The arrival of Werther’s servant occasioned her the greatest embarrassment. He gave Albert a note, which the latter coldly handed to his wife, saying, at the same time, ‘Give him the pistols. I wish him a pleasant journey,’ he added, turning to the servant. These words fell upon Charlotte like a thunderstroke: she rose from her seat half-fainting, and unconscious of what she did. She walked mechanically toward the wall, took down the pistols with a trembling hand, slowly wiped the dust from them, and would have delayed longer, had not Albert hastened her movements by an impatient look. She then delivered the fatal weapons to the servant, without being able to utter a word.15
Werther, upon receiving this final gift, falls into raptures:
‘They have been in your hands you wiped the dust from them. I kiss them a thousand times — you have touched them. Yes, Heaven favours my design, and you, Charlotte, provide me with the fatal instruments. It was my desire to receive my death from your hands, and my wish is gratified…’16
The stage is set for Goethe’s tragic hero to have his final showdown with the world that broke his heart.
Goethe: ‘It is impossible to describe one’s feelings save in the flash and fire of the moment’.
Passion Incapable of Being Converted into Action
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE HAD been dominated, politically and culturally, by the French — the rationalism of the Philosophes was the intellectual fashion. Werther was a book about feelings, told from the point of view of a character who is ruled by his emotions to an unprecedented degree. It was a revolt against French ideas, and the founding work of the German romantic movement.
German critics August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel were among the first to reclaim the word ‘romantic’ as a positive term. To Sir Joshua Reynolds, it would have meant, as art historian William Vaughn puts it, ‘those emotive extremes that lay beyond the proper sphere of the artist to depict’. For the Schlegels, emotive extremes would characterise the art and literature of the new century. They seized on the romantic as being closer to the spirit of the age than the watered-down classicism that had been in vogue for so long.1
In his Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (1809), August Schlegel praised Goethe for jettisoning the tired rules of neoclassicism in favour of ‘organic form’.2 Thanks to Schlegel’s promotion, and the fact that his work was so widely translated, Goethe’s name soon became indelibly connected with the romantic movement in England, Italy, Spain and — most surprising of all — France. Goethe’s reputation was consolidated by Madame de Staël’s appreciation of his work in her De l’Allemagne, which, as Martin Swales points out, virtually inverted the supremacy of France over Germany in the world of letters in one fell swoop.3 By 1826 Goethe was being praised by French critics for having revived that country’s literature by replacing the old classical insistence on learning and imitation with a new approach that drew on personal confession, ‘finding the subject matter within oneself’.4
For the young Goethe, there was simply no other way to write. As Barker Fairley has shown in his study of the author, Goethe was fiercely anti-intellectual as a youth. At the age of eighteen, he had already realised that books had nothing to teach him, and that everything he had to offer the world could be found by plumbing the depths of his own soul. He was extraordinarily creative — but the idea of editing or refining his work, let alone ordering it or subjecting it to intellectual scrutiny, was absolutely abhorrent to him. ‘It is impossible to describe one’s feelings save in the flash and fire of the moment,’ he wrote in 1775.5
By the time he died, Goethe was seen, in most European countries, as the father of German romanticism. The irony in this is that Goethe enjoyed being called ‘romantic’ about as much as Gerard Way likes being called ‘emo’. He very quickly tried to distance himself from Werther’s emotional excess, maintaining that it was a crazy book written at a crazy time in his life. The older Goethe never read from Werther in public, and admitted once or twice that he was almost scared to open the thing, in case the terrible mood that had inspired it was somehow trapped between its pages, and might overtake him again.
Thomas Carlyle would have agreed that Werther was better left on the shelf. Not that Carlyle didn’t admire Goethe, in fact, he did more for the cause of Goethe in Britain than anyone, including Madame de Staël. De Staël had unintentionally done Goethe a disservice by presenting to her English readers a version of his Faust that played up the work’s ‘satanic’ overtones at the expense of its more important ideas. This merely confirmed Wordsworth and Coleridge’s suspicions that there was something offensively immoral in Goethe. Carlyle’s translations and essays improved Goethe’s reputation in Britain a great deal. But Carlyle was not unbiased in his appreciation. ‘Carlyle’, writes Swales, ‘saw in Goethe’s career a reflection of his own spiritual development that led from gloomy despair to the recognition of community service.’6 In other words, Carlyle saw Werther as a phase that Goethe had grown out of, and that the literary world had — or ought to have — as well.
In England Werther had been a smash hit. It had run to fourteen editions and been turned into a popular play. It was, for a while, inescapable: like something in the air, you could catch it just by walking around and breathing — although young men with good educations and nothing to do seemed more susceptible than most. Lord Byron didn’t even have to read the book to understand its importance — he couldn’t have, in any case, since he’d never learned to do anything other than swear in German. But Byron instinctively picked up on the mood of gloomy introspection in Goethe’s novella, and rode the same unhappy bandwagon all the way to the bank, which in turn led to another wave of tortured poetry by young men with lots of feelings — all of them bad. Years later Carlyle, fed up with all the sobbing and moping Werther had inspired, made an example of Byron as an English ‘sentimentalist’ — hopefully, he said, the last:
For what good is it to ‘whine, put finger i’ the eye, and sob,’ in such a case? Still more, to snarl and snap in malignant wise, ‘like dog distract, or monkey sick?’ Why should we quarrel with our existence, here as it lies before us, our field and inheritance…7
Carlyle is effectively telling the sentimentalists, the Werther faces and the Byronic brooders to grow up and get over it. And this is almost exactly what Charlotte, when she can no longer take his hysterics, says to Werther. In life, as in art, Werther follows his heart exclusively, and refuses to be bound by manners, good taste or commonsense — all of which he sees as every bit as deadening to life and love as they are to art. But by refusing to see reason and indulging his feelings to the exclusion of all else, Werther drives everybody crazy — in the real world, it seems, being emotional is not okay. Charlotte, who at first finds that her kind heart will not permit her to turn Werther completely away, eventually runs out of patience:
‘Oh! why were you born with that excessive, that ungovernable passion for everything that is dear to you?’ Then, taking his hand, she said, ‘I entreat of you to be more calm: your talents, your understanding, your genius, will furnish you with a thousand resources. Be a man, and conquer an unhappy attachment toward a creature who can do nothing but pity you.’8
Charlotte, in other words, sees that Werther needs to take control of his life. She wants him to stop standing around emoting and do something — anything. But Werther is paralysed by feeling. This, as Carlyle himself admitted, is why Werther is an important book. Werther, Carlyle insisted,
attempted the more accurate delineation of a class of feelings deeply important to modern minds, but for which our elder poetry offered no exponent, and perhaps could offer none, because they are feelings that arise from Passion incapable of being converted into Action.9
The hero’s ‘quarrel with existence’ is not one that can be resolved by practical means, because his revolt is a revolt against the practical world — he demands the right to be unreasonable in the Age of Reason.
Sentimentalists
ROMANTIC LO
VE, SAYS Rupert Christiansen, began sometime between 1763 and 1774. The love we know from blockbuster movies, perfume commercials and daytime soaps — all passion beyond reason and waves of feeling bursting the banks of everyday life — was totally unknown in the early eighteenth century. Love, in the literature of Pope and Johnson’s time, was a contract in the parties’ mutual interest, in which the occasional bawdy romp was part of the give-and-take.1
But Rousseau’s novel Julie and — fast on its heels — Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, changed all this for good. In these books, love is not a part of the normal fabric of social relations, it’s something so powerful and irrational that society can barely accommodate it. And where an earlier age might have used these eruptions of emotion to teach the reader a lesson about the wages of sin, here the moral universe of Christianity was reversed. Rousseau taught that feeling was more important than reason, and implied that the sensitive individual who feels more deeply than others is privy to a deeper, truer moral wisdom. Werther took this idea to extremes. Werther’s emotionalism made him a hero — a martyr even. ‘In Werther,’ writes historian Walter Benjamin, ‘the bourgeoisie finds the demigod who sacrifices his life for them.’2
Reasonable people told him to get over it and do something useful with his life — but Werther would rather die of feeling than not feel anything. For this reason, Werther became the founding work of a late eighteenth-century cult of the emotions called sentimentalism.
In his book Romantic Affinities, Christiansen presents a fascinating document of the sentimentalist mindset — a collection of love letters written in 1777. Mary Hays and John Eccles fall in love but soon find that their perfect love is threatened by the dull world, which considers them too young and too poor to marry. Ignoring the advice of her friends and family, who urge her to calm down and get over it, Mary goes half-hysterical with frustrated passion. Of course, she knows they’re right — that she could, if she chose, set her sights on finding a husband with better prospects, settle down, raise a family, and leave all this sentimental nonsense behind. But Mary would rather live in sorrow for the rest of her life than suppress her true feelings for even a day.
Half the world have no souls. I envy them not their dull insipid calmness — rather would I suffer all those heart-rending, exquisite distresses, which too often flow from sensibility.3
It is, as Christiansen admits, enough to make you gag. From this small piece of evidence, Carlyle’s objections to sentimentalism are easy enough to understand. At the heart of the sentimentalist’s philosophy is the trendy Rousseauistic idea that human beings are naturally good, but have been corrupted by society. Rousseau’s novels, as Norman Davies points out, made unprecedented links in the public imagination between nature, feeling and virtue. Emotions are natural, society is artificial. Therefore, to the sentimentalist, feelings are sacred, and nobody can tell him otherwise. But this is a selfish philosophy which in the end leads to a profound estrangement, not only from society and its problems, but from other people. This is exactly what happens to Werther.
I could tear open my bosom with vexation to think how little we are capable of influencing the feelings of each other. No one can communicate to me those sensations of love, joy, rapture, and delight which I do not naturally possess; and, though my heart may glow with the most lively affection, I cannot make the happiness of one in whom the same warmth is not inherent.4
Werther is full of feeling, but he doesn’t treat people very well — because they’re not him, and they don’t understand how he feels. As Martin Swales notes, this ‘dreadful solipsism’ of Werther’s ruins his relationship with Lotte before it’s even begun.5 Again and again he cries to heaven; Why, how can she not feel how I feel? For all his ability to empathise with her, she might as well not exist.
Across the Sea
RIVERS CUOMO’S SENTIMENTALIST phase reached its logical end point with Pinkerton. Here, the exploration of his emotional world that he’d begun in the privacy of his bedroom some years earlier bore its bitter fruit. Cuomo’s over-sensitivity to feeling, combined with his estrangement from the world, resulted in songs like ‘Across the Sea’, where the hero despairs of ever being able to connect with another human being,
Why are you so far away from me?
I need help and you’re way across the sea.1
But as he admits on the album’s last song, a beautiful acoustic lament called ‘Butterfly’, it’s mostly his fault. He spins an allegory about going out into the garden with a mason jar to catch a butterfly. He snares one — a real beauty. But after a couple of days, it’s dead. This kind of thing, the singer tells us, happens to him all the time, ‘Everytime I pin down what I think I want it slips away.’2
It always feels like he’s doing the right thing. ‘I did what my body told me to’, he reflects. He acts naturally, according to his emotions, but it doesn’t make him happier. ‘Butterfly’ contains an important insight — that a philosophy based on feelings almost inevitably leads to romantic despair — and with Pinkerton, Cuomo had ridden the snake all the way to the bottom of the board. It’s little wonder that, after he’d recovered his strength again a couple of years later, he had no desire to go back down there. Like Goethe, he must have had a slightly superstitious feeling that he’d simply stuffed the nightmare into those songs and shoved a cork in the top — why risk letting it out again? ‘The most painful thing in my life these days,’ he told Rolling Stone magazine in 2001, ‘is the cult around Pinkerton.’
It’s just a sick album, sick in a diseased sort of way. It’s such a source of anxiety because all the fans we have right now have stuck around because of that album. But, honestly, I never want to play those songs again; I never want to hear them again.3
‘It’s so weird being at total loggerheads with your fans,’ he said of the Pinkerton obsessives who were so frustrated by his new unemotional music.
I don’t know how to deal with it. I don’t want to say anything that would sound condescending, but those fans are probably younger and they probably just want to hear that extreme emotion from moment to moment. They need to hear that excess.4
Any definition of emo, as music writer Andy Greenwald has discovered, has to begin with the fans. This is the only thing that could be said to connect the hundreds of bands who have found themselves described as such. What do My Chemical Romance, Weezer, Sunny Day Real Estate and Dashboard Confessional have in common? Almost nothing. But their fans all want the same thing — feelings.
In Nothing Feels Good: Punk rock, teenagers, and emo, Greenwald meets four young friends from Plainview, Long Island, united by their love of Dashboard Confessional and their belief in the importance of emotion. While all the other kids are drinking beer and watching football, Ian, Howie, Anthony and Justin sit around playing acoustic guitars, writing poetry and…feeling stuff. The girls at their high school, sick and tired of pretending to be interested in sports, start to look their way more often. Justin is not surprised. ‘They’d never seen real people that are emotional,’ he explains.5
Elsewhere, fifteen-year-old Tracy drives the point home — emotional people are real people — everyone else is fake.
I don’t care what anyone else thinks anymore — I’m not gonna be fake. I’m gonna be real. I made all new friends because I didn’t want to have fake friends, and all of them are themselves too.6
In 1973 theatre critic John Weightman noted that the world is full of people who subscribe to a basically Rousseauistic philosophy without ever having heard of him.7 He was thinking of hippies, but emo is, in many ways, even closer to the mark. Emo fans share a strikingly similar language to that of the sentimentalists, and an almost identical set of priorities. Greenwald quotes an online review of Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary, which insists that the album:
Strikes at the heart of all that makes us human, begging us to profess our deepest sympathies and dearest sensibilities.8
Two hundred years ago they were saying the same thing about Rousseau�
�s Julie. Emo fans, like their sentimentalist forebears, have evolved a system of values in which powerful feelings automatically have moral superiority, because they’re seen as authentically human. This is why emo culture is inherently terrifying to parents, and an irresistible target for news organisations who profit from their secret fears.
Emo is a very specific sort of teenage longing, a romantic and ultimately self-centered need to understand the bigness of the world in relation to you.9
To the kid who feels that her emotions are the most important thing in the world, the singer says: it’s true. ‘What has AFI taught you?’ asks a thread on the goth-punk band’s website. ‘The main thing for me,’ says kXa, ‘was I don’t need to live up to anyone’s standards. I don’t have to put on a fake smile and go through my day.’ ‘They’ve taught me that being emotional is okay,’ says edenforever, ‘and to express myself any way possible.’10
Davey Havok: As nature puts on her autumn tints, it becomes autumn with me and around me.
Love Like Winter
LIKE MY CHEMICAL Romance, AFI is not a band anyone would have thought to call emo ten years ago. But then, ten years ago, AFI was a very different band. As music writer Neil Strauss has observed, the AFI of today barely resembles the group that recorded ‘I Wanna Get a Mohawk (But Mom Won’t Let Me Get One)’ in 1997.1 Since 1999, Havok’s steady diet of mostly English bands — The Cure, The Cult, Bowie and Morrissey — has pushed AFI’s music in a completely different direction from its scrappy punk roots. These days, AFI is larger than life, mythic. Like Gerard Way, Havok is a proper glam-rock superhero. His look is an ultra-stylised synthesis of kinky goth-wear, punk ink and Misfits-style Halloween corn. His band, likewise, eschews the snot-nosed pop-punk typical of recent emo bands for a much more eclectic sound. 2006’s Decemberunderground was their most ambitious effort to date, sounding by turns like The Cure, Depeche Mode, Bowie and Bon Jovi — with even a hint of Timbaland-style stadium R&B in the album’s intro.
Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone Page 8