upon him [the student] as well as on the institution of which he is privileged to be a member.”27 Hertz shows that for all the “justifiable moral indignation, the righteous contempt of the honest for the dishonest” (149) the pamphlet ostensibly professes it betrays strange “fantasies of moral legibility” (148) that subscribe to a notion of hermeneutics as a tool of total control over texts and their authors. The problem such pamphlets issued by academic committees encounter is their inability to enforce the moral code they uphold, and what is scandalous about this is the infringement it constitutes on a hermeneutics of identification. It must be clear what is said, and what is said becomes clear as long as we know who is saying it. The challenge of matching meaning and text with author and source has recently been taken on by readers with a memory more powerful and faster than that of professors hunting down plagiarized sources in the stacks of university libraries. Some years ago an article in the New York Times gave a report on the “little plagiarism machine” developed by two scientists in Bethesda, which is able to scan documents to compare them with other material and “boldfaces text whenever 30 characters or more are identical.” 28 The computer program designed at the National Institute of Health may well be a major contribution to the moral health of the scientific community. “Fraud contaminates the literature,” the project manager emphasizes, adding that “We need mechanisms to find out what the facts are” (C9). In the age of the internet copying has become an easy cut and paste operation, and detection has become difficult. As a result there are a host of companies offering support to researchers and teachers, such as Plagiarism.org, CopyCatch Gold, 27 “A Writer’s Responsibility,” cited in Neil Hertz, “Two Extravagant Teachings,” in The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 146. 28 Philip J. Hilts, “Plagiarists Take Note: Machine’s on Guard,” New York Times (January 7, 1992), C1. The text cites Walter Stewart, researcher at the Institute.

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IntegriGuard, Essay Verification Engine, and many others.29 Glatt Plagiarism Services, Inc. – a Californian software company owned by “Dr. Barbara Glatt, Ph. D. University of Chicago, nationally recognized as a leading expert in plagiarism research” – is advertising a package containing a Plagiarism Teaching Program, a Plagiarism Screening Program, and a Plagiarism Self-Detection Program. While the screening program is designed for faculty members – “teachers can monitor student performance” – the self test turns what Hertz describes as the “cops-and-robbers routine” (145) into a partnership with the students: “Using the same procedure as the Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program, whereby every fifth word is deleted from the student paper and replaced by a standard size blank, students can test themselves to detect plagiarism in their assignment before turning them in.” Interestingly, the sophisticated methods Glatt uses are informed by the Romantic notion that writing is a unique expression of personality: “The procedure assumes that each person has an individual style of writing, i.e., writing styles are as unique as fingerprints.”30 The forensic analysis undertaken by the Glatt plagiarism software may take us back to William Gaddis, concluding this introduction with a brief look at his fourth and latest novel, A Frolic of His Own. Gaddis’s narrative delivers a devastating satire on the impact the liability litigations of the legal profession have on life in the U.S. In contemporary American fiction phantasies about a huge and anony29 For a comparison of some companies, see Western Oregon University Library <www. wou.edu/provost/library/kincanon/plagiarism/chart.htm>. See also the discussion on plagiarism in the classroom in Lise Buranen et al., eds. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999). See also Andrew Queen Morton, Literary Detection: How to Prove Authorship and Fraud in Literature and Documents (New York: Scribner, 1978), which examines text as well as art. 30 All citations on the Glatt Plagiarism Services are from promotional material, a hand-out describing the programs and a letter addressed to the deans of colleges and universities. See also their internet site <www.plagiarism.com>.

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mous conspiracy form a genre to which Gaddis’s lawyers, always ready to identify someone who is going to pay staggering sums in punitive damages to compensate the victims, seems like a grim consolation. It seems that the legal instrument of compensatory damages can serve as an incentive to cash in on the crisis of individual freedom and responsibility we are facing at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In a book on authorship, translation, and plagiarism the structure of the authority and accountability of individual agency as well as the question of its indeterminacy are of central importance.31 Taking the question of authorship to court A Frolic of His Own opens a perspective on the product liability of literary texts. The novel evolves around a suit brought by Oscar Crease on the television producer Constantine Kiester of Erebus Entertainment, who is accused of having plagiarized Crease’s play “Once at Antietam” for their box office hit “The Blood in the Red White and Blue.”32 The suit is about the Civil War in more than one sense, about the battle fought at Antietam as well as those fought in American courts. Incidentally, 31 On indeterminacy in Gaddis, see Gregory Comnes, The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994). In the context of phantasies about conspiracy that turn any discussion of plagiarism into a form of the sublime I have found help in the study on individual agency by Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). 32 Gaddis’s novel actually belongs to a group of modern naratives that either make forgery or plagiarism their central motif or themselves constitute a fake. See the study by Kathrin Ackermann, Fälschung und Plagiat als Motiv in der zeitgenössischen Literatur (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 1992), discussing Borges’s famous story about plagiarism, Gide’s novel about counterfeiting, Les Fauxmonnayeurs, Eco’s fake of history in Il pendolo di Foucault, Hildesheimer’s fake biography Marbot, as well as Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi and Calvino’s Se una Notte d’inverno un viaggiatore. Texts written by fictional or supposed authors – such as Chatterton’s, for example – constitute another genre close to those narratives. See Jean-François Jeandillou, Superchercherie Littéraires: La Vie et l’oeuvre des auteurs supposés (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2001), which presents Pierre Louÿs’s Bilitis and other lesser known texts of French literature in their context.

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the play is about a soldier that pays someone to take his place. When, through a series of complications, they meet on different sides in the battle at Antietam and one is killed by his double, the fatal shooting becomes some weird case of suicide. The plagiarism of this fantastic scene doubles this killing of doubles. However, it all begins, quite inconspicuously as one might first think, with a casualty in a quiet residential area of an otherwise unremarkable suburb when Oscar Crease is run over by a car. As it turns out in the hospital, it was his own car that bowled him over. And, as finally becomes clear, nobody was sitting in it at the time of the accident. This is how Oscar and his half-sister Christina explain the situation to Harry Lutz, lawyer and Oscar’s brother-in-law: – Well this car, it’s not new, I mean it wasn’t new when I bought it and about a month ago the ignition switch broke and the garage didn’t have one, they had to order a new one but it hasn’t come in yet so they showed me how to start it by touching a wire from the coil to the battery and usually I stand beside it but this time... – He was standing right in front of it Harry. When it started suddenly it slipped into Drive and I mean why were you standing in front of it Oscar, how could the... – Because there was a puddle beside it and I didn’t want my... – Look nobody is asking him that, Christina. The insurance covers the owner of the car so he just sues the owner. – But he owns it Harry, it’s his car he owns it. – The owner’s insurance would probably go after the driver. – But there wasn’t any driver that’s the point! The car ran over him and nobody was driving it. – Let them worry about that, go after the car’s maker for product liability, it couldn’t have been in Drive or it wouldn’t have started, probably the only proof they’d need, just the incident itself. Res ipsa loquitur Oscar, like the chandelier 33 falling on your head.

The situation may be bizarre or even ludicrous, but we definitely have a legal problem here. Technically speaking, Oscar Crease is both the 33 William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 19. Further references to the novel will be cited in the text.

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victim and the driver, occupying two positions at once in the accident, for which – as the agent of Ace Worldwide Fidelity explains to him in due course – there is simply no provision in a car owner’s insurance. The accident is not covered under the policy, and the diffculties are compounded by the fact that the manipulation that started the car and caused the accident is one that any insurance would associate with car thieves rather than owners. “I believe that’s called hot wiring. We constantly have reports of cars stolen that way” (27), the agent remarks. Because of the strange fact of the driver’s absence in the accident, product liability remains the only way of making someone accountable for the accident. How can one talk about a non-driving driver or an owner hot wiring his own car? Actually Gaddis’s presentation of this hilarious incident jump starts the argument on originality and literary theft that lies at the center of his novel. For one might indeed read the episode as some kind of allegory of authorship in which the driver emerges as the author, the victim as the reader, and the car as the work of art that stands between them. The smack of over-exaggerated refinement this reading takes on is quite intended here. Oscar Crease is a professor of history, and before turning to writing his play on the Civil War he authored a monograph on Rousseau that elaborates on a concept of history as figural fulfillment, countering the prevalent tendency he sees in society and the university toward the notion of what at one point is called “history as a game show” (443). There is indeed a really figural, or figurally factual, connection between the car accident and the plagiarism suit he is contemplating at the time he is run over. The wounds inflicted on him – his family come to call it “his battle scar” (53) – makes him claim loss of income because he is temporarily confined to a wheelchair and thus cannot go on a lecture tour to give a paper on the battle at Antietam and promote his play. While this may be deplored it also puts him in touch with the soldiers he has glorified in his play. He is quite touchy on this point: “I think you’ve really got to establish serious injury, lose an arm or a leg or some real disfigurement to start an action for...– Well look at me! I still can’t move this leg if I try to turn this way or sit up straight it’s like a hot 30

pitchfork right through here, I was on the critical list in there wasn’t I? in the hospital?” (52). When Oscar cannot make a convincing case for a product liability suit he throws all his forces into the literary battle going on at the front of originality and plagiarism. Committing an act of plagiarism is like hot wiring a car and then get run over by it. Once one gets used to the crazy logic of Gaddis’s narrative the allegorical accident, or the accident of allegory, starts making sense. In a text that plagiarizes an unacknowledged source the author is not in the driver’s seat. He may perhaps be lucky enough not to be detected, and thus avoid being hit, but he never has full control over the power of a text that is not fully his own. He is at once author and reader, driver and victim, owner and thief, and in dividing his function between those different tasks, being in two different structural positions at once, he cannot explain what exactly shifts his work into Drive. Once a text powered by an external engine starts rolling it is difficult to either get it under control or step on the brake, since the author went out of his work and out of his way to get it going, striking a spark of inspiration by short-circuiting his power with the source of a power stored in the battery of another work. What remains is the mystery of who shifts the text into Drive. Oscar is absolutely positive that the car was properly parked when he started it and his proof or conviction rests on the assumption that cars don’t start unless the shift stick is in P. In his speculations on technical malfunction, the sloppiness of the local mechanics, and the conspiracy of the Japanese engineers that designed the car, the question of his own responsibility for an error does not even enter his mind. It is difficult to tell whether his experience with literary works can be trusted more than his expertise about mechanical engines. We are talking about transmission here, which is something rather complicated in both areas. The reader may always respond to a text in a gear that is different from the one in which the author has written it. Eventually, one keeps coming back to the question of the phantom agency that made the car jump on Oscar, the invisible hand shifting the gear stick. Curiously, in Gaddis’s excessive book about plagiarism and property rights the author as the creator of a unique work of art is blanked out: 31

The driver’s seat is empty. In two famous essays Barthes and Foucault have declared the death of the author. As Barthes writes emphatically in 1968, “Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. [...] We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”34 Recent criticism has resuscitated the Author, and after or despite all those theoretical speculations about his or her demise Sean Burke sees the figure of the author as some kind of “ghost in the machine.”35 It is that Ghost (with a capital G) that sits in Oscar’s car.

***

Some of the texts in this study exist in earlier versions. Some parts of chapter 1 were published as “The Genius as Compositor: Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition and the Imprimatur of Romanticism” in Peter Hughes and Robert Rehder, eds. Imprints & Revisions: The Making of the Literary Text, 1759–1818 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1995), a collection of essays that gathers papers given in a series of lectures on Romanticism at the University of Zurich. A version of chapter 2 appeared in Modern Language Notes 110 (1995). Some of the argument developed in chapter 3 was published as a review essay in diacritics 22.3–4 (1992) under the title “Poedelaire: Translation and the Volatility of the Letter.”

34 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image–Music–Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 148. See also Michel Foucault, “What is an Author,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38. 35 Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 187.

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I wish to thank Hans-Jost Frey and Peter Hughes from the University of Zurich for the inspiration and support they have given me for many years. At Johns Hopkins University I have benefited from the advice and comments of Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, Rainer Nägele, and David Wellbery. In a book dealing with translation a brief remark about the use of sources in languages other than English may be pertinent. In general, passages in German and French written by the authors under discussion or their contemporaries are cited in the original language, with the translation provided in the footnotes. Where no published translation was available I have translated the texts myself. Twentieth century criticism and theory is cited in English only. Thus Kant and Hegel, for example, are cited in German, while Benjamin and Barthes speak in English. Choosing this policy I have tried to strike a compromise between a desire for authenticity and an economy of space. But this is perhaps already part of the subject discussed in the following pages.

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Chapter 2

The Genius as Compositor: Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition “Why should it seem altogether impossible, that Heaven’s latest editions of the human mind may be the most correct and fair; that the day may come when the moderns may proudly look back on the comparative darkness of former ages, […] reputing Homer and Demosthenes as the dawn of divine genius?“ Young, Conjectures on Original Composition1 “I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.” Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell2 “Mr Bloom stood by, hearing the loud throbs of cranks, watching the silent typesetters at their cases.” Joyce, Ulysses3

1

Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, in The Complete Works: Poetry and Prose (London, 1854; rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1968), II: 571. Further references to Young’s works are to volume II of this edition and will be cited in the text by page number alone.

2

David V. Erdman, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Anchor Press, 1982), 40. Further references to Blake’s work are to this edition.

3

James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 122.

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I. From Young’s Original to Joyce’s Hypertext Young’s heavenly press and Blake’s printing house in hell share the eighteenth-century interest in the press as the main agent in the transmission of reason and imagination, literature and knowledge. While Young’s essay was written before, Blake’s satire appeared after the French Revolution that accelerated the transformation of the Republic of Letters into a deregulated marketplace for a growing number of professional writers. Both develop a perspective on literature in which the question of authorship emerges as an issue of technology and where the power of genius is measured by its proximity to the printing press. The original genius, one might conjecture, is a compositor, as the person arranging the movable type for printing is called in the publishing business. No other author in English literature has been more radical in his resolution to exchange the writer’s desk with the printer’s press than the romantic poet that signed most of his works in the name of “The Author & Printer W Blake.” He composed his illuminated printings by etching text and pictures directly on the copperplates, uniting invention and execution in a creative process that performs writing as printing. The co-instantaneous nature of these processes shows in Blake’s work not only in the incidental reflections on his technique of etching but also, and primarily, in the fact that his method of composition necessitated a writing and drawing in reverse. He inscribed his texts on the copperplates backward, as in a mirror, and the pictures were etched as mirror-images.4 In printing, the negative and the 4

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In plate 5 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell the author-printer sees his own image mirrored in the plate he is inscribing: “When I came home; on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world. I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with corroding fire he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, & read by them on earth” (35). As Erdman points out in his textual notes, the Devil is something like the reflection or shadow of the scribe bending over the plate or “flat sided steep.” For a careful as well as cautious reading of Blake’s

positive are – like heaven and hell – at once closely related and radically dissimilar, and much of the argument in Blake’s visionary philosophy, notably his revision of Milton, is based on an interplay between exact correspondence and radical difference that has its counterpart in the technique of the poems’ production. Central to his mythical vision, the working of the press also has clear political implications for Blake. “The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity,” he writes in the 1793 Prospectus of his works, adding that “this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to the neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works” (692). In order to become independent of the booksellers, the poet must either have the exclusive copyright on his work or he must own the means of its reproduction in print. In the absence of the former, Blake concludes that the “Man of Genius” must be his own printer. His Milton performs what Milton lacked. It has both aesthetic and political implications that the printing press sits at the centre of Blake’s universe, marrying heaven and hell. It is this performance of a marriage or intimate union that turns the workrooms in the “Printing house in Hell” into a visionary space where Blake breaks with, and mocks, traditional modes of literary production that separate the author from the printer and set up the press as an instrument of mere reproduction and transmission of the word. The notion, as old as human history, that in the language of man spirit is related to the word like the soul to the body easily translates references to printing in his poetry, see Robert N. Essick, William Blake: Printmaker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 206–16. Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) addresses Blake’s work from a technical perspective, adding a great number of photographs illustrating his art of etching. The historical significance of Blake’s reproductive techniques is intriguingly presented by Morris Eaves, The CounterArts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992). In particular, see section IV, “Technology: The Artistic Machine,” 153–272.

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into the corresponding notion that the book is like a body in which the soul of its content is trapped. To Blake, author and printer at the same time, this view is unacceptable, and only his development of the new technique of relief etching cleared the way for the originality of his visionary poetry: “But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid” (39). Unlike the inscription of letters on a blank page, relief etching works on the blank space around the characters, making Blake’s text and illustrations emerge, as it were, from the infinity of the surface. In this sense writing literally becomes an act of cleansing rather than the addition of a mark, a process that creates the surface along with its inscriptions. If The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a manifesto on authorship, the tour through the “Printing House in Hell” also reads like a printer’s manual. The history of “the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation” tells the story of an infernal genesis of the book: In the first chamber was a Dragon-Man, clearing away the rubbish from a caves mouth; within, a number of Dragons were hollowing the cave, In the second chamber was a Viper folding round the rock & the cave, and others adorning it with gold and silver and precious stones. In the third chamber was an Eagle with wings and feathers of air, he caused the inside of the cave to be infinite, around were numbers of Eagle like men, who built palaces in the immense cliffs. In the fourth chamber were Lions of flaming fire raging around & melting the metals into living fluids. In the fifth chamber were Unnam’d forms, which cast the metals into the expanse. There they were reciev’d by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the forms of books & were arranged in libraries. (40)

Compared to the sublimity of Blake’s mythical figures the bookbinders and librarians shown in the last chamber appear as mere archivists of poetic vision. One of them could be Young.

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While Blake ridicules the bookish spirit of man, Young still entertains the phantasy of the library in which a host of French and British scholars staged their battle of the books in the decades around 1700. His Conjectures on Original Composition marks the end of the controversy between the ancients and the moderns, and as the passage from the essay cited as epigraph suggests, it is the printing press that breaks the supremacy of the ancients in matters of literature. The press establishes a power structure unknown to Homer and Demosthenes composing at “the dawn of divine genius.” They may have been inspired but they did not command the inspiration that has been flowing from the press since Gutenberg printed his first bible. What Young calls “Heaven’s latest editions of the human mind” is the figure of the original genius the Doctor of Divinity appoints as the agent of modernity, and there is little doubt that the genius is itself running the heavenly press. In Orality and Literacy Walter J. Ong describes how the transition from an oral to a scribal culture and the age of print affects the creative process and the structure of memory as the repository of images. “For the extreme Romantic, the perfect poet should ideally be like God Himself, creating ex nihilo: the better he or she was, the less predictable was anything and everything in the poem. Only beginners or permanently poor poets used prefabricated stuff.”5 Judged from this perspective even Homer could be counted among the beginners: “The meaning of the Greek term ‘rhapsodize’, rhapsoidein, ‘to stitch song together’ [...], became ominous. Homer stitched together prefabricated parts. Instead of a creator, you had an assemblyline worker.” Milman Parry’s discovery in the 1930s of Homer’s formulaic method of composition seemed to confirm what historical criticism in the eighteenth century had suspected. Although those scholars did not engage in the structural linguistics practiced by Parry, they on different grounds arrived at a similar conclusion: The father 5

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), 22. Subsequent references will be cited in the text. Ong’s concept of an oral mnemonics continues the work of Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

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figure of Western literature was not an original genius. “Let it not be suspected, that I would weakly insinuate any thing in favour of the moderns,” Young writes in a passage that sounds noble but that also, in his usual manner, lacks sincerity: “No, I am lamenting their great inferiority. But I think that it is no necessary inferiority; that it is not from Divine destination, but from some cause far beneath the moon” (554). In a footnote he refers to the Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer by Thomas Blackwell, who claims on the basis of ancient sources that Homer actually borrowed some of his verse from the daughter of the old and blind prophet Tiresias: “However imaginary this Insinuation may appear, it would be rash to condemn it as entirely groundless,“6 as Blackwell summarizes his enquiry. It indeed is not. The scholarly work of Blackwell as well as the comments of classical authors labored to explain the change in literary taste and judgment that occured in the scribal culture after Homer. Even if some of Homer’s sources mentioned by Blackwell’s sources are spurious, the oracles of Tiresias’s daughter Manto are important because their transmission is part of the oral culture that already in classical times became outmoded and was replaced by a system of rhetoric that, as Ong emphasizes, was already part of writing and its new mode of technologizing the word: “The new way to store knowledge was not in mnemonic formulas but in the written text. This freed the mind for more original, more abstract thought” (24). Writing demands individual performance and produces a sense for originality. Typography marks further decisive step in the technologizing of the word. As McLuhan points out in The Gutenberg Galaxy it fostered “a consumer-oriented culture that is concerned about authors and labels of authenticity. Manuscript culture was producer-oriented, almost a do-it-yourself culture, and naturally looked to the relevance and usability of items rather than their sources.”7 While his remark is 6

Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London: 1735), 177.

7

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 131. The distinction between pro-

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certainly correct with regard to the use of citation in medieval writing and the rise of a modern reading public that could buy books as a commodity and enjoy them in privacy rather than actively participating in literature as a communal event, it underrates the exclusive or even prohibitive status of the manuscript culture in which a small community of scribes were in control of the word and the interpretation of its truth. McLuhan also leaves the original genius as some kind of do-it-yourself man unaccounted for. The figure of genius was in fact invented in the eighteenth century to distinguish the author from the mass market for which he or she was writing. Interestingly, its exclusivity works in a way similar to that of the medieval scribes. Just as the monk is inspired to disseminate the holy word the genius is singled out by nature to present its original work, and in order to achieve their goals both strive to gain a privileged access to the technological means of textual production. What is new in the case of the modern genius is the institution of copyright needed to construct as well as protect the authority of individual authorship in a time of standardized production and duplication of works. Blake’s method of etching his work into a solid copperplate is unique in its direct transfer of handwriting into the new medium of print, resisting copying much better than texts set in type that can be easily reprinted by pirates. But Blake’s work, too, is inspired by the new spirit of the age: To the modern author the press is the organon of originality. McLuhan’s catchphrase that the medium is the message is also true for typography and the role of genius.: “The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as ‘content’.”8 Young’s essay demonstrates that the content that makes print such a powerful medium is the genius and its originality. Young would not have expected that one day Joyce would meet his challenge to the “comparative darkness of former ages” by ducer-oriented and consumer-oriented culture is repeated verbatim, and put in context, by Ong in Orality and Literacy, 122–23. 8

McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 18.

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presenting Homer among the printers. The wind of change blows strongly in the Aeolus episode where Joyce’s latter day Ulysses is momentarily arrested on his voyage through Dublin by a printer waiting for the typesetters to get him some galleyproofs to check. “Mr Bloom stood by, hearing the loud throbs of cranks, watching the silent typesetters at their cases.” While the compositors are silent, the rotating press speaks: Sllt. The nethermost deck of the machine jogged forwards its flyboard with sllt the first batch of quirefold papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. (123)

What we hear is the voice of modernity as a machine working hard to present the cacophony of voices as a unified text framed and kept in check by the page on which it is printed. “Ulysses is not organized in memory and unfolded in time,” Hugh Kenner writes, “but both organized and unfolded in what we may call technological space: on printed pages for which it was designed from the beginning.”9 If the novel can be said to dramatize the transition from Homer’s oral technique of narrative to typography in which temporal sequence is locked into space, it also renders in print the formulaic and repetitive style that characterizes orality. In Joyce’s mosaic technique of composition Ong’s characterization of Homer as an assembly-line worker literally comes true. Not only because the novel closely retraces the steps of Ulysses like a detective taking casts of footprints a fugitive left in the wet soil, but also by reflecting upon the printing technology that makes up the record of the case. The assembly-line workers are the compositors silently arranging the type in the caseroom visited by Bloom.

9

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Hugh Kenner, Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 35. This is precisely what Ong keeps emphasizing in his books: “Writing had reconstituted the originally oral, spoken word in visual space. Print embedded the word in space more definitively” (Orality and Literacy, 123).

A reading of Ulysses in terms of the Conjectures must despair at the absence of what Young would call originality, and yet Joyce’s novel is a unique model for the text of modernity in that it parodies imitation precisely by imitating its model. The Romantic ideology of authenticity allows for a sense of irony that has made subject matter, plot, or imagery less important for the constitution of originality than the personal or individual style of expression. In Hegel’s aesthetics, originality as a “Begeisterung des Genius,” as the inspiration and ecstasy of genius allows the subject to present itself, the self, in the object it represents in works of art. In his view originality gives truth to the rules style dictates.10 Hegel feels edgy about the concept of irony introduced by the Jena Romantics because it resists his sense of historical fulfillment in aesthetics and presents the self as the paradigm of an infinite and thus also inconclusive cultural discourse. While the autonomy and authority of the self is seriously questioned in the wake of Romanticism, Joyce returns to style as the medium reflecting on the limits of writing. The idiosyncrasy of style is what remains of originality. “Stand up to hard ware and step into style,“11 as Joyce puts it obscenely in Finnegans Wake. In an almost absurd way Joyce’s last novel materializes Hegel’s dream of an historical fulfillment in aesthetics. It fulfills the promise of typography by presenting a text in which the compositors that in Ulysses are shown to be silently working in the caseroom seem to have gone berserk, mixing up the movable type as if they had accidentally dropped the 10 See Hegel, “Manier, Stil und Originalität,” in Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, eds. Werke (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), XIII: 376–85; citation on p. 385. Hegel’s discussion transforms Goethe’s 1789 triad of imitation, mannerism, and style. See “Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil,” in Goethe’s Werke (München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1973), XII: 30–34. On style as a paradigm of cultural and philosophical discourse, see Berel Lang, ed. The Concept of Style (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987) and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. Stil: Geschichten und Funktionen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Diskurselements (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986). 11 Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 614.

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galley and then hastily picked up the scattered letters to put them back into place at random. To typeset Joyce’s manuscript must be a compositor’s nightmare. No stylus, no pen or pencil could transpose the letters as carriers of meaning the way movable type can. Finnegans Wake is indeed a book composed directly at the compositor’s workplace. Literature takes place at the edge of history. This too is part of the story the composition of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake tells. While some may stylize the novels as supreme examples of writing in the age of print, others have claimed that they already announce writing in the electronic age to come. They seem like two prototypes of a “hard ware” operated by the language of a system software that allows a recombination of letters and word processing swifter than anything the printing press could achieve with its movable type. Only a computer, it seems, can manage the data of all the babble cascading from Joyce’s Babel. Discussing the control mechanisms of meaning played out and put to the test in Finnegans Wake Derrida characterizes the narrator of the novel as a demiurg, “setting up a hypermnesiac machine, there in advance, decades in advance, to compute you, control you, forbid you the slightest inaugural syllable because you can say nothing that is not programmed on this 1000th generation computer [...] besides which the current technology of our computers and our micro-computerified archives and our translating machines remains a bricolage of a prehistoric child’s toys.”12 If the performance of Finnegans Wake and 12 Jacques Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” in Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer, eds. Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 147. On Derrida and Finnegans Wake, see Alan Roughley, Reading Derrida Reading Joyce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 44–57. In Ong’s scenario of a literary kindergarden the students imitating Homer and other classical models in the schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth century resemble boys that “assemble a structure from an old Erector set or Mechano set or from a set of Tinker Toys” (22). In the case of Joyce, the Mechano set is replaced by something like Super Mario in the land of Nintendo, but in both scenarios, that of Ong as well as that of Derrida, the phantasmatic image of children imitating “great books” is placed in a scene of sublime fatherhood.

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Ulysses takes place at the forefront of information technology and at the intersection of different media of composition and communication, we should also note that its writing reconstructs and rediscovers the very orality that according to critics like Ong have gradually gone lost in the rise of a scribal culture and through the subsequent invention of print. Where indeed would one find an oral or aural event more powerful than the concluding monologue of Molly Bloom in Ulysses or that by ALP in Finnegans Wake? As Joyce writes about the latter novel in a letter to his daughter: “Lord knows what my prose means. In a word, it is pleasing to the ear.”13 Finnegans Wake plays in the different registers of writing and speech, sound and sight, combining them, unlocking the word locked into the space of the printed text while at the same time linking sounds to letters that spell out a meaning foreign to what they say. The mnemonic formulas of Homeric narrative are re–membered in print according to a governing principle that Finnegans Wake at one point calls “aural eyeness” (623). Derrida speaks of Joyce’s “phonemanon,” the clash of phonemes and phenomena in a text that presents language as an uncontrollable effect of translation from the medium of the voice into the medium of the letter and back again.14 Joyce’s hyperoriginality begets hypertext. The software engineers of the “micro-computerified archives” Derrida derides in his essay have celebrated Ulysses and Finnegans Wake along with Tristram Shandy and the fiction of Borges as prime examples of what in technological lingo is called “interactive fiction.” Although one would be hard pressed to define literature as anything other than interactive, it is interesting to see how the momentous change in media technology deals with the challenge Joyce’s work brings to literature. As Jay Bolter claims, “It is true that Joyce employs most every technique 13 Stuart Gilbert, ed. The Letters of James Joyce (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), I: 341. 14 Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” 153. Important on this aspect of Joyce’s narrative is Fritz Senn, Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

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available in the repertory of print: like Sterne before him, he experiments with the layout of the text, or recapitulates the history of those techniques [...]. But Joyce’s narrative strategy is too complex and too dynamic for the medium of print.”15 The point of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is, of course, that they do take place in the printed medium, and the strategy of Joyce’s narratives is precisely to transform the medium of print by breaking – and thus at the same time also positing – its limits. This does not disqualify Bolter’s claim that they are instances of what is now called hypertext, a text in which the sequential, temporal as well as hierarchical order is replaced by a system of layers through which a reader can navigate in directions that are not predetermined as they are in a book. “How can one find all the references to Troy or Tolstoy or Hermes Trismegistus?” (136) he asks with reference to Ulysses. Hermeneutics becomes the task of linking information: “Each sentence or even each word might be made a topical unit in the electronic writing space. These units would first be connected in temporal order, as they appear in print; further links could then be drawn to indicate allusions and parallels. The result would be a massive network that the scholar [...] could traverse in a variety of ways” (137). In Finnegans Wake the result would be an odd decomposition of the very process by which Joyce makes two words collide in the same audio-visual space opened up in print, an effect of hypertext that hypertext effectually destroys. Used as a sophisticated and fast encyclopedia, hypertext is only an update on traditional modes of reading and existing technologies of information management, and the main problem it constitutes is the transformation of texts into pools or repositories of information. “The idea of the great, inescapable book belongs to the age of print that is now passing” (240), as Bolter concludes his book that is also available on a “computer diskette that can be obtained by sending in the order form enclosed in the book.” The doubling of his text into hypertext restores, to some extent perhaps, the Joycean character of his undertaking. 15 Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), 137.

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“Readers who obtain the diskette wil see that the hypertext cheerfully violates the constraints imposed by the medium of print. [...] It does not confront the reader with a single persona; instead, it speaks in several, sometimes contradictory voices.” The multiple personality of authorship also includes an invitation to the reader to add his or her own comments on the screen that displays the virtual book. Elsewhere in his text Bolter equates hypertext with medieval manuscripts, “when the reader’s own notes and glosses had the same status as the text itself” (148–49). Although it is accurate that printed books put a greater distance between author and reader, Bolter’s scenario is tinged with the odd nostalgia American computer culture has shown for the monastic and feudal society of the middle ages. “Any reader could decide to cross over and become an author: one simply sat down and wrote a treatise or put one’s notes in a form for others to read. Once the treatise was written, there was no difference between it and the works of other ‘published’ writers, except that more famous works existed in more copies” (149). It is almost cute how the monks in Bolter’s version of a medieval scriptorium are transmogrified into students sitting down in a computer lab to write up their lecture notes for a seminar paper they have to hand in. As the research of Paul Zumthor has demonstrated, writing in the middle ages was the tactile performance of a vocalité that gave writing and copying an altogether different status, power, and immediacy, requiring also a tight control over who was allowed to write what.16 Bolton’s electronic scriptorium is reconstructed from the very perspective of Romantic authorship it seeks to circumvent, and his argument is a disturbing example of ongoing attempts to historicize concepts of authorship out of context. In his presentation hypertext reads like the electronic version of Joyce’s book of kills or Book of Kells in Finnegans Wake, buth without the parodic element. His remark about the number of copies as a measure of fame also shows that hypertext does not change the basic concept of authorship inherited from book culture, but rather the politics of their distribution. In the meantime the databases are still 16 See Paul Zumthor, La Lettre et la voix (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987).

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managed by the Men occupying the sixth chamber in Blake’s Printing house in Hell that take the forms and arrange them in electronic libraries, even if it is a multi-media pop-up book. Cultural changes introduce new paradigms that may initiate a shift of power within a social system, but they do not alter the law of power itself that controls those changes. In his book on hypertextuality George Landow summarizes the change the concepts of authorship and originality undergo in the electronic media: One relevant characteristic quality of networked hypertext systems is that they produce a sense of authorship, authorial property, and creativity that differs markedly from those associated with book technology. Hypertext changes our sense of authorship and creativity (or originality) by moving away from the constrictions of page-bound technology. In so doing, it promises to have an effect on cultural and intellectual disciplines as important as those produced by earlier shifts in the technology of cultural memory that followed the invention of writing and print.17

The huge storage capacity on computer systems does not only affect the quantity but indeed also the quality of cultural memory. The change of paradigms the new electronic media promise concern the location of data and the concept of property that itself also belongs to a sense of place. The decentralization of data downloaded from a network that users can plug into from anywhere in the world; the hyperlinks that combine widely dispersed texts, pictures, and sounds on internet; the telematic system with realtime access to documents on which several users can work simultaneously from different locations; the virtual universities and electronic colleges with interactive teaching; photocomposition and online publishing – all these features and terms signal that the the author in a classical sense as well as the institutions where he has traditionally asserted his authority seem seriously challenged some thirty years after the announcement of his 17 George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopins University Press, 1992), 94.

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death by Barthes and Foucault. The figures of the author and reader have both become users in a network. As Landow emphasizes, reading and writing, producing a work and sharing a work are almost indistinguishable. However, Landow’s vision of an active reader participating in the text may still be said to reiterate or reconstruct the Romantic notion of authorship. “Landow gives us the hypertext reader as a supermarket shopper,” Christopher J. Keep argues, “‘freely’ moving about a world of endless lexical commodities, picking and chossing those which best suit the the color scheme of his or her reserach interests.”18 In Landow’s understanding of hypertext as radical de–centering the figure of the reader seems to take the traditional place of the author. “Organic unity and internal coherence may have been routed from the text by the advents of the poststructuralist literary theory, but they reappear in the undisturbed totality of the person sitting before the computer screen” (175). This person, Keep suggests, is not unlike Victor Frankenstein. Yet, collaborative writing, the idea of authorship as teamwork, remain an important area of investigation for educators studying the effects of hypertext and cyberspace textuality. Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede call for a “pedagogy of collaboration, one that would view writing as always shared and social; writers as constantly building and negotiating meaning with and among others,” which in their opinon would “advance efforts on a number of fronts to reconceive intellectual property and selfhood [...] commensurate with the idea of a postmodern democracy.”19 Although they discuss collaboration from the 18 Christopher J. Keep, “The Disturbing Liveliness of Machines: Rethinking the Body in Hypertext Theory and Fiction,” in Marie-Laure Ryan, ed. Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 175. 19 Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa Ede, “Collaborative Authorship and the Teaching of Writing,” in Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, eds. The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 438. For details of their research and the history of collaboration in writing, see their book Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois

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perspective of the classroom rather than intranet or internet, their approach is important in that it maps out a carnivalistic mode of cultural production in a Bakhtinian sense that applies very well to the politics and potential development of electronic media. Their militant critique of “the conception of a solitary, sovereign – and usually male – writer with individually ‘owned’ property rights” (436) is an accurate description of the ideology that has dominated not only literature but the whole field of intellectual activities. In the wake of the current interest in historical criticism, aesthetic ideology and the despotic authority of the Romantic author are, once again, under attack. In her introductory essay to the volume of papers presented at a conference on the construction of authorship, Martha Woodmansee compares collaborative projects from medieval compilations to those presented by Lunsford and Ede with the “kind of solitary origination Edward Young sought to promote.”20 Turning from Romanticism to the new electronic media she states that “the computer is dissolving the boundaries essential to the survival of our modern fiction of the author as the sole creator of unique, original works” (25). But precisely with regard to computer software Peter Jaszi, the co-editor of the volume, points out that, “lawyers and judges have invoked the vision of the Romantic ‘author–genius’ in rationalizing the extension of copyright protection to computer software. The conceptual challenge to copyright posed by computer technology has been submerged in an insistence that programs are no less inspired than traditional literary works, and that the imaginative processes of the programmer are analogous to those of the literary ‘author’.”21 University Press, 1990). As their research reveals, collaborative work has become common practice in the universities and in business, which the grading systems as well as corporate compensation schemes based on individual performance do not sufficiently take into account. 20 Martha Woodmansee, “On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity,” in The Construction of Authorship, 17. 21 Peter Jaszi, “On the Author Effect: Contemporary Copyright and Collective Creativity,” in The Construction of Authorship, 33–34.

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Copyright is not primarily designed to propagate the ideology of the author–genius but rather to regulate the control over the distribution of a work and thus the profit one makes from it. Woodmansee and Jaszi are well aware of this, and they have in fact done much to show that the booksellers and distributors have helped in the construction of the genius in order to secure the bigger share of the profit. But the reader is invited to forget that the Romantics were far away from an author’s copyright and that the vision of a sovereign author never materialized for them. In England authors had to wait until the Act of 1911 before their intellectual property was fully recognized and protected like any other personal property. As far as international copyright is concerned, publishers in the United States could freely print or reprint English authors up to the Chase Act of 1891, and only in 1952 the U.S. recognized all rights of foreign authors by joining the ratification of the Universal Copyright Convention. The Romanticism of authorship was a long time in coming, and it was the crude question of income they were fighting for throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. One of them was Joyce. Whatever his hypertexts may say about the end of Romantic authorship and the great book, he wanted to cash in on the little profit his books made.22 The myth that makes Jaszi put quotation marks around the word “author” whenever he uses it is not the product of Romantic but modern academic criticism, as Jack Stillinger’s book on multiple authorship and the figure of genius shows.23 Far from glorifying sovereign authorship, Romantic theory and practice have experimented with all forms of collaboration, have demonstrated in a most acute sense the instability of texts and the impossibility of appropri22 See his paper delivered to the P.E.N. Congress in James Joyce, Critical Writings, ed. E. Ellsworth Mason and R. Ellman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 274–75. On international copyright, see N. N. Feltes, “International Copyright: Structuring ‘the Condition of Modernity’ in British Publishing,” in The Construction of Authorship, 271–80. 23 Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

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ating origins, and have invented the reader celebrated in hypertext. It is not surprising that the rise of electronic media has provoked a cultural war similar to the battle of the books fought out between the ancients and moderns that informs Young’s promotion of the original genius. Internet will change the canon and genres of cultural production, but there is little evidence that it will do away with the figure of the author. The World Wide Web will radically deregulate information, communication, and even art in order to create a market in which networked individuals and corporations will not only work on collaborative projects but also interact in fierce competition. A community of billions of users will be dependent on a few global providers of software to whom the eighteenth-century booksellers look small in comparison. If the postmodern technologies of the word can be said to fulfill the program of Romanticism, the genius is not a passive bystander. In fact a majority of the literature on electronic media restores this uncanny figure to a seat in front of the computer screen, as Keep rightly remarks. Just as the vision of the original genius as a compositor comes true in the age of desktop publishing, every user can become a local genius on the Local Area Network into which he or she is plugged. As Baudrillard argues, L’Homme Télématique lives in a space in which nothing is generated but in which everything can be altered. It is the space of virtuality in wich simulation takes the place of the simulacrum, the face and its confrontation with otherness is replaced by the interface replicating sameness. As the title indicates, his essay is informed by both Levinas and the Romantic phantasy of the sublime: Le xerox et l’infini. “If men dream of original and genial machines, it is because they despair of their own originality or because they prefer to give up and enjoy it through machines put between them.”24 Connected to the Minitel or the World Wide Web the genius becomes a machine. As we shall see in the next section, modern concepts of creative genius have always shown a close affinity to the

24 Jean Baudrillard, La Transparence et le mal (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1990), 58.

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mechanics of a machinery,25 and Baudrillard’s sublime horror is no less indebted to a Romantic idea of genius than the exuberant portrait of the genius in the age of electronic media given, for example, by Eugene Provenzo: “What is crucial, [...] is the realization that the telematic process – in which individuals are given access to ‘intelligent’ terminals in the form of microcomputers that are linked to sophisticated communication systems – suddenly makes it possible for them to become much more autonomous from the traditional hierarchical structure. As a result, creativity can be much more individualized and independent.”26 The eighteenth-century figure of the genius creates its homepage on the internet. The suspicion about the figure of the genius is certainly justified. As David Bromwich states in his article on the genius, Young’s essay is “the first modern association of genius with individual power, or with what we have come to call originality.”27 The equation of originality with individual power and its opposition to what one might call communal, collaborative, or democratic processes cannot be denied. The career of the genius finds its fulfillment in the Romantic concept of the person as individual subject, of personality as subjectivity, and if an essay as harmless as Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition stands at the beginning of this fulfillment, its perversion came with the cult of the genius in nationalist movements. Edgar Zilsel’s work on the emergence of a religious cult of personality shows that the enthusiasm for the genius in the German storm and stress movement inspired by Young and others was resolutely anti25 On the relationship between the original genius and the development of science and technology in the age of Enlightenment, see Günter Peters, Der zerrissene Engel: Genieästhetik und literarische Selbstdarstellung im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1982), 70–78. 26 Eugene E. Provenzo, Jr., Beyond the Gutenberg Galaxy: Microcomputers and the Emergence of Post-Typographic Culture (New York and London: Teachers College Press at Columbia University, 1986), 33. 27 David Bromwich, “Reflections on the Word Genius,” New Literary History 17.1 (1985): 143.

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authoritarian and politically rebellious before it was transformed into a worship of political leaders and a powerful weapon of racism. Published in 1918 Die Geniereligion anticipates the fascist notions of a genial race culminating in the figure of the Führer as genius in the Third Reich.28 The origin of a collective national genius can be found in Romanticism. This is a fragment from Novalis: Journale sind eigentlich schon gemeinschaftliche Bücher. Das Schreiben in Gesellschaft ist ein interessantes Symptom – das noch eine grosse Ausbildung der Schriftstellerey ahnden lässt. Man wird vielleicht einmal in Masse schreiben, denken, und handeln – Ganze Gemeinden, selbst Nationen werden Ein Werck unternehmen.29

The collections of fragments published in the Athenäum by Schlegel and Novalis mark the origin, in German Romanticism, of originality as an effect of multiple authorship, and one might be tempted to read this reference to Romantic journals as a prophetic statement about collaborative writing in the internet. But while the Romantic fragments gather a multitude of micro-systems to fuse them into One Work, something like hypertext constitutes One Network from which a multitude of texts are launched. The difference is decisive, but both make one feel uncomfortable. Hans Blumenberg cites Novalis’s fragment in the context of the Romantic idea of the absolute book, 28 Edgar Zilsel, Die Geniereligion: Ein kritischer Versuch über das moderne Persönlichkeitsideal, mit einer historischen Begründung (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990). See also his book Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffs (Tübingen: Mohr, 1926). On the figure of the genius in German national socialism, see Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosphie und Politik 1750–1945 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), II: 194–237. 29 Novalis, “Über Goethe,” in Schriften, ed. Richard Samuel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), II: 645, fragment no. 465: “Journals are in fact already communal books. Collaborative writing is an interesting symptom – indicating a great potential of writing. One day one might perhaps write, think, and act in one mass. Whole communities, even nations will be engaged in the enterprise of One Work.”

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arguing that it not only stands in a marked contrast to the unique nature and work of the solitary genius but also in opposition to the very idea of a public: “The intended paradox of this concept is that such a total subject can no longer count on the existence of a public.”30 The subsequent fragment in Novalis’s notebook makes this abundantly clear: “Jede Person, die aus Personen besteht, ist eine Person in der 2ten Potenz – oder ein Genius.”31 If the genius is not one but two persons, this does not vouchsafe a plurality of authorship or what Maurice Blanchot calls la parole plurielle, the proper language of the fragment.32 The two persons united in the genius seem to be the author and the reader turning in upon themselves. Blumenberg’s study on the readability of the world traces the history of the metaphor presenting nature as a book and the revisions this book has undergone with the changing technologies of reading and interpreting it. As an imitation of nature, within the tradition of mimesis, art has always entertained a privileged relationship to this book, and Aristotle calls the power of man as an artist techne. In an early essay Blumenberg points out that techne meant more than what we now call technology, the capacity to create a work as both an artist and artisan, in an artificial as well as artistic sense. To Aristotle “nature and art have the same structure,” as Blumenberg points out, and arts as well as crafts imitate or perfect what he calls the “autotechnical” nature of nature. That is to say, art can only do what is already prescribed in nature itself.33 The Renaissance breaks out of this mould to assert the authenticity of the second nature it creates; the eighteenth century awards this authenticity a place in the system of aesthetics, introducing the figure of the original genius as the progeny 30 Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981), 301. Novalis is cited on the same page. 31 Novalis, Schriften, II: 645, no. 466: “Each person that consists of persons is a person in the second degree – that is to say, a genius.” 32 Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 1–118. 33 Hans Blumenberg, “‘Nachahmung der Natur’: Zur Vorgeschichte der Idee des schöpferischen Menschen,” Studium Generale 10.5 (1957): 266.

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of nature. It is telling that the rise of the genius coincides with the growing interest in the mechanical arts. With the revaluation of techne in art comes a new language for technology. To illustrate what he calls the autotechnical structure of nature Blumenberg cites Aristotle’s remark that an architect building a house only does what nature would do if it “grew” houses. Romanticism employs organic growth as the master metaphor to describe the work of genius and distinguish it from mechanical technology. Twentieth-century literary theory has given Young credit for his original use of this metaphor in English criticism. His essay would possibly no longer be read if it was not for his reference to the “vegetable nature” (552) of genius. But Young’s interest in its organicism cannot be dissociated from his interest in the technology of printing. The historical significance of his essay lies in the fact that it concludes the controversy between the ancients and the moderns, the battle of the books in which the printing press is celebrated as one of the great inventions of modernity. This controversy gave technology its own language, and it is printed in its most comprehensive form in the encyclopedia. While the bible is the first book Gutenberg’s printing press issued, the encyclopedia is what Young calls “Heaven’s latest editions of the human mind.” Young’s metaphor refers to the original genius, and we shall have to see in what respect the encyclopedia is a work of genius. In the year Young published his Conjectures on Original Composition Diderot was printing his Encyclopédie. In his article “Encyclopédie” Diderot writes at great length about language and particularly about orthography. Providing a language for the management of knowledge, the encyclopedia focuses both on its history and on the place it is given in the system, on its orthography so to speak. “On prononce une langue, on en écrit une autre,” as he comments on the difference between letter and voice, adding that one gets so accustomed to this difference that one would not recognize words that would be written phonetically by someone bad at spelling, “on ne reconnaîtrait plus la langue parlée sous cette nouvelle combinaison de

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caractères.”34 The language would be similar to that of Finnegans Wake. It is one of the main tasks of an encyclopedia to bring language as close as possible to the phenomena it describes and defines, in some kind of phonetic writing as it were, but the encyclopedia also demonstrates that knowledge is discourse and that concepts and things are separated from nature by the letters and signifiers that describe them. Thus the encyclopedia is exposed to, and brings about, a defamiliarization. This also shows in its alphabetic ordering of knowledge. Taking apart what belongs together, a concept, thing, or part of a system appears in a “nouvelle combinaison de caractères” that may appear bewildering to someone who has learnt about these things in their natural or in a different context. Moreover the alphabet and its power of forming new combinations that lead to surprising or perhaps even original effects operates in the encyclopedia similar to the movable type arranged by the compositor at the press. At the press, the medium of the encyclopedia becomes the message. The original genius is close enough to pick it up.

II. Genius, Encyclopedia, Automata With Young’s essay, we have argued, the genius enters the domain of the typesetter or compositor. A look into the Encyclopædia Britannica published in 1771 finds support for the equivocation the title of the Conjectures on Original Composition invites: COMPOSITION, in literature, the art of forming and arranging sentiments, and cloathing them with language suitable to the nature of the subject or discourse. [...] COMPOSITION, in printing, commonly termed composing, the arranging of several types, or letters, in the composing-stick, in order to form a line; and of several 34 Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” in vol. VII of Œuvres complètes, eds. Herbert Dieckmann, Jacques Proust, and Jean Varloot (Paris: Hermann, 1976), 199.

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lines ranged in order in the galley, to make a page; and of several pages, to make 35 a form. SEE PRINTING.

In whatever area composition composes it seems it can invariably be subsumed under the general notion of assembling different parts into some kind of unified whole. The entry introducing the different kinds of composition reads as follows: “COMPOSITION, in a general sense, the uniting or putting together several things, so as to form one whole, called a compound” (II: 249). The question of how this composition is compounded is of particular importance to the enterprise of an encyclopedia since it presents knowledge precisely by “uniting or putting together several things” in alphabetical order. So does the printing press. The letters of the alphabet forms the basis of both the compositor’s and the encyclopedist’s work. According to the editors of the Encyclopædia Britannica their project is radically different from earlier dictionaries such as Chamber’s Cyclopedia or Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s much more voluminous French Encyclopédie: “Instead of dismembering the Sciences, by attempting to treat them intelligibly under a multitude of technical terms, they [the compilers] have digested the principles of every science in the form of systems or distinct treatises, and explained the terms as they occur in the order of the alphabet, with references to the sciences to which they belong” (I: v). Denouncing the dismemberment an alphabetical arrangement of knowledge performs, the editors use an organic metaphor to promote the advantage of what they call systems: “SYSTEM, in general, denotes an assemblage or chain of principles and conclusions, or the whole of any doctrine, the several parts whereof are bound together and follow or depend on each other” (III: 882). With regard to the systematic structure of their dictionary the Society of Gentlemen in Scotland find support in Bacon’s table on the relationship among the arts and sciences published in 1587 under the 35 Encyclopædia Britannica; or, a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Compiled upon a New Plan by a Society of Gentlemen in Scotland (Edinburgh: Bell and MacFarquhar, 1771), II: 250, 261.

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title of Encyclopedia, a term also used by Chambers for his dictionary in 1728. But their definition of system raises the question of how their own alphabetical enterprise can spell out the difference between mere “assemblage” and a “chain of principles” that would effectively be “bound together.” The alphabetical organization of knowledge was already used in the medieval Cornucupiae to collect the scientific observations and findings of classical authors, and the thesauruses, indexes, and manuals of the Renaissance steered the advancement of learning in a direction that caused some anxiety on the part of Pierre Bayle, author of the Dictionnaire historique et critique published in 1696, that the multiplicity of scientific knowledge would lead to a fragmentation of the idea of a scientia universalis. The book of nature became a collection of detached pages bound in a new order by systematic philosophy. As McLuhan argues this also increased its use value, and he links this value to the invention of print. With regard to Bacon’s encyclopedic mind he writes: “The medieval Book of Nature was for contemplatio like the Bible. The Renaissance Book of Nature was for applicatio and use like movable type.”36 In 1818, Coleridge set out on the project of a Romantic encyclopedia designed to avoid the fragmentation Bayle was so anxious about. In his Treatise on Method, which should have served as an introduction to Fenner’s and Curtis’s Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, he writes: “As the philosophical arrangement is, [...] [it] will give that unity of design and of elucidation, the want of which we have most deeply felt in other works of a similar kind, where the desired information is divided into innumerable fragments scattered over many volumes, like a mirror broken on the ground, presenting, instead of one, a thousand images, but none entire.”37 To put up a mirror that 36 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 185. On the history of the encyclopedia, see François Moureau, Le Roman vrai de l’Encyclopédie (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). On Bacon, see Brian Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). 37 Samuel Taylor Colerdige, “Treatise on Method,” in Shorter Works and Fragments, vol. 11 of the Collected Works, eds. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), I: 683–84.

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would reflect nature undivided, Coleridge puts all his trust into the synthetic power of his idealist philosophy: “Throughout the ENCYCLOPAEDIA METROPOLITANA, the philosophical arrangement predominates and regulates; the alphabetical arrangement and the references [...] are auxiliary” (I: 684). This is of course precisely the original structure and idea of the Encyclopædia Britannica, even though the massive increase from three to twenty volumes in the fifth edition of 1817 loosened the tightly knit composition of the work published in 1771. As with most of his grand projects, Coleridge’s Romantic encyclopedia never materialized. What makes his essay yet remarkable is his effort to turn the encyclopedic spirit into the selfreferential system of what his Prospectus heralds as the “elements of future Science” (I: 587). Echoing German scientists such as Ritter the Prospectus proclaims “the manifest tendency of all the Arts and Sciences at present, from the most purely intellectual even to the labours of the common mechanic, to lose their former insulated character, and organize themselves into one harmonious body of knowledge” (I: 587). The Aristotelian concept of the organon that informed traditional organizations of knowledge is reorganized into the Romantic paradigm of organicity. Compared to Romantic projects of knowledge management, earlier encyclopedias seem to address the scientist primarily in his capacity as a “mechanic,” and their spirit is perhaps closest to the manuals on machines that had appeared since the sixteenth38 and the medical research that in the seventeenth century started to radically change the image of man. Thus William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood and the nervous system, for example, laid the foundation for a materialist anthropology that would soon inform every scientific dictionary. Organisms are some kind of machines: “ORGAN, in general, is an instrument or machine designed for the production of some certain action or operation; in wich sense, the mechanic powers, machines, and even the veins, arteries, nerves, 38 See A. P. Usher, “Machines and Mechanisms,” in Charles Singer, ed. A History of Technology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), III: 324–46.

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muscles, and bones of the human body, may be called organs.” (III: 443). What fascinated, astonished, or shocked contemporary readers unfamiliar with science was this uncanny relationship the mechanism of machines formed with the functions of the human body. One only needs to look at the figures on human anatomy in the French Encyclopédie or at the indeed graphic illustrations of amputation in Robert James’s Medicinal Dictionary of 1743 to see that a presentation of scientific knowledge literally entails the dismemberment the editors of the Encyclopædia seek to ward off with regard to their systematic organization of that knowledge. Turning the human body into an aggregate of mechanical parts, the encyclopedia itself becomes some kind of machine. One might actually say that the representation of truncated limbs and of organs dissected in order to exhibit the veins, arteries, nerves, and muscles operates on a level similar to the way in which the encyclopedia’s body of knowledge is divided up and scattered across the alphabet of its discourse. The organs that pull the muscles of the encyclopedia are the letters of the alphabet, whose “mechanic powers” it shares with the printing press and its movable type. If it makes sense to employ the array of human body parts on the dissection table in the illustrations to the encyclopedias as some kind of allegory of the lexicon’s structure as well as of the process of composition, we ought to note that this comparison is based on the sense of a radical dissimilarity. The limbs or interior organs displayed on the pages of the encyclopedia look totally different from the body as one knows or imagines it. They are no longer part of a living body. They do not seem to belong to each other or to the body as a whole. And in this they resemble the entries in the encyclopedia arranged alphabetically or the type cast as negatives. Both the illustrations and the text do not just present a new look at the body and the world around it. They actually represent a new and foreign way of looking. Walter J. Ong argues that the Encyclopédie marks the culmination of a development initiated by the press: “At this point the potential for locating discourse in space had been maximized through alphabetic letterpress print – which is alphabetic writing locked with new firmness into space – and man’s feeling for his lifeworld was undergoing a 61

major change.”39 The reference to a spatial organization of discourse is important here, not only because it explains the integral part the illustrations play as objects of a shocked or fascinated gaze. It also helps us to understand why the encyclopedia is some kind of machine transforming every object of investigation, including the human body, into a mechanism. From a technological point of view the vital difference between organic life and a machine is not that the former lives and the latter is dead. As Norbert Wiener points out in his work on cybernetics, non-linear machines can check themselves in operations that performs something like learning and self-reproduction, a dynamic performance that plays an important part in Niklas Luhmann’s theory of autopoeic reproduction and self-monitoring in social systems.40 In order to work, a machine does not need to live, but each part must be in its proper place. That is the principle of both the encyclopedia and the letterpress. In his Parallèle des anciens et des modernes Perrault presents a machine weaving silk stockings as one of the most astonishing or even miraculous achievements of modern technology. It is the work of genius, as Perrault points out, and one might note that the operation of this textile machinery is not unlike the ingenious machine the compositors work to print the text of Perrault’s book. Professing a vivid interest in silk stockings, Perrault’s worldly Abbot in the Parallèle exclaims: “Ceux qui ont assez de genie, non pas pour inventer de semblables choses, mais pour les comprendre, tombent dans un profond étonnement à la vûë des ressorts presque infinis dont elle est composée & du grand nombre de ses divers & extraordinaires

39 Walter J. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1971), 263–64. 40 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Boston: MIT Press, 1961), part II. Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme: Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984). See 468–69 for the impact of the print culture on social systems.

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mouvemens.”41 He then points out that due to its automatism the operator does not even need to understand how it works. What Marx one hundred and fifty years later will describe as the radical estrangement of the worker from his work strikes the abbot as proof of a perfect congruence of god’s creation of man with man’s construction of machines: “En quoy on la peut comparer à la plus excellente machine que Dieu ait faite, je veux dire à l’homme dans lequel mille operations differentes se font pour le nourrir & pour le conserver sans qu’il les comprenne, sans qu’il les connoisse & même sans qu’il y songe” (I: 77).42 Jacques de Vaucanson, a doctor and engineer from Grenoble owning two factories producing fabrics, was working on a refinement of the kind of machinery that Perrault’s abbot praises. While his genius as industrial inventor did not come to fruition, he became famous in quite another field. In his musical toys and mechanical animals his know-how in engineering and medicine was happily married to put Descartes’ ideas about automata into practice.43 With reference to his artificial duck and his project of a machine-man Voltaire soon speculated about the use one could make of such mechanical bodies in anatomy courses at the universities.44 Although Vaucanson’s androidic man was never completed, La Mettrie, in 41 Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences (Paris, 1688; rpt. München: Eidos Verlag,1964), I: 76. “Those that have enough ingenuity – if not to invent similar things, so at least to understand them – are profoundly astonished at the sight of the almost infinite number of springs of which it consists and the great number of different and extraordinary mouvements of which it is capable.” 42 “In this we can compare it to the most excellent machine that God has made, that is to say, to man, in whom a thousand operations work to feed and sustain him without his understanding, remarking, and even thinking about it.” 43 See Perrault’s long digression on Descartes’ theory of automata in Paralèlle, V: 182–91 and 197–229. 44 Voltaire’s eulogy is printed, together with photographs of Vaucanson’s duck, in Jean-Claude Beaune, “The Classical Age of Automata: An Impressionistic Survey from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century,” in Michel Fehr, ed. Fragments for a Human Body (New York: Zone Books, 1989), I: 457.

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1748, seized upon the project as a corroboration of his scandalous theory propounded in L’homme machine: “S’il a fallu plus d’art à Vaucanson pour faire son Fluteur, que pour son Canard, il eût dû en emploier encore davantage pour faire un Parleur; Machine qui ne peut plus être regardée comme impossible, surtout entre les mains d’un nouveau Prométhée.”45 Frankenstein, we remember, is called a Modern Prometheus in the subtitle to Mary Shelley’s novel. Her narrative is one among many literary productions of Romanticism dealing with the Faustian quest for the secrets of life or the creation of human beings as automata.46 Frankenstein assembled his monster from body parts he gathered in the cemetery with a body of knowledge culled from works like James’s Medicinal Dictionary. “I became acquainted with the science of anatomy,” he explains to the narrator, “but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body.”47 In the meantime the reader observes the corruption of the anatomist’s mind. One marvels at the naivety with which the scientist uses his lecture notes, some manuals on natural philosophy, and the 45 Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L’homme machine (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990), 120. “If it took Vaucanson more artistic skill to make his flute-player than his duck, he would have needed even more to make a speaking figure; a machine that no longer seems impossible, especially not from the hands of a new Prometheus.” Vaucanson’s flute-player and duck are shown and placed in historical perspective in Mary Hillier, Automata and Mechanical Toys: An Illustrated History (London: Bloomsbury Books, 1976), 45. 46 On the philosophical discourse on automata in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, see Alex Sutter, Göttliche Maschinen: Die Automaten für Lebendiges bei Descartes, Leibniz, La Mettrie und Kant (Frankfurt/Main: Athenäum Verlag, 1988). See also Lieselotte Sauer, Marionetten, Maschinen, Automaten: Der künstliche Mensch in der deutschen und englischen Romantik (Bonn: Bouvier, 1983) and Rudolf Drux, ed. Menschen aus Menschenhand: Zur Geschichte der Androiden (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1988). Johann Gutenberg’s partner Johannes Fust was often confused with the historical figure of Faust, linking the miraculous working of the press with Faust’s dealings with the devil. 47 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, ed. James Rieger (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1982), 46.

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works of alchemists to patch together a human being.48 His phantasies about the popular myth of second creation produces only second-rate work. What Young, citing from Paradise Lost, says of Gulliver, that other giant in English literature, comes true for Frankenstein: “What a monster hast thou made of the ‘human face divine’” (567). Of Swift Young writes: “His was an infantine genius; a genius, which, like other infants, must be nursed and educated, or it will come to nought” (II: 558). Throughout his essay Young emphasizes, in agreement with all the other authorities on the subject, that it is impossible to become a genius by education. If Frankenstein bears out the truth of this doctrine, it is also important to note that the protagonist, who is studying at eighteenth-century universities,49 is fatally mired in the encyclopedic mode of thinking and the corresponding arrangement as well as application of knowledge. At least tacitly every encyclopedia is designed as a manual for the do-it-yourself genius. This is what spells disaster for Frankenstein, who is not accidentally named a modern Prometheus. Classical mythology tells that Athena endowed Prometheus with the gift of understanding the principles that move nature and the universe, which the torch bearer of enlightenment – traitor and teacher at once – passed on to the human beings he created in the form of knowledge about distinct arts and sciences such as architecture, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, metallurgy, and others. What Prometheus received as divine wisdom, man is taught in the unwieldy volumes of encyclopedias. Already in classical times there was a good deal of scepticism about the myth that tells of Prometheus’ creation of man. If he can pass as the first encyclopedist, 48 On the natural philosophy that informs Shelley’s novel, see Simon Schaffer, “Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy,” in Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, eds. Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 82–98. 49 References to modern chemistry, electricity, the microscope, and in particular to Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, whose first part in fifteen volumes appeared between 1749 and 1767, indicate that Frankenstein studied in the second half of the eighteenth century. He is thus Young’s contemporary.

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there may also be some anxiety that as the founding father of technology he may have been a forefather of Frankenstein.50 The genius does not need instruction in the specific area of its talent nor can it learn about it. This talent, it seems, is a gift of nature. This is the conclusion at which modern writers unanimously arrive. It is “Un merveilleux sçavoir qu’on ne peut enseigner,” as Perrault writes in his poem “Le Génie,” included in his Parallèle.51 In his encyclopedic article on the genius Diderot explains this je ne sais quoi by writing that “le génie est un pur don de la nature; ce qu’il produit est l’ouvrage d’un moment.”52 Addison, the first English critic to devote an essay to natural genius, connects the spontaneity of the genius with its power to astonish and suprise: “Among great Genius’s, those few draw the Admiration of all the World upon them, and stand up as the Prodigies of Mankind, who by the meer Strength of natural Parts, and without any Assistance of Art and Learning, have produced Works that were the Delight of their own Times and the Wonder of Posterity.”53 In Young’s essay this natural excellence is the true property of genius: “Learning is borrowed knowledge; genius is knowledge innate, and quite our own” (559). If the genius can benefit from learning as some kind of supplement to its natural talent, one wonders what its position should be with regard to the encyclopedia, whose sole office is to impart knowledge. It is definitely not an inspired work dashed out on the spur of the moment, as Diderot describes the 50 On Prometheus as the agent of a link between nature, art, and the machine, see Horst Bredekamp, Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglauben (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1993), 26–33. 51 Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, Supplement to vol. I, p. 31: “A marvellous knowledge that cannot be taught.” 52 Diderot, “Génie,” article in his Encyclopédie, cited from Œuvres esthétiques (Paris: Garnier, 1968), 11: “The genius is a pure gift of nature; it produces on the spur of the moment. Taste is the work of study and time; it depends on the knowledge of a multitude of well established or assumed rules.” 53 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), no. 160, II: 126–27. Further references are to this edition.

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genius’s mode of composition in his Encyclopédie. The genius thus constitutes a major challenge to the purpose and design of the encyclopedia. This is how the Encyclopædia Britannica faces this challenge: GENIUS, in matters of literature, &c. a natural talent or disposition to do one thing more than another; or the aptitude a man has received from nature to perform well and easily that which others can do but indifferently and with a great deal of pains. To know the bent of nature is the most important concern. Men come into the world with a genius determined not only to a certain art, but to certain parts of that art, in which only they are capable of success. If they quit their sphere, they fall even below mediocrity in their profession. Art and industry add much to natural endowments, but cannot supply them where they are wanting. (II: 672)

At first sight the entry seems to corroborate the sense that the genius is lost to the educational aim of the encyclopedia. But emphasizing both the unsurpassed excellence of natural talent and the partition of that talent into minute “spheres” of expertise, the power of genius is seen to be at once complete and lacking any sense of comprehensive breadth. In this it actually describes the very nature of encyclopedic articles. The entries arranged in alphabetical order also perform a division into innumerable different arts and sciences. “To perform well and easily that which others can do but indifferently and with a great deal of pains“: This definition of genius is an achievement the encyclopedia would like to claim for its own undertaking, which consists precisely in teaching others to understand areas of knowledge outside their natural “disposition” with less “pains.” Thus the encyclopedia complements the genius, and vice versa. Jean-Claude Beaune has pointed out that encyclopedias constitute something like automata: “As a cultural automaton, the Encyclopedia can be seen as a total and systematic machine.”54 Becoming part of this totalitarian system, the genius gets built into this machine. The genius is in fact itself a cultural automaton. It does what it is destined 54 Beaune, “The Classical Age of Automata,” 447.

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by nature to do, it cannot excel in anything else, and like the weaver at Perrault’s loom or the compositor at Young’s press it does not even understand the process of its production. The inability of the genius to develop its talent, and its appointment to a very narrow task or art tells the story of its instrumental nature. It is an organ in the powerful machine of eighteenth-century philosphical discourse, which gives it unlimited freedom within a very narrow compass in order to employ it in its service and subject its potentially dangerous nature to the tightest control possible. As we have already indicated, Young’s essay focused on the original genius in order to overcome the impasse in which the discussion about learning and progress in arts and sciences found itself around 1700. While the sciences made continuous progress, literature and the fine arts continued imitating traditional models and following prescriptive rules. While new technologies made the inventions and constructions of antiquity obsolete, Homer & Co. remained the master builders of literature and culture supervising modern authors and artists. With the construction of genius as a gift from nature, an emergency exit suddenly opened. Since the title of genius was conferred on an author at birth, the whole question of competing with the venerable ancestors seemed resolved. Imitation and rules were no longer a priority and could actually be labelled as a lack of genius. In this sense the championing of untutored originality might be said to have originated as some kind of defense mechanism. However, it is crucial that it was not to be considered a mechanism. As an endowment of nature the genius could enter the register of the organic in contradistinction to the mechanical. The history of the relationship between those two terms is long, and we shall have to come back to the problem it creates for the construction of the genius as natural talent. Suffice it to say at this point that Young’s essay is important because it was one of the first to claim, or reclaim, the organic nature of genius and originality at a time organs could be described as parts of a machine. The genius, conceived as something organic, supplemented the technological concept of progress by a sense of growth. The sciences make progress, the art of genius grows. Although this 68

distinction was amenable to an aestheticization that transferred art from the order of history to the order of nature, it is important to note that despite its organicist and aesthetic rhetoric Young’s essay insists on the coexistence of growth and progress: All arts and sciences are making considerable advance; with them, all the accomodations, ornaments, delights, and glories of human life; and these are as the root, and composition as the flower; and as the root spreads and thrives, shall the flower fail? (571)

Literary criticism has thrived on this flower of rhetoric, accomodating with great delight the ornament it fixes on an otherwise garrulous discourse. The flower is there, and we shall have to see where else in the essay its organicism takes root. But we might note that there is also composition in this composition, the imprint of the mechanical printing press that throughout the essay will compete with the vegetable life of flowers as an emblem of originality in the advancement of literature and art. Even if the genius in its untutored originality is not a reader of encyclopedias, it still seems to be one of the principal contributors to the project. Young, too, is one of those contributors. Under the heading of “COMPOSITION, in literature” the Encyclopædia Britannica actually prints substantial parts of his essay. As the editors point out in their Preface, “Not to mention original articles, they [the compilers] have had recourse to the best books upon almost every subject, extracted the useful parts, and rejected whatever appeared trifling or less interesting” (I: v). Apparently, one of those best books is Young’s Conjectures. Whatever value the editorial work of the compilers may have added to the rambling discourse of Young’s compilation in terms of its usefulness for a systematic treatment of the subject, it seems that the essay was included as an entry on the merit of its much professed originality. “I begin with original composition,” Young writes at the beginning of the essay, “and the more willingly, as it seems an original subject to me, who have seen nothing hitherto written on it” (549). Boswell has recorded his master’s caustic remark that he was

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“surprised to find the Doctor receive as novelties what Mr. Johnson thought very common thoughts.”55 Although Johnson’s sound judgment on Young’s achievements as critic and poet never failed him, as a maker of dictionaries the decision of his fellow compilers from Edinburgh would probably have met with his approval.56 To a large measure Young’s essay is a compilation of traditional opinions on originality, imitation, and a classical notion of poetic decorum balancing these two aspects of artistic creation. In this sense it has its proper place in an encyclopedia, and this is also why Young’s protestation of originality is one of the passages “extracted” from the entry. But we should also note the following passage that the compilers do reprint. It is one of several instances where Young, again using a traditional topos, laments the absence of originality and the flood of writing that define the predicament of modern authors: Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies? [...] The letter’d world no longer consists of singulars, it is a medly, a mass; and a hundred books, at bottom, are but one. (253)

Copying Young’s “original” the Encyclopædia actually describe its own mode of composition: a hundred books reduced or condensed into one. This is precisely the aim of encyclopedias. True, the context of the passage cited from Young’s essay focuses on the creation of works of art whereas the encyclopedia, as a repository of knowledge, necessarily turns everything into some form of popular science. But the citation is nonetheless to the point here because the Conjectures are also, if not primarily, a discourse on the different value the controversy between the ancients and the moderns placed on the concept of originality in science and art. Young’s essay can claim originality, as 55 Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., in George Birbeck Hill, ed. Boswell’s Life of Johnson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), VI: 269. 56 On Johnson’s interest in issues concerning authorship and the publishing industry, see Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters and Samual Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

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it were, for confronting this controversy with the situation that evolved in the publishing business around the middle of the eighteenth century. The passage is interesting for another reason. Young’s essay is one of the first to give prominence to the concept of property in connection with originality,57 and the question cited – “Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies?” – appears in a somewhat ironic light when we consider that Young had indeed been dead five years by the time the compositors in Edinburgh arranged the type for an unauthorized copy of his essay on original composition. Although we must give the “Society of Gentlemen in Scotland” credit for crediting Young’s authorship in their list of contributors, in many cases the encyclopedists, citing their material without acknowledging their source, could indeed be accused of plagiarism.58 “Hope we from plagiarism any dominion in literature, as that of Rome arose from a nest of thieves?” (556), Young asks in a passage that obliquely connects the abduction and rape of the Sabinian women by the founding fathers of the Eternal City with the theft they committed by transferring the literature and philosophy of their Greek teachers into Latin language and culture. Originals are, and ought to be, great favourites, for they are great benefactors; they extend the republic of letters, and add a new province to its dominion: imitators only give us a sort of duplicates of what we had, possibly much better, before; increasing the mere drug of books, while all that makes them valuable, knowledge and genius, are at a stand. (551)

Originality, not plagiarism governs the colonial politics of the man of letters, and the increasing production of books does not multiply 57 See the pioneering essay by Gerhard Plumpe, “Eigentum – Eigentümlichkeit: Über den Zusammenhang ästhetischer und juristischer Begriffe im 18. Jahrhundert,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 23.2 (1979): 188–92. 58 Also of piracy and plagiarism among themselves. See Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775–1800 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), 131–76.

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genius but rather duplicates imitation. The claim that not only the works of genius but also the dissemination of knowledge grinds to a standstill in the factories of the republic of letters is problematic and cannot be upheld. Throughout the essay Young’s faked or exaggerated indignation at all forms of imitation and adaptation struggles with the concept of progress that had become the hallmark of scientific investigation and philosphical discourse. A later passage about the disadvantages of imitation is more precise on this point than the one just cited: First, it deprives the liberal and politer arts of an advantage which the mechanic enjoy: in these, men are ever endeavouring to go beyond their predecessors; in the former, to follow them. And since copies surpass not their originals, [...] hence, while arts mechanic are in perpetual progress and increase, the liberal are in retrogradation and decay. (561)

The passage puts in a nutshell what the moderns had taken great efforts to point out in their controversy with the ancients. If literature and the fine arts were to keep pace with the development in the sciences, they would have to break out of the imitative mode that had established the critical tradition. The original genius is the agent appointed to achieve this. Since the authority of originality no longer rests on a reference to canonical authors, the principal adversary of the genius is the plagiary, who not only steals some work but usurps, as it were, the author’s voice and position. “Stat contra, dicitque tibi tua pagina. Fur es,” Young quotes Martial, one of those struggling to make his name as an author in that “nest of thieves,” the city of Rome: “Your page confronts you and says, ‘You are a thief’” (556). The citation is taken from a series of epigrams dealing with plagiarism, and it becomes clear that Martial must marshall his friends to remind the audience on festive occasions where his competitors recite lines from his work without acknowledgment that they are actually Martial’s property. “Et, cum se dominum vocabit ille,/ dicas esse meos manuque missos./ hoc si terque quaterque clamitaris,/ impones plagiario pudorem“: “And when he calls himself their owner, say they are mine, discharged from my hand. If you shout this three or four 72

times, you will make the kidnapper (plagiario) ashamed of himself.”59 The plagiarist is a kidnapper abducting the slaves “discharged” or set free (manu missi) by the author when he releases his work into the public. This is how the Encyclopædia Britannica defines the term: PLAGIARY, in philology, the purloining another person’s works, and putting them off for a man’s own. Among the Romans, plagiarius was properly a person who bought, sold, or retained a freeman for a slave; and was so called, because by the Flavian law such persons were condemned, ad plagas, to be whipped. (III: 480)

The Encylopædia should actually also take some whipping because it prints without authorization Young’s essay on originality. Putting his essay to work in their service without proper payment, Young as well as the original publisher of the essay are enslaved. The voice calling out “Your are a thief” would be the copyright protecting the pages of his work. It took several more decades before such a copyright would be in force. There is another reason why the issue of plagiarism is of some importance in this context. It is no accident that the encyclopedia confines plagiarism to duplication “in philology.” As we have seen, Young’s essay elaborates – inadvertently perhaps – a distinction between repetition in arts and the sciences. His remark that the “arts mechanic are in perpetual progress and increase” while “the liberal are in retrogradation and decay” does not simply imply that the original genius has originated in the sciences and has not yet been applied to literature. It rather means that repetition and imitation have a different status in the “arts mechanic.” The duplication and adaptation of ideas or knowledge is in fact the driving force behind this progress, and the encyclopedia is the very book designed to document it: “a hundred books, at bottom, are but one.” No one has pointed this out more 59 Marcus Valerius Martialis, Epigrams, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), I: 52, ll. 6–9 in vol. I, 80–81. The passage cited by Young and the translation are from epigram 53.

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clearly than Hegel, who has actually written the Romantic encyclopedia that Coleridge was dreaming of. If Young’s essay can be said to originate from the controversy between the ancients and the moderns, one might also argue that, at the end of Romanticism, Hegel’s work comes to conclude the debates on originality, plagiarism, and the question of intellectual property that had fuelled the imagination of the eighteenth century. In his Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts of 1821, a supplement to his Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Hegel writes: Die Fortpflanzung der Wissenschaften überhaupt und das bestimmte Lehrgeschäft insbesondere ist, seiner Bestimmung und Pflicht nach, am bestimmtesten bei positiven Wissenschaften, der Lehre einer Kirche, der Jurisprudenz usf., die Repetition festgesetzter, überhaupt schon geäusserter und von aussen aufgenommener Gedanken, somit auch in Schriften, welche diese Fortpflanzung und Verbreitung der Wissenschaften zum Zweck haben. [...] Inwiefern solche Wiederholung in einem schriftstellerischen Werke ein Plagiat werde, lässt sich nicht durch eine genaue Bestimmung angeben und hiermit nicht rechtlich und gesetzlich festsetzen. Das Plagiat müsste daher eine Sache der Ehre sein und von 60 dieser zurückgehalten werden.

Teaching implies repetition, learning means copying. This has grave implications for the usefulness of the original genius for academia and society at large, and we shall see that this is one of the limitations Kant imposes on the genius in his Third Critique. It also has impli60 Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, vol. VII of Werke, § 69, p. 148. The translation follows Hegel’s Philosophy of Rights, trans. T. M. Knox (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 56: “Those engaged in the propagation of knowledge of all kinds, in particular those whose appointed task is teaching, have as their specific function and duty (above all in the case of the positive sciences, the doctrine of a church, the study of positive law, &c.) the repetition of well-established thoughts, taken up ab extra and all of them given expression already. [...] To what extent is such repetition of another’s material in one’s book a plagiarism? There is no precise principle of determination available to answer these questions, and therefore they cannot be finally settled either in principle or by positive legislation. Hence plagiarism would have to be a matter of honour and be held in check by honour.”

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cations for the effectiveness of copyright legislation. However fertile the Fortpflanzung or propagation of the sciences may be, the property laws do not seem to have made any progress since Martial, who, as we have seen, relegates plagiarism to pudor and thus also to the realm of ethics. In the passage quoted Hegel actually states: “Gesetze gegen den Nachdruck erfüllen daher ihren Zweck, das Eigentum der Schriftsteller und der Verleger rechtlich zu sichern, zwar in dem bestimmten, aber sehr beschränkten Umfange.”61 This is particularly true of encyclopedias and other forms of anthologies: Wie die hundert und aberhundert Kompendien, Auszüge, Sammlungen usf., Rechenbücher, Geometrien, Erbauungsschriften usf. zeigen, wie jeder Einfall einer kritischen Zeitschrift, Musenalmanachs, Konversationslexikons usf. sogleich ebenfalls unter demselben oder einem veränderten Titel wiederholt, aber als etwas Eigentümliches behauptet werden kann, – wodurch denn leicht dem Schriftsteller oder erfindenden Unternehmer der Gewinn, den ihm sein Werk oder Einfall versprach, zunichte gemacht oder gegenseitig heruntergebracht oder allein ruiniert wird.62

At Hegel’s hand, the problem of copying and reprinting, which indeed threatened the rise of a professional class of authors with financial ruin in the eighteenth century, is toned down into an accidental sideshow in the much more exciting arena of dialectical speculation about the impossibility of true repetition. Dialectical philosophy is the new machine that will run the business of organizing knowledge and 61 “Thus copyright legislation attains its end of securing the property rights of author and publisher only to a very restricted extent, though it does attain it within limits.” 62 Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts, 149: “For instance, the hundreds and hundreds of compendia, selections, anthologies, &c., arithmetics, geometries, religious tracts, &c., show how every new idea in a review or annual or encyclopedia, &c., can be forthwith repeated over and over again under the same or different title, and yet may be claimed as something peculiarly the writer’s own. The result of this may easily be that the profit promised to the author, or the projector of the original undertaking, by his work or his original idea becomes negligible or reduced for both parties or lost to all concerned” (56).

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imagination. Moreover, to the salaried professor at a nineteenthcentury university the question of plagiarism appears slightly ridiculous. Plagiarism, as a term, has ceased to exist, Hegel maintains, “es sei entweder, dass die Ehre ihre Wirkung getan, das Plagiat zu verdrängen, [...] oder dass ein Einfällchen oder Veränderung einer äusseren Form sich als Originalität und selbstdenkendes Produzieren so hoch anschlägt, um den Gedanken an ein Plagiat gar nicht in sich aufkommen zu lassen.”63 It is a long way from Young to Hegel. Although, to a philosophical mind, Young’s thinking might itself appear as merely a string of “Einfällchen” or trivial ideas about originality, we have seen that his essay breaks new ground in three ways. First, he establishes a connection between the liberal arts and the sciences by presenting the mechanical printing press as the organon of originality; secondly, he introduces the metaphor of organicism to describe the work of the original genius and distinguish it from the labors of imitation; and thirdly, he raises the question of intellectual property to give genius a legitimate claim to originality. Focussing on these three achievements we shall have to unfold his argument in which the mechanics of the printing press organizes his organic concept of the orginal genius as well as its position within the concept of natural law.

III. The Mechanics of Originality Having announced original composition to be the subject of his essay, Young pauses momentarily to contemplate the contemporary scene of writing : 63 Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts, 149: “It may be that honour has been effective in abolishing plagiarism, [...] or possibly an ingenious and trivial idea, and a change in external form, is rated so highly as originality and a product of independent thinking that the thought of plagiarism becomes wholly insufferable” (56)

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But, first, a few thoughts on composition in general. Some are of opinion, that its growth, at present, is too luxuriant, and that the press is overcharged. Overcharged, I think, it could never be, if none were admitted, but such as brought their imprimatur from sound understanding, and the public good. [...] This restriction allowed, the more composition the better. (549–50)

The essay will labor to demonstrate that good composition is not just a matter of sound understanding and the public good but that it receives its imprimatur from the hand of the original genius. The genius, to press this point once more, is a compositor. Thirty years lie between the Conjectures and the Epistles to Mr. Pope Concerning the Authors of the Age, in which Young had mustered all his power as a satirist to castigate the “writing tribe“64 that overcharge the press. The Epistles were written in response to the publication of the Dunciad in 1728. In a letter to Tickell dating from 1727, Young professes a shocked admiration for the heavy-handed approach Pope’s modern interpretation of classical models takes: Mr Pope is finishing a Burlesque Heroik on Writers, & ye modern diversions of ye Town, it alludes to Virgil & Homer thro[ugh]out. The 5th book of Virgil is burlesqud into games, in wh Booksellers run for Authors, & Piss for Authoresses & c; as is likewise part of ye 6th by a Vision of Heroes in Dullness & c: tis nearly done, & what is done is very correct.65

Young’s interest in the mores of the members constituting the Republic of Letters makes him make haste in the composition of a piece that on the one hand should show him to be a partisan to Pope’s cause and on the other stimulate the urinary tract of the booksellers. Competition is intense, and writing his Epistles Young contributes to the flood of letters on which he would like to set sail as a midshipman in Pope’s ark. 64 Young, Epistles to Mr. Pope Concerning the Authors of the Age, in Complete Works, II: 40, l. 49. References to the Epistles will henceforth be cited by line numbers alone. Unless otherwise noted they refer to the first epistle. 65 Henry Pettit, ed. The Correspondence of Edward Young, 1683–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 60–61.

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Whilst you at Twickenham plan the future wood, Or turn the volumes of the wise and good, Our senate meets; at parties parties bawl, And pamphlets stun the streets, and load the stall. So rushing tides bring things obscene to light, Foul wrecks emerge, and dead dogs swim in sight. (ll. 1–6)

Young’s effort to make Pope pose as the solitary author holding intimate conversations with the wise men bound in vellum appears odd if one considers that Pope, as Mark Rose puts it, “more than any other writer of his day […] behaved like a literary entrepreneur and made a fortune from his verse.”66 The translator of Homer is indeed the ringleader among the “brokers in old song” (l. 58) upbraided and ridiculed by Young in his Epistles, and it is the hard-won success in his battles with the booksellers that awarded him this position as Britain’s foremost professional author in the eighteenth century. As Marlon Ross remarks in an essay most pertinent to our argument: “Caught at this turning point of history, Pope helps to authorize the individual’s possession of authority as an effect of print, even as he attempts to prevent this process by printing satires against individually possessed, self-proclaimed authorities.”67 Whether Young’s desperate attempt to jump on the bandwagon of public lament about the proliferation of all kinds of publications made him blind to the irony involved in Pope’s satire or whether it was simply his natural insincerity about his motives, it is striking that in 1730 he espouses the view that good composition must stand the test of time and that therefore authors should not do what he himself had just done by rushing his Epistles to the press in order to cash in on the success of Pope’s glaring critique of the publishing industry. “Write, and re– write, blot out, and write again,/ And for its swiftness ne’er applaud 66 Mark Rose, “The Author in Court: Pope v. Curll (1741),” in The Construction of Authorship, 216. Curll, by the way, is the winner of the pissing contest in the Dunciad, and we shall return to his impudence later in the chapter. 67 Marlon B. Ross, “Authority and Authenticity: Scribbling Authors and the Genius of Print in Eighteenth-Century England,” in The Construction of Authorship, 247.

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your pen” (Epistle 2, ll. 119–20), Young advises young and old authors, sending word to the printer that the press is indeed overcharged, “all, but sense, they print” (l. 117). The unprecedented and astonishing swiftness of the the printing press is the real driver of change in the Republic of Letters, and the booksellers are the agents of this change, gradually replacing the patrons and circle of friends among whom poets like Gray or Collins were circulating their manuscripts before even thinking of having them published. In one passage of the Epistles Young ridicules the vanity of a local genius to have his work printed, using words that are remarkable because they actually outline the strategy of the original genius he will develop some thirty laters in the Conjectures on Original Composition: He writes, in inspiration puts his trust; Though wrong his thoughts, the gods will make them just; Genius directly from the gods descends And who by labour would distrust his friends? Thus having reason’d with consummate skill, In immortality he dips his quill: And, since blank paper is denied the press, He mingles the whole alphabet by guess, In various sets, which various words compose, Of which, he hopes, mankind the meaning knows. (ll. 89–98; emphasis added)

The dabbling author seen here to assemble the letters of the alphabet like a compositor working on his sets of movable type will be transformed, in Young’s Conjectures, into the original genius amazing mankind by the spontaneous and irregular wildness of a work written directly, as it were, into the printing press. For the original genius is, as the essay will emphasize, “one who, to speak accurately, thinks and composes; while other invaders of the press, how voluminous and learned soever, (with due respect be it spoken,) only read and write” (565; emphasis added). While some just scribble, others compose their composition as the compositors of their own texts. By the time Young comes to write his essay his ambivalent feelings toward Pope have changed for the worse, not least because in the

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meantime he had himself moved in with the compositors that behind his desk were composing the original works he had just composed in order to prevent booksellers like Curll, the winner of the contest in the Dunciad, from cheating him out of his profit. In 1759 Young is a prospering author presenting the act of printing as an instance of original writing, and he boldly relegates Pope to the class of mere imitators. In an oblique reference to the poet that had preceded him in establishing the authority of the author in the eighteenth century, he writes: While the true genius is crossing all public roads into fresh untrodden ground, he [the imitator], up to the knees in antiquity, is treading the sacred footsteps of great examples, with the blind veneration of a bigot saluting the papal toe; comfortably hoping full absolution for the sins of his own understanding, from the powerful charm of touching his idol’s infallibility. (565)

Denouncing the imitator of ancient works as a catholic stooping to kiss the “papal toe,” Young treads on the toe of Pope, who was a catholic and whose career was built on the success of his translation of Homer. In the next paragraph the translators come under attack as poets that stoop or indeed prostrate themselves before the idols of their admiration: Were not prostrate spirits their voluntary pedestals, the figure they make among mankind would not stand so high. Imitators and translators are somewhat of the pedestal-kind, and sometimes rather raise their original’s reputation, by showing him to be by them inimitable, than their own. (565)

The act of translation confers originality on the original just as imitation renders its model inimitable. The status of being an original is thus not necessarily an intrinsic quality of the original, and in pushing those famed statues from their pedestals Young buries Pope under the debris of his argument.68 We have already cited the passage where 68 On the problem translation in Young’s essay, see Joel Weinsheimer, “Conjectures on Unoriginal Composition,” Eighteenth Century 22.1 (1981), 58–73.

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Young characterizes Swift as an “infantine genius” needing a good education to make it as a lesser figure in the world of originality, and in Young’s view Pope is another poet that belongs to that kindergarden. But in fact, already as a child Pope seems to have shown an unusual interest in print. Joseph Warton relates the anecdote that, “He was taught to read very early by an aunt; and of his own indefatigable industry learned to write, by copying printed books, which he executed with great neatness and accuracy.”69 Soon he was reproducing his copious handwriting in print. One of those books was the Dunciad Variorum with the prolegomena and notes by Scriblerus, a splendid example of how pubescent scribbling translates into print in the eighteenth century. The Dunciad Variorum, a book to end all books, should actually make a splendid addition to Young’s library. The war among booksellers and the dunces whose work they bring to public notice is closely related to the controversy between the Ancients and the Moderns that started in France with a stand-off between Fontenelle and Boileau in the camp of the ancients and Perrault and Fénelon as the generals in the army of the moderns.70 Boileau’s translation of Longinus’s treatise on the sublime, which plays an important role in this dispute, is mentioned as a model of its kind in the The Dunciad Variorum, and it is no accident that Pope’s burlesque looks very much like Richard Bentley’s Dissertations upon the Epistles of Phalaris of 1698, which proved the spuriousness of a work on which the ancients had founded their claim that classical literature excells modern poetry and which ignited the cultural war that had been ravaging in the French Academy 69 Joseph Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 4th ed. (London: Dodsley, 1782), I: 81. The work is dedicated to Young. 70 On the history of this controversy, which has its roots in the renaissance, see H. Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des anciens et des modernes (Paris, 1856), for France as well as for England; and Hubert Gillot, La Querelle des anciens et des modernes en France (Nancy, 1914; rpt. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968). A selection of contributions to the debate in English criticism has been edited by J. E. Spingarn in vol. III of Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963).

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on British territory.71 The most clamorous English battle-cry in this war was raised by Swift in his Battel Fought between the Antient and the Modern Books in St. James’s Library published in 1710. It provides the context for Young’s faked despise of the “black militia of the pen” (l. 310) in his Epistles as well as for his polemics against Pope and Swift thirty years later. The Conjectures stage the waning controversy between the ancients and moderns as the final showdown in which the original genius, wearing the crest of the moderns, confronts a whole battalion of imitators. While Swift’s armies clash in a manner that makes Homer’s war scenes pale in comparison and brings the narrator so close to the frontline that the report about the war gets itself wounded by gaps inflicted on the manuscript, Young presides over the strife between original works and mere copies like a general observing the battle from a distant hill. What makes this detachment possible is the different weaponry Young brings to the combat. In Swift’s library the main weapon on both sides is the quill used to attack the enemy at close quarters: Now, it must here be understood, that Ink is the great missive Weapon, in all Battels of the Learned, which, convey’d thro’ a sort of Engine, call’d a Quill, infinite Numbers of these are darted at the Enemy, by the Valiant on each side, 72 with equal Skill and Violence, as if it were an Engagement of Porcupines.

In the Conjectures, the moderns spill their ink mainly by means of the printing press, and compared to the hog-like frenzy we encounter in 71 On the Phalaris controversy, see Alexander Dyce’s introduction to the Dissertation in The Works of Richard Bentley, D.D. (London, 1836; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1966), I: v–xix. Incidentally, the controversy between Bentley and Boyle was started off by the negligence of Bennet, Boyle’s bookseller and printer, who claimed that Bentley had used his power as the King’s Librarian to withhold the MS. of the Epistles. The supposed antiquity of the Epistles is a construction of Renaissance scholarship. 72 Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, in A Tale of a Tub, ed. D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 158), 221.

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Swift’s library the battle of Young’s essay takes place on the literary battlefield mapped out as “an ample area for renowned adventure in original attempts” (570). Young carefully plans his strategy that will lead the genius and its troops to their final victory: If [...] ancients and moderns were no longer considered as masters and pupils, but as hard-matched rivals for renown, – then moderns, by the longevity of their labours, might one day become ancients themselves; and old Time, that best weigher of merits, to keep his balance even, might have the golden weight of an Augustan age in both his scales; or, rather, our scale might descend; and that of antiquity (as a modern match for it strongly speaks) might kick the beam. (570)

What guarantees the longevity of the moderns is the press, which, whenever need arises, will reprint the works of their labor. Young’s reference to the scale cites the confrontation between God and Satan in book IV of Paradise Lost, and Milton is frequently called upon as the first modern author after Shakespeare to have surpassed the ancients: “With what a gust do we retire to the disinterested and immortal friends in our closet” (550). If Milton’s immortality is founded on the sublimity of his epic, we should also bear in mind that Paradise Lost is the first work of modern literature for which a formal contract exists between the author and his printer. Even though Milton’s eighteenth-century biographers and Blake complained that the sum of £20 he received from Samuel Simmons represented a crass case of exploitation, some biographers did point out the extraordinary fact that there was a writer that as early as 1667 actually entered into a contract on what for professionals authors meant paradise.73 This was not lost on Young, one might conjecture, whose essay keeps reminding the reader that immortality is a question of print as well as the profit one gets from it as an author. Immortality is a great advantage if you go to war, and Young was not the first among the moderns to notice that technological progress in literary matters put a weapon in their hands that was unknown to 73 On Milton as “our earliest modern professional author,” see Peter Lindenbaum, “Milton’s Contract,” in The Construction of Authorship, 175–90; 190.

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the copyists of manuscripts in antiquity. Perrault actually points out that the invention of the printing press historically coincides with the invention of modern artillery. The combination of ink and gunpowder is used to great effect in the war between the ancients and moderns: LE CHEVALIER. Après avoir parlé des Arts où les Modernes l’emportent sur les Anciens, il me semble que vous devriez dire quelque chose des Arts qui n’ont esté connus que dans ces derniers siecles, comme de L’Imprimerie & de l’Artillerie. L’ABBE’. Nous en avons parlé, nous avons remarqué que l’Imprimerie avoit rendu la science beaucoup plus commune qu’elle n’estoit, en mettant les livres dans les mains de tout le monde, & nous avons observé que l’Artillerie avoit changé toute 74 la face de la guerre.

The change modern artillery has brought about is not unlike that effected by modern printing technology. Both greatly increase the speed and range of delivery with an almost untiring automatism that makes weapons and the press mighty power tools in any conquest or contest. In his History of the Royal Society published in 1667 Thomas Sprat speculates about the role of print in the advancement of learning during the Renaissance: And now I am come to the time within our view, and to the third great Age of the flourishing of Learning. Whether this recovery of knowledge did happen by the benefit of Printing, invented about that time, which shew’d a very easie way of communicating mens thoughts one to another? or whether it came from the hatred [...] against the blindness, and stupidity, of the Roman Fryers? or from the 74 Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, IV: 285. “The CHEVALIER: Having talked about the arts in which the moderns excel the ancients it seems to me that we should also say something about the arts that only became known in these centuries, such as the printing press and the artillery. / The ABBOT: Actually, we have talked about them. We have seen that the printing press made science much more popular than before in that it put books in the hands of everybody; and we also observed that artillery has changed the nature of warfare.” The abbot refers to II: 294–95.

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Reformation, which put men upon a stricter inquiry into the Truth of things? [...] I will not take much pains to determine.75

It is quite needless for Sprat to determine the primary cause because the cultural, spiritual, political, and scientific motives he touches upon are all interrelated through the press. By the time he writes his History the account of modernity as the great age of print had already become commonplace.76 The way in which the Society calls its history into being is a remarkable instance of the power the press had acquired in the seventeenth century: “Let this Book, Intit’led, The History of the Royal Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, be Printed” (2). The decree recalls the creative word of divine utterance. Let there be light, let there be print. Soon the enlightenment would turn this decree into a powerful program. A number of the moderns participating in the controversy with the ancients belonged to the Royal Society, and it is not surprising that as the chief promoter of progress this body should evince a keen interest in the printing press. In our context Sprat’s remark in his History is also significant with regard to Samuel Richardson, who was was one of three printers employed by the Society for the Encouragement of Learning and later also secured a contract to print the Philosophical Transactions for the Royal Society, thus acting – at his printing machine – as the operator of technological progress. The Conjectures on Original Composition are composed, we remember, as a letter addressed “to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison.” Richardson is not only the addressee but also the co-author of the essay, which is in fact

75 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London (London, 1667; rpt. St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1959), 22. 76 See the comprehensive history in Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in EarlyModern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). On the politics of power exerted through print, see Roger Chartier, ed. The Culture of Print: Power and the Use of Print in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).

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a composite composition,77 and he is also appointed as its printer. Young’s deeply unoriginal frame of mind was always looking for exemplary models, and Richardson, the prolific eighteenth-century man of letters, epitomizes the original genius portrayed in the Conjectures. It is more than a gesture of recognition and gratitude when Young dedicates his essay to him. Richardson achieved in his career as a printer what Young never attained as a writer, and this career in many ways exemplifies the argument of the essay. Having started out as an apprentice in a print-shop, he worked as a compositor, corrector, and overseer of a press, was made freeman of the Stationers’ Company, and finally set up his own printing-house in Fleet Street. He became printer to the Parliament and, in 1760, the year after the publication of the Conjectures, even secured a law patent that gave him the exclusive right to print books dealing with the common law in his function of Law Printer to His Majesty.78 Just as his contract with the Royal Society placed him at the organ of learning and scientific progress, his contract with Parliament gave him, at the cases of his printing press, a voice and a seat to which Young, despite all his shifting of political alliances, always aspired in vain. The year Richardson was appointed to print the King’s laws, Young was proposed for the honorific but insignificant appointment as Clerk of the Closet to the Princess Dowager of Wales.79 Public recognition came to him very late in life, and the considerable amount of money he made as an author constituted something like a compensation for the humiliation he endured, and continuously sought, in his long 77 For Richardson’s share in the writing of the essay, see Alan D. McKillop, “Richardson, Young, and the Conjectures,” Modern Philology 22 (1925): 391– 404. 78 On his business career, see T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 37–86, 154–66, 498– 510. 79 See his letter of acceptance to the Duchess of Portland in Correspondence, 523: “As the Honour is great & the Duty small, [...] I do accept it with great Gratitude for Your remembrance of one who might easily & naturally be forgotten.”

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campaign for preferment. What must have fascinated him most about Richardson was his privileged access to the press. The endless and rapid flow of letters scribbled or composed by the correspondents in Richarson’s three novels could instantly be set in type and be printed. For Pamela, Clarissa, and Harriet Byron comes true what is implied throughout the Conjecture on Original Compositions: The vision of the author writing in a corner of the printing shop. Richardson also printed the first comprehensive edition of the Night-Thoughts, and a letter to Young intimates that a busy printer only really reads when composing a work for the press: I am expecting down the last proof of the new edition [...] of your noble work. And noble work it is indeed! I never before read it in series: the first numbers only when they came out; the second part, as I printed it, under your inspection; and the second edition of that second as I reprinted it, another printer doing Mr. Dodsley’s part. But, now printing the whole, it is not possible for me to express my admiration of it.80

In his reply, Young repays the compliment by praising Clarissa as a model for modern authors. “I rejoice at it,” he writes, “for the noblest compositions need such aids” (337). That he is also thinking of an unsentimental aid from the compositor of his poem becomes clear in his suggestion concerning its marketing: “Suppose, in the title-page of the Night-Thoughts, you should say —published by the author of Clarissa. This is a trick to put it into more hands; I know it would have that effect” (338). Richardson does not act on the advice, but ten years later the masterprinter will figure on the title page of the Conjectures as the embodiment of the original genius. The other exemplary genius inspiring the essay is Joseph Addison, who was not only the first modern English author to write about the genius but also the first to go public every day as a professional journalist. In contrast to Swift, who was inclined to “tyranny in wit,” and Pope, who was “for softening tyranny into lawful monarchy,” Addison is portrayed as a true republican in the eighteenth80 The Correspondence of Edward Young, 336.

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century Republic of Letters: “Addison’s crown was elective: he reigned by the public voice” (579). Young’s talent, developed in the course of his dealing with the system of patronage, for pegging ideas on eminent public figures in order to promote them is really astounding. The spontaneous nature of genius, the way in which it writes on the spur of the moment, is sponsored by Richardson in his capacity as both a sentimental letter writer and printer. The sponsorship for the whole problem of how originality can be handed down to posterity, the question of the legacy of genius, is passed on to Addison. This is why the deathbed looms so large in the second part of the essay. The long disquisition about Addison’s last words – “‘See in what peace a Christian can die!’” (581) – has generally been considered incongruous with its main argument, a sneak preview of the essay on moral composition Young promises in the postscriptum to his public letter to Richardson. But it can be said to organize the recurring references to the problems of succession in the essay, problems that prove to be virulent with regard to those ancient authors whose fame has immortalized them to such a degree that they simply refuse to die and make room for modern authors. The press allows Addison to prepare for death with the clear conscience of a Christian who has done everything to put his estate in order. In the first number of the Spectator he writes about his resolution “to Print my self out, if possible, before I Die.”81 Young’s essay professes great admiration for such an endeavor. “Imitate,” he writes at one point, “but imitate not the composition, but the man” (555). Addison is an original to be emulated because in his life the man and his work form a union that finds its best expression in the print-out of his articles and books. Even on his deathbed he is still working indefatigably on his last and greatest book, preparing it for posthumous publication. “His compositions are but a noble preface,” Young writes, “the grand work is his death: that is a work which is read in heaven” (582). It is an immortal work of genius.

81 Addison, The Spectator, no. 1, I: 5.

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As the supreme Being has expressed, and as it were printed his Ideas in the Creation, Men express their Ideas in Books, which by this great Invention of these latter Ages may last as long as the Sun and Moon, and perish only in the 82 general Wreck of Nature.

What sounds like the pathos of Young’s Night Thoughts turned into prose with some help from Milton is in fact a citation from Addison’s 1711 essay on books and the power of print in the Spectator.83 “Books are the Legacies that a great Genius leaves to Mankind, which are delivered down from Generation to Generation, as Presents to the Posterity of those who are yet unborn” (II: 154), the essay continues. It is a legacy bequeathed, on his death, to Young, who in his essay on genius will show originality to be an effect of print. However, there is a little wrinkle in Addison’s testament. The press, that “great Invention of these latter Ages,” has one flaw, and the types the compositors assemble to print the article on books in the Spectator spell out a serious problem the original genius has to grapple with. What at first sight looks like a great advantage the moderns have over the ancients now also becomes a liability: The Circumstance which gives Authors an Advantage above all these great Masters, is this, that they can multiply their Originals; or rather can make Copies of their Works, to what Number they please, which shall be as valuable as the Originals themselves. (II: 154)

If the press can print myriad numbers of identical copies, how are we then to tell the copy from the original? If the copy has the same value as the original, originality can no longer function as a reliable standard of value. What makes matters worse is that “this great Invention of these latter Ages” indiscriminately reprints also the works of the ancients. The classical authors are “accidental originals,” as Young 82 Addison, The Spectator, no. 166, II: 154; emphasis added. 83 Cp. also no. 124, I: 505–08 on essay writing as opposed to publishing books; no. 367, III: 379–81 on the paper manufacture; no. 379, III: 422–25 on reading, learning, and publishing.

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points out. “The works they imitated, few excepted, are lost,” and if thus their claim to fame is not based on the strength of their work alone, they are even “secured in it, in spite of Goths and flames, by the perpetuating power of the press” (553). Thus their work too “may last as long as the Sun and Moon,” as Addison had put it. In his Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning published in 1690, William Temple, the most perspicacious mind among the British ancients, uses the supposed advantage of the press as a tool of swift and perfect duplication with great advantage to make short work of the moderns’ claim that advanced technology gives their age ascendancy over classical learning: The Invention of Printing has not, perhaps, multiplied Books, but only the Copies of them; and if we believe there were Six Hundred Thousand in the Library of Ptolomy, we shall hardly pretend to equal it by any of ours, nor perhaps, by all put together; I mean so many Originals that have lived any time, and thereby given Testimony of their having been thought worth preserving.84

Young would not really contest this view, which corresponds exactly with his topical complaint about the multiplication of books by imitators. He in fact sets fire to the Ptolomean and all those other libraries to show the dismal state in which the Republic of Letters finds itself: So few are our originals, that, if all other books were to be burnt, the lettered world would resemble some metropolis in flames, where a few incombustible buildings, a fortress, temple, or tower, lift their heads, in melancholy grandeur, amid the mighty ruin. (553)

The sublimity of melancholy grandeur is perhaps the most sincere feeling or thought Young is capable of, in his essay as well as in his other writings. It is of no great help in distinguishing between originals and imitations in the age of print. Oddly enough, the most 84 William Temple, “An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning,” in Spingarn, ed. Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, III: 33–34.

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original contribution of the printing press to modern discourse is a new technology of duplication that transforms literature and the arts into a medium in which the original is an effect of imitation. Without copy there would be no original. How, then, are we to distinguish between originality and imitation? Curiously, this is a question Young would not even consider. “I shall not enter into the curious inquiry of what is, or is not, strictly speaking, original” (551), he remarks somewhere at the beginning of his essay with an indifference that might astonish modern critics. However, it was hardly surprising to his contemporaries. Nowhere in the essay does Young challenge the concept of mimesis that presents all art as an imitation of nature. “Imitations are of two kinds; one of nature, one of authors: the first we call ‘originals,’ and confine the term ‘imitation’ to the second” (551), he writes in a passage that on the one hand somewhat complicates his argument but on the other integrates it within the mainstream of eighteenth-century criticism. In this sense Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition takes the same stance as the Discourse on Poetical Imitation by Richard Hurd, another doctor of divinity interested in aesthetics, who approaches the subject from the other end. He argues that all productions of creative imagination are “derived from the archetype of one common original“85 and he thus distinguishes between “original copying,” which he calls “Invention” (II: 111), and “secondary or derivative image,” which is “Imitation” (II: 113): “And here the difficulty, we are about to examine, commences,” he states, for “the reader is often at a loss [...] to discern the original from the copy” (II: 113). Just like Young he focuses on the task of genius to arrange objects and images that have already been given by nature and copied by man: In this view every wondrous original, which ages have gazed at, as the offspring of creative fancy, [...] is itself but a copy, a transcript from some brighter page of this vast volume of the universe. Thus all is derived; all is unoriginal. And the office of the genius is but to select the fairest forms of things, and to present them

85 Richard Hurd, “A Discourse on Poetical Imitation,” in Works (London, 1811; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1967), II: 131.

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in due place and circumstance, and in the richest colouring of expression, to the imagination. (II: 111)

The genius is a technician of imagination. It selects forms, puts them into their proper place, colors them. Hurd’s office of the genius is not unlike the office of Young’s compositor or that of an engraver in a print shop. Based on Locke’s philosophy the body of writings on genius and imagination in British criticism provides countless other instances of this mechanical procedure. Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Genius states: All the fine arts are, in some sense, imitative of Nature; invention in these arts, is only observing and copying Nature in a certain manner: natural objects and appearances are observed by the artist, they are conceived with distinctness and with force, their characteristical circumstances are selected, and so expressed as to imprint the whole form on the minds of others, with the like clearness and vivacity with which he himself apprehended it.86

Again we find the same mechanism: Observing, selecting, imprinting on the mind of others. In William Duff’s Essay on Original Genius we read: A Poet [...], who is possessed of original Genius, feels in the strongest manner every impression made upon the mind, by the influence of external objects on the senses, or by reflection on those ideas which are treasured up in the repository of the memory, and is consequently qualified to express the vivacity and strength of his own feelings.87

Conceived of as an archivist of images and feelings, the original genius can produce novelty only through new or even surprising combinations of images and ideas in a manner that has allowed us to compare the working of its mind to the work of a compositor: 86 Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Genius (London, 1774; rpt. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1966), 395. 87 William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767; rpt. Delmar: Scholar’s Facsimilies and Reprints, 1978), 159.

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Association is often so strong, that it bestows a sort of cohesion on several separate ideas, and makes them start up in numberless combinations, many of them different from every form which the senses have perceived; and thus produces a new creation. In this operation of the imagination, its associating power, we shall, on a careful examination, discover the origin of genius. (40– 41)

While the mechanical arrangement of ideas and words in associationist theories provides a rationale for Young’s argument, there is one important element that we have frequently alluded to in passing but to which we have not paid close attention so far: the organic metaphors Young employs to “discover the origin of genius.” Originals are organic, imitations are mechanical. This distinction will constitute the cornerstone of Romantic aesthetics, and the abundant growth of organic imagery in the Conjectures has made modern literary criticism praise Young as an early champion of Romanticism. Returning from the the caseroom at the printing press to the “sweet refuge” (550) of Young’s library, one might indeed ask whether the conjecture that the original genius is a compositor is not pressing the point too much. If the library is the place where the doctor of divinity seeks and finds consolation in “the pleasures of the pen” (550), his other pleasure spots are the “monumental marbles scattered in a wide pleasure-garden” (549) to which the door and window of his study open. Not the printing press but ancient ruins and the abundant growth of flowers seem to map out the territory on which Young stages his battle between the ancients and the moderns. In the setting of this park the original and the imitation are planted side by side and the genius loci protecting his garden is the original genius. Let us look at Young’s curious non-definition of originality in its entirety: The mind of a man of genius is a fertile and pleasant field; pleasant as Elysium, and fertile as Tempe; it enjoys a perpetual spring. Of that spring originals are the fairest flowers: imitations are of quicker growth, but fainter bloom. Imitations are of two kinds; one of nature, one of authors: the first we call “originals,” and con-

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fine the term “imitation” to the second. I shall not enter into the curious inquiry of what is, or is not, strictly speaking, original, content with what all must allow, that some compositions are more so than others; and the more they are so, I say, the better. (551)

Young might have been learned in things literary, but he does not really seem to be competent as a botanist. Plucking flowers for his herbarium, Young gathers those two species that resist easy classification and under close scrutiny turn out to be some kind of crossbreed: the original and the imitation. “Originality is seen in fact as a variant of imitation,“88 Thomas McFarland comments, or as Joel Weinsheimer justly remarks, “The Conjectures is blank at the center. Because Young omits to define the essence of originality and rests content with a comparative elucidation of the concept, we are entitled to ask whether originality has an essence [...]. If it does not, originality and imitation belong to a continuum; and it is therefore perfectly legitimate to speak of imitative originals as well as original imitations.”89 While Weinsheimer and McFarland are right in pointing out the instability of Young’s argument, their comments are also indicative of the continuum that has been constructed between Young’s mimetic stance and the Romantic discourse that will transform it. In his influential book The Mirror and the Lamp M. H. Abrams quotes what has become the most famous or notorious passage in Young’s essay. We cite his citation together with his comment: “An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made: Imitations are often a sort of manufacture wrought up by those mechanics, art, and labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own.” The passage might almost serve as a précis of Coleridge’s basic distinction, half a century later, between mechanical making and organic growth, between the

88 Thomas McFarland, Originality and Imagination (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 5. 89 Weinsheimer, “Conjectures on Unoriginal Composition,” 59–60.

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reordering of given materials by artificers like Beaumont and Fletcher, and the 90 vital emergence of an original form in the plays of Shakespeare.

While Abrams points out that Young was by no means the first to denounce the mechanical aspect of art’s artifice in favour of some innate powers that would give poetry a life of its own, he does give him credit for having employed the metaphor of the vegetable nature of genius to describe the creative process of art and poetry in an original fashion: Young’s innovation is first, in setting up the growth of a plant as the contrary of mechanical manufacture, and second, in using the plant unequivocally as the analogue for the process, and not only the product, of genial creativity. In thus transferring the emphasis to the development of a work of art, Young imports from vegetable life certain attributes destined to become important concepts in organic aesthetics. As opposed to objects which are “made” by “art and labour,” the original work is vital, it grows, spontaneously, from a root, and (by implication) unfolds its original form from within outward. (199–200)

What the passage unfolds – “(by implication)” – is a reading that has its roots already in the soil of romanticism rather than showing Young’s essay to be the ground from which an organic aesthetics could be said to grow. Ironically, Abrams’s allusion to “Coleridge’s basic distinction […] between mechanical making and organic growth” points to a text that vividly demonstrates the tangled problem of originality. This is what Coleridge writes in the notes for his lecture on Shakespeare: The form is mechanic when to on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material – as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we like wish it to retain when hardened – The organic form on the other hand is innate, it form shapes as it developes

90 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Norton, 1958), 199. Emphasis in the source.

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itself from within, and the fullness of its developement is one & the same with 91 the perfection of its outward Form.

The privileged position Coleridge assigns to the organic form is of particular interest here because the note is an almost verbatim translation from A. W. Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur. Citing and translating from Schlegel, he seems to present what Young calls “a sort of manufacture wrought up by those mechanics, art, and labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own” (552) rather than the “original form” whose “vital emergence” Abrams seeks in his lecture. Since the idea central to the distinction is not Coleridge’s intellectual property, the note can hardly be called an “organic form” that would be “arising out of the properties of the material.” Yet, it is precisely within the folds of his translation-asimitation that Coleridge tries to demonstrate how the organic “shapes as it developes itself from within.” His translation is this shaping and development. These are Schlegel’s words: “Die organische Form hingegen ist eingebohren, sie bildet von innen heraus, und erreicht ihre Bestimmtheit zugleich mit der vollständigen Entwickelung des Keimes.”92 While Coleridge follows Schlegel in the first part of the sentence, he transforms the “perfect development of the germ” into the “perfection of its outward form.” In a most literal sense, the translation “developes itself from within” in that it is an “outward form” growing from the seed of the original. Thus, Coleridge’s trans91 Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, vol. 5 of the Collected Works, ed. by R. A. Foakes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), I: 495. Further references are to this edition and will be cited as LL. 92 Cited from G. N. G. Orsini, “Coleridge and Schlegel Reconsidered,” Comparative Literature 16.2 (1964): 102. The article gives a detailed history of the controversy about Coleridge’s apparent plagiarism. Foakes, the editor of the Bollingen edition of LL, follows Orsini when he points out that the only change Coleridge makes to Schlegel’s text occurs in the passage about the shape given to “a mass of wet clay,” which translates “einer weichen Masse.” We might note that the soft mass of clay comes to retain the impression of letters from the translator’s name: Coleridge and Taylor.

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lation appears at the same time as mechanical imitation of a “predetermined form” and as an “organic form” that yields the fruit or unfolds the flower hidden in the original. Whereas Young might be said to figure in the Conjectures as a somewhat confused botanist unable to clearly distinguish the traits of the original from those of the imitation in the crossbreed he discovers in his “pleasure-garden,” Coleridge seems to fuse the two species on purpose. As he writes in another lecture on Shakespeare and his contemporaries: There have been instances in the literary world that might remind one of a Botanist of a singular sort of parasite Plant, which rises above ground, independent and unsupported, an apparent original; but trace its roots and you will find their fibres all terminating in the root of a<nother> plant at an unspuspected distance. (LL, II: 145)

The revision that turns “a plant” into “another plant” is significant. For it is not sure whether the discovery of the “singular sort of parasite Plant” leads to the registration of a distinct difference between the original and the imitation. Their roots cannot easily be disentangled, and it is hard to say which of the two concepts is parasitic. Much of Coleridge’s writing enacts the originality of origins as an effect of plagiarism and citation. In his transcendental aesthetics it becomes difficult to tell the plant from the transplant. Abrams’s effort to present the organic imagery in the Conjectures as an early bid for romanticism has to be taken with caution. The essay’s achievement lies elsewhere. George Eliot has accused Young of a “disruption of language from genuine thought,“93 and one might indeed say that the essay does little to elaborate the concepts underlying its organic imagery. But it is due to his superficial rheoric that he inadvertantly lays bare the essential monstrosity of the original genius and the unnatural nature of its “vegetable nature.” The discourse of romanticism will take great pains to transform organic originality into a self-generating system. In Young’s essay originality appears as a 93 George Eliot, “Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young,” in The Writings of George Eliot (Boston, 1907; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1970), 45.

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series of tricks in the grandiose show of a magician entering the arena of literature: The pen of an original writer, like Armida’s wand, out of a barren waste calls a blooming spring: out of that blooming spring an imitator is a transplanter of laurels, which sometimes die on removal, always languish in a foreign soil. (551)

The luxuriant garden and bower of Tasso’s wild enchantress, who in William Duff’s textbook about the original genius is compared to the witches in Macbeth,94 becomes a desolate place where spring is not the season of organic growth but rather a spell the genius casts on the reader. The bouquet of organic imagery originates in a “barren waste,” is then quickly removed to die, and is finally laid to rest in the “foreign soil” of imitation. Nature withers fast with old Young, like flowers in a herbary. His citation of Armida’s garden only illustrates that his essay is itself a very traditional florilegium where plants are removed from their native soil. In the end, the passage amounts to little more than a struggle for the laurels, and it remains unclear whether it is the genius or the imitator that puts them on his head. But most importantly, the passage points to the “barren waste” as the abode of the original genius, its native soil, its proper nature. Like the flowers that do not really grow but rather pop up suddenly by some kind of spell or decree, the genius has no natural genealogy. Although it is itself part of nature, something innate, it does not seem to be of natural parentage and it also seems that emerging from a “barren waste” it cannot procreate. The original genius is barren. This is Young’s only original insight. Kant will give it a conceptual base in his Third Critique. In his Kritik der Urteilskraft, Kant tries to stabilize the uneasy relationship between nature and art by granting aesthetic judgment a secure place among the faculties of the mind. The status it attains, 94 William Duff, Critical Observations on the Wrtings of the Most Celebrated Original Geniuses in Poetry (1770; rpt. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholar’s Reprints, 1973), 334.

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however, is one in which art is shown to have no recourse to conceptual understanding. This places the original genius as a promoter or chief executive of art in the gap opening up between theoretical understanding and practical reason. Gerard, to whom Shakespeare and Newton are the two greatest geniuses of modernity, still applies geniality to both arts and the sciences: “Genius is [...] the power of invention, either in science or in the arts, either of truth or of beauty” (318). In Kant’s Third Critique the genius is presented as a figure of aesthetics dealing mainly, or even exclusively, with arts. Aesthetic judgment deals with the beautiful, and aesthetic beauty consists in what the German language ambiguously calls der schöne Schein. Aesthetic beauty emerges as a shine, but it shines by virtue of its appearance as something that is apparent in both senses of the word. Imitating nature, “die schöne Kunst” – fine art and belles lettres – seems like a part of mere nature but is itself nothing natural. Art is merely the illusion of nature: An einem Produkte der schönen Kunst muß man sich bewußt werden, daß es Kunst sei, und nicht Natur; aber doch muß die Zweckmässigkeit in der Form desselben von allem Zwange willkürlicher Regeln so frei scheinen, als ob es ein Produkt der bloßen Natur sei. Auf diesem Gefühle der Freiheit im Spiele unserer Erkenntnisvermögen, welches doch zugleich zweckmässig sein muß, beruht diejenige Lust, welche allein allgemein mitteilbar ist, ohne sich doch auf Begriffe zu gründen. Die Natur war schön, wenn sie zugleich als Kunst aussah; und die Kunst kann nur schön genannt werden, wenn wir uns bewußt sind, sie sei Kunst, 95 und sie doch als Natur aussieht.

95 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Wilhelm Weischedel, ed. Werke (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1957), X: § 45, p. 240; emphasis added. Further references to the Third Critique will be cited in the text by paragraph and page number. The translation follows The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1991): “A product of fine art must be recognized to be art and not nature. Nevertheless the finality in its form must appear just as free from the constraint of arbitrary rules as if it were a product of mere nature. Upon this feeling of freedom in the play of our cognitive faculties – which play has at the same time to be final – rests that pleasure which aloe is universally communicable without being based on concepts. Nature proved beautiful when it

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While Kant’s presentation of art as illusion follows traditional explanations, his emphasis on a “feeling of freedom” that is free only to the extent that it is not based on rules or cognitive concepts, raises the difficult question of how these works of art can be produced at all. His answer is the original genius, and in so far as it does not produce its works according to some rule or other, the genius must be part of nature. For only nature is free from the constraints of arbitrary rules: Genie ist das Talent (Naturgabe), welches der Kunst die Regel gibt. Da das Talent, als angebornes produktives Vermögen des Künstlers, selbst zur Natur gehört, so könnte man sich auch so ausdrücken: Genie ist die angeborne Gemütsanlage (ingenium), durch welche die Natur der Kunst die Regel gibt. (§ 46, 241– 96 42)

Genius is an innate talent, something nature offers to certain artists and poets at their birth in the form of a contract. The terms of this agreement give the genius the right to produce originals freely and rule over the realm of art by setting examples that can be imitated by others that are not endowed with the same innate talent. At the same time, however, the means of production – the genius’s “innate productive faculty” – remains in the possession of nature. In other words, the original genius and its works are the exclusive property of nature. They belong to nature and as such can be neither appropriated nor alienated. Nature secures this right by not allowing the genius to grasp what it is doing. This is what Kant means when he argues in § 45 that art provides “that pleasure which alone is communicable without being based on concepts.” The genius communicates without either understanding (begreifen) or taking possession (greifen) of its own communication. wore the appearance of of art; and art can only be termed beautiful, where we are conscious of its being art, while yet it has the appearance of nature” (166–67). 96 “Genius is the talent (natural endowment) which gives the rule to art. Since talent, as an innate productive faculty of the artist, belongs itself to nature, we may put it this way: Genius is the innate mental aptitude (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art” (168).

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Listing the properties or characteristics of the genius, Kant adds to those of originality and exemplarity the inhibition to pass its talent on to someone else. The genius is an incompetent teacher, and this is why “der Urheber eines Produkts, welches er seinem Genie verdankt, selbst nicht weiß, wie sich ihm die Ideen dazu herbei finden, auch es nicht in seiner Gewalt hat, dergleichen nach Belieben oder planmäßig auszudenken, und anderen in solchen Vorschriften mitzuteilen, die sie in den Stand setzen, gleichmäßige Produkte hervorzubringen.”97 Ignorant of its own art, unable to impart knowledge, and thus, as it were, impotent to engender children in which their work would live on, the genius is appointed to die a solitary death. This is the fine print of Kant’s contract: In contrast to the scientist whose work enjoys a continuous progress, the genius suffers from a disadvantage, Weil für diese die Kunst irgendwo still steht, indem ihr eine Grenze gesetzt ist, über die sie nicht weiter gehen kann, die vermutlich auch schon seit lange her erreicht ist und nicht mehr erweitert werden kann; und überdem eine solche Geschicklichkeit sich auch nicht mitteilen läßt, sondern jedem unmittelbar von der Hand der Natur erteilt sein will, mit ihm also stirbt, bis die Natur einmal 98 einen andern wiederum eben so begabt. (§47, 244)

Kant’s employment of the original genius in the service of nature does not lead to the “eternal spring” Young phantasizes about in his essay but, rather, to death. Young was 76 when he composed his essay.

97 § 46; X: 242–43: “Hence, where an author owes a product to his genius, he does not himself know how the ideas for it have entered into his head, nor has he it in his power to invent the like at pleasure, or methodically, and communicate the same to to others in such precepts as would put them in a position to produce similar products” (169). 98 “Genius reaches a point at which art must make a halt, as there is a limit imposed upon it which it cannot transcend. This limit has in all probability been long since attained. In addition, such skill cannot be communicated, but requires to be bestowed directly from the hand of nature upon each individual, and so with him it dies, awaiting the day when nature once again endows another in the same way” (170).

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In a passage presented to praise the ultimate achievement of genius, Young points out that the human mind is boundless and can actually reach into the “vast void beyond real existence” (570). The image he conjures up to describe the “quite-original beauties we may call paradisiacal” (570) awaiting the poet and reader in that vast void are indeed a token of the horror vacui the genius creates. It is the image of Natos sine semine flores, the sterility of “flowers produced without seeds.” It shows Young’s pleasure-garden in its most desolate state. Ovid’s flowers bode ill for the supposed fertility of genius. An original author is born of himself, is his own progenitor, and will probably propagate a numerous offspring of imitators, to eternise his glory; while mulelike imitators die without issue. (569)

The remark merely produces another image of sterility and gives more life to the bastard imitator in the character of a patient mule than to the original author. Without biological parents and without a partner bound to him by love he resembles the self-reproducing machine in Wiener’s cybernetics or Frankenstein’s solitary Monster. The imitator’s death “without issue” brings us back to the mechanical printing press that works incessantly in the background of Young’s essay. The difference between the imitator and the original author is not that the former dies without offspring while the latter lives to reproduce. Only through the press can the author come into existence and in this sense become his own progenitor. And as Addison’s determination “to Print my self out, if possible, before I Die” shows, the original author must indeed propagate “numerous offspring” as the operator of the press. Printing texts he becomes part of the machine. At the centre of Young’s “pleasure-garden” stands a fountain that does not water the flowers but rather power a gigantic mechanism, “that fountain of fame (if I may so call the press)” (550). The original genius is a machine. In his Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, Hans Blumenberg retraces a forgotten chapter in the history of the relationship between mechanical and organic interpretations of the cosmic world. The machina mundi of Lucretius does not

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have the connotation of a mechanism, he points out, but denotes the universe. The middle ages have used the term ingenium to describe the mechanical and distinguish it from the machina, and engenno in Spanish or engin in French indeed mean machine in a mechanical sense. The genius, as ingenium, is an engin or machine.99 Modern technology has reinterpreted the machina as a mechanism, and Blumenberg’s remark that mechanical creations are more dependent on their engineers than organic life on its creator or parent is important in our context: “A mechanism belongs as a thing completely to the engineer that has created it” (73). This tells as much about the seventeenth and eighteenth-century imagination of man and the world as God’s perfect machine as about the construction of the genius. In Young’s essay the old meaning of ingenium as engin survives. “Genius has ever been supposed to partake of something Divine” (556), he writes, pointing out that the genius is that God within ourselves. “Sacer nobis inest Deus,” he quotes from Seneca: With regard to the moral world, conscience – with regard to the intellectual, genius – is that god within. Genius can set us right in composition without the rules of the learned, as conscience sets us right in life without the laws of the land; this, singly, can make us good, as men; that, singly, as writers, can sometimes make us great. (557–58; emphasis added)

The divine nature of genius, the magic quality that marks genius as a great writer, is intimately bound up with its mysterious power to write directly into the printing press. However, to be a great author the original genius also needs a legal system that protects its property. While ethics might rely on what Young calls conscience and Kant will define as a categorical imperative, the genius must appeal to the “laws of the land” to harvest the fruit or flowers of its fertile mind. The genius must have a copyright on its work, for there is no originality if it can be illegally reprinted.

99 Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1960), 70, 71.

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IV. Forever Young The Conjectures begins with a last confession and a signature, presenting the essay as Young’s last literary will and testament: “Dear Sir, / We confess the follies of youth without a blush; not so, those of age” (549). Young commits his name to an undertaking that promises something like eternal youth, even though he is 76 years old when he writes the essay. One year after its publication he writes another last will: “In the name of God, & my most blessed Redeemer. Amen. I write this my last Will, with my own hand, Feby the 5th 1760, in ye manner following“100 – “I begin with original composition...” (549). The juxtaposition of his last will and his literary testament is an important structural element in the essay. Young is old, but being an original he will stay young and Young forever. He in fact builds his own monument. Gazing at the “monumental marbles” in the “churchyard walk” of his imagination, the man of the church writes: “To one such monument I may conduct you, in which is a hidden lustre, like the sepulchral lamps of old; but not like those will this be extinguished, but shine the brighter for being produced, after so long concealment, into open day” (549). The essay is not a “sepulchral lamp of old,” but the lamp of Young that shines bright because something original on originality is at long last produced, printed, and thus sees the light of day. We have already mentioned that the report on Addison’s death in the second half of the essay plays an important part because it organizes the question of legacy and cultural heritage the essay deals with. “It is piously to be hoped, that this narrative may have some effect, since all listen when a death-bed speaks” (584), Young concludes his essay in a passage that seems to refer to both Addison’s and his own deathbed.101 100 The Correspondence of Edward Young, 601. 101 It is telling that Young’s death in 1765 at the age of 86 re-enacts the scene at Addison’s bed with a significant difference. The latter received his step-son to teach him how nobly a pious man can die: “Forcibly grasping the youth’s hand,

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Young’s signature and the antithetical rhetoric of his distinction between old and young are more than part of a personal agenda because they are in fact tied to the difference between the works of the moderns and ancients. On the one hand Young emphasizes, using a staple argument of the controversy, that the moderns are older than the ancients: “Though we are moderns, the world is an ancient; more ancient far than when they whom we most admire filled it with their fame” (555).102 On the other hand the ancients are constantly rejuvenated by the power of the press: The works they imitated, few excepted, are lost; they, on their fathers’ decease, enter as lawful heirs on their estates in fame: the fathers of our copyists are still in possession; and secured in it, in spite of Goths and flames, by the perpetuating power of the press. Very late must a modern imitator’s fame arrive, if it waits for their decease. (553)

The notion that the ancients are “accidental originals” has already been cited, and like the argument about the moderns as the true ancients it is an idea widely used in the debate.103 What is peculiar to he softly said, ‘See in what peace a Christian can die!’ He spoke with difficulty, and soon expired. [...] Who would not thus expire?” (581). When Young’s estranged son Frederick asked to be received at his dying father’s bed, however, he was not allowed to see him: “I have now the pleasure to acquaint you, that the late Dr Young, tho’ he had for many years kept his Son at a distance from him, yet has now last left him all his possessions, after the payment of certain legacies. [...] The Father on his death-bed [...] was applied to in the tenderest manner [...] to admit the son into his presence, to make submission, intreat forgiveness, and obtain his blessings. As to an interview wih his son, he intimated that he chose to decline it [...]. With regard to the next particular, he said, I heartily forgive him; and, upon mention of the last, he gently lifted up his hand, and, letting it gently fall, pronounced these words, God bless him” (The Correspondence of Edward Young, 593–94, letter from Young’s curate to Thomas Birch). Even in his last words Young keeps the distance that marks all of his writing. 102 Cp. Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, I: 49: “C’est nous qui sommes les Anciens.” 103 See for example Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 26: “This circumstance is often of peculiar disadvantage to modern authors; and it leads us, perhaps, to ascribe

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Young is his link with the laws regulating the inheritance of an estate as well as his notion of originality based on merit rather than birth. “After all, the first ancients had no merit in being originals: they could not be imitators. Modern writers have a choice to make, and therefore have a merit in their power. They may soar in the regions of liberty, or move in the soft fetters of easy imitation” (554). Originality becomes a matter of choice and thus of freedom, an idea that anticipates an argument advanced in Romanticism. The following remarkable passage about the status of the original genius combines Young’s notion of merit and right of birth: I have said, that some are born wise; but they, like those that are born rich, by neglecting the cultivation and produce of their own possessions, and by running in debt, may be beggared at last; and lose their reputations, as younger brothers estates, not by being born with less abilities than the rich heir, but at too late an hour. (560)

The drift of the argument is not easy to understand. The genius is a genius by birth, but while it cannot lose its talent, which is given by nature, it can lose its status if it does not properly attend to its production. At the same time, the genius cannot properly develop its talent awarded by nature if it happens to be second in succession to the estate. The first proposition emphasizes that even natural talent requires industriousness, the second points out the inequality that may arise from the incongruity that exists between the law of nature that presides over the birth of genius and the law of man that simply counts on the sequence of births. What makes the passage both difficult and remarkable is that it intricately intertwines two strands of the essay’s argument. The second part refers to the “accidental origigreater genius to the ancients, than they are entitled to. The former are accused of borrowing from their predecessors, many principles, sentiments, or images, for which they are indebted solely to their own genius. In the latter, every thing is reckoned original, because we know not, who had occupied it before. We can form no objection against the oldest authors extant, for the works of those who wrote before them, are long since lost.”

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nality” of the ancients that may deprive the modern genius of its success. The first part breaks with the stereotype, to be found throughout the essay, that natural talent would be something stable. The passage skillfully uses the metaphor of the estate to drive home its point. The genius is both a member of the landed gentry and must work hard to keep its estate in order and to produce the agricultural “produce” – that is to say, the books – that reap its success. Young thus combines the aristocratic notion of an estate and the notion of a meritocracy based on labor that constitute a shift in the discourse on copyright and intellectual property in the second half of the eighteenth century. Young was one of the first authors to establish a link between genius and intellectual property.104 His concern for ownership, mani104 We have already referred to the article by Gerhard Plumpe, “Eigentum–Eigentümlichkeit: Über den Zusammenhang ästhetischer und juristischer Begriffe im 18. Jahrhundert,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 23.2 (1979): 175–96. The first comprehensive study in the relationship between genius and copyright is the pioneering book by Heinrich Bosse, Autorschaft ist Werkherrschaft: Über die Entstehung des Urheberrechts aus dem Geist der Goethezeit (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1981). See also his article “Autorisieren. Ein Essay über Entwicklungen heute und seit dem 18. Jahrhundert,” LiLi. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 11 (1981): 120–34. In both works Young opens the discussion. Drawing on Bosse’s book, the influential essay by Martha Woodmansee, “The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author’,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 17.4 (1984): 425–48, has helped to initiate the recent debate on copyright in American and English critical and legal discourse. See pp. 430–31 and p. 446 for references to the Conjectures. Woodmansee mainly discusses German sources, which is certainly justified with regard to Young. While his essay didn’t attract much critical attention in his own country, the 1760 translation by H. E. von Teubern added to the immense popularity he already enjoyed in Germany as the poet of the Night-Thoughts. See Gerhard Sauder’s edition of Gedanken über die Original-Werke (Leipzig, 1760; rpt. Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert und Schneider, 1977), with documents on the contemporary German reception on pp. 67–158. There has been a peculiar rediscovery of Young’s essay in twentieth-century Anglo-American criticism through Herder, Kant, Lavater, and German ideologies of the genius. The main German sponsor of Young as a poet was Klopstock; see Young’s letters to him in

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fest throughout the essay, is also based on personal experience. In 1741, Edmund Curll – one of English literature’s most notorious booksellers and the winner of the infamous pissing contest in Pope’s Dunciad – published an unauthorized edition of his collected works. Although the evidence is not quite clear (there is a letter from Young to Curll, in which he writes, “I heartily wish you all success in yt undertakg“) the texts were printed without his supervision and corrections and deprived him of some of the proceeds from his work.105 Young was also involved in three cases of piracy when his NightThoughts were reprinted by Alexander Donaldson in 1743, 1744, and 1749 respectively, on which occasions the receipts for his sale of copyright to Dodsley and Millar were used as testimonies in the trials.106 Also the other two originals authors and friends that have a hand in the composition and narrative of the Conjectures were victims of pirates.

Correspondence, no. 387, 389, 406, 435. One might indeed say that Young is in many respects some kind of German author. 105 See Correspondence, 74–76 for the letters to Curll. In 1717 Young fell out with Curll over the publication of a poem by Newcomb that he had recommended for publication. His subsequent denial of having passed on the poem for publication provoked Curll to state publicly that Young was “pleas’d to deny his own hand.” On this altercation see Correspondence, 7, 10–15. While Curll’s remark about Young’s denial of his own hand is not an altogether inaccurate description of his behavior in advertising the work of others and his own, or indeed of his insincerity as a writer in general, the notes in Correspondence show that Curll clearly manipulated Young’s hand in this as well as in the later case of his unauthorized edition of Young’s work. We might in this context note that in the same year Curll published an unauthorized edition of Swift’s correspondence, containing also letters to and from Pope, who successfully sued Curll under the Statute of Anne. See Mark Rose, “The Author in Court: Pope v. Curll (1741),” in Woodmansee and Jaszi, eds. The Construction of Authorship, 211–29. Curll is scorned by Young in his Epistles to Mr. Pope, Concerning the Authors of the Age in a couplet where “injured purse” rhymes with “nor Curll can wish them worse” (ll. 285–86). 106 The receipts are printed in Correspondence, 597–98.

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The printing of Sir Charles Grandison had to be interrupted in 1753 when a group of Irish booksellers advertised a publication of the novel in Dublin,107 necessitating an extensive revision of the text in order to make it an original composition again. “The patriarch of his print works, Richardson is also sole progenitor of his texts,“108 Terry Eagleton writes in terms that echo the passage from the Conjectures claiming that the “original author is born of himself, is his own progenitor.” But as Eagleton continues, “Yet texts, like apprentices, may be wayward and insubordinate, subject to piracy and rape; the phrase master printer has an oxymoronic ring to it, suggesting authority over the perpetually insubordinate, proprietorship of that which is nobody’s property” (9–10). It is indeed ironic that Richardson’s successful solicitation of a law patent gave him an exclusive right to print the kind of legal texts that failed to protect the copyright on his own novels.109 As to Addison, his desire “to Print my self out, if possible, before I Die” also has to be read against the background of eighteenthcentury piracy. In his Tatler he bitterly complains about the fact that “All Mechanick Artizans are allowed to reap the Fruit of their Invention and Ingenuity without Invasion” while an author that “has an Ambition to communicate the Effect of half his Life spent in [...] noble Enquiries, has no Property in what he is willing to produce, but is exposed to Robbery and Want.”110 In 1759 – the very year in which the Conjectures shows Addison on his deathbed, bequeathing the 107 Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 116. 108 Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 9. 109 However, as Eaves and Kimpel point out in Samuel Richardson, 507, “there was some dispute about what rights it gave to print those [books] dealing with statute law.” Existing copyright laws were statutory, and Eaves and Kimpel report on a controversy over Richardson’s right to print a quarto edition of the Statutes at Large, 508–09. 110 Addison, The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), no. 101. Addison’s critique of the booktrade is discussed along with that by Defoe in Rose, Authors and Owners, 34–41.

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legacy of the original genius to Young and posterity – the London bookseller Tonson, who had bought the copyright on the Spectator, sued a Scottish bookseller for illegally reprinting the journal.111 If the Conjectures can be said to engage in the last attacks fought in the Battle of the Books, its is also clear that Young is maneuvering to take a stand in what Patterson has called the Battle of the Booksellers.112 In this battle the writer is actually only some kind of soldier on foot fighting under the fire of the heavy artillery in the clash between the London booksellers and the provincial pirates. The booksellers virtually enjoyed a monopoly and permanent copyright until the landmark case of Donaldson v. Becket came before the House of Lords in 1774. Printing had long been regulated by royal privilege granted to institutions such as the university presses since the 1557 charter of Queen Mary, issued by the Stationer’s Company that regulated the trade and thus protected the interest of the booksellers, also enacting a subtle form of censorship. Only members of the Stationer’s Company were authorized to give the imprimatur and then actually print a work. One of them was Samuel Richardson, whose epistolary novels are indeed also printed to police the behavior and conduct among the sexes. Yet, he was quick in recognizing that Young’s appeal to censorship in his opening remark about admitting only those works to the press which “brought their imprimatur from sound understanding, and the public good,” was potentially dangerous to both the author and his printer. In the manuscript submitted to his scrutiny the passage read: “‘If legal authority stands centinel, &c.,” which Richardson first modifies into “If legal authority were to stand centinel at the press,” and later – because the subject could “give offence to the liberty-mad” – leads him to order the centinel to with-

111 See Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), 165–67, and Mark Rose, Authors and Owners, 74–75. 112 Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective, 151–79. Cp. Rose, Authors and Owners, 67–91 for a survey of the same period between 1710 and 1774.

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draw altogether.113 Not censorship but copyright must protect the genius. Only in pursuing originality, Young consequently argues, the poet can secure his intellectual property by the authority of his authorship: His works will stand distinguished; his the sole property of them; which property alone can confer the noble title of an author; that is, of one who, to speak accurately, thinks and composes; while other invaders of the press, how voluminous and learned soever, […] only read and write. (565)

As Rose has pointed out, Young’s emphasis on the nobility of the author “invokes the ancient feudal linkage between real estate and aristocracy [...]. Thus ‘author’ becomes analogous to ‘baron’ or ‘earl,’ an honorific title grounded in authenticity and originality.”114 Young was very sensitive to honors and titles, but as we have seen, while his essay keeps coming back to the metaphor of the estate to describe the original genius as a member of the landed gentry, he also describes the property of the author-genius in terms of a concept of labor. The 1709 Statute of Anne had been designed to define intellectual property. Like all the licensing acts before it was not an author’s copyright, but it limited the period of the copyright the booksellers assumed wen buying a manuscript to fourteen years or, if the author was then still alive, to a maximum of twenty-eight years. Because one clause stipulated that the statute did not extend to university presses or “any person” with a legitimate right to reprint a book, nothing much changed until 1769 and 1773 when finally the provincial booksellers brought their cause before a tribunal. What is of interest here is not the legal quibbles that attended their battle but the argument advanced by the two parties. The limit imposed by the statute assimilated copyright to the letter patent on an invention, and the statute was clearly dictated by the spirit of progress in the sciences and mechanical arts prevalent in the years around 1700. As we have seen, philosophers writing on 113 See Correspondence, 445 and 485. 114 Rose, Authors and Owners, 118.

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the genius like Gerard retained the notion that scientific and aesthetic production are essentially the same: “Genius is [...] the power of invention, either in science or in the arts.” Inventio is the equivalent in classical rhetoric to what the moderns call originality, but the use made of it by Gerard and written into law by the Statute of Anne do not seem to account for the difference in the nature of the objects that are produced in the process. A mechanical invention is a tool that seems to be relatively independent of its maker, while artistic productions seem to be tightly related to, and controlled by, the personality of their authors. In the preceding section of this chapter we have seen that Blumenberg makes a convincing case that exactly the opposite was considered true before the advent of modernity. The London booksellers, in arguing that copyright is a permanent right of the author or his assignee grounded in the artist’s person, actually created an author persona that had no real existence but that was beginning to arouse the imagination of professional writers. As Rose writes in his important essay on the case of Donaldson v. Becket that eventually decided in favor of a limited copyright in 1774: “Putting it baldly, and exaggerating for the sake of clarity, it might be said that the London booksellers invented the modern author, constructing him as a weapon in their struggle with the booksellers of the provinces.”115 While the Londoners focused on the author’s common-law right, declaring authorship to be a personal right, the provincial booksellers emphasized that a book was merely an object, defining ownership as the right in a thing. These two aspects are interlocked in Lockean philosophy. The recent debate about intellectual property has rightly emphasized the impact of Locke’s definition of private property on the development of modern ideas about authorship and copyright legislation. His Two Treatises of Government, published in 1698, indeed brought about a momentous change in eighteenth century political philosophy and legal discourse by initiating a shift away from the 115 Rose, “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship,” in Brad Sherman and Alain Strowel, eds. Of Authors and Origins: Essays on Copyright (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 30.

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traditional Roman concept of property based on occupatio, the physical appropriation of things or land, to a definition of property as the product of labor, that is to say, as the formation of an object. While theories of occupancy claimed that property is a product of social contracts and thus focused on the question of distribution, Locke argues that the creation of private property constitutes a natural law antecedent to social conventions. While the former places emphasis on the power of the state and crown, the latter grounds property in individual labor and diligence as the source of man’s freedom. Written in response to the Revolution of 1688, the Two Treatises thus laid the foundation for the rise of capitalism.116 This is Locke’s famous paragraph initiating the fundamental change in the direction of modern thought on property, law, and economics: Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by his labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men.117

The success of Locke’s conception of property consists in his discovery that what he calls “person” can be defined through what he calls “property” and that “labour” establishes the bond between them. In the process of establishing this relationship the act of labor at once 116 In addition to the works discussed by Peter Laslett in the introduction to his edition of Locke’s work, see the comprehensive presentation of a history of property in Manfred Brocker, Arbeit und Eigentum: Der Paradigmenwechsel in der neuzeitlichen Eigentumstheorie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992) and the highly speculative but lucid book by Gunnar Heinsohn, Privateigentum, Patriarchatm Geldwirtschaft: Eine sozialtheoretische Rekonstruktion zur Antike (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984). 117 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Second Treatise, § 27, pp. 287–88.

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appropriates the object it forms and puts, as it were, something of the person into this form. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right will present the dynamics of this process as the dialectics of appropriation and alienation mediated or synthesized by the free will of the subject. While the subject is limited by the objects around it, those objects also define – both de–fine and un–limit – the subject that puts its will into them as a free subject. After Locke, property can be conceived of as an exclusive right in things or land because the personal right that makes this concept work pertains to the inviolable freedom of body and mind needed to work and thus create private property. It is in this sense that the two positions taken in the battle of the booksellers – the one that a book is a thing, and the other that a book is the expression of personal ideas – can be merged. But in what sense can intellectual property be either appropriated or alienated? How ist it possible to own language or letters, which are by necessity in the public domain? These are legitimate questions to ask, and they are of course the very questions raised in the eighteenth century debate. Mediated through Martha Woodmansee’s article on genius and copyright, a large number of scholars have turned to Fichte’s 1791 essay on the illegality of reprinting, “Beweis der Unrechtmässigkeit des Büchernachdrucks,” for an answer. While the content of a book can be appropriated, Fichte argues, the form of this content remains elusive to anyone trying to take possesion of it. As Woodmansee writes: “In his central concept of the ‘form’ taken by a thought – that which it is impossible for another person to appropriate – Fichte solves the philosophical puzzles to which the defenders of piracy had recurred, and establishes the grounds upon which the writer could lay claim to ownership of his work – could lay claim, that is, to authorship.”118 In this view, what Rose calls a construction of the modern author by the booksellers suddenly seems to materialize. However, Fichte’s distinction does not really solve the “philosophical puzzles“; it actually creates them. This is what Fichte writes in the passage Woodmansee refers to: 118 Martha Woodmansee, “The Genius and the Copyright,” 445.

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Alles, was wir uns denken sollen, müssen wir uns nach der Analogie unserer übrigen Denkart denken; und bloss durch dieses Verarbeiten fremder Gedanken, nach der Analogie unserer Denkart, werden sie die unsrigen: ohne dies sind sie etwas Fremdartiges in unserem Geiste, das mit nichts zusammenhängt und auf nichts wirkt. [...] Da nun reine Ideen ohne sinnliche Bilder sich nicht einmal denken, vielweniger andern darstellen lassen, so muss freilich jeder Schriftsteller seinen Gedanken eine gewisse Form geben, und kann ihnen keine andere geben als die seinige, weil er keine andere hat; aber er kann durch die Bekanntmachung seiner Gedanken gar nicht Willens seyn, auch diese Form gemein zu machen: denn niemand kann seine Gedanken sich zueignen, ohne dadurch, dass er ihre Form verändere. Die letztere also bleibt auf immer sein ausschliessliches Eigentum.119

On closer scrutiny it becomes clear that the ground on which Fichte’s idea of intellectual property rests is unstable. The first part of the passage cited shows that thinking, if we grant that it never happens in a void, always performs an act of appropriation. There is always something foreign, “etwas Fremdartiges,” in which thinking originates, and the labor of thinking that makes them our own, “dieses Verarbeiten fremder Gedanken,” has this foreignness as its substance. The activity of thinking works through and alters this foreignness to trans:form it into the property of one’s own ideas or concepts. It is important to note that this act of originary appropriation is analogous, 119 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Beweis der Unrechtmässigkeit des Büchernachdrucks,” in Werke, ed. Immanuel Hermann Fichte (Berlin, 1846; rpt. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), VIII: 227–28. “All that we think we must think according to the analogy of our other habits of thought; and solely through reworking new thoughts after the analogy of our habitual thought processes do we make them our own. Without this they remain something foreign in our minds, which connects with nothing and affects nothing. [...] Now, since pure ideas without sensible images canot be thought, much less are they capable of represetation to others. Hence, each writer must give his thoughts a certain form, and he can give them no other form than his own because he has no other. But neither can he be willing to hand over this form in making his thoughts public, for no one can appropriate his thoughts without thereby altering their form. This latter thus remains forever his exclusive property” (“Proof of the Illegality of Reprinting,” translated by Woodmansee, 445).

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to use Fichte’s term, to the illegal appropriation someone might be tempted to perform. The forma formans Fichte speaks of, the formation of the form, is at once the essence that makes something our own property and the very essence that resists its alienation. The form appropriates and at the same time cannot itself be appropriated. This is the new puzzle Fichte’s essay introduces. Another piece in the puzzle is the implication that the exclusivity of the form prevents its proper communication to others. When Fichte argues that the author does not want to make his form public – he is “gar nicht Willens [...], auch diese Form gemein zu machen” – it is also implied that the author cannot bring across what belongs only to him, even if he wanted to. His originality cannot be accessed by others, which on the one hand protects it as the author’s property, but on the other also prevents the representation of its unique quality. The problem we face is one that will preoccupy Romanticism in the endless reconstruction of fictitious origins, in all the revision of its visions, and in the fragment as one of its major forms. In a passage immediately preceding the one cited above, Fichte writes that the material components of a book can be appropriated and its contents learned. But the form of thinking remains untouched: “Was aber schlechterdings nie jemand sich zueignen kann, weil dies pyhisch unmöglich bleibt, ist die Form dieser Gedanken, die Ideenverbindung, in der, und die Zeichen, mit denen sie vorgetragen werden” (227).120 The passage means, to be sure, that plagiaries cannot copy the author’s property. But strictly speaking, Fichte’s claim that never anyone – “nie jemand” – can appropriate a particular form of thinking also refers to the author himself. He can never really own the thoughts, ideas, or signs of his writing. There is always a factor of foreignness in property, as Fichte’s “Ich” or “I” can only be laboriously concluded from its opposition to a “Nicht-Ich” or “Not-I.”

120 “But what no one can ever appropriate, because it is physically impossible, is the form of these thoughts, the connection of ideas, and the signs by which they are represented.”

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The dozen or more versions of his Wissenschaftslehre published between 1794 and 1812 testify to this instability. Fichte’s essay with its notion of Verarbeiten introduces the Lockean scenario of the proprietor as laborer into German idealism. Its sense of demarcation and the move of positing property through negation does not fully account for the problems authors faced in the age of piracy. While it can be argued that the invention of the press rendered the idea of authorship an effect of print, the heated debate on the illegality of reprinting also shows that the power of textual or literal authority actually diminishes with the advent of modern technological means of reproduction. It diminishes not so much because the mass production of printed matter introduced a plurality of opinions competing for some measure of authority, which is to be considered only as a contingent effect of quantity, but it decreased mainly because the public market of publications functions according to the principle of a division of labor. This is true for any market economy, and the business of authors trading their work for recognition, admiration, or respect paid in the form of an honorarium or royalties is no exception. Before the advent of desktop publishing, the author wrote and the publisher printed, and the questions of copyright and intellectual property became a prominent issue in the eighteenth century precisely because the authors did not have sufficient authority or control over their work. The bookseller or printer made their work also his work, and in this sense publishing a work is a joint venture in which many a pirate was planning an unfriendly takeover. The division of labor in the writing and printing of a work raises the question of who is actually talking. Until the end of the eighteenth century spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and typographical layout were considered the domain of the printer, who owned the letters or the type and did not easily tolerate authorial interference in those matters.121 Who is the author of such a work written, as it were, by 121 Roger Lonsdale’s preface to his edition of The Poems of Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith (London: Longman, 1969), xiii–xviii is still a good introduction to the problems attending editorial and printers’ conventions. With regard to the significance of typography and Young’s Night Thoughts, see Nicolas Barker, “Typo-

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several hands? The emergence of the original genius touches on this crucial question, and the debate about copyright is primarily concerned with a redistribution of the rights pertaining to the author’s and the printer’s respective labor. Contrary to Fichte, who primarily considers reprinting with regard to the work, Kant’s 1763 essay on the illegality of reprinting, “Von der Unrechtmäßigkeit des Büchernachdrucks,” tries to solve the legal questions surrounding the problem of piracy by sorting out the different voices of the author and the publisher.122 “In einem Buche als Schrift redet der Autor zu seinem Leser; und der, welcher sie gedruckt hat, redet durch seine Exemplare nicht für sich selbst, sondern ganz und gar im Namen des Verfassers.”123 The printer appears as a mere transmitter of an author’s word. He does not speak in his own voice but on behalf of the author, and in this sense he is mute. At the same time, however, he creates “in seinem eigenen Namen das stumme Werkzeug der Überbringung einer Rede des Autors an das Publikum” (81).124 Distinguishing what the graphy and the Meaning of Words: The Revolution in the Layout of Boks in the Eighteenth Century,” in Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian, eds. Buch und Buchhandel in Europa im achtzehnten Jahrhundert / The Book and the Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1981), 134: “The problem is – who is responsible? Was it just the compositor ‘following copy,’ or following a house style? Or was the layout dictated, even drawn out, by another hand, the author, the master-printer, or someone else?” 122 On Kant’s doubts about the Lockean concept of property and contemporary positions, see Brocker, Arbeit und Eigentum, 309–11, 378–83. See also the section on private laws in Kant’s Metaphysik der Sitten / Metaphysics of Morals and his drafts in vol. XXIII of Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1955), 273–336. 123 Immanuel Kant, “On the Illegality of Reprinting Books,” in vol. 8 of Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (Berlin and Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1923), 80. Subsequent references to the essay will be cited in the text. “In a book, which is a form of writing, the author speaks to his reader. The publisher, who prints it, does not speak in his own voice through the copies he has printed but exclusively in the name of the author.” 124 “in his own name the mute instrument for the transmission of a speech addressed to the public by the author.”

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publisher or printer does in his own name from what he does in the name of the author, Kant arrives at the following conclusion: Das Exemplar, wornach der Verleger drucken läßt, ist ein Werk des Autors (opus) und gehört dem Verleger, nachdem er es im Manuscript oder gedruckt erhandelt hat, gänzlich zu, um alles damit zu thun, was er will, und was in seinem eigenen Namen gethan werden kann; denn das ist ein Erforderniß des vollständigen Rechts an einer Sache, d. i. des Eigenthums. Der Gebrauch aber, den er davon nicht anders als nur im Namen eines Andern (nämlich des Verfassers) machen kann, ist ein Geschäft (opera), das dieser Andere durch den 125 Eigenthümer des Exemplars treibt […]. (84)

While the author retains the power of addressing the public in his own voice, only the publisher can claim the title of proprietor. He is “Eigenthümer des Exemplars,” the proprietor of the manuscript from which the book is printed, and he thus properly, in a material and legal sense, owns the author’s work. How are we to understand the author’s exclusion from his work if, as Kant so vividly emphasizes, the presence of his voice is the condition for the printer’s silent operation? Curiously, the author remains the sole subject of his utterance at the price of selling out to the publisher who reproduces his utterance as an object in his possession. The author is at once given a voice and muted by the publisher. He is granted an authority and exempted from the exemplars of his own work. Kant’s give and take works according to an economy based on his distinction between Sachenrecht (ius reale), persönliches Recht (ius personale), and what he calls dinglichpersönliches Recht (ius realiter personale). He elaborates this distinction in the first part of his Metaphysik der Sitten, inserting a

125 “The copy from which the publisher prints is a work of the author (opus), and it exclusively belongs to the publisher once he has purchased or printed the manuscript. He can do with it as he pleases and put it to whatever use he can in his own name, for this is a requisite of having complete right over an object, that is to say, property. However, the use made of it on behalf of someone else (i.e. the author) is a transaction (opera) which that other person carries out through the proprietor of the copy.”

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special paragraph on the question of the book, “Was ist ein Buch?”,126 where he argues that the book as a thing belongs to the ius reale while as utterance it is at the same time governed by the ius personale. His warning not to confuse those two realms of jurisdiction cannot forestall Hegel’s critique that he is in fact the instigator of a “disorderly intermixture of rights” that confuse (kunterbunt zu vermischen) categories that do not belong together: “Objektiv ist ein Recht aus dem Vertrage nicht ein Recht an eine Person, sondern nur an ein ihr Äußerliches oder etwas von ihr zu Veräußerndes, immer an eine Sache.”127 What, then, is a book? Is it a mute thing or is it utterance? Kant’s essay is most pertinent to this question precisely because it creates the confusion it seeks to sort out. Sketched out twelve years before the Metaphysik der Sitten, his argument hinges on the difficult distinction between opus (the work), and opera (the act of utterance). As we have seen, the opus is a thing that can be both appropriated and alienated, which affects the publisher when he buys a manuscript to print it or, respectively, when a pirate usurps his right by printing an unauthorized edition. The status of the author is the same in both instances. His right over the utterance the publisher or pirate mutely conveys is grounded in his person or personality and as such cannot be alienated. However, as we have also seen, this precludes that he can properly own the reproduction of his utterance. He has no copyright, and Kant rigorusly argues that it is in fact the essence of works of art that they can be copied: Kunstwerke als Sachen können […] nach einem Exemplar derselben, welches man rechtmäßig erworben hat, nachgeahmt, abgeformt und die Copien derselben öffentlich verkehrt werden, ohne daß es der Einwilligung des Urhebers ihres Originals […] bedürfe. Eine Zeichnung, die jemand entworfen, oder durch einen andern hat in Kupfer stechen, oder in Stein, Metall, oder Gips ausführen lassen, 126 Kant, “What is a Book?“, Metaphysik der Sitten, vol. 8 of Werke, 404–06. 127 G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 99 and 100. “Objectively considered, a right arising from a contract is never a right over a person, but only a right over something external to a person or something which he can alienate, always a right over a thing” (39–40).

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kann von dem, der dieses Producte kauft, abgedruckt oder abgegossen und so öffentlich verkehrt werden; so wie alles, was jemand mit seiner Sache in seinem eignen Namen verrichten kann, der Einwilligung eines andern nicht bedarf. (85– 128 86)

Originality in and as a thing can be copied. Kant’s focus on the plastic arts is embedded in two competing eighteenth-century notions about statues, engravings, and similar objects. Some consider fine art to be a mechanical art, others argue that unlike the mass production of books they are independent works of art rather than multiplications of identical copies since each copy changes the form of the original. A printed text, however, is not a copy in the sense of an imitation but an Exemplar, as Kant puts it, of the original work. Addison, as we have seen, sees the revolution brought about by the publishing industry precisely in its capacity to present something like original copies. We have already quoted from his Spectator essay on the exemplary originality of books and might here add what he says about the economic effect of a duplication of originals: The Circumstance which gives Authors an Advantage above all these great Masters, is this, that they can multiply their Originals; or rather can make Copies of their Works, to what Number they please, which shall be as valuable as the Originals themselves. This gives a great Author something like a Prospect of Eternity, but at the same time deprives him of those other Advantages which artists meet with. The Artist finds greater Returns in Profit, as the Author in Fame. What an inestimable Price would a Virgil or a Homer, a Cicero or an Aristotle bear, were their Works like a Statue, a Building, or a Picture, to be 129 confined only in one Place, and made the Property of a single Person?

128 “Works of art, considered as objects, can be imitated and copied from a copy that one has lawfully purchased, and those copies can be sold to the public without the consent of the author of the original. A sketch that someone has made or that someone else appointed by him has engraved or executed in stone, metal, or clay can again be copied or recast and then be sold by someone that buys that production. In fact, nothing that can be done to one’s own object in one’s own name needs the formal consent of anyone else.” 129 Addison, The Spectator, no. 166, II: 154.

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Although the original does not lose its proper value in the process of printing, the books issued by the press lose in market value due to the output of a high number of copies. In the age of mechanical reproduction, originality is no longer a question of scarcity. This makes the problem of piracy and plagiarism such a sensitive issues, as we can see when we compare the passage in the Spectator with the entry on “Imprimerie” in the Encyclopédie: L’avantage que les auteurs ont sur ces grands maîtres, vient de ce qu’on peut multiplier leurs écrits, en tirer, en renouveller sans-cesse le nombre d’exemplaires qu’on désire, sans que les copies les cedent en valeur aux originaux. Que ne payeroit-on pas d’un Virgile, d’un Horace, d’un Homere, d’un Cicéron, d’un Platon, d’un Aristote, d’un Pline, si leurs ouvrages étoient confinés dans un seul lieu, ou entre les mains d’une personne, comme peut l’être une 130 statue, un édifice, un tableau?

It is not surprising that the unauthorized translation printed in the Encyclopédie omits Addison’s point that the (re)printed author is deprived of his profit. Addison’s vision of a book held in one place and retained as the property of one single person materializes in the printer’s name and place of publication on the title page. Kant’s essay gives this vision a legal foundation. Books are different from other works of art, we remember, in that the publisher or printer does not speak in his own name but on behalf of the author as another person. Reprinting an unauthorized edition, the pirate violates that other voice and name: “Denn es ist ein Widerspruch: eine Rede in seinem Namen zu halten, die doch […] die Rede eines andern sein soll” (86).131 This is where a lacuna opens up in Kant’s argument. Why should the relationship between the pirate and the author be any different from that between 130 “Imprimerie,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers (Neuchâtel: Samuel Faulche, 1754), VIII: 609. 131 “For there is a contradiction if someone speaks in his own name, while it is in fact the speech of someone else.”

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the authorized publisher and the author? The pirate does not infringe upon the rights of the author, as the passage cited seems to suggest, but rather on those assumed by the printer. For we remember that the publisher too acts in his own name, creating “in his own name the mute instrument (das stumme Werkzeug) for the transmission of a speech addressed to the public by the author ” (81). Both the author’s and the printer’s name appear on the title page, and like the author Kant’s publisher can claim to perform an action in his own name, an unassailable and inalienable opera grounded in his person. But what is this personal action? It is, precisely, his reproduction of the original opus as several identical opera. The essay concludes with the mute difference between the singular opera and the many opera it prints as originals: Der Grund also, warum alle Kunstwerke anderer zum öffentlichen Vertrieb nachgemacht, Bücher aber, die schon ihre eingesetzten Verleger haben, nicht nachgedruckt werden dürfen, liegt darin: daß die erstern Werke (opera), die zweiten Handlungen (operae) sind, davon jene als für sich selbst existirende Dinge, diese aber nur in einer Person ihr Dasein haben können. Folglich kommen diese letztern der Person des Verfassers ausschließlich zu; und derselbe hat daran ein unveräußerliches Recht (ius personalissimum) durch jeden andern immer 132 selbst zu reden. (86)

Books are different from other works of art because they are at once things that can be copied and acts of an utterance whose originality and singularity consists in the power to bring forth and appropriate its own copies. Kant’s emphasis that the author expresses himself – his self – through all the others that may speak on his behalf cannot quite suppress the notion that the identity of the self is in fact constituted by 132 “The reason why other people’s works of art can be copied for public sale while books that have their appointed publishers must not be reprinted is this: the former are works (opera) that all have their own proper existence, the latter are actions (operae) that have their existence only in and through a person. From this follows that the latter pertain exclusively to the person of the author, who has a right over them that cannot be alienated (ius personalissimum) and on whose force he always speaks himself through others.”

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others. Romantic authorship will act out this tension by shifting the emphasis on the otherness or estrangement of the self. To the philosopher writing in the 1780s it is important to stress the possibility of a continuity between the self and the other that also and foremost includes the status and stature of the author as a model to be imitated. He has a right to this, and as Kant reiterates in a footnote to the question of the author’s ownership it is, as a ius personalissimum, an innate or indigenous right, “kein Recht in der Sache, nämlich dem Exemplar […], sondern ein angebornes Recht in seiner eignen Person” (86).133 Only the contract between the author and the publisher makes the continuity and dissemination of the author’s voice possible and gives it the desired permanence: This is the insight at which Kant’s essay arrives. While the former lends the book resulting from this alliance the force of authorship, the latter secures its claim to ownership. In this sense, the author and the publisher make an ideal pair. Just as the author’s right is innate, “ein angebornes Recht,” the genius is presented in Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft as “innate mental aptitude.” In his Metaphysik der Sitten, Kant refers to the ancient notion of the genius as a tutelary spirit presiding over the house or oikos.134 If one were to think of ownership as an exclusive right over things, Kant argues, one would have to refer any unfounded claim to authorship to the spirit of a guardian genius that “gleich einem die Sache begleitenden und vor allem fremden Angriff bewahrenden Genius, den fremden Besitzer immer an mich weise.”135 Bizarre as this imagination may be, in the collaboration of author and printer it materializes. The true genius is a compositor. 133 “not a right grounded in the object, that is to say the copy [...], but an innate right grounded in his person.” 134 For a detailed history of the genius in ancient mythology and its impact on mythic conceptions of authorship in modernity, see Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Genius: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte antiker Mythologeme in der Goethezeit (München: Beck, 1978). 135 Kant, Werke, VIII: 371. “Like a genius that would accompany an object, protect it from being touched by any stranger, and that would thus always refer unauthorized persons claiming possession back to myself.”

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There is a good deal of irony in the fact that the professional writers of the time only provided the backdrop for the arguments deployed by the booksellers in their battle for copyright. The booksellers employed them in their service as they had always done, and it is significant that authors like Johnson did not buy into their rhetoric and instead favored a limited copyright for a variety of reason, not least because a strict enforcement of the Statute would give them a financial advantage. Although Young did not live to witness the outcome of the battle of the booksellers, his stance is similar. We have already commented on his concern about the problem of a perpetual reprinting of classical authors, whose work was exempt from the Statute of Anne, and we have also seen that his stature as a pioneer in the question of originality and modern authorship is coupled with an aristocratic view that receives its orientation from the system of patronage in which Young grew up as an author. Even if patronage and modern authorship defined as ownership differ widely with regard to their political implications, the practice of the booksellers cashing in on the original geniuses they printed may have minimized the difference in the view of some authors. Money is what connects the two systems, and while Young was born too early to see a an author’s copyright come into effect, he lived and wrote in time to witness the transformation of the Republic of Letters into a mercenary organization. Money is in fact one of the guiding metaphors in the essay. Young certainly heard the rhyme of minting in printing. It pays off to be an original genius. This is not the least valuable insight Young makes in his essay. “Virgil and Horace owed their divine talents to Heaven, their imortal works to men: thank Maecenas and Augustus for them. Had it not been for these, the genius of those poets had lain buried in their ashes” (562–63). While the ancients could rely on the support of the rich and the powerful, the eighteenthcentury men of letters turned their attention to preferment or the publishing industry. “Thoughts, when too common, should lose their currency; and we should send new metal to the mint, that is, new meaning to the press” (552). Young’s remark not only connects printing and minting with regard to the profit authors may reap from 125

the publication of their books, but also indicates an affinity between an ancient and a modern form of reproduction that in the eighteenth century became one of the most important cultural issues. An important passage in the essay points to the change it might bring about in modern notions of genius. Imitators must travel far and wide in search of appropriate material for their work. While they “must visit the remote and rich ancients,” the moderns lead a more sedentary life: But an inventive genius may safely stay at home; that, like the widow’s cruse, is divinely replenished from within, and affords us a miraculous delight. Whether our own genius be such or not, we diligently should inquire, that we may not go a-begging with gold in our purse; for there is a mine in man, which must be deeply dug ere we can conjecture its contents. (562)

Although the replenishment “from within” still echoes the organic growth of an original work from within, the passage translates organicism into an almost baroque allegory of the genius as a miner. The heart of the original genius is a purse filled with gold, and while Kant insists on the notion that genius is an innate talent, a gift from nature, it here appears as an income that is “organic” only in the sense that it can be generated by the diligent inquirer or worker. The essay’s emphasis on the quality of genius as some kind of birthmark finds in this passage a counterbalance that is of particular importance to Young. For it is no coincidence that the passage about the mine cites the title of his essay. The reader must deeply dig into the Conjectures to get at the contents of the purse it constitutes. The modern author will find “a mine” in himself if he can make what he writes, composes, and prints his own property – “mine.” The monetary metaphors that accompany the organic analogies throughout the essay also point to what we have called the sterility of the original genius. Aristotle’s doctrine that money should not grow or bear children, that is to say interest, has a long history in Western thought. In Young’s essay money appears to be something like Ovid’s Natos sine semine flores, the “flowers produced without seeds” which Young cites to describe the “quite-original beauties we may call paradisiacal” (570). One wonders why they should be the currency of 126

paradise. At once a horrible token of the barrenness of genius and the promise of a bloom that does no longer need nature to propagate, they aptly describe the situation of Young as a compositor. Until the end of romanticism, the position of authors remained weak with regard to the security of their own intellectual property and the return on their poetic investment. The romantics hoped to found their poetry on an organic discourse that would at least make poetry proper to itself. One of them, William Wordsworth, turned to the question of copyright late in his life. Comparing literary and agricultural property he deplores that the owners of the latter could bring in a harvest that in a comparabe form was denied to the former. As Susan Eilenberg writes in her formidable book on literary possession in romanticism, “Any man could own a plot of vegetables; only a writer could own a plot of words.”136 Old Young, writing about the “vegetable genius,” knew about that long before. “Some are of opinion that its [composition’s] growth, at present, is too luxuriant, and that the press is overcharged. Overcharged, I think, it could never be, if none were admitted, but such as brought their imprimatur from sound understanding, and the public good” (550). Not the flower but the insistent discourse on the power and importance of the press is the essay’s imprimatur of romanticism.

136 Susan Eilenberg, Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Literary Possession (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 204.

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Chapter 3

The Worth of Werther: Goethe’s Literary Marketing JULIET ‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? It is nor hand nor foot. Nor arm nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O be some other name! What’s in a name? [...] ROMEO I take thee at thy word: Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptised; Henceforth I never will be Romeo. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

I. Names and Silhouettes Werther was the first work of German literature to become something like a brand name. It seemed that a new era had begun for the sympathetic reader in the second half of the eighteenth century. The discourse of sensibility presented the world as an effusion of the self, as a space in which the subject could be constructed as the receptacle of its own imaginary projections reflected by the objects around it. The vogue of sensibility prepared literary culture for the emergence of a cult of subjectivity. Werther gave it a name. In turn, the illustrations of the novel’s most memorable scenes gave Lotte and Werther a face. They became an integral part of the book’s spectacular success and were indeed the object of the intense competition between the authorized publisher Weygand and the numerous pirates that reprinted the text along with new illustrations to 129

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gain a bigger share of the market.1 When, in order to stay in business, Weygand issued a second edition, the “Zweyte ächte Auflage” of 1775, he added two vignettes on the title pages to each of the novel’s two parts. While the first shows Lotte and Werther at the well near Wahlheim, the second has no corresponding scene in the narrative. Yet, it is precisely this second picture that captures a central moment organizing both Werther’s writing of his letters and the public’s reception of the book. It shows a young man kneeling in front of a rock on whose face he is about to inscribe Werther’s name. The letters already engraved spell the word Wert. A young woman enters the scene from the right, holding a book in her hand and a handkerchief to her face, apparently moved to tears by the reading she has just done (see fig.). The artist might have modelled his work on the famous illustration in La Nouvelle Heloïse where Saint-Preux shows Julie the rocks on which – “in a thousand places” – he had once inscribed her name along with verses from Petrarch and Tasso, monuments to a passionate love in which, according to Rousseau’s elaborate commentary on the picture, virtue has come to preside over the dangers of remembrance.2 Although there is no comparable scene of recollection 1

Some of the most popular illustrations are available in the paperback edition by Jörn Göres, ed. Die Leiden des jungen Werther (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1973). See also the exhibition catalogue by Göres, ed. Die Leiden des jungen Werther: Goethes Roman im Spiegel seiner Zeit (Düsseldorf: Goethe-Museum, 1972), 136–47 for a detailed description of some thirty pictures, with sample reproductions on pp. 183–200.

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Rousseau closely controlled the design and production of the artwork, which was published as a separate book in 1761 with page references to Rey’s edition of the novel in the same year. It contains not only the lengthy commentary by Rousseau speaking in the voice of the Editor but also the so-called “Seconde Préface” in the form of a dialogue between the editor and a man of letters. Rousseau’s description of the illustration referred to above reads: “Il lui parle en même tems avec feu; on lit dans les yeux de Julie l’attendrissement que lui causeent ses discours et les objets qu’ils lui rappelle; mais on y lit aussi que la vertu préside, et ne craint rien de ces dangereux souvenirs” (Rousseau, Œuvres complètes [Paris: Gallimard, 1961], II: 768). The picture illustrates Saint-Preux’s account in Book 4, letter 17: “Je la conduis vers le rocher et lui montrai son

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to be found in Werther, it would be wrong to say that the vignette showing two readers instead of two lovers has no foundation in the narrative. As we shall see, Werther takes great pains to inscribe his name in the book that the figure resembling Lotte is holding out to the scribe kneeling in front of the rock. However, his attempt to appropriate the name in which he signs the letters of his love fails, and the narrative will perform Werther’s failure to enter into possession of his own name as a suicide. In the end even the grave wherein he is laid remains unmarked. Wert: The letters engraved by the young man in the vignette spells out the worth or value that informs the lover’s name. “What’s in a name?” Werther translates Juliet’s query into “What’s a name worth?” The question is as difficult to answer as that posed in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Value is never intrinsic to the object whose worth it assesses nor is it a purely subjective element that could be controlled by those placing value on an object. Value is in this sense both contingent and inconclusive.3 In the second half of the 18th century subjectivist conceptions of value became increasingly important for the emergence of a diverse market economy, and it is no accident that Werther, a novel that unfolds the drama of overestimating the worth of subjectivity, should articulate 18th-century speculations on economic, aesthetic, and moral values in the name of its protagonist. Although value is in itself not a property of anyone or anything, neither purely subjective nor purely objective, certain objects can be valuable to an individual to the point of becoming invaluable, removing them from their circulation in a public system that regulates value judgments into chiffre gravés dans mille endroits, et plusieurs vers du Petrarch et du Tasse relatifs à la situation où j’étais en les traçant” (p. 519). Interestingly, the presentation of the illustration quotes a passage from the letter that describes the landscape and at the same time inscribes Rousseau’s own name on the rock: “Quelques ruisseaux filtroient à travers les rochers, et rouloient sur la verdure en filets de cristal” (767, quoting from 518). 3

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See Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s excellent book, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).

a private sphere where those things are kept or stored without regard to their exchange value or use value. Collections of items like books or china and of memorabilia such as silhouettes or ribbons have a personal significance and can be invaluable or priceless because they form a part of one’s life that cannot be transferred to anyone else. “The collection seeks a form of self-enclosure,” as Susan Stewart points out, it “represents the total aestheticization of use value” and thus “represents a hermetic world.” What she calls “self-enclosure” is an apt term for the world of Werther and his readers, in which the items listed above bear a crucial significance because they are part of the novel’s proliferating construction of the self: “The ultimate term in the series that marks the collection is the ‘self,’ the articulation of the collector’s own ‘identity.’”4 An increasing number of objects produced for and gathered in the homes of the 18th-century bourgeoisie was marked by this exclusiveness of a construction or fashioning of the self, constituting the private and intimate atmosphere where letters like those written by Saint-Preux or Werther could find their proper destination. Private letters from friends became collectibles themselves, and Werther’s love letters can indeed be said to reflect the kind of amorous relationship that existed between people and the objects of which they claim possession. That his letters are publishable as a book is not just a mark of their literary and fictive character but rather shows that the creation of privacy and intimacy in the eighteenth century was an eminently public event.5 What they also show is that to Werther the negotiation of a relationship between the public and private sphere as well as that between people and the objects that belong to them is fraught with enormous dangers. While his nar4

Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 150,152, 162.

5

On the circulation of copies of private letters among friends and the increasing attempts by eighteenth-century booksellers and newspapers to get hold of letters by eminent personalities in order to print them, see Georg Steinhausen, Geschichte des deutschen Briefes (1889; rpt. Dublin and Zurich: Weidmann, 1968), II: 320–25.

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cissism complicates the former, his fetishism befalls the latter. Investing the world with his self-infatuation, he transforms objects into persons and persons into objects in a fetishism that, notably, also includes his proper name. Every object, every event, every story is connected to Lotte and through Lotte to him, and in every decisive scene in the novel’s first book Werther tries to establish this connection by inscribing his name within the narrative. This act of inscription is neatly packaged in the present he receives on his birthday from Lotte and Albert. As it turns out, it is also his name day: Mir fällt beym Eröfnen sogleich eine der blaßrothen Schleifen in die Augen, die Lotte vorhatte, als ich sie kennen lernte, und um die ich sie seither etlichemal gebeten hatte. Es waren zwey Büchelgen in duodez dabey, der kleine Wetsteinische Homer, ein Büchelgen, nach dem ich so oft verlangt, um mich auf dem Spaziergange mit dem Ernestischen nicht zu schleppen. Sieh! so kommen sie meinen Wünschen zuvor, so suchen sie all die kleinen Gefälligkeiten der Freundschaft auf, die tausendmal werther sind als jene blendende Geschenke, wodurch uns die Eitelkeit des Gebers erniedrigt. Ich küsse diese Schleife tausendmal, und mir jedem Athemzuge schlürfe ich die Erinnerung jener Seligkeiten ein, mit denen mich jene wenige, glückliche unwiederbringliche Tage überfüllten.6 6

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Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, in vol. 8 of the Frankfurter Ausgabe (FA) of Goethe’s works, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Kleine Prosa, Epen, ed. Waltraud Wiethölter (Frankfurt/Main: Klassiker Verlag, 1994), 110. References to Goethe’s novel are to this edition and will henceforth be cited in the text. Unless otherwise noted the citations are from the first edition of 1774, which FA prints on facing pages with the revised edition of 1787. Emphasis is added unless otherwise indicated. The translation follows the text of vol. 11 in the Suhrkamp Edition (SE) of Goethe’s works, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Elective Affinities, Novella, ed. David E. Wellbery (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988), henceforth cited by page numbers alone. Since the text in SE translates the revised edition of 1787, it is occasionally necessary to alter the translation or provide a new translation where the two versions differ considerably. Sometimes a translation is revised to bring out constellations of meanings in the original that are important to our reading. All instances of revision will be indicated: “As I opened it, I found one of the pink ribbons which Charlotte wore in her dress the first time I saw her, and which I had several times asked her to give me. With it were two volumes in duodecimo of Wetstein’s

What Werther unpacks in his letter to Wilhelm is his desire to be given what he does not seem to have: his own proper name. Like the two books and the ribbon it seems to be a gift offered to him by Lotte. Her ribbon is in fact what at once ties and unties the parcel containing something like a jack-in-the-box that will jump out and skip around in every letter and every thought because it bears the mark of a gift a thousand times werther than anything else: Werther, Werther, Werther, Werther, Werther, a thousand times Werther. In a recent essay, David Wellbery has argued that Werther turns Lotte and everything around her into the phantasmatic body of a nourishing mother. Demonstrating how the ecstatic “liquid emotionality” of his letters engages in an “liquid-maternal economy,” he points out that in his insatiable love for Lotte Werther actually “wants to drink her.”7 Around the middle of the century the fashion-style called stérilité was replaced by that of a fécondité, which emphasized the feminity of motherhood, and it also became a matter of etiquette to

Homer – a book I had often wanted to own, to save me the trouble of carrying the large Ernesti edition with me on my walks. You see how they anticipate my wishes, how well they understand all those little attentions of friendship, so much more valuable (werther) than the expensive presents of the great, which only humiliate us. I kissed the ribbon a thousand times, and in every breath inhaled the memory of those happy and unrecoverable days which filled me with the keenest joy” (38; rev.). Proper names, we are told, cannot be translated. The rendering of Lotte’s name as Charlotte indicates, however, that they have somewhat different identites. Charlotte is the name Lotte would have been given at baptism. Throughout the novel she is addresed by her abbreviated name, which is in this sense merely a name given to her by convention. With regard to the tradition that has firmly established Charlotte’s name among English and American readers of the novel as well in the hope that this complication might demonstrate a point this article takes some pains to make, no attempt will be made to gloss over this difference. 7

David E. Wellbery, “Morphisms of the Phantasmatic Body: Goethe’s ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’,” in Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mücke, eds. Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 199, 204, 192.

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withdraw from social gatherings to breastfeed one’s child.8 The pink ribbons attached to the arms and breast of the white dress Lotte is wearing in the scene of their first meeting (“ein simples weisses Kleid mit blaßrothen Schleifen an Arm und Brust” [40]) are interesting in this regard and of particular importance to Wellbery’s reading: “These ribbons, which are so proximate to the source of the Mother’s liquid gift of nourishment (and in the first sketch of the novel, which calls them ‘flesh-colored,’ even mimic the color of that source), become a fetish for Werther, the single token of his love he takes to his grave” (191). Kissing a thousand times the ribbon that is a thousand times werther than any other gift he might have received on his birthday, and inhaling or rather sucking in (schlürfen) the blissful memory of Lotte it brings back, one might indeed say that he engages in a phantasy of imbibing his name, and Wellbery’s notion that the economy of his emotional discourse describes a desire to be “born anew in the sign of the Mother’s gift” (p. 191) is corroborated by the grandiose scene of baptism Werther staged at the well near Wahlheim two months prior to his birthday. In the first letters of the novel it is the place to which Werther retires to read Homer in the bulky Ernesti edition that now, on his birthday, is being replaced by a smaller edition. If the ribbon brings back memories of his first encounter with Lotte, the books included in the parcel recall his patriarchal phantasy about a Homeric world that turned the girls from the village coming to the well into the daughters of kings coming to get water for their fathers. As he once wrote, “Wenn ich da sizze, so lebt die patriarchalische Idee so lebhaft um mich, wie sie alle die Altväter am Brunnen Bekanntschaft machen und freyen” (16).9 When the well becomes the site not only of courtship but also of baptism, it gathers the memories and phantasies of mother and father figures, adding the child necessary to make the family into which Werther would like to be adopted. 8

Leo Balet and E. Gerhard, Die Verbürgerlichung der deutschen Kunst, Literatur und Musik im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1972), 435.

9

“As I sit there the old patriarchal idea comes to life again. I see them, our old ancestors, forming their friendships and doing their courting at the well” (7).

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Lotte, a friend, and a little girl called Malchen meet Werther on a walk that leads them to the well. The letter introduces the account of what happened there as follows: Nach einem Wege von anderthalb Stunden kamen wir gegen die Stadt zurück, an den Brunnen, der mir so werth ist, und nun tausendmal werther ward, als Lotte sich auf’s Mäuergen sezte. Ich sah umher, ach! und die Zeit, da mein Herz so allein war, lebte wieder vor mir auf. […] Ich blikte hinab und sah, daß Malgen mit einem Glase Wasser sehr beschäftigt heraufstieg. Ich sah Lotten an und fühlte alles, was ich an ihr habe. Indem so kommt Malgen mit einem Glase, Marianne wollte es ihr abnehmen, nein! ruft das Kind mit dem süßesten Ausdrukke: nein, Lottgen, du sollst zuerst trinken!” (70)10

The introduction of Lotte at the source of Werther’s former solitary musing about the patriarchal world of Homer suffices to make the spot appear to him a thousand times werther. Again we see his name well up: Werther, Werther, Werther,... “I turned towards Charlotte, and felt deeply how much she means to me”: It is precisely this baptism that she means to him, and the scene his letter describes indeed shows that to Werther the proper name has an intentional structure. Being valued by Lotte means his name; his name means this value. This is why Werther needs Lotte, this is the intention he has on her, and it is an intention that he desires to be repaid in the sense that Lotte is made to intend him once she produces this assessment of value which calls up his name. One might put it this way: Lotte means his name, that is to say, she means everything worth to him called “Werther” and at the 10 “After about an hour and a half, we returned to the town. We stopped at the spring which is so dear (werth) to me, and which is now a thousand times dearer (werther) to me than ever since Charlotte sat down by the low wall. I looked round, and recalled the time when my heart was all alone. […] I looked down and observed Amalie (Malgen or Malchen) coming up the steps with a glass of water. I turned towards Charlotte, and felt deeply how much she means to me. Amalie approached with the glass. Marianne wanted to take it from her. ‘No!’ cried the child with the sweetest expression, ‘Charlotte must drink first’” (24–25; rev.). Since we are talking about the baptism this scene performs, one might note that the English text – as in the case of Charlotte’s name – calls Malchen by the full name she would have been given at baptism: Amalie.

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same time means more than everything in the sense that in his love for her she is made to confer on him this name that means something “more” – Werther. His name bears an excess value or, if you will, a surplus value that Lotte produces and on which Werther capitalizes. In his amorous discourse value or worth is always a comparative beyond comparison. By the same token, “Werther” is also an address. Citing Lotte in one of his letters, Werther writes, “Adieu lieber Werther! Lieber Werther! Es war das erstemal, daß sie mich Lieber hies, und mir giengs durch Mark und Bein” (182).11 What penetrates his whole being is that the apostrophe “Lieber Werther!” addresses him from whatever end one reads it. Lieber Werther – Werther Lieber: it is always the same. Werther’s name is Lieber, and when he rejoices “daß sie mich Lieber hies,” Lotte is made to utter that he is dearer to her, dearer than anyone else that figures in the narrative.12 Also, Werther’s citation of Lotte’s address “Dear Werther” starts, in his letter to Wilhelm, a letter written by Lotte to him. At the end of the letter, Lotte is cited before his bed to deliver it: “Ich hab mir’s hundertmal wiederholt und gestern Nacht da ich in’s Bett gehen wollte, und mit mir selbst allerley schwazte, sag ich so auf einmal: gute Nacht, lieber Werther!” (182).13 Speaking both parts of an imaginary dialogue, Werther is enclosed in a silent world of his own making. The dubious structure of Werther’s amorous desire plays out the naming of a proper name against the meaning of this name, and we shall have to pay attention to what this implies.14 We should also note 11 “‘Adieu, dear Werther.’ Dear Werther! It was the first time she ever called me ‘dear’: it penetrated my whole being” (61). 12 This reading of the passage exploits the equivocation Werther exploits when quoting Lotte out of context. In German, lieber means “dear” when preceding a male noun or proper name, but “dearer” when used as a comparative. 13 “I have repated it a hundred times and last night, as I was going to bed and talked to myself about nothing in particular, I suddenly said, ‘Good night, dear Werther!’” (61). 14 This is also to say that my argument must take care not to fall prey to what it seeks to expose. Werther’s investment of the proper name with meaning con-

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that the gift of the name Werther receives first at the well and then again, neatly packaged, on his birthday operates in the structure of a give and take. This is in fact the reason why the scene at the well commands a special place in Werther’s letter and memory. As in all other instances where Lotte is portrayed as a mother figure, there is a gesture by the children repaying the gift of love the mother is expected to give. Here, Malchen hands Lotte the glass for the first sip. Moved by this reversal of roles and perhaps also because of the displacement of his patriachal phantasy connected with the well into the constellation of an eighteenth-century family organized around Lotte, Werther gets carried away and hugs and kisses the girl. The kiss is an act of transgression that Lotte at once censures and heals. In her position as surrogate mother she leads the crying child to the well so that she may wash off, as Lotte says, the mark of shame on her face. Her reference to the superstitious belief that a man’s kiss may grow facial hair on a girl’s cheek operates according to a model of contagion and transference that allows Werther to substitute his own face for that of Malchen. Thus it is also his body that undergoes a ritual washing under the supervision of Lotte, transforming her act of cleansing into an act of baptism: Ich sage dir, Wilhelm, ich habe mit mehr Respekt nie einer Taufhandlung beygewohnt, und als Lotte herauf kam, hätte ich mich gern vor ihr niedergeworfen wie vor einem Propheten, der die Schulden einer Nation weggeweiht hat. (70/72)15

The audacity of Werther’s letter lies in his investiture of Lotte as prophet or priest and in his alignment of supersition with religious practice. As the first of the seven sacraments, baptism performs, in the name of the Father, the absolution from original sin. The scene at the well seems to perform Werther’s baptism in the name of the Mother. stitutes a fetishism, I argue, and as will become apparent, the citations of such instances in the text easily gets itself involved in this movement. 15 “I assure you, Wilhelm, I never attended a baptism with greater reverence; and when Charlotte came up, I could have fallen on my knees as before a prophet who has washed away the sins of his people” (25).

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For the logic of the narrative it is all important that Lotte is not a mother, the group at the well not a family, just as it is important that Lotte’s ribbon is not a breast, for it enables Werther, who is not a child, to rename the positions in this and all other imaginary structures of his discourse and to install or inscribe himself at the spot where he desires to emerge. The renaming performed at the well presents the proper name as an ineradicable mark that is yet void or empty until it is invested and filled with meaning. Malchen, the name of the little girl, means “little mark” or “mole.” Washing off the mark or Mal of Werther’s kiss on the girl’s cheek, Lotte draws Werther’s attention to the proper name as something that is already there, but it is there as something improper, as an irregularity or blemish in the smooth skin of one’e existence, a birthmark or MutterMal that is not, as one would have it, already given in the name of love, as a bond of love at one’s birth, but that only the later kiss of an erotic love can signify or resignify as an individual, distinguishing mark, something beautiful or worth having. The problem of the proper name we encounter in Werther is that it is presented and read as a sign. That distinguishes Werther’s notion of language from Juliet’s discourse on the proper name in the play’s famous orchard scene cited above as epigraph. The letter written on his birthday – which, as we have seen, is also his name day – ends in Lotte’s orchard. It is a very different, disturbingly homely place compared to Juliet’s garden, and the careful transformation of sexual desire that informs Werther’s account is part of that homeliness: “Lebe wohl! Es ist ein herrlicher Sommer, ich sizze oft auf den Obstbäumen in Lottens Baumstük mit dem Obstbrecher der langen Stange, und hole die Birn aus dem Gipfel. Sie steht unten und nimmt sie ab, wenn ich sie ihr hinunter lasse” (112).16 Werther is a fruit picker, and this is how he hopes to pick up everything around him, including his name. Lotte’s cooperation in this scene (she is the fruit 16 “Farewell! This is a glorious summer. I often climb into the trees in Charlotte’s orchard, and with a fruit picker bring down the pears that hang on the highest branches. She stands below, and takes them as I hand them to her” (38).

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to be picked and the tree on which it grows) plays out an economy of the gift in which Werther only gives what he has already been given. In this sense, he does not give anything without already receiving. It is a structure in which Werther seeks to install himself at every moment, and it is disturbing because it makes it actually impossible for him to give anything or to properly receive any gift. As Derrida has pointed out, the gift, in order to be given without initiating the obligation of repayment that cancels the gift as gift, must not appear as such.17 The name, one might argue, is such a gift. Werther’s obsession with a gift he ceaselessly wants to touch, take in, and incorporate encloses him in an economy in which he is at once a constant debtor and the sole beneficiary. It is the economy of narcissism. While it is useless to speculate whether Werther’s narcissism forestalls his rejection by Lotte (why should she want his gift? what should she desire?), it is interesting to note that Lotte, the apparent object of Werther’s adoration, is in fact superfluous. She is needed in order to set up a structure in which the position of an addressee of his love becomes available but where it doesn’t really matter whether she receives what is dispatched to this address. Barthes, whose book on the lover’s discourse is arguably the most perspiuous reading of Werther, has stated this pointedly: Charlotte is quite insipid; she is the paltry character of a powerful, tormented, flamboyant drama staged by the subject Werther; by a kindly decision of this subject, a colorless object is placed in the center of the stage and there adored, idolized, taken to task, covered with discourse, with prayers […]; as if she were a huge motionless hen huddled amid her feathers, around which circles a slightly mad cock. Enough that, in a flash, I should see the other in the guise of an inert object, like a kind of stuffed doll, for me to shift my desire from this annulled object to

17 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), particularly the section entitled “A Gift without Present,” 34–70.

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my desire itself; it is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.18

Werther performs some kind of puppet play.19 Barthes’ unmasking of the coercive nature of Werther’s discourse is devastating to the project of constructing the novel as the model of a love story that might not find fulfillment but nonetheless is an ardent expression of Werther’s passion for Lotte. What he calls Lotte’s annullment might void her identity, but it props up the mirror Werther needs in a manner similar to what we observed on Malchen’s cheek with regard to the inscription of his name. Lotte’s position becomes available, and we shall yet have to see how the fiction of the book, as opposed to the letters it publishes, refigures the constellation of agents in the narrative in such a way that Lotte disappears from the structure as the mother she is not in order to make room for a trio of men that will capitalize on her image as the Mother. Let us not forget, at this point, that the ardent love letters Werther writes are addressed to Wilhelm and, for their publication as book, carefully arranged by the Editor. First, however, we ought to focus on Werther’s conception of the name as a sign, for it is the signifying character that enables Werther to integrate his name, and indeed all proper names, with his writing 18 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Disourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Noonday Press, 1978), 31. Barthes’ emphasis. Further references to Barthes’ study will be cited in the text. The influence of his formidable book on my thought will become apparent at every turn of the argument. 19 If Lotte is a doll, Werther is a puppet. His anxiety at court that the people around him may be lifeless marionettes includes himself: “Ich stehe wie vor einem Raritätenkasten, und sehe die Männgen und Gäulgen vor mir herumrükken, und frage mich oft, ob’s nicht optischer Betrug ist. Ich spiele mit, vielmehr, ich werde gespielt wie eine Marionette, und fasse manchmal meinen Nachbar an der hölzernen Hand und schaudere zurük” (134) / “I stand before a puppet show and see the little puppets move, and I ask myself whether it isn’t an optical illusion. I am amused by these puppets, or rather, I am myself one of them” (45). The doctor appointed by the judge, Lotte’s father, to serve in official inquests in his district is described as a “dogmatische Dratpuppe” (58) / ” dogmatic puppet on strings”; he will pronounce Werther dead at the end of the novel.

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and feeling in which every object and each event becomes a sign of his love. In order to make his name readable as part of this amorous signification – I am worthy of Lotte, Lotte values me more than anything else – Werther must first ascertain that Lotte indeed loves him, which is again something he does not leave to some vague feeling but rather seeks to decipher in a sure sign. To him, love is nothing but the reading and inscription of signs. While this might be true of every lover and every amorous discourse, it is of special significance to Werther and his name because value, like the sign, operates in a register of difference and distinction. Most importantly, value is relational, assessing the worth of an object or action in comparison to others or to an accepted standard. Although Werther leads an increasingly solitary life, the judgments about his actions and behavior are of course also subject to the social dynamics of such comparisons. One might argue, however, that he fosters his solitude by positing all values as absolute, and for the imaginary signification of his own name in which he seems to engage this means that everything connected with his love is more valuable without comparison: Werther, period. Yet, there is one difficulty, and it’s name is Albert, Lotte’s fiancé and later husband. He too wraps the gift Werther receives on his birthday, and if Lotte gave the maternal ribbon, it might have been he that purchased the patriarchal Homer. Albert cannot be avoided because he occupies the position Werther desires to attain. As Barthes points out, “Werther does not hate Albert; quite simply, Albert occupies a desired place: he is an adversary (a rival), not an enemy” (144). One might indeed argue that all of Werther’s declarations of love are also addressed to Albert. He loves him for his place, and his transfer of affection onto the rival is a first step to invade his place. This invasion also includes the mimicking of Albert that one sees Werther undertake in some scenes. Once his hand writing a short note to Wilhelm seems to accidentally perform such a mimicry: “Die alberne Figur, die ich mache, wenn in Gesellschaft von ihr gesprochen

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wird, solltest du sehen.” (74).20 The mention of Lotte’s name in casual conversation automatically invokes that of Albert to which it is coupled. However foolish Werther might react in such situations, he is already underway toward his goal of cutting a better figure and substitute his own name and person for that of his rival. Speaking of figures, one might remember that Werther did indeed look foolish in the scene where Albert’s name is mentioned the first time, for it happens in the middle of his dance with Lotte at the party that starts the love story. Whirling through the room they are suddenly addressed by a girl flying past them in the arms of her partner: “Sie sieht Lotte lächelnd an, hebt einen drohenden Finger auf, und nennt den Nahmen Albert zweymal im Vorbeyfliegen mit viel Bedeutung” (48).21 The intervention of Albert’s proper name that comes to claim or reclaim Lotte as his property is of some significance not only to Lotte but also to Werther, for it calls up for the first time his own name in relation to that of Lotte’s fiancé: Nun war mir das nichts neues, denn die Mädchen hatten mir’s auf dem Wege gesagt, und war mir doch so ganz neu, weil ich das noch nicht im Verhältnisse auf sie, die mir in so wenig Augenblikken so werth geworden war, gedacht hatte. Genug ich verwirrte mich, vergaß mich, und kam zwischen das unrechte Paar hinein, daß alles drunter und drüber gieng, und Lottens ganze Gegenwart und Zerren und Ziehen nöthig war, um’s schnell wieder in Ordnung zu bringen. (50)22

20 “You should see how foolish (albern) I look in company when her name is mentioned” (26). 21 “She looks at Charlotte with a smile, shakes her finger at her and twice repeats with great significance the name Albert” (18). 22 “Now, there was nothing new to me in this (the girls had told me of it on the way), yet it struck me as new since I had not thought of it in relation to her who in so short a time had become so dear (werth) to me. At any rate, I got confused, forgot myself, got caught between the wrong couples, and caused a general disorder so that it took Charlotte’s whole presence of mind to straighten me out by pulling and pushing me into my proper place” (18; rev.).

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Although he had heard of Lotte’s engagement, the name of Albert appears unfamiliar to Werther because it occupies a place in a structure where he holds Lotte in his arms, and he is ready to cling to this notion. Lotte has become so dear or werth to Werther that it seems inconceivable that in relation to him the unknown and absent Albert should be werther to Lotte: Werther / Lotte / Albert. The letter already starts spelling out the relationship among three names that will constitute the drama of the narrative. However, the point is, let us not forget, that Werther, at the very moment he hears the name Albert, construes a dyadic relationship in which Lotte occupies one spot and he the other one. One name has to be forgotten in order to keep this structure stable. It is indeed the addition of a third position in this relationship that will bring up the problem of a comparative and thus the question of werth and werther, the question, in other words, of who is worthier of Lotte’s attention. There is no place for Albert who, as Werther and Lotte are reminded, already inhabits that place. This structural complication, unfolding rapidly in a matter of seconds during the dance, makes Werther “confused.” The forgetting of the name that enables Werther to construct this dyadic relationship simultaneously reintroduces that very name and thus explodes the relationship at the moment it is established. It is indeed confusing. In this delicate structure Werther comes to rest on a spot from which, at the same moment, he is already departing again. The movement describes, precisely, a dance.23 What Werther performs in Lotte’s arms is a whirling dance of names and positions that in varying figures and at a differing pace will structure the narrative. The disorder of their first dance at the party is a figure of the narrative’s choreography: “I got confused, forgot myself, got caught between the wrong couple.” 23 Friedrich A. Kittler has pointed to the intimate nature of the waltz that scandalized and delighted the 1770s. It makes it possible for Werther to take Lotte in his arms without possessing or having to possess her. See “Autorschaft und Liebe,” in Kittler, ed. Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1980), 147. The historical relevance of this intimacy corresponds to the way in which the report on the dance is intimately bound up with the structure of the narrative and the problem of naming.

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Remembering himself by inscribing his name, he forgets himself by assuming a place already occupied. Taking Lotte in his arms, he gets entangled between two lovers that form a couple. If dance is a metaphor – but how should we tell the dancer from the dance –, we might wonder what Werther’s proper place is. “It took Charlotte’s whole presence of mind to straighten me out by pulling and pushing me into my proper place.” Whether he is pushed away from Lotte or pulled toward her is difficult to tell. The dance constitutes the questions Werther keeps asking throughout the first part of the novel. Does she love him? Is he worth more than Albert in her eyes? It is in her eyes that he reads the signs of an answer. They constitute the mirror in which Werther sees himself having a place in her heart and soul. The readers interested in the novel’s construction of identity have always focussed on Lotte’s black eyes, whether in the debate about whose eyes they really were or in the attempts to trace Werther’s narcissisim.24 In the following letter Werther presents them, in the full pathos of his discourse, as sealing his fate. They are like the black ink that writes this narrative: Nein, ich betrüge mich nicht! Ich lese in ihren schwarzen Augen wahre Theilnehmung an mir, und meinem Schicksaale. Ja ich fühle, und darin darf ich meinem Herzen trauen, daß sie – O darf ich, kann ich den Himmel in diesen Worten aussprechen? – daß sie mich liebt. (76) Mich liebt! – Und wie werth ich mir selbst werde, wie ich – Dir darf ich’s wohl sagen, Du hast Sinn für so etwas – wie ich mich selbst anbethe, seitdem sie mich liebt! (77; 1787) Und ob das Vermessenheit ist oder Gefühl des wahren Verhältnisses: Ich kenne den Menschen nicht, von dem ich etwas in Lottens Herzen fürchtete. Und doch – wenn sie von ihrem Bräutigam spricht mit all der Wärme, all der Liebe,

24 For a reading of the novel along the lines of Lacan’s argument about the mirrorstage, see the important essay by Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, “Werthers Krankheit zum Tode: Pathologie und Familie in der Empfindsamkeit,” in Friedrich A. Kittler and Horst Turk, eds. Urszenen: Literaturwissenschaft als Diskursanalyse und Diskurskritik (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 90–97.

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da ist mir’s wie einem, der all seiner Ehren und Würden entsetzt, und dem der Degen abgenommen wird. (76)25

As Werther comes to see his worth in Lotte’s eyes, his gesture of a worship or worthship of the self places him in a position of prayer comparable to the young man in the vignette, who kneels in front of the rock on which he inscribes the word Wert. Value is an expression of comparative measure,26 and Werther’s uncertainty as to whether his assumption that Lotte loves him is in fact a presumption or Vermessenheit raises the suspicion that his assessment of his own worth is out of proportion. As we have seen, in Werther’s discourse of love the idea of his value instantly raises the question if someone might be worth more, which immediately calls up Albert. In this letter he brings a terrifying weapon to their contest. The military metaphor of Werther’s degradation cuts deep; the soldier being deprived of his sword invokes the anxiety of a symbolic castration. What fuels this phantasy is Werther’s attempt to posit his person and his name as some kind of surplus value produced by Lotte’s love. As I argued earlier, it is this increase of value he seeks to gain from her. The letter cited above shows that there is a serious doubt about the success of this venture, for it is not certain that he can actually employ Lotte to work for his love in his company. His position is simply not tenable. Marx has described surplus value as a castration of the workers by the 25 The second of the three paragraphs was added in the revised edition of 1787: “No, I am not deceived. In her black eyes I read a genuine interest in me and in my fate. Yes, I feel it; and I can believe my own heart which tells me – dare I say it? – dare I pronounce the divine words? – that she loves me! / That she loves me! How this lifts my self-esteem! And – since you understand my feelings, I can say this to you – how I worship myself since she loves me! / Is this presumption, or is it an awareness of the truth? I do not know the man able to supplant me in Charlotte’s heart; and yet when she speaks of the betrothed with so much warmth and affection, I feel like a soldier who has been stripped of his honors and titles, and deprived of his sword” (26–27; rev.). 26 See Marc Shell’s reading of Heraclitus on this point in The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 54.

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capitalist that owns the means of production as the father owns the mother.27 Werther’s anxiety is that for all his attempts to appropriate Lotte and the love she could give him and for all the certainty he reads in her eyes, he does not own the “mother.” The economic discourse underlying Werther’s declarations of love and its exchange of gifts has been apparent throughout, and the structure of value he brings to bear on the meaning of his proper name as sketched out in the preceding pages is related to money as a measure of value. In one letter, Werther explicitely articulates the invaluable value of Lotte in terms of money: Heut konnt ich nicht zu Lotten, eine unvermeidliche Gesellschaft hielt mich ab. Was war zu thun? Ich schikte meinen Buben hinaus, nur um einen Menschen um mich zu haben, der ihr heute nahe gekommen wäre. Mit welcher Ungedult ich den Buben erwartete, mit welcher Freude ich ihn wiedersah. Ich hätt’ ihn gern bey’m Kopf genommen und geküßt, wenn ich mich nicht geschämt hätte. Man erzählt von dem Bononischen Stein, daß er, wenn man ihn in die Sonne legt, ihre Strahlen anzieht und eine Weile bey Nacht leuchtet. So war mir’s mit dem Jungen. Das Gefühl, daß ihre Augen auf seinem Gesicht’, seinen Bakken, seinen Rokknöpfen und dem Kragen am Sürtout geruht hatten, machte mir das all so heilig, so werth, ich hätte in dem Augenblikke den Jungen nicht vor tausend Thaler gegeben. Es war mir so wohl in seiner Gegenwart – Bewahre dich Gott, daß du darüber nicht lachst. Wilhelm, sind das Phantomen, wenn es uns wohl wird? (78/80)28 27 On this relationship, see Kurt Heinzelmann, The Economics of the Imagination (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1980), 95–98. 28 “I haven’t been able to see Charlotte today. I was prevented by company from which I couldn’t disengage myself. What was I to do? I sent my servant to her house, that I might at least see somebody today who had been near her. Oh, the impatience with which I awaited his return, the joy with which I welcomed him! I should have liked to hold him in my arms and kiss him, if I had not been embarrassed. / It is said that the Bologna stone, when it is placed in the sun, absorbs the rays and for a time appears luminous in the dark. So it was with me and this servant. The idea that her eyes had dwelt on his countenance, his cheek, his coat buttons, the collar of his surtout, made them all inestimably dear (werth) to me, so that at the moment I would not have parted with him for a thousand crowns. His presence made me so happy! For heaven’s sake, Wilhelm, don’t laugh at me! Can it be a delusion if it makes us so happy?” (27–28).

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As in the letter about Lotte’s black eyes cited previously, it is her gaze that organizes the reading of this scene. What the servant delivers is in fact the magic power of her look that he has absorbed and now emanates like the Bologna stone that glows in the night. Although this stone stores energy a lot less effectively and for a much shorter time than money, it seems to be worth a thousand times more than a coin because of its magic quality. Although the metaphor Werther uses seems to point out that Lotte’s attention cannot be paid in money and is of a different order than currency, the structure of the transfer corresponds precisely to the nature of money that abstracts from the physical nature of the commodity whose value it represents and can be used to buy some other goods of the same value. The metaphor itself functions that way. It is a metaphor for the metaphor of money. The servant was not just exposed to Lotte’s gaze but faced her face, as Lévinas would put it, when he absorbed what Werther desires to take in as some kind of magic emanation. Werther does not face Lotte when he gazes on the very different face of the servant or at the buttons that might look like metal coins or may be of some other material resembling the tokens of unstamped physical money. Looking at the buttons, Werther is already counting. The structure of an exchange and monetary abstraction that informs the scene is important because it lets Werther see – at that moment, “in diesem Augenblikke” – his own gaze. And, again, his own name. This is what he buys. As a token of Lotte’s power to invest objects with her presence the boy cannot be traded for a thousand crowns, which means that he, as a substitute for Lotte that can again be substituted by her lover, is worth more: he is werther and Werther, and thus invaluable. Money is magic, or as the letter puts it, a phantom. What emanates in this scene is Werther’s appropriation of Lotte and his proper name as fetish. The fetish embodies a principle of substitution, the possibility of exchanging a part for the whole or an object for a person in a metonymic relationship. To Werther, the proper name has meaning and exchange value in the form of a metonymy. To make a fetish of one’s own name is to forget that the proper name does not judge and in this sense has, properly speaking, no 149

value. It is unique because it is, in the sense pointed out earlier, invaluable. In our names we are named free. The worth of a proper name cannot be assessed because it is no part of the economy or circulation of words within the system of signification. Proper names have, strictly speaking, no meaning and this is precisely what makes them meaningful and necessary for a resistance to all the attempts to have our lives controlled by systems that assign a determinate value, meaning, and position to our names. It is this resistance that speaks in Juliet’s powerful words cited at the beginning of the chapter. Her rallying call to Romeo that the name “is no part of thee” is by no means some kind of frivolous negation of identity. It originates in her decision to resist the father as the representative of a law that posits the name as his legacy: “Deny thy father and refuse thy name” (2. 2. 34). Juliet and Romeo can retain their singular identity to the extent they resist, in the name of love, the ideology of the law of the signifier enacted by their fathers. Shakespeare’s play constitutes a poignant critique of Lacan’s Name-of-the-Father. The threat Juliet’s resistance poses becomes clear when the fathers finally gather the lovers’ dead bodies in a grave they pronounce to be a monument to the reconciliation of the two families, while it is in fact designed to reinscribe the names of their fathers on the tomb of their love. Werther, too, will end in a grave. But while Romeo heeds Juliet’s call for resistance and is ready to give up his name for her love – “Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptised; / Henceforth I never will be Romeo” – Werther puts, as we have seen, all his hopes for love in the inscription of his name. There are no family names in Werther, but just as he is trying to reconstruct families that might adopt him he also desperately tries to enter into the possession of the legacy of the father that financially does not pay out in the novel. For some moments it seems he could receive it in the imaginary reconstruction of his proper name. The socio-political dimension of the name corresponds to a linguistic problem addressed poignantly by the discourse of analytical philosophy on the question of names, reference, designators, and identity statements. Insofar as the proper name does not signify and thus does not appropriate the objects signified, it somehow seems to 150

be outside of language.29 Proper names are not referents, nor are they simply descriptive. The difference between proper names and common names complicates language considerably, and in the case of literary figures there is also the question of who their proper names would refer to if they were referents, what they would exactly describe if they were descriptions. The fact that in Werther we see that it is very well possible to invest proper names with meaning (a possibility on which this reading banks) does not alleviate the problem. In an essay on proper names and the question of transfer, Major confronts the claim of analytical philosophy that names are a form of language that “does not necessitate any recourse to signification in order to designate or identify someone” with the observation that it is “always possible, by detaching signifiers from the proper name, to deploy them in an imaginary register.”30 If there is something like a non-signifying mark that informs the proper name and separates or interrupts the relationship between proper name and common names in language, a space opens up where the name, as Major puts it, remains without name (“une place demeure sans nom” [160]). Thus, the proper name designed to designate a subject dangerously borders on the effacement of what it names. According to Major the task of the analyst (and by implication, the translator and the critic) is to interpret that site where the name remains without name, that is to say keep open and thus make sense of the gap between the imaginary projections of meaning in order to allow the singularity of the individual and the proper name to emerge.31 Werther’s imaginary obsession with the meaning of his name effectively closes and seals this gap. 29 Kripke’s lectures on naming unfold their argument also in response to the problem that proper names, if they do not have any meaning at all, cannot be simply integrated with language conceived of as a system of signification. See Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 32. 30 René Major, “La Logique du nom propre et le transfert,” Cahiers Confrontation 15 (1986): 148–49. 31 To keep this gap open means according to Major to be guarded against the effacement of the trace of effacement in the proper name, which would subsume

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Major’s spot without name in the proper name bears an interesting relationship to Benjamin’s writings on language. Benjamin argues that the proper name demarcates the boundary between the creative word and the language of cognition. It has neither intention nor meaning but rather vouchsafes and provides the ground for a translation of the language of things into that of man, which performs, as he puts it, “die Übersetzung des Namenlosen in den Namen.”32 Thus, the notion that names do not form part of language as a system of signification is related to his view that they participate in a medium of translation mapping out “Kontinua der Verwandlung, nicht abstrakte Gleichheitsund Ähnlichkeitsbezirke” (151).33 Benjamin’s emphasis on the name’s power of translation and translatability (as opposed to its operation in a system of signification) accounts for his view that the names parents give “do not correspond […] to any knowledge (entspricht keine Erkenntnis)” and that “in a strict sense, no name ought (in its etymological meaning) to correspond to any person”: “Es sollte im strengen Geist auch kein Mensch dem Namen (nach seiner etymologischen Bedeutung) entsprechen” (324; 150). With regard to this notion of dissimilarity it might surprise that Benjamin continues, “Mit ihm wird jedem Menschen seine Erschaffung durch Gott verbürgt, und in diesem Sinne ist er selbst schaffend, wie die mythologische Weisheit es in der Anschauung ausspricht (die sich wohl nicht selten findet), daß sein Name des Menschen Schicksal sei” the proper name under the common or communal name (161). His argument is a subtle critique of Lacan’s play of the signifier. 32 “The translation of the nameless into name.” Walter Benjamin, “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache de Menschen,” in vol. II, 1 of Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 151. The translation is from “On Laguage as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Peter Demetz, ed. Reflections (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 325. 33 “Translation passes through continua of transformtion, not abstract areas of identity and similarity” (325). On translation and the proper name, see Bettine Menke’s impressive study, Sprachfiguren: Name – Allegorie – Bild nach Walter Benjamin (München: Fink, 1991), 78–126.

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(150).34 The passage is interesting because in his later essay on “Schicksal und Charakter” Benjamin discusses fate in its relation to a reading of signs. It invokes the mythic world of law and judgment that in the essay on language represents the fall from the pure language of names and in “Fate and Character” introduces the notion of guilt: “Das Recht verurteilt nicht zur Strafe, sondern zur Schuld. Schicksal ist der Schuldzusammenhang des Lebendigen.”35 Those who try to read in their name the signs of their fate, are inscribed within a system of evaluative judgments that are not based on their action in the freedom of their name but rather on a reading enslaved by an imaginary transference. This is true for Werther, who looks for his fate in Lotte’s black eyes: “In her black eyes I read a genuine interest in me and in my fate.” Guilt is written all over the narrative, all of Werther’s actions are morally outlawed, be it his illicit love for a woman promised to someone else or the suicide he commits in the end. It is telling that Werther’s drama of guilt is staged in and around a house where the law has its residence. Lotte’s father is the county judge, Albert a legal secretary. Benjamin’s suggestion that in a mythic conception of the proper name a man’s name may be his fate, and thus might bind him to an unnamed guilt, comes true for Werther in the sense that his attempts to appropriate his own proper name by inscribing it within the central scenes of the novel, and the pains he takes to substitute the names and persons rivalling his claim on Lotte, forgets that the proper name is something like an invaluable gift of language. Lenz has articulated the mythological nature of his fate by calling Werther a crucified Prometheus. Werther’s posturing as the 34 “By it [the proper name] each man is guaranteed his creation by God, and in this sense he is himself creative, as is expressed by mythological wisdom in the idea (which doubtless not infrequently comes true) that a man’s name is his fate” (324). 35 Benjamin, “Schicksal und Charakter,” in Gesammelte Schriften, II:175: “Law condemns, not to punishment but to guilt. Fate is the guilt context (Schuldzusammenhang) of the living” (“Fate and Character,” in Reflections, 308).

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son forsaken by both the Father and the Mother articulates the accusation that he has been deprived of this invaluable gift and that he therefore has to procure it himself. To procure a name is to make it part of a system of meaning in which it appears as merely a pseudonym. As Benjamin writes at the end of his essay on fate and character, “Die Physiognomik [ist eine Erscheinung] des neuen Weltalters gewesen. Ihren Zusammenhang mit der alten Wahrsagekunst zeigt die moderne Physiognomik noch in dem unfruchtbaren moralischen Wertakzent ihrer Begriffe” (178–79).36 A reading of signs is always a form of evaluation, and Werther looking for Lotte in every object she might have touched or just looked at is no less that of a physiognomist than the author as genius carefully observing the public for whose taste he is writing. What makes this kind of physiognomy both risky and attractive is the uncertainty of how the signs are to be read. As we have seen, in the letter where Werther reads Lotte’s eyes for a confirmation of her love he makes his fate dependent on the accurate interpretation of the signs they might offer. Her eyes are black and become themselves something like silhouettes in which every line and every reflection means something. It is amazing that Lavater and his followers were never bothered by the fact that the black profiles they were subjecting to careful scrutiny were actually turning their head to look in another direction. You cannot face a silhouette; its eyes disappear in darkness. It does not bode well for Werther’s attempt to decipher his fate in Lotte’s black eyes. Ten days after his look in her eyes he attempts to paint her portrait, but settles for a silhouette when it comes to nothing: Lottens Porträt habe ich dreymal angefangen, und habe mich dreymal prostituiert, das mich um so mehr verdriest, weil ich vor einiger Zeit sehr glücklich im

36 “The study of physiognomy […] was a manifestation of the new age of genius. Modern physiognomics reveals its connection with the old art of divination in the unfruitful, morally evaluative accent of its concepts” (311).

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Treffen war, darauf hab ich denn den Schattenriß gemacht, und damit soll mir genügen. (82)37

Love taken in profile makes blind, one might say, and in Werther it also shows death. Chodowiecki’s marvellous illustrations show a silhouette hanging on the wall in the three pictures grouped around Werther’s suicide: in the scene where Lotte hands Werther the pistol, in the room where he lies dying on his bed, in the picture that shows the corpse in the empty room after his death.38 Every reading of signs and inscription of signs in the novel has a physiognomical character, including the names. Names, we have seen, are taken at face value. That their reading was part of eighteenth-century studies in physiognomy is confirmed by Lichtenberg’s scathing remark that one of his fellow students boasted he could see in the face of people whether they were called Caspar: “Dieser rühmte sich im Ernst, daß er den Leuten ansehen könnte, wenn sie Caspar hießen. Er irrte sich nicht wenig wie man mir gern glauben wird, allein er blieb […] im ganzen bei seiner Meinung, und Caspar war ein Name, womit er einen sehr zusammengesetzten Charakter bezeichnete.”39 Lavater, whose second name was Kaspar, will have felt the jab.40 Lichtenberg’s remark is 37 “I have begun Charlotte’s portrait three times, and have as often made a fool of myself. This is the more annoying, since I was formerly very successful in catching the likeness. I have since traced her profile, and must content myself with that” (28–29). 38 The illustrations are included in Jörn Göres’ beautiful edition, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1973), 159, 163, 165. See also Georg Witkowski, “Chodowieckis Werther-Bilder,” Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde 2.4 (July 1898): 153–62. 39 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, “Über Physiognomik; wider die Physiognomen,” in Schriften und Briefe, ed. Wolfgang Promies (München: Carl Hanser, 1972), III: 284–85: “He boasted in all earnest that he could recognize if someone was called Caspar. He was wrong often, as you can imagine, but all in all he nonetheless stuck to his opinion. To him, Caspar meant a dubious character.” 40 On the occasion of his grandson’s birth and baptism, Lavater wrote a tract entitled Briefe an meinen neugeborenen Großsohn Johannes Lavater in Richtersweil (1791) in which he speculates on the meaning of his name that combines the

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interesting because he distinguishes the translation of a proper name into a signifying structure from a physiognomy of letters, which is not based on similarity. Long before he had seen the portrait of the American general Lee, he writes, “habe ich mir ein Bild von ihm gemacht, das aus Deserteur und doppeltem e so wunderbar zusammengesetzt ist, daß ich nie ohne Vergnügen daran denke” (285).41 While this reading of letters lends general Lee a meaning that does not appropriate but rather keeps the name, Werther’s presentation and inscription of his name engulfs him in speculations in which he gets lost amidst the self-enamored gazing he performs. As Barthes writes about the lover’s search for confirmation: I look for signs, but of what? What is the object of my reading? Is it: am I loved (am I loved no longer, am I still loved)? Is it my future that I am trying to read, deciphering in what is inscribed the announcement of what will happen to me, according to a method which combines paleography and manticism? Isn’t it rather, all things considered, that I remain suspended on this question, whose answer I tirelessly seek in the other’s face: What am I worth?” (214; Barthes’ emphasis)

It is this specular moment that accounts for the spectacular success of the novel and the cult that developed around it, for the last question was one that could be transferred to all readers – in the name of Werther.

Evangelist John with one of the three Magi, Kaspar, from whom Kasper or Kasperl, the belligerent fool in German puppet plays for children, derives its name. Lavater was well aware of this, arguing that his middle name should not be given to his grandson. One Kaspar in the family is enough, or even more than enough: “Es ist genug und mehr als genug an Einem Johann Kaspar Lavater! Ja wahrlich, Einige sagen: es sei zu viel an dem, wenigstens Manches zu viel an diesem überflüssigen Hans Kaspar" (Schriften, ed. Johann Kaspar Orelli [Zürich: Schultheß 1844], V: 250). 41 “I formed in my mind a picture of him that combined defector and a double e in such a wondrous way that I still think of it with pleasure.”

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II. Lovers, Authors, Bureaucrats Every cult provokes effects of identification gathered, organized, and indeed serialized by a proper name. In this sense, to identify with the figure of a cult is to make his or her name proper to oneself as an image. It means to prop up that name as an icon or idol where self and other converge in an act that at once estranges the self and familiarizes the otherness of the other. Inexorably, the cult cultivates the image of the other as an enlargement or aggrandizement of the self, addressing its object in the manner of a certain kind of amorous discourse. As we have seen, Werther’s cultish dance around Lotte inscribes his name within a text that becomes a testimony to the value of his subjectivity. The young man that in the vignette on the title page to the novel’s “second genuine edition” engraves the worth of Werther is a reader that seems to write his epitaph. At the same time, this vignette, which does not illustrate a scene from the narrative and yet is so illustrative of its discourse, is remarkable precisely because the scribe it shows is something like the phantom of Werther that rises from his grave to inscribe his name as the author of the book his letters constitute. The title page would be the proper place for the author’s proper name to appear. In an important essay on Goethe’s novel, Kittler has pointed out that the narrative’s love story is also a story of authorship, and Barthes’ words about the lover’s hunger for the confirmation of his value can indeed be rephrased for an author’s hankering after the love of his readers: am I loved (am I read no longer, am I still read)? What am I worth as an author? Kittler follows up Foucault’s suggestion in “What is an Author?” that one should examine “at what point we began to recount the lives of authors rather than of heroes,”42 presenting Werther as a prime instance of this shift in German literature. 42 Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” in JosuéV. Harari, ed. Textual Strategies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 141. Further references to Foucault’s essay are cited in the text.

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Contrasting Francesca and Paolo’s passionate kiss after their reading of Arthurian romance in the inferno of the Divine Comedy with Werther’s and Lotte’s emotional and yet strangely chaste entanglement in the novel’s dramatization of their encounters with literature, Kittler argues that these scenarios of reading demonstrate “the power the names of authors attain over souls (die Gewalt von Autorennamen über die Seelen)” in the eighteenth century.43 He argues that in modernity the myth of the hero whose deeds were formerly related by an anonymous voice is replaced by the myth of an identified author presenting the story of figures whose names are comparatively unimportant if not indeed vanishing (149). Kittler’s essay takes up Foucault’s point that the naming and identification of the author is a way of keeping in check “the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches, but also with one’s discourses and their significations” (159). The unfettered genius, he points out, is some sort of decoy or compensation to dissimulate the ideological control this figure affords: “In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion. […] The author is […] the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.” Foucault’s essay is important for a reading of Werther because it points to a transition in literature and philosophy that brings about a change of the critical and aesthetic evaluation of works as texts. “A text has an inaugurative value precisely because it is the work of a particular author” (157), “modern criticism uses methods similar to those that Christian exegesis employed when trying to prove the value of a text” (150), “the author is […] defined as a constant level of value” (151). While Werther can be placed in the culture of emergent authorship, its discourse and its effect on the readers complicates things because it is marked precisely by an attempt to orchestrate a proliferation of meaning in order to dramatize, in every sense of the word, the 43 Friedrich A. Kittler, “Autorschaft und Liebe,” 144.

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inscription of the name of an author. In other words, it was written to satisfy or rather incite the public’s desire for a proliferation of desire because the author perceived that this would make his name in literature, and it is precisely the success of this undertaking that made it difficult for the author to claim control over his work. In this lies the historical significance of Werther, which is somewhat obscured by Kittler’s attempt to project Foucault’s argument onto the novel. After more than 200 years of criticism the novel is safely resting in the author’s lap, and Kittler’s argument is written from this perspective. The role of the heroes and heroines declined in relation to the rise of the author’s importance, Kittler states. But the scene in which Werther reads his translation of Ossian to Lotte is not really different from Francesca and Paolo reading Arthurian romance, and the reception of the text, its status as a cult book, shows that the public did not care too much about the author. They dressed and spoke like Werther and Lotte, not like the author. Kittler further argues that at the dawn of the age of authors in the second half of the eighteenth century, there had to be an author’s name on the title page or the readers would inquire about his or her identity (148). But the novel was for good reasons published anonymously in 1774. He claims that by the end of the eighteenth century copyright laws were in place to protect intellectual property (150). But in Germany it was not until the year after Goethe’s death that this happened,44 and the textual history of Werther is marked by the intense competition between the publisher and the pirates that left the author completely out of the loop. Goethe became the first modern German author (154), he says with reference to Goethe’s writing about the writing of Werther in his autobiography. This is very true, but it was a project that only began to take shape with the publication of Dichtung und Wahrheit in the years between 1811 and 1814, and Goethe’s account of the novel’s composition is

44 On the problems of copyright, see Heinrich Bosse, Autorschaft ist Werkherrschaft: Über die Entstehung des Urheberrechts aus dem Geist der Goethezeit (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1981).

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interesting because it tells the story of a text whose astounding success made it spin out of his authorial control. Goethe is the author of Werther. We shall have to come back to this claim later. At this point we ought to consider the question of how the narrative’s proliferation of meaning could, in Foucault’s sense, be kept in check. It is a proliferation that leaves Werther scrambling for his identity and, as we have seen, his proper name. The inscription of “Wert” on the title page can neither fill the lack of the author’s name nor recuperate the loss of Werther. The second part of the novel contains no reference to value or worth in Werther’s letters.45 The last time it does emerge is in the deathbed scene where Lotte’s mother transfers or imposes her responsibility for the children and her obligations toward her husband upon Lotte. She appoints Lotte as mother and wife, and in arranging her engagement with Albert, whom she also calls to her bedside, she tries to make sure that incest is not part of Lotte’s lot, as it is the case in some of Lessing’s and Schiller’s plays.46 Lotte tells Werther about her mother’s death on the night before he leaves the town. This is how Werther gets adopted into the family: “Lotte! rief ich aus, indem ich mich vor sie hinwarf, ihre Hände nahm und mit tausend Thränen nezte. Lotte, der Segen Gottes ruht über dir, und der Geist deiner Mutter! – Wenn sie sie gekannt hätten! sagte sie, indem sie mir die Hand

45 “Werth” is mentioned in three passages added in 1787. See pp. 203, 219, 220. The Editor cites Lotte using the word in a significant passage in which she suggests to Werther tat he leave to find a worthy object of his love: “Gewinnen Sie’s über sich! Eine Reise wird Sie muß Sie zerstreuen! Suchen Sie, finden Sie einen werthen Gegenstand all Ihrer Liebe, und kehren Sie zurük, und lassen Sie uns zusammen die Seligkeit einer wahren Freundschaft genießen” (220). / “Make an effort: a short journey will distract you. Seek and find an object worthy of your love; then return and let us enjoy together the happiness of a most perfect friendship” (72). 46 See Meyer-Kalkus’s comments on the deathbed scene in “Werthers Krankheit zum Tode,” 109–10 and 117–18.

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drükte, – sie war werth, von ihnen gekannt zu seyn. – Ich glaubte zu vergehen. Nie war ein grösseres, stolzeres Wort über mich ausgesprochen worden” (120).47

The adoption and, one last time, the imaginary naming of Werther are not performed in the name of the Father, but under the supervision of the spirit of the mother. They transform the word werth into the praise for the Mother whose place Lotte is called upon to take. MeyerKalkus has worked out the structures of what he calls Werther’s matriarchal hominisation in the patriarchal structure of the eighteenthcentury family. Drawing on Lacan’s concept of the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father by the mother, he sets up an oedipal structure in which Werther, in the absence of the symbolic father, identifies with the imago of the Mother and is eventually driven to his suicide.48 His reading is borne out by the narrative in many respects, and one might add that the grave is something like the womb of the Mother to which Werther returns in the end. His claim that the importance of the Mother in this structure corresponds to a gradual weakening of the father’s position in the families of the nineteenth and twentieth century is accurate and judicious, but one notes with some uneasiness the hints that in the end Werther’s death might be blamed on the 47 “‘Charlotte,’ I exclaimed, ‘God’s blessing and your mother’s spirit are upon you!’ ‘Oh if you had only known her!’ she said, pressing my hand. ‘She was worthy (werth) of being known by you.’ I thought I should faint. Never had I received praise so magnificent” (41). Not only the last but also the first instance of the narrative’s assessment of Werther’s worth occurs in a scene of adoption. Werther is visiting Lotte at her house, she is handing out bread to her siblings. Lotte asks one of the boys to shake hands with him and in doing so calls him “cousin”: “Vetter? sagt’ ich, indem ich ihr die Hand reichte, glauben Sie, dass ich des Glüks werth sey, mit Ihnen verwandt zu seyn? – O! sagte sie, mit einem leichtfertigen Lächeln, unsere Vetterschaft ist sehr weitläuftig, und es wäre mir leid, wenn sie der Schlimmste drunter seyn sollten” (40/42). / “Cousin?” I said to Charlotte, as I offered her my hand, “do you think I am worth (werth) the happiness of being related to you?” She replied, with a quick smile, “Oh! I have such a number of cousins that I should be sorry if you were the most undeserving of them” (15; rev.). “Worth” and “sorry”: The Sorrows of Young Werther. 48 Meyer-Kalkus, “Werthers Krankheit zum Tode,” 119–24.

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Mother and that Lotte, in the Ossian scene where they embrace and kiss, shows the “same” desire as Werther. The words Meyer-Klakus cites to corroborate this suspicion – she felt “tief, ohne sich es deutlich zu machen, daß ihr herzliches heimliches Verlangen sey, ihn für sich zu behalten” (229)49 – are in fact an interpolation by the Editor added in 1787. Lotte’s rejection of Werther when he kisses her after their reading of his translation of Ossian is marked by her emphatic call of his name: “Werther! rief sie mit erstikter Stimme abwendend, Werther! und drükt mit schwacher Hand seine Brust von der ihrigen! Werther! rief sie mit dem gefassten Tone des edelsten Gefühls” (246).50 Lotte does not simply appear as Germany’s virtuous wife. She calls Werther to reason in calling him to his proper proper name, which is to say that she does not simply remind him that his kisses are unworthy of him or their relationship. Rather, her call marks the end of such imaginary phantasies about Werther’s worth. It is a late call, but it is placed. The Editor’s speculations about Lotte’s desires are interesting not only because they engage in something like psychoanalysis without asking the psyche under investigation, but also, and in the first place, because it indicates the source of what Foucault calls “the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.” Werther testifies to a fear of uncontrollable and insatiable female sexuality, and the novel’s enormous success with the public dovetails with the increasing concern in the male dominated republic of letters about the Lesesucht, the voracity with which women were reading novels. Female sexuality is the proliferation of meaning that the figure of a father and author should delimit. The shift of his affection to the image of the Mother makes Werther’s love permissible and at the same time turns it into a threat of an impermissible oedipal incest. It is this structure of desire 49 “She felt, for the first time, deeply thou half unconsciously that it was her secret desire to keep him for herself” (75). 50 “‘Werther!’ she cried with choking voice, turning away. ‘Werther!’ and, with a feeble hand, pushed him from her. And again, more composed and from her heart, she repeated, ‘Werther!’” (80–81).

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and threat that at once provokes his desire to be named by Lotte in an act of rejecting the Father and his inscription of this desire within the narrative according to an absent and phantasmatic law represented by an absent Father. How can the fear of female sexuality be controlled? The answer the narrative of Werther brings to this question is not the name of an author but, as one might say with Foucault, the text’s tendency toward anonymity. This tendency will not just cancel out the voice of an author but, rather, constitutes what Foucault calls “the anonymity of a murmur” (160), which is related to his notion that “all discourses endowed with the author-function do possess this plurality of self” (152). The novel – as opposed to the letters it contains or includes – has several “authors” and discourses, at least two. While one of them is the amorous discourse of the lover, the other one is the discourse of the law and of the bureaucracy of law in which several figures participate. To work out these two discourses, we shall have to look at the structure of a rivalry and erasure Werther sets up when talking about authors in order to substitute them. Further, we must try to see in what way the rivalry that organizes his relationship with Albert is in fact one between the two discourses. Doing this, we shall once more have to pay attention to the gaze; it links the two modes of discourse by confronting Werther’s amorous gaze with the investigative eye of the law. In what is perhaps the most famous or notorious scene of the novel, Werther and Lotte find themselves at a window after the thunderstorm that interrupted the party where they met had blown over and given way to a soft rain pouring from the sky. The avowal of love that follows is not only marked by the flow of tears that will put Lotte and Werther in harmony with the rain outside, but also by a proper name that sounds like thunder and strikes the sympathetic hearts like lightening: Wir traten an’s Fenster, es donnerte abseitwärts und der herrliche Regen säuselte auf das Land, und der erquikkendste Wohlgeruch stieg in aller Fülle einer warmen Luft zu uns auf. Sie stand auf ihrem Ellenbogen gestützt und ihr Blik

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durchdrang die Gegend, sie sah gen Himmel und auf mich, ich sah ihr Auge thränenvoll, sie legte ihre Hand auf die meinige und sagte – Klopstock! Ich versank in dem Strome von Empfindungen, den sie in dieser Loosung über mich ausgoß. Ich ertrugs nicht, neigte mich auf ihre Hand und küßte sie unter den wonnevollesten Thränen. Und sah nach ihrem Auge wieder – Edler! hättest du deine Vergötterung in diesem Blikke gesehn, und möcht ich nun deinen so oft entweihten Nahmen nie wieder nennen hören! (52/54)51

Klopstock’s name is uttered as a password (Loosung) that will allow Lotte and Werther to enter the intimate community of friends idolizing the German bard. The alternate holding of hands, the kiss, the exchange of tender looks: In its peculiar combination of an upsurge of emotions and formal gestures that keep them in check, the scene stages an imaginary wedding in which the circle around Klopstock constitutes the ring that binds them in some kind of matrimony of sensibility. In the name of “Klopstock!,” Lotte becomes Werther’s lawful wedded heart. Werther moves fast, and the scene at the window that concludes the long letter telling the story of a love at first sight has in fact already undergone a series of revisions. Choreography is one of Werther’s strengths, even if he appeared to be out of step in his 51 “We went to the window. It was still thundering in the distance; a soft rain was pouring down over the countryside and filled the air around us with delicious fragrance. Charlotte leaned on her elbows, her eyes wandered over the scene, she looked up to the sky, and then turned to me, her eyes filled with tears; she put her hand on mine and said, ‘Klopstock!’ I felt overcome by the flood of emotion which the mention of his name called forth. It was more than I could bear. I bent over her hand, kissed it in a stream of ecstatic tears, and again looked into her eyes. Divine Klopstock! If only you could have seen your apotheosis in those eyes! And your name, so often profaned, may I never hear it uttered again!” (19; rev.). The reference to Klopstock’s ode “Die Frühlingsfeyer” added by Goethe in 1787 is omitted. Proper names, we are told, cannot be translated. As we see, they can be translated. Lotte and Charlotte will keep their differing names. It tells something about the mistaken notion that proper names are stable markers of identity, which the following argument can hardly drive home so subtly. Their co-presence in the original and the translation are an instance of what Goethe, in his autobiography, called “those several Charlottes,” that is to say, “diese mehreren Lotten.”

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dance with Lotte some moments before. While the scene on the dance floor was governed by a dyadic structure threatening to be disrupted at any moment, the Klopstock scene seems to be set up as one in which a third name mediates the position of the two friends. However, things quickly get confusing again. Trying to assume the imaginary place of Albert by reading Lotte’s utterance of “Klopstock!” as a promise, the letter that arranges this arrangement at the same time puts Klopstock in the place the phantasy was designed to keep vacant for Werther. In other words, if Werther’s phantasy of a marriage with Lotte remembers the suppressed memory that Lotte is already engaged to marry someone else, it now also engages in a competition with the name by whose authority their emotional coupling is performed. The scene unfolds a rivalling scenario of rivalry. Its structure no doubt pertains to the leadership cult. Every figure of a leader engenders both identification and challenge. The conclusion of Werther’s letter addresses the poet directly in terms marked by both adulation and aggression. “Divine Klopstock! If only you could have seen your apotheosis in those eyes!” For a fleeting moment – “in wenig Augenblikken” – Werther sees himself in the mirror of Lotte’s eyes as the apotheosis of Klopstock. The letter is in fact already working on an erasure of Klopstock’s name in Lotte’s apostrophe: “And your name, […] may I never hear it uttered again!” The reverence of this reference cannot hide the wish to substitute his name for that of the bard. There lies the difference between the rivalry with Albert and the competition with Klopstock. Although it might be difficult to assume the place of the fiancé, one thing seems certain to Werther: You can make your name. This is what the appropriation of “Klopstock!” for the scene of an imaginary marriage tells Werther. It offers the name as an image or imaginary construct, and this is why the scene is staged in an amorous gaze. Everything depends on being allotted a place in Lotte’s eyes. The hungry look of Werther. It is the most haunting aspect of the novel: “Wie […] ich, weis Gott mit wieviel Wonne, an ihrem Arme

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und Auge hieng” (48),52 he writes about the dance after the party that seemed to take place in the orb of her eye. After the scene of baptism at the well, he writes: “Was man nach so einem Blikk geizt!” Lotte and her friends depart in the carriage, and Werther looks for her eyes, “Ich suchte Lottens Augen! Ach, sie giengen von einem zum andern! Aber auf mich! Mich! Mich! der ganz allein auf sie resignirt dastund, fielen sie nicht!” (72).53 The “Mich! Mich! Mich! – Nicht!” performs something like a biting. Wellbery has drawn attention to the nonrepresentational character of nourishment in Werther, and his presentation of the novel shows that it can indeed be read as the modulation of a voice. Werther’s proper mode would be the lyric, the hymn, or the elegy. As he once writes at the end of one of his most lyrical letters, having returned from a walk: “Ich sehe nichts, als ein ewig verschlingendes, ewig wiederkäuendes Ungeheuer” (108).54 This is the reverse side of Werther’s lyric orality, and with regard to Lotte, with whom everything is connected in this devouring look (verschlungenes and verschlingendes), there is something of the myth of the vagina dentata in this passage. As Lévinas argues, we live and feed on the world in an act of eating that radically transforms the intentions we bring to bear on the world before us. Eating alters the meaning with which we endow this world in representational modes of thinking in that this very intentionality aiming at the objects around us “becomes interior to the exteriority it constitutes.”55 Lévinas thus comes to distinguish nourishment as the milieu of existence and thought from an intake that destroys the alterity of the world by an act of assimilation and appropriation: “To be sure, in the satisfaction of 52 “Heaven knows with what ecstasy I was clinging to her body and gazed at her eyes” (17, rev.). 53

“What a child I am to be so covetous of a look! […] I tried to catch Lotte’s eye. Her glance wandered from to the other, but it didn’t light on me – on me! On me, who stood there motionless, on me who alone saw her” (25).

54 “The universe looks to me like a an all-consuming, devouring monster” (37; rev.). 55 Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971), 136.

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needs the foreignness of the world on which I am founded loses its alterity: in satiation the real on which I feed gets assimilated; the power that was in the other becomes my power, becomes me […]. In its preparation and possession the alterity of nourrishing substances enters the order of the Same” (135). This is what Werther lives on, preparing Lotte as the substitute of a lost mother, a prop to be appropriated like Klopstock, who is a father figure at once desired and shunned. In Werther’s sentimental discourse the relationship between interiority and exteriority explored by Lévinas is threatened by the suspicion that his body, like that of Lotte’s, is in fact hollow. “Ach diese Lükke! Diese entsetzliche Lükke, die ich hier in meinem Busen fühle!” (172).56 Goethe’s play Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit presents a puppet or automaton as a paragon of love. When its stomach or womb is opened some of the key texts of European sentimentality clatter down to the ground. Among the books the puppet devoured, as it were, are the Nouvelle Héloïse and Werther. How can one eat a name? Lévinas’ remark that food constitutes a medium rather than an object to be appropriated and assimilated to oneself holds true for the name as well. To incorporate a name means to endow it with a meaning that then can be seized upon. The truly voracious reading experience of the Russian countess Lubomirska gives some evidence of this. When she received the book she sat down to read it with the help of a dictionary. Arriving at the emotional Klopstock scene she sensed that it constituted one of the novel’s climactic moments but did not understand what Werther and Lotte made almost delirious. She looked up “Klopstock!” Because proper names have no meaning, countess Lubomirska did not find the word “Klopstock” listed in the dictionary. When she called her German cook to help her out, the cook glanced at the passage and then told the countess that Klopstock was an especially delicious kind of roastbeef.57 56 “Ah! the void – the fearful void within me!” 57 Related by Richard Alewyn in “Klopstock!,” Euphorion 73 (1979): 359. One wonders how the countess read the rest of the novel. But one also senses that the cook had a very clear view of Werther’s hungry look.

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In his reading of Werther, Barthes characterizes identification in terms that aptly describe the set of the novel’s Klopstock scene: “I devour every amorous system with my gaze and in it I discern the place which would be mine if I were a part of that system. I perceive not analogies but homologies: I note, for instance, that I am to X what Y is to Z; everything I am told about Y affects me powerfully, though Y’s person is a matter of indifference to me, or even unknown; I am caught in a mirror which changes position and which reflects me wherever there is a dual structure” (129). The voracity of the narcissistic desire with which the lover seeks to inscribe himself within the amorous discourse contrasts sharply with the utter absence of intention that characterizes the structure of its system: “Identification is not a psychological process; it is a pure structural operation: I am the one who has the same place I have” (129). Once you are in the system, you are in, and Barthes even suggests that its structure can actually do you in. “The structure has nothing to do with persons; hence (like a bureaucracy) it is terrible. It cannot be implored – I cannot say to it: ‘Look how much better I am than H.’ Inexorable, the structure replies: ‘You are in the same place; hence you are H.’ No one can plead against the structure” (130; emphasis in the text). If Werther’s plea for Lotte’s affection is a desire to be named, Barthes’ presentation of the lover’s discourse as a bureaucracy commands some interest. What makes any bureaucracy terrible is the anonymity it creates in the very act of gaining control over the proper names entered in its books. The bureaucracy ascribes, strictly speaking, neither value nor character to the persons it registers and administers a name merely as an empty placeholder within an incident or a series of incidents it is designed to report regardless of the life or history of the name reported in its connection. Thus the registration of, say, a marriage simply relates that there was a wedding to be duly reported and that on that particular day it happened to be X and Y that were involved in it. The perspective Barthes brings to the novel reveals a strange complicity between Werther’s letters and the documents amassed in a bureaucratic apparatus. While the latter void the name of a specific individual by translating it into a marker within the structure of a 168

given system, the former reconstruct those systems in whose structure Werther then seeks to install himself by substituting his name for those of others. Thus, when Werther during his dance with Lotte hears the name “Albert” and learns about their imminent marriage, an imaginary marriage will be set up in which “Klopstock!” is substituted for “Albert,” then “Klopstock!” replaced by Werther. The “H.” Barthes refers to in the passage cited above seems to be Heinrich, the madman with an interesting physiognomy Werther encounters on the hills outside the town. “Er war ein so guter stiller Mensch, der mich ernähren half; seine schöne Hand schrieb, und auf einmal wird er tiefsinnig, fällt in ein hitziges Fieber, daraus in Raserey, und nun ist er, wie sie ihn sehen” (188)58 As it turns out, the “very fine hand” was writing in the service of the judge’s office: Wilhelm! der Mensch, von dem ich dir schrieb, der glükliche Unglükliche, war Schreiber bey Lottens Vater, und eine unglückliche Leidenschaft zu ihr, die er nährte, verbarg, entdekte, und aus dem Dienst geschikt wurde, hat ihn rasend gemacht. Fühle Kerl, bey diesen troknen Worten, mit welchem Unsinne mich die Geschichte ergriffen hat, da mir sie Albert eben so gelassen erzählte, als dus’ vielleicht liesest. (190)59

The story grips Werther, just as he grabs the figure of Heinrich for his own story. What it tells him is that fine writing in amorous letters can go hand in hand with the writing in an administration. That makes Lotte’s position so dangerous. She is at home in a place that demarcates and thus holds together those two modes of discourse. Heinrich, clerk and lover, could not tell them apart. His madness might be the 58 “He used to be a good, quiet boy, who helped support me, and wrote a very fine hand. But all at once, he became melancholy, was seized with a violent fever, grew distracted, and is now as you see” (63). 59 Wilhelm! The man about whom I wrote to you – that man so happy in his misfortunes – was a clerk in the service of Charlotte’s father. An unhappy passion for her, which he cherished, concealed, and eventually revealed, made him lose his position. This caused his madness. Think, as you read these dry words, what an impression all this made on me! Albert told it as calmly as you will probably read it” (SE 11, 64).

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insight that – in this story and house – they cannot be easily dissociated. We do not know what act of revelation led to his dismissal. Perhaps one day that “very fine hand” was inadvertently writing a billet doux on the office stationery.60 It is no accident that Albert tells Werther this story. He too moves in both these discourses and makes his home where they meet. Unlike Werther, he knows when it is time to turn his attention to business matters. This is why he stays on top in their rivalry. Not because he would be in a better position with regard to Lotte’s affection but because he sees that their rivalry has the same structure as that between amorous and bureaucratic discourse. He never insists on being Lotte’s lawful husband, but he continually shows that as a legal clerk he is wedded to the law. When the situation gets really tense toward the end of the novel, Albert immerses himself in his legal work while Werther and Lotte are entrenched in their emotional turmoil. Returning from a visit to a judge in the neighbouring county that had kept him away during the night in which Werther saw Lotte for the last time, he is met by Lotte whose embrace and irritated look makes him suspicious: “Eben dadurch machte sie die Aufmerksamkeit Albertens rege, der, nachdem er einige Briefe und Pakete erbrochen, sie ganz trokken fragte, ob sonst nichts vorgefallen, ob niemand da gewesen wäre?” (254/56).61 On hearing that Werther had been making love while he had been doing business he retires to his study and starts writing at his desk, gets up to pace up and down the room, returns to the desk, and writes on. At the same time Werther is in his room 60 The mad scribe is one of three figures in the novel that form some kind of parallels whose suffering anticipate what Werther himself will later endure. See Elisabeth Auer, “Selbstmord begehn zu wollen ist wie ein Gedicht zu schreiben”: Eine psychoanalytische Studie zu Goethes Briefroman ‘Die Leiden des jungen Werther’ (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1999), 137–48. The two other figures are the young peasant (Bauernbursche epsiode) and the girl drowning. 61 “This aroused the suspicion of Albert, who, after he had opened some letters and packages, curtly asked her whethere anything else had happened and whethere anyone had ben visiting” (my translation; the sequence of events and the words in the 1774 narrative are different from the 1787 text at SE 11, 84).

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following the same pattern: He is writing, gets up to roam through the garden and across the hills (nature is to him what the office is to Albert), gets back to his desk, continues to write. The rivalry of the two parallel and now simultaneous modes of fine writing reaches its finale. The lover sends the bureaucrat a note, asking him to lend his pistols: “Wollten Sie mir wohl zu einer vorhabenden Reise ihre Pistolen leihen? Leben Sie recht wohl” (252).62 Chodowiecki’s illustration of the scene where Lotte gives Werther’s servant the two pistols shows Albert sitting at his desk. The next picture shows Werther lying dying beside his desk. In this novel, being a bureaucrat is a way of survival. Barthes’ argument is a timely reminder that the amorous discourse of sensibility is developed at the same time as, and in conjunction with, eighteenth-century attempts to make the administrations of the legal system and the police more effective in their control over names, people, and their respective place in society.63 Kittler is right on this point: Werther is a narrative in which the subjects are controlled by the authorities. As a lover, Werther quickly slips into the slots the bureaucracy puts in place in order to keep some order in the novel’s rambling discourse on love. Once his name is on file, there is no escape from the secret intelligence culled from his love letters for the 62 “‘Would you lend me your pistols for a journey I am about to undertake? Adieu’” (SE 11, 82). 63 In his autobiography, Goethe presents a history of the German supreme court, the Reichskammergericht at Wetzlar, commenting also on its role in a reorganization of the police forces in the many principalities of the country. See Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit, vol. 14 of FA, ed. Klaus-Detlef Müller (Frankfurt/Main: Klassiker Verlag, 1986), 570–78 and the translation in Poetry and Truth, vol. 4 of SE, ed. Thomas P. Saine (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1987), 387–93. He characterizes the court as a “durchaus kranken Körper” (FA 14, 577), a “totally diseased organism” (SE 4, 392), terms that put it in touch with the sickness of Werther. See also Wilhelm Herbst, Goethe in Wetzlar (Gotha: Perthes, 1881), 33–44 and W. H. Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century: The Social Background of the Literary Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935).

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reports on which the bureaucrats, adding to his record, work in the background. Albert and Lotte’s father, the county judge, might be the most prominent administrators in the novel, but there are of course also the members of the nobility acting as chief officers in the affairs of the state. Werther seeks a position in their staff and entourage, and his letters in the second book of the novel are pervaded by an air of suspicion that all the bureaucrats around him are engaged in some kind of conspiracy to betray not only his love but the very idea of love. However, there is one more administrative aide to reckon with. Although he in fact controls the whole novel, he is rarely mentioned in criticism, which only shows that he does a good job. For his job is to remain in the background in order to more effectively lead the investigation he undertakes: the Editor. He is the agent assembling the records, he has Wilhelm hand over the letters once Werther is dead, he arranges the contents of the file on Werther, he will close the case. Werther presents a case history. As such, its chief interest lies in the fact that it rigorously stages Werther’s intimate amorous discourse as a public event. While the myth still endures that eighteenth-century epistolary fiction created something like a private space that was given a private and unmediated voice, it is important to note that this privacy is a concept carefully monitored by public moral and ideologies. Epistolary fiction is also an attempt on the part of bourgeois society to subject private discourse to public scrutiny. This did not preclude that fiction and its publicized discourse from putting up standards of value that its protagonists would then be shown to transgress. Quite to the contrary. Self-censorship became a mark of distinction from the moral corruptness of the nobility long before Freud introduced the super-ego and the unconscious as agents of control in a society where the nobility had long lost its commanding position. In Werther this censorship is performed by the Editor. He makes his entrance early enough to give the last stammers and spurts of Werther’s desperate writing some coherence, filling in the gaps of the epistolary discourse. Although the tone of his report, especially in the revised edition of 1787, seems to characterize him as a sympathetic and indeed very close friend of Werther’s, he also performs the duties of the police. 172

Readers of the novel have celebrated the book’s last scene where a solitary lover forsaken by the world is lowered into an unmarked, anonymous grave outside the churchyard. “Kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet” (266). This is how the novel ends. “No clergyman attended” (87), but other public officials did. One of them is the judge, the other one – we might conjecture – is the Editor. For let us not forget that Werther’s suicide necessitates an official inquest by the authorities. The legal sources cited in Zedler’s encyclopedia are very clear about this: Da nun jemand wider göttliche obere Gewalt sich selbst das Leben nimmt, und ein todter Körper gefunden wird; so liegt zuförderst denen Gerichten des Ortes, in deren Gerichtsbarkeit selbiger befunden wird, ob, sich nicht allein selbst dahin zu verfügen, und den todten Leichnam zu besichtigen, sondern auch, wegen derer dabey vorkommenden Umstände, genaue Kundschaft einzuziehen.64

The Editor is something like the coroner that in time appears at the scene to conduct the inquest or, as it is called in Zedler, the Inquisition. The officers or Gerichts-Halter had the duty and right to collect evidence and talk to those who knew the person. This is the case in the novel, and the characters that already figured in Werther’s letters now also become witnesses in a formal public proceeding: Die ausführliche Geschichte der letzten merkwürdigen Tage unseres Feundes zu liefern, sehe ich mich genöthiget seine Briefe durch Erzählung zu unterbrechen, wozu ich den Stof aus dem Munde Lottens, Albertens, seines Bedienten, und anderer Zeugen gesammlet habe. (198)65

64 Johann Heinrich Zedler, ed. Großes vollständiges Universal Lexikon aller Wissenschaften und Künste (Leipzig and Halle, 1743), 36, 1604–05: “If someone has taken his own life and his body is found, it is the duty of the courts in the district where it is found to go to the spot where it happened and to examine the body. There also has to be an inquiry into the circumstances of the action.” 65 “In order to present a detailed history of our friend’s last days I am forced to interrupt his letters by a connecting narrative gathered from what Lotte, Albert, his servant, and other witnesses reported.”

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On the evaluation and interpretation of the Editor depends the crucial question whether the reason for Werther’s suicide is insanity or some other motive that could lead to a post-mortem execution and his burial under the gallows. With the entrance of the Editor, the literary work of art is investigated with regard to its potential for crime. Apparently, this is how Napoleon read the novel. As Eckermann quotes Goethe’s remark about Napoleon’s reading of Werther: “‘Er hatte ihn studirt wie ein Criminalrichter seine Acten.’”66 In his debate with Albert about suicide, Werther demands not only respect for someone committing suicide but also a sympathetic investigation into his motives. Their different approach presents exactly the difference documented in Zedler’s encyclopedic entry between the more enlightened legal positions and those following traditional doctrine. And surprisingly, while Werther cannot focus as a lover and looks foolish in comparison to Albert’s self-composed attitude toward his rival, he is the better advocate for the rights a suicide should have. In the area of the law, his sympathy and empathy get all his words in their proper place: “Habt ihr […] die innern Verhältnisse einer Handlung erforscht? Wißt ihr mit Bestimmtheit die Ursachen zu entwikkeln, warum sie geschah, warum sie geschehen mußte? Hättet ihr das, ihr würdet nicht so eilfertig mit euren Urtheilen seyn” (94).67 In the revised version of 1787, the Editor’s voice is substantially edited to appear much more sympathetic to the cause than the law officer of 1774, who at times speaks a rather dry and latinized formal language. His words now actually echo Werther’s own:

66 Hans Gerhard Gräf, Goethe über seine Dichtungen (Frankfurt/main: Rütten und Loening, 1902), I, vol. 2, entry 1115: “He studied the novel like a criminal judge studies his reports.” Further references to Gräf are to this volume and will be cited in the text, followed by the number of the entry. 67 “What does that all mean? That you have fathomed the motives of these actions? That you can explain with certainty why they happened, why they had to happen? If you could you would be less hasty with your ‘labels’” (32).

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Was bleibt uns übrig, als dasjenige was wir mit wiederholter Mühe erfahren können, gewissenhaft zu erzählen; die von dem Abscheidenden hinterlaßnen Briefe einzuschalten und das kleinste aufgefundene Blättchen nicht gering zu achten; zumal da es so schwer ist, die eigensten wahren Triebfedern auch nur einer einzelnen Handlung zu entdecken, wenn sie unter Menschen vorgeht, die nicht gemeiner Art sind. (199 [1787])68

Thirteen years have passed since Werther’s death, and the legal gaze looking for evidence becomes not only more humane but also undergoes an aestheticization. Werther’s body has rotten away in an unlocated grave, the autograph letters have perhaps disappeared into some drawers of privacy. But the book remains, and it has to be refined, polished, mummified. The Editor’s search for those “eigensten wahren Triebfedern” transforms him into a psychologist that shares some of the exuberant language of the object he studies. At the same time we ought to notice that the addition of the so-called Bauernbursche episode – the story of the young man that falls in love with a widow, loses his job, and later kills the servant that replaced him – on the one hand elaborates on the legal discourse of the narrative and on the other introduces one more figure, or constellation of figures, on which Werther can exercise his power of identification. As Werther’s and Albert’s dispute about the fate of the murderer shows, the episode is something like a test for the narrative to fuse and at the same time sharply distinguish the legal and the amorous discourse in which it engages. Whether sympathetic psychologist or dutiful coroner, both editors – that of 1774 and that of 1787 – share the duty to “pay attention to even the slightest fragment from his pen” (65). Wilhelm, but also Lotte and Albert, have to submit, as it were, every single letter or scrap of paper to the legally literary authorities represented by the 68 “All that is left to do, then, is to relate conscientiously the facts which our persistent labor has enabled us to collect, to give the letters found after his death, and to pay attention to even the slightest fragment from his pen, especially since it is so difficult to discover the true and innermost motives of men who are not of the common run” (65).

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Editor. Bernhard Siegert has pointed out that according to the law of the time, letters had the same status as testaments.69 According to Zedler, one of the most important decision the inquest had to make was whether the suicide had in fact taken his or her life because of an explicable insanity or mental derangement, on which depended the decision on whether or not their testaments were declared invalid. The madness of Werther has saved a masterpiece of German literature for posterity. The publication of any novel that consists of private letters containing and divulging the intimate feelings of its characters performs, to reiterate this point, something like a public investigation. This is as true of Richardson’s novels as it is of Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloïse. In Werther, this performance takes a somewhat different turn although it follows the same structural principle. While Richardson’s and Rousseau’s texts can be imagined to be letters passed on among sympathetic friends that are either interested in gossip or delight in exemplary morality, or both at the same time, Werther’s utter solitude and isolation from the communities around him makes such a circulation neither possible nor conceivable. It is indeed this isolation that enables his amorous discourse and his diction to transgress all boundaries of conventions observed by a public that, in turn, comes to observe this transgression only because Werther’s death demands this official inquest. The Editor is not only a legal clerk but also the agent of the rhetorical and aesthetic law of decorum. He makes the appearance of Werther’s solitary discourse in the public domain credible by the authority of both the forensic and the aesthetic law he represents. If eighteenth-century epistolary fiction presents privacy as a public spectacle, this speculum is presented in Werther by an Editor that, in a manner unprecedented in European literature, gains access to the private recesses of an individual. What is extraordinary about this presence of a public eye in the private sphere is the extent of control it 69 Bernhard Siegert, Relais: Geschicke der Literatur als Epoche der Post, 1751– 1913 (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose, 1993), 46–48.

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exerts over the object of its observation. One only needs to look into Justi’s handbook on the duties and science of the police to see what the police had in mind. They have to protect domestic peace, the Hausfrieden. In areas where the potential for disorder is high, however, Justi suggests an organization of citizens on patrol. “In Japan,” he writes, “wo das Volk einen grausamen Caracter hat, ist allemal unter vier Hauswirthen einer der Aufseher über die drey übrigen, der sofort herbey eilen muß, sobald er den geringsten Lerm höret.”70 To get a clearer notion about what the move of the public on the privacy of citizens means, one might want to turn to the eighteenthcentury illustrations of the novel.71 Many pictures illustrating the novel’s central scenes show Lotte and Werther in a park-like setting. Thus, Bunbury’s “The First Interview between Werter and Charlotte” of 1782 has Lotte distribute the bread among her siblings somewhere in the garden under the branches of a huge tree. Schubert’s 1788 illustration of the same scene is staged in the house but in front of an oversized window overlooking the garden. While Morange’s engraving of “Lolotte et Werther” cannot move the piano at which the couple sit out of the house, it too is dominated by a large and open window that leads into the park. All these illustrations, and particularly those of the French and English translations, stand in the tradition of the Rousseauistic scenes in a bower. One of the scenes in 70 Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi, Die Grundfeste zu der Macht und Glückseligkeit der Staaten, oder ausführliche Vorstellung der gesamten Polizeiwissenschaft (Königsberg, 1761; rpt. Aalen: Scientia, 1965), II: 188: “In Japan, where the people have a cruel disposition, there is one supervisor to three tenants. He must immediately rush to the spot when he hears the slightest commotion.” 71 Besides the illustrations Jörn Göres’s Insel paperback edition of the novel, see also the exhibition catalogue of Jörn Göres, ed. Die Leiden des jungen Werther: Goethes Roman im Spiegel seiner Zeit (Düsseldorf: Goethe-Museum, 1972), 136–47 for a description of some thirty of the most influential pictures with sample reproductions on pp. 183–200. On Schubert, see Wofgang Pfeiffer, Die Wertherillustrationen des Johann David Schubert, vol. 46 of Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft (Weimar: Verlag der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1933).

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the narrative is quite explicitely staged in such an enclosed spot in the garden. It is, significantly, a place where Lotte and Werther meet in the presence of Albert. An encounter in a corner of the garden framed by trees and bushes or in front of a large window represents a private meeting in a place that is still sufficiently public. It thus corresponds to the gaze of the spectator who could have happened to pass by and catch a glance of that intimate meeting. Chodowiecki’s rightly famous illustrations break with this convention. While some of his pictures show an open door to the right or in the backgound that gives the public spectator an entrance to the scene, his illustrations of Werther’s and Lotte’s kiss on the sofa and the bed on which Werther, surrounded by a doctor, the judge, and his sons, is struggling with death are set in a room that does not have any visible window or door. What makes the engravings particularly impressive are the candles that throw a blinding light in a darkening space of privacy. No spectator could accidentally come to witness these sights. If the effect of these two illustrations is one of voyeurism, they also present the gaze from the perspective of those figures that do have right of access to those scenes or might burst upon them: Albert in the first instance, the coroner and the judge in the second. They are all representatives of the law that in this novel enters aesthetics. Chodowiecki’s illustration for the 1776 French translation by Deyverduns shows Werther’s room after his death. Everyone has left, a corpse remains. A hand of the body can be seen in the opening of the bed’s half drawn curtain, Lessing’s Emilia Galotti lies still open on the deserted desk, a pistol can be discerned lying next to it. It looks like a photograph taken by the police at the scene of a crime. Nothing is to be moved before every trace and evidence is carefully registered. In Werther, the public gaze on scenes of privacy is deeply involved in the official investigation of a case. At the end of the eighteenth century the police enlist the sympathetic reader to take quarters in the study and bedroom of German literature. The amorous and legal discourses in the narrative cannot be disentangled. Together they form the book entitled Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Unlike other epistolary novels in which both or 178

several sides of a correspondence are gathered, Werther is not dialogic. There is no indication that Werther and the Editor ever met, and if they have, if Wilhelm is the Editor, for example, this would not change anything about the relationship of the two discourses. They are neither dialogic nor antagonistic, nor, indeed, complementary. “A private letter may well have a signer – it does not have an author” (148), Foucault maintains, and one might want to say that the Editor in his publication of the letters, in which the words of the letters remain while the signature disappears, makes Werther into something like an author. In turn, Werther gives the Editor material to work on what one would clearly have to call an author’s task, such as the serialization of the letters or the partitioning of the letters in the part where the Editor fills in undocumented information. Although they collaborate to make the book, the two modes of writing remain distanced from each other, and they can coexist precisely because of this demarcation. This is what distinguishes Werther’s and the Editor’s cohabitation from the lover’s relationship with Lotte. In their plurality the two discourses create something like an anonymity. We have seen how Werther’s attempts to inscribe his name within the narrative fail and how he ends up in an unmarked grave. To the Editor anonymity is part of the censorship he exerts as a representative of the authorities: “Der Leser wird sich keine Mühe geben, die hier genannten Orte zu suchen, man hat sich genötigt gesehen, die im Originale befindlichen wahren Nahmen zu ändern” (26).72 This is how he comments on the name of Wahlheim. You can choose your home, but it is here chosen for us. Wahlheim resembles the graveyard in Wahlverwandschaften, where the stones are pushed around without regard to the place to which they belong. None of the names in the novel is genuine. It is not clear whether this applies to place names only. Some authors’ names are also taken out by the Editor: “Man hat auch hier die Namen einiger vaterländischer Autoren ausgelassen” (44).73 The 72 “The reader need not take the trouble to look for the place thus designated. We have found it necessary to change the names given in the original letters” (10). 73 “The names of some of our native authors have been omitted” (16).

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names that remain are not many. Goldsmith (the Vicar is named), Klopstock (“And your name, may I never hear it uttered again”), Ossian (an impostor), Homer (but who is Homer, the man?), Lotte (or is it Charlotte?), Malchen (call me Amalie). And Werther? What if his proper name would also be different, like those of the places? In fact, the narrative tells just this. That his proper name is different from the readings he performed on it. In order not to become anonymous, proper names are different. The lover never realized. Lotte, Lotte’s mother, other mothers, the widow in the Bauernburschen episode, Werther’s mother, his aunt: As Meyer-Kalkus has pointed out, the narrative is dominated by women that occupy important positions where one would expect men to appear. The carefully devised marketing of the novel addresses women as the reading public that in the second half of the eighteenth century became increasingly important. At the same time it is disturbing to note that all these women are struck by loss. Lotte’s mother died, the young mother lost Hans, Werther’s mother lost her husband, his aunt her brother – and there are others that are either sick or on the point of passing away. As if they had to pay a price for occupying the place they are in, the novel’s women are all wounded. Even Lotte herself, a mother imago surrounded by several children she feeds, is tied by Werther into the structure of a simulated fecundity for which it is important that she remain isolated between two men and a father – a switchboard for their desires and needs. A reading in which the Editor is given more than a secretarial job introduces a man in the structure to whom one must also add Wilhelm. He receives the love letters Werther sends, and the letters’ trio of Werther – Lotte – Albert can be refigured as one in which Wilhelm takes the place of Lotte: Werther – Wilhelm – Editor. Although the affectionate tone in Werther’s letters to Wilhelm is not unusual for the eighteenth century,74 every letter Werther sends addresses Wilhelm as an object of his love. Criticism of the novel has been silent about the 74 See Georg Steinhausen, Geschichte des deutschen Briefes (1889; rpt. Dublin und Zürich: Weidmann, 1968), 362–64 on Gleim and his group.

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silent figure of Wilhelm and has thus suppressed the homoeroticism of Werther’s love. The reason why he has never been considered as a rival to Lotte is that they are carefully kept apart by the novel’s strategy of a division of labor. While the first trio participates in the intimate narrative created in the letters, the second organizes the production of the book. Thus the novel builds up an economy in which Lotte, and all the other women, provide a story, a problem, or a complication – in short, a content for a work of art – while the three men (one of them dead) turn the story into a book. This, then, is the control the book exerts over the proliferation of meaning created by the narrative’s women. Three men publish the book, unless one assumes that Werther’s aunt is the Editor, a possibility that does not seem to be totally unfounded with regard to Werther’s comment on his negotiation with her about the family inheritance: “Sie sagte mir […] ihre Bedingungen unter welchen sie bereit wäre alles heraus zu geben, und mehr als wir verlangten” (12).75 In that case Werther’s father would, after all, emerge in the novel. He would be contributing the funds for its publication. What remains is a body in an unmarked grave, dressed in blue and yellow, a pink ribbon in his pocket. In these fetishized garments Werther and Lotte will be resurrected to parade the streets of German provincial towns. Werther’s name survives his death, as a brandname.

75 “She told me […] the terms on which she would be willing to give up (herausgeben) the whole, even to do more than we asked” (5).

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III. The Genius and Its Monstrous Doubles “Die Wirkung dieses Büchleins war groß, ja ungeheuer, und vorzüglich deshalb, weil es genau in die rechte Zeit traf,”76 Goethe comments in his autobiography. The novel’s astonishing sales figures corroborate his remark. Never before had a book met with comparable acclaim or scandal, and while the novel took the small reading public by storm, it took Goethe’s publisher Weygand by surprise. Soon after it had appeared at the Leipzig book fair at the end of September 1774, the first printing of 1,500 copies was exhausted. Booksellers in the university town of Göttingen were out of stock as early as November. While readers were rushing to buy the book, pirates were rushing to reprint the novel in order to cash in on this unprecedented craze for a novel written by some young author whose name did not appear on the title page. The seven pirated editions published in 1775 supplied another 3,500 copies, which in turn forced Weygand to come up with a second “authorized” edition to stay in the market at all. The 3,000 copies of the “zweyte, ächte Auflage” and its subsequent two unauthorized editions with a printing of 1,000 copies brings the total figure to about 9,000 copies within two or three years of the novel’s original publication, a figure at least twice as large as the printing of works by established authors in the eighteenth century.77 Several more reprints of the first two as well as the substantially revised edition of 1787 would follow in Goethe’s lifetime, as did translations into nine European languages.78 To demarcate Goethe’s authorized text from 76 Goethe, Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit, FA 641: “The impression made by my little book was great, nay, immense, and principally because it appeared at just the right time” (SE 4: 433). 77 One notable exception is Klopstock, whose Gelehrtenrepublik had a printing of 6,000 copies. Goethe’s edition of his Götz ran into 5,000 – and into a huge deficit. We shall have to come back to this later. The average printing of works by established writers was between 2,000 and 3,000 copies. 78 On the printing figures and their assessment, see Wolfgang Hagen, “Goethes Werke auf dem Markt des deutschen Buchhandels,” Goethe-Jahrbuch 100

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the pirated editions, the translations from the imitations, continuations, parodies, tracts, plays, and other Wertheriana is an almost impossible task. The novel created its own textual field, constituted a new genre. Although one should take care not to overestimate the significance of the absolute figures of readers in relation to the total population, it is precisely because the literate and literati still formed a relatively small group that its effects were so dramatic. One of the many plays produced to maintain a public discussion was Göchhausen’s WertherFieber (1776), which gave the whole cultural movement a name. Like a dangerous fever the novel infected the readers, and what enraged the clergy and the learned readers most was that it did not focus on a certain group, class, taste, or otherwise limited readership, but rather spoke to every reader. Had it been a love story, and a much more daring one for that, the clergy could have looked away or would indeed have overlooked it. Or they would have pulled it from the market, as the bishop of Milan actually did by buying all available copies of an Italian translation of Werther (Gräf, 1114). However, issues such as suicide and the critique of life at court could not be left unanswered. The true scandal of the book was that it constituted a medium in which clergymen or politicians communicated with the cultish community of sensibility, an effect that is connected with the interplay and interferences between the several discourses as pointed out earlier. The amorous discourse has a magnetic effect on other modes of writing. Goethe worked out a literary device rather than a racy topic, and the success was soon overwhelming him. Although Goethe’s later account in Dichtung und Wahrheit emphasizes the rapidity and unpremeditated way of the novel’s composition, he did not just come up with a good idea and some leads he then worked out, but in fact studied the public intensely and (1983): 21 and particularly Helmuth Kiesel and Paul Münch, Gesellschaft und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (München: Beck, 1977), 159–64. For a list and description of authorized and pirated editions as well as of translations, see Johann Wilhelm Appell, Werther und seine Zeit (4th ed., Oldenburg: Schulzesche Hof-Buchhandlung, 1896), 293–328.

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developed something like a marketing strategy. As Merck, his friend and advisor writes to his wife, “He separates himself from us and exists only for the works that he prepares for the public. He feels he has to succeed in everything he undertakes” (Gräf 915, n. 2). This urge to succeed had to grapple with the economic difficulty in which the genius found itself in the 1770s. In Dichtung und Wahrheit Goethe writes about the rise of the genius in the world of literature: Nun sollte aber die Zeit kommen, wo das Dichtergenie sich selbst gewahr würde, sich seine eigene Verhältnisse selbst schüfe und den Grund zu einer unabhängigen Würde zu legen verstünde. Alles traf in Klopstock zusammen, um eine solche Epoche zu begründen […] Ernst und gründlich erzogen legt er, von Jugend an, einen großen Wert auf sich selbst und auf alles was er tut. (434)79

“Klopstock!” The figure at the window in Wahlheim is the model of the genius the author of Werther would like to emulate. Goethe’s concise characterization of the task of the genius – it must be selfsufficient – includes financial independence, which was difficult to attain in a situation where the printers were trying to keep the honorarium as low as possible. “Die Produktion von poetischen Schriften aber wurde als etwas Heiliges angesehn, und man hielt es beinahe für Simonie, ein Honorar zu nehmen oder zu steigern” (563),80 Goethe writes. In a dispute with his printer, Wieland claimed that genius, talent, and taste should be remunerated, conferring a market value on the genius.81 That was in 1791. As it turns out, Klopstock was the first to test a new financing of genius: subscription. The massive figure of 3,600 filled a subscripton for his Gelehrten79 “Now, however, the time was at hand when poetic genius would discover selfawareness, create its own circumstances, and understand how to lay the foundations for independent respectability. Klopstock had all the qualities required for instituting such an epoch. […] Having been solidly and thoroughly educated, he put a high value on himself and everything he did” (295). 80 “The production of poetic writings was viewed as something sacred, and it was almost considered an act of simony to accept or increase an honorarium” (383). 81 Kiesel and Münch, Gesellschaft und Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert , 146–47.

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republik. When it appeared in 1774, it met with great disappointment, “zwar immer von bedeutendem Wert, aber nichts weniger als allgemein ansprechend” (564).82 The genius had messed up, and as Goethe points out this was not without consequences for other authors: “Diese dem Autor gelungene, dem Publikum aber mißlungene Unternehmung hatte die böse Folge, daß nun sobald nicht mehr an Subskription und Pränumeration zu denken war” (565).83 When Goethe prepared his novel for publication in 1774, he had to think of another way of avoiding financial risk. His play Götz von Berlichingen was printed at his own cost, and while it made his name known in literarry circles it got Goethe into debt. The strategy for Werther was to find a publisher that would print him and to write a book that would sell better. Genius became linked to sales figures. As already mentioned, an increase in sales could only be brought about by a good marketing, and apart from the customary precirculation of the book among friends Goethe took to other measures as well. The little preface to the novel ends with an appeal to the readers that not only consoles and warns the reader but also advertizes the book: “Ihr könnt seinem Geist und seinem Charakter eure Bewunderung und Liebe, und seinem Schicksaale eure Thränen nicht versagen. / Und du gute Seele, die du eben den Drang fühlst wie er, schöpfe Trost aus seinem Leiden, und laß das Büchlein deinen Freund

82 “While of significant value, it was anything but general in its appeal” (383). It is hard to see Goethe as a member of Klopstock’s idea of a Republic of Scholars. See Ulrich Dzwonek et al., “Bürgerliche Oppositionsliteratur zwischen Revolution und Reformismus: Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstocks Deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik und Bardendichtung als Dokumente der bürgerlichen Emanzipationsbewegung,” in Bernd Lutz, ed. Deutsches Bürgertum und literarische Intelligenz (1750–1800) (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974), 277–328. 83 “The undertaking, which was successful for the author but not the public, had the bad result of making subscriptions and prepayments now not seem very feasible” (384).

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seyn” (10).84 The tears the readers are asked to shed, to spend, and not to hold back are the money they should pay to make the book their companion. One of the first reviews ends by quoting this advertisement,85 and Schubart exclaims, “Kauf’s Buch und lies selbst!”86 Werther’s and Lotte’s names are part of the purchase. The readers of the novel quickly picked up the promise of an identification they offered, and it sometimes took the most grotesque forms. In a letter to Kestner, Goethe includes the following words from a friend (probably Lotte Jacobi) that had written to him: “Eine andere schrieb neulich: ‘Ich bitt’ Euch um Gotteswillen, heisst mich nicht mehr Lotte! – Lottgen, oder Lolo – wie ihr wollt – Nur nicht Lotte biss ich des Nahmens werther werde denn ichs bin” (Gräf, 940).87 As one reviewer writes, addressing the female readership, “Und du verehrungswürdige Schöne, die du mit Lotten den ganzen Werth unsers Werthers zu schätzen weißt, […] mögest du doch in den Armen deines Gatten […] alle die Seeligkeiten einathmen, die Dein und mein unglücklicher Freund nur in der Ferne schimmern sah.”88 The reviewer’s attempt to simultaneously recommend the novel and send the woman back into her husband’s arms betokens the anxiety that the worth of Werther includes some danger and that it might get out of hand. And it indeed did. Nothing is known about an increasing divorce rate after the 84 “You must give your admiration and love to his soul and character, and to his fate your tears. / And you, good soul, if you feel oppressed like him take consolation in his suffering and let the book be your companion.” 85 Gothaische gelehrte Zeitungen (29 October 1774), in Julius W. Braun, Goethe im Urtheile seiner Zeitgenossen (Berlin: Luckhardt, 1883), I, 52–53. 86 Daniel Schubart, Deutsche Chronik (5 December 1774), in Braun, I: 64: “Buy the book and read it yourself.” 87 “Another friend recently wrote to me, ‘I implore you, please do not call me Lotte anymore! Lottgen or Lolo if you please, but not Lotte before I am not more deserving (werther) of this name than I am now.’” 88 Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen (1 November 1774), in Braun, I: 55: “And you, my dear beloved, like Charlotte you know the worth of our Werther. I hope you will find, in the arms of your husband, the bliss that our unhappy friend only saw beckoning from afar.”

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novel’s publication. But soon the first bodies of young men were found that had taken their life in the manner of Werther; a young woman, who had a copy of the novel in her pocket, was pulled out of a river. The motives of those suicides inspired by Werther were a gruesome souvenir brought home from a reading trip to Wahlheim. Goethe was first entranced by his success, then horrified at some of the effects his novel produced. Later in life, Goethe scolded the Jena Romantics for their sickly spirit. In the 1770s, however, conservative readers were ready to blame him for having written a cult book for what they thought was a sick generation.89 The proliferation of souvenirs and fashion items that developed around the names of Werther and Lotte is astounding. Cups and saucers, plates, fans, woodcuts, silhouettes and portraits of the “true” Lotte, dresses with pink ribbons, blue coats and yellow vests. The novel led to something like a diversification of literature. A perfume called Eau de Werther enveloped those wearing it with a whiff of authenticity. As Susan Stewart points out, authenticity is the hallmark of the souvenir. They are “traces of authentic experience” that can be transferred or translated to a different place without losing their relation to the context from which they have been taken. “The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia.”90 What makes the cult around the figures of Werther and Lotte possible is that the figures in the narrative, and particularly Werther, have themselves this insatiable longing. Moreover, the narrative that presents them is itself 89 See Ariane Martin, Die kranke Jugend: J. M. R. Lenz und Goethes ‘Werther’ in der Rezeption des Sturm und Drang bis zum Naturalismus (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2002). It seems that cult figures invariably lead to emulation before they become sublimated into literary models that can control their disruptive power. On Werther’s literary after-life in Wilhelminian Germany, see Thomas Horré, Werther-Roman und Werther-Figur in der deutschen Prosa des Wilhelminischen Zeitalters: Variationen über ein Thema von J. W. Goethe (St. Ingbert: Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 1997). 90 Susan Stewart, On Longing, 135.

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a souvenir. This is why the autobiographical structure of the text is important. Modern criticism has by principle become skeptical of the value of biographical relationships texts may have. It is important here because the contemporary readers of Werther inquiring about the origin of the narrative, its reference to names and faces outside of the narrative, were trying to get the same souvenir as Goethe. This souvenir is the novel. One might inded say that Goethe’s authorship consists in having created a literary souvenir, and all those trying to get it were encroaching upon his authorship. Das forschende Publikum konnte daher Ähnlichkeiten von verschiedenen Frauenzimmern entdecken, und den Damen war es auch nicht ganz gleichgültig, für die rechte zu gelten. Diese mehreren Lotten aber brachten mir eine unendliche Qual, weil Jedermann der mich ansah, entscheiden zu wissen verlangte, wo denn die eigentliche wohnhaft sei?” (645)91

The question about the proper abode is one that can also be put to the novel in which, as we have seen, the place names are changed. There were also inquiries about the abode of Werther and Jerusalem. One clever innkeeper near Garbenheim placed Werther’s grave in his garden to show it to English tourists for money.92 To escape the tourists, Goethe became one himself. All his life he had the obsession of travelling incognito. Assuming another name he would disappear. One might see in this his desire to leave his proper name at home, as if the name was determined by its location. The passage in Dichtung und Wahrheit about the uncanny doubling of Lotte curiously presents authorship in terms of such an escape: “Ich suchte mich dann davor auf Reisen durch’s Inkognito zu retten, aber auch das Hülfsmittel wurde mir unversehens vereitelt, und so war der 91 “The inquisitive public could discover similarities with various young women, and these ladies themselves were not altogether indifferent about passing for the right one. But these multiple Lottes caused me endless torment, because everyone who just looked at me would insist on knowing where the real Lotte lived” (435). 92 Appell, Werther und seine Zeit, 52–55.

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Verfasser jenes Werkleins, wenn er ja etwas Unrechtes und Schädliches getan, dafür genugsam, ja übermässig durch solche unausweichliche Zudringlichkeit bestraft” (645).93 Goethe and his entourage cultivated this notion of an unjustified punishment. One day the author of Werther was sent a package from the South Sea that contained something like a compensation. Like the gift Werther had received from Lotte and Albert, the parcel contained a book. In his Mittheilungen, Riemer relates the following story: Noch im Jahre 1809 oder 1810 kam unter französischer Aufschrift: “an den Verfasser der Leiden des jungen Werther” ein Paket von Ingolstadt, mit einer französischen Nachbildung des Werther, das, weil es den Weg von Isle de France nach Ingolstadt gemacht und hier mit begreiflichem Protest, als inconnu à Ingolstadt abgewiesen worden, den ganzen Rückweg hätte antreten müssen, wennnicht zuletzt irgendwo ein Postmeister sich auf den Namen des Autors und ein Anderer auf dessen Wohnort besonnen und dem Herumirrenden die rechte Strase gewiesen hätte.94

Thanks to the expedient German postal system, the anonymous package arrives at Weimar even though its address omits the author’s name in the manner it was lacking on the title page of the original book. Return to Sender. Imagine what would have happened if Werther’s papers sent off on the eve of his death had not arrived at 93 “On journeys I tried to escape them by traveling incognito, but even this expedient unexpectedly failed me, and so the author of that little work, if he had indeed done something wrong and hurtful, was sufficiently, nay, excessively punished for it by these unavoidable importunities” (435). 94 Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer, Mittheilungen über Goethe (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1841), 616–17: “As late as 1809 or 1810, a package addressed in French ‘To the author of the Sorrows of Young Werther’ was received from Ingolstadt. It contained a French imitation of Werther which had come all the way from Isle de France to Ingolstadt, where, understandably, they put addressee unknown on the package. It would have been returned to the sender if it had not been for a postmaster that remembered the name of the author and someone else that knew where he lived so that they could give the erring mailman directions. This is, I think, the only instance when the novel actually provided G. with some fun.”

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their destination: “Er kramte den Abend noch viel in seinen Papieren, zerriß vieles und warf’s in Ofen, versiegelte einige Päkke mit den Addressen an Wilhelmen” (260).95 They are his legacy, they are indeed something like the heritage of modern German literature, and Werther’s obedient servant does well to go to bed fully dressed, “denn sein Herr hatte gesagt, die Postpferde würden vor sechse vors Haus kommen.”96 In the morning the servant, one assumes, did not fail to send off Werther’s precious packages at six, no matter what. Or perhaps he handed them over to the authorities. Or perhaps they have indeed disappeared. We cannot tell for sure, but it would possibly account for the Editor’s opening remark, “Wie sehr wünscht’ ich daß uns von den letzten merkwürdigen Tagen unsers Freundes so viele eigenhändige Zeugnisse übrig geblieben wären, daß ich nicht nöthig hätte, die Folge seiner hinterlaßnen Briefe durch Erzählung zu untebrechen” (199; 1787).97 At any rate, it might tell us something about the importance of the proper name. To Goethe, Riemer tells us, the detour was amusing. Inconnu à Ingolstadt. Perhaps because he would almost have found an incognito, or because he was after all recognized as the author of the anonymous book, or even because the translator in the South Sea had confused Werther with Johann Miller’s Siegwart, a novel modelled on Werther that actually takes place in Ingolstadt. The question of the proper name is a sensitive issue to Goethe, as the following narrative from Dichtung und Wahrheit illustrates. Goethe had brought some books from his father’s library to Strasburg and Herder sent him a note requesting that he lend him some of them for his studies. Herder concludes his letter by addressing Goethe as 95 “He spent the rest of the evening going through his papers; he tore up and burned a great many; he sealed a few packages and addressed them to Wilhelm” (85). 96 “as his master had told him that the coach horses would be at the door before six o’clock” (85). 97 “I wish that we had so many documents by his own hand about our friend’s memorable last days that I did not need to interrupt the sequence of his letters by a connecting narrative” (65).

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follows, “Der von Göttern du stammst, von Goten oder vom Kote, Goethe, sende mir sie” (444).98 This is Goethe’s rejoinder: Der Eigenname eines Menschen ist nicht etwa wie ein Mantel, der bloß um ihn her hängt und an dem man allenfalls noch zupfen und zerren kann, sondern ein vollkommen passendes Kleid, ja wie die Haut selbst ihm über und über angewachsen, an der man nicht schaben und schinden darf, ohne ihn selbst zu verletzen. (444)99

The blue coat Werther was wearing when he met Lotte became so worn out and “unscheinbar” (166) that it had to be replaced by the one that dresses his body in the unmarked grave. That second coat never fitted like a skin. This takes us back to the Inconnu à Ingolstadt. For this town is also the birthplace of another famous Inconnu of literature who has a severe problem with his skin and name: Frankenstein’s Monster. There is a relationship between his being patched together in the image of man and his having no name. Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set [...].100

The monster looks very different from Lotte, but not altogether different from the figure that sees his reflection in her black eyes. “I 98 “You, who stem from the gods, or from the Goths, or from goat-dung, / Goethe, send them to me” (302). 99 “A man’s own name is not, say, like a cloak, which merely hangs from his shoulders and can be pulled and tugged, if need be. Rather, it is a perfectly fitting garment, nay, it is grown tight to him all over, like his own skin, and one may not scrape and pare away at it without wounding the person himself” (302). 100 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, ed. James Rieger (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 52. Further references are to this edition and will be cited in the text.

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had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body” (52), Frankenstein says. When that body comes alive in an act of creation described in analogy to Genesis, the creator did not name it. Benjamin writes, “Man is the knower in the same language in which God is creator. [...] His mental being is the language in which creation took place. In the word creation took place, and God’s linguistic being is the word. All human language is only reflection of the word in name.”101 Frankenstein thought that he could create life. His error becomes apparent when, instead of naming his creation, he escapes the scene in panic: “Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room” (53). One might see a link between this flight and Goethe’s escape when confronted with the zombies of Werther and Lotte springing up all around him. What the two novels share is the danger inherent in the phantasy of genius and its power of invention, the risk of confusing creation with what Benjamin calls its reflection in the name. What they share, in other words, is the articulation of this risk with regard to the problem of their protagonists’ proper names. There is indeed something monstrous about Werther, and let us not forget that one of the three books from which Frankenstein’s Monster culls its knowledge of the world around it is a copy of Goethe’s novel. On one of his forays into the wood surrounding the house of the family that had given him shelter and protection the Monster finds a bag “containing several articles of dress and some books.” Taking the spoil back to its hiding place Frankenstein’s hideous creation soon unpacks the books that will open another strange world to it. “Fortunately the books were written in the language the elements of which I had acquired at the cottage; they consisted of Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter” (123). The Monster enters the scene of world literature. Werther is the book it reads first.

101 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Reflections, 323.

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Chapter 4

The Volatility of the Letter: Baudelaire Translates Poe “Cauhiff aud ftd sdftirf ithot tacd wdde rdchfdr tiu fuaefshffheo fdoudf hetiusafhie tuis ied herhchriai fi aeiftdu wn sdaef it iuhfheo hiidohwid wn aen deodsf ths tiu itis hf iaf iuhoheaiin rdffhedr; [...].” Poe, “A Few Words on Secret Writing“102

I. Destination Paris How does one approach the foreignness of languages? Translation, it would seem, is a powerful answer to this question, for it is not merely constituted by the fact that we speak in different languages but can be said to be the most original form of our encounter with language as difference. If translation thus gains privileged access to the question of otherness in language, we should also note that throughout its long history it has been made to participate in a politics that would negate or overcome what is alien in texts of a different language. No course on “Great Books,” literary theory, and cultural studies in our universities can neglect the problem that the idea of its teaching is still connected to the 19th-century project of a world literature that reads and interprets the polyglot world from the perspective of unilingual nations. Ultimately the tendency to subject what is foreign to some 102

Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 1285. Subsequent references to Poe’s criticism and theory refer to this edition and will be cited in the text as ER.

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form of domestication is the problem of any translation in any context and period. Translation has always been a form of cultural appropriation.103 In “The Task of the Translator” Benjamin cites a passage from Rudolf Pannwitz demonstrating that the translator is not only a linguist and historian but also – in the widest sense of the term – a geographer: “Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English.”104 Reversing or redirecting the relationship between what are commonly called the source-language and the target-language, Pannwitz promotes a translation that does not appropriate its source but rather, as Carol Jacobs puts it, “renders radically foreign that language we believe to be ours.”105 Challenging the assumption that the translator should serve as an agent of the erroneous belief in the familiarity of one’s own language, Pannwitz writes: “The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue” (81). He puts in more radical terms what Schleiermacher before him had described as the first of two distinct methods of translating: “Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader toward the writer, or he leaves 103 On translation in 19th-century Germany, where the links with nationalism were particularly close, see Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Heyvaert (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992). Cp. also Andreas Huyssen, Die frühromantische Konzeption von Übersetzung und Aneignung: Studien zur frühromantischen Utopie einer Weltliteratur (Zürich: Atlantis Verlag, 1969). A discussion of the politics of language in the U.S. must turn to the excellent article by Marc Shell, “Babel in America; or, the Politics of Language Diversity in the United States,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 103–27. 104 Pannwitz, cited by Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 80. Subsequent references are cited in the text. 105 Carol Jacobs, “The Monstrosity of Translation,” MLN 90 (1975): 756.

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the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer toward the reader.”106 In his role as mediator the translator using the first method not only stands between reader and author but also between his own native tongue and the foreign language: “He seeks to communicate to his readers the same image, the same impression that he himself has gained – through his knowledge of the original language – of the work as it stands, and therefore to move the readers to his viewpoint, which is actually foreign to them” (42). What Schleiermacher’s translator does for the reader he also does to his own language: turning German, as Pannwitz would say, into Hindi, Greek, or English. Unlike Pannwitz, though, Schleiermacher leaves no doubt that in the end the mediation of the translator brings the experience of the foreign home to the fatherland of German letters where it “would be kept safe in the center and heart of Europe” (53). Writing his essay on “The Crisis of European Culture” in 1917, at a time when the destiny of what Schleiermacher had called “translation on a large scale” (54) translated into military action, Pannwitz shifted his focus to the relationship between languages rather than subjects. This is what attracts Benjamin, who begins his essay by stating flatly that “in the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver (Rücksicht auf den Aufnehmenden) never proves fruitful” (69). The task of the translator is not to mediate between the persons of author and reader but rather to attend to translation as the most important medium of language. In what might be considered the central and most difficult statement of his essay, he writes: “Translatability is an essential quality of certain works (eignet gewissen Werken wesentlich), which is not to say that their translation is essential to them (wesentlich für sie selbst); it means rather that a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability” (71; modified). The passage says two things. Transla106 Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating,” in Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, eds. Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 42.

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tability is an essence of language, its Eigenes, and what is most proper to it is precisely the foreignness without which translation would simply make no sense. Which is to say: The Eigenes, the proper property of language, is in fact its foreignness, the Fremdes. Pannwitz’s distinction between foreign language (fremde sprache) and mother tongue (eignen Sprache) is thus inflected in Benjamin’s discourse by the notion of an irreducible foreignness that exists in any tongue and that therefore can be neither overcome nor appropriated. The passage cited also claims that the work of art is indifferent to its actually being translated although translatability is its very condition and promise. Benjamin’s rejection of any aesthetics of reception not only disregards the reader but also, it seems, the translator and his work. The task of the translator, his Aufgabe, is to give up his work to what the essay in several instances calls Sprachbewegung, the movement of language or, as Zohn translates, “linguistic flux” (80). In the movement or displacement of translation, Benjamin says, the works of art curiously remain indifferent to the difference the act of translating carries out. How are we to understand this? Within the framework of the essay’s messianic conception of history, “all translation is only a somewhat provisional (vorläufige) way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages” (75), pointing to what Benjamin repeatedly calls “pure language,” that is to say, “the predestined, hitherto inaccessible (versagten) realm of reconciliation and fulfillment of languages” (75). Translation seems to constitute the promise of a fulfillment it cannot keep. One should not conclude from this that actual translation counts less to Benjamin than sheer translatability and that this is the reason why the question of whether they are actually translated is inessential to works of art. Rather, works of art are indifferent to their being translated to the extent they bear a mark of difference in the essential foreignness inherent in language. It is the task of the translator to bear out this difference. The way in which Benjamin’s radical argument undermines the distinction between mother tongue and foreign language would lead one to expect that it also affects the distinction between the original 196

and its translation. However, this does not seem to be the case. Nowhere is there any doubt about their relative positions even if the arcane value attached to translation contradicts the commonly held instrumental view of its acting as a handmaiden to the original. In metaphors that Benjamin insists “should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity” (71), original works of art are presented as a form of life that find some kind of afterlife (Fortleben) in translation: “In translation the original grows into a higher and purer linguistic air, as it were” (75; modified). How are we to understand the unmetaphorical metaphor of growth, the “seed” of the original that “ripens” into a “fruit“? All this organicism somehow seems to harken back to Schleiermacher’s garden in which the translator plants the flowers of rhetoric that he has dug up in foreign lands of language and culture to fertilize, as it were, his own soil.107 Even Benjamin’s emphasis that translation fulfills the destiny of the original and that the life of works is not to be understood organically but historically has a correspondence in Schleiermacher’s essay. One might indeed say that in its religious conception of an ineffable language Benjamin’s messianic theory of translation is not altogether different from the more pragmatic, protestant hermeneutics of Schleiermacher’s “translation on a large scale.”108 What remains, though, is the fundamental difference one discerns in Benjamin’s radical stance with regard to an aesthetics of reception that Schleiermacher helped to establish in literary criticism. To Benjamin translation sets up a relationship between languages in which the author, the translator, and the reader do not matter as persons but, rather, as linguistic beings. 107 See Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating,” 53: “Just as our soil itself has probably become richer and more fertile, and our climate more lovely and mild after much transplanting of foreign plants, so do we feel that our language, which we practice less because of our Nordic lethargy,can only flourish and develop its own perfect power through the most varied contacts with what is foreign.” 108 On Benjamin’s essay as “translation Bible,” see Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 240–62.

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They have their life and history through the experience of the translatability of language, and this is how we must understand Benjamin’s difficult contention that the metaphor of the life and afterlife of works of art “should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity” (71). De Man has rightly focussed on the strangeness of Benjamin’s use of metaphor in this context: “The translation is not the metaphor of the original; nevertheless, the German word for translation, übersetzen, means metaphor. Übersetzen translates exactly the Greek metaphorein, to move over, übersetzen, to put across. Übersetzen, one might say, translates metaphor – which, asserts Benjamin, is not at all the same. They are not metaphors, yet the word means metaphor. The metaphor is not a metaphor, Benjamin is saying.”109 Although de Man’s provocative reading misses Benjamin’s point that there is a “nucleus” in every work of art that “does not lend itself to translation” (75) and that this nucleus is the very translatability of a work, his essay shows clearly how Benjamin gets into difficulty with regard to the seemingly stable relationship between the original and the translation after all. If any and every language is marked by an essential foreignness, translation is at once necessary and impossible, and one might ask how one should then be able to distinguish it from the original it translates. This is precisely the question to be addressed in a reading of the two narratives signed jointly by Poe and Baudelaire under the separate titles of an original and its translation: “The Purloined Letter” and “La lettre volée.” Let us not forget that “The Task of the Translator” serves as a preface to Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens. Whatever the essay may tell us about Benjamin’s translation of Baudelaire, one wonders what it says about Baudelaire as the translator of Poe. While Benjamin’s essay is silent on this question, his book on Charles Baudelaire: A Poet in the Time of Capitalism points out that in translating the 109 Paul de Man, “‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 83. See also Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig, ed. Übersetzen: Walter Benjamin (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001).

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Histoires extraordinaires Baudelaire makes Poe invade his poetry. Through his translation of Poe’s stories of detection, he argues, Baudelaire “adopted” a new genre for French literature: “Poe’s work was absorbed into his own, which Baudelaire emphasizes by professing a solidarity with the method underlying all genres of Poe’s production. Poe was one of the greatest technicians of modern literature.”110 Baudelaire’s theory of poetry owes much to Poe’s aesthetics. “I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect” (ER, 13), Poe begins his account of writing “The Raven” in The Philosophy of Composition. Building on the sonorous effect of its refrain – “nevermore” – the poem originated, as it were, from its end, a notion we shall discuss in detail in the following chapter on Poe’s literary theory. The repetition of the poem’s performance in the narrative about the method of its composition produces that effect of reproduction on which Baudelaire comments in one of his essays on Poe: “Il croyait, en vrai poète qu’il était, que le but de la poésie est de même nature que son principe.”111 Baudelaire’s identification with Poe’s aesthetics of reconstruction manifests itself in two areas. In his own poetry, where the correspondence of “l’amour du Beau” and “l’amour du mal” ascribed to the American poet provides something like a bed to Les Fleurs du mal, and in his translation of Poe’s work into French.112 Benjamin’s remark that Poe entered into Baudelaire’s work is true in more than one sense. “Il y a dans l’histoire littéraire des destinées analogues, de vraies damnations – des hommes qui portent le mot guignon écrit en caractères mystérieux dans les plis 110 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–1986), I:545. Henceforth cited as GS. 111 Baudelaire, “Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses œuvres,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), II: 305. “As the true poet he was he believed the aim of poetry to be of the same nature as its principle.” 112 On Baudelaire’s translation of Poe, see Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler, Charles Baudelaire (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 495–500, and Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Translation and Literary Criticism: Translation as Analysis (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 1997), 31–38.

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sinueux de leur front.”113 Poe, like Baudelaire himself, is a poète maudit bearing Cain’s mark on his forehead, and as we shall see in the next chapter guignon – “no chance” – is also the title of a poem in Les Fleurs du mal that steals, and translates, verse Baudelaire had culled from the epigraph to one of Poe’s stories. If Poe’s texts can be said to lead something like an “afterlife” in Baudelaire’s poetry, Baudelaire’s poetry can also be said to invade the life of the American poet. In his 1852 essay “Edgar Allan Poe: Sa vie et ses ouvrages” published in La Revue de Paris, Baudelaire relates in plain newspaper style how one morning the police found Poe in the streets of Baltimore: “Le matin, les hommes de police le ramassèrent par terre, dans un état de stupeur.”114 In his preface to Lévy’s 1856 edition of Histoires extraordinaires, the corresponding passage reads like a poème en prose: “Le lendemain matin, dans les pâles ténèbres du petit jour, un cadavre fut trouvé sur la voie [...] – non, un corps vivant encore, mais que la Mort avait déjà marqué de sa royale estampille.”115 Poe’s solitary life and death, his “mélancolie bien solitaire,“116 fashions the poet into a figure akin to those we encounter in the streets of Baudelaire’s Paris. His characters withering away in isolation and estrangement are spotted by the narrator roaming the city like a flâneur. Benjamin has identified the flâneur as a brother of the narrator in Poe’s “Man of the Crowd“: “Poe’s famous short story ‘The 113 Baudelaire, “Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses œuvres,” II: 296. “There exists, in the history of literature, an analogy of fate, of real damnations – men that have the word guignon written in mysterious characters in the sinuous folds on their forehead.” 114 Baudelaire, “Edgar Allan Poe: Sa vie et ses ouvrages,” Œuvres complètes, II: 264: “In the morning, policemen picked him up from thestreet in a state of stupor.” 115 Baudelaire, “Edgar Poe: Sa vie et ses œuvres,” Œuvres complètes, II: 305: “The following morning, in the pale darkness of the small hours, a corpse was found in the street [...] – nay, a body living still, but one already marked by Death’s royal stamp.” 116 Baudelaire, “Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages,” II: 269.

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Man of the Crowd’ is something like an X-ray of a detective story.”117 What is missing, Benjamin points out, is the trappings of a crime, shifting the focus on the persecution of someone seeking invisibility in the throng of people around him. The strategy of hiding in the midst of things, in the obvious, links the story to “The Purloined Letter.” And indeed, the very letter that signs that narrative is not missing. “Not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in autumn, I sat at the large bow window of the D— Coffee-House in London.” 118 It is evening, it is autumn, and one wonders whether the D-cipher refers to the Minister D— or Dupin. A subterraneous passage links the D— Coffee-House with the apartments in Paris where D— detects D—’s ruse. The secret passage is intriguing because it links London with Paris, the French language with the English. “J’étais assis devant la grande fenêtre cintrée du café D..., à London.”119 The window opens on a scene in which the flâneur enters as detective and where it turns out that the detective is a translator. The translator is a detective: This explains why “The Purloined Letter” / “La Lettre volée” take such an important position in Baude117 Benjamin, GS, I: 550. Benjamin also intimates that the man of the crowd returns as the widow in “A une passante.” One might add that the line “Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!” (Œuvres complètes, I: 93) echoes Poe’s refrain of “nevermore” in “The Raven” – jamais plus, as Baudelaire translates. The widow is something like a sister of Poe’s Lenore. 118 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” in Poetry and Tales, The Library of America (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 388. Unless otherwise noted, Poe’s narratives are cited from this edition and will be referred to as PT. 119 Poe, Œuvres en prose, traduites par Charles Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 311. Subsequent references to Baudelaire’s translation of Poe refers to this edition and will be cited as Pœuvres. In one of Baudelaire’s biographical essays, the narrator observing the Man in the Crowd from his seat in the D— CoffeHouse or in the street: “Il était marqué par la Nature, comme ces gens, qui, dans un cercle, au café, dans la rue, tirent l’oeil de l’observateur et le préoccupent” (“Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages,” Œuvres complètes, II: 268. Emphasis in the source.) The identificatory relationship Baudelaire enters with regard to Poe can indeed be described as that of an observer observing someone observing.

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laire’s work. Like a detective the translator must find the meaning hidden in the foreign language of a text in order to draw it out of its secrecy and make it openly available to understanding. Like Dupin, the translator is dealing with letters, displacing, changing, counterfeiting them. But Dupin, in stealing and counterfeiting the letter, finds himself also in the position of a criminal. If the translator is the double of the detective, the detective’s double is – in turn – a criminal. While the content or meaning of the narrative deploys the latter relationship of doubles, the translation of the narrative doubles this doubling on a formal or technical level. The translator is both a traitor and a detective. That the distinction between the content of a text and its form is untenable is something that literary criticism has come to take for granted. In “The Purloined Letter” / “La Lettre volée” this impossibility of distinction is dramatized. To understand this drama we might take up again Benjamin’s shrewd observation that through his translation of the detective stories Baudelaire absorbed or adopted Poe’s method. This is where the task of the translator and that of the detective are essentially the same. Both use a certain method, and to both applies Poe’s word cited earlier: “I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect.” Or, as Baudelaire rephrases this maxim, “le but de la poésie est de même nature que son principe.” The composition of detective stories begins, one might conjecture, with the conception of an effect of surprise that will be disclosed to the reader only at the very end of the narrative. In most cases the author of the classical whodunit will start with the ending and construct the complication that the reader will go through in reverse order. If this is a common method in writing detective stories, how does it compare to the work of the translator? The target or but of the translator is the so called target language into which he translates. Regardless of whether one translates a text into a foreign language or into one’s mother tongue, the source always moves away from its original language. Although Baudelaire’s notion that the goal of poetry is the same as its principle is also true of the displacement that informs translation, the surprising reversal of direction he detected in Poe’s literary theory and practice does not seem to apply. In “The Purloined Letter” / “La Lettre 202

volée,” however, this surprising reversal occurs. While “The Man of the Crowd” is displaced from London to Paris in “L’home des foules,” the situation is different in the detective story under discussion. Poe’s Dupin lives in Paris, in the city where Baudelaire can claim to have his home. One might safely assume that Dupin and the Prefect of the Parisian Police speak French, but in Poe’s original narrative their words are in English. This is the surprise we detect in the narrative: Poe’s original is in fact a translation, and Baudelaire’s translation is something like an original. The peculiar redirection of what is original and what is its translation might account for the strange fascination Poe’s naratives and in particular the Dupin trilogy have exerted on French literature. Beginning with Baudelaire, Poe became the hero of French modernism. The remarkable history of Poe’s influence in France shows that the translation of his work established something like a common language of poetry and poe-etics.120 The mismatch between the admiration or even idolatry attached to Poe’s work in France and the tempered judgment passed on his literary hoaxes by the AngloAmerican public is a matter of cultural difference we cannot go into here. But we might recall once more Schleiermacher’s famous distinction between the two accepted methods of translation: “Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader toward the writer, or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer toward the reader.” As we discussed earlier, Benjamin’s essay on translation – like most modern theories – champions the first method to demonstrate how translation displaces 120 See Célestine Pierre Cambiaire, The Influence of Edgar Allan Poe in France (New York: Stechert, 1927), Patrick F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957), Dominique Jardez, La Réception de l’oeuvre d’Edgar Poe en France de 1844 à 1877 (Lille: Atelier National de Reproduction des Thèses, 1999), and Patrizia Lombardo, Edgar Poe et la modernité: Breton, Barthes, Derrida, Blanchot (Birmingham, Alabama: Summa Publications, 1985). On Baudelaire’s relationship with Poe, see Peter M. Wetherill, Charles Baudelaire et la poésie d’Edgar Poe (Paris: Nizet, 1962) and the notes in the Pléiade editions of his works and the translations of Poe.

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the text into an essential foreignness. Schleiermacher prefers this method because it makes translation culturally more acceptable, for it allows the readers to enrich their heritage with foreign culture or, depending on the perspective one takes, to foray into foreign territory. The second method is suspicious because it makes the original writer invade, as it were, the reader’s mother tongue: “This method, obviously, is on the mind of all those who use the formula that an author should be translated as if he himself had written in German.” As a consequence, “the original work would become for them exactly the same as the translation, since the author has transformed himself into a German.”121 With regard to “The Purloined Letter” / “La Lettre volée” we might say that Schleiermacher’s second method describes exactly the predicament of these two texts. While Poe transforms his Dupin into a fake Frenchman, Baudelaire remodels his Dupin from a fake American original.122 In our discusion of the two narratives the question of cultural difference and transformation will obliquely surface in Lacan’s reading of Poe in his “Séminaire sur ‘La lettre volée’” / “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’.” For eventually, Lacan’s Seminar is about translation and about the role of translation in psychoanalysis.123 His 121 Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating,” in Theories of Translation, 42. 122 On Schleiermacher’s essay, see Hans-Jost Frey, “Schleiermachers Übersetzungstheorie,” in Der unendliche Text (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 25–37. The relationship between original and translation is also discussed in the following chapter on Celan’s translation of Shakespeare, 38–50. My reading of Baudelaire and Poe is indebted to Frey’s notion, articulated in one of the aphorisms preceding his essays on translation, that “The attempt to read originals as translations is maybe new” (25). He has made this attempt in which I gladly follow him. 123 The letters of the narrative’s letter perform a translation on several levels, either translating a signified into a signifier or between Poe’s and Baudelaire’s languages. Attempting “a psychobiography of Lacan based on his readings,” Colette Soler argues that to Lacan Hamlet designates desire, Antigone beauty, Gide the fetish, Sade and Kant the will to jouissance, Joyce the symptom, and Poe the letter. See Colette Soler, “Literature as Symptom,” in Critical Essays on Jacques Lacan (New York: G. K. Hall, 1999), 70–75; here 71. On Lacan’s

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notion of a “pure signifier” will have to be related to Benjamin’s idea of “pure language.”124 Together with Derrida’s critique they provide a theory of translation put to the test by the two narratives that seem to reverse the respective positions of the original and the translation. In his “Tombeau d’Edgar Poe” composed for the dedication of a Poe memorial in Baltimore, Mallarmé writes that it was the task of “that strange voice” (cette voix étrange) to give “a sense more pure to the words of the tribe” (un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu).125 As a poet, translator, and French teacher of English, Mallarmé leaves uncertain to which language of which ethnic group or nation Poe gave a purer meaning. To him “pure language” might well be “cette voix étrange,” the language of translation.

II. D— ciphering How does one address the question of the relationship between “The Purloined Letter” and “La Lettre volée”? In the manner of a letter, the tales begin with an address: At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18–, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend

employment of literature, see also Jean-Michel Rabaté, Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). 124 On Benjamin’s essay and Lacan’s signifier, read with Slavoj Zizek, see Gregor Schwering, Benjamin – Lacan: Vom Diskurs des Anderen (Wien: Turia & Kant, 1998), 65–76. 125 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 70, ll. 4, and 6. The translation follows Roger Fry’s “The Tomb of Edgar Poe,” reprinted in Graham Clarke, ed. Edgar Allan Poe: Critical Assessments (Mountfield: Helm Information, 1991), II: 383; slightly modified).

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C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back library, or book-closet, au troisième, No. 33, Rue Dunôt, Faubourg St. Germain.126 J’étais à Paris en 18… Après une sombre et orageuse soirée d’automne, je jouissais de la double volupté de la méditation et d’une pipe d’écume de mer, en compagnie de mon ami Dupin, dans sa petite bibliothèque ou cabinet d’étude, rue Dunot, no 33, au troisième, faubourg Saint-Germain.127

Like the names of Paris and Dupin, the address seems to be one of the textual spaces and words the two narratives share. They are, one would expect, the names in Poe’s tale that a translation will leave untranslated. However, it is precisely these names and places that in “La Lettre volée” come to be the scene of a first redirection or refolding of the letter. Moi, j’étais à Paris – period. Interrupting the reader’s address in “The Purloined Letter,” Baudelaire’s narrator insists on an important difference. Whereas the Anglo-American text sends the reader to Paris, the French tongue of Baudelaire’s narrator reminds us that he, as it were, originally or properly belongs there. His address does not name the destination of the letter but rather the address of the letter’s sender. A note Baudelaire added to his “Double assassinat dans la rue Morgue” brings home the anxiety the translator might have felt with regard to the misleading street names Poe put on the map of Paris: “Ai-je besoin d’avertir à propos de la rue Morgue, du passage Lamartine, etc., qu’Edgar Poe n’est jamais venu à Paris? (C. B.).”128 126 Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” is quoted from Poetry and Tales (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984) and will henceforth be cited as PT. Here the reference is to p. 680. I have also used the annotated edition by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978): III: 972–97. 127 Poe, Œuvres en prose, trans. Charles Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 45. References to Baudelaire’s translations are to this edition and will subsequently be cited as PŒ. 128 PŒ, 1069: “With regard to the rue Morgue, the passage Lamartine, etc., do I have to draw your attention to the fact that Edgar Poe has never been to Paris? (C. B.).”

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Baudelaire was not the first to remark this. “Some years ago,” Poe writes in his Marginalia, “‘The Paris Charivari’ copied my story [“The Murders in the Rue Morgue“] with complimentary comments; objecting, however, that no such street (to the Charivari’s knowledge) existed in Paris.”129 Paris is the City of Baudelaire, as one might decipher his initials C. B. Initials become important in the struggle over who is authorized to sign the narrative. Inscribing the address in “La Lettre volée,” the translator omits Dupin’s first names, C. Auguste. In a note to the tale’s opening paragraph, Baudelaire draws attention to the fact that the stories about Dupin form “a kind of trilogy,” signing his note by “C. B.” His name, it seems, competes with C. A. Dupin, raising the question of the relative position C. A. and C. B. occupy in the ABC of the drama of priority the letters enact in translation. In a letter to Michel Lévy, the editor of the Histoires extraordinaires to whom he had sold the copyright of all his translations, Baudelaire expresses his concern that the unauthorized translations of a burgeoning Poe industry published anonymously or under a pseudonym in Parisian journals constitute cases of flagrant plagiarism: “Je suis passablement exaspéré par tous ces plagiats et les reproductions non autorisées.”130 As his well-known letter to Théophile Thoré spells out, Baudelaire soon became himself implicated in the suspicion of having imitated Poe: Eh bien! on m’accuse, moi, d’imiter Edgar Poe! Savez-vous pourquoi j’ai si patiemment traduit Poe? Parce qu’il me ressemblait. La première fois que j’ai ouvert un livre de lui, j’ai vu, avec épouvante et ravissement, non seulement des

129 Poe, Marginalia, November 1846, ER, 1407. No such translation was published in the Charivari “some years” before. The first translation or adaptation of the story appeared serialized in La Quotidienne in June 1846 under the title of “Un Meurtre sans Exemple dans les Fastes de la Justice, histoire trouvée dans les papiers d’un Américain.” 130 Cited in PŒ, 1069: “I am exasperated by all those plagiarisms and unauthorized reproductions.”

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sujets rêvés par moi, mais des PHRASES pensées par moi, et écrites par lui vingt ans auparavant.131

The pathos with wich Baudelaire presents this extraordinary case of telepathic writing itself becomes part of the Histoires extraordinaires. It is part of “William Wilson,” for example, which is another story about doubles: My dress it was an easy matter to copy; my gait and general manner were, without difficulty, appropriated; in spite of his constitutional defect, even my voice did not escape him. My louder tones were, of course, unattempted, but then the key, it was identical; and his singular whisper, it grew the echo of my own. (PT, 344)

Baudelaire cannot even claim originality with regard to the uncanny relationship between Poe and himself. His anxiety of being persecuted by a double is already present in the characters of the tales whose dress, gait, general manner, and voice he copies so patiently. Translation is indeed the source of this telepathy. “Sa voix [...] devenait le parfait écho de la mienne” (PŒ, 297). Translation is the echo of the original. It seems that “La lettre volée” can come to Baudelaire’s rescue, for it intimates – as we have already indicated – that Poe’s “original” narrative is in fact a translation. If the conversations between Dupin and the Prefect of Police were conducted in French, everything we read in Poe’s tale has already – at the story’s origin – undergone a translation. Regardless of what his native language may be, the narrator is a translator in the first place, and it is important to note that he appears as a translator in both narratives: “The Purloined 131 Baudelaire, Correspondance, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), II: 386. “Well, I myself am accused of imitating Edgar Poe! Do you know why I’ve translated Poe so patiently? Because he was like me. The first time I opened one of his books, I saw, with horror and delight, not only topics I had dreamed of, but sentences I had thought of, and that he had written 20 years before” (Charles Baudelaire, Selected Letters, trans. et ed. Rosemary Lloyd [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986], 204.)

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Letter” is an original that has already been translated, while “La lettre volée” is some sort of retranslation into the narrative’s original language. We can in no way be certain that the narrator is an American in Paris, nor can we safely assume that he is a Frenchman. As translators both narrators seem to live up to the expectations of Rudolf Pannwitz and give up their national identities. What does it imply to say that “The Purloined Letter” is an original-as-translation and “La lettre volée” a translation-as-original? First of all, such a reversal destabilizes the relationship between the original and the translation. Baudelaire’s text is not an original since it clearly translates Poe’s tale. But neither is it simply a translation because it reconstitutes an original voice that never was. Simulating this lost voice or text it comes close to what Baudrillard calls the simulacrum.132 As the narrative’s address seems to indicate, there is a third factor, a simulated intertext au troisième that disrupts the twofold relationship between the original and the translation. The number three is an important structural element in the narratives. “The Purloined Letter” forms what Baudelaire in a note to “La Lettre volée” calls “une espèce de trilogie” (PŒ, 1070): There is the trio of Dupin, the Minister, and the police; there are three letters: the one the royal “personage” receives, the one the Minister transforms to make it look like a different document, the forged letter Dupin fabricates. Lacan’s “Séminaire sur ‘La lettre volée’” capitalizes on this structure to organize its argument about the peculiar circulation of the letter: Thus three moments, structuring three glances, borne by three subjects, incarnated each time by different characters. The first is a glance that sees nothing: the King and the police.

132 According to Baudrillard the simulacrum concludes and comprises the four consecutive stages of the image from a reflection of reality to the renunciation of all relationship with reality. See “L’Ordre des simulacres,” in L’Echange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 75–128, and Simulacres et simulation (Paris: Galilée, 1981). Key sections from both these books have been translated and published in Simulations (New York: Foreign Agents Series, 1983).

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The second, a glance which sees that the first sees nothing and deludes itself as to the secrecy of what it hides: the Queen, then the Minister. The third sees that the first two glances leave what should be hidden exposed to whomever would seize it: the Minister, and finally Dupin.133

While according to Lacan the agents in the first group are simply blind – and by virtue of this very ignorance can retain the power of their authority – those in the second and third group are caught up in a relay of positions that threatens their integrity. Refolding the purloined letter the Minister imitates a “diminutive and feminine” (21) hand in the address that redirects the letter to himself. According to Lacan he sets up an imaginary identification with the Queen from whom he had purloined the letter, thus taking her place and exposing himself to the danger of being robbed. This is the message Dupin reads in the letter he finds and then purloins from the Minister’s apartment. When he cannot refrain from leaving a message for the Minister in his forged duplicate, he too threatens to suffer the transformation from victor into victim in the struggle over the possession of the letter. Lacan’s construction of oedipal triangles with a changing cast lodges the narrative in a familial drama that can be controlled by the psychoanalyst. “The movement of the letter in Poe’s tale provides an allegory of the analytic process,”134 as John Forrester argues, and Lacan indeed seems to rehearse the different stages of transference and counter-transference in his reading of the narrative. In his trenchant critique of the “Seminar” Derrida rightly points out that “all the characters of ‘The Purloined Letter,’ [...] Dupin 133 Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” For the sake of convenience, the English translations of Lacan’s seminar and Derrida’s critique are cited from the collection of texts surrounding Poe’s narrative edited by John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, eds., The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 32. Citations from other critical essays that have been reprinted in Purloined Poe are also taken from and keyed to this collection. 134 John Forrester, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 137.

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included, successively and structurally occupied all the positions, the position of the dead-blind King (and of the Prefect of Police thereby), then the positions of the Queen and of the Minister.”135 Not the oedipal triangle but the rivalry of brothers – the contest staged between Dupin and the Minister, Dupin and the narrator, and so on – is the structure on which Derrida’s argument comes to rest: “This rivalrous and duplicitous identification of the two brothers, far from entering into the symbolic space of the familial triangle [...], endlessly carries off the triangle into a labyrinth of doubles without originals, of fac-similes without an authentic and indivisible letter, of forgeries without something forged, thereby imprinting on the purloined letter an incorrigible indirection” (203–04). Much of the criticism on Poe’s narrative has shifted its focus away from the circulation of the letters in the story to the exchange of mail between the two factions of the Lacanian and Derridean readers. In the context of our question of what the narratives by Poe and Baudelaire can tell us about translation, and what translation tells about them, both Derrida’s notion of the uncanniness of doubles and Lacan’s notion of an imaginary relationship existing between the figures within the symbolic order of the narrative are important. The rewriting and redirecting of the letters, which according to Lacan leads to an imaginary identification within the narrative, also operates, as we have seen, on the level of the relationship between Poe and his translator. The crucial point in Derrida’s argument is his presentation of the “doubles without originals” as the structural principle of the tale. It also describes most exactly the status of “The Purloined Letter” and “La Lettre volée.” Looking at the addresses in the narratives and the repeated redirections they undergo, we should also take a look at the titles of the two stories. They too are something like an address. Lacan comments on Baudelaire’s title in a passage that articulates the question of translation we are dealing with: “It remains that Baudelaire, despite his devotion, betrayed Poe by translating as ‘la lettre volée’ […] his title: the purloined letter, a title containing a word rare enough for us 135 Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” in The Purloined Poe, 203.

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to find it easier to define its etymology than its usage” (42–43). The suspicion that the translator invariably betrays the author of the original is as old as the history of translation. It is of particular interest here because it seems to allow Lacan to align the translator with both the Queen, whose reception of the letter already constitutes a betrayal of the King, and Dupin, who plays a trick on his rival. However, his reference to the etymology offered by the OED purports that it is in fact language that commits some sort of betrayal. Purloin, Lacan points out, is “an Anglo-French word […] composed of the prefix pur–, found in purpose, purchase, purport, and of the Old French word: loing, loigner, longé,” a constellation that entitles him to claim that the letter in question “has been prolonged (etymologically, the word of the title), or, to revert to the language of the post office, a letter in sufferance” (43). If Baudelaire’s translation literally enacts the sufferance or prolonging the narrative about the stealing of a letter tells, the betrayal does not consist in a mistranslation but rather, as Lacan’s argument suggests, in the impossibility of translating an old Norman word in the English language that no longer properly, as it were, exists in French. What Lacan calls a “rare” word is listed in Mallarmé’s Les mots anglais among those words “of ours” (nos Mots) that “are obsolete (se sont éteints) in our language but survive in English.”136 As the entry in his dictionary reads: “TO PURLOIN (voler), de purloigner” (1005). If Les mots anglais can be said to retrace Mallarmé’s efforts to learn English “in order to better read Poe“137 – or, for that matter, to translate him – his entry on “purloin” is of particular relevance. Summarizing the section dealing with compound words and the question of the prefix and suffix in language – the very question of dissection and reconstruction, in other words, with which Lacan’s attempt at an etymological reading of Poe’s title is concerned – Mallarmé writes that the composition of English words is “a task to be left to the English themselves. We, being French, can analyze them. And this is good so: For one hardly sees a word as 136 Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 1005. 137 Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, 662.

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clearly (sûrement) as from the outside, from the position we are in; that is to say, from abroad (de l’étranger)” (975). While this reads like Benjamin’s citation of Pannwitz translated into French, it might also be said to inform the “Seminar’s” psychoanalytic discourse on language and otherness. Reading Les mots anglais, Lacan will certainly have taken a special interest in Mallarmé’s notion that “to purloin” belongs to those words that are “dead to their original idiom but that have not disappeared elsewhere” (998; my emphasis). For we ought to bear in mind that the “Seminar” was originally embedded in a discussion of the death instinct and repetition compulsion in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. To situate Lacan’s essay in the larger context from which it was taken, one would have to ask how his interest in Poe’s and Baudelaire’s narratives is related to his notion – mediated by Hegel and Kojève and lucidly presented by BorchJacobsen138 – of death as the absolute master. If Death cannot be mastered, it cannot be translated. This is the difficulty Baudelaire seems to encounter: “La lettre volée” cannot translate the obsolete or dead word in Poe’s title. This is not to say that “The Purloined Letter” occupies the position of a master text in relation to which “La lettre volée” could merely aspire to what we are wont to call a slavish translation. If “to purloin” marks a death or an absence in the original title, this is due not only to the observation that the word is no longer used in the French language, but also to the fact that, properly speaking, it never existed as an English word in the English language. Both Baudelaire’s and Poe’s title are heading a “foreignness of languages” that the two texts will unfold in terms of the relationship they establish between an original and its translation. Lacan’s hint at the presence of something French and something obsolete or dead in the original as well as Mallarmé’s sense of a survival in language are not lost on the readers of Benjamin, whose “Task of the Translator” strongly emphasizes that translation constitutes a Fortleben and Überleben, an afterlife or survival of the 138 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 9–20; 91–96.

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original. Translation is “a transformation and a renewal of something living” (73), Benjamin argues, and in this sense it appears to be “so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all the literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs (Wehen) of its own” (73). Reading this passage, Paul de Man has suggested that Benjamin’s Wehen would have to be translated “by ‘death pangs’ as much as by ‘birth pangs’.”139 It is indeed important to note that the essay’s notion of an “afterlife” or Fortleben in translation places equal emphasis on both the Fort and the Leben. Translation plays in a Fort-Da, and the title of “The Purloined Letter” indicates that what Benjamin calls its “mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language” can become, as in the case of Baudelaire, something like a deathwatch. As de Man comments on Benjamin: “The translation belongs not to the life of the original, the original is already dead, but the translation belongs to the afterlife of the original, thus assuming and confirming the death of the original.” What he calls the death of the original is akin to what Derrida describes as “doubles without originals.” The titles of Poe’s and Baudelaire’s narratives address the problem that precisely the key word of the tale’s story – the act of stealing – cannot be translated, and that it cannot be translated because, paradoxically, it is a vestige of the “original” Romance language that was “originally” spoken by the agents of this theft before their dialogue was “translated” into English. But all this is pure fiction, one might protest, and it is the fictional character of this original translating or translated original within Poe’s narrative itself that puts inverted commas around the use of “original” and “translation” in the preceding sentence. But one would then also have to accord some kind of fictional status to the Norman word “purloign,” which properly speaking is neither French nor English. Yet it is by no means fiction. It does really exist, and its irreplacable reality renders it

139 De Man, “‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” 85.

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impossible to displace, to steal, or to translate. In no way can the central word “purloign” be purloigned. If the puzzling translation effect of “purloign” complicates things due to its obsolent existence in the French language, one wonders how the other French words in the story fare at the hands of Baudelaire. “The Purloined Letter” indeed contains numerous residua of the French language, as if to mark the translation to which Poe’s original narrator has subjected his text. One would expect that they, like the proper names, would remain untranslated in “La Lettre volée.” This is not the case. It seems that Baudelaire’s narrator translates from another source; that he indeed handles altogether different letters. At his first visit to Dupin, the Prefect of Police emphasizes that “to a properly trained police agent, such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible” (PT, 684). This contention will receive two answers, one by Dupin and one by Baudelaire’s translator-narrator, who indeed knows how to draw on, and expose, the secret of translation. “Do you not see also,” Dupin explains to the narrator-translator, “that such recherchés nooks for concealment are adapted only for ordinary occasions” (PT, 691). The French recherchés in the American text, its emphasis on the “recherché manner” (PT, 691) of concealment the police ascribe to the thief, might seem a fitting description of the manner in which one would translate the letters of Poe’s original narrative. Translation is something essentially recherché. However, in “La Lettre volée” Dupin’s rhetorical question suffers a surprising turn: “Et ne voyez-vous pas aussi que des cachettes aussi originales ne sont employées que dans des occasions ordinaires” (PŒ, 57). The translation of the Histoires extraordinaires is not one of those ordinary occasions. What Baudelaire both conceals and detects in his translation is precisely something original. The original language of the narrative, the language of the original, is at at once concealed and sealed in his translation. As “La lettre volée” will subsequently show, the cachette – the hiding place Baudelaire’s Dupin refers to – is in fact a cachet, a seal. The example of Baudelaire’s practice of translating plays in the register Lacan would call the imaginary. One might be curious to see 215

how translation operates when Dupin tries his hand at readdressing the letter, the most critical moment in Lacan’s reading of the text. Retrieving the letter from the Minister D—, Dupin fabricates a facsimile of the letter he had detected hanging in the card-rack. His dicovery scatters the initial he shares with the Minister – “le chiffre de D…” (PŒ, 62) – across the page that describes – or D— scribes – the state of the letter in a manner that cannot be imitated by the original translation of “The Purloined Letter": “presque déchirée en deux,” “écriture […] décidée,” “l’état déplorable du papier, fripé et déchiré, qui contredisaient les véritables habitudes de D…, si méthodiques, et qui dénonçaient l’intention de dérouter un indiscret” (PŒ, 62). Amidst the throng of these ciphers, the Dupin of “La Lettre volée” makes a discovery: “A la longue je tombai sur une découverte” (PŒ, 63). It is the discovery, the D—couverte, of the proper sealing he is going to perform on the envelope of his letter. He counterfeits the seal of the Minister by pressing a piece of bread on his facsimile. One rightly assumes that he will use some French bread: Du pain. Dupin – in other words – seals his name in the translation rather than in the original, where he imitates “the D— cipher, very readily, by means of a seal formed of bread” (PT, 697).140 As Benjamin’s essay argues, “the word Brot means something different to a German than the word pain to a Frenchman,” adding “that these words are not interchangeable for them, that, in fact, they strive to exclude each other” (74). This exclusion, one might argue, also includes the AngloAmerican detective Dupin, whose signature is radically different from the French detective, “contrefaisant le chiffre D… à l’aide d’un sceau de mie de pain” (PŒ, 63). If it can be argued that it is Baudelaire’s translation and not Poe’s original that properly bears the seal of Dupin’s proper name, it is of some significance – “plein de signification” – that the French text 140 On this signature, see also Servanne Woodward, “Lacan and Derrida on ‘The Purloined Letter’,” Comparative Literature Studies 26 (1989): 42, and Stephen Bretzius, “The Figure-Power Dialectic: Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’,” MLN 110 (1995): 685.

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inscribes this proper name “by means of” a partitive article, “à l’aide d’un sceau de mie de pain.” The letter “is not to admit partition” (39), as Lacan argues in a central passage of the “Seminar” that posits the signifier as that in language which cannot be manipulated, copied, stolen, counterfeited, or translated. “Cut a letter in small pieces, and it remains the letter it is” (39). Confronted by the supreme power of Lacan’s pure signifier, the attempts on the part of the narrative’s figures to get hold of and redirect the letter appear futile, an act of imaginary delusion. “A letter always arrives at its destinaton” (53), as Lacan comes to conclude his “Seminar.” It does so because it cannot be divided: Language delivers its judgment to whomever knows how to hear it: through the usage of the article as partitive particle. It is there that spirit […] appears, no less oddly, as more available for quantification than its letter. To begin with meaning itself, which bears our saying: a speech rich with meaning (“plein de signification”), just as we recognize a measure of intention (“de l’intention”) in an act, or deplore that there is no more love (“plus d’amour”); or store up hatred (“de la haine”) and expend devotion (“du dévouement”), and so much infatuation (“tant d’infatuation”) is easily reconciled to the fact there will always be ass (“de la cuisse”) for sale and brawling (“du rififi”) among men. But as for the letter – be it taken as typographical character, epistle, or what makes a man of letters – we will say that what is said is to be understood to the letter (à la lettre), that a letter (une lettre) awaits you at the post office, or even that you are acquainted with letters (que vous avez des lettres) – never that there is letter (de la lettre) anywhere, whatever the context, even to designate overdue mail. For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence. (39; emphasis in the “original”)

The passage quoted does not only testify to the difficulty of reading and translating Lacan to the letter but – as throughout the “Seminar”/ “Séminaire” – also leaves uncertain to which stolen letter Lacan actually refers. As he concludes: “We cannot say of the purloined letter (la lettre volée) that, like other objects, it must be or not be in a particular place but that unlike them it will be and not be where it is, wherever it goes.” If we take the letter in question also to be the letters

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of Poedelaire’s translation, it is indeed present as well as absent in both texts at once. This is uncanny enough. Barbara Johnson has pointed out that “this passage is particularly resistant to translation […] because its message is in the ‘superficial’ play of the signifer,“141 the signifier of an article whose proper play gets lost in translation. A reading of the two narratives might indeed adopt her acute sense that “the question of translation in connection with a message so obvious that it goes unseen is not an accident here.” For what both Poe’s and Baudelaire’s texts deliver is the message that they are both translations, a message whose obviousness Lacan displays in order to then hide it in the folds of an argument that presents translation precisely as an imaginary attempt to hide in language. At the very end of “La lettre volée,” Baudelaire impresses his own seal on his translation. Dupin tells the narrator that the Minister “is well acquainted with my MS., and I just copied into the middle of the blank sheet the words – / – Un dessein si funeste,/ S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne de Thyeste. / They are to be found in Crébillon’s ‘Atrée’” (PT, 698). The lines cited from Crébillon touch upon a scene or “dessein funeste” in which Baudelaire’s writings is in its most proper milieu, where we best recognize his hand. He translates Dupin’s act of inscription, adding a word of precision that might otherwise seem unnecessary: “Il connaît fort bien mon écriture, et j’ai copié tout au beau milieu de la page blanche ces mots” (PŒ, 64). Citing the passage from Crébillon, Lacan does not perform a translation – the text is already in French in the “original” – but a citation. A misquotation, as Derrida has pointed out, replacing “un dessein si funeste” by “un destin si funeste.” Johnson has pointed out that this misquote, be it intended or not, is true to Lacan’s reading of the redirected destination of the letter.142 If it is true to Lacan, it would 141 Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida,” Purloined Poe, 246. 142 Johnson, Purloined Poe, 248. On Poe’s as a parable of, or model for, rereading and rewriting, see John T. Irwin, “Mysteries We Reread, Mysteries of Rereading: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story,” in Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, eds. Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from

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also be true to Baudelaire. He does not misquote Crébillon, but by placing the citation in the original language into the beau milieu of his translation, he signs once more as the translator that seeks to return the narrative to its proper destination. Crébillon’s tragedy comes out of Dupin’s library, copied perhaps from the “very rare and very remarkable book” he found in the bookshop where he made the acquaintance of the narrator. “Our first meeting was at an obscure library in the Rue Montmartre, where the accident of our both being in search of the same very rare and very remarkable volume brought us into closer communion. [...] I was deeply interested in the little family history which he detailed to me with all that candor which a Frenchman indulges whenever mere self is his theme. I was astonished, too, at the vast extent of his reading; and, above all, I felt my soul enkindled within me by the wild fervor, and the vivid freshness of his imagination.”143 We do not know what details of the “little family history” he told the narrator, but perhaps it was the history of André Marie Jean-Jacques Dupin, the eminent political figure in the July monarchy. Since the narrative is one in which names, addresses, and seals play such an important part, we might want to look at him.144 There is no doubt that Poe knew Dupin. In 1841 he wrote a review of Walsh’s Sketches of Cosnpicuous Living Characters of France, which contains a portrait of the French magistrate. If some of the traits of the historical Dupin might be discovered in the detective, it is above all his frantic erudition and overbearing manner that looks familiar to a reader of Poe’s stories. Compare the meeting in the bookshop in the rue Morgue cited above with the following passage from Walsh: “Mr. Dupin has written a great deal. A collection of his 18mos., which he jocosely styles his pocket books, would almost alone make a library. [...] To judge from his writings, Dupin must be a perfect living encyclopedia. From Poe to Postmodernism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 27–54. 143 Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” PT, 400. 144 One might also note that two of Lacan’s Christian names are Jacques and Marie.

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Homer to Rousseau, from the Bible to the civil code, from the laws of the twelve tables to the Koran, he has read everything; he knows so many and such different things, that it is not astonishing he only half digests what he knows.”145 Dupin and Dupin meet in the library, the “book-closet” (PT, 680), as it is called in “The Purloined Letter.” Poe’s narrator seems infinitely more naive than the author in Walsh’s Sketches, who cannot refrain from ridiculing the pretentiousness of the lawyer interpreting legal as well as literary texts: “It is curious to see with what zeal, with what ardour, with what power of investigation, he comes to the aid of the text, how he vivifies the dead letter, how he illumines it with the torch of his erudition, how he forces it by his resistless logic to speak in despite of itself, to say what it should have said, and what unfortunately it has not said” (225). The biographical sketch shows a less flattering portrait than that of his namesake in “The Purloined Letter.” But what makes Dupin interesting is his copious work as a translator of legal texts from the Latin, and the fact that he even “has made up for the silence of the law in questions of literary property” (225). Dupin knew about all forms of purloining letters. Finally, Walsh’s portraits are intriguing because they are themselves translations from articles “originally published in weekly numbers at Paris,” as Poe recounts at the beginning of his review. “We are told in the Preface to the present translation that they met with the greatest success, upon their first appearance, and were considered by the Parisians as perfectly authentic in their statement of facts” (ER, 987). It is in Walsh’s book that Dupin – one of three brothers forming another kind of trilogy – crossed the sea. The figure of Dupin aîné was of special interest to Poe for another reason. As a lawyer he acted as counselor to the duc d’Orléans, the future king Louis-Phillippe – to whom, perhaps, the “exalted personage” in Poe’s tale refers. Although he had close political and personal ties to the king, he refused to become a minister, retaining some sort of political independence that allowed him to shift his 145 Robert M. Walsh, tr. Sketches of Cosnpicuous Living Characters of France (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1841), 224.

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allegiance when necessary. While he had made a name as a defender of liberal causes and notably also of the freedom of the press during the Bourbon Restoration, he became increasingly unpopular after 1830. In the caricatures of L’Association mensuelle – a series of lithographs published by Charles Philipon, proprietor of the Charivari – Dupin is seen as a bystander keeping a low profile, but always ready to join the king and his ministers in their attack on the press. The caricatures were published in response to Philipon’s indictment for offences against the King.146 The tyrannical laws of 1835 were in large part supported by Dupin. It is not surprising that the question of censorship and libel was a matter of great concern to Poe in his capacity as the editor of several journals. While this alone justifies a look at the historical Dupin, we also ought to notice that Poe’s review of the book in which the portrait of Dupin is published actually contains a long digression on writing in ciphers that can be linked with the plot of “The Purloined Letter” and the question of translation we are dealing with. It costitutes in fact something like an alternative to “The Purloined Letter.” The following passage in Walsh’s book catches Poe’s eye: “In the notice of Berryer it is said that, a letter being addressed by the Dutchess of Berry to the legitimists of Paris, to inform them of her arrival, it was accompanied by a long note in cypher, the key of which she had forgotten to give. ‘The penetrating mind of Berryer,’ says our biographer, ‘soon discovered it.’” (ER, 989). The letter in the portrait of Berryer would provide something like a solution to the problem the royal “personage“ faces in “The Purloined Letter.” Her letter is not written in cipher but, on the contrary, is exceedingly easy to decipher once it is spotted. “At this juncture enters the Minister D—. His lynx eye immediately perceives the paper, recognises the handwriting of 146 See, Edwin de T. Bechtel, Philipon versus Louis Philippe: Freedom of the Press and L’Association mensuelle (New York: Grolier Club, 1952). See also Irene Collins, The Government and the Newspaper Press in France, 1814–1881 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 82–99 and Collingham, The July Monarchy, 169–87. Philipon was brought to court because he commented in one of his caricatures on the King’s proneness to assassination.

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the address, observes the confusion of the personage addressed, and fathoms her secret” (8–9). Had the letter been encrypted like that written by the Duchess, the Minister could probably not have read it unless he has the “penetrating mind” of a Berryer or a Dupin. Probably the letter would not even have been stolen. Poe’s story and the incident related in Walsh’s biographical sketch present two different kinds of secrecy. While the former develops a theory of hiding in relation to the position of the letter in space, the latter performs hiding as a disfiguration of the words in the letter. In Poe’s narrative the eye looks for the letter as document, whereas in Walsh’s portrait the focus is shifted to the letters in the letter. But as we have seen, Poe’s and Baudelaire’s narratives also contain a “cipher.” It is the “D— cipher” that can only be deciphered in translation. On the level of the letter’s letters, translation is a form of encryption. The letter from the Duchess touches on Poe’s interest in what he calls cryptography. A comment in his review demonstrates that the art of cryptography is closely connected with translation. “All this is very well as an anecdote,” he writes, “but we cannot understand the extraordinary penetration required in the matter. The phrase ‘Le gouvernement provisoire’ is in French, and the note in cypher was addressed to Frenchmen. The difficulty of decyphering may well be supposed much greater had the key been in a foreign tongue; yet any one who will take the trouble may address us a note, in the same manner as here proposed, and the key-phrase may be either in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Latin or Greek [...], and we pledge ourselves for the solution of the riddle” (ER, 989). Three months later two such riddles are published in Poe’s article entitled “A Few Words on Secret Writing.” Here it is, together with its translation: “Cauhiff aud ftd sdftirf ithot tacd wdde rdchfdr tiu fuaefshffheo fdoudf hetiusafhie tuis ied herhchriai fi aeiftdu wn sdaef it iuhfheo hiidohwid wn aen deodsf ths tiu itis hf iaf iuhoheaiin rdffhedr.” / “Various are the methods which have been devised for transmitting secret information from one individual to another, by means of writing, illegible to any except him for whom it was originally designed” (ER, 1285–86; emphasis added). The foreignness of languages is heightened when it is first translated 222

and then transliterated into cipher. As we shall see, the language of such secret writing comes close to what Benjamin’s essay calls “pure language.”

III. Pure Language, Pure Signifier Every word we encounter in Poe’s tale – beginning with the title – is translation; its original is lost. And yet, although the word purloin might mark an obsolescence that cannot be faithfully translated, the existence of “La Lettre volée” testifies that Poe’s narrative can still be translated. It even seems, as Lacan suggests, that the unattainability of the original, to which Poe is entitled in the title of his tale, enacts a compulsion on the part of Baudelaire to translate his narrative. If Baudelaire cannot translate the word purloin, he can or must purloin what he translates. Thus, Lacan is entitled to articulate the question of translation in terms of the narrative’s drama of propriation and appropriation: “Pour qu’il y ait lettre volée, nous dirons-nous, à qui une lettre appartient-elle?“147 / “For a purloined letter to exist, we may ask, to whom does a letter belong?” (41). While the “Seminar” leaves little doubt that the letter, as an object, cannot be taken possession of, Lacan tries hard to present the struggle for its possession among the figures in the narrative as the function of an imaginary desire. His question is to be addressed to both Poe as the author of the original and Baudelaire as his translator: “To whom does a letter belong?” Instead of offering an answer, Lacan’s question first of all takes note of a desire without which neither language nor any text would be conceivable and which might be said to affect particularly the translator. In a more acute sense than perhaps any other form of language, translation enacts a longing in language to belong to language. If Lacan’s question about the ownership of letters harbours, or translates, 147 Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), 27. Emphasis added.

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such a thought of a desire for participation (ap-part-tenir) in language, it provides a vantagepoint from which it can be compared with a central passage in Benjamin’s essay that deals with translation precisely in terms of such a longing to belong: […] It is not the highest praise of a translation, particularly in the age of its origin, to say that it reads as if it had originally been written in that language. Rather, the significance of fidelity (Treue) as ensured by literalness (Wörtlichkeit) is that the work reflects the great longing for linguistic complementation (die große Sehnsucht nach Sprachergänzung). (79, emphasis added)

Although this citation is particularly interesting with regard to Lacan’s notion that in the case of “The Purloined Letter” not even the original purloining can be credited to have “originally been written in that language,” we might also register the difference between Lacan’s and Benjamin’s conception of translation this passage helps to point out. Whereas to Benjamin “real translation” (79) aims at a fidelity that does not trust in meaning but is rather “ensured by literalness” – “For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade” (79) – the “Seminar’s” interest in literalness and the symbolic seems to situate translation in a purely imaginary register. While the desire to possess the letter is betrayed by the symbolic’s resistance to possession, Baudelaire’s translation is presented – or interpreted – as a betrayal that repeats the story’s investment in the imaginary pursuit of the letter. The story’s doubling in translation raises the question of interpretation. Doubly so, for to translate always also means to interpret. At the origin of hermeneutics, there is a kinship of translation and interpretation.Whatever the critique of Lacan as an interpreter of Poe’s and Baudelaire’s narrative(s) might disclose, his notion that the story points to betrayal as its fundamental hermeneutic law is a timely reminder that the figure of Hermes is also the patron of thieves. Among the critical essays that discuss Lacan’s “Seminar” in terms of translation and the double, Jane Gallop’s excellent article “The American Other” bears most directly on the questions we have been trying to approach. She lucidly points out how Lacan’s reminder to his 224

audience that “we are talking about the tale which Baudelaire translated under the title ‘La lettre volée’” (Purloined Poe, 29), and his decision not to include the “Seminar” in the English selection of his Écrits, engage in an imaginary politics of transference or translation framed by both his attack of American ego psychology and his resistance to the reception of his teaching in the American university. The “Seminar’s” complex dealings with the imaginary, Gallop argues, have their base in the “francophilia” of Poe’s tale, which – starting with Baudelaire – has led to numerous attempts to (re)appropriate what Mehlman calls Poe’s “deluded idealization of Gallic genius” (277). As she sums up the history of these cultural crossovers: “What begins as Poe’s imago, the French (including Lacan) take as their own” (278). Her important and most pertinent remarks have their theoretical underpinning in the thesis that “the symbolic can be encountered only as a tear in the fabric of the imaginary, a revealing interruption,” and that the “paths to the symbolic are thus in the imaginary” (271). Mapping out the double tracks of some of these paths, Gallop offers a reading of Lacan’s cunning game of identification and mastery that is as critical as it is sympathetic. “To fall for the illusion of Lacan’s mastery is to be trapped in the imaginary of the text” (281), she writes, and while her unhurried look at the “Seminar” might be said to succeed in defusing some of the violence and aggression built into all of Lacan’s texts and consequently building up in many of his readers, she achieves this by setting up a difference between translation and analysis she then, in a difficult move, grounds in the personae of Dupin and the narrator. Her account follows Lacan’s oblique notion that translation is essentially imaginary and requires, in order to reveal a glimpse at the symbolic, some kind of “a ‘translation’ of a translation” (275). This “translation,” or rather this interruption of translation as a purely imaginary act, is analysis – psychoanalysis as well as literary interpretation – whose agent, according to Gallop, is present in Poe’s tale in the figure or voice of the American narrator while the ceaselessly analysing Dupin remains some sort of an imago of translation. As she writes in one of the concluding paragraphs of her essay: 225

So as a reader of Lacan, in my attempt to delineate the symbolic in the Ecrits, I find myself identifying with Poe’s narrator. It is certainly to the point that in situating my reading I choose to identify with the American, not the Frenchman in the story. But more startling, and more suspect, I choose to locate “the analyst” in the American who is my double, rather than in the Gallic genius. (281)

What happens in this passage which, in reply to Lacan’s citation of Baudelaire’s translation, merely seems to restore the narrative of a theft to its original author? There is clearly more at stake than the suspicion about a problematic and yet quite legitimate identification. Containing and yet holding apart an American and a Frenchman, Gallop cites Poe’s tale as the original’s representation of a translation that takes the place of the relationship that exists between the American text of “The Purloined Letter” and its French translation as “La Lettre volée.” This mise en abîme of an intertextual relation is no doubt an important effect of Poe’s narrative. But as Gallop’s essay marvellously shows, this effect is brought about only by Baudelaire’s translation. Their dynamics eventually displaces the national or rather linguistic identities at which Gallop arrives. We might ask, however, in what sense her final suspension of translation might constitute an adequate response to a problem we encounter in Lacan’s idea of language and how this suspension is to be distinguished from Benjamin’s theory of language as a continuum of translation. In one of the most rigorous philosophical readings of Lacan, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe have pointed out how Lacan’s translation in 1956 of Heidegger’s essay on truth and translation, “Logos,” achieves a programmatic status in that it will allow him to translate Freud’s notion of desire into Heidegger’s concept of truth as something that, ultimately, cannot (and need not) be translated: “As in the case of logos (truth), experience (desire) is itself perfectly (un)translatable, that is, immediately equivalent to its pure utterance or pure enunciation.”148 Translation and its simultaneous suspense are indeed 148 Jean Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan, trans. François Raffout and David Pettigrew (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 141. Emphasis added.

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central to Lacan’s understanding of language, and with regard to the “Seminar” Gallop is quite right in locating this suspense or interruption in what he calls the symbolic. Lacan’s “itinerary of a signifier” (29) along “the symbolic chain” (28) is different, he thinks, from the imaginary correlation between a signifier and its signified that constitutes Saussure’s model of the sign and that is then aligned with the act of translation. Barred from the signified, the signifier takes a flight that seems to break loose from the point-to-point trans-latio of a signifier to a signified that constitutes meaning. Interestingly, it is precisely in the escape from this imaginary dimension that Lacan’s idea of translation can be said to be still mired in that “bourgeois concept of language” with which Benjamin breaks. While Lacan’s investment in the imaginary presents Baudelaire’s translation as a mimetic operation which resembles the mimicry that goes on in the narrative and that organizes all of the “Seminar’s” argument, Benjamin decidedly maintains a non-mimetic concept of translation: “To grasp the genuine relationship between an original and a translation requires an investigation analogous to the argumentation by which a critique of cognition would have to prove the impossibility of an image theory” (73). In his paper “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,” Benjamin criticizes Kant for having forgotten that “all philosophical cognition finds its sole expression in language” (GS II 168). Kant thus misses, he argues, the possibility of founding a concept of religious as well as artistic and historical experience on the findings of his critical epistemology. In Benjamin’s writings such a program can indeed be said to materialize.149 What the investigation carried out in “The Task of the Translator” attempts to demonstrate is “that no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness (Ähnlichkeit) to

149 See Bettine Menke, Sprachfiguren: Name, Allegorie, Bild nach Benjamin (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1991).

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the original” (73).150 This claim, to be sure, is also at the very center of the interest psychoanalysis takes in translation. As Andrew Benjamin argues in his reading of Freud’s approach to translation and transference: Psychoanalysis can itself be read as an attempt to forge a theory of the conscious; of presentation to consciousness; of interpretation, and therefore in each of translation, that does not take place within the boundaries of mimesis. Indeed the ‘utterances’ of the analysand in recounting a dream, and the subsequent ‘translation’ by the analyst – the putting into words of what were originally images – necessarily refuse in a passive sense (because of transference), as well as in an active sense the possibility of reproduction or representation that is explicable in mimetic terms. […] Translation here – the translation by the anlayst – involves therefore the refusal of mimesis.”151

Lacan’s interpretation of the narrative about the letter is meant to reveal the truth of this refusal. If the “Seminar” corroborates Benjamin’s “Task” on this point, we might note, however, that Lacan’s account puts the translator in the position of a blindness that makes it posssible for the analyst to act out such a refusal of language. In order to understand the difference between Benjamin’s and Lacan’s rejection of a resemblance between languages, we might want to turn briefly to Benjamin’s writing on Ähnlichkeit or resemblence which qualify the somewhat hasty claim that to him translation is simply non-mimetic. In his essay “On the Mimetic Faculty” we read that language – and particularly the writing of letters, in which all images in a strict sense of the word become Schriftbilder – constitutes “an archive of 150 On Benjamin’s refutation of the mimetic nature of language, see Hans J. Vermeer, Übersetzen als Utopie: Die Übersetzungstheorie des Walter Bendix Schoenflies Benjamin (Heidelberg: TEXTconTEXT Verlag, 1996), 182–86. 151 Andrew Benjamin, Translation and the Nature of Philosophy: A New Theory of Words (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 130. For an exploration of translation in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, see also Georg Christoph Tholen et al., eds. Übertragung – Übersetzung – Überlieferung: Episteme und Sprache in der Psychoanalyse Lacans (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2001).

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nonsensuous (unsinnlicher) similarities, nonsensuous correspondences.”152 How are we to understand this “unsinnliche Ähnlichkeit” which according to Benjamin preserves in the semiotic system of linguistic representation an older notion of mimesis as a magic power of resembling or becoming the things with which one communicates in some kind of sensuous language? In a passage that indeed amounts to a “reformulation of his theory of translation,“153 Benjamin writes: If words meaning the same thing in different languages are arranged about that thing (Bedeutete) as their center, we have to inquire how they all – while often possessing not the slightest similarity to one another – are similar to what they signify.154

The lack of likeness between the words of different languages is precisely what renders them foreign to each other and accounts for the impossibility of founding any theory of translation on a concept of mimetic similarity. Yet, each of these words seems to resemble what they mean or signify, and this resemblance can be called “nonsensuous” in the sense that their act of meaning is an intellectual activity. However, the difficulty of this passage lies in the ambiguous overtones of unsinnlich, which also, in a strict sense, means a negation of sense. This is no nonsense. Although Benjamin repeatedly claims that certain words or constellation of letters can look like the object they name, meaning has itself no likeness to the words or letters that mean it. As he points out, the semiotics of language is that foreign element, “etwas Fremde(s)” (GS II 208), needed for the momentary flashes of a magic power of mimesis to appear. For example in the play of the proper name or the kind of picture-puzzle that letters can form. If the relationship between the words and their signified in each language “resembles,” as it were, the otherness that constitutes the 152 Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Reflections, 335. 153 Winnfried Menninghaus, Walter Benjamins (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 64.

Theorie

der

Sprachmagie

154 Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Reflections, 335.

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relationship between different languages, we see why Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator” can argue that no translation can ever familiarize the meaning of a foreign text since this meaning is something already foreign in the language of the original. Yet, translation makes sense. Its displacement of words from one language into another performs the displacement signification represents. Thus, translation is – literally – the meaning of the original. We have cited the central passage in Benjamin’s essay before: “Translatability is an essential quality of certain works, which is not to say that it is essential that they be translated; it means rather that a specific significance (Bedeutung) inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability” (71). Although Benjamin’s radical exclusion of translation from a traditional, imagistic concept of mimesis marks an important divergence from Lacan’s account of language in the “Seminar,” their relationship is not sufficiently described by this critique. For just as the symbolic in Lacan points to the impossibility as well as the pervasiveness of the imaginary, and thus indicates that the “Seminar’s” apparent trapping of Baudelaire in the imaginary register of translation has an underside as yet to be explored, Nancy’s and Lacoue-Labarthe’s notion that his discourse is informed by an idea of an “(un)translatable” truth in language touches on the problem of an (un)translatability that any reading of Benjamin’s essay has to deal with. In order to present both their views on the latter issue, we shall have to turn to what is intimately connected with it and thus plays a central role in the two texts under discussion: Benjamin’s “pure language” and Lacan’s “pure signifier.” As Lacan points out at the beginning of his seminar, “the purloined letter” – that is to say “la lettre volée” (Écrits 16) – is “a pure signifier” (32). At this point, Lacan is talking about repetition automatism, and in citing “le pur signifiant” in terms of the title of Baudelaire’s translation – “la lettre volée” – it becomes clear that his reading of Freudian repetition will not only address the repeated re-petitioning for the possession of the letter by the figures in the narrative but also the common notion of translation as repetition. 230

“What interests us today is the manner in which the subjects relay each other in their displacement during the intersubjective repetition. We shall see that their displacement is determined by the place which a pure signifier – the purloined letter – comes to occupy in their trio.” This trio, one might thus argue, is not only constituted by the figures in the narrative relaying their respective positions, but also by the constellation of Poe, Baudelaire, and the reader. As we have seen, “a pure signifier” is a letter that – quite literally or materially – does not suffer partition: “But if it is first of all on the materiality of the signifier that we have insisted, that materiality is odd (singulière) in many ways, the first of which is not to admit partition. Cut a letter in small pieces, and it remains the letter it is” (38–39). If the impossibility of partition marks the foremost singularity of the letter as “pure signifier,” its unerring arrival seems to come second: “A letter always arrives at its destination” (53). Derrida has offered a rigorous critique of both these claims, insisting that “a letter can always not arrive at its destination. Its ‘materiality’ and ‘topology’ are due to its divisibility, its always possible partition.”155 As he convincingly argues, Lacan’s “pure signifier” does not participate in the narrative’s scenes of writing but rather figures as a vocalization of the letter embedded in his idea of an “authentic excellence of the spoken, of speech, and of the word: of logos as phone” (193). The seminar’s maxim of “scripta manent” and “verba volant” (41) stands in a marked contrast to Benjamin’s emphasis on writing in his essays on language, mimesis, and translation. What is of even greater interest – and what creates a major complication in the “Seminar” – is the question of how in the face of the signifier’s resistance to partition any 155 Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” Purloined Poe, 187. As to the letter’s partition: The editors of The Purloined Poe have omitted more than half of Derrida's text. As their note explains: “With the permission of the author, we have omitted long quotations from Lacan, Freud, and Bonaparte, some footnotes, and some of the argument” (173). Although Derrida’s permission to have his text cut might be his most forceful reminder of the letter’s “always possible partition,” the editorial decision does indeed curtail the usefulness of the book in the classroom.

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kind of translation or theft (and, for that matter, possession) should be conceivable. Insofar as it is a “pure signifier,” the “purloined letter” – that is to say “la lettre volée” – can neither be translated nor be purloined. While one might readily grant the narrative to tell the truth of the latter claim and while Lacan’s interest in fact lies in the questioning of the letter’s ownership and theft, the suspicion that it cannot be translated seems to belied by Lacan’s choice of a translation as the object of his discourse. In order to understand the full implications of this problem, we need to focus on the question of how Lacan’s statement that a letter “is not to admit partition” contradicts Benjamin’s central tenet of the “Mitteilbarkeit” of language, a term that is not simply to be translated as “communicability” but rather as the “partition” of a divisibility (Teilbarkeit) that renders it possible to share (mit-teilen) language.156 To Benjamin, all existing things and events are shareholders of language: “There is no event or thing […] that would not in a certain way have a share (teilhätte) in language, for it is essential to each of them to impart (mitzuteilen) their intellectual content” (GS II 140–41). This passage from the Sprachaufsatz indicates how we have to read his critique of translation theories that receive their orientation from a model of communication. Things communicate with language and in language by sharing their linguistic existence with it: “Language communicates the linguistic being of things” (GS II 142). This is not to say that the “intellectual being” or geistige Wesen of things and events is simply identical with that part of them which is linguistic. It does mean, however, that only their linguistic being takes part in language. Translation from one language into another language has no access to whatever lies outside the “linguistic being” of its content, and it is in this sense most directly, if not to say exclusively, engaged in communication or Mitteilung as a sheer sharing or partition of 156 On Benjamin’s notion of communication in the context of the Judaic tradition of translation, see Alfred Hirsch, Der Dialog der Sprachen: Studien zum Sprachund Übersetzungsdenken Walter Benjamins und Jacques Derridas (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1995), 91–104.

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language. If we can claim that this notion constitutes a sharp distinction between Benjamin and Lacan, we as yet have to read a passage in “The Task of the Translator” that deals with the symbolic and where Benjamin argues that the symbolic is that in language which cannot be communicated: In all language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated (außer dem Mitteilbaren ein Nicht-Mitteilbares); depending on the context in which it appears, it is something that symbolizes or something symbolized. It is the former only in the finite products of language, the latter in the evolving (Werden) of the languages themselves. And that which seeks to represent (darzustellen), to produce (herzustellen) itself in the evolving of languages, is that very nucleus of pure language (reinen Sprache). (79)

“Pure language” can be symbolized, but it cannot be communicated. To Benjamin, this “pure language” is – literally – a symbolon of all singular or particular languages, and the allegory of the shattered vessel he uses earlier to present the relationship between the original and the translation means precisley this. Derrida has fittingly called this metaphor of an amphora Benjamin’s “ammetaphor,“157 a vessel of language in which metaphoricity, and in this sense translation, is at once necessary and impossible. All languages are fragments of “pure language,” and no translation can mend this. Just as it remains doubtful whether gluing together the fragments will make the vessel fit to hold its contents, the single fragments or different languages only precariously contain, and can thus hardly communicate, what is called “pure language.” It is precisely that lack or crack in communicability that renders it necessary to translate or displace the “Nicht-Mitteilbare” of Benjamin’s symbolic into the radical partition of language in which translation must participate if it wants to mean something. The fragments of the broken vessel, Benjamin argues, “must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one 157 Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 188.

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another” (78). They indeed only fit together if they are most unlike each other – like the seal in whose sealing, as Benjamin points out in his essay on Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften, a concave form in the metal corresponds to a convex form in the wax. The seal that seals the letter to the Minister is the point where the “The Purloined Letter” and “La Lettre volée,” translation and the original, unite in a distinct difference.The names of Dupin and Dupin are radically different in the exact sense of the difference that exists between the seal and the seal, the concave and the convex forms that separate at the very moment they are united in the act of sealing. Dupin, insofar as it is a proper name, demands translation. Derrida’s discussion of Benjamin’s essay in “Des Tours de Babel” has worked out the implications of this demand that contradicts the conventional view that proper names cannot be translated. “The Purloined Letter” and “La lettre volée” are written at the limit of the necessity and possibility of this demand. To Lacan, as we have seen, the name of Dupin cannot be translated insofar as the letters defy partition. The “Seminar’s” notion that a letter can be or not be in a particular place as long as it does not suffer a partitive article demonstrate that to Lacan it is not the name but, strictly speaking, the article and thus the articulation of all names that remains properly indivisible, untranslatable, and even impossible to cite. “To cite a word means to call it by its name,“158 Benjamin writes. Lacan’s politics of citation play, as we have seen, in the register of the imaginary. To him, citation is necessarily misquotation. Benjamin’s essay bears the imprint of a seal in the citation of an untranslated passage from Mallarmé’s “Crise de vers” that Derrida in somewhat different terms has called “the medallion of a proper name.”159 It deals with the problem of the plurality of languages central to Benjamin’s essay: “Les langues imparfaites en cela que plusieurs, manque la suprême” / “The imperfection of languages consists in their plurality, the supreme one is missing” (77). Mallarmé 158 Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” GS, II: 362. 159 Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” 177.

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is cited and left untranslated in order to throw into relief that the absence of a supreme language cannot be filled. But it can be translated, and this is why the citation – like a seal – can be pressed onto the essay: La diversité, sur terre, des idiomes empêche personne de proférer les mots qui, sinon se trouveraient, par une frappe unique, elle-même matériellement la vérité” / “the diversity of idioms on earth prevents everybody from uttering the words which otherwise, at one single stroke, would materialize as truth.

The truth that does materialize in translation is its “frappe unique,” the seal of a singularity in which the singular languages are not simply elevated into a supreme language but rather – like the convex form of the seal complementing the concave – constitute what the essay calls the “great longing (Sehnsucht) for linguistic complementation” (79) or, in the formulation that heads the citation from Mallarmé, “a yearning (Sehnsucht) for that language which manifests itself in translations” (77). As Derrida puts it in The Ear of the Other, the multiplicity of languages form a “generalized singularity.”160 The seal, the difference between the seal and the seal, is the constellation of this longing for complementation, and if its impression in “The Purloined Letter” and “La lettre volée” marks a decisive distinction between Dupin and Dupin, it discloses that the proper name is also, if not in the first place, the site of translation and difference. Not so with Lacan. As he cryptically lets know those of his inner circle that accompanied him to Zurich the year before, “the signifier’s answer to whomever interrogates it is: ‘Eat your Dasein’” (52). Whatever came to pass with this “password” in Zurich, it seems that Dupin’s seal – du pain – depends on some restraint of his voracity or, if you wish, on a notion of luxury. The proper name is the luxury we are precariously granted in language. Benjamin’s “linguistic complementation” is their Verwandtschaft, the kinship of languages. “As for the posited central kinship of 160 Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 104.

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languages, it is marked by a distinctive convergence. Languages are not strangers to one another (einander nicht fremd), but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated (verwandt) in what they want to express” (72). As the fragments of the vessel show, this notion of kinship turns on a turning whose convergence requires a difference. Languages are not only “not strangers to one another,” but also not strangers to an Other, einem anderen nicht fremd. If “pure language” cannot be attained by any single tongue, as Benjamin argues, but is rather constituted by “the totality of their intentions supplementing each other” (74), if “pure language” in this sense is always singularly in the plural, it is ultimately alien to each single tongue and in a strict sense remains untranslatable. Language is the event of what Jean-Luc Nancy has called Le Partage des voix, a “dia-logue as the partition of the logos“161 in which each of our voices is singular and singularly divided from others. Nancy’s book unfolds a dia-logic sense of abandonner and donner that is of great importance to an understanding of what Benjamin repeatedly calls the gift or Gabe of language. What Nancy’s dia-logue announces is the otherness of voices not to be subsumed under the notion of an Other, “un grand Autre,” that would present “the origin of the discourse-of-the-other in general” (85), a discourse Lacan’s “Seminar” might indeed be said to conduct. Meaning, Nancy argues, “is this partition of the logos. (We are this meaning, in the partition of our voices). This is to say that meaning ‘is’ the gift of itself in partition […] That meaning is given (donné) also means that it is given up (abandonné) to partition, to the hermeneutic law of the difference of voices, and that it is not a given, anterior and exterior to our voices and our utterances” (82). This is precisely what meaning means in Benjamin’s theory of translation. Throughout his essay, Benjamin refers to single tongues in the plural – “the foreignness of languages,” “the kinship of languages,” – while the use of the singular is reserved for what properly speaking means the plurality of languages in their “linguistic complementation”: “pure language” or “true language.” While the plurality of 161 Jean Luc Nancy, Le partage des voix (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1982), 84.

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languages propels or requires translation, this plurality is itself something that cannot be translated by any one language. This accounts for the fragmentary nature of languages and intimates that to all languages we know and speak, “pure language” is in a strict sense always “foreign language,” the proof and experience of a foreignness in language.162

IV. King of Apes Nothing makes the difference between Benjamin and Lacan on the question of the fragmentary nature of language and translation clearer than the footnote Lacan adds to the passage where he claims the letter’s resistance to partition and sets it off from “the dormant vitalism” that informs the notion of the whole in Gestalttheorie: “This is so true that philosophers, in those hackneyed examples with which they argue on the basis of the single and the multiple, will not use to the same purpose a simple sheet of white paper ripped in the middle and a broken circle, indeed a shattered vase, not to mention a cut worm” (53, n. 9). While much in this note might be designed to remain obscure, we find Benjamin’s vessel and the narrative’s letter conveniently brought together. In Lacan’s list of examples they belong to two different registers. While the torn paper still seems a multiple series of something whole, the vase, the circle and the worm are cut or broken in singular pieces whose reconstitution as a whole means more than the sum of its parts. In his usual fashion, Lacan settles in the camp of his opponents to teach them more effectively why his remark on the indivisible letter is “so true.” What he takes along is a letter 162 In addition to Antoine Berman’s important book on The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany cited earlier, see also Arno Renken, La Représentation de l’étranger: Une reflexion hermeneutique sur la notion de traduction (Lausanne: CTL, 2002).

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from which the writing in the letter of Poe’s and Baudelaire’s narratives is conveniently effaced to make room for the inscription of a pun. The worm cut in half, le ver coupé, will grow back into ver-ité.163 Never is there any harm done to Lacan’s vérité of the letter. This makes his remark “so true,” an illustration of his sense of an organic, inviolable truth that is vital to both the “pure signifier” and the phallus for which it stands. The phallus is not inadvertently raised here in the context of translation. Derrida is certainly right in conjecturing that Marie Bonaparte’s footnote on Baudelaire’s mistranslation of a passage that describes the fireplace in the Minister’s room plays an important part in Lacan’s reading of the text. This mistranslation concerns the position of “a little brass knob” from which the card-rack that holds the letter hangs, and that in Poe’s text is located “beneath” the mantelpiece while in Baudelaire’s text it appears “above” the mantelpiece. Referring to it in passing and pronouncing it a negligible detail, this question of a displacement in translation should not be neglected here. For the mantelpiece and fireplace set the scene for what Stuart Schneiderman has called Lacan’s “Fiction,” his invention of the story of “an immense female body, waiting to be undressed”164 by Dupin as his gaze moves across the room. What Derrida has called Lacan’s phallocentrism, and to which he returns again in his essay on Lacan in Résistances,165 is also articulated by the Seminar’s citation from 163 On Lacan’s understanding of “vérité,” see Erik Porge, Les Noms du père chez Jacques Lacan: Ponctuations et problématiques (Ramonville Saint-Agne: Editions Erès, 1997), 107–12. 164 Stuart Schneiderman, “Fictions,” in Critical Essays on Jacques Lacan, 89. 165 Derrida, “Pour l’amour de Lacan,” in Résistances de la psychanalyse (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1996), 77: “La position transcendentale du pahhlus, ‘signifiant privilégié de cette marque où la part du logos se conjoint à l’avènement du désir’, position transcendentale qui n’est autre que la doctrine qui lie la vérité à la castration et à, je cite, ‘ce manque du pénis de la mère où se révèle la nature du phallus’.” Derrida’s text begins by reflecting on how he lives with Lacan, which is also a response to René Major, Lacan avec Derrida: Analyse désistentielle (Paris: Mentha, 1991).

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Crébillon’s Atrée. The title and name holds both âtre – the fireplace that plays so important a role in the history of the debate about “The Purloined Letter” and its translation by Baudelaire – and castration, the becoming châtré. The phallus is a signifier of lack.166 In his introduction to the pocketbook edition of Écrits Lacan insists on this word: “Voici pourquoi le Ministre vient à être châtré, châtré, c’est le mot de ce qu’il croit toujours l’avoir: cette lettre que Dupin a su repérer de son évidence entre les jambes de sa cheminée (that is, in the âtre) de haute lisse.”167 If the letter the Queen and then the Minister receive can be read as a substitute for the phallus , we might ask whether in such a reading – that is to say in Lacan’s reading – the act of translation is substituted by an act of substitution that would explain the seminar’s “odd” maneuvre to focus upon a translation while simultaneously making translation seem impossible. In other words, we might ask whether Lacan’s “pure signifier” may be substituted but cannot be translated in a manner comparable to the way in which Benjamin’s “pure language” may be symbolized in and through translation but cannot be communicated. Such an investigation might start from the premise that Lacan’s “pure signifier” figures as the King. The letter-signifier figures as the King by substituting him. Thus he – like the phallus being nowhere present in the narrative save in its substitutes – is everywhere the letter goes in Lacan’s “Seminar.” The phallus is a signifier, Lacan argues, and must not be confused with the sexual organ as the signified of this signifier. This confusion is part of the oedipal phase in which, according to Lacan, the child suspects that the mother has a real phallus before learning that she has not, thus gaining access to the signfied as a concept of absence in the process of signification. In the following passage from Lacan’s paper on “The Meaning of the Phallus” this confusion appears as a mystery: “For the phallus is a signifier, a signifier whose function in the intrasubjective economy of analysis might lift the veil from that which 166 See Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 101–04. 167 Lacan, Écrits I, Collection Points (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), 8.

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it served in the mysteries. For it is to this signified that it is given to designate as a whole the effect of there being a signified, inasmuch as it conditions any such effect by its presence as signifier.”168 While in Lacan’s family drama the phallus gives access to a notion of the pure signifier, it is important to note that it is never purely symbolic because there is always some imaginary attraction that remains in the process of its act of signification. In the “Seminar” this Lacanian inversion comes into play where he writes about the danger Dupin faces of falling prey to the power of the imaginary relationships among the recipients of the letters that he seems to have detected, recognized, and mastered. The passage in question deals with the “intrasubjective economy of analysis” mentioned above in terms of the economy of the financial transaction taking place in Baudelaire’s and Poe’s narrative: Do we not in fact feel concerned with good reason when for Dupin what is perhaps at stake is his withdrawal from the symbolic circuit of the letter – we would become the emissaries of all the purloined letters which at least for a time remain in sufferance with us in the transference. And is it not the responsibility their transference entails which we neutralize by equating it with the signifier most destructive of all signification; namely money. (49; emphasis added)

Dupin works for money; he gets compensated for the sharpness of his wits. This makes him both a rival and a colleague of the analyst, to whom money is of great concern not only as a means of sustenance – du pain and all – but also as a tool to destroy the imaginary in signification. If money is a pure signifier, it works like the phallus whose symbolic dimension the analyst is trying to bring forth in his work. A number of Lacan’s patients vividly remember the drawer where they were asked to deposit the money on leaving his room. “To a properly 168 Lacan, Écrits, 685–95. The citation quotes the new translation in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the “école freudienne” (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1982), 79–80. On the phallus, see their introduction and Samuel Weber, Rückkehr zu Freud: Jacques Lacans Entstellung der Psychoanalyse (Frankfurt/Main: Ullstein, 1978), 114–24.

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trained police agent, such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible” (PT, 684), the Prefect says at one point. This also seems to apply to a properly trained analyst. Interestingly, Lacan finds it “shocking” that Dupin, after cashing in on his success, reverts to a skirmish with the Minister and thus enters into an imaginary relationship with him: “The profit Dupin so nimbly extracts from his exploit, if its purpose is to allow him to withdraw his stakes from the game, makes all the more paradoxical, even shocking, the partisan attack, the underhanded blow, he suddenly permits himself to launch against the Minister” (49). This “underhand blow” is the citation from Atrée he sends to the Minister. What makes this so shocking is not really the note but the failure of money as a pure signifier to seal the case. Trying to make sense of Dupin’s revenge, Lacan enters into his argument of how Dupin shifts into the position of the Queen, “feeling a rage of manifestly feminine nature” (51) against the Minister. But we need not follow him there. Instead we should ask what happens when Dupin – “opening a drawer, and producing a check-book” (688) – asks the Prefect to sign his check. We are back to the drawer in the analyst’s office, and it should be no secret to him that no monetary transaction can remain a secret to the King. For the money paid against the check bears the King’s name, face, and seal. “Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge” (41), Lacan writes at one point. Having the check signed, Dupin sends, as it were, the letter back to the King. If the Queen has already de facto betrayed her husband by receiving the letter, Dupin now betrays her by cashing in the check and thus reporting back to the King. This is why he can stay in the spot of blindness to which Lacan assigns him without missing anything. The check underwritten by the King and signed by the Prefect as his public servant belongs to Lacan’s register of the symbolic. Entering the King’s accounting books, Dupin becomes subject to his power and control. If the detective had wanted to avoid this he should not have accepted the money. This is precisely what he does in an earlier translation of Poe’s tale published anonymously in a Parisian journal ten years before Baudelaire produced his text. It is unlikely that 241

Baudelaire knew the translation, but one might wonder if Lacan has read it. There Dupin is introduced under the “assumed name” of Verdier, and while the translation faithfully follows the original in most points it takes an altogether different course in the passage about the financial transaction: Verdier abruptly turned to me: – What is the sum that poor widow you told me about yesterday would need to make a reunion with her children possible? – About one hundred livres. – That’s a mere trifle. My dear Mr. Secretary, would you be so kind as to write out a check in the sum of two hundred livres drawn on the credit union of the police in the name of the widow...What is her name again? – Mariane Dufour. – Did you get that, Mr. Secretary? Mr. X... looked at him with astonishment. – Write it out, sign it, Verdier said to him, putting pen and paper before him.169

Verdier’s act of charity enables him to avoid his own involvement in a case where much is at stake. Unlike Poe’s detective, Verdier cannot be traced by the King on whose power of control Lacan’s reading of that financial transaction capitalizes. Interestingly, “The Task of the Translator” offers a possibility to relate Benjamin’s interest in the kinship of languages to Lacan’s interest in the kingship of language. In a passage that deals with the relationship between the original and the translation, Benjamin’s text unfolds a “royal robe,” the Königsmantel of translation. What makes the passage particularly intriguing is its discussion of the limits of translation:

169 Anonymous, “Une lettre volée,” Magasin pittoresque 13 (August 1845), 271. The text is difficult to obtain and since in several instances it opens up a new perspective on the relationship between the two texts, it is printed in full as an appendix at the end of the book.

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While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds. For it signifies a more exalted language than its own and thus remains unsuited (unangemessen) to its content, overpowering and alien (fremd). This disjunction prevents (verhindert) translation and at the same time makes it superfluous (sich erübrigt). (75)

The iconography of the fruit and the robe bring together what receives considerable attention in Benjamin’s Sprachaufsatz. The fruit evokes the Fall from Eden; the robe law and judgment: “[…] From the Fall, in exchange of the immediacy of name damaged by it, a new immediacy arises, the magic of judgment, which no longer rests blissfully in itself (nicht mehr selig in sich selbst ruht).”170 Translation can indeed never be self-sufficient insofar as it is always related to the foreignness of what it translates. This, Benjamin argues, both prevents translation and makes it superfluous. How do we have to understand this sudden and peculiar juxtaposition of translation and the violence or power of the law, which seems to contradict what one read earlier about the kinship of languages? It is to be noted that Benjamin at this point is not talking about the translation from an original but about the translation of a translation. A translation cannot again be translated: This is a fundamental law Benjamin’s essay seeks to propagate. “Translations,” he argues, “prove to be untranslatable not because of the heaviness (Schwere), but rather the looseness with which meaning (Sinn) attaches to them” (81, mod.). While in other passages Benjamin maintains that it is the task of translation to liberate the original from the burden of a “heavy, alien meaning” (80), we now see that meaning can become too volatile for a text to be translated again. This move can only be explained in terms of the problematic notion underlying Benjamin’s argument that translation is, in fact, an original act that cannot be repeated. If its repetition is attempted, as for example in the translation of a translation, one is close to the betrayal of the King that Lacan puts at the center of his “Seminar.” 170 Benjamin, “On Language,” in Reflections, 328.

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If the unnamed King looming large in the seminar needs to be named, one may safely assume that it is Louis-Philippe, who reigned at the time of the publication of “The Purloined Letter” in 1844.171 Interestingly, Louis Philippe had an an uncommonly great interest in the English language and once visited the United States. Even the peculiar relationship between America and France established in Poe’s tale is governed by the “exalted personage” that, despite his blindness, governs or dictates all the moves. When the revolutionary convention in Paris issued a ban against all the members of the Bourbon family in 1795, Louis Phillippe planned to emigrate to the United States. Before circumstances allowed him to undertake the voyage he fled to Switzerland where, under the assumed name of Chabos, he obtained a 171 He may also be identified through the reference in a passage of “The Purloined Letter” whose significance for Dupin’s trick played on the Minister is obvious, but where we may also find an oblique reference to a political incident that shook France and certainly was of great interest to Poe. Dupin pays his visit to the Minister; they talk. “While thus engaged, however, a loud report, as if of a pistol, was heard immediately beneath the windows of the hotel, and was succeeded by a series of fearful screams, and the shoutings of a mob. D— rushed to a casement, threw it open, and looked out.” (22). The shot fired by a “lunatic” in Dupin’s pay echoes the attempts on Louis-Phillippe’s life in the wake of the April Insurrections. In 1835 Fieschi’s machine infernale, firing from twenty-five barrels simultaneously, killed eighteen people and wounded another twent-two. The king was unharmed. One year later, in 1836, another assassin vainly tried to kill Louis-Phillippe. The Minister’s concern is not unfounded, for if the shot had been ben that of a successful assassin, the power his letter wields would have ceased together with the king’s life. Precisely in the moment of anxiety about the safety of the letter and his king he looks away and thus gives Dupin the chance to steal it. The assassinations and the trials attracted great public attention, particularly because Fieschi’s machine infernale triggered the September Laws that introduced a number of changes in the legal system and a censorship of the press. See Collingham, The July Monarchy: A Political History of France 1830–1848, 157–68. Excerpts of the September Laws are translated in Irene Collins, Government and Society in France 1814–1848 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970), 99–100. For a full report on the assassination attempts and the subsequent trials, see Louis Blanc, History of the Ten Years, 1830–1840 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1845), II: 87–90 (Bergeron); 370–403 (Fieschi); 415–24 (Alibaud).

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position as assistant teacher in a boys’ boarding school at Reichenau, a village in the Grisons. “He was examined by the officers of this institution under a feigned name, and unanimously admittted. Here he taught geography, history, the French and English language, and mathematics, for eight months, without having been discovered.”172 Armed with a certificate of competence as a teacher, Louis-Philippe finally set sail for the United States: “He sailed from the Elbe, on board the American ship America, in September, 1796, and in October, he landed in Philadelphia.”173 The French king, certified teacher of English, arrives in the city where Poe writes “The Purloined Letter,” a crossing redirected by Baudelaire’s translation that will take the English speaking French detective back to Paris.174 The King – supreme bearer of the signifier – guards the original, both in Lacan and Benjamin. Paul de Man’s presentation of “The Task of the Translator” is particularly helpful for an exposition of the problematic status of the original in Benjamin: “The relationship of the translator to the original is the relationship between language and language, wherein the problem of meaning, the desire to say something […], is entirely absent. Translation is a relation from language to language, not a relation to an extralinguistic meaning that could be copied, para172 Thomas Wyatt, History of the Kings of France (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1846), 250. Wyatt is the author of the Manual of Conchology and Conchologist’s First Book, which was published in a pirated edition under the name of Poe in 1839. Poe was paid a small sum of money to let his name appear on the title page. 173 Wyatt, History of the Kings of France, 251. 174 Louis-Phillippe’s exploits as a teacher and sailor were much talked and written about in the 1830s. Poe, who was an avid reader of the French press while the French king only read The Times, may well have picked up the elements of pseudonymy and hiding that were of particular interest to his imagination. The details on the first years of Louis-Philippe’s exile are all taken from T. E. B. Howarth, Citizen King: The Life of Louis-Phillippe, King of the French (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961), 87–102. See p. 81 for Winterhalter’s 1830 portrait of Louis-Phillippe as a teacher in Reichenau.

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phrased, or imitated.”175 While one readily agrees with the assessment that translation does not refer to a meaning that would lie beyond the text it translates, it needs to be asked whether the category of “the original” is indeed a linguistic concept that could be grounded in the text or whether it is in fact a meaning that is extra-linguistic and thus after all motivated by a “desire to say something.” Nowhere in Benjamin’s essay is there any doubt that an original is an original and a translation a translation, despite the emphasis that both are marked by an ineradicable foreignness. Translation is a displacement that can neither be undone nor be replaced. It also seems that to retranslate a translation would mean to reverse a movement that in Benjamin’s conception is not only infinite but also strictly one-directional. But in the texts by Poe and Baudelaire, as we have seen, the positional relationship between the original and the translation is challenged. Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s detective stories performs a displacement of the concept of the original that renders it possible to read the Dupin trilogy as a sustained reflection on translation. One of those tales, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” indeed offers a most graphic representation of the “linguistic complementation” (79) that according to Benjamin constitutes “pure language.” Like the constellation of words of different languages that in his essay on mimesis surround the signified, reine Sprache is a language hidden among the particular languages from which it will or would only emerge at the “messianic end of their history” (74; tr. mod.). What emerges, in the end, is meaning: In the individual, unsupplemented languages, meaning is never found in relative independence, as in individual words and sentences; rather, it is in a constant state of flux – until it is able to emerge as pure language from the harmony of all the various modes of intention. Until then, it remains hidden in the languages. (74)

175 de Man, “‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 81–82.

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What Dupin de–tects in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is the hiding place of such harmony. It is, to be sure, an alien harmony. If it was ever heard or spoken, “pure language” – one might venture to say – would sound and speak like an orangutang. Surrounded, as it were, by six witnesses hearing the invisible murderer utter some words hidden behind the locked door to the apartment of Madame L’Espanaye, all of the witnesses differ with regard to the origin of the language. The evidence on which Dupin’s solution of the case rests, is precisely what Benjamin calls “the foreignness of languages“: But in regard to the shrill voice, the pecularity is – not that they (the witnesses) disagreed – but that, while an Italian, an Englishman, a Spaniard, a Hollander, and a Frenchman attempted to describe it, each one spoke of it as that of a foreigner. Each is sure that it was not the voice of one of his countrymen. Each likens it – not to the voice of an individual of any nation with whose language he is conversant – but the converse. The Frenchman supposes it the voice of a Spaniard, and “might have distinguished some words had he been acquainted with the Spanish.” The Dutchman maintains it to have been that of a Frenchman; but we find it stated that “not understanding French this witness was examined through an interpreter.” The Englishman thinks it the voice of a German, and “does not understand German.” The Spaniard is “sure” that it was that of an Englishman, but “judges by the intonation” altogether, “as he has no knowledge of the English.” The Italian believes it the voice of a Russian, but “has never conversed with a native of Russia.” […] Now, how strangely unusual must that voice have really been, about which such testimony as this could have been elicited! (PT, 415–16; emphasis in the original)

The voice is that of “pure language,” that is to say, the plurality of languages.176 It is not an angelic language. But how – one wonders – 176 The language of the ape is called “an ‘ironic’ Ur-sprache” by Clive Bloom, Reading Poe Reading Freud: The Romantic Imagination in Crisis (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1988), 115. See also Patrick Primavesi, Kommentar, Übersetzung, Theater in Walter Benjamins frühen Schriften (Frankfurt/Main and Basel: Stroemfeld, 1998), 125–36 on Benjamin’s plurality of languages, and Jeffrey DeShell, The Peculiarity of Literature: An Allegorical Approach to Poe’s Fiction (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 68–87 for a comparison between Benjamin’s pure language and Poe’s hieroglyphics.

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does the language of angels sound? Perhaps it would not be different from the sounds uttered by animals. The murderous orangutan – this linguistic animal – was speaking no language and several languages at once. The passage of secret language we cited earlier shows in some kind of approximation how “pure language” is written. And whoever manages to speak the text will most possibly sound like the orangutang speaking “pure language“: Cauhiff aud ftd sdftirf ithot tacd wdde rdchfdr tiu fuaefshffheo fdoudf hetiusafhie tuis ied herhchriai fi aeiftdu wn sdaef it iuhfheo hiidohwid wn aen deodsf ths tiu itis hf iaf iuhoheaiin rdffhedr. (ER, 1285)

Finally, we might note that even before he is given his first chance to demonstrate his extraordinary talents as a detective, we are introduced to Dupin in a passage that contains something like a motto whose wisdom is very much to the point here. Summing up what might well be Dupin’s most important detection, it articulates that the task of the detective is indeed the task of a translator. Quite fittingly in the context of a murder, the motto is written in a dead language: “Perdidit antiquum litera prima sonum” (PT, 404). To translate: “The first letter has lost its original sound.”

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Chapter 5

Transplants: Poe, Plagiarism, and Les Fleurs du mal

By stealing, in open day, the finest passages, the most beautiful thoughts (no others are worth stealing) and the rarest images of another, and claiming them as his own; and that too, when he knows that every competitor for fame, every critical tribunal in the world, as well as the real owner, will be ready to identify the borrowed plumes in a moment, and cry him down as a thief. A madman, an idiot, if he were capable of such an achievement, might do it, but no other. 1 ‘Outis,’ Broadway Journal, March 8, 1845

I. Nevermore In Poe’s literary universe nothing is left to chance. Everything is connected to an ultimate effect to which all incidents, actions, characters, gestures or words are drawn irresistibly. Effect and attraction are the two governing principles in Poe’s intellectual world and poetic creation. “I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect” (ER, 13) he writes in “The Philosophy of Composition” about the genesis of his poem “The Raven.” According to his fictional account the text was composed backward, as it were, starting from the 1

“Plagiarism,” in Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 711. Subsequent references to Poe’s theoretical essays and journalistic articles are to this edition and will be cited in the text as ER.

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refrain of “Nevermore” in which the mood of sadness and the notion of loss structuring the poem’s narrative and performance resonate. What is called an effect is thus actually presented as an origin: Here then the poem may be said to have its beginning – at the end, where all works of art should begin – for it was here, at this point of my preconsiderations, that I first put pen to paper in the composition of the stanza: “Prophet,” said I, “thing of evil! prophet still if bird or devil! By that heaven that bends above us – by that God we both adore, Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore – Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.” Quoth the raven “Nevermore.”2

The maxim that a work of art should properly begin at the end articulates the Romantic notion about the circularity of origin and finality in terms of the technical issues of composition. Poe’s poetry is based on skillful calculation, setting the image of the modern poet apart from the Romantic bard improvising spontaneously under the influence of a poetic urge. One might indeed say that his transformation of the intricate philosophical question about the ends of poetry into the technical question of how a poem ends is his most important contribution to post-Romantic poetics. The influence Poe exerted on Mallarmé is closely connected to his emphasis on the technicalities of writing and to the value this assigns to the individual words of a poem. “Eviter quelque réalité d’échafaudage demeuré autour de cette architecture spontanée et magique, n’y implique pas le 2

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Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 1286. Unless otherwise noted references will be to this edition, cited in he text as PT. For the tales and poems I have also used Thomas Ollive Mabbott’s edition of the Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969–78), which gives variant readings and excellent annotations. References to that edition will henceforth be cited as Collected Works, followed by volume and page numbers.

manque de puissants calculs et subtils, mais on les ignore; eux-mêmes se font, mystérieux exprès.”3 The refrain is one such mystery of linguistic magic. “Nevermore“: More sound than word it gathers force independent of whatever it may signify to the narrator writing an autobiography torn between “never” and “more.” Translating or interpreting the raven’s croak as “nevermore” the speaking subject invests language with a meaning foreign to the bird. Regardless of whether the raven actually utters “nevermore” or whether it merely sounds like this, the bird never understands the human language it imitates or is heard to be imitating. Speaking its own original language the raven would remain unintelligible. Imitating human speech, the bird acts as an interlocutor. For the question of plagiarism the notion that to speak a language is to parrot language is of great significance. Like the orangutang that speaks all languages and no language at all in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” the raven is set up as a medium through which language speaks itself, mysteriously. Mallarmé must have liked this. He also remarks on the subtle calculation that makes such architexture possible. One can never really forget about it in Poe’s reconstruction of a final effect as origin. Whatever the mysterious bird may or may not be saying, even its pronunciation follows the doctrine of the poem’s backward composition. Read backward with a little imagination, or a twist of the beak, “never” spells “raven.” Writing for effect, Poe never hesitates to use the proper strategy to achieve his goal. Curiously, Mallarmé’s praise for his dissimulation of the poem’s intellectual framework – “L’armature intellectuelle du poëme se dissimule” (872) – reverses Poe’s dramatization of backward composition by taking the essay at face value. Although the essay professes to tell the story of how the poem was cunningly 3

Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, eds. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 872: “To avoid the reality of a scaffold left around that spontaneous and magical architecture does not imply the absence of powerful and subtle calculations; one merely ignores them. They make themselves, deliberately, mysterious.”

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fabricated, Poe’s architecture rather builds the house first and then puts up the scaffolding. Not dissimulation but the simulation of a false origin is the subject of “The Philosophy of Composition.” For one might indeed say that the essay, written one year after the publication of “The Raven,” is something of a hoax, belonging to a genre Poe brought to perfection as a journalist. To demonstrate that the poem’s atmosphere of sadness and despair is carefully premeditated and thus the result of technical considerations rather than emotional exuberance is not to say that it lacks sincerity. Quite to the contrary. Hoax is another term for what the Romantics called the suspension of disbelief. All literature is essentially a hoax, and this is one of its foremost ends. What is sincere about Poe’s move is not the act of unmasking the poem as merely a fake, but rather the fact that the act of writing an essay to frame the poem reconstructs and reinforces the poem’s narrative of loss. Eagerly I wished the morrow; – vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow – sorrow for the lost Lenore – (PT, 81)

The situation of the narrator within the poem tallies with that of the narrator in the essay. To the former, Lenore is lost to death and at the same time is remembered through the sonorous syllables that echo her name, to the latter the lyric performance of the poem gets lost in the explanatory discourse of his prose that at the same time reconstructs its originary moment. The essay is a refrain on the refrain, a text written after the poem but presented as its origin in a performance that both refutes and confirms the “Nevermore” on which all words and thoughts converge. The poem and its commentary belong to the books in the library that do not provide “surcease of sorrow.” The two narrators are doubles or shadows of each other, and one might even claim that the report that throws light on the poem’s composition constitutes something like an act of mourning undertaken the following morning: And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

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And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted – nevermore!” (PT, 86)

It is no coincidence that the floor on which the two narrators meet to reconstruct Lenore is that of the library. At their hands she becomes text, a string of sonorous syllables, the romance of an aesthetic theory borrowed from the “quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore” (PT, 81). The presentation of Lenore as lore necessitates her death, for if Lenore rhymes with lore, death rhymes with beauty: “The death [...] of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (ER, 19) Poe writes in “The Philosophy of Composition.” According to his account the topic was selected only after the length of the poem, its chief effect, its tone, the refrain, and the speaker of the refrain had already been determined. Although she is placed at the center of the poem, the dead Lenore is assigned this place by the material frame (length, form, sound) of the poem. In a double sense of the word she is framed by two narrators deploring her absent corpse in order to reconstruct her and the text she embodies as an effect of beauty. Commenting on the misogyny of Poe’s infamously famous aesthetic maxim about the death of a woman, Elisabeth Bronfen has pointed out that “Not without reason does the word corpus refer both to the body of a dead human or animal and to a collection of writing.”4 The reduction of Lenore to a body of writing allows the text to turn in upon itself: “Because her dying figures as an analogy to the creation of an art work [...] the ‘death of a beautiful woman’ marks the mise en abyme of a text, the moment of self-reflexivity, where the text seems to comment on itself and its own process of composition, and so decomposes itself.” Composition and decomposition indeed go hand in hand in many of Poe’s works, and in some cases it is precisely the graphic representation of a body’s decomposition that raises the question of their relationship. For it is not only death but the very uncertainty of death that organizes Poe’s handling of the “most 4

Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 71.

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poetical topic in the world” in all those narratives that act out an obsession about revenants, metempsychosis, or premature burial. In the case of “The Raven” death ushers Lenore out, clearing the way for what one might call Poe’s phantasmatic idea of the author as a mother. The talkative bird, we remember, is “Perched upon a bust of Pallas” (PT, 83), and if, as the essay concludes, “the reader begins now to regard the Raven as emblematical” (ER, 25), we might see in this also an oblique allegorical reference to Athena springing fully armed from the head of Jupiter. Lenore may be dead, but she is reborn in the essay in whose prosaic argument her death is conceived and borne out as an origin. Poe’s library is not only a morgue but also something like an intellectual labor ward. “The Raven” was written, Poe makes us believe, as a rigorous exercise in the application of his main principle of a final effect attracting all formal and narrative elements into the sphere of its influence. Adherence to those two principles of effect and attraction is absolutely imperative, and even if “The Philosophy of Composition” can be said to belong to Poe’s literary hoaxes, its main purpose is to demonstrate their ultimate truth. The beginning of the essay indicates that like the translator we were dealing with in the preceding chapter the philosopher revealing this truth is in fact a detective. Charles Dickens, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an examination I once made of the mechanism of “Barnaby Rudge,” says – “By the way, are you aware that Godwin wrote his ‘Caleb Williams’ backwards? He first involved his hero in a web of difficulties, forming the second volume, and then, for the first, cast about him for some mode of accounting for what had been done. (ER, 13)

To start with a citation from a letter by Dickens is, first of all, an effective way of advertising his essay, placing Poe’s theory under the authority of the famous author who had recently attracted the attention of an even wider American public through his lecture tour in the U.S. and the subsequent publication of his American Notes in 1842. The reference to Dickens’s remark about the backward composition of Caleb Williams hints at a program Poe will carry out to the point of perfection or even zealotry, surpassing not only Dickens but even 254

Godwin himself. Caleb Williams, we remember, is the story of a murder committed by Falkland but blamed on an innocent tenant and his son who are sentenced to death with the support of a corrupt judicial system. When Caleb finds out about the secret crime, he faces a relentless pursuit by his master and is put into prison for an alleged theft pinned on him on the strength of evidence fabricated by Falkland. Accused of having forced open a trunk to steal money, jewels, and a watch, Caleb tells the judge and the jury where his belongings are hidden, confident that the search will prove his innocence. As it happens, the boxes contain the jewels and the watch. Appealing to common sense Caleb asks “whether, if I had been conscious they would be found among my property, I should myself have indicated the place where I had concealed it?“5 But this is a story of madness rather than common sense. “To the rest of the persons present I seemed to be merely the subject of detection; but in reality I was of all the spectators that individual who was most at a loss to conceive through every stage of the scene what would come next, and who listened to every word that was uttered with the most uncontrolable amazement. Amazement however alternately yielded to indignation and horror” (168–69). It is the horror that befalls many of Poe’s characters, and just as his insane criminals are shattered by a nervous breakdown after contemplating their horrifying deeds, the innocent Caleb remains a broken man even after the real truth is finally revealed in a dramatic courtroom scene at the end of the novel. Caleb’s amazement, his being “at a loss to conceive [...] what would come next” confirms Dickens’s remark that Godwin “first involved his hero in a web of difficulties” before writing the part that accounts for the mystery. Cause follows effect in the backward composition Poe makes the cornerstone of his thought and writing. Barnaby Rudge, too, is a narrative about murder and fabricated evidence. It is no accident that Poe begins his essay with an allusion to two stories in which aesthetic and legal judgment are intricately 5

William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (New York and London: Norton, 1977), 168.

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connected. As Poe’s comment on Dickens’s letter indicates, aesthetics and criminology, plot and plotting indeed have a common ground: “It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention” (ER, 13). The use of the term dénouement points to the structural congruence of Poe’s poetry with his tales of ratiocination, testifying to the validity of Benjamin’s remark, cited in the previous chapter, that his narratives of detection provide the fullest exposition of his analytic method in literary creation. Nothing can escape the scrutiny of Poe’s aesthetic intention. This becomes clear in the review of Barnaby Rudge where he identified the murderer in the story long before the installment revaling the truth had been published. In that review, to which Poe draws attention in the opening passage of his essay, he outlines the plot of the first three installments of Barnaby Rudge in order to reconstruct the plotting of the murderer: “The person murdered is Mr. Reuben Haredale. He was found assassinated in his bed-chamber. His steward (Mr. Rudge, senior) and his gardener (name not mentioned) are missing” (ER, 219–20). When the body of Rudge is found in a nearby pond, it seems clear that the gardener had committed the crime and got rid of an unwanted witness. The scene is set for the author of detective fiction who had just published “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” the month before, and the cunning detective-turned-reviewer immediately guesses that Dickens has planted false evidence to mislead his readers. The review merits attention because it is actually about the dénouement that figures so prominently in his essay on composition: His [Dickens’s] design is to make it appear, in the dénouement, that the steward, Rudge, first murdered the gardener, then went to his master’s chamber, murdered him, was interrupted by his (Rudge’s) wife, whom he seized and held by the wrist, to prevent her giving the alarm – that he then, after possessing himself of the booty desired, returned to the gardener’s room, exchanged clothes with him, put upon the corpse his own watch and rings, and secreted it where it was afterwards discovered at so late a period that the features could not be identified. It will appear that Rudge himself, through his wife, gave indication to the police,

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after due time had elapsed, of the proper spot to be searched – so that when the decomposed body was found, it might be regarded as his own. We say that Rudge, in perpetrating the murder, seized his wife by the wrist; and we draw this inference from the fact that Barnaby is said to have upon his wrist the appearance of a smear of blood. (ER, 220)

Dickens‘s Rudge plants faked evidence like Godwin‘s Falkland. Every reader may be some kind of Dupin led or led on by the teller of a tale, but in this extraordinary case Poe acts as a reader purloining what one would think is the exclusive property of the author: the plot of the narrative. Like Rudge senior changing the identity of the corpse, Poe puts on, as it were, the clothes, the watch, and the ring of Dickens to assume his identity. And he takes his quill, inscribing – in blood – the truth of “this inference” within the narrative. Emphasizing that the murderer “seized his wife by the wrist,” Poe somehow comes to review a novel from his own hand. As it turns out, one of the few errors in the reviewer’s guesswork concerns precisely this change of hands and ownership. “The differences between our pre-conceived ideas [...] and the actual facts of the story, will be found immaterial,” Poe boldly states in his second review written one year after the first: The gardener was not murdered before but after his master; and that Rudge’s wife seized him by the wrist, instead of his seizing her, has so much the air of a mistake on the part of Mr. Dickens, that we can scarcely speak of our own version as erroneous. The grasp of a murderer’s bloody hand on the wrist of a woman enceinte, would have been more likely to produce the effect described [...] than the grasp of the hand of the woman upon the wrist of the assassin. We may therefore say [...] that if we did not rightly prophesy, yet, at least, our prophecy should have been right. (ER, 235)

Once Poe has laid his hand on Dickens’s novel he does not easily let go. Just as according to his philosophy of backward composition cause follows effect, the author must follow the reader. It is not surprising that Poe’s (p)review should change the question of who smears blood on whom. The reversal of touch is not without significance for a reading of Poe’s reading, if we consider that he takes the place of the assassin in his scenario of rewriting the novel. 257

Also, if Lenore proves that the death of a woman is “the most poetical topic in the world,” his reading of Barnaby Rudge shows that the mark of violent death on the wrist of a pregnant woman is no less morbidly attractive to Poe. As a previewer he fathers a thought that he defends in his review with the pride of a mother having given birth to her child after prolonged labor. One thing is clear: Dickens is not the author of “The Raven.” What is also clear is that Dickens is the father of the raven. Among the many real, improbable, and fictional sources that have been pointed out by critics or by Poe himself – e.g. Coleridge’s albatross, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” three poems entitled “The Dying Raven,” “The Old Night Owl,” and “The Bird of the Dream” – Dickens takes the most prominent place. As many readers have remarked, Poe’s raven flutters into his poem from the pages of the very novel alluded to at the beginning of his essay.6 Barnaby‘s best friend, the son of Rudge senior, is a raven called Grip. Although this aspect is not commented upon in “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe’s misplaced “grasp” also grabs Grip. In the chapter where Barnaby’s father, whom the police assume to be dead, stalks the “widow” Rudge in her house, the raven wakes up from his slumber to comment on the stranger’s appearance: “Polly put the ket-tle on, we’ll all have tea. Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah! I’m a devil, I’m a devil, I’m a kettle on, Keep up your spirits, Never say die, Bow, wow, wow, I’m a devil, I’m a ket-tle, I’m a – Polly put the ket-tle on, we’ll all have tea.” They stood rooted to the ground, as though it had been a voice from the grave.7

Grip’s additions to his staple phrase of “Polly put the kettle on” assume a significance very different from those other situations in 6

On the sources of “The Raven,” see Mabbott’s introduction in Collected Works, I: 354–7.

7

Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 136.

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which he calls himself “devil” or when he utters “Never say die” in response to Barnaby’s belief that every day is one’s birthday. His oracular pronouncements sound like an echo of thoughts conjured up by the presence of the devilish murderer that has returned from his supposed grave and now stands mute before the raven. Their echo is also echoed, it seems, in the “nevermore” of Poe’s “The Raven.” If we follow the narrative and logic of the “The Philosophy of Composition,” the first line written by Poe reads like a reference to Dickens’s bird in his own original words, if we can indeed call them words. Let us cite again the relevant passage from Poe‘s essay: Here then the poem may be said to have its beginning – at the end, where all works of art should begin – for it was here, at this point of my preconsiderations, that I first put pen to paper in the composition of the stanza: “Prophet,” said I, “thing of evil! prophet still if bird or devil! [...]” (PT, 1286)

If Poe’s poem about the talking raven is indeed inspired by Dickens’s raven, as a host of readers think it is, one might argue that Poe begins the composition of his poem with an act of plagiarism. Grip says, “I’m a devil” and Poe cites this bird by naming it “bird of devil“; Grip says “Never say die” and Poe’s raven answers by saying “Nevermore.” To call attention to this parallel, and to call it a case of plagiarism, follows a strategy of argumentation that Poe himself employed in his lifelong obsession about charging other authors with literary theft, pointing out verbal parallels or similarities in the use of imagery and rhyme to corroborate his accusation. His often wild accusations shook up the literary establishment, and Poe was in turn accused of being a thief himself.8 One instance of this is of some importance in our 8

On Poe’s plagiarism in the context of American journalism, see J. Lasley Dameron, “Poe, Plagiarism, and American Periodicals,” Poe Studies 30.1–2 (1997): 39–47. On the literary marketplace and Poe’s position in it, see Kevin J. Hayes, Poe and the Printed Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

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context since it concerns an article in the London Foreign Quarterly allegedly written by Dickens. This is what Poe writes to James R. Lowell in March 1844: It has been denied that Dickens wrote it – but, to me, the article affords so strong internal evidence of his hand that I would as soon think of doubting my existence. [...] Among other points he accuses myself of ‘metrical imitation’ of Tennyson, citing, by way of instance, passages from poems which were written & published by me long before Tennyson was heard of: – but I have, at no time, made any poetical pretension.9

It must have galled Poe to see himself on the bench of the defence facing the charge of stealing from the poet he had earlier used as a witness in his own most notorious crusade against plagiarism. Poe’s journalistic campaign against plagiarism started in 1840 and targeted Longfellow, professor at Harvard and arguably the most respected and influential American contemporary poet. In a review of Voices of the Night Poe maintains that Longfellow’s “Midnight Mass for the Dying Year” is indebted to Tennyson’s “The Death of the Old Year.”10 What seemed to be an unfair review by an aspiring young American poet gathered considerable momentum five years later. In the course of his fiercest literary battle, fought out mainly in the Broadway Journal, whose editorial staff he had joined in 1845, Poe received and printed a letter from an anonymous friend and defender of Longfellow’s that was signed in the name of Outis, which is in Greek and means ‘Nobody’. To write a letter in the name of nobody is of some significance if it deals with the use of unacknowledged sources that deprives somebody of his or her intellectual property. In his counter-attack Outis accuses Poe, among other things, of having 9

John Ward Ostrom, ed. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Gordian Press, 1966), I: 246–47. See also his next letter to Lowell written on May 28, 1844, I: 253–54.

10 On the relationship between Poe and Tennyson, see Gerhard Joseph, Tennyson and the Text: The Weaver’s Shuttle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 26–46. The charge of plagiarism is addressed on pp. 28, 35–36.

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freely borrowed from other poets in the composition of “The Raven.” Comparing “The Raven” first to the albatross as the most famous bird hovering over the history of English literature – “a palpable imitation of the manner of Coleridge” (ER, 713) – he turns to an anonymous poem entitled “The Bird of the Dream.” In this poem, “The author was awaked from sleep by the song of a beautiful bird, sitting on the sill of his window – the sweet notes had mingled with his dreams, and brought to his remembrance, the sweeter voice of his lost ‘CLARE’” (ER, 713–14). Having cited three stanzas (“And thou wert in my dream – a spirit thou didst seem –/ The spirit of a friend long since departed” etc.) Outis lists what he calls the “identities” between the two poems: First, in each case the poet is a broken-hearted lover. Second, that lover longs for for some hereafter communion with the departed. Third, there is a bird. Fourth, the bird is at the poet’s window. Fifth, the bird being at the poet’s window, makes a noise. Sixth, making a noise, attracts the attention of the poet; who, Seventh, was half asleep, dosing, dreaming. Eighth, the poet invites the bird to come in. Ninth, a confabulation ensues. Tenth, the bird is supposed to be a visitor from the land of spirits; Eleventh, an allusion is made to the departed. Twelfth, intimation is given that the bird knew something of the departed. Thirteenth, that he knew her worth and loveliness. Fourteenth, the bird seems willing to linger with the poet. Fifteenth, there is a repetition, in the second and fourth lines, of a part, and that the emphatic part, of the first and third. (ER, 714–15)

In the long history of source hunting this account might well take a place of honor as one of the most ludicrous satires on plagiarism. Stereotypes such as “the poet is a broken-hearted lover” and “[he] was half asleep, dosing, dreaming” belong to the staple of literature and would be absolutely worthless as evidence before any literary tribunal. But this is of course Outis’s point. “Now I shall not charge Mr. Poe with Plagiarism – for, as I have said, such charges are perfectly absurd” (ER, 714), he comments on the “identities,” which did not deter Poe from painstakingly refuting every single point in his reply.11 11 The refutation is printed in ER, 730–36.

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Plagiarism and the accusation of plagiarism border on absurdity. While Outis’s remark should make us cautious with regard to the facile assumption that Poe’s raven is lifted from Barnaby Rudge to lead a second life in his poem, we should also bear in mind that absurdity is the vantage point from which Poe’s writing commences and toward which it moves. “The Philosophy of Composition” was written, Poe once claimed, “to see how near to the absurd I could come without overstepping the dividing line.”12 Plagiarism plays a pivotal role in “The Raven” after all. To claim this is not to argue that the verbal parallelism between Grip’s “I’m a devil” and the narrator’s “bird of devil” would constitute a positive proof of theft. Ravens have traditionally been emblems of both wisdom and ill omen, and the parallel between the two poems as such amounts to little more than Outis’s “there is a bird.” But their relationship is nevertheless of importance because it presents Poe’s poem as a text about plagiarism. In order to understand the amazing ferocity and seriousness with which Poe hunted down plagiaries in his journalistic work we must address the seemingly contradictory and no less amazing tendency of his writing to usurp or incorporate without acknowledgment texts, images, props and properties that seem to belong to other authors or sources. To Poe authorship and originality are some form of outsourcing. The question of plagiarism in “The Raven” centers on the problem that the raven never speaks in its original voice. As we have pointed out, it only imitates speech and thus simply repeats what it learnt by rote. Its human voice is not only a language foreign to it but also a production of sounds that in their repetitiveness are displaced from the source and context that originally elicited them. Whatever the poem’s narrator says, the bird invariably gives the same reply: “Nevermore.” It only repeats that it can only repeat. Imitation, repetition, foreignness, displacement: “The Raven” unfolds and brings into play the central features of both citation and plagiarism. Since the raven’s 12 Cited in Joel Porte, In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 77.

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imitation of a voice no longer refers to its original context and thus cites an unacknowledged source, the bird can be said to commit, strictly speaking, an act of plagiarism. Yet, the citation that no longer refers to its original source – the word “nevermore” – articulates precisely what plagiarism is all about. In this sense one might say that the raven cites plagiarism. Poe’s citation of plagiarism also involves his figure of the narrator, who incorporates the “Nevermore” to say something bird does not or cannot really mean to say. While the raven seems to reply to the narrator’s questions, those questions are actually phrased in such a way that the mechanically repeated word of the bird produces a meaning intended by the narrator. This manipulation by which he employs a text that does not properly belong to him and is in turn spellbound by its mysterious power describes pretty accurately the operation of a plagiary using another author’s words to make them speak on his behalf. In the polemics about literary theft the focus of indignation and incrimination is usually directed at the improper appropriation of someone else’s thought or text. While there is no question that any attempt to rob someone else’s intellectual property deserves public censure, we should not forget that a passage, image, or thought pilfered from an unacknowledged source can never be really absorbed or appropriated. A plagiarized text always remains an alien body and a foreign voice, regardless of whether it is detected or not, and it may well be this unalienable foreignness that accounts for the strange fascination and attraction other authors’ texts hold for the compulsive plagiary. This is what Poe’s poem unfolds in its dramatization of citation and plagiarism acted out jointly by the narrator and the raven. In the key passage about dénouement cited earlier Poe argues that all incidents of the plot as well as the general tone of a text must “tend to the development of the intention,” which constitutes the ultimate effect from which the narrative is then (re)constructed in some form of backward composition. If we can read the raven’s “Nevermore” as an articulation of the problem of citation and plagiarism, if it is purloined or borrowed as the intended meaning toward which the narrator’s text tends, we can argue that citation and 263

plagiarism constitute that final effect from which the poem takes its origin.

II. Madman in the Library Plagiarism is an effect toward which all poetry and fiction tend: The famous and mysterious letter signed by Outis/Nobody corroborates this view. It lies at the centre of the intense debate that has become known as the Longfellow war, in the course of which Poe repeatedly repeated his outrageous accusation of the Cambridge poet-professor as “the GREAT MOGUL of the Imitators” (ER, 761). Since the letter triggered a series of four rejoinders from Poe that protracted and further heated up the controversy, there has been a great deal of speculation about the identity of Outis. While Cornelius Conway Felton, a loyal member of Longfellow’s Cambridge circle, was long held to be the most likely candidate, it has more recently been suggested that Outis was Lawrence Labree, editor of the Rover, which entered the battle to give succor to the Harvard professor’s militia.13 But early on some readers and critics suspected that Poe himself wrote the letter by Outis to promote his name as an author and journalist and to increase the circulation of the Broadway Journal, in which the five weekly installments on plagiarism were published between March 8

13 The “little Longfellow war” is fully documented and put in perspective by Sidney P. Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963), 132–89. Kent Ljungquist and Buford Jones, “The Identity of ‘Outis’: A Further Chapter in the Poe–Longfellow War,” American Literature 60 (1988): 402–15, who promote Labree as the author of the Outis letter. See also David Ketterer, The Rationale of Deception in Poe (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 55–67.

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and April 5, 1845.14 If Poe had indeed sent a letter to himself – effecting a circulation similar to that we observed in “The Purloined Letter” – the document reversing the direction of the argument by accusing him of plagiarism would itself be some kind of reverse plagiarism. The letter would itself be without authenticity or authority, and this would also apply to “The Bird of the Dream,” the poem Outis compares with “The Raven” and whose existence is called into question by Poe: “Whether the poem in question is or is not in existence (and we have only Nobody’s word that it is) the passages as quoted, are not in existence, except as quoted by Outis, who in some particulars, I maintain, has falsified the text, for the purpose of forcing a similarity” (ER, 731–32). Poe’s caution is certainly justified, but his remark pertains also to the structure of his own poem where, as we have seen, the citation of “Nevermore” and the question about its existence as an authentic, falsified, or plagiarized text play exactly in the same register. If Outis has falsified his source to force a similarity that does not exist, a perfect similarity does exist. In demolishing the basis on which Outis’s claim rests, Poe actually reconstructs the basis for a comparison that shows the two texts as identical in their rhetorical structure. Interestingly, it does not make any difference if Poe’s “real” indignation at a “supposed” fake is itself faked or real. Even if Outis and the poem exist “as quoted,” the letter and the replies are some kind of hoax like “The Philosophy of Composition.” Mabbott rightly points out a “kinship” between Outis’s letter and Poe’s two satires on the politics of journalism entitled “A Reviewer Reviewed” and “How to Write a Blackwood Article.”15 They are both written under a mock pseudonym. In Poe’s work pseudonym, 14 See Mabbot’s comments in Collected Works, I: 372n, 557n and Burton Pollin, “Poe as the Author of the ‘Outis’ Letter and ‘The Bird of Dream’,” Poe Studies 20 (1987): 10–15. 15 See Collected Works, III: 1378n. “A Reviewer Reviewed” is attributed to one Walter G. Bowen, the author persona writing “How to Write a Blackwood Article” calls herself Signora Psyche Zenobia: “I presume every body has heard of me. My name is the Signora Psyche Zenobia. This I know to be a fact” (PT, 278).

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anonymity, and the author’s real name are as hard to distinguish as an authentic text from plagiarism. Even if there is no decisive evidence to prove Poe’s authorship of the Outis letter, the suspicion that he actually wrote it may have some foundation on historical grounds. On February 21 Poe had become coeditor of the journal and entered into a contract that gave him one third of the profit. “I have taken a 3d interest in the ‘Broadway Journal’ & will be glad if you could send me anything, at any time, in the way of ‘Literary Intelligence’,“16 he writes to Griswold two days after signing the contract. What Poe as an experienced journalist and editor is looking for is either intelligent contributions or, preferably, some scandal or gossip dug up by the vast intelligence network in the literary community. It is very well possible that Poe, when nothing quick materialized, remembered the plagiarism charge he had levelled at Longfellow five years earlier in his attempt to secure an editorship with Burton’s Gentleman Magazine. Picking a fight with Longfellow was a successful strategy then and could be helpful again, perhaps. What we know for certain is that Charles F. Briggs, editor-in-charge at the Broadway Journal, considered Poe an asset and also supported his first project, the Outis papers, with a look toward the subscription list.17 At any rate, the following passage from Poe’s letter to J. Hunt, the editor of an Ithaca journal that had criticized Poe after the first installment of the Outis papers, gives the impression that the combination of attack and self-defence follow a carefully planned marketing strategy: There will be four chapters in all. My excuse for treating it at length is that it demanded an answer & no proper answer could be given in less compass – that 16 Ostrom, ed. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, I: 280. Griswold was one of three colleagues to lend Poe $50 when he bought out the former proprietor to take control over the journal in October 1845. Only three months later Poe had to stop publication due to ill health and severe financial difficulties. 17 See Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles, 169–70. Some critics have in fact suggested Briggs as the true author of the Outis letter. Poe later fell out with Briggs and ridiculed him in his series on the “Literati of New York City.” See ER, 1131–34.

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the subject of imitation, plagiarism, &c is one in which the public has lately taken much interest & is admirably adapted to the character of a literary journal – and that I have some important developments to make, which the commonest principles of self-defence demand imperatively at my hands. [...] If ever man had to cause to be in good humor with Outis and all the world, it is precisely myself, at this moment – as hereafter you shall see.18

Poe’s personal involvement, his obligation to exonerate himself from the counter-charges brought against him by Outis, comes only third on the list of why the series is going to be written. This and the apparent complacency expressed in the second paragraph of the passage cited do not quite tell the story of embarrassment and humiliation that some critics have made out of the affair. Even if we cannot ascertain that Poe has written the Outis letter to himself in order to refute it, to promote his poetic principles, and on that occasion also advertise “The Raven” and some other of his poems, we can confidently confirm that the structure of his strategy lives up to his maxim that ultimate effects come first and that whatever leads up to that effect will then follow. The Outis papers were introduced, as it were, by a reprinting of “The Raven” in the Broadway Journal on February 8, 1845. Not surprisingly the sequence that generates “The Raven” is similar to the moves that array Poe’s artillery in the Longfellow War: Poetry means beauty; the most beautiful subject in the world is the death of a woman; “Nevermore” croaked by a raven is best fitted to combine the sense of beauty and death; a narrator must be put in place to articulate the proper questions tending toward the refrain and its effect – a beautiful poem is finally achieved. This gets translated into: The public wants scandal; plagiarism is the most scandalous subject in the republic of letters; a dignified poet-professor from the Northern states is an ideal target; Outis or Nobody is best fitted as a pseudonym in a story of obliterating the name and authority of wronged owners of text; some parallels have to be constructed that make the desired point – the scandal is perfect. The Outis papers play in the system developed one year later in “The Philosophy of Composition.” 18 Ostrom, ed. The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, I: 283.

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One particular feature that connects the Longfellow War with “The Raven” and “The Philosophy of Composition” is the principle of intention. In his first review to bring up the charge of Longfellow’s plagiarism Poe is still somewhat vague about the nature of literary theft. Citing Longfellow’s “Midnight Mass for the Dying Year” and Tennyson’s “The Death of the Old Year,” he writes: We have no idea of commenting, at any length, upon this plagiarism; which is too palpable to be mistaken; and which belongs to the most barbarous class of literary robbery; that class in which, while the words of the wronged author are avoided, his most intangible, and therefore his least defensible and least reclaimable property, is purloined. (ER, 678)

Since Poe is not prepared to spell out – “at any length” – what this “least reclaimable property” is, the essay stops short with a general remark about Longfellow’s theft of the “singularly wild and fantastic manner” (ER, 678) in which Tennyson’s poem is carried out. Except for the traditional idea of representing the four seasons as the four ages of man there is little that would justify the accusation. In parentheses Poe points out the few “lapses” that seem to give away Longfellow: “(such for instance as the use of the capitalized “Old Year,” the general peculiarity of the rhythm, and the absence of rhyme at the end of each stanza).”19 Five years later, in the Outis papers, rhythm and rhyme are identified as the authentic signature of a poet, his “least reclaimable property.” In the refutation of Outis much is made out of this, and one might indeed say that Poe seeks to beat his opponent on the ground of what he says at the end of his letter: “From my earliest readings of reviews and critical notices,” Nobody writes, “I have been disgusted with this wholesale mangling of victims without rhyme or reason” (ER, 715). It is precisely the rhyme of reason and rhythm that guides Poe’s poetry and literary theory, including his criticism of plagiarism. It is ironic that he may be said to

19 ER, 678. The passage is repeated verbatim at ER, 749.

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plagiarize this approach from Coleridge, who also organizes his discussion of plagiarism around metre and related questions.20 As the Outis papers show, Poe does not restrict his accusation to formal elements alone. This is what makes his attitude toward plagiarism so utterly amazing and this is where the problem of intention comes in. Throughout his series of replies to Outis he keeps listing verbal echoes and vaguely similar images between texts in a manner that transforms Outis’s satirical enumeration of parallels between “The Raven” and “The Bird of the Dream” into a deadly serious method of detecting plagiarism. In Poe’s view plagiarism seems to be based on deliberate choice or intent. As Moss rightly says, Poe was “unable, for most of his career, to explain imitation in any other terms than intention.”21 This becomes clear most acutely in those instances where his own poetry is involved. Longfellow steals, for example, from Poe’s “Scene from Politian,” “The Sleeper,” and “The Haunted Palace.”22 In one troubling instance Longfellow seems to plagiarize Poe by lifting text from a poem that is not even written by Poe. The text in question is Longfellow’s “The Good George Campbell,” a ballad “purporting to be a translation from the German of O. L. B. Wolff” (ER, 749). Poe prints Longfellow’s translation side by side with “The Bonnie George Campell” cited from a collection of ballads by William Motherwell, “a poem partly compiled and partly written by Motherwell himself,” as Poe states. What we find printed “side by side” in Poe’s article are two texts whose relationship is already exceedingly complex. In the right column Poe prints Longfellow’s English translation of a German original imitating an ancient Scotch ballad. Longfellow’s “translation” is based on an original that 20 This point is made by Jonathan Bate, “Edgar Allan Poe: A Debt Repaid,” in Richard Gravil and Molly Lefebure, eds. The Coleridge Connection (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1990), 259. Bate refers to the controversy over the relationship between Coleridge’s “Christabel” and Scott’s “The Lay of the Last Minstrel.” 21 Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles, 145. 22 See ER, 751–55; 767–68.

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is itself an imitation in a foreign language. But only allegedly so, for Poe accuses Longfellow of not having translated Wolff’s German but, instead, having directly transferred Motherwell’s Scottish text into modern English. If this is not complicated enough, we might remind ourselves that Motherwell’s original is, as Poe points out, “partly compiled and partly written by Motherwell himself.” Which is to say that the original which Longfellow plagiarizes – although he claims to be translating from an original that is itself an imitated translation – is itself only partly an original, some parts coming from other unspecified sources of minstrel songs. But this not yet the end of it. Those parts “written by Motherwell himself” are written in the same archaic English as the parts one might call original, if one can indeed call a compilation an original. Thus the text “plagiarized” by Longfellow is itself, at least in part, spoken in a false voice, in a manner not altogether different from the text by Wolff that mimes a Scottish ballad in the German language. It is hardly possible to keep apart original from translation, citation from plagiarism, authentic voices from foreign language. This does not prevent Poe from levelling his charge at Longfellow: In the first place how happens it that, in the transmission from the Scotch into the German, and again from the German into the English, not only the versification should have been preserved, but the rhymes, and alliterations? [...] I have now before me a large volume of songs, ballads, etc. collected by Wolff; but there is no such poem – and, to be sure, it should not be sought in such a collection. No collection of his own poems has been published, and the piece of which we are in search must be fugitive – unless, indeed, it is included in a volume of translations from various tongues, of which O. L. B. Wolff is also the author – but of which I am unable to obtain a copy. (ER, 750)

The attack moves on two fronts. First, Poe finds it mysterious that the prosody as the hallmark of authenticity should remain intact in Longfellow’s translation. Secondly Poe revels in the discovery that Wolff’s German imitation of a Scottish ballad is not to be found in a collection of his original poems, adding that it may perhaps be found in a volume of his translations. Longfellow integrity depends on the 270

question of the existence of the poem by Wolff, for if it could not be found among his works this would prove that Longfellow indeed went directly to Motherwell as the source of his translation. What we have been unfolding laboriously here is of some interest for two reasons. As in the case of the question about the true existence or falsification of “The Bird of the Dream” cited by Outis, it does not really matter whether the poem does or does not exist, either as an original work or as a translation. The impossibility of tracing it in the library dramatizes the far more complicated and bewildering question of sources outlined above. Even if Wolff’s poem can be located, the question of the original source is not really solved. But finding it is all important to clear Longfellow of the accusation of insincerity and plagiarism. The danger of Poe’s accusations lies precisely in the confusion of those two issues. What his obsession with plagiarism discovers or uncovers is the impossibility of disentangling the multiple sources, of distinguishing between original and copy. We have encountered the same problem in our reading of his detective stories as original translations. What makes plagiarism a far more sensitive issue is that the difficulty of attributing texts to their proper source is bound up with an ad hominem attack. To Poe, we argued with Moss, plagiarism is a question of personal intent. This is definitely true in this case, and Poe’s attempt to implicate Longfellow raises troubling questions about his own personal integrity. For Poe’s accusation is itself some kind of flagrant plagiarism. The suspicion that Longfellow sold an adaptation of Motherwell’s ballad as a literary translation was not raised by Poe but by the Western Literary Messenger in Buffalo, which published an article about Longfellow’s translation on January 25, 1845. Among the journals that picked up this lead was also the Broadway Journal, which readily joined the chorus of journalists incriminating Longfellow. As ludicrous as the whole affair may seem, centering on what seems an absurdly academic question of no interest whatsoever, it created quite an uproar because it suddenly seemed to corroborate the accusations brought forth by Poe in 1840 and 1842. While Poe’s repetition of the charge would in itself not be damaging to his character, it is mysterious that 271

he repeated the accusation although Longfellow had explained the situation in a letter sent out to at least one magazine by February 19, more than one month before Poe published his piece. And there are indications that he knew about this. Apparently Longfellow had used a source in which Wolff’s text was identified as an imitation in German rather than a translation, and thanks to a printer’s error that led to a corresponding mistranslation the Cambridge poet could finally exonerate himself.23 One reason why Poe did not let Longfellow slip away might be that, incidentally, the translation contained a refrain to which he felt a certain attachment. What in Motherwell’s Scottish reads “Toom hame cam the saddle,/ But never cam he” appears in Longfellow’s text as “Home came the saddle,/ But he nevermore” (ER, 750). In the context of Poe’s refutation of Outis’s accusation about “The Raven” there may be an indirect and uncontrolled attempt to make Longfellow appear to be also borrowing from his poem. As Joel Porte comments on the passage, “Since Longfellow’s poem was published in 1843 and Poe’s ‘Raven’ in 1845, we must surely be expected to stare in amazement at a presumed demonstration of Longfellow’s plagiarism that in fact implicitly shows Poe to have been more seriously in debt.”24 Whether Poe actually makes this presumption in his essay is difficult to determine. But it brings us back to the problem of sources that cannot be clearly attributed to one specific author or voice, and to the question of intention that structures Poe’s concept of plagiarism. On the one hand intention acts, as we have seen, as a subjectivist force that presents plagiarism as an individual choice. On the other hand intention is part of all elements that contribute to a text, including not only the author and narrator but also narrative and formal elements of the plot as well as notions of foreignness and originality that, taken in 23 The incident is painstakingly documented in Poe’s Literary Battles, 161–63, 173–75. The way in which Moss credits every single librarian in Germany and the U.S. for assistance in his research on the matter gives an impression of the sensitivity of the issue. 24 Porte, In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing, 90.

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their entirety, constitute language. While the notion of personal intention accounts for the ad hominem orientation of Poe’s crusade against plagiarism, the intention we might call the intention of language transgresses all boundaries of personal ownership and destabilizes the distinction between originality and imitation. In the last installment of the Outis papers Poe articulates a concept of plagiarism that seems incompatible with the opinion he had so firmly asserted in the preceding parts: The poetic sentiment [...] implies a peculiarly, perhaps an abnormally keen appreciation of the beautiful, with a longing for its assimilation, or absorption, into the poetic identity. What the poet intensely admires, becomes thus, in very fact, although only partially, a portion of his own intellect. [...] The poet is thus possessed by another’s thought, and cannot be said to take of it, possession. But he thoroughly feels it as his own – and this feeling is counteracted only by the sensible presence of its true, palpable origin [...] which, in the long lapse of years it is almost impossible not to forget – for in the mean time the thought itself is forgotten. But the frailest association will regenerate it – it springs up with all the vigor of a new birth [...] and when the poet has written it and printed it, and on its account is charged with plagiarism, there will be no one in the world more entirely astounded than himself. (ER, 759)

Some critics have read this passage as a retraction at the end of a heated debate, as an attempt on Poe’s part to appease the literati annoyed at the impertinence with which the editor of the Broadway Journal approaches the question of literary authority. Moss comes to a more sympathetic conclusion: “Poe’s sudden reversal of position [...] suggests that he had finally found an explanation for imitation other than one of intention.”25 This may be right with regard to what we have called personal intention. However, what the passage cited suggests is not an explanation of plagiarism that would be based on something other than intention but, rather, another concept of intention altogether. Poe argues that the author can never appropriate a thought that does not belong to him. Instead, every writer is exposed to the influence of others whose thoughts invade or possess him. In 25 Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles, 179.

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this sense one can argue, with Poe, that the texts of other authors intend the plagiary. Poe’s radical formulation makes it difficult to see how one could ever avoid stealing someone else’s thought or intellectual property. Every author is bound to come out as a plagiary at some point. It is important to note that Poe’s argument goes far beyond the traditional nihil novi sub sole that in one form or other has always accompanied discussions of imitation and originality. Poe’s author-as-plagiary is possessed in the strongest sense of the word. Thinking and writing become an obsession, and it seems impossible that the author can save his or her integrity in the moral, physical, or psychological sense. Writing borders on plagiarism as a form of madness. Poe’s theory of plagiarism finds its fullest expression in his late work entitled Eureka: A Prose Poem.26 It translates his aesthetic idea that all elements of a narrative plot tend toward an ultimate effect into a metaphysics of the world’s creation based on an atomistic model of both the physical and intellectual universe: Had we discovered, simply, that each atom tends to some one point, [...] what is it that we are actually called to comprehend? That each atom attracts – sympathizes with the most delicate movements of every other atom, and with each and with all at the same time, and forever, and according to a determinate law of which the complexity, even considered by itself solely, is utterly beyond the grasp of the imagination. (PT, 1286; emphasis added)

What may be compelling to the imagination is also what stretches it to the point of snapping under an over-excitement of the nerves. The reasoning of Eureka opens a window on a delirious world in which Poe’s protagonists take their residence. In “The Power of Words” – one of three dialogues that prepare the argument of Poe’s meta-

26 Maryse Ducreu-Petit, E. A. Poe. Le livre des bords (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1995) is an excellent discussion of Poe’s work in the light of Eureka. See in particular “Le plagiaire de Dieu,” 236–49.

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physical poem27 – a pair of angels enter the scene to spell out the consequences of what in Eureka is described as the power of sympathy among atoms: Agathos. – [...] You are well aware that, as no thought can perish, so no act is without infinite result. We moved our hands, for example, when we were dwellers on the earth, and, in so doing, we gave vibration to the atmosphere which engirdled it. This vibration was indefinitely extended, till it gave impulse to every particle of the earth’s air, which thenceforward, and for ever, was actuated by the one movement of the hand. This fact the mathematicians of our globe well knew. [...] Retrograding they found no difficulty, from a given effect, under given conditions, in determining the value of the original impulse. (PT, 823–24)

The notion that “no thought can perish” is closely linked to the idea expressed in the last installment of the Outis paper that an author may forget what he read because “the thought itself is forgotten,” but that “the frailest association will regenerate it.” What Poe’s utopian narrative adds is the notion that in both time and space every single act affects all other acts to the very end of time. Everything is connected with everything, everything vibrates in a continuum of space and time, and, as Agathos explains, this motion is “the great medium of creation” (PT, 825). This applies in particular to language as the agent of this thought and to words as their expression. This is the conclusion – or ultimate effect – of “The Power of Words“: “While I thus spoke, did there not cross your mind some thought of the physical power of words? Is not every word an impulse on the air?” (PT, 825). The power of words consists in the power to create. But the passage also indicates that all words are connected synchronically and diachronically, which is to say that every word affects or invades all other words while it is itself “possessed” by those words. This is Poe’s rationale of plagiarism. An author may trace the origin of his or her 27 For a reading of Eureka in the context of those dialogues, see David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 377–414.

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words back to their original source by that mathematical method Poe calls retrograding – and “The Philosophy of Composition” indeed claims that “The Raven” has the “rigid consequence of a mathematical problem” (ER, 15). But since all words are interrelated, they all participate in the same source – or the author is bound to lose track in the cacophony of multiple voices. Therefore it is ultimately impossible to distinguish the property of one author from that of another author. In this sense only God is an original author because he has, as Agathos points out, the “power of retrogradation in its absolute fulness and perfection – this faculty of referring at all epochs, all effects to all causes” (PT, 824–25). Lucifer, one might conjecture, was the first to imitate and copy him, the first to cite God without acknowledging his source. Lucifer was the first plagiary. There is no mention of the devil in “The Power of Words,” but there is the “bird of devil” in Poe’s major poem. The raven cites what the devil has to say about originality and what later supplied the material and thought on which the Outis papers build: “Nevermore” by “Nobody.” The most lurid among Poe’s tales read like an application of the theory of attraction provided in Eureka. In one of them – “The Imp of the Perverse” – the devil actually enters the scene. Poe’s imp is an invader, something or somebody that takes possession of thoughts and makes thinkers possessed with the madness of an incurable obsession. Once it befalls the mind, melancholy and immobility or nervous breakdown and uncontrollable aggression seem unavoidable. What Poe calls “perverseness” is closely connected with the sense of reversal, backward composition, and mathematical retrogradation that we have been dealing with in this chapter. “In the sense I intend,” his narrator writes, “it is, in fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt. Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not” (PT, 827). To act on the impulse of the imp means to act without actually wanting to, and perverseness turns out to be a self-defeating force that at once builds up that resistance to action and overcomes its obstacle. The 276

narrative proper tells the story of a perfect murder the narrator commits to enter on the estate of his victim. Yet, he then confesses the crime although the deed had not been detected and the murderer seemed absolutely safe. “‘I am safe – I am safe – yes – if I be not fool enough to make open confession!’,” the narrator says or rather thinks at one point and then can never again get rid of this perverse thought. Murder will out: Could I have torn out my tongue, I would have done it, but a rough voice resounded in my ears – a rougher grasp seized me by the shoulder. I turned – I gasped for breath. For a moment, I experienced all the pangs of suffocation; I became blind, and deaf, and giddy; and then, some invisible fiend, I thought, struck me with his broad palm upon the back. The long imprisoned secret burst forth from my soul. (PT, 831)

In a comment on the story Stanley Cavell argues that the narrator develops a new kind of radical philosphy, “claiming to have discovered an original motion of the mind hitherto overlooked by philosophy and religion, one that is itself unmoved, hence an unmoved mover in ourselves, which would, I guess, accordingly not only prove our existence but prove our immortality.”28 If the epithet of “unmoved mover” points to the godhead, the narrator commits a divine act according to a traditional conception of the poet philosopher writing under the influence of the heavens. However, as we have indicated, in Poe’s fiction heaven is counterfeited by God’s impostors that turn it into the hell imprisoning his protagonists. Quite significantly, the symptoms of the narrator’s madness affect the organs of speech: he hears a strange voice, is out of breath and near suffocation, becomes blind and deaf, would like to tear out his tongue. Cavell has shown that the invasion of Poe’s imp befalls language itself. It is a cipher for reason as imperator as well as for the sense of imperfection that provokes scepticism in the reign of supreme reason: 28 Stanley Cavell, “In Quest of the Ordinary: Texts of Recovery,” in Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer, eds. Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 219.

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“What is perverse about the prefix ‘im–’ is that [...] it has opposite meanings. It is sometimes a negation or privative, as in immediate, immaculate, imperfect, imprecise, improper, implacable, impious, impecunious; and sometimes an affirmative or intensive, as in imprison, impinge, imbue, implant, impulse, implicate” (220). The aim of this section of our chapter will be to show how the tension between the privative and the intensive works in plagiarism, the instance of perverseness Cavell cites as the “implant.” Most of Poe’s tales of horror and the macabre engage in the practice of plagiarism. “The Imp of the Perverse” is no exception. As Mabbott has pointed out, Poe made good use of Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s novel Ellen Middleton, whose protagonist feels responsible for the death of her cousin and out of sadness and remorse incriminates herself. “The organ of destructiveness must be strong in you,” one of her friends remarks when, in a “spirit of reckless defiance,” she presents herself as the guilty murderess.29 “There is much, in the whole manner of this book, which puts me in mind of ‘Caleb Williams’,” Poe writes in a note on the novel published in the Democratic Review in December 1844.30 The manner that most closely ressembles Godwin’s novel is the backward composition the plagiarism constitues. Stealing a central moment in Lady Fullerton’s novel to employ it as the narrative’s chief effect Poe constructs his philosophy around it in a manner comparable to his reading of “The Raven” in “The Philosophy of Composition.” Curiously, the crime of murder narrated in the story largely corresponds with the crime of plagiarism committed in the writing of the tale. Having killed his victim the narrator inherits his estate, and it seems legitimate to read 29 Cited in Collected Works, III: 1218. Here, as in the reading of all of Poe’s fiction, I am indebted to Mabbott for his judicious assessment of Poe’s use of sources. 30 The note is published in Marginalia, ER, 1336. It gives another instance of Poe’s low estimate of women writers: “A remarkable work, and one which I find much difficulty in admitting to be the composition of a woman” (ER, 1335). As we have seen, in his philosophy of composition woman is the dead object of aesthetics.

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this motive as an allegory of how Poe illegally annects the work of another author.31 In a similar way the method of the narrator’s crime assumes some significance: For weeks, for months, I pondered upon the means of the murder. I rejected a thousand schemes because their accomplishment involved a chance of detection. At length, in reading some French Memoirs, I found an account of a nearly fatal illness that occurred to Madame Pilau, through the agency of a candle accidentally poisoned. The idea struck my fancy at once. I knew my victim’s habit of reading in bed. I knew, too, that his apartment was narrow and ill ventilated. But I need not vex you with impertinent details. (PT, 830)

There are never any details too impertinent to Poe’s imp, which lives and feeds on details. In a triple sense the story unfolds a murder by reading. Firstly, the narrator lifts the idea of using a poisoned candle from a book he reads; secondly, the victim seals his death by reading; and thirdly, Poe actually borrowed the incident told in the “French Memoirs” from an article in the New Monthly Magazine published in 1839.32 Not only the plot but also the execution of the murder is linked to the question of plagiarism. Central to both criminal cases is the “chance” of detection. Just as the story hinges on the compulsion to confess the killing, Poe is compelled to confess, as it were, his literary theft by making the narrative reflect obliquely on questions of authorship, ownership, and inheritance – regardless of whether the sources purloined by Poe are actually detected or not. Cavell’s notion that the Imp’s effect is both privative and intensive materializes in Poe’s philosophy and politics of plagiarism. “The Imp of the Perverse” presents the story of plagiarism as a case of murder. This seems plausible enough if we consider that the suppression of an author’s name in the use of an unacknowledged source comes close to annihilating his or her existence. But as we have seen, Poe’s dealings with the question of plagiarism play on two 31 The pre-Lockean conception of intellectual property as an estate has been discussed in detail in chapter 2, “The Genius as Compositor.” 32 See Collected Works, III: 1227, n7.

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levels at once. In “The Imp of the Perverse” and other related narratives the emphasis is not on the crime but on its detection or confession. If murder will out, so does plagiarism. In the polemics about Poe’s wild accusations of other poets’ plagiarisms many critics have drawn attention to the glaring contradiction his own compulsive borrowing seems to constitute. But it is no contradiction at all. His fiction faithfully tells the story of plagiarism presented in the Outis paper. Plagiarism is an obsession that cannot be cured, something that is intended by language in which all participants share the same words. In this context we ought to take one more look at Cavell’s notion that the doctrine articulated in the “Imp” develops a concept that proves immortality. The phantasy of immortality haunts the figures in Poe’s most lurid narratives as a negation of death, as their inability to die. While the vicitim in the “Imp” lives in a “narrow and ill ventilated” room that resembles a grave, other characters in Poe’s tales that are actually placed in a narrow and badly ventilated grave turn out not to be dead. Once they are laid to rest the narrator either disturbs their peace, or some return as revenants and reincarnations hunting him down, or there is an uncanny double, or it turns out they were buried alive. Many of Poe’s characters are already dead although they still live, while others still live a second uncanny life although they are believed to be dead. It is compelling to ask in what way this impossibility or uncertainty of death, which we have already encountered in our reading of “The Raven,” describes the scenario of plagiarism in which a literary thief robs the grave of another author, plucking some passages or lines from a book that does not belong to him but that then leads an uncanny second existence in his own text. It is telling that most of Poe’s narratives that deal with the horror of premature burial or a revenant are constructed around a plagiarized passage that constitutes the center or, if you wish, the bones of the plot. “Berenice” – Poe’s earliest tale about premature burial and vandalizing a grave – seems to take up a much discussed scandal in Baltimore about a gang of grave robbers that procured teeth for

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dentists.33 The plot of “Morella” – the first tale about metempsychosis – reproduces in great detail a story by Henry Glassford Bell entitled “The Dead Daughter,” which Poe seemed to have known.34 “Ligeia” – Poe’s most famous tale about “this hideous drama of revivification” (PT, 276) – is a reworking of a theme in Scott’s Ivanhoe, from which the tale’s figure of Rowena takes her name, and of “A Madman’s Manuscript” in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, to which Poe’s tale is indebted for a number of structural elements and verbal parallels.35 Dickens also has a hand in “A Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe’s horrific narrative about a murder that almost reads as if it had been committed by the brother of the narrator in “The Imp of the Perverse.” We shall have to come back to that narrative later. Here we might add the further evidence of “William Wilson,” his chilling tale about a double. It is based on Washington Irving’s sketch of “An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron,” an article that reconstructs a text by a dead author that was itself based on an idea provided by Shelley, who in turn took his idea from an old Spanish play. Poe had himself drawn attention to this debt that triggered a narrative whose theme of the doppelgänger can or indeed must be read as a mise en abyme of this series of borrowings and those whispers in someone else’s voice.36 “A Tale of the Ragged Mountain” – combining the subject of metempsychosis with the cult of mesmerism that had recently received a lot of public attention – gives a report from beyond the grave on life in death or death in life and is indebted to a host of elements worked out in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntley. As Mabbott comments on the use of this and other sources in the tale: “Whatever its basis, this tale is another demonstration of Poe’s extraordinary ability to put together images and ideas from a number of different recognizable sources to make a 33 See Collected Works, II: 207. 34 See Collected Works, II: 222–24 for excerpts from the story. 35 See Collected Works, II: 306. 36 See Collected Works, II: 422–25. Poe’s letter to Irving, which points out the debt, is cited along with the relevant passages from Irving’s article.

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coherent fabric distinctively his own.”37 While this is certainly a most judicious judgment, the concern in Poe’s fiction is not about what makes those images and ideas “distinctively his own” but rather to what extent they speak in a foreign voice. The chamber in which those foreign and unauthorized voices reverberate is the library as the spot where the crimes of murder and plagiarism are planned and executed. Most of Poe’s protagonists practically live in the library of their house. Egaeus – the narrator in “Berenice” – was born in the “library chamber” of his family: “The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber, and with its volumes – of which latter I will say no more. Here died my mother. Herein I was born” (PT, 225). As in “The Raven” the library is the site of both death and birth. That Egaeus does not want to talk about the books and journals in his library may well indicate that one might find there the sources of his “morbid attention” (PT, 227). At any rate, it is in that chamber – where his “attention [is] riveted to some frivolous design in the margin, or in the typography of a book” (PT, 227) – that he converses with Berenice, proposes to her, is told about her sudden death, and finally learns about his untold and thus unconscious excursion to her grave where he apparently extracted her teeth as if they were some passages excerpted from one of his books. “There came a light tap at the library door, and pale as a tenant of a tomb, a menial entered upon tiptoe” (PT, 232). Egaeus never seems to leave his library in which he lives as if it was his tomb. In “Morella” the narrator holds his most intimate conversations with his love by “poring over forbidden pages” (PT, 234) such as “the doctrines of Identity as urged by Schelling” (PT, 235). When he later carries his dead daughter – the fruit of that forbidden reading – to the family vault, the tomb seems to be empty. But it is hard to tell whether Morella has vanished from her grave or whether, instead, the library has become that grave in a metamorphosis similar to that of their daughter who, continuing her mother’s studies, had become Morella.

37 Mabbott, Collected Works, III: 936.

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While Poe’s fiction is indebted to many unacknowledged sources, there are also a number of fictional sources in his narratives. In “Ligeia” the narrator relates how he traces or retraces his beloved in the material world. Everything, from a vine to a moth to a meteor or a star seen through the telescope, reminds him of Ligeia. But he also finds her frame of mind and the feelings she instilled in the books he reads: Among innumerable other instances, I well remember something in a volume of Joseph Glanville, which [...] never failed to inspire me with the sentiment; – “And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.” (PT, 265; emphasis added)

The citation from Glanville has never been traced and seems to have been made up by Poe.38 It is not surprising that the passage cannot be located. Poe’s fictional source explains the narrator’s belief in a will that transcends the limit between life and death in terms of the theory of intention developed in Eureka. Plagiarism, in Poe, is not only about the unauthorized use of sources but also about the invention of a source that fits his theory. The source plagiarized from Nobody fits his theory of turning effect into origin.

III. Sisyphos, Slave The validity of Poe’s conception of plagiarism is tested by Baudelaire’s project of a poetry of shock that with its program of repetition and contrast transforms traditional modes of literary production and intertextual relationships. Although one would think that literary theft 38 See Collected Works, II: 330–31.

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fits very well into Baudelaire’s world of dandyism, addiction, and prostitution, most twentieth-century critics have reacted rather defensively when confronted with the note inserted at the end of one of his drafts for a preface to Les Fleurs du mal. This is how the sketch ends: Note sur les plagiats.–Thomas Gray, Edgar Poe (2 passages). Longfellow (2 passages). Stace. Virgile (tout le morceau d’Andromaque). Eschyle. Victor 39 Hugo.

Once the passages alluded to had been identified, Baudelaire was quickly exonerated with the customary gesture of confirming a poet’s originality by emphasizing his creative use of sources. In our context Baudelaire’s reference to Poe and Longfellow is of great interest, of course, and we might ask how the question of plagiarism is dealt with at the hands of his most sympathetic translator. To begin with one might note that Baudelaire was himself acutely sensitive to the notion of originality, and the following passage from a letter to his mother seems to support the short shrift his note on plagiarism in Les Fleurs du mal has been given by the critics: “Depuis quelques années je surprenais, ça et là, des imitations et des tendences qui m’alarmaient. Je ne connais rien de plus compromettant que les imitateurs et je n’aime rien tant que d’être seul.”40 The letter refers to the école 39 Charles Baudelaire, Projets de préfaces, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), I: 184. With the exception of the second passage plagiarized from Poe the sources have been found and are pointed out by Pichois at I: 1170. Subsequent references to Baudelaire’s poetry and prose are to Pichois’ edition and will be cited in the text as OC. 40 Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), II: 625: “For several years now, I’ve been noticing here and there imitations and tendencies that alarm me. I know of nothing more compromising than imitators and I like nothing better than being alone.” The translation follows Rosemary Llloyd, ed. and trans. Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire: The Conquest of Solitude (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 251. It has been slightly modified in this instance. Further references to Baudelaire’s letters are to those two editions and will be cited as C and SL respectively.

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Baudelaire that was being formed by Mallarmé and other young writers. It betrays an anxiety on the part of the older poet to retain his singular voice, an anxiety that corresponds to his indignation at contemporary critics that had emphasized his indebtedness to Poe’s aesthetics ever since his translations were published. As he writes in an earlier letter: “J’ai perdu beaucoup de temps à traduire Edgar Poe, et le grand bénéfice que j’en ai tiré, c’est que quelques bonnes langues ont dit que j’avais emprunté à Poe mes poésies, lesquelles étaient faites dix ans avant que je connusse les œuvres de ce dernier.”41 Even if Baudelaire’s chronology is more or less accurate, it cannot secure his claim to priority and certainly cannot stave off the influence of Poe on his writing. Throughout his career Baudelaire had ambivalent feelings about the obsession that took hold of him once he read Poe’s fiction. His work is indissolubly tied to Poe’s name, and it is indeed the question of the name that informs the two letters cited above. The way in which the rejected name of Poe is firmly inscribed within mes poé:sies corresponds with the inscription of Mallarmé’s name in the “m’alarmaient” in the letter to his mother. Barbara Johnson has detected this play on the proper name and deciphered it as an oedipal dynamics in which the école Baudelaire, as the stamp of the father, cannot keep out the name of the disciple: The almost perfect homophony between “m’alarmaient” and “Mallarmé” reveals a play of intertextuality in which the text, while seeming to decry the dangers of imitations, is actually acting out, against the express purposes of its author, the far graver dangers of usurpation. And what is usurped is not only Baudelaire’s claim to authority over the works of his disciples, but also and more significantly

41 Baudelaire, Correspondence, II: 466–67: “I lost a great deal of time in translating Edgar Poe and the great benefit it brought me was to make some kindly souls say I’d borrowed my poems from Poe – poems I’d written 10 years before I knew Poe’s works.” Cp. his letter to Thoré, C, II: 386 (SL, 204). Baudelaire has also been accused of plagiarizing from two articles that were published in the Southern Literary Messenger. See Rosemary Lloyd, Baudelaire’s Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 51–52.

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the claims of his conscious intentions to authority over the workings of his own writings. The suppressed name of Mallarmé shows through.42

Language usurps the author’s intention, speaking up against “his express purposes.” What Johnson points out with regard to Baudelaire is what Poe calls the imp of the perverse. The proper name is brought into play as a mark that does not simply assign authority over a text but rather becomes a signifier that has the power to resign and redistribute the title of ownership. Most importantly, the proper name is not tied to a person outside of the text but rather appears as a signature inscribed within the text by what Johnson calls the workings of writing. How this works might be seen in one of the passages Baudelaire alludes to in his “Note sur les plagiats.” In his sonnet “Le Flambeau vivant” Baudelaire writes about a pair of eyes that guide the poet on his way toward beauty: Ils marchent devant moi, ces Yeux pleins de lumières, Qu’un Ange très savant a sans doute aimantés; Ils marchent, ces divins frères qui sont mes frères, Secouant dans mes yeux leurs feux diamantés. (OC, I: 43, ll. 1–4)

As it turns out, the brother Baudelaire is talking about is Poe, in whose poetry and fiction the eyes have a paramount importance. To him they are not merely a window to the soul according to a traditional image but the very reflector of a subject’s identity. The “eye” is always also the “I.” In the second quatrain of the sonnet Baudelaire faces Poe’s “To Helen” by stealing one of its lines: Me sauvant de tout piège et de tout péché grave, Ils conduisent mes pas dans la route du Beau; Ils sont mes serviteurs et je suis leur esclave; Tout mon être obéit à ce vivant flambeau. (I: 43–44, ll. 5–8; emphasis added)

42 Barbara Johnson, “Les Fleurs du Mal Armé: Some Reflections on Intertextuality,” in A World of Difference (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 118–19.

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Ironically the eyes are said to save the speaking subject from the pitfalls of sin at the very moment the poem performs an act of plagiarism, a péché grave committed against another author’s gravure. “Ils sont mes serviteurs et je suis leur esclave” translates Poe’s “They are my ministers – yet I their slave” (PT, 96, l. 56). Trapped in Baudelaire’s sonnet the line abducted from Poe actually comes to talk about plagiarism in the original sense of the term. In Roman law the plagiarius was a person that illegally enslaves a free citizen or kidnaps, buys, or sells slaves and children without the consent of their proprietor, and the Lex Fabia stipulated that a plagiary is sentenced to a public flogging ad plagas.43 What, then, happens to Poe’s child? If the eyes lead Baudelaire’s sonnet to beauty, one might venture to say that the purloined line actually constitutes the beauty toward which the poem tends. “Tout mon être obéit à ce vivant flambeau.” The flame of the flambeau incorporates the beauty of le Beau and their rhyme frames the plagiarized line in an act of obeisance to the power of what the line says. While Poe’s “They are my ministers – yet I their slave” refers to Helen’s eyes as the object of its enunciation, Baudelaire’s “Ils sont mes serviteurs et je suis leur esclave” refers to the enunciation itself and thus observes the amorous gaze in Poe’s text. Looking at looking, Baudelaire’s plagiarism reflects on plagiarism. Also, and more significantly, the line under scrutiny describes exactly the structure of literary theft. Stealing a text by another author means to employ it in one’s service. Poe’s line does the talking for Baudelaire. At the same 43 Baudelaire may have read Diderot’s article on the plagiaire in the Encyclopédie. See Denis Diderot, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Le club français du livre, 1973), XV: 362–63. Voltaire remarks in his Dictionnaire philosophique that the history of the legal term has nothing to do with literary theft, adding with a touch of irony that the plagiaries in the modern sense of the term do not sell or enslave persons even though they may at times sell themselves for a little money: “Cela n’a rien de commun avec le plagiat des auteurs, lequels ne vendent point d’hommes, soit esclaves, soit libres. Ils se vendent seulement eux-mêmes quelquefois pour un peu d’argent” (319). On the lex Fabia, see Alan Watson, Roman Slave Law (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University, 1987), 60–61, 64.

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time the plagiary is enslaved by the text he steals precisely because he is not the master of the thought and words the purloined text articulates. This accounts for the conflict between total usurpation and spellbound fascination that ultimately marks any act of plagiarism. But in what sense is the plagiarism of Poe’s line connected with the notion of beauty that frames it? In “To Helen” the speaking subject says about the eyes that “They fill my soul with Beauty (which is Hope,)” (PT, 97, l. 61). The beauty of Baudelaire’s poem is that it fulfills this hope by returning the amorous gaze of Poe’s text. It releases “Hope” and its sense of anxiety and expectation from the parentheses into which it is locked in Poe’s poem and places it into the frame of a rhyme that echoes its beauty in “Beau” and “flambeau.” If “Le Flambeau vivant” can be said to fulfill the hope of “To Helen,” we can also argue that Baudelaire’s sonnet enslaves or usurps Poe’ text while repaying its service by giving it the response it cannot produce on its own. By virtue of Baudelaire’s plagiarism the two texts establish a dialogue in which they merge without giving up their different identity. Thus Baudelaire’s text provides a space where the two authors jointly sign their common aesthetic project. Although the letter cited above shows Baudelaire to react nervously to the close association of his name with that of Poe, his remarks on Poe’s “idée de beauté” (II: 328) in “The Philosophy of Composition” maps out a common ground on which his Salon of 1859 will be built.44 The contractual agreement the two authors jointly sign is the idea of beauty, la route du Beau, which elicits the name of “Bau:delaire.” And, one might even argue with a twist of the tongue, “la route du Beau” is “la route de Poe.” In a remarkable essay Philippe Bonnefis has presented Baudelaire’s insistence on the correct spelling of his proper name in the context of his constant financial problems: “Baudelaire s’écrit sans e au commencement” (OC, I: 785).45 Baudelaire is always in debt and he is anxious to avoid the inscription 44 See Pichois’s cross-references in his notes on Baudelaire’s Etudes sur Poe and Lloyd, Baudelaire’s Literary Criticism, 77–80. 45 Philippe Bonnefis, “Beaudelaire,” MLN 98 (1983): 551–78.

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of beauty within his proper name out of some fear that as a poet and art critic he would not be able to pay it back with interest. In the light of this anxiety the determining power poe:try exerts on Poe’s proper name must have appeared to Baudelaire as a most dangerous fate.46 Poe is enslaved by poetry. While Baudelaire’s Etudes sur Poe tell the story of this fate and enslavement, “Le Flambeau vivant” spells out the promise of a hope. Bau/Beau/Poe: Through an act of plagiarism poetic beauty is invoked in the name of Poedelaire. Baudelaire’s dramatization of plagiarism finds its most artistic expression in the sonnet entitled “Le Guignon.” While it contains the passage from Gray and one of the passages from Longfellow pointed out in the draft of his preface, the poem is again closely connected with Poe. His first essay on Poe’s life and work begins with the following sentence: “Il y a des destinées fatales; il existe dans la littérature de chaque pays des hommes qui portent le mot guignon écrit en caractères mystérieux dans les plis sinueux de leurs front.”47 If the title of a text can be said to constitute something like a forehead, one might ask in what way Baudelaire’s text about plagiarism is related to Poe as a figure of the poète maudit. “Le Guignon” was written between September 1851 and January 1852, three years after Baudelaire’s first translation of a tale by Poe and one year before the publication of “Edgar Allan Poe: Sa vie et ses ouvrages.” In his notes to the poem Pichois prints an inscription Baudelaire put above a portrait of Auguste Blanqui in 1850, containing the four lines from Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” and the four lines from Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” (OC, I: 859) that, translated into French, constitute the body of his

46 On the determining power of the proper name, see Karl Abraham, “Über die determinierende Kraft des Namens,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1982), I: 22–23. 47 OC, II: 249: “There are fatal destinies, there exist men in the literature of each country that have the word guignon [bad luck] writ large across the sinuous folds of their forehead.”

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sonnet. This is the text of Baudeliare’s poem. The plagiarized passages are put next to the verses they translate: LE GUIGNON Pour soulever un poids si lourd, Sisyphe, il faudrait ton courage! Bien qu’on ait du coeur à l’ouvrage, L’Art est long et le Temps est court.

Art is long, and time is fleeting,

Loin des sépultures célèbres, Vers un cimetière isolé, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Mon cœur, comme un tambour voilé, Still, like muffled drums are beating 48 Va battant des marches funèbres. Funeral marches to the grave. – Maint joyau dort enseveli Dans les ténèbres et l’oubli, Bien loin des pioches et des sondes;

Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathomed caves of Ocean bear.

Mainte fleur épanche à regret Son parfum doux comme un secret Dans les solitudes profondes.

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, 49 And waste its sweetness on the desert air. (OC, I: 17)

It is of particular interest that “Le Guignon” links Poe and Longfellow. Baudelaire knew about the Little Longfellow War from Griswold’s “Memoir” of Poe,50 and he may even have read the Outis 48 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “A Psalm of Life,” in Katharine Tynan, ed. Longfellow’s Poems (London and New York: Dent and Dutton, 1960), 5. The poem was published in the collection entitled Voices of the Night. The verses cited are lines 13–16. 49 Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” in Roger Lonsdale, ed. The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith (London: Longman, 1969), 127. The verses cited are lines 53–56. 50 See the references to Poe’s campaign in Rufus Wilmor Griswold, “Memoir of the Author,” in The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Redfield, 1858), xxxvi–xxxvii, xlviii–xlix.

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papers in the course of his studies on Poe that in part are based on material published in The Southern Literary Messenger and other American journals.51 If Baudelaire has read Poe’s last attack published in the Aristidean, he will have come across Poe’s accusation that the very lines he steals from “A Psalm of Life” are themselves plagiarized: “A Psalm of Life,” is German throughout, in manner and spirit, and otherwise is chiefly remarkable for its containing one of the most palpable plagiarisms ever perpetrated by an author of equal character. We allude to the well-known lines: “Art is long and time is fleeting And our hearts, tho’ stout and brave, Still like muffled drums are beating Funeral marches to the grave.” Mr. LONGFELLOW has, unfortunately, derived from these very lines, a full half of his poetical reputation. But they are by no means his own – the first line being an evident translation of the well-known Latin sentence – “Ars longa, vita brêvis” – and the remaining part pillaged from an old English writer. Mr. POE first detected this. It appears that in “HEADLEY’s collection of old British Ballads,” there is to be found, “An Exequy on the death of his wife, by HENRY KING, Bishop of Chichester,” and in this Exequy the following verses: “But hark! my pulse, like a soft drum, Beats my approach – tells thee I come – And slow howe’er my marches be I shall at last sit down by thee.”

51 Baudelaire has actually been accused of plagiarizing two articles by John R. Thompson and John M. Daniel for large parts of his first essay on Poe, “Edgar Allan Poe: Sa vie et ses ouvrages.” See W. T. Bandy, “New Light on Baudelaire and Poe,” Yale French Studies 10 (1952): 65–69, and his introduction to Edgar Allan Poe (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1973), an annotated translation of Baudelaire’s essay. See also the notes by Pichois in OC, II: 1200–04.

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Dr. KING is here speaking of soon following his wife to the grave. We have thus, in each poem, the identical ideas of a pulse (or heart) – of its beating like a drum – like a soft (or muffled) drum – of its beating a march; and of its beating a march to the grave: – all this identity of idea expressed in identical phraseology, and all in the compass of four lines. (ER, 765–66)

Poe’s accusations are simply preposterous, and for all its emphasis on “identical ideas” his parallels only demonstrate that everybody has a heart that beats regularly and that one day everybody will die and come to rest in a grave. But as we have seen in our discussion of Poe’s politics of plagiarism, what counts – against all rhetorical evidence to the contrary – is not the repetition or identical copy of the source but rather the perverse drama of how the act of plagiarism contradicts or interrupts what the purloined passage intends to say. The point of Poe’s clamorous accusation of Longfellow’s plagiarism is precisely that the heart beating in Dr. King’s Exequy does not stop beating, that the pulse is not muffled to the point of becoming inaudible, that the text is not carried to a cold grave. What Poe calls the “idea” and “phraseology” of the source survive death and escape the grave about which the source talks – and which it itself constitutes – in order to return as some kind of revenant in Longfellow’s poem. In his book on the double in nineteenth-century fiction John Herdman makes a point that is relevant in our context if we grant that plagiarism enacts the drama of the doppelgänger on a textual level: “There are two obsessive themes which repeatedly elicit images of duality in Poe’s fiction: that of survival after death, and that of the avenging conscience.”52 To tell this story of a survival of death and the avenging conscience is the purpose of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his most successful narrative about murder and confession written along the lines of “The Imp of the Perverse” and “The Black Cat.” If Baudelaire had no knowledge of Poe’s article in the Aristidean, Longfellow’s poem was brought to his attention by the epigraph to “The Tell-Tale 52 John Herdman, The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1990), 89.

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Heart,” which cites the stanza from “A Psalm to Life” that turn up in “Le Guignon.” A cursory glance at Poe’s narrative is revealing not only because it provides the fullest exposition of his principle of perverseness and the despotism of the eye/I, but also because it is organized around a plagiarized source. The insistence on the detection of Poe’s plagiarisms should not be taken as mere source-hunting. The almost endless series in which one text is indebted to another text which itself borrows from yet another source is a principle in Poe’s writing with which we have become familiar and which in the case of “The Tell-Tale Heart” has the effect of making the grave into which the victim is laid difficult to locate. Ultimately this is what the narrative is about. “True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” (PT, 555). Thus begins Poe’s story that Halliburton has rightly called “a kind of hysterical conversation-poem.”53 How could we avoid thinking the narrator is mad if he says that he is not? From the very beginning the hysterical nature of the narrative shuts out the reader or listener addressed by a voice that only seems to speak to itself. There is no conversation, there is no recipient that would correspond to a sender, there is no you because there is no I. But there is an eye, the “Evil Eye” (PT, 555) of the old man that is going to be killed by the narrator. With unsurpassed precision Poe’s tale connects the close atmosphere pervading the victim’s bedroom with the narrow space under the floorings of the bedroom, those two narrow spaces with the little lantern emitting a thin ray of light, that lantern with the open eye of the man lying in the dark. Poe’s theory of a single but total effect toward which all elements of a text must converge is most graphically represented by that thin ray of light falling on the eye: “I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot” (PT, 557). There is method in that instinct, and it works on the spot. “Spot” is an anagram of “stop,” and it is precisely the apparent refusal of that “damned” heart to stop beating that makes the story collapse. 53 Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe, 335.

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In the narrative’s maze of mutual attraction and intratextual relationships it is no longer sure who is in the spot of the victim. Having replaced the boards of the floor that hides the dismembered corpse the narrator rejoices “that no human eye – not even his – could have detected any thing wrong” (PT, 558). Who observes whom, who sees and who is being seen? Slowly – in the presence of police officers, the eyes of the law – the subject of the narration takes the place of the object of his aggression. The question of the eye provokes the question of the “I.” At the heart of the narrative’s questioning of identity lies a heart that keeps beating and we cannot tell for sure whether it is the old man’s heart or the narrator’s. “I felt that I must scream or die! – and now – again! – hark! louder! louder! louder! louder! –” (PT, 559). While this passage seems to refer to the beating of a heart that belongs to the dismembered corpse buried beneath the floor, the spot it occupies within the narrative is indistinguishable from a passage in “The Premature Burial” where the narrator wakes from a trance to find himself in what he thinks is a “nameless grave“: “As this awful conviction forced itself, thus, into the innermost chambers of my soul, I once again struggled to cry aloud. [...] A long, wild, and continuous shriek, or yell, resounded through the realms of the subterrene Night” (PT, 678). Just as the narrator in the latter tale imagines he awakes in a grave while he is in fact lying entranced on a bed, the madman in the former thinks he is sitting on the grave of his victim while perhaps he is the victim buried alive. “I admit the deed! – tear up the planks! – here, here! – it is the beating of his hideous heart!” (PT, 559). Although one might take for granted that the police listen to his shriek of confession, there is no indication whatsoever that the narrator’s words are heard, received, and acted upon. If the story about murder can be said to turn into a story about premature burial, it is not outrageous to speculate that the last words of “The Tell-Tale Heart” are yelled from a position beneath the planks. In his panic to be buried alive the narrator in “The Premature Burial” has a special vault constructed for him that provides air, water, food, and more: “Among other things, I had the family vault so remodelled as to admit of being readily opened from within” (PT, 676). In Poe’s 294

fictional world the passage between life and death is approached from both sides. Tzvetan Todorov has described Poe’s fascination with premature burial as a “negation of negation.”54 Buried alive some of his protagonists no longer live and are not yet quite dead. Roland Barthes has discussed this problem in his structuralist reading of “The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar,” Poe’s tale about mesmerizing a dying patient in order to hear him speak from beyond death. The dead man’s utterance “I am dead” (PT, 840) performs, according to Barthes, a “reversion of the metaphor to literalness.”55 While it is possible to say “I am dead” metaphorically, it is impossible to say this sentence once one is literally dead. Death enters language as a metaphor, and where it becomes literal language stops.56 Negating the mutual exclusion of death and language Poe creates what Barthes calls a “scandal of language.” Poe’s transgression consists in his “invention of an unheard-of category” in semiotics: “The true–false, the yes–no: The death–life is conceived as an indivisible wholeness that cannot be combined and that is not dialectic because it does not imply a third term. It is not a twofold entity, but a singular and new term” (353). To write and speak in this category is to create the language of madness, Barthes adds, and “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a supreme example of such creation. Not only because the narrator goes mad but also with regard to the use the text makes of its sources. Poe’s theory and practice of 54 Tzvetan Todorov, “Les Limites d’Edgar Poe,” in La Notion de littérature (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987), 112. See also Arnold Goldman, “Poe’s Stories of Premature Burial: ‘That Ere Kind of Style’,” in A. Robert Lee, ed. Edgar Allan Poe: The Design of Order (London and Totowa, N.J.: Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1987), 49–65. 55 Roland Barthes, “Analyse textuelle d’un conte d’Edgar Poe,” in L’Aventure sémiologique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1985), 352. 56 The problem of talking about one’s own death is also the subject of an essay by Derrida, Aporias: Dying – Awaiting (One Another At) the “Limits of Truth” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). See also Derrida’s essay about Barthes, “Les Morts de Roland Barthes,” in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 273–304.

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plagiarism belongs to the category of the true–false and the yes–no, and the graves robbed by “The Tell-Tale Heart” also have something to tell about death–life. As Mabbott has pointed out, one of the two principal sources Poe used for his narrative is Dickens’s “A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second,” a text inserted in Master Humphrey’s Clock.57 Poe favourably reviewed Dickens’s book for Graham’s Magazine in May 1841, praising the “Confession” as a “paper of remarkable power, truly original in conception” (ER, 212). Most of what gives that “original conception” its “remarkable power” is plagiarized by Poe. The narrative is told by the murderer on the day before his death-sentence. It relates how the narrator killed a young boy adopted by him after the death of the boy’s mother, which was soon followed by the death of his father, the narrator’s brother. “I soon began to be uneasy when this child was by. I never roused myself from some moody train of thought but I marked him looking at me. [...] I never could look the boy down. [...] Even when he drew back beneath my gaze [...] he would keep his bright eyes upon me still. [...] I never could bear that the child should see me looking at him [...]. Sometimes I would steal upstairs and watch him as he slept“58 Everything is there: The eyes, the dynamics of the boy observing the uncle and the uncle observing the boy, the bedroom scene. The moment of murder is structured as a last exchange of glances in which the subject observing his victim becomes the object of total observation, a reversal on which Poe’s tale will build. “His mother’s ghost was looking from his eyes. [...] There were eyes in everything. 57 Collected Works, III: 791. Untypically, Mabbott betrays some uneasiness about Poe’s use of sources in this case, calling Dickens’s story a “contributory source.” He names, and documents, as principal source a pamphlet about a real murder in Massachussetts (789–90). Longfellow’s poem as the third and politically most pertinent source is not mentioned. He notes that the epigraph citing the fourth stanza from Longfellow’s poem was omitted after the first publication of the tale, “probably as only tangentially related to his tale” (797n). 58 Dickens, Master Humphrey’s Clock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 43; emphasis added.

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The whole great universe of light was there to see the murder done” (44). It is this reversal that brings the narrator down. He is compelled to continuously watch the spot where the corpse is buried – “I sat at the bed-room window all day long, and watched the spot where the dreadful secret lay” (45) – ceaselessly observing the grave in order to make it invisible to the eyes of others. Like the narrator in “The TellTale Heart” he sits down on the grave when two officers come to visit him, at once hiding and pointing to his crime: “I felt I could not bear to be out of sight of the place. [...] I sat down with my chair upon the grave, and being assured that nobody could disturb it now without my knowledge, tried to drink and talk” (46). The only elements Poe does not rob from Dickens’s grave seem to be the fact that the boy was adopted and that it is a pair of blood-hounds that smell the crime, tearing up the grass under which the corpse is buried. But his dramatization of plagiarism is nevertheless a family romance. What he adopts is the text about the boy’s murder, rewriting it and thus executing the crime once again on the body of a victim that has, after all, survived the first attack and has meanwhile grown up to be an old man waiting for death to finally come. Having taken out the eye of the Dickensian boy, Poe transplanted the heart that beats the funeral march to his graves from Longfellow. His text is patched together as if it had been created in Frankenstein’s body shop. “I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the dead man’s heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage” (PT, 557). He knew that sound well because only two years before he had beat the drum of plagiarism in his literary battle with Longfellow. “In the world’s broad field of battle,” Longfellow’s poem continues, “In the bivouac of Life,/ Be not like dumb, driven cattle!/ Be a hero in the strife!” (ll. 17–20). The plagiary’s military strategy cleverly enlists his enemy to march in the line of his own army of words. “Yet the sound increased – and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound – much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton” (PT, 559). The panic that puts these words in italics is not really caused by the fear of detection, as its structural position in the narrative would suggest, but rather – and perversely – by the secret fear that the crime 297

could remain undetected and that the heart will beat forever, that not even murder and dismemberment can stop the beating of the heart, that there is no end to it, no death. If there is no death, if the heart keeps on beating, it can again be transplanted into the engraving of another body of text at another spot. If language – “ideas” and “phraseology” – never dies, there is no original piece of writing that would belong to an author forever and would forever be linked to his name. This is the anxiety, if not the panic, Poe entertained as an author and critic, and only this can sufficiently explain why he would charge Longfellow with plagiarizing a Dr. King for a text from which he himself borrows in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” This is the tale to be told. At the hands of Baudelaire, his most sympathetic reader, it becomes a twice-told tale. Baudelaire transplants the stanza from Longfellow cited as epigraph into “Le Guignon” and translates the rest of the narrative as “Le Coeur révélateur.” As Ducreu-Petit has noted, in translating the passage about the hiding of the corpse – “I then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye – not even his – could have detected any thing wrong” (PT, 558) – Baudelaire uses the word “feuilles” instead of “bords” to emphasize how neatly the planks are put back in place.59 Unwittingly perhaps, his choice of “feuilles” also points to the pages of the books in which Poe’s corpses are buried or from which they are being exhumed. When Baudelaire copied Longfellow’s lines on the page of his manuscript he added the source of “L’art est long et le temps est court” in the margin: “Vita brevis, ars longa. HIPPOCRATIS aphorismorum Sectio prima. I.” (OC, I: 861, n1.). The marginal gloss did not make it into print although it speaks to the central subject of sources.60 Also, and more significantly, it draws attention to the main problem of Sisyphos, to whom the poem is addressed: 59 Ducreu-Petit, E. A. Poe: Le livre des bords, 170. See Edgar Allan Poe, Oeuvres en prose, trans. Charles Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 325: “Puis je replaçai les feuilles si habilement, si adroitement, qu’aucun oeil humain – pas même le sien! – n’aurait pu y découvrir quelque chose de louche.” 60 Pichois’s remark that it was not necessary to cite the source “since already Longfellow had borrowed the maxim from Hippocrates” is typical of the

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Pour soulever un poids si lourd, Sisyphe, il faudrait ton courage! Bien qu’on ait du coeur à l’ouvrage, L’Art est long et le Temps est court.

Art is long, and time is fleeting,

To say that life is short to one who, to the end of time, must repeat his task of rolling a stone up a steep slope but can never reach the summit is deeply ironic. Lest we might misunderstand the irony involved, we ought to remind ourselves that Sisyphos is not called upon as the hero of ars longa, but as a mythological figure that attempted to challenge the god-given law of vita brevis. For he once arrested Hades, the God of the Underworld, and thus suspended death for several days or weeks. According to some mythological narratives even criminals that had been decapitated or otherwise dismembered were inable to die and suffered unspeakable agony.61 The narrative element in Poe’s tale of the heart that does not stop beating assumes a new significance in this context, and so does the relationship between plagiarism and the impossibility of death we have been developing in this chapter. Myth also tells how Sisyphos convicted Autolycus of stealing some of his cattle by the ingenious method of carving his monogram into the hooves of the animals so that he could trace them to Autolycus’s barn by following their imprints on the ground. While this narrative presents Sisyphos as a detective he was also known as an infamous strategic blindness to the questions discussed in the poem. See Jean Prévost, Baudelaire: Essai sur l’inspiration et la création poétiques (1943–44; Paris: Zulma, 1997), 345–47; Paul Delbouille, “L’Unité du Guignon de Baudelaire,” Cahiers d’analyse textuelle 7 (1965): 104–10; Paul Bénichou, “A propos du ‘Guignon’: Note sur le travail poétique chez Baudelaire,” Etudes Baudelairiennes 3 (1973): 234–35. 61 This is what makes Sisyphos a central figure to the philosopher and critic that understands him best and to whom I am indebted in my reading of the problem of death in this chapter: Maurice Blanchot. See “La Littérature et le droit à la mort,” in La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 293–331 and his discussion of Sisyphos around Camus in “Le Mythe de Sisyphe,” in Faux-Pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 65–71; “Le Détour vers la simplicité,” in L’Amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 217–19, 227.

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highwayman robbing and killing countless travellers, and as a notorious rapist. The sources are not clear on the question of whether it was the arrest of Death or his infliction of death that led the Gods to punish him by making him work on his stone. At any rate, Sisyphos is a figure that knows about crime – both in his capacity as a detective and perpetrator – and he also has intimate knowledge of the question of death in which we have been particularly interested in our context. Whatever may have led Baudelaire to writing his poem under the patronage of the ambivalent figure of Sisyphos, the significance of the various accomplishments of his career is neatly summed up in his punishment. He enters the sonnet as a mythic figure of repetition and can thus be relied on as a most sympathetic, encouraging reader of a poem that repeats other texts by plagiarizing them. However, the myth of Sisyphos also shows that, ultimately, repetition is impossible. Whenever Sisyphos starts his ascent to the summit of the slope he starts anew and has forgotten his last failure. No God can be so cruel as to let him remember it and thus lose the courage, the heart to achieve his goal, a courage he is given credit for in Baudelaire’s poem. And even if there was a God that would make his remembering all failures an integral part of the punishment, every attempt would still be different. For Sisyphos would then also have to remember the long series of failed attempts, and in reminding himself of them would add one more. Every time he would be counting a different number, until the end of time. Either way there is no repetition. Only at first sight this might seem a consolation for Sisyphos. Repetition – if it were possible – brings every action to a standstill, would bring it to its end. The impossibility of repetition means a progress without rest. But rest, like repetition, is the very idea denied to Sisyphos. And to the plagiary. To deny the possibility of repetition means to negate the possibility of plagiarism as an identical copy. Most if not all plagiarists will see in this a chance of originality, and a pragmatic approach to originality may indeed describe it as a happy or clever management of differences. In Poe’s obsession with plagiarism, and Baudelaire’s sympathetic reading of it, plagiarism is entertained as a phantasmatic as well as radically strict idea of reaching a point 300

where differences no longer exist. In the background of this phantasm a very traditional view of originality and origin is forming. This view and this origin, however, are already past and part of a tradition that can no longer be recovered, surviving in Poe’s and Baudelaire’s work only as a vestige or a reconstruction of an origin on the basis of a total effect. Death is at the other end of the phantasm about an ultimate point in which all differences converge and thus vanish. However, death – to put it with Barthes – can only be reached in language metaphorically. While Poe, as we have seen, tries to make death enter language like his phantastically mad characters opening their vaults from the inside, Baudelaire’s work elaborates on a concept toward which “Le Guignon” tends and that it reaches in its last line: “les solitudes profondes.” Pour soulever un poids si lourd, Sisyphe, il faudrait ton courage! Bien qu’on ait du coeur à l’ouvrage, L’Art est long et le Temps est court.

Art is long, and time is fleeting,

Loin des sépultures célèbres, Vers un cimetière isolé, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Mon cœur, comme un tambour voilé, Still, like muffled drums are beating Va battant des marches funèbres. Funeral marches to the grave.

Heaving the burden of the past – “un poids si lourd” – the second quatrain lifts the passage from Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life.” Two things strike the reader: The lines translated by Baudelaire most faithfully repeat Longfellow’s words and at the same time put Longfellow’s poem at the greatest possible distance. How can this be explained? The stanza lifted from the source strongly contradicts the general drive of Longfellow’s text. “Life is real! Life is earnest!/ And the grave is not its goal” (ll. 5–6), the young man in “A Psalm of Life” exclaims. As Pichois rightly points out in his note to the sonnet, “Isolating the stanza about the funeral Baudelaire reverses their meaning” (OC, I: 860). It is important to note that this isolation effects a double theft. Baudelaire purloins not only Longfellow’s words but 301

also their meaning. Thus one can no longer confidently claim that what has been stolen is indeed what you can steal. While Baudelaire appropriates words that may belong to Longfellow’s text, they take on – in return – a tone and meaning that is unmistakably a hallmark of Baudelaire’s or, for that matter, Poe’s work. Longfellow’s lines never “owned” that strange fascination for graves and cemeteries. In this sense Baudelaire plagiarizes Longfellow and at the same time cannot plagiarize from him. The only line inserted into Baudelaire’s translation that does not correspond to anything in Longfellow – “Loin des sépultures célèbres” (l. 5) – accurately describes the relationship of the two texts. Although it is one of the two principal sources of “Le Guignon,” Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” is as far away from the graves of Baudelaire and Poe as possible. The line “Loin des sépultures célèbres” also points ahead to the second source of “Le Guignon,” Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which was made famous in France by Chateaubriand and other translators of the poem62 and which makes up the greater part of the two tercets: – Maint joyau dort enseveli Dans les ténèbres et l’oubli, Bien loin des pioches et des sondes;

Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathomed caves of Ocean bear.

Mainte fleur épanche à regret Son parfum doux comme un secret Dans les solitudes profondes.

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Again the reader is struck by the same operation: The lines translated by Baudelaire faithfully repeat Gray’s words, but at the same time put Gray’s poem at the greatest possible distance. The “Elegy” is not only one of the most famous graveyard poems in English literature but also reads like a roll call of would-be celebrities of seventeenth and eigh62 On Baudelaire’s acquaintance with English poetry in general and with Gray in particular, see Peter Michael Wetherill, Charles Baudelaire et la poesie d’Edgar Allan Poe (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1962), 173–91; 180–81.

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teenth-century history whose names are listed on the tombstones. But oddly enough, we do not find the “sépultures célèbres” we would expect in a passage pilfered from Gray’s poem. They turn up in Longfellow’s “Psalm” instead, which is much more interested in life than in death and whose goal is explicitely stated not to be the grave. Curiously, the lines Baudelaire plagiarizes from Longfellow are thus made to purloin the main characteristic of Gray’s poem. The “tambour voilé” is a tambour volé. If one can argue that Longfellow’s poem stealthily steals into Gray’s graveyard, it is equally true to say that the charge of intratextual plagiarism also works in the other direction. Gray’s passage about the caves in the ocean and the flower in the desert is itself famous and characteristic enough, but it also recasts the scene at the end of Longfellow’s poem where the young man presents his vision of “Footprints on the sands of time,” “Footprints that perhaps another,/ Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,/ A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,/ Seeing, shall take heart again.” The brother reading those footprints is Baudelaire. Taking heart he transplants the core idea of “A Psalm of Life” into Gray’s elegy from where it speaks back to Longfellow in a foreign voice. Baudelaire’s plagiarism-as-translation operates on several levels at once. While he appropriates the words that belong to the two texts he purloins, he also gives them something they never had: a sense of “les solitudes profondes.” This solitude appears as a heart that secretly beats in the body of their text, as a flower that blooms unobserved, as a gem that is buried in the soil. Although those images are the property of the two texts, they cannot understand them properly because they are taken out of their original context and in this sense made solitary by the sonnet that patches them together. “Bien loin des pioches et des sondes” repeats the loin de of line 5. Loin de is one of the key terms in Les Fleurs du mal, and it also seems to hark back to the act of theft, to the verb purloin that resisted translation in “La lettre volée.” Having been purloined or, as Lacan translates the AngloFrench word, prolonged, Longfellow’s and Gray’s lines speak in a language foreign to them. On the one hand because they have been translated into French and on the other because they have both been 303

exiled from their proper context. But this is precisely the “solitudes profondes” that Baudelaire’s poem grants to them under the patronage of Sisyphos. “Sisyphos is a solitude deprived of its center,” Blanchot writes, “not because he is alone but because he is without relationship to himself.”63 In granting this solitude “Le Guignon” isolates a space in which, paradoxically, Baudelaire finds his proper home as a poet. “Mainte fleur épanche à regret/ Son parfum doux comme un secret.” These two lines not only sound and smell like Baudelaire’s poetry; they also imprint his signature. The flower in Gray’s desert is one of the Fleurs du mal. It had always been there but only now it has been plucked and transplanted into its proper soil – “les solitudes profondes.”

63 Blanchot, “Réflexions sur l’enfer,” in L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 261. Baudelaire’s “solitudes profondes” are very close to Blanchot’s “solitude essentielle” in L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 9–28.

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Appendix:

“Une Lettre volée” in Magasin Pittoresque 13 (1845) In August 1845 an unsigned translation of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” appeared as “Une Lettre volée” in volume 13 of the Parisian Magasin pittoresque published by Jouvet & Cie., just eleven months after the original had been published in The Gift: A Christmas, New Year, and Birthday Present. The annual for 1845 was issued in September 1844. The text seems to be the first translation or adaptation of a narrative by Poe to appear in France. Baudelaire’s “La Lettre volée” was first published in Le Pays in four installments between 7 and 14 March 1855. Baudelaire discovered Poe in the late 40s; there is no indication that he knew the translation in Magasin pittoresque. The text is listed in the bibliography of POE, 1149 under the inaccurate title “La lettre volée” and in Mabbott’s edition of Poe’s Collected Works, III: 974. Mabbott points out that the translation was reprinted in L’Echo de la Presse on August 25, 1845.

UNE LETTRE VOLÉE.

I. Armand Verdier, qui, sous un nom d’emprunt, a joué un rôle secondaire, mais très singulier, dans le grand drame de la révolution française, était mon compatriote et un de mes plus anciens amis de collège. En 178..,, nous habitions deux étages d’un même hôtel, rue Saint-Honoré. Nous passions quelque-fois les après-dînées ensemble. Dès ce temps je remarquai la finesse de son esprit, la vivacité de son imagination, son aptitude à lire dans la pensée d’autrui; mais je redoutais, pour son avenir, son entraînement naturel aux choses difficiles, et j’ajouterai, puisque les mémoires du temps l’ont dit avant moi, un certain goût de l’intrigue. Parmi mes souvenirs, je

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retrouve un exemple assez curieux de la rare perspicacité dont il a depuis donné tant de preuves. Cette anecdote a été certainement ignorée de ses biographes. Un soir, on nous annonça la visite de M. X..., sécretaire du lieutenant de police. Uni à Verdier par une alliance lointaine, M. X... recherchait volontiers sa société, surtout lorsqu’il avait besoin de conseils. A son salut distrait, à son regard creux, à l’hésitation de ses premières paroles, il nous fut aisé de voir qu’il était engagé par ses fonctions dans quelque labyrinthe. Il en convint, et, sans se faire prier, il nous confla le sujet de sa préoccupation. Il y a six semaines, nous dit-il, le lieutenant de police fut informé officiellement qu’une lettre d’une haute importance avait été dérobée aus palais de Versailles. L’auteur de cette soustraction est connu: aucun doute n’est possible. Par ce coup hardi, il s’est assuré indirectement un ascendant dangereux sur une personne du sang royal qu’il est inutile de nommer: il tient en ses mains, non pas son honneur, mais son repos. Le voleur, remarqua Verdier, sait donc qu’il est soupçonné par la personne ellemême à qui la lettre appartient. Et quel homme en France a osé ?... – Le voleur, reprit le secrétaire, est homme à tout oser. Vous l’avez connu à Dresde: c’est le duc de G... La manière dont il a commis ce vol prouve autant d’adresse que d’audace. La princesse était seule dans son boudoir, absorbée dans la lecture de cette lettre, lorsque plusieurs personnes entrèrent presque inopinément: elle n’eut que le temps de jeter la lettre sur le marbre de la cheminée en la retournant seulement pour ne laisser à découvert que l’adresse. Peu d’instant après, on annonça le duc de G... Ses yeux de lynx eurent bientôt remarqué la lettre, lu l’adresse, reconnu l’écriture, deviné quelque embarras dans la physionomie de la princesse, et pénétré son secret. Avec l’apparence de d’étourderie qui lui sert à masquer ses desseins, il monta peu à peu la conversation à un ton animé, raconta des anecdotes, tira plusieurs papiers, choisit dans le nombre une lettre à peu près semblable à celle qu’il convoitait; en lut un pasage qui avait rapport aux nouvelles du jour, et quand il eut achevé, tout en gesticulant, il jeta négligemment cette lettre sur la cheminée près de l’autre, et continua à parler avec une vivacité bruyante qui obligea la princesse et les personnes présentes à porter plus d’attention au sujet de l’entretien. Enfin les dames qui l’avaient précédé se levèrent pour prendre congé: ce fut alors que, profitant de la distraction causée par les politesses d’ usage, il prit sur la cheminée d’un air calme la lettre adressée à la princesse en laissant la sienne à la place, puis il se retira pour reconduire les dames jusqu’à leur carrosse. La princesse avait vu dans une glace son mouvement, sans soupçonner la ruse; lorsqu’elle découvrit l’échange, il était trop tard. Faire rappeler le duc, lui demander ouvertement la resititution de la lettre devenait une chose impossible: outre qu’un sentiment de dignité personnelle s’y opposait, il était trop évident que le duc ne s’en était pas si hardiment emparé sans une volonté bien arrêtée d’en tirer avantage pour son ambition. En effet, depuis ce jour, le duc de G... ne fait plus mystère de certaines prétentions politiques auparavant désespérées. Il

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affecte un crédit sans limites, et agit avec une confiance insolente qui inspire des craintes de plus en plus vives. Tenter une négociation ou recourir à la force, ce serait tout compromettre. Le seul moyen de sortir d’embarras est de reprendre la lettre par ruse: c’est le lieutenant de police que l’on a chargé de l’entreprise. – Il est évident, dit Verdier, que la lettre est toujours en la possession du duc de G... puisqu’il arrive à ses fins sans en faire aucun usage. Qu’il cesse de la posséder, il cesse aussitôt d’être à craindre. – Sans nul doute, reprit le secrétaire, et j’ai agi d’après cette conviction. Le duc de G... est beaucoup trop prudent pour porter la lettre sur lui; il sait, par plus d’un exemple fameux, que ce serait perdre tout repos et exposer sa personne: il aurait à craindre toutes les méprises imaginables, un duel chaque jour, un guet-apens chaque nuit. D’un autre côté, il est doué d’une trop juste méfiance pour déposer la lettre entre les mains de qui que ce soit; personne ne connait mieux que lui le pouvoir de la corruption. D’ailleurs, la difficulté n’aurait fait que changer de place. Enfin, le duc de G... n’ayant fait aucun voyage depuis six semaines, la lettre est nécessairement dans son hôtel. Mais en quel endroit l’a-t-il cachée? Voilà toute la question. – Et bien! vous vous êtes ménagé des intelligences dans le service du duc? Vous avez gagné le premier valet de chambre, le concierge? – Non. Toute ouverture à des individus qui pourraient être dévoués au duc et jouer dans cette affaire un double rôle m’est interdite. Echouer de cette manière, ce serait augmenter sa force. Il a fallu user de moyens extrêmes. On a profité des absences du duc, de quelques nuits qu’il a passées au jeu, du sommeil ou de l’ivresse de ses domestiques, et huit fois déjà les appartements ont été soigneusement visités et fouillés par plusieurs de nos agents qui ont pour ce genre de travail une expérience consommée. Je vous avouerai même qu’en raison de l’extrême importance de cette affaire, j’ai présidé cette nuit en personne à la dernière recherche. – Et vous n’avez point découvert la lettre? – Je n’y conçois rien. Vous me voyez découragé, consterné. Je n’ose plus paraître à Versailles. – Racontez-vous, je vous prie, dit Verdier, comment on été dirigées les recherches. – On n’a négligé aucune précaution. un habile homme a dressé dès la première nuit un plan complet des appartements. On a pris les mesures les plus exactes de toutes les pièces, de tous les cabinets. La forme des meubles, leurs dimensions, la nature de tous les matériaux, les moindres épaisseurs, à un dixième de ligne près, ont été scrupuleusement notées. On a exploré, le plan à la main, méthodiquement, toutes les profondeurs, tous les creux, tous les secrets. Vous savez que ce sont là des choses faciles, élémentaires; la plus petite erreur est impossible. On peut dire que pour ces sortes d’expéditions la police française est infaillible; elle n’en a pas seulement l’instinct, elle en a la science: tout est depuis longtemps réduit à un petit nombre de

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règles confirmées par des expériences qi se renouvellent incessamment. En un mot, j’affirme, que l’on a cherché partout. – Il est cependant bien difficile de croire que l’on puisse avoir jamais la certitude absolue de n’avoir fait aucune omission. – Vous n’auriez pas ce doute, si vous connaissiez la théorie, et si vous l’avez vu pratiquer une seule fois. Les meubles ont été disjoints, démembrés; on a enlevé les marbres, les dessus de table; on a retourné les tableaux, détaché les encadrements et les fonds des miroirs. On a sondé les boiseries, les panneaux, les planchers. On ne s’est pas contenté de s’assurer par le son si, contre l’apparence, certaines parties des meubles, tels que les pieds ou les dossiers, étaient vides. Nous n’ignorons pas, en effet, que quelquefois, après avoir introduit un objet dans une secrète cavité, on a soin de remplir le reste avec du coton, afin de mettre l’oreille en défaut, ou avec quelque menue poussière de métal, aflu de ne point diminuer le poids. Croyez-moi, on a tout exploré. – Mais, reprit Verdier, une lettre peut être pliée ou tournée en spirale de manière à occuper si peu de place qu’il y aurait mille cavités presque invisibles où l’on pourrait l’insinuer. Qui m’empêcherait, par exemple, d’en cacher une sous la moindre tresse de paille de cette chaise? Vous n’avez point, je suppose, dans votre zèle infernal, dépaillé toutes les chaises? – Non: mais les moindres interstices, les jointures, les rainures, les plis, les coutures, des draperies, des rideaux, toutes les surfaces, et particulièrement celles des chaises, soit dessus, soit dessous, ont été examinées avec une attention qu’on peut appeler véritablement microscopique. Nous avons eu recours au même moyen que lorsque nous avons à rechercher de très petits objets, par exemple, des diamants; on s’est servi de loupes lentement promenées pour découvrir jusqu’aux moindres dérangements et jusqu’aux moindres altérations de quelque nature que ce fût. Je vous répète que nous connaissons les appartements du duc et tout ce qu’ils renferment comme s’ils étaient faits du verre le plus transparent. Verdier continua d’adresser au sécretaire beaucoup d’objections qui toutes furent résolues. – Huit visites, ajouta-t-il, ont dû suffire à peine à une recherche si minutieuse. – On a emloyé chaque fois, pendant huit à dix heures, dix agents munis de tous les instruments utiles, et malgré la nécessité d’observer autant que possible le silence, on a travaillé avec une activité extraordinaire. La récompense promise est très considérable, et le lieutenant de police s’est engagé à rémunérer largement toutes les personnes qui auront concouru à la recherche. On ne reculera devant aucune dépense pour atteindre le but. Avec le temps, si je conservais la confiance que la lettre fût dans l’hôtel, je ferais fouiller jusqu’aux grenier et aux caves. Mais je commence à douter du succès. Qu’en pensez-vous, mon cher Verdier? Que me conseillez-vous? – Avez-vous une description exacte de la lettre?

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– En voici la copie, où l’on a tout imité, la forme, la dimension, le cachet, l’écriture. Verdier prit cette copie de la lettre, l’examina attentivement, demanda l’autorisation d’en lire le contenu, puis la rendit au secrétaire. – Eh bien, mon cher Verdier? Que faut-il faire? Ne faut-il pas renoncer à chercher la lettre dans l’hôtel? – Ce n’est pas mon avis, dit Verdier. Je crois, comme vous, qu’elle est dans les appartements du duc. – Mais où peut-elle être? – Evidemment où vous ne l’avez pas cherchée. Inventez quelque moyen d’attirer le duc et ses gens à la campagne, et refaites à loisir vos ténébreuses perquisitions. Si cette fois vous ne réussissez pas davantage, vous changerez vos batteries. – Je tenterai donc une dernière recherche, dit le secrétaire en secouant la tête d’un air découragé. Mais ce sera inutilement: on a tout visité; il ne reste plus rien à faire. Maudite, maudite lettre! Et il sortit plus consterné encore que lorsqu’il était entré. – Je ne comprends pas votre conseil, dis-je. Il ne trouvera rien. – Très certainement, me répondit Verdier. Le cher homme se croit beaucoup plus fin qu’il n’est, et il est ridiculement assoté des talents de sa bande. Mais écoutez bien ceci: avant trois jours, si, comme je le crois, la lettre est encore dans l’hôtel du duc, un autre que notre ami l’aura trouvée.

II. Quelques jours après, je jouais avec Verdier une partie d’échecs. M. X... entra. – Eh bien? lui demanda Verdier. M. X... avait une triste figure; il répondit par un mouvement d’épaules qui signifiait clairement: Nous n’avons rien trouvé. Quand la partie fut achevée, Verdier se tourna vers le secrétaire: “– Ainsi, lui ditil, votre nouvelle perquisition n’a pas mieux réussi que les premières? – Elle a duré toute une nuit et vainement. C’est une bien malhereuse affaire. M. le lieutenant de police ne veut plus qu’on s’occupe de cette recherche. J’y perdrai peut-être ma place. Verdier se tourna brusquement vers moi: – De quelle somme aurait besoin cette pauvre veuve dont vous me parliez hier pour retourner près de ses enfants? – A peu près de cent livres. – C’est une bagatelle. Voulez-vous, mon cher secrétaire, m’écrire un bon de deux cents livres sur la caisse de la police au nom de la veuve... Quel est son nom? – Mariane Dufour. – Vous entendez, monsieur le secrétaire?

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M. X... le regardait avec étonnement. – Ecrivez, signez, lui dit Verdier en plaçant devant lui une feuille de papier et l’écritoire. Le secrétaire obéit. – En échange voici votre lettre, dit Verdier en tirant de son portfeuille un petit papier. Vous aurez aussi à donner une petite gratification à l’un de vos agents, à Jean Levieux: il en a été utile. Le secrétaire demeura un moment les yeux fixés sur Verdier, la bouche entr’ouverte, muet, sans mouvement, comme s’il n’eût pas compris. Enfin, il saisit la lettre de Levieux, l’ouvrit, la regarda, se leva, et s’élança d’un seul bond dehors en s’écriant: C’est elle! c’est bien elle! Et nous l’entendîmes crier à son cocher, du milieu de l’escalier: A Versailles! à Versailles! Verdier se renversa dans son fauteuil en riant aux éclats. Je n’étais pas très édifié du rôle que je lui voyais jouer dans cette affaire. Il y avait en lui du Beaumarchais: il aimait l’intrigue elle-même, et parce qu’elle donnait de l’exercice à son imagination et à son esprit. D’ailleurs nous n’étions pas intimes, mes remontrances eussent été mal reçues. – Vous avez rendu ce pauvre homme bien heureux, lui dis-je. Dans l’excès de sa surprise et de sa joie, il n’a pas même songé à vous demander comment vous êtes parvenu à vous procurer la lettre. C’est là une rude leçon que vous avez donnée à la police. Cette preuve de sa maladresse fera honte au lieutenant. – Ne dites point de mal de la police, reprit Verdier; elle est d’une habilité presque incroyable. Ingénieuse, rusée, persévérante, elle possède toutes les connaissances nécessaires au but de son institution; elle a poussé son art presque à la perfection; et je suis sûr qu’elle en a consciencieusement épuisé toutes les ressources dans les limites de la recherche qui lui avait été ordonné à l’hôtel de G... Considérées en elles-mêmes, les mesures étaient certainement bien conçues et elles ont été bien exécutées; mais étaient-elles applicables à la circonstance et surtout à l’homme? c’était la question importante. Le lieutenant et son secrétaire l’ont mal résolue; ils ont manqué au début de pénétration. A l’âge de douze ans, j’en avais plus qu’eux. Je me rappelle que j’étais très habile à pair ou non. Vous connaissez ce jeu? On ferme une main, et on donne à deviner si les billes qu’elle contient sont en nombre pair ou impair. Je gagnais presque toujours, non polut par hasard, mais en vertu de règles que je m’étais faites. Un camerade me posait la question: pair ou non? Je répondais la première fois au hasard, par exemple: pair. Je perdais. Mais à la seconde question, je me disais: ce garçon-là est peu malin. La première fois il a mis non-pair; à la seconde, sa dose de finesse n’ira pas plus loin qu’un simple changement de combinaison: il mettra pair. En effet, contre son attente, je disais encore pair, et je gagnais. Mais si j’avais affaire à un écolier un peu plus intelligent, je me disais: au premier coup, j’ai deviné pair, et j’ai perdu. Sa première pensée va être aussi de changer le non-pair qui m’a fait perdre en pair; mais

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son esprit ne s’arrêtera pas là; un peu plus de réflexion lui suggérera que ce serait là une ruse beaucoup trop simple, et en définitive il en restera comme la première fois au non-pair. Donc je devinais non-pair, et je gagnais. En définitive, toute mon habileté consistait à lire de mon mieux dans la pensée de mon adversaire en calculant sur son degré d’intelligence ou sur la nuance du caractère que je lui connaissais. Je m’appliquais à mesurer on raisonnement intérieur avec le sien, à les identifier tous deux, et pour y parvenir, je m’aidais quelquefois d’un moyen physique qui depuis m’a souvent réussi dans des affaires d’une tout autre importance. Il est bien simple. Lorsque je cherche à deviner les passions ou les pensées d’une personne qui est devant moi, je m’étudie à mettre l’expression de ma figure dans le rapport le plus exact possible avec l’expression de la sienne; je m’attache à en imiter et à en suivre très exactement les changements les plus imperceptibles, et en même temps j’observe avec attention, en moi-même, les pensées, les sentiments qui naissent naturellement et par correspondance aux diverses modifications qui se succèdent sur ses traits et sur les miens. Si j’ai lieu de soupçonner que je suis en présence d’une personne qi se méfie de sa propre physionomie et qui lui fait jouer un rôle, je cherche les pensées opposées à celles qu’en l’imitant je sens naître en moi. C’est une affaire de tact et d’expérience. Or, notre cher secrétaire est impropre au poste qu’il occupe, parce qu’il n’agit jamais que d’après les seules idées qui lui sont particulières. Il suppose que les autres hommes pensent comme il penserait dans des circonstances semblables. La conséquence inévitable est qu’il n’a de chance pour réussir que lorsqu’il est en lutte avec des esprits qui se trouvent être précisément de sa force et de sa nature. Il est nécessairement en défaut toutes les fois qu’il est en rapport avec les intelligences supérieures à la sienne, et souvent même avec celles qui sont inférieures. Il n’a qu’un certain nombre de règles qui ressortent de sa manière d’être individuelle; il les applique indifféremment à toutes les affaires de même ordre; les difficultés sont-elles plus grandes que de coutume, tout son effort consiste, non à changer de règles, à en chercher d’autres; mais simplement à pousser la pratique des seules qu’il connaisse jusqu’aux dernières conséquences. Semblable en cela à un médecin qui n’a que deux recettes, la saignée ou l’eau chaude, et qui se borne quand la maladie résiste à tirer plus de sang ou à noyer l’estomac du patient. C’est toujours la même routine. Dans la recherche de cette lettre volée, il n’a pas même songé à s’identifier avec l’esprit du duc de G... et à en mesurer la portée. Il a procédé de même que s’il avait eu affaire au premier bourgeois venu. Ses agents ne découvrant rien avec leurs yeux dans les endroits les plus secrets, il leur a donné des loupes, et les fentes des meubles ne contenant rien, il a fait sonder jusqu’aux poutres. Mais le duc de G... n’ignore aucune des ruses de la police: s’il s’est absenté si complaisamment de son hôtel pour laisser la place libre à la police, c’était qu’il avait l’assurance qu’on ne trouverait rien. En lutte avec un système qui suppose toujours du mystère, la meilleure ruse était, en effet, de n’en faire aucun. Il n’a point caché la lettre, et il a certainement bien ri de la peine qu’on se donnait pour chercher dans l’épaisseur de ses murailles ou dans les pieds de

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ses fauteuils ce que l’on avait sous les yeux. Je n’aime point le duc de G... Nous ne nous sommes que trop connus à Dresde. J’avais un prétexte suffisant pour me présenter à son hôtel. Avant-hier j’allai le voir, et je réclamai de lui un mémoire qu’il n’avait aucun intérêt à garder. Il me conduisit à son cabinet, et j’engageai la conversation sur un sujet qui devait me donner au moins un quart d’heure pour observer. Je n’eus pas besoin d’un temps aussi long. Sa table était encombrée de livres et de papiers. Après quelques minutes, je remarquai, parmi de vieux parchemins et au milieu de billets négligemment jetés, une très petite lettre froissée, salle, à demi déchirée. L’adresse était lisible; c’était celle du duc lui-même; l’écriture très fine paraissait être d’une femme, mais elle pouvait être contrefaite. Le format n’avait aucun rapport avec celui du modèle que m’avait remis le secrétaire. Le cachet, d’une autre couleur, était très large: je le reconnus; c’est un de ceux dont le duc fait quelquefois usage. Ce détail fut pour moi un trait de lumière. Le duc avait fait là une imprudence: on ne s’avise jamaid de tout. Je sortis, et vous devinez le reste. Persuadé que j’avais découvert la fameuse lettre, mais ne pouvant rien affirmer, et ne voulant pas faire naître une fausse espérance dans l’esprit de notre cher secrétaire, je fis venir Jean Levieux, et je lui donnai mes instructions. Le drôle est entré en plein jour jusque dans le cabinet du duc, qu’il y rencontra. Il lui offrit de le tenir au courant des recherches de la police. A peine avait-il prononcé quelques mots que des cris affreux poussés dans la rue et un grand tumulte attirèrent le duc vers une fenêtre: on se battait; il y avait un attroupement. Le duc ne jeta qu’un regard; mais quand il se retourna, la petite lettre déchirée était déjà dans la poche de Levieux qui, à l’imitation du duc, avait mis à la même place une lettre d’une apparence semblable. Aussi calme qu’en entrant, Levieux continua d’exposer le motif de sa visite, mais de manière à se faire promptement éconduire. Il est inutile d’ajouter que c’était deux camarades de Levieux qui avaient simulé une querelle dans la rue. Le duc, suivant toute probabilité, n’a pas encore découvert la perte qu’il a faite; hier même il a donné une nouvelle preuve de son extrême confiance dans ce crédit étrange qu’il a usurpé depuis un mois. Sa disgrâce sera prompte et terrible. C’est un homme perdu. Toutes les cours d’Europe lui seront fermées. J’avoue qu’il me serait agréable de voir sa surprise et sa fureur lorsqu’il découvrira la petite lettre substituée à celle qu’il avait volée. Il y trouvera deux vers tracés d’une main connue, et qu’il se rappellera d’avoir cités, il y a dix ans, dans une triste circonstance, avec une joie infernale: . . . . . . . . . . . Un dessein si funeste, S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne de Thyeste. Mais je ne vous vois pas très enthousiaste de mon succès. Vous êtes tant soit peu puritain, et vous ne goûtez que médiocrement ce que l’on a appelé le plaisir des dieux. – Je connais trop votre pénétration, lui dis-je, pour nier qu’il y ait une différence entre nos deux caractères; mais je crois que les études d’observation qui vous ont

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conduit au résultat dont vous vous félicitez trop peuvent être quelquefois utiles aux esprits les plus sévères et les aider à faire le bien autant qu’à combattre le mal. Magasin pittoresque 13 (August 1845): 269–272.

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