The Silhouette Artist

It's easy to see why this week's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, struck its first readers as real. Goethe created a portrait of a tragic young man through the fictional character of Werther's letters that I feel is one of the most complete portraits of an afflicted, sensitive person I've ever observed. Burton Pike's introduction in The Modern Library's edition of the book suggests that Werther's character may have had an autobiographical element to it. As I read the novel I debated whether the author's hand was rendering a scathing self-portrait of himself at times, or providing a precise, internal study of the emotional world of someone he understood very well. Is this impossible, impractical, unfortunate, dazzlingly true and deluded creature, someone who the writer once knew? Or someone who the writer once was? Either way, the picture he to presents us, strikes our senses as vibrantly--and painfully-- authentic. Like great art, it is has the potential to cut and cure.

I'm fascinated by Goethe's surgical precision when it comes to capturing the intricate hopes and despairs of a classic goner. The way Goethe constructs this slim book by cutting and pasting things out of the fabric of remembered experience, for instance: What Goethe pastes together is just as interesting and important as what he cuts out. As Pike mentions in the intro, we get only Werther's letters, not his friend's responses, not Lotte's journals. Information is limited and truncated when it comes to the world beyond Werther's impractical senses, so that we often only receive the first letters of names of places and people. We are given a complete portrait of Werther, but only belated, conjectured glimpses into the minds of the other characters (at the novel's conclusion by the so-called 'editor'). Of Werther, we are privileged—or burdened-- with a cascade of his inner-most thoughts and perceptions-- through his eyes, we get only people's exteriors. Though this is common in first-person narratives, I feel like it illustrates the very nature of Werther's, and mankind's dilemma. How much do we ever really know each other?

As a reader, I feel like I'm not sure if I really know or understand Lotte, the object of Werther's all-consuming love, and even Werther admits himself that he can't draw an accurate picture of her face. Instead, the only image he can make of her on paper is by cutting “out her silhouette instead.” (p45). The New Oxford American dictionary offers a definition of the word silhouette that corresponds with a theme that I feel encompasses Werther's experience-- “the dark shape and outline of someone or something visible against a lighter background. . .”

Nothing perhaps reflects this definition and illuminates Werther's—and mankind's-- predicament than his own words, “. . we are so made that we compare everything with ourselves and ourselves with everything. . .everything outside ourselves seems more glorious, every other person more perfect” (p.71).

At the end of his life, when Werther plans his suicide and settles his affairs, he requests that the silhouette he created of Lotte be returned to her so she can be pleased with his work. But in the end, the silhouette he has left behind is the one created by his own self-negating actions, his own absence. In this sense, the motif of the silhouette provides an apt metaphor for loss. Werther has chosen to cut himself out of the fabric of life. And no one is pleased with his work.  

Gray Area

The Inferno is sensational. And I mean sensational in an unsavory, skin-crawling way. From the moment we embark on Dante’s journey through hell, our senses are assailed by unpleasant smells, sights, and sounds, brought to us by one incredibly uncanny, unflinching mind, and the Hollanders’ vivid and lyrical translation.

On a purely poetic level, the work is a beauty. But I’m still strongly unsettled by much of the imagery, by the ghastly souls, regions, and assorted torments that clawed at my perceptions and left disturbing impressions. At the present, I’m trying to shake off the almost physical discomfort of a description in the final canto, when Dante and his guide Virgil must endure close contact with Satan. We are confronted with the massive and hairy body of Lucifer, and given a description of how Virgil and Dante are escorted to their final destination:

Climbing aboard the colossal Devil, Virgil “clung to the hair” (xxxiv, 80) of the monster, and instructs Dante to do the same: “Hold on tight, for by such rungs as these. . .must we depart from so much evil.” (xxxiv 82-84).

It’s not the first time the characters of Dante and Virgil have received assistance from a demon or monster during their voyage through Hell. And it’s not the first time that one of Hell’s disgruntled creatures has bent itself to their service. (Their ride on the Devil is preceded by aid from the Centaurs in Canto 12, the monster Geryon in Canto 18, the gang of Malebranche in Canto 21, and the giant Antaeus in Canto 31.)

It’s difficult to accept the idea of Good, even for a moment, joining forces with Evil. Even if you just call it an indirect embrace of cruelty, or an expedient alignment, or alliance, with immorality, I think it’s problematic.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just one of those gray areas, like politics, religion, and social psychology, that I have to accept.

Another Beast

If I thought the classics we have been reading so far were unusual, Dante's Inferno is a whole different animal. I really found writer Thomas Cahill's summation of Robert Fagle's translation of The Aeneid accurate: a "miraculous beast of a text."

I agree the most with the beast part of his assessment, since I'm still wrestling with Virgil's work while I'm getting a feel for Dante's tricky swift-footed creation. This again being my first introduction to the text, it's not without trepidation. What strikes me most is how timid the character of Dante is. He worships Virgil, and is uncertain about his own courage and resolve in the first chapter, though the man who is writing the verses is anything but. I love the images that he threads together-- Hollanders' translation is so immediate to me.

Right now I have my own theories about the significance of the three beasts that Dante encounters in the beginning of the story that block his 'ascent'.  "Your spirit is assailed by cowardice," Virgil tells him, after Dante says, "But why should I go there? Who allows it? I am not Aeneas, nor am I Paul. Neither I nor any think me fit for this."  Self-doubt and a sense of shame have a hold of him, and I feel that the beauty of the leopard, enforces that self-doubt, making him step back, while the lion and the she-wolf, hold him in the grips of fear.