Thanatological Revenants (2024)

In Werther, the protagonist’s death coincides with the novel’s narrative conclusion. During the last hour of Christmas Eve, as two pistols lie ready on his writing desk, he jots down his final words: ‘They are loaded – the clock strikes twelve. So be it! Charlotte! Charlotte, farewell, farewell!’ (L 86). Demonstrating outstanding restraint, the narrator packs the final events into a single page, including the gritty detail of Werther’s protruding brains and his denied burial on hallowed ground. Despite the coincidence between the ends of the narrative and the protagonist’s lifeline, to claim that Werther’s suicide also marks the culmination of his inner development, a happy ending of sorts, departs considerably from contemporary academic reading habits. Is it possible to conceive of him as a man who positively embraces his own demise rather than as someone who simply succumbs to a sad fate?

This chapter unearths the death-fixated aspects of Werther and Wertherian literature. To emphasise their discursive embeddedness, it seems advisable to speak of ‘thanatological’ literature instead of their death fixation, a term that highlights subjective and pathological impulses. When thanatos, the Ancient Greek term for ‘death’ in the broadest sense, encounters the logos, designating ‘reason’ and cognition, profound meditations on the human condition follow. When the ideals of modern love connect with morbid themes such as self-destruction, incest and murder, the great project of modernity, the realisation of freedom and the pursuit of happiness, appear as ill-fated strategies that only exacerbate man’s miserable lot. Arguably, the prospect of salvation through romantic love, which only became common currency in the late 18th century, exposes the individual to greater peril than a morality designed to dismiss the worldly realm as deceptive and ultimately disappointing. The heroes of sentimentalism suspend the advice issued by Stoic and Christian treatises for centuries, warning against worldly sources of delight, for they should be treated like ‘an earthen pot […], or a glass cup, that when it has been broken, you may remember what it was, and may not be troubled’.1 Romantic love means to do the exact opposite: to place all one’s hopes in that fragile ‘earthen pot’. The tangible risk is that the destructive aspects of love undermine its uplifting effects – a mechanism that texts such as Werther perfectly illustrate.

Moving beyond prescriptive notions of how individuals should reign in their passions, post-Wertherian literature is unafraid to address the allure of death. This dimension of the text reiterates the crushing realisation that non-being could be preferable to being, after all. Or, as Oedipus famously laments in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (401 bce): ‘Not to be born at all / Is best, far best that can befall.’2 Such classic references, invoked across the ages,3 clash with the life-affirming consensus of modern societies where cases such as Werther’s are dismissed as pathological; after all, his actions go against what Christopher Belshaw considers in rather abstract terms the ‘widespread and natural tendency to link life and value, death and disvalue’.4 Instead of treating death-fixated Wertherian texts from a moral perspective that objects to world-weariness as such, the present chapter takes them at face value and takes their sinister line of thinking seriously: what if life is not worth living?

The chapter first addresses scholars’ reactions to the thanatological musings in Werther’s letters. After a review of rare instances of death-affirmative Werther criticism in early 20th-century Germany and Japan, such arguments are placed within wider philosophical discussions on the human death drive, including the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer and Sigmund Freud. The aim of this conceptual digression is to lend more credibility to a segment of the Werther nursery that is too easily dismissed as excessive and bizarre. Equipped with a suitable framework to detect the thanatological underpinnings of Wertherian literature, the argument then moves to an analysis of the five rewritings of Goethe’s book. As in the case of revolutionary rewritings, they appeared outside the German context. The first strand of death-fixated reinterpretations emerges from the text’s hypertextual transformations and transcodings in French Romanticism, including in Chateaubriand’s René (1801), Étienne Pivert de Senancour’s Obermann (1804) and Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe (1816). Here, death is the unflinching answer to the individual’s frustrated quest for romantic love. Death fixation also comes to the fore in Japanese letters during the early 20th century, as in Sōseki Natsume’s Kokoro (心, 1914) and Dazai Osamu’s post-war classic No Longer Human (人間失格 Ningen Shikkaku, 1948). As in the preceding chapter, the heterogeneity of this corpus raises the question of the texts’ comparability. Again, Werther-inspired prose follows familiar stylistic patterns, including a commitment to subjective articulation, as seen in diaries, letters and memoirs. In contrast to the discussed revolutionary novels, thanatological rewritings, owing to their fatalistic worldviews, do not occupy an equally central position in the respective literary histories. Although the Wertherian hero reappears alongside his preference for contemplating suicide, he differs substantially from the troubled characters who also despair of humanity and life, and who occupy a more central position within world literature. In contrast to Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1894–5), a Werther may suffer from financial and sexual constraints but never exhibits an affirmative view of a cultural and intellectual Parnassus like Christminster. Other than Emma in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856/1857), who also suffers from a break-up and eventually takes her own life, the Wertherian perspective forces the reader to consider the protagonist’s inner perspective – without flashes of irony. And in contrast to Kochan in Mishima Yukio’s Confessions of a Mask (仮面の告白 Kamen no Kokuhaku, 1949), the most iconic Japanese thanatological novel, a Werther infallibly conforms to the norms of heterosexual love and is spared direct confrontation with the destruction of war.

This sprawling history of rewritings helps unearth strata of meaning in Werther that have disappeared amid the canonisation of the text. To reclaim a Werther who willingly embraces death means to undo this process. This chapter approaches the corpus to answer the following questions: are the findings of thanatological Werther criticism compatible with the novel’s subsequent transformations in French and Japanese literature? Do theoretical reflections on the death drive refine the reader’s judgement of its representations in narrative? What is the point of drawing on the Werther model when well-established equivalents, usually sourced from religious or ancient wisdom, articulate analogous tropes of transience?

Werther’s denied agency

In principle, to highlight Werther’s death drive is to make a trivial observation. From the onset, Werther’s letters are imbued with references to the vanity of existence. As early as 16 July 1771, the young man feels ‘like shooting a bullet into my head’ (L 27). One month later, he playfully holds the muzzle of a gun against his forehead, defending suicide as a glorious alternative to living in oppression. Even during his happy days of self-contentment, his thinking gravitates towards death. For scholars, the bone of contention is the level of lucidity that readers can – or should – attribute to his actions. He is commonly taken for a fool who carelessly indulges in harmful thoughts and unwittingly finds himself caught in a dead end. But alternatively, one can also perceive him as a radical human being who, unable to accept the frustration of his goals and desires, consciously accelerates his own demise.

Regrettably, this diary is not included in the book. The passage itself gave rise to two different interpretations. According to Dieter Welz, the letter is of less psychological than editorial significance. Forming part of the amendments that Goethe introduced to the 1787, it manifests the aesthetic trajectory of the rewritten version: the enforcement of greater distance between reader and protagonist.5 Welz’s argument culminates in a firm defence of the first edition’s explosive style, thereby neutralising Werther’s most palpable instance of lucidity as exterior to the novel’s true shape. Meanwhile, other critics took the second edition at face value, reading the added notice as an indication of the protagonist’s inner struggle between head and heart. Accordingly, Werther’s surprise at his diary marks a rare episode of clarity amid general darkness.6 Powerful metaphors such as Werther’s early reference to a ‘noble race of horses that instinctively bite open a vein when they are hot and exhausted’ (L 50) are mere aperçus that emerge at the scene of writing but that disappear seconds later without leaving a trace in his mind. In short, Werther’s authorship erases itself once the ink is dried. Both interpretations choose to ignore his programmatic assertion: ‘Even now I see it all plainly, and yet seem to have no thought of acting more wisely.’ He accepts that he has put himself in a desperate situation but does not intend to change it.

Given critics’ preference to look at Werther through the lens of mature condescension, they also regarded his deliberate indecision as immature or pathological, indicating that he is a perverse person in need of healing. While critics of the 19th century conjured the image of a pathological Werther in order to enforce the edifying appeal of Goethe’s works, this stance, later transformed into an interpretative cliché, which critics reproduced throughout the 20th century. In this vein, Rolf Zimmermann’s 1979 study asserts: ‘Werther himself is the cause of his ills. […] Werther’s frailty is caused not by external affliction, but by his inner constitution.’7 There is nothing heroic about this inner constitution, a stance that Nicholas Boyle would agree on. Since Werther is trapped in a ‘ghastly delusion’, the moral logic of the narrative is straightforward: ‘Werther has lived by feeling and must die by it.’8

In more general terms, criticism has interpreted Werther’s thanatological musings as indications of the protagonist’s ‘mortal disease’ (L 34), a phrase borrowed from Werther’s own musings on the case of a girl who drowned herself.9 The notion of Werther’s ‘mortal disease’ assumes a tacit understanding between author and readers: while both are fully aware of Werther’s unfolding tragedy, he himself is not.10 Although the exploration of the creative exchanges between pathography and literature can yield fascinating results,11 this form of interpretative grafting hardly exhausts the wealth of the text. To dismiss Werther as a sick man raises more questions than it answers. It also completely ignores the text’s most outstanding legacy: its wide popularity, especially among non-German audiences. Why should the sick musings of a fictional man have attracted so much interest across the world, while the work of mature Goethe, with the exception of Faust, barely attracted attention outside academic circles?

Before Goethe had a chance to disseminate his dismissive self-interpretation, Hamburg’s Pastor Goeze called for a ban, arguing that ‘the novel’s sole aim is to cleanse the disgrace from a young hothead who commits suicide by revaluating his misdeed as heroism’.12 Johann August Ernesti, a member of Leipzig’s divinity school, also accused the novel of promoting suicide: ‘This piece of writing is an apology and recommendation of suicide. Composed in a witty and sympathetic manner, it appears particularly dangerous.’13 In criticism, such calls for literary censorship stand accused of lacking aesthetic sensibility; indeed, Goeze’s and Ernesti’s assessments subscribe to a premodern concept of literature that stipulates edification as the primary aim of literary production. In their fanaticism, however, they took Werther’s death fixation more seriously than those critics who sang its praises but effectively neutralised the text’s destructive force.

Tracing Werther’s death drive

Isolated critics in the present, Benjamin Bennett and Michael Gratzke, have considered the possibility that Werther’s actions are lucid through and through – yet both critics remained unconvinced in the end. Meanwhile, two scholars whose work dates from the interwar period, Hermann August Korff and Kamei Katsuichirō, wholeheartedly embraced the idea of a Werther who is fully cognisant of what is happening to him.

According to Bennett, the protagonist consciously manoeuvres himself into self-enslavement. While Werther embodies the modern psychological tendency to explore extremes, he also seeks to escape from the ‘dizzying experience of freedom’. His frequent invocation of fate only serves as ‘an excuse for […] deliberately letting himself go’.14 Werther chooses to die because he embraces one kind of freedom, to die by his own hand, in reaction to another kind of freedom, modern individualism, which causes him to suffer from psychological alienation. This choice places Werther’s aporetic conflict within the discourse of post-Enlightenment disenchantment, a concept discussed by Odo Marquard.15 Ex negativo, Bennett’s interpretation is informed by a questionable assumption: the implication is that Werther would have fared better in more constricting surroundings.

Gratzke also puts forward a cautious appreciation of Werther’s thanatological lucidity. Both his antisocial behaviour and his obsession with Lotte’s image – rather than the woman herself – raise the possibility ‘that behind Werther’s fetishistic obsession […] there is the death drive at work on a much more profound level’. After mentioning this possibility, however, Gratzke backtracks: ‘On closer inspection of the literary text, this does not appear to be the case.’16 Striving to meet his beloved below the benevolent eye of God the Father, his death fixation is levelled out by conventional religious imagery as well as conventional piety. Both Bennett’s and Gratzke’s interpretations ultimately remain unconvinced of Werther’s self-aware demise.

Death as salvation (Korff)

In contrast, the interwar period allowed for a more generous appreciation of the thanatological aspects of Werther. Korff’s four-volume study Spirit of Goethe’s Age (Der Geist der Goethezeit, 1923–53) portrays the poet as the first modern German pagan; after Christianity grew obsolete, goes the argument, Goethe lived up to the task of pioneering a new morality beyond conventional dogma. In Korff’s first instalment, the Sturm und Drang movement is portrayed as a historical rupture: Goethe’s protagonists explore the cartography of a world in which all boundaries and limitations have been thoroughly redrawn. Amid such spiritual rupture, Werther emerges as the mouthpiece of pantheism, understood as the individual’s spontaneous awareness of the Almighty. While this general approach is fairly uncontroversial, it leads Korff to draw highly original conclusions. Accordingly, the protagonist’s affection for Lotte is a metaphor for something more comprehensive: ‘the unhappy love of the soulful man for the world at large, a world that “fails” to satisfy the infinite aspirations of his [i.e. Werther’s] inner God.’17 In Korff’s eyes, Werther prefigures not only Faust, Goethe’s other iconic suicidal hero, but also one of the tenets of German idealism: ‘In Werther, the poet anticipates what the philosopher would later discover in its full transcendental scope in the critique of reason: the worldbuilding power of the subject. What is the world? The world is my imagination.’18 Korff endows Werther’s meditations with a philosophical dignity that is usually withheld from Sturm und Drang characters.

Like most forceful interpretations, Korff’s argument makes ample use of interpretative grafting. The lover’s miserable wailings and the editor’s empathic commentaries fall by the wayside, as the critic endows all conflicting inner tensions with steadfast intention. Werther’s vow, ‘My mind is made up, Charlotte: I am resolved to die!’ (L 73), is seen as consistent with his radical metaphor of self-mutilating horses. In Korff’s study, such snippets are incorporated into an interpretation that stands in opposition not only to the assumption of Werther’s delusional mindset, but also to Bennett’s idea that the protagonist’s death drive represents an escape from modern freedom. Quite the contrary, for Korff, Werther’s renunciation of the world gives evidence of his uncompromising intellectual freedom. Instead of accepting his tragic role as a broken man, he embraces death as salvation from final disappointment, a stance that allows him to emerge as an enlightened victor from the conflict between boundless subjectivity and finite objectivity: ‘Werther’s suicide judges a world full of limitations, one that is unworthy of truly divine life.’19 Unperturbed by Goethe’s fraught relationship with his early literary creation, this analysis puts forward a headstrong defence of Werther as an upright man who wages war against the lowliness of the material world. Korff’s case for Werther inherits one of the most notorious tropes of German idealism, the disjunction between ideal and reality. This Werther could as well be a protagonist in a fanciful novel by Novalis or a comic novella by E. T. A. Hoffmann, in which young men regularly find their expectations of bliss and ecstasy at odds with the iron laws of the everyday world. But while these men can hope to find salvation in transcendence and art, Werther has no prospect of finding an adequate substitute. It remains unclear to what extent Korff believes that Werther’s ‘infinite aspirations’ represent tragic gestures or if he assumes that metaphysical transcendence is in fact attainable.

Within the German context, Korff’s take on Goethe’s novel was idiosyncratic. Despite holding a chair position in Leipzig’s prestigious department of Germanistik between 1925 and 1954 – a curious example of continuous employment in rather eventful years – he could not establish a lasting counternarrative against the pathological or biographic paradigms.20

Beauty in death (Kamei)

Outside Germany, Korff’s work attracted considerable interest, especially in Japan, where, in the 1930s, it was considered exemplary.21 During this period, Japanese scholarly discourse was shaped by intensified intellectual exchange between the newly forged Axis powers. In East Asia, Goethe’s work held the promise to build cross-cultural bridges. Interestingly, this transcultural bond was made possible less by the figure of the mature Goethe, whom Wilhelmine Germany adored, than by the potential of Werther for literary grafting.

According to Stefan Keppler-Tasaki and Seiko Tasaki, the extraordinary side-effect of Goethe’s cross-cultural reception in Japan was ‘the stunning overshadowing of the Goethe image by death, more precisely the obsession with the interconnection of beauty and death in a larger framework of the “suicide nation” self-image’.22 This cross-cultural bridge shows most convincingly in Kimura Kinji’s programmatic essay ‘Goethe in Japan’, published in a journal specifically dedicated to cultural exchange between Axis powers.23 In Japan, where suicide was traditionally conceptualised as a historical act rather than a psychiatric condition,24 literary figures such as Werther and Faust attracted great interest as suicidal role models. As a consequence, Goethe’s characters found themselves in the unexpected company of local icons of ritual suicide, for example Saigō Takamori, the Samurai rebel leader of the late 19th century whose heroism and sense of honour became a fixture in Japanese nationalism.

Like Korff, Kamei finds that sentimental love leads the tragic individual into a confrontation between imagination and reality. Since no compromise is possible, the suffering young man’s rebellion culminates in the transcendence of his desires and in an act of revenge against reality. This bleak vision, however, is mollified by the Buddhist undertones that appear in Kamei’s interpretation. His smooth integration of death and ‘the most beautiful moment of life’ is rooted in traditional Japanese aesthetics, where the tragic beauty of transience occupies a special place.26

Furthermore, Kamei presents a hard-nosed assessment of Werther’s life options. Faced with Lotte’s supposed marital misery as the wife of Albert, a more reckless Werther could transgress social conventions by committing adultery or killing Albert. Instead, Werther restrains himself, which leads Kamei to the following judgement: ‘Werther alone wants to be the one who suffers. […] In fact, his love is an act of selflessness.’27 Kamei’s Werther is neither the unhinged pathological young man that German criticism has in mind nor Korff’s pantheistic genius, but a master of self-control. Mindful of his disposition, he accepts that he is too weak to transgress social norms or, alternatively, to accept the task that fate has given him. Kamei cannot detect any moral failings in Werther’s weakness; instead, his passivity is the precondition of a radical insight: ‘Perhaps truth lies in one’s own annihilation.’28 There is no prospect for spiritual salvation but only the immanent beauty of self-murder.

As in Korff’s case, Kamei’s account leaves Werther’s endemic indecision unmentioned, as it would distract from the radical statement articulated in one of his last letters: ‘Yes, Charlotte, why should I not say it? One of us three must go: it shall be Werther’ (L 73). Basing his interpretation mostly on this strong-willed proposition, Kamei finds numerous points of connection with Japanese ideas about worldly transience, notably the thought of Kitamura Tōkoku, an early Romantic Japanese poet who took his life at the age of twenty-five. According to the famous suicide, love culminates not in a lowly physical union but in the spiritual journey of the individual who fails to patch the disjunction between imagination and reality. In line with the idea of Goethe’s presumed compatibility with Japanese thought, Kamei regards Werther as an extension of native poetry, such as that of Kitamura. As in China’s revolutionary rereading of Werther, Japanese grafting implies a highly selective appropriation of the text in dialogue with highly culturalised ideas about life as such.

Kamei’s pamphlet recommends a two-fold struggle, one outward and one inward: ‘Externally, the war that we are currently fighting represents the overthrow of British and American Power, while internally it represents the basic cure for the spiritual disease brought about by modern civilization.’31

Although the pamphlet abstains from mentioning Werther, Goethe’s hero enters Kamei’s apotheosis of self-sacrifice as the invisible guest who provides moral support in his quest for a thanatological Japanese national identity. The stated antagonism between a local community-based society and Anglo-American individualism reiterates the idea of a struggle between fundamentally different civilisations, an idea that was also popular among German intellectuals of the time.32 United in their rejection of both Western individualism and materialism, the Axis powers, united in their defence of cultural essentialism, embarked on an existential struggle for cultural survival.33 In Japan, Werther enters the Second World War as a Germano-Japanese role model.

In sum, Korff’s and Kamei’s takes on Werther exhibit the characteristics of conceptual grafting: they connect the protagonist’s inner struggle with an absolutist worldview in which death can serve as an end in itself, thereby endowing him with the kind of spiritual grandeur that critical consensus denies him. They conjure in Werther the idea that his struggle allows him to transcend the everyday world. The Wertherian hero, an exemplary individual, mends the disjunction between the poetic aspirations of the modern era and its limitations amid a prosaic reality.

Genealogy of the Death Drive

Supposing the protagonist is fully cognisant of his predicament, is it possible to isolate Werther’s death drive while avoiding the unattractive aspects of Korff’s and Kamei’s interpretations? After all, it sounds overblown to speak with Korff of Goethe’s post-Christian paganism. Worse still, Kamei’s proto-fascist ideas compromise his enthusiasm for Werther. Can one understand the protagonist’s realisation that he has ‘entangled himself step by step and yet seems to have no thought of acting more wisely’ as a valid reaction towards the unbearable weight of being alive? Since the answer cannot be found in Werther criticism alone, this subchapter will turn to the concept of the death drive as presented by Arthur Schopenhauer and Sigmund Freud. In contrast to Korff’s and Kamei’s contributions, to engage with their works may not bring to light previously ignored material, yet the marginal status of Schopenhauer and specific elements of Freud’s thought underscore the critical prejudices that reproduce, as Belshaw argues, the widespread tendency ‘to link life and value, death and disvalue’. The aim is to better understand the cultural undercurrents that criticism largely rejects but which a group of literary successors have embraced so wholeheartedly.

The Werther triangle easily comes to mind. The successful union of Lotte and Werther is thwarted by a successful rival, resulting in Werther joining the ranks of the many men who shoot themselves in reaction to denied fatherhood.

In the light of the novel’s ambivalence regarding the hero’s desire for Lotte, however, it is important not to forget the other possibility that is contained in the novel. Werther’s case is more complex than the denial of fatherhood. Although he dreams of Lotte’s ‘possession’ once (16 July 1771), he commits suicide without having consistently and obsessively desired her. There exists an intimate connecting thread between Goethe’s text and Schopenhauer’s work: the idea of renunciation.

Although Schopenhauer’s list of tragic heroes who embody the free self-abolition of the will includes Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Schiller’s Johanna and Segismundo in Calderón’s Life Is a Dream (La vida es sueño, 1635), the list bypasses Werther, whose story is related in prose rather than in the dramatic form. Werther represents a pertinent borderline case. In particular, the letters dating from the period after his departure from Wahlheim evince his exhaustion with human affairs, as he declares: ‘Not one single moment of happiness: nothing! Nothing touches me. I stand before a puppet show and see the little puppets move, and I ask myself whether it isn’t an optical illusion’ (L 45). If articulated in a humorous tone, this statement could befit Hamlet; and if pronounced with more gravity, it would betray Segismundo’s confusion, as he can no longer tell what role he is playing in whose scheme.

In contrast to this illustrious group, however, Werther gradually loses his detached attitude towards worldly affairs in the course of the narrative, especially during the last days before his suicide. When he visits Lotte to read Ossian to her, he ‘clasped her in his arms tightly, and covered her trembling, stammering lips with furious kisses’ (L 80), an act that conforms to Schopenhauer’s idea that suicide in fact represents an unworthy affirmation of the will-to-live. Just minutes before he shoots himself, he proclaims that Lotte’s pink ribbon should be buried with him. Strangely, his ardour arrives belatedly, then keeps intensifying. Without question, such behaviour defies Schopenhauer’s ‘quieter of the will’ and does not befit those men who ‘cheerfully and willingly give up life itself’. To arrive at Korff’s and Kamei’s conclusion about Werther’s clarity means to overlook his final days: there is a distinction to be made between lucid renunciation and the kind of emotional turmoil that features spells of renunciative moods. Thanatological Wertherian rewritings, however, pursue a different agenda, as they isolate the protagonist’s general exhaustion with human affairs from such lowly fits of passion.

In the 20th century, Schopenhauer’s elaborations on the death drive have arguably found their most relevant echo in Freud’s study Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 1920). While the first edition only implicitly refers to Schopenhauer, the 1921 edition makes these references explicit. In the conclusion, Freud invokes the authority of the German thinker, pointing out that he has ‘unwittingly steered our course into the harbour of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. For him death is the “true result and to that extent the purpose of life”, while the sexual instinct is the embodiment of the will to live.’36 Since Beyond the Pleasure Principle reacts to the experience of the First World War, Freud’s interest in pessimistic philosophy documents his departure from the epistemic optimism that connected early psychoanalysis with the modern belief in progress. The inconsistencies that arise from this intellectual borrowing are secondary to the text’s determination to find answers.37

The aim of life is not simply to return to a more peaceful state in comparison with the present but death proper. As a consequence, Freud also characterises the death drive as the ‘Nirvana principle’ (50), a conceptual borrowing from Buddhist philosophy that reiterates Schopenhauer’s invocation of historical death-affirmative philosophies. As a complement to the self-destructive aspects of the death drive, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930) envisions a different trajectory of the death drive, when the organism rids itself of inner tension by externalising such tensions. In this case, ‘a portion of the instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness’38 – that is, through death and murder. Overall, Freud’s conception of the death drive challenges psychoanalytic orthodoxy by relativising the pleasure principle, resulting in much controversy among his readers.39

Becoming inorganic

To explore the Wertherian death drive, the wide spectrum offered by Schopenhauer’s and Freud’s elaborations facilitates a more nuanced appreciation of the protagonists’ self-destructive paths. When a character gravitates towards death, this can mean many things. According to Schopenhauer, the death drive finds expression in an intellectual process. Meanwhile, Freud portrays it as a hidden force that operates outside human cognition. In view of this incongruence, Korff’s and Kamei’s ideas about Werther’s lucidity are easier to reconcile with Schopenhauer’s concept. The implication is that the hero experiences a moment of quasi-anagnorisis, as he becomes cognisant of his own predicament. That said, the narrative does not justify the wholesale application of Schopenhauer’s model, which would entail a precise moment in the narrative when Werther comes to this realisation. Is it after Lotte storms out from their embrace and he collapses on the floor? Or does he come to this conclusion in a much earlier passage, for example when Albert’s return destroys his illusions of uncomplicated love? Or does the moment of anagnorisis even precede Werther’s arrival in Wahlheim? Neither Korff nor Kamei elaborates on this point. Werther’s dissatisfaction with his surroundings grows in intensity but never reaches a true threshold moment.

Perhaps in the absence of an explicit moment of anagnorisis, most portraits of the protagonist are more compatible with Freud’s observations about the kind of behaviour that is guided by a hidden thanatological force, the so-called Nirvana principle. This drive, due to its muteness, precludes insight into one’s actions. In particular, Freud’s discussion of repetition compulsion features an example that is reminiscent of Goethe’s hero, namely ‘the lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion’. Indeed, Lotte forms part of a series that also includes Werther’s elderly friend, who dies prematurely, and Lady B, who complains that her mother advises her against mingling with him. His amorous choices reliably produce disappointments. Unknowingly, Werther gravitates towards self-destruction.

Viewed from the perspective of philosophical pessimism, this passage implies the idea of becoming inorganic once again. Transformed into wind, as he fantasises, he would be freed not only from corporal limitations, but also from emotional turmoil and pointless longing. Werther’s fantasy of an incorporeal existence advances a poetic image of absolute freedom that implies the total annihilation of the self. In contrast to the banality of his theological views,41 the mentioned passage offers an original take on the kind of mysticism that is difficult to discern from nihilism, as he hopes to become an inanimate object. In sum, the protagonist functions as a vessel for a broad thanatological spectrum, where Schopenhauer’s conscious volition and Freud’s unfathomable drive coexist. In the light of the protagonist’s fascination with death and his lukewarm faith in an afterlife, the criticism of the German clergy, Goeze and Ernesti, appears entirely plausible. Their idea that the book is ‘an apology and recommendation of suicide’ leads into the heart of the text, perhaps more so than sanguine readers, convinced by the protagonist’s misconceptions about life, are willing to admit. From a Schopenhauerian perspective, Werther is a paragon of the dilemma that life, while full of allure and beauty, is not worth living. And from a Freudian perspective, he appears like a living example of man’s innate desire to become inorganic, once again.

It is evident that Korff’s and Kamei’s thanatological interpretations, despite their shortcomings, are not outlandish examples of misunderstanding or overinterpretation but rather connect the book to a philosophical discourse on the questionable value of life. Criticism’s uneasiness with this aspect is hardly a unique feature of Goethe studies but conforms with the questionable status of death-focused philosophies at large. In psychoanalysis, the death drive was – with the exception of Melanie Klein – rejected by analysts, who found its clinical applications highly contentious and criticised its bleak outlook on life.42 The same tendency also shows in the legacy of Schopenhauer’s work, as pessimism’s fatalistic acquiescence to the wretchedness of existence conflicted with the grand projects, both liberal and socialist, concerning the transformation, development and progress of mankind in the 19th and 20th centuries.43 The obvious exceptions to this rule are E. M. Cioran, who openly praised enlightened death as salvation;44 Michel Foucault, who considered suicide both an act of political empowerment and an art form;45 and David Benatar, who describes the act as possibly ‘more rational than continuing to exist’.46

The French Romantics

The pessimism inside Werther became a key ingredient of the text’s rewritings that subjected it to a grafting process that rendered the protagonist’s death-driven behaviour starkly visible. This section discusses the strand of letters written by French Romantics, a lineage that includes Chateaubriand’s René (1802), Senancour’s Obermann (1804) and Constant’s Adolphe (1816). Although comparative studies dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, intent on documenting Franco-German transcultural encounters, devoted considerable attention to this lineage, they show little inclination to focus on thanatological elements.47 In recent years, the lineage has also been discussed by Bernard Dieterle, who elaborates on the continuity between Werther and different strands of reception in France, and Anna Sennefelder’s study, which focuses on leisure as their overarching theme.48 To emphasise the continuity between Goethe and authors such as Senancour challenges a habit that stands at the heart of German Germanistik, to place Goethe in pronounced opposition to the Romantics. From a European perspective, however, the poet plays a central role in the movement. Next to Faust, Werther is considered integral to its inventory of themes and motifs. Within this diffuse body of texts, however, an important distinction must be made between sentimental and thanatological wertherisme.

In Madame de Staël’s case, borrowings from Goethe reveal themselves in the author’s aesthetic ideals as well as in the tropes of her own novels, such as Delphine (1802).49 Meanwhile, Stendhal’s essay collection On Love (De l’Amour, 1822) also avoids taking note of the book’s pessimism. The focus is on the protagonist’s personal fulfilment in his pursuit of the sublime spectacle: ‘Love à la Werther […] causes man to find happiness even without riches.’50 The following three texts go quite the opposite way. They put forward a grafted idea of Goethe’s novel, in which interpersonal love plays a subordinate role. Instead, Ossianic moods, the tragic end and the protagonist’s ennui take centre stage, thereby coupling the text with Catholic narratives of worldly transience and spiritual salvation.

René, a Catholic Werther (Chateaubriand)

Chateaubriand’s René stands at the beginning of the text’s thanatological reinterpretation. While the short novel ‘updates Werther in an American setting’,51 the New World does not recommend itself as a refuge of liberty as seen in other French novels of the time.52 With a protagonist who suffers from unfulfilled love, harbours suicidal thoughts and articulates his lamentation in highly aestheticised prose, Chateaubriand isolates familiar elements from the German text. This also applies to the typical blurring between literature and life, as the public imagination merged François-René (the author) and René (the protagonist) into a striking and colourful image, which Eléonore Zimmermann’s 1959 study outlined as ‘the classical picture of a short, elegant Chateaubriand with beautifully chiselled features and wind-blown hair, who stands alone, amidst the rocks, facing the ocean’. As a consequence, the ‘lonely, misunderstood genius in dialogue with vastness’53 dominated the reception of a text that is more complicated than this image suggests. In addition, the short text has a complex editorial history. First published independently in 1802, it was also included in the late prose poem Les Natchez, published in 1826. The author also provided a piece of self-commentary on René in his Christian treatises of the 1800s. As the following analysis will demonstrate, the author’s editorial efforts were guided by the ambition to neutralise the kind of Wertherian death-fixation that makes the text relevant for the present study.

Made aware of her brother’s suicidal state, Amélie rushes to meet him. After she wrings the promise from him that he would never commit the sin of suicide, they rekindle their friendship until he learns that Amélie is about to take her vows. The ceremony of her initiation as a nun sends both into a paroxysm, as a quasi-erotic scene develops between them. Then, after her premature death, René realises: ‘God had sent Amélie both to save and to punish me.’58 This painful state of sorrow, however, gradually transforms into a sober mindset that allows him to accept life’s misery as an unchangeable fact. René’s confession ends abruptly. After patiently hearing out the young man’s soliloquy, the priest scolds him for his excessive emotionality. The old native, the other listener, joins in and reminds René: ‘[Y]‌ou must renounce this freakish life which is filled with nothing but sorrow. There is only happiness in following the ordinary path.’59 After the young man’s assurance that he will change his ways, the reader learns that René and his two interlocutors died during an unspecified massacre.

Chateaubriand characterises people such as Werther and René as weak and in need of a cure. They are the products of the moral corruption pioneered in Rousseau’s Confessions, the book that inaugurated the cult of aesthetic individualism, a malady that Chateaubriand finds can only be remedied by religion. Placed into the pious narrative of the individual soul’s journey towards grace and salvation, René’s aimless wandering is reframed as a quest for God. The protagonist thus becomes emblematic of French society which, having lost its spiritual moorings in the wake of the revolution, is now in need of a Catholic renaissance. In this light, eccentric individuals such as René and Werther must not be regarded as exceptional humans but are, as Jean-Marie Roulin proposes, ‘exempla of the greatness and benefits of Catholicism’.63

Inserted into the Natchez cycle of 1826, Chateaubriand further advanced his Catholic interpretation of René. Rousseauian idealisations of nature – evident in René’s exclamation: ‘Happy Savages! Oh! Why can’t I enjoy the peace that ever accompanies you!’64 – are now replaced with Augustinian dualism. As both Indians and settlers are portrayed as possessed by evil, the fall of man dominates the narrative.65

Satanic rage

Strikingly, René’s speech oscillates between first and third person. This effect not only facilitates the typical inversion of self and landscape, as the volcano’s crater resembles the inner abyss and vice versa, but also marks René’s determination to cast himself as an exceptional personality. Such fits of vanity are an integral effect of the text’s aesthetic programme, which in fact undermines the author’s alleged intention ‘to elaborate on the disastrous consequences of love’. Surprisingly, critics rarely find this tension problematic. According to Sébastien Baudoin, Chateaubriand’s literary style captivates the reader through an overload of imagery that aims to re-enchant the world: ‘By invoking, summoning and transcribing reality according to his inner world, Chateaubriand achieves an alchemy of style that facilitates enchantment.’67 Moreover, ‘[t]‌he poet knows how to grasp the totality of reality’.68 Even the poet’s references to Catholicism are discussed in affirmative terms, for example in Jean-Baptiste Amadieu’s recent study.69

There are considerable differences between René’s alleged Christian awakening, which Sainte-Beuve safely ignores, and the morbid framework, which the critic considers central to understanding the Romantic’s work. Under a thin layer of spirituality, argues Saint-Beuve, hides a deluded character who is not simply pathologically weak, like his German predecessor, but reveals a diabolic narcissism that goes as far as desiring the apocalyptic destruction of the world. Drawing on a particular scene in the sequel Les Natchez, in which René urges his native wife to follow him into death, Sainte-Beuve observes a typical pattern: ‘That’s how he [i.e. Chateaubriand] adds a new touch to passion, a new connotation that is fatal, mad, cruel but singularly poetic: he always brings in a pledge, a burning desire for the destruction and ruination of the world.’72 The author’s habit of returning to his favourite themes, death and destruction, and reverting to a ‘specific satanic rage’73 with epicurean joy represent the central ethos of his works. Chateaubriand’s ostentatious Catholicism, argues Sainte-Beuve, conceals an idée fixe: death less as a gateway to salvation than as a source of joy.

Polemics aside, Sainte-Beuve’s take on René is compatible with Freud’s assertion of a universal death drive, a mute and unrelenting force. Condensed in a biographic tale, René’s death drive sets into motion a spectacular project that involves both self-destructive impulses and aggression against the external world. On closer inspection, René’s alleged piety becomes a mere distraction from his deeper-seated conviction that humans have little reason to praise God’s creation. And that there is glory in its erasure.

At this point, one can detect an important distinction between the assessment of René and Werther in literary histories. Although both protagonists gravitate towards death and barely manage to conceal their death drives through hasty references to the Almighty, critics have judged their subjective excess differently. Observations that in Werther’s case frequently incur negative judgement, especially in consideration of his solipsistic subjectivity, are a positive factor in the analysis of René. Only sardonic readers such as Sainte-Beuve spotted the traces of a sinister core that stubbornly resists integration into religious redemption. A possible explanation for this discrepancy is the lingering appeal of author-sanctioned interpretations, as both Goethe and Chateaubriand retrospectively sought to reclaim their texts’ meaning: while the German poet condemned his early novels, his French successor asserted its compatibility with his later convictions. But there is also another reason for the greater tolerance for René’s self-indulgent subjectivity. As the following subchapter shows, Chateaubriand and subsequent French Romantics built on an intellectual tradition that attributed more credibility to the pain of the suffering individual than the austere climate of the German Enlightenment.

Ennui

On the surface, René’s happiness is thwarted by the incest taboo which forbids him to consummate his love for Amélie. Amid the global success of sentimentalist letters, incest frequently resulted in tragic constellations, causing the promise of fulfilled love to turn into bitterness. Another example is William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, or: The Triumph of Nature (1789), an American epistolary novel that centres around the lovers Harriot and Harrington. First unaware of their kinship, they belatedly learn of the illicit nature of their bond. After their forced separation Harrington kills himself with a copy of Werther lying by his side.74

The example of The Power of Sympathy highlights the lack of an exhaustive explanation for René’s pain. For long periods, the protagonist does not occupy himself much with Amélie, supposedly the source of his sorrows. Only belatedly does he become aware that ‘her soul possessed the same innocent graces as her body’,75 an observation that stirs his feeling so violently that he faints during her ordination as a nun. Since the bleakness of René’s outlook on life cannot be explained away with linear cause and effect, it is worthwhile to relate his suffering to a cultural trope that precedes the love discourse of the late 18th century: ennui.

In Pascal’s eyes, this dire situation applies to privileged and wretched members of society alike. As a Christian thinker, he arrives at the conclusion that ennui serves the higher purpose of guiding the godless back into the arms of God. Meanwhile, those who refuse to seek spiritual consolation are condemned to distract themselves with worldly entertainment. While Pascal’s diagnosis of ennui passed the test of time, the growing secularisation of intellectual life, especially after the upheavals of the French Revolution, made his solution questionable and left a vacuum that was filled by the aestheticism of the 19th century. According to Richard Scholar’s analysis of the term, ‘ennui mutated thereafter with succeeding shifts in literary sensibility all the way to the fin de siècle’.77 While the treatments of such symptoms vary considerably between Pascal and the Romantics, the symptoms indicate a continued experience of existential pain. As Georges Minois’s comprehensive study of mal de vivre demonstrates, the dismissive view of existence goes by many terms, including taedium vitae, melancholia, acedia, pessimism, ennui, spleen, despair, depression, nihilism and nausea. Ultimately, all these terms address a shared phenomenon across time and cultures.78 As the quote from Oedipus at Colonus already suggested at the beginning of this chapter, there lies considerable discomfort in being human.

Despite these general terms, the ennui of the Romantics features a number of specific traits. In contrast to Chateaubriand’s self-interpretation, which follows in Pascal’s footsteps, Senancour and Constant hesitated to invoke Catholicism as an answer to the spiritual crises of the 19th century. To them, ennui is the emotional marker of a crisis that goes unmitigated for a lack of convincing solutions. In contrast to the political agitation seen in revolutionary Werther reinterpretations, this set of texts abstains from committing to any socialist or patriotic agenda.

Obermann’s ascetic nihilism (Senancour)

Next to René, the other French text that most visibly transplants Wertherian motifs into a dark Romantic setting is Senancour’s Obermann. The epistolary novel features the letters of a young man who retreats from social life at the tender age of twenty-one. Reminiscent of Werther’s escape from the city and René’s frustration with Paris, he can no longer bear society: ‘I saw that I was out of harmony with society, that my needs were not in touch with its handiwork. I checked myself with terror, feeling that I was on the verge of giving up my life to intolerable weariness, to a loathing without aim and without end.’79 Following Rousseau’s solitary walker, as prefigured in The Reveries of a Solitary Walker (Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, 1776–8), to Switzerland, he hopes to revel in nature’s ‘romantic effects [which] alone keep fresh in our hearts the bloom of youth and the springtime of life’ (O II, 9). Here, he finds in the Alps’ icy peaks the perfect emblem of his desire to choke off his will to live. After a while, however, the charm of this spectacular backdrop wears off. Time and again, his disgust for the world reappears, and so he laments: ‘Why is the earth thus disenchanted to my eyes? It is not satiety that I feel; on all sides I find a void’ (O II, 6). The text repeatedly discusses suicide as an option but, perhaps lacking an immediate occasion, ultimately eschews this drastic solution. The last pages of the book conclude with the complaint that already inaugurated Obermann’s journey: ‘Nothing occupies me, nothing interests me; I still feel as though I were suspended in the void’ (O II, 187). There is certainly a comic aspect to such repetitiveness, yet the text features no stylistic signals that hint at humorous undercurrents.

After this passage, the letter writer restrains his register again, returning to his habitual statements about the vanity of existence. In contrast to Werther, Jacopo and René, Obermann successfully keeps all upsurges of hopefulness and passionate longing in check.

Obermann invokes the ideal of a disillusioned state of mind, as pursued by the mystic strands of the world religions, though without seeking solace in transcendence. Senancour’s protagonist stresses that he has no interest in discussing the ‘incomprehensible questions’ (O I, 132) of religion, such as the scandalous dissonance between God’s perfect creation and its wretchedness. Unfazed by the soothing prospect of salvation, Obermann regards ascetism, a value more commonly found among the faithful than among worldly-minded people, as a formidable way of inhabiting the world. Despite the Stoic ring, his view steers clear of the positive values that are commonly associated with personal virtue ethics, such as bravery and justice. Obermann focuses on self-control merely to avoid disappointment. Werther’s desire to achieve oneness with the world transforms into the asceticism of a nihilist.

Senancour’s unvarnished portrait of the individual’s dire prospects of reaching a tolerable state of mind is reminiscent of Schopenhauer, who also claimed that resignation, ‘the giving up not merely of life, but of the whole will’, is desirable. Schopenhauer also highlighted the continued relevance of Christianity and Buddhism without subscribing to their metaphysical speculation. In view of such parallels, scholars have drawn attention to the philosophical correspondences between the German thinker and the French poet, even though they never met and probably were ignorant of each other’s works.81 Regardless of the world’s provision of eternal pain and disappointment, both applaud those who withdraw from human affairs or, alternatively, lead an ascetic life far from the bustle of the city. Senancour knows: ‘A great man not only has not a passion for woman, for play, for wine, but I hold that he is not even ambitious’ (O I, 147).

This meditation culminates in Werther’s idea of a man who ‘preserves in his heart the sweet feeling of liberty, and knows that he can quit this prison whenever he likes’ (L 10). This mindset prefigures the worldview that ennui-afflicted Romantics across the Rhine would later cultivate: renunciation of the world sans transcendental escape routes. Life is only bearable as long as one can remind oneself of the substances, ropes or pistols that can end it. A few days later, however, Werther’s detached perspective is interrupted by the sight of Lotte cutting bread. What distinguishes him from Obermann is not so much a different outlook on the world but temperament. Although he has already tasted the bitterness of life, Werther cannot resist immersing himself in yet another passion.

Adolphe’s postcoital ennui (Constant)

At first glance, Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, written around 1806 and published in 1816, does not fit the profile of a Wertherian novel. At its conclusion, it is not the eponymous hero who commits suicide but Ellenore, his beloved. And yet Adolphe’s memoirs abound with self-reproach and indecisiveness alongside a characteristic fascination pour soi-même. As one of the most poignant rewritings of Goethe’s novel, it faces the protagonist with a scenario that is rare within the Werther nursery: the coincidence of sentimental love and sexual fulfilment.

As in Chateaubriand’s René, the first-person narrator indulges in lengthy reflections on his circ*mstances. Even as the narrative follows the events as they occur, the general tone is one of self-pity, self-accusation and loss. Adolphe’s initial misanthropy resembles that of the freshly arrived visitor in Wahlheim in many respects. He is a twenty-two-year-old aristocrat who, having just graduated from university, speaks from a perspective of precocious maturity and melodramatic solitude. At such a tender age, he already looks back at a life marred by self-doubt, missed opportunities and, as he repeatedly states, extraordinary vanity. He traces his long-standing melancholy to an early experience of loss: ‘This universal apathy of mine had been deepened by the thought of death which had haunted me from my earliest years. [….] When I was seventeen I had witnessed the death of an aged woman whose remarkable and highly original mind had begun to influence my own.’83 Like Werther’s elderly female friend, who also passed away prematurely, this woman had a lasting impact on Adolphe’s inner development. Devastated by her loss, he started to derive aesthetic enjoyment primarily from ‘the poets who dwelt upon the transitoriness of human life’ (A 40). It is safe to assume that Ossianic song formed part of his reading list. In contrast to Werther, however, who falls in love with Lotte rather spontaneously, Adolphe purposely seeks someone to love, hoping that amorous feelings will remedy his melancholic state of mind: ‘In my state of vague emotional torment I decided that I wanted to be loved, and looked about me. But I saw nobody who inspired love in me or looked likely to feel any’ (A 39). The situation changes when Count P—, a relative, introduces him to his mistress.

Ellenore, at the beginning of the novel already in her thirties and the mother of two children, is the daughter of deceased Polish aristocrats, who had lived in exile before their deaths. When she meets Adolphe, she is living in concubinage with Count P—, but since their relationship is on an unequal footing, Ellenore soon warms to Adolphe’s advances. His affection offers the promise of a more balanced relationship. Eventually, she leaves the count and their illegitimate children, somewhat to the embarrassment of Adolphe, who had thought of their affair in less absolute terms. Anxious not to hurt her feelings, however, he complies, and they elope together and settle down in Poland. Eventually, after years of endless quarrelling, he resolves to leave her. Shocked by his betrayal, she suffers a breakdown and dies a few days later. In his concluding remarks, the editor points out that ‘Adolphe has since been punished for his character by his very character, that he has kept to no fixed path, adopted no useful career, that he had used up his gifts with no sense of direction beyond mere caprice’. The story of Adolphe’s life, argues the editor, illustrates the idea that ‘[c]‌irc*mstances are quite unimportant, character is everything’ (A 125). How this snippet of Stoic wisdom should provide a satisfactory explanation for the hero’s life, however, is left to the reader’s imagination. Conversely, Adolphe’s ceaseless stream of self-doubt and irresolution provides little information about the text’s purpose.

In view of Adolphe, critics have established a positive connection between his personal affliction and socio-political issues. Joshua Landy, for example, argues that Constant sets out to expose the incompatibility of Rousseau’s confessional project and the soul’s inner dividedness, placing the ‘relentless, comprehensive, paralyzing doubt’84 at the heart of the narration that befalls the individual in the post-revolutionary world after 1789. In the same vein, Melanie Conroy wonders how Constant’s political treatises, such as On Political Reactions (Des réactions politiques, 1796), relate to the novel. She finds that Adolphe, who rejects all social norms and tries to be utterly modern, is unable to find a moral compass outside traditional systems.85 Instead of treating the protagonist’s mental state of doubt and paralysis as an indication of an incurable, pathological deficit, both Landy and Conroy find that it points to something more comprehensive. After the collapse of the Ancien Régime and the value systems that accompanied monarchic rule, the world has become destabilised for good. While Chateaubriand could make himself believe that a return to the certainties of the past is desirable, Constant’s Adolphe is a truer inhabitant of the new secular age. Not having yet reached an Obermannian detachment, he still hopes that salvation lies in the promise of sentimental love. While Constant’s political thought certainly plays a role in Adolphe, the protagonist’s struggle with the modern condition deserves to be taken at face value – as a question that concerns the possibility of love.

Constant’s emphasis on the fragility of amorous feelings – resembling faint embers rather than blazing fires – recalls Werther’s letter dating from 29 July 1772, when he starts to wax melodramatic about his love for Lotte, then closes abruptly: ‘I have been interrupted by an insufferable visitor. I have dried my tears; my thoughts are elsewhere’ (L 53). Haverkamp, as discussed in Chapter 1, granted this scene a central role, concluding that the lover’s feelings are a mere product of letter-writing.

For Constant’s novel, this observation is of great value. In view of the dynamics of the protagonist’s inner life, Tzvetan Todorov has already singled out that Adolphe merely talks himself into his passion, to the effect that his shaky infatuation spoils the triumph of his courtship.86 At first, Adolphe celebrates his conquest, exclaiming triumphantly: ‘I loved and respected Ellenore a thousand times more after she had given herself to me. […] I eagerly went out to meet nature and thank her for the immense and unhoped-for gift she had deigned to bestow on me’ (A 62). After some time, however, he shares the satiety of Don Juan, though without the latter’s ability to move on after each conquest. Instead, he finds himself dragged into a vortex of self-reproach and pity for Ellenore. At this point, Adolphe’s meandering thoughts emulate a familiar pattern of indecision, the Either–Or formula. In the case of Werther, this formula indicated a situation when two logical options are true: he does have hopes, and he does not. Adolphe’s case is different: he must leave Ellenore, and he cannot bring himself to hurt her.

Conroy’s study considers such sudden changes of mind as an integral structural feature of Adolphe’s inability to think logically. The cascading syntax of his writing follows a repetitive pattern: ‘First Adolphe thinks of his current emotions, then “les sentiments contraires.” […] Even when it builds to a crescendo, another shift in perspective cannot be far off. More worryingly still, it embeds multiple points of view without synthesizing them.’87 Implicit in Conroy’s diagnosis is a cure for the young man’s paralysis. Drawing on a concept that Constant has articulated in his philosophical writings, she recommends that Adolphe mediate between abstraction and everyday life through intermediary principles (‘principes intermédiaires’). This proposition reinforces the perspective of the text’s fictional editor, who asserts that ‘character is everything’, yet this viewpoint ignores the anthropological problem that discussions of ennui capture so well. Certainly, for someone who subscribes to Enlightenment values and who believes in the advancement of civilisation through rationalism alone, intermediary principles could provide sufficient guidance. But for someone whose reality is grounded in Pascal’s observation that ‘[n]‌othing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study’ and that in such circ*mstance ‘he then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness’, intermediary principles will have little effect on his mental ability to act more prudently. After all, Adolphe’s original motivation to throw himself into a vortex of contradictory emotions serves the purpose of distraction. Aware of his own morbid fascination with death, his career as a lover gravitates around the observation that desperate measures, such as suicide, are possibly the only solution for human disquiet.

Against this backdrop, it becomes evident that the protagonist’s affair with Ellenore helps to prevent the young man from falling back into a ‘universal apathy’ and the recurring ‘thought of death’. For the duration of their relationship, he must no longer browse through tomes of melancholic poetry. Towards the end of their relationship, however, his death-fixated thoughts reappear, proving that there is no escape from the insights that have driven Obermann to abandon all hopes of finding happiness. Adolphe sighs: ‘Ah, enough of these useless struggles! […] The thought of death has always had great power over me. In my keenest afflictions it has always sufficed to calm me at once, and now it produced its usual effect upon my soul’ (A 97). After Ellenore’s pitiful death, the narrative ends but Adolphe’s life continues. Will he now pay heed to the editor’s voice or transform into a dispassionate ‘man of strong organization’ who sublimates all ambition? Since the editor assures the reader that Adolphe was ‘punished for his character by his very character’, this is unlikely. Instead, he seems prone to repeat the initial situation of the novel once more. Given to melancholy after the loss of his greatest love, he hopes to overcome his sorrows by falling in love with another woman. In this light, it could appear that ascetism and one’s commitment to distraction are not that different after all. They both articulate the same kind of existential despair.

Observations on the French lineage

According to French Wertherian texts, one should not overstate the relevance of romantic love for a joyful life. In fact, a person’s prospect for happiness is lastingly compromised by giving in to false hopes. In Chateaubriand’s novel, René is driven to despair by his incestuous love for Amélie; in Senancour’s novel, Obermann’s widowed Madame Del***, who had been married off to another man, cannot remedy past injury; and Adolphe despairs over his fickle feelings for Ellenore that provide mere distraction instead of salvation. Possibly the most shocking aspect of Constant’s novel is the insight that it makes no difference whether a lover succeeds or fails to fulfil his desire. It turns out that a successful suitor suffers from the same weariness of life that plagues the others. Love can only temporarily prevent those young men from realising the meaninglessness of life. After Pascal’s pious solution to this dilemma became obsolete, the hope for a joyful existence could no longer be deferred to an afterlife but needed to be situated within this-worldly immanence. According to French Wertherian writing, whether one follows Werther’s example by cutting the thread of life or hangs on to it like a dying person is simply a matter of personal preference. To overcome suffering is not simply a question of waiting until personal growth renders such questions obsolete, as the later Goethe made his readers believe, but rather of accepting life in a barren world.

Apart from such uncompromising insights, thanatological Werther rewritings evince a somewhat surprising conservatism. Regardless of the changed circ*mstances after 1789, Chateaubriand, Senancour and Constant do not contaminate their plots with socio-political agendas. While Foscolo’s rewriting embedded Jacopo’s suffering in a programmatic pre-Risorgimento setting, Chateaubriand’s René does not mention the circ*mstances that facilitate his return to Paris. He would not dream of digressing from his self-centred laments by elaborating on the ‘nincompoops, scoundrels and villains’ whom Jacopo accuses of betraying Italy. Neither Obermann nor Adolphe connects their individual lives with the fates of their nations. The only indication that things are not well in the protagonists’ homelands is that they consistently recede from Paris, the centre of French cultural and intellectual life, in favour of rural surroundings, such as René’s America, Obermann’s Switzerland and Adolphe’s Poland. That said, those young men do not simply form part of toxic peer groups, penniless aristocrats with a hang-up for narcissistic monologue, but are metonymic for post-revolutionary society at large.

Such abstinence from socio-political commentary is surprising in the light of the biographies of all three authors, whose lives were defined by the experience of political exile. Senancour found himself exiled during the French Revolution, and Constant was banned from Paris during the reign of Napoleon. In the case of Chateaubriand, who as a nobleman also found himself exiled during the French Revolution, Roulin goes as far as stating that his Romanticism is ‘inseparable from [his] political life and history’.88 Chateaubriand’s return to France would eventually culminate in the opposite ascetic withdrawal: he was appointed the Foreign Minister of France. Yet all three authors carefully avoid referencing political events; instead, they portray suffering in the world as the conditio humana. Since there is no escape from the iron laws of reality, one can only seek alleviation, not salvation.

In literary history, the topical nexus of retreat from society, suicidal thoughts and relentless ennui did not end with Werther’s French revenants but developed a life of its own in décadence literature. In this context, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against the Grain (À rebours, 1884) and André Gide’s Notebooks of André Walter (Les Cahiers d’André Walter, 1890) represent the final ripples of Werther’s impact on the French lineage. In these texts, the editorial frames disappear along with the flimsy moral messages of the discussed novels, facilitating a luxuriant aestheticism replete with irony and elitist gestures. Inheriting the grandiloquence of René, Obermann’s serenity and Adolphe’s stubbornness, Huysmans and Gide redeem Korff’s notion of a Werther who embraces ‘the world-building power of the subject’.

The lineage that connects Werther to French Romanticism ends here, as the set of shared features thins out considerably. Jean des Esseintes, Huysmans’s ennui-ridden aesthete, no longer retreats from society into wilderness but creates his splendid refuge on the margins of the bustling city of Paris, where he embarks on bizarre intellectual and artistic projects. Rather than tiring himself writing letters, a third-person narrator puts an end to the confessional project. And most importantly, décadence writers depart from the rational order that, despite all subjective excesses, holds together the Werther nursery. From this point on, the disintegrating forces of the death drive find new modes of aesthetic expression and dissolve into proto-surreal scenes that no longer observe the unity of action.

Modern Japanese suicides

In Europe, the success of Werther in French and English letters came with exoticist undertones. Stendhal, for example, considered ‘love à la Werther[,]‌ in which a man has no idea where he is going’,89 as an ideal that contrasts favourably with the type of love practised elsewhere. Unafraid of generalisations, Stendhal stated that while Italians exhaust their feelings in mere passion and the French in plain vanity, ‘the good and simple descendants of the ancient Germans are assuredly creatures of imagination’.90 Considering German love to be the most congenial, the French author ostentatiously identified with the protagonist of Goethe’s novel.91

One can expect that the book’s exotic appeal was even more pronounced in Japan. And yet it was consistently read in a way that ignored the frictions between the German novel and the Japanese literary field. According to Kamei Katsuichirō’s Education of Man, discussed at the beginning of this chapter, Werther shows that ‘the most beautiful moment of life – that is, love – blossoms in the proximity of death’; after all, ‘truth lies in one’s own annihilation’. Regardless of scholarly reservations about such idiosyncratic views, Kamei’s interpretation is consistent with the general trajectory of literary adaptations and continuations of Werther by Japanese writers during the 20th century. One of the most obvious choices for a comparison, Yoichi Nakagawa’s A Moonflower in Heaven (天の夕顔 Ten no yūgao, 1938), relates a tale of unfulfilled love, in which a lover waits for twenty years for the consummation of his relationship with his beloved, only for her to die on the day of their awaited reunion. Since the purity of their love is not challenged at any point, Yoichi’s book resembles German or English sentimental rewritings of Goethe’s book. The texts that are most congenial to the French thanatological lineage are Sōseki Natsume’s Kokoro (こころ, 1914) and Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human (人間失格 Ningen shikkaku, 1948), which provide compelling variations on the bleak themes and motifs of Wertherian literature.

Just like in China and Korea, Werther was embraced as an integral part of the Western literary canon in Japan. Amid the dizzying speed of reform enforced across the country after 1868, the works of foreign poets and writers entered the country as a by-product of administrative and military reform.92 Unlike their East Asian neighbours, Japanese writers had no great interest in identifying the sorrows of Werther as a cue for socio-political reform. Instead, foreign works offered the possibility to address the psychological conflicts that typically play out in a modern society in a more direct way than traditional Japanese literature allowed.

The mentioned students – one can think of Kamei – eventually turned into critics and writers. In view of the text’s success among the Japanese Romantic School (日本浪曼派 Nihon romanha), Kevin M. Doak makes a similar argument: ‘Werther’s dilemma is not the exclusive property of the West […] but belongs to every Japanese who has tried to come to terms with the origin of his own modernity.’95

There is a considerable discrepancy between Hutchinson’s postcolonial stance, which plays down direct Western influences, and Miyash*ta and Doak’s stress on the impact of Werther on Japanese letters. Arguably, both claims are excessively reductive and fail to take into account the bidirectional complexity of cross-cultural grafting. The saturation of Japanese literature with intertextual references to Western novels and poetry clashes with Hutchinson’s idea of their firm rejection; likewise, to claim that Werther holds universal appeal for ‘young people of all ages’ ignores the book’s malleability, which allowed different audiences to hold vastly different ideas of Werther.

The late Donald H. Shivley proposed a third view on Japanese transcultural products that also corresponds to the proposed idea of grafting. In view of the tension between aesthetic imitation and assimilation to native traditions, Shivley observes: ‘Japanese literature was transformed, in large measure under the influence of Western models; we find, however, that the products are more Japanese than they seemed at first glance.’96 This observation is consistent with a typical feature of transcultural migration, suggesting that literary reception on the island kingdom is not that exceptional after all. As the French Werther lineage demonstrates, such imports inevitably suffer some damage – at least if one agrees with the orthodoxy that dominates a text’s reception in its original culture.

While Sōseki leaves the value of Western letters unchallenged, he rejects the general assumption that a text’s native audience – its so-called intended audience – has better access to a text’s meaning. Invoking the turbulent reception of Macpherson’s The Works of Ossian, he argues that literary histories do not provide reliable assessments. After the bardic text originally attracted eminent readers in Europe – Sōseki points out that Goethe and Napoleon both loved it – it eventually fell into disgrace. Considering such fickle judgement, Sōseki is adamant that Japanese readers should avoid emulating established aesthetic judgements; instead, the point of reading foreign literature is to ‘evaluate it based on our own feelings (insofar as our feelings are actually provoked by it)’.98 Sōseki’s proposition is entirely congenial with the present methodology of grafting, as it places emphasis on selective appropriation without forgetting about the ruptures incurred by this process.

Sensei’s mythology of self-murder (Sōseki)

Critical analyses of Werther and Sōseki’s Kokoro have asserted their comparability in many ways. Evelyn Zgraggen, for example, states that ‘it is probable that he [i.e. Sōseki] read the whole Werther when he wrote Kokoro’.99 Yet this kind of speculation seems gratuitous when one keeps in mind that classics such Werther had inscribed themselves in confessional literature by the early 20th century in the most general terms. Its combination of motifs – unrequited love, misanthropy, loneliness and suicide – had reappeared in multiple variations throughout the 19th century, not least in French literature, and this literary figuration was eagerly reproduced and transformed by Japanese modernists who set out to portray the lifeworlds of culturally uprooted individuals.

In addition to parallels on the level of theme and structure, A. Owen Aldridge points to the two texts’ transhistorical and transcultural similarities, arguing that both protest against the optimistic spirit of political reform: ‘It has frequently been said that Goethe’s intention was to combat the notion of the 18th-century Enlightenment that all is right with the world. Sōseki delivered the same message over a century later.’100 Doris Bargen also draws on this assumed compatibility when she describes the suicide of K, one of Sōseki’s protagonists, as ‘a typically romantic Werther-like response to unrequited love’.101 Such analogies are helpful to place both texts within a shared thanatological framework, in which the wishes of the individual collide with the demands of society. But in order to move beyond a trivial comparison, one must also carefully distinguish between the two protagonists in Kokoro, Sensei and K. Their unhappy biographies inherit the complex legacy of thanatological discourse in different ways, a distinction that marks the transition from honour-based to more subjectively motivated suicides.

The story of Kokoro is told by an anonymous narrator who befriends Sensei, a middle-aged man who bears within himself a dark secret. While the first two parts of the novel relate the narrator’s evolving friendship with the secretive man, the last part contains the latter’s life confession, a detailed suicide letter. Sensei looks back at many disappointments with the world and himself. His first setback is when he loses his parents, an event that exposes the young man to the schemes of his uncle, who cheats him out of his inheritance. As a student in Tokyo, he feels repelled by the upbeat community at the students’ dormitory, so he boards with a mature woman and Shizu, her daughter. He develops feelings for the young girl but cannot bring himself to open up to her at first: ‘[M]‌y heart was by now deeply ingrained with distrust. I opened my mouth to speak, then stopped and deliberately shifted the direction of the conversation elsewhere.’102 Later on, K, a friend from the university (who bears no relation to Kafka’s eponymous character), moves in with them. K also falls for Shizu, turning the two friends into fierce competitors, before Sensei can eventually secure the consent of the girl’s mother. A few days later, he discovers the lifeless body of K, who has taken his own life. Sensei carries on with his marriage plans with Shizu nonetheless. As time passes, he finds it increasingly difficult to come to terms with his friend’s death, feeling he is now fated to live as a ‘walking mummy doomed to remain in the human world’ (121). He further withdraws from society, also keeping this episode a secret from his wife. The purpose of his testament is ‘to present both the good and bad in my life, for others to learn from’ (233). As a belated atonement for his betrayal, Sensei vows to kill himself upon finishing his confession.

Sōseki’s text is an elaborate adaptation of Werther’s love triangle with a notable twist. After young, hot-headed K has committed suicide, a more profound tragedy unfolds in the life of the supposedly lucky man who marries the beloved. Sensei, a melancholic revenant of Albert, is haunted by the events that led up to the supposed joys of love. Regardless of such remarkable connecting threads, Margaret Hillenbrand finds it somewhat ‘disturbing’103 that such comparisons gloss over the vastly different socio-historical situations that have shaped the two texts. Indeed, if we assume that Werther and Kokoro are documents of epochal tensions, as Aldridge asserts, this comparison merely states that history repeats itself – and literature as well. In the present study, Werther and Kokoro are placed in dialogue nevertheless. The idea is that their shared attention to world-weariness and suicide offers a unique opportunity to explore the congeniality between a non-orthodox strand of Werther criticism (Korff, Kamei) and the novel of an author who proposed to ‘use’ Western literary models without concern for what the ‘English say about English literature’. Arguably, this also applies to what the ‘Germans say about German literature’.

In reaction to his friend’s admonishment, K decides to overcome his lowly passions. It is consistent that K’s suicide letter makes no mention of Shizu at all but references an abstract struggle. K paraphrases its content: ‘He was committing suicide […] because he was weak and infirm of purpose, and because the future held nothing for him. […] With the last of the brush’s ink, he had added that he should have died sooner and did not know why he had lived so long’ (217).

Liberation through suicide

According to Sensei’s account, K found himself at odds with a society that was embracing egotism and materialism. His conflict, however, was not the experience of the simpleton who, lacking intellectual curiosity or ability, fell behind the advances of modernity. Quite the contrary, K diligently expanded his horizon by studying non-Japanese belief systems, such as Christianity and Islam. His quest for transcendental meaning, however, exacerbated his alienation from an environment that had, in contrast to himself, abandoned spiritual meaning altogether. Confronted with Shizu’s seductive presence and his friend’s treachery, he falls into a void: ‘With his eyes fixed on the past, he had no choice but to continue along its trajectory’ (206). But is K really the passive agent in a process that drives him to commit suicide?

Criticism on Kokoro usually follows the interpretative guidance provided by Sensei’s testament. David Pollack, for example, links Sōseki to the post-war writer Yukio Mishima, who also regretted the breakdown in human relations in the wake of the country’s modernisation.105 In the same vein, Hosea Hirata finds that Kokoro documents the suspension of the traditional social structure of home.106 Although it is impossible to overestimate the effects of Japan’s rapid modernisation on the individual psyche, literary suicides do not automatically indicate a person who fails to face up to a cruel environment. The opposite may be true, as Korff’s and Kamei’s interpretations of Werther indicate.

Within K’s value system, suicide is an appropriate response to the unbearable challenge of living in an evil age. K looks at the world through a prism of an anti-sensualist doctrine that celebrates the individual’s heroic triumph over the samsara (輪廻 rinne), the karmic cycle of the lowly material world.107 His unabated spiritual inclinations are revealed when he visits the birthplace of Nichiren, one of the most important figures of Japanese spirituality, and promptly engages the head priest in a long conversation. In the light of this background, his decision to take his own life is not the ‘typically romantic Werther-like response to unrequited love’, as Bargen argues, but points to a rigid metaphysical project. So is K an exemplary Buddhist believer?

If we go by Sensei’s account, K is more interested in ascetism itself than in the promised rewards of a virtuous lifestyle. One is reminded of Schopenhauer and Senancour, who found that many world religions converge in their recommendation of ascetism in reaction to the pain of existence. In this context, the idea of metaphysical salvation appears secondary to the true purpose of religion. Reminiscent of the German philosopher’s views, K appears convinced that the world holds nothing but ‘unspeakable pain, the wretchedness and misery of mankind, the triumph of wickedness, the scornful mastery of chance, and the irretrievable fall of the just and the innocent’. One may also speculate that K, like Senancour’s Obermann, is inclined to think that a ‘great man not only has not a passion for woman, for play, for wine, but I hold that he is not even ambitious’. Taking K’s convictions seriously, it becomes clear that the usual culmination of boy-meets-girl narratives, the consummation of love, would only place K in an even greater dilemma. After all, the only freedom accessible to humans is resignation. While modern readers will object to his values, K’s story relates the positive tale of how the young man overcame his passion for Shizu so that he could free himself from the material world. Rather than failing in life, K fulfils the central purpose of Buddhist philosophy, as he attains a spiritual state in which suffering stops.

In contrast to K’s suicide, which is vindicated by his spiritual ambitions, Sensei’s death is more difficult to relate to a philosophical conviction. Indeed, Alan S. Wolfe points out that the clarity of purpose typical of traditional forms of suicide in Japan is here replaced by obscurity.108 In view of his behaviour towards K, it appears that pragmatic self-interest guides his actions, a trait that makes him a perfect exponent of modernity’s egotism and materialism. He certainly feels guilt about his involvement in his friend’s suicide, but he keeps his self-recriminations hidden from his environment, possibly hoping that they will disappear with time. For some time, Sensei manages to live a somewhat muted but tranquil life alongside the dutiful Shizu, who accepts his guarded personality without complaint.

After holding back his remorse over K’s death for decades, Sensei finds that he can no longer bear this state of suspension. Once he learns the news that Nogi Maresuke, a disgraced military general, committed seppuku, an inexorable mental process of transformation begins. Although Sensei does not identify with traditional martial values – in fact, he finds the general’s reasons hard to grasp – he is moved by his inner struggle. Nogi killed himself to atone for a martial defeat that he oversaw thirty years earlier, proving that self-murder must not always result from visceral impulses but can also result from profound meditation. Under the spell of Nogi’s belated atonement, Sensei’s sense of self-preservation vanishes. Like K, he is quite uninterested in the rewards that are promised to those who are willing to sacrifice themselves; but unlike K, he is not driven by ascetic ideals but simply seeks to neutralise the tension that torments him – not only since his friend’s suicide, but also since the death of his parents. Being cheated out of his inheritance, causing a friend’s death, consummating a marriage with a woman who forms part of this tragedy – Sensei comes to the realisation that the pain of existence overshadows the benefits of remaining alive. In writing down his testimony, he becomes the creator of his own ascetic creed. Told to the anonymous narrator, Sensei’s story will live on in the imagination of the next generation and provide a blueprint for future acts of self-sacrifice.

Interlude: suicide, nostalgia and the ‘I-novel’ (Mori, Akutagawa)

In the previous sections, Kamei’s celebratory account and K’s ascetic values were situated within the cultural paradigms that surround suicide in Japan. In the light of Sōseki’s enormous impact on Japanese modernism, it is not surprising that subsequent generations of writers also embraced this motif as a means of discussing the individual’s changing role in society. Such literary accounts of suicide do not present self-murder as the sweeping climax of an unhappy life but rather as part of a wide spectrum of motives. This spectrum ranges from ritualistic types of self-murder, such as seppuku (切腹), the ‘cutting of the abdomen’, to jisatsu (自殺), the ‘murder of the self’, a neutral expression that does not imply personal honour. Sōseki’s protagonists reconcile their individual desire to end their lives with collective ideas of honour-based suicide, but such holism is rare. The great majority of suicide-themed narratives feature examples that highlight either the collective or the psychological significance of the deed.

Mori Ōgai’s suicide stories, for example, celebrate the heroic death of warriors in the most un-Wertherian way. ‘The Last Testament of Okitsu Yagoemon’ (興津弥五右衛門の遺書 Okitsu Yagoemon no isho) of 1912 is a sober account of a man who resolves to kill himself because, as he believes, he must atone for the death of a warrior he killed in a duel. Similarly, ‘The Incident at Sakai’ (堺事件 Sakai jinken), first published in 1914, tells of eleven samurai who fulfil an ultimatum made by the French imperial army. Instead of waiting to be shot, they perform seppuku in front of their shocked audience. Set in a nostalgic version of the country’s historical past, Mori’s texts avoid psychologisation, the crucial element that Japanese modernist writers sought to assimilate from Western models.

While Mori’s stories contributed to what Keppler-Tasaki calls the ‘“suicide nation” self-image’ in modern Japan, the ‘I-novel’ (私小説 shishōsetsu) went to the other extreme. Emerging in reaction to epistemic uncertainty, the genre was characterised by the first-person narrator’s retreat from society to pursue uncompromising autobiographical accounts. With regard to Katai Tayama’s The Quilt (蒲団 Futon, 1907), the first representative novel of this kind, critics took note of the genre’s resemblance to European Romantic literature. Writing in the 1930s, Kobayashi Hideo observed that Katai borrowed from European classics, such as Goethe’s Werther, Senancour’s Obermann and Constant’s Adolphe. Regarding this lineage, Kobayashi identified all four authors’ confessional mindset as central to the genre.109 Indeed, there are many parallels between European Romantic literature and the Japanese I-novel, such as their meandering writing style and recurring motifs such as tragic love triangles.110

In Akutagawa’s text, global feelings like Sensei’s disappointment with mankind are replaced by incurable ennui. The preface categorises the text as a testament: ‘I am living now in the unhappiest happiness imaginable. Yet, strangely, I have no regrets. I just feel sorry for anyone unfortunate enough to have had a bad husband, a bad son, a bad father like me. So goodbye, then.’112 Apparently, the fifty-one fragments of the novel must be read as a highly stylised suicide letter. In contrast to the fictional status of Sōseki’s protagonists, Akutagawa stresses the autobiographical momentum of his text by signing the preface with his own name. And indeed, Life of a Stupid Man was published posthumously, after the writer took his own life at the age of thirty-six.

While the reception of Werther teaches that author and narrative voice should not be mixed up, the I-novel is a special case. Edward Seidensticker already stated that this genre centred on its authors ‘to an extreme that would not […] be tolerated elsewhere’,113 giving considerable credence to its autobiographical momentum. Further elaborating on this problematic connection, Miyoshi Masao made a pertinent observation about the genre’s teleological trajectory: ‘The I-novel reaches a dead end once the author’s life is completely exposed. [… [T]‌hus the shi-shōsetsu writer is never free of the temptation of suicide.’114 Indeed, extraliterary evidence supports Miyoshi’s observation. Akutagawa belongs to the dozens of prominent modern Japanese writers who committed suicide throughout the 20th century.115 This autobiographical nexus, however, should not distract from an inquiry into the spiritual crisis that contributed to the rise of literary suicide. In contrast to Sensei’s soul-searching, Akutagawa’s suicidal narrator does not single out specific events in his life that nurtured his taedium vitae. Only in passing does an acquaintance of the narrator, a madman, mention: ‘You and I are both possessed by a demon, […] the demon of the fin de siècle.’116 First published in 1927 and replete with references to French writers, Akutagawa’s ‘demon of the fin de siècle’117 evidently points to a European trope that was absorbed in Japan with some delay.118

For Japanese writers of the early 20th century – and, as the next section will show, even more so of the post-war era – the invocation of European predecessors was not as playful as their Chinese contemporaries’ cross-cultural references, such as Guo Moruo’s ecstatic invocations of Western novels (as described in Chapter 3). At a time when all certainties started to break away, Akutagawa’s ‘demon of the fin de siècle’ indicated that there exists an analogous experience in the West. But in contrast to Guo’s artistic apotheosis, there lies no sense of salvation in Akutagawa’s discovery.

In his meditations on nihilism, Nish*tani Keiji analyses the specific intellectual mood that befell writers in the post-Meiji period. Although he argues that nihilism is primarily a product that emerges from the Western philosophical tradition, Nish*tani stresses that European nihilism had a profound impact on Japanese thought. After having turned itself into an ‘offshoot of European culture’,119 Japan failed to take this legacy seriously enough for two reasons. Firstly, the crisis of Western thought, first diagnosed by Friedrich Nietzsche and Baudelaire, was late in reaching modern Japanese literati, who had by then already rested their thinking and aesthetics on shaky foundations. Secondly, while Western philosophers consciously inherited the crisis of their own philosophical tradition, Japan acquired those flawed foreign foundations in exchange for abandoning its own cultural heritage, Buddhism and Confucian thought. Amid this situation of cultural loss and exposure to corroded imports, the Japanese felt ‘a mood of resignation about having been born Japanese’ (177). Regardless of its European echoes, Akutagawa’s ‘demon of the fin de siècle’ indicates a uniquely Japanese experience of nihilism.

Yōzō’s nihilistic monism (Dazai)

Dazai Ozamu’s final novel, No Longer Human from 1948, is little known outside Japan but occupies, alongside Sōseki’s Kokoro, canonical status in modern Japanese literature today. Although it would be bold to assert a direct lineage between No Longer Human and French Romanticism, let alone Werther, Eugene Thacker’s book on pessimism mentions Dazai’s protagonist and Werther as analogous figures on a list of the twelve most representative books of pessimist writing.120 And indeed, significant Wertherian elements reappear in this novel: highly subjective prose, a poetics of suffering, the hope in salvation through the beloved and the individual’s apotheosis in death.

The Decadent School (無頼派 buraiha), among them Dazai as one of its ‘most nihilistic’121 members, emerged after Japan’s capitulation that ended the Pacific War (1941–5). By that time, the public had witnessed the dropping of two nuclear bombs, aerial firebombing and the collapse of the martial spirit that was so integral to Japan’s mythological self-image.122 Critics often note that the intellectual climate of the immediate post-war era was defined by resignation, nihilism and spiritual disorientation. Such sentiments placed writers in opposition to the country’s reorientation towards high-speed economic growth, making them weary of the ‘facade of buoyant optimism and progress that had so quickly taken hold after the war and defeat’.123 But beyond concrete observations of Japanese society’s failings, the novels of the Decadent School articulate the conviction that something is fundamentally wrong with human nature itself.

To answer this question, Yōzō begins with an unvarnished account of his childhood, when he experienced a world governed by lies and hypocrisy. This applies not only to his surroundings, but also to himself when he devises a superficially goofy persona to hide his fright before his family members. Later in life, when his father denies him the prospect of going to art school, the frustrated young man falls under the spell of Horiki, who introduces him to Tokyo’s demi-monde: ‘I soon came to understand that drink, tobacco and prostitutes were all excellent means of dissipating (even for a few moments) my dread of human beings’ (D 63). This phase culminates in his acquaintance with Tsuneko, an unhappily married woman, with whom he resolves to commit double suicide. They go into the water together – she dies but Yōzō survives.

In the aftermath of this event, he is expelled from college and disowned by his family. For some time, he earns a meagre living by drawing cartoons for magazines and leads the life of a kept man, until he finally meets Yoshiko, a simple girl. Tragically, her innocence also makes her vulnerable to rape, as a ribald editor takes advantage of her unsuspecting personality. Unable to come to terms with this event, Yōzō attempts to take his own life by taking sleeping pills. Later, he becomes a morphine addict, again attempts to commit suicide and ends up in a madhouse.

Dazai’s Yōzō experiences human misery in gritty detail that clearly departs from Romantic writing. In view of his inner disposition, however, Yōzō’s alienation from basic human norms follows the Wertherian narrative in which the protagonist increasingly conceives of himself as a mere spectator of life. Yōzō’s tragic interactions with the other sex suit the profile of those unhappy young men who search for emotional turmoil, notably in passionate relationships, to distract themselves from inner emptiness and to counter the other source of consolation, the thought of death. Ultimately, they are condemned to wander through a world in which no one can be saved.

It is somewhat surprising that scholars have consistently asserted the constructive trajectory of No Longer Human. In a study dating from 1974, Hijiya Yukihito finds that Dazai portrays ‘an era of confusion, a “no-longer-human” age that had come, an age governed solely by self-interest, in which true human concerns were being ignored’.125 This is particularly true after Yoshiko’s rape, when Yōzō finds the destructiveness of man’s nature confirmed. And yet Hijiya also argues that No Longer Human is ‘Dazai’s summation of his view of life as well as the manifesto of his faith in the beauty of humanity’.126 Accordingly, redemption can be achieved, despite everything, through trust and compassion for one’s fellow man. Alan S. Wolfe’s study also finds that a hopeful subtext underpins the apparent bleakness of the text, stating that Dazai’s protagonist critiques ‘the ease and superficiality with which even the most ardent supporters of the war effort made the switch’127 from military heroism to democracy and individual freedom. At the heart of No Longer Human, argues Wolfe, stands a utopian impulse to change society by advancing sexual, political and psychological liberation.

This assessment is certainly true of Dazai’s somewhat more sanguine novel The Setting Sun (斜陽 Shayō, 1947). And unlike the protagonist of Dazai’s short story ‘Villon’s Woman’ (ヴィヨンの妻 Viyon no tsuma, 1947), Yōzō does not give in to sarcasm to become an unrepentant rascal.128 In contrast, No Longer Human gives an unflinching account of life’s joyless wretchedness. Only isolated studies have placed Dazai’s text in the context of nihilism. According to Ştefan Bolea, the novel resonates with Cioran’s pessimism as it culminates in the conviction that ‘being alive expresses death better than death itself would’.129 This striking formula highlights Dazai’s inheritance of the thanatological legacy found in Japanese and European letters. As the following subchapter shows, this becomes most evident in a guessing game that Yōzō playfully devises but which traps him in a philosophical impasse.

Nihilistic monism

The implication of this thought game is radical: if ‘crime’ has no antonym, then it is an absolute category. In contrast to a Manichaean worldview, in which good and evil are suspended in an equilibrium, Yōzō’s world is governed by a monistic principle. Baseness is the single determining factor of creation. In No Longer Human, Yōzō is bound to find out what this theoretical observation means for his own life.

Donald Keene’s translation of the term in question as ‘crime’ conceals its ambiguity. The Japanese original is tsumi (罪),130 a term that in Confucian philosophy refers to social actions that injure the moral order established among humans. But tsumi is also the Japanese translation for the Christian term ‘sin’, an influential theological import to East Asia, which implies something more fundamental. According to Christian eschatology, human sinfulness is representative of the broken image of God in mankind. Only by acknowledging that one is a sinner separated from God can one be forgiven in Christ Jesus.131 In line with the philosophical optimism that informs Dazai scholarship, Massimiliano Tomasi assumes that Yōzō’s meditations on tsumi follow Christian rather than Confucian usage. Even in the absence of biographical evidence for Dazai’s Christian faith, he argues that No Longer Human reacts against the lingering heritage of Meiji Protestantism ‘that had preached man’s innate depravity and his predestination for either salvation or damnation’. Ultimately, the novel advances a ‘coherent salvific discourse of protest’,132 a gesture that Tomasi also finds among other Japanese post-war writers of Christian faith who argued in favour of a less sinister faith. The implicit assumption is that, in theory, Dazai’s protagonist could embrace the opposite of ‘sin’ in the sacrament of forgiveness, baptism. Thus, should Donald Keene’s translation, which opts for the secular term, be corrected from ‘crime’ to ‘sin’?

Contrary to Tomasi’s assumption, the existence of Christian allusions in Dazai’s work does not necessarily entail the presence of Christian convictions. After all, trust in God is impossible for Yōzō, who states: ‘I could not believe in His love, only in His punishment. […] I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven’ (D 117). This declaration does not result from the ravings of a madman but reiterates one of the most poignant diagnoses of the inner corrosion of Western metaphysics, Nietzsche’s hypothetical scenario: ‘God is refuted but the devil is not – ?’133 In contrast to scholarly attempts to find a positive message in No Longer Human, the present thanatological interpretation of the novel draws attention to its consistent rejection of constructive ideas about the world – both as it is and in view of its perfectibility. Next to Yōzō’s meditations on the opposite of tsumi, this monistic view also shows in his disregard for emancipatory politics. While attending a secret communist meeting, he takes issue with the simplistic role that historical materialism attributes to greed. He feels that nothing would be gained by erasing greed from society: ‘I felt sure that something more obscure, more frightening lurked in the hearts of human beings. […] I felt that there was something inexplicable at the bottom of human society which was not reducible to economics’ (66). Like Christianity, the promises of Marxism only remind him of the fundamental wretchedness of human existence.

Yōzō only suspends his nihilistic monism during a short interval. After a heavy night of drinking, he collapses on the street where he is found by a female stranger, his future wife Yoshiko, who rushes to help him. The embarrassed man pledges to quit drinking that night. Inevitably, he is intoxicated the next time he comes across Yoshiko, yet she firmly believes that he has kept his promise. This simple encounter leaves him in a state of shock and embarrassment, as he cannot quite accommodate her ‘immaculate trustfulness’ (151) within his dark outlook on life. With her innocence acting as a counterweight to his cynicism, his monistic view transforms into a vision of polarity, in which light and darkness strike a balance. He raves: ‘What a holy thing uncorrupted virginity is, I thought. […] We would get married. In the spring we’d go together on bicycles to see waterfalls framed in green leaves’ (D 132). And indeed, at this point, the story takes an unexpected turn. They marry, he actually gives up drinking and they start enjoying the simple pleasures of life, such as going to the movies. Tragically, Yoshiko’s rape ends this blissful phase. Now he realises that innocence forms an integral part of human misery rather than its opposite: ‘Yoshiko was a genius at trusting people. She didn’t know how to suspect anyone. But the misery it caused’ (150). Apart from the event’s drastic impact on the girl, it also triggers Yōzō’s final collapse: ‘Now that I harbored doubts about the one virtue I had depended on, I lost all comprehension of everything around me. My only resort was drink’ (152). Unable to see how he and Yoshiko can put up with this vile world, he resorts to drugs and narcotics.

Yōzō does not find fulfilment in a conclusive act of self-murder, which he attempts repeatedly without success. He is condemned to remain a perpetual guest in the vicinity of death. Unlike his predecessors who successfully killed themselves or developed a Stoic attitude towards enduring the bitterness of life, Dazai’s hero witnesses the disappearance of life before his own eyes: ‘Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes. That is the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell. Everything passes’ (169, emphasis in the original). Despite the Buddhist undertones of this quote, Yōzō’s language painstakingly avoids the classical formulas that would connect his statement to ancient wisdom.134 After all, there is a significant difference between ancient spirituality and the modern condition: while the former allows for the communal rejection of worldly life in the company of fellow believers, the latter emanates from a lonely psychological process.

The spiritual vacuum of Yōzō’s joyless life has considerable implications for the strand of Japanese philosophical nihilism that Nish*tani addresses in his study. Accordingly, the devaluation of all values stems from the import of Western philosophic paradigms that, although corroded from within, were overzealously assimilated. As Akutagawa’s Life of a Stupid Man shows, this philosophical import also facilitated positive identification, such as the writer’s invocation of the ‘demon of the fin de siècle’. His intertextual references to French poetry created an awareness for the transcultural community among poets. As a young man, when Yōzō still had high hopes of becoming a painter, he was also intrigued by Amadeo Modigliani and the Impressionists; but when he gives up on art, he becomes indifferent to the connection between his personal story and larger socio-political phenomena. His focus is solely on human nature, which prevents sensitive individuals like him from finding peace, let alone happiness. And while Nish*tani points out that Japanese nihilism can be overcome by developing new patterns of modern subjectivity, notably through Zen Buddhist practices of the self,135 Dazai’s Yōzō has no use for his cultural roots. They appear like everything else that promises to mitigate the senselessness of human existence – only to turn into a source of further grief and pain.

In comparison with Yōzō, his literary predecessors appear as unstable but ultimately life-affirming individuals. Werther’s and Sensei’s suicides articulate the hope that life’s misery can be undone by self-murder. René flees into foreign lands to die in exotic surroundings. Obermann endures stoically, Adolphe rushes away. Only Yōzō’s death drive is so comprehensive that it suffocates all impulses to act decisively. In Dazai’s cosmos, impulsive acts such as suicide are deceptive, as they presume a polar world that also provides relief from life’s misery. According to Dazai’s nihilistic monism, one must bear with the grinding slowness of the death drive. Before the suffering individual can thoroughly internalise the idea that ‘everything passes’, they will have died infinite times. Schopenhauer’s idea of resignation, ‘the giving up not merely of life, but of the whole will-to-live itself’, finds its purest articulation in this Japanese Werther. The constant presence of the death drive is not an obscure force that acts in the shadow of conscious volition, as Freud has it, but results from unprejudiced experience of human life.

Conclusion

This chapter followed up on the findings of thanatological Werther criticism and traced the novel’s subsequent transformations in French and Japanese literature. To arrive at Korff’s and Kamei’s conclusion about Werther’s triumph means to practise interpretative grafting, since the novel lacks a clear moment of anagnorisis, as is the case in Schopenhauerian renunciation. Yet Freud’s definition of the death drive – the ‘urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things’ – suggests another definition of the death drive, one that eschews conscious volition altogether. This dormant drive is compatible with Werther’s continuous oscillation between passive melancholy and lucidity. Self-destructive impulses that remain hidden under the surface of consciousness can also be found in Chateaubriand’s René, who is disappointed with life even before his incestuous afflictions commence. In contrast, Senancour’s Obermann and Constant’s Adolphe are relatively cognisant of their disposition, and this also applies to Sōseki’s protagonists and Dazai’s Yōzō.

These findings allow for general observations about three aspects of Wertherian literature: their visions of nature, questions of genre and Japanese particularities.

Visions of nature

On 21 June 1771, Werther finds the perfect words to describe his oneness with his surroundings: ‘How fine the view from that summit! – that delightful chain of hills, and the exquisite valleys at their feet! – could I but lose myself amongst them! – I ran off, and returned without finding what I sought. Distance, my friend, is like the future.’ A few months later, as he finds his hopes disappointed, his sanguine perception of the natural world undergoes a drastic change. Suddenly, the river rapids suggest to him the presence of a cosmic, ‘all-consuming, devouring monster’. Despite these swings between the extremes of ecstasy and visions of annihilation, he continues to perceive the world as an integrated whole. Werther’s all-encompassing visions transcend the limitations of individual subjectivity: as a happy man, he feels the presence of the Almighty in every worm and insect; as an unhappy man, he strives to return to the all-loving father. Although he harbours doubts about the Creation’s design, he trusts that suffering can be redeemed. Or, to speak in more Korffian terms: with absolute confidence about his own ability, he demands to be saved from a world that is ‘unworthy of truly divine life’.

While Chateaubriand’s René also revels in such grand visions, he does not transcend his own self but exacerbates the solipsistic tendencies that modern critics often castigate in Werther’s views. In René’s account of Mount Etna, the shift between first and third person blurs the distinction between confession and third-person narrative. Ultimately, this rhetoric reveals an individual who feels, as Sainte-Beuve argues, a ‘burning desire for the destruction and ruination of the world’. René’s fellow French Romantic protagonist, Obermann, also feels drawn to dramatic landscapes, such as the icy peaks of the Swiss Alps and the cataract which he contemplates on his wanderings with Fonsalbe. In contrast to Werther and René, Obermann’s nature fulfils a completely different purpose, as it reminds the suffering individual to exert self-control.

Constant’s Adolphe displays a striking indifference to the metaphorical appeal of natural surroundings. Immersed in the vortex of his own thoughts, he takes no interest in external projections of his own feelings or ideals outside the microcosm of his relationship with Ellenore. A cynical observer could argue that, as a successful suitor who consummates his love, he has no need to sublimate his sexual passion in the contemplation of the shapes of nature. Yet Werther’s revenants in Japan also display the same kind of indifference to landscape. When the two celibates, Sensei and K, travel along the Bōsō peninsula, their long, exhausting walks along the rocky beaches offer no spectacular vistas and hardly serve as a distraction from their bitter rivalry. And in Dazai’s novel, the only vision of nature that comes to mind is Yōzō’s walk through wintry Tokyo, when he suddenly vomits blood: ‘It formed a big rising-sun flag in the snow’ (D 157). Since the mentioned flag is closely associated with Japanese militarism, this scene marks the disappearance of the naive appreciation of nature that was first explored in Goethe’s Werther. From now on, nature is irretrievably compromised by the baseness of human society.

Genre

This chapter started out from the same premise as Chapter 3, positing that Werther adaptations can be loosely defined by subjective prose styles, stylistic naturalness, intertextual references and the presence of Wertherian heroes. In addition to such characteristics, thanatological Werther adaptations include a fifth element, the emotionally distanced editorial frame. Such a frame is already present in Goethe’s novel, and scholars have debated whether the editor provides reliable guidance or if his account gives away the voice of the philistine. In the discussed novels, the frames range from frosty commentary, such as the postscript of René, to denunciation, as in the case of Adolphe, where the editor grumbles that the protagonist has ‘adopted no useful career, that he had used up his gifts with no sense of direction beyond mere caprice’. The Japanese novels use such frame narratives as well. While Dazai’s editor restricts himself to distanced commentary, Sōseki’s Kokoro embeds Sensei’s testament in the main narration, which is told by an introverted young man and which comprises two-thirds of the total text. The notable exception is Obermann, a text that lacks such a narrative device altogether.

The presence of the editorial frame, regardless of its length and reliability, is a crucial means with which to put the suffering of the Wertherian hero in perspective. To elaborate on the thanatological dimension of the selected texts, the present study chose to de-emphasise the relevance of the frame. This choice as such can serve as an example of the act of interpretative grafting, as one loses a central point of reference within the narrative order. After all, the main function of such editorial frames is to put the protagonist’s bleak outlook on life into perspective. In line with Aristotle’s doctrine of the Mean, the editors suggest that moderate behaviour is commendable to everyone, even hot-headed young men, who should not embrace their self-destructive drives but observe restraint. The old native in Chateaubriand’s René, who knows that ‘[t]‌here is only happiness in following the ordinary path’, ultimately raises a point that Lotte already made in Goethe’s original: ‘Whenever anything worries me, I go to my old squeaky piano, drum out a quadrille, and then everything’s all right again’ (L 16).

The presence of this sanguine and life-affirming perspective also explains why sophisticated interpretations of Chateaubriand can insist on the positive trajectory of their novels, as when Roulin asserts that Chateaubriand ‘knows how to grasp the totality of reality’. In view of Adolphe’s lack of an inner compass, Conroy also recommends that the young man consider the intermediary principles between abstraction and the reality of everyday life. In line with this kind of interpretation, Hijiya can also speak of Dazai’s ‘faith in the beauty of humanity’. The problematic aspect of such frames, however, is that they impose a predefined result on such texts, a tendency that accords with educational purposes but which compromise literature’s ability to describe the world in uncompromising terms. And while there lies great value in taking a positive attitude towards life, the editors’ ostentatious affirmations of life do not necessarily help in this regard.

Japan’s Wertherian heroes

The present study referenced Schopenhauer and Freud to make a stronger case for Korff’s and Kamei’s analyses, which stand at odds with general scholarship. In French Romantic literature, to claim compatibility between Wertherian novels and philosophical pessimism also appears to disrupt established assumptions about Chateaubriand and Constant. Only the mysterious correspondences between Senancour and Schopenhauer have aroused scholarly interest before.

By contrast, it seems unnecessary to discuss the relevance of the death drive in the Japanese context. The thanatological texts by Sōseki, Mori, Akutagawa and Dazai leave little doubt about the power of self-destructive drives; instead, they are treated as an integral force in the individual’s quest to make sense of the world. In Keppler-Tasaki’s study of Goethe’s unusual reception in Japan, this awareness is portrayed negatively as ‘the obsession with the interconnection of beauty and death in a larger framework of the “suicide nation” self-image’, yet this alleged obsession also allows writers to elaborate on self-murder with far more nuance than their European peers. This starts with Sōseki’s two suicides, K and Sensei, whose motivations to die have little in common. Arguably, Mori’s heroic tales naturalised suicide to such a degree that Dazai can envision non-death as the peak of human suffering: Yōzō is condemned to fail at self-murder and endure his miserable human life.

Regardless of the sophistication of Sōseki’s and Dazai’s texts, their appraisal of resignation is afforded by a specific type of historical amnesia, as James A. Fujii has already explained. Accordingly, Kokoro must be read in the context of Sōseki’s Manchurian travelogues, in which he shows little sensitivity to Japan’s military expansion: ‘Kokoro, like virtually every other text from the modern Japanese literary canon, refuses or is unable to address the imperialist dimensions of Japanese modernity.’136 As a consequence, the novel’s striking portrait of modern society comes with a bitter aftertaste. As Fujii’s quote already indicates, the same also applies to other texts, such as the novels of the Decadent School, which also steered clear of discussing Japanese guilt even when scores of war crimes, committed by the Empire’s armies, came to light. The singular focus remained on the isolated individual who is cut off from the collective but is also freed from all responsibility towards his fellow humans.

Although the label ‘pessimism’ unites Wertherian novels, Schopenhauerian renunciation and modern Japanese Wertherian writing, this label latches on a number of isolated motifs that say little about the corresponding world visions. While metaphysical ideas feature prominently in the work of the German philosopher, modern Japan’s young men inhabit a world in which their suffering cannot be redeemed by a higher reality. In this sense, they depart from Schopenhauer as much as they reject native Buddhism. Dazai’s monistic nihilism posits that the wretchedness of the material world cannot be transcended. Yōzō captures the idea of non-transcendence in the striking image of the tattered kite that hangs outside his lover’s apartment: ‘blown about and ripped by the dusty spring wind, it nevertheless clung tenaciously to the wires, as if in affirmation of something. […] It haunted me even in my dreams’ (D 113). Of course, such poetic figurations of nihilism can also be found in Western literary fiction of the 20th century – one may think of Albert Camus or Samuel Beckett – but only Japanese letters have situated them within the characteristic nexus of ideas, motifs and narrative features that are prefigured in Goethe’s text.

Metrics