Revolutionary Afterlives (2024)

Johannes Kaminski

Is Werther a political text? For some readers, the answer is obvious. After all, Werther’s snub at the aristocratic assembly indicates that he suffers not only from unrequited love, indecisiveness and pathological moods, but also from social alienation. Upon his arrival in Wahlheim and, later, when he takes a position as an attaché to an ambassador, he eagerly communicates a haughty disdain for societal norms and conformity. This attitude transforms into bitter resentment once he learns that, owing to ‘curious customs’, his company is not welcome at an assembly graced by the presence of noblemen. Learning of the subsequent gossip about his ejection, he scornfully declares: ‘I detest the whole breed’ (L 48) and quits an employment that he only took up three months earlier.

Heinrich Heine argued that, had the book been published a few decades later, this passage would have become central to the book’s reception.1 In the wake of flaring social tensions in Germany, Werther appeared like a misfit whose suffering derived from rigid social conventions. Readers in the early 20th century made analogous observations, including Guo Moruo, who noted that Werther ‘opposes the social class system’,2 and Georg Lukács, who considered the text a literary symptom of the class contradictions that fuelled the revolution in neighbouring France. This is arguably a classical case of grafting: Werther’s letter dating from 15 March 1772 is first cut out, then connected to socio-political narratives of emancipation and suppression. Even if today’s scholarship does not concede such interpretations anything more than historic value, reminiscent of excessively politicised scholarship, the history of Wertherian writing demonstrates how easily the novel lends itself to being appropriated to revolutionary settings. In combining the emotive depth of sentimentalism with a political agenda, literary adaptations of Goethe’s book advanced original variations that respond to the core conflicts of the modern novel. According to G. W. F. Hegel’s aesthetics, it is informed by the ‘conflict between the poetry and the heart and the opposing prose of circ*mstances and the accidents of external situation’.3 And while most protagonists of the Goethezeit balance this conflict by learning the ways of the world, the Wertherian hero embraces a less conciliatory resolution. Here, the clichés of maturation and personal growth crack under the pressure of existential struggle.

This chapter first elaborates on the principal reason why Germany was – and remains – such a hostile ground for the revolutionary line of interpretation, then asks what the attribute ‘revolutionary’ means, especially in view of the French Revolution and the birth of the nation state. While a limited corpus of academic literature exists that discusses the text’s socio-political dynamics, the most substantial contributions to this nexus exist in narrative literature itself, as Werther transformed into a blueprint for texts that explicitly pursue a revolutionary agenda. This was primarily an effect of the book’s reception outside Germany, where it had not been colonised by an author-sanctioned and depoliticised interpretation. In pre-Risorgimento Italy, Ugo Foscolo’s Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 1802/1817) drew on multiple aspects of Werther to pioneer an innovative blend of sentimentalism and the revolutionary cause. At the onset of the 20th century, Werther’s career among patriotic revolutionaries continued among those Chinese writers who pursued a paradoxical project: the creation of modern Chinese letters through the assimilation of foreign – that is, Western – literary models. Love-sick, despairing and angry characters populate the literature produced in the wake of not only the May Fourth Movement in China, but also the March First Movement in Korea, both of which took place in 1919. Foscolo’s selective appropriation of Werther continues in the early novels of Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu’s Sinking (沈淪 Chenlun, 1921), Jiang Guangci’s The Young Wanderer (少年漂泊者 Shaonian piaobozhe, 1926) and Ba Jin’s Trilogy of Love (愛情三部曲 Aiqing sanbuqu, 1931–5). This also applies to one of the core texts of Korean modernity, Yi Kwangsu’s Heartless (무정 Mujong, 1919).

Such a diverse corpus inevitably raises questions about the texts’ comparability and their slippery relation to the source text. While scholarship has linked most of the discussed texts to Werther already, they are undoubtedly originals in their own right, with generations of authors using them as source texts for further literary exploration. In adaptation studies, the focus has, similar to translation studies, shifted from analyses that emphasise fidelity to a self-conscious approach. As the narratological mastermind who coined much of the terminology currently in use, Gérard Genette has elaborated on scenarios of intertextual connectivity. When a narrative text corresponds to an older one that serves as its model, this nexus is ideally singled out by paratextual signals, as seen in the work’s title, subtitle or preface. In the absence of such signals, however, text-external forces have the last word when it comes to establishing a relevant connection between two texts. By the term ‘hypertextuality’ Genette understands ‘the general notion of a text in the second degree […]: i.e., a text derived from another preexistent text’. In this case, the adaptation remains indebted to the original text, ‘from which it originates through a process I shall provisionally call transformation, and which it consequently evokes more or less perceptibly without necessarily speaking of it or citing it’.4 While Genette invokes the relation of Virgil’s Aeneid (29–19 bce) to Homer’s epics as perfect examples of such hypertextuality, the Werther nursery rarely features such obvious lineages. The criteria for a ‘more or less perceptible’ connection is up to the eye of the beholder. Genette’s invocation of an ideal reader conveniently solves this problem, for such a reader may flag erroneous cases of hypertextuality and indicate valid ones. In the absence of such authority, hypertextuality risks becoming a product of sheer habit: some textual pairings, such as Werther and, say, Rousseau’s Julie, appear legitimate, while others, especially those including non-European texts, appear far-fetched.

In answer to this untenable epistemic frame, Linda Hutcheon has pursued a more self-aware approach to literary succession by speaking of ‘adaptation as adaptation’.5 Accordingly, the act of choosing such a comparison already implies a degree of generosity, as one no longer expects to gauge the successful transmission of the ‘spirit’, ‘tone’ or ‘style’ of a work; instead, the task is to trace the process by which a text is transposed and subjected to transcoding. Hutcheon proposes a minimum threshold for the classification of a text as adaptation, such as the use of stories, themes, characters or merely ‘specific units of a story’6 that are taken from an existing work. In the absence of explicit references to the source texts, Hutcheon’s case examples include many instances that Genette would classify as merely paratextual. The risk is in broadening the definition of adaptation excessively, since too many texts could be read as adaptations of too many pre-existing works.

To counterbalance excessive imprecision, one can keep in mind four fundamental features that determine a text’s inclusion into the Werther nursery: firstly, they use subjective prose genres such as epistolary novels, diaries or memoirs. Secondly, they are written in vernacular styles that emphasise stylistic naturalness or local flavour. Thirdly, they are interspersed with intertextual references, taken from either national classics or foreign letters. And fourthly, they inevitably feature a Wertherian hero – usually male – whose linguistic articulations contrast markedly with the protagonists of the novels that are commonly associated with revolutionary themes in world literature. While he shares a personal prehistory of oppression and persecution with Jean Valjean from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), he never manages to escape his predicament by becoming a powerful man himself. Jean’s central conflict, the difficulty of concealing his miserable family background, is irrelevant to a Werther. And while Pierre Bezukhov, the socially awkward protagonist of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), is no stranger to the frustration and anger caused by a beautiful and indifferent beloved, a Werther is never driven to actually kill his rival in a duel. For the greatest part of the narrative, a Wertherian hero remains trapped in a situation that in the mentioned novels is transitory. This is also the reason why only he contemplates, discusses and – sometimes, but not always – commits suicide with such effect. Regardless of all socio-political scope, the entire world shrinks to form a tight skin around the suffering individual.

This chapter explores the plural of Werther by connecting one specific strand of interpretation, which emphasises the protagonist’s rebellious traits, to those literary adaptations that feature Wertherian protagonists who rebel against their surroundings.

Post-1789 Werther

Goethe’s Werther, published in 1774 and revised in 1787, is separated from its revolutionary revenants by the political caesura of the French Revolution. Upon its publication, readers would relate the protagonist’s displeasure with the ‘curious customs’ to an immutable world in which feudal relations determined the sociocultural order. After the political earthquake in Paris, however, the changed equilibrium encouraged political subjects to question the rule by divine right and hereditary monarchy; instead, freedom and equality became fundamental categories of legitimate rule. Most importantly, the French Revolution demonstrated that the principles of the American Revolution (1775–83) – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – could also be applied to the European context. This included not only civil rights, but also the prerogative to overthrow despotic rulers.7

In Germany, the initial wave of enthusiasm for the developments in Paris included Kant’s and Hegel’s much-discussed admissions that revolutionary movements possess legitimacy.8 Amid the bloodshed of the Reign of Terror, however, German enthusiasm was dented. In the case of Goethe, who opposed the French Revolution from the start, there was no change of mind at all. Having been elevated into peerage in 1782 and leaving his mark as one of the leading bureaucrats in the Duchy of Weimar, he had become part of the Ancien Régime, an ideological choice that inevitably brought him into conflict with the following generation of writers.9 This biographical nexus is also the principal reason why Friedrich Engels reacted with such strong words when another socialist critic, Karl Grün, asserted the revolutionary credentials of Goethe’s works, including Werther. According to Grün, the epistolary novel features a ‘pure, fresh concept of true humanity’10 by portraying the misery of bourgeois reality prior to the storming of the Bastille. Dismissing this reinterpretation as complete nonsense, Engels characterised the poetic voice of Goethe’s protagonist as the ‘lamentation of a delusional whiner who decries the disjunction between bourgeois reality and his nonetheless bourgeois illusions of reality’. Werther does not answer the revolutionary call for insubordination against usurpers, nor can he grasp the antagonistic forces playing out in society; after all, his ‘halfhearted lamentation […] merely originates in the lack of any basic experience of life’.11

Engels’s judgement conforms to the theory of reflection, which argues that material reality can only be adequately reflected through the lens of a fully developed social consciousness – that is, of the writer. Conceived by Engels and later refined by Lenin, reflection theory regards literature as the voice of the people, which is typically also represented through positive characters.12 It is easy to see that Goethe and the product of his imagination, Werther, do not fit such criteria.13 Although the classical theory of reflection never gained hold in ambitious literary criticism, the biographical paradigm of Goethe studies culminated in a verdict on the book that is identical with Engels’s judgement: Werther’s complaints are merely the noise produced by the inconsequential sorrows of a misguided man.

Despite the authoritative condemnation by Engels, the early 19th century also saw a handful of emancipatory critics launch a positive revaluation of Werther. As already discussed in Chapter 1, the democratic writers associated with Junges Deutschland attempted to untangle protagonist and author in a way quite different from the pedestrian Werther–Goethe juxtaposition. After Heine’s hypothetical revaluation of the ejection scene, which if published in the 1820s would ‘have enraged readers more than the whole suicide bombshell’,14 Ludwig Börne also invoked Werther in glowing terms in 1831. When these reassessments were written, the changed socio-political mood displaced the dominant narratives provided by sentimental and psychopathological interpretations. This window of opportunity, however, closed rapidly. This interpretation did not receive much attention, nor did Heine and Börne seek to promote their views with greater vehemence. Subsequent attempts by Georg Lukács in 1936 and Peter Müller in 1969 shared the same fate. Both considered the text a literary symptom of the class contradictions that connect Werther’s individual suffering with the social superstructure.15

Although the interpretative lineage of Heine–Börne–Lukács–Müller remained obscure to readers outside Germany and was not even taken seriously by most native readers, their claims about the text were unwittingly reproduced by literary authors who used the text as a blueprint for revolutionary prose. The absence of Goethe’s oppressive presence as an Author-God afforded the protagonist a semantic possibility that was denied him at home: the rebellion against reactionary politics.

The invention of a politicised Werther (Foscolo)

As a seismograph of socio-political tension, Wertherian suffering became a crucial resource for writers who sought to advance the idea of national self-determination, one of the historical by-products of the French Revolution. Originally, popular protest against the injustices committed by the Ancien Régime was nurtured by universalist ideals, yet the revolution took a different turn after the ‘Declaration of Rights and Duties’ (1793), which gave preference to national, specifically French, rights over universal ideals.16 In the following decades, the nationalisation of the revolution spread across French borders, also in reaction to Napoleon’s invasion of neighbouring countries. A new source of political legitimacy was consolidating itself first across Europe, then also in East Asia: the nation state. According to Benedict Anderson, this imaginary gave rise to a new sense of belonging, for ‘the nations to which they give political expression loom out of an immemorial past, and […] glide into a limitless future’.17 Werther never became a sans-culotte but he did join the ranks of those who sought to protect their nationhood against foreign aggression.

The earliest literary text that uses the malleability of Werther to craft an unmistakably political text is Ugo Foscolo’s Last Letter of Jacopo Ortis, first published in 1802 and revised in 1807. Foscolo’s literary career predates the Risorgimento, a movement that transformed Italy from a political and ethnic patchwork into a united nation state. As the ‘true initiator of Romantic literary criticism and aesthetics in Italy’,18 the author was eulogised by his direct successors, Giuseppe Pecchio and Giuseppe Mazzini. Isolated contributions in Romance studies and comparative criticism took note of the threads connecting Werther and Ortis.19 Both are epistolary texts in which the narration is dominated by the musings of young men who despair of their cruel environments. Both men see their beloveds married off to other men and commit suicide towards the end of the text. Furthermore, both texts’ initial reception was shaped by an assumed autobiographical connection between the protagonists and their authors. Despite such similarities, Werther and Ortis differ widely in terms of their political saturation.

Jacopo finds himself caught in the geopolitical rivalry between the Habsburg monarchy and Napoleonic France, which occupied large parts of the Italian peninsula in 1796. Patriotic-minded men originally greeted the French general as a liberator but soon found themselves disappointed by the Treaty of Campo Formio, when Bonaparte agreed that the Venetian Republic, including its maritime fleet, should be handed over to Austria. In the novel, the ensuing political persecution of Italian nationalists is exemplified by Jacopo’s ban from Venice and his expulsion from the University of Padua, events that are indeed mirrored by the author’s biography. Foscolo was forced to emigrate to the Cisalpine Republic, a short-lived political state in northern Italy, and ultimately settled in political exile in Britain.

After their poetry recital moves to Sapphic odes, arguably a more fitting choice than ethereal Klopstock, they share a passionate kiss under a mulberry tree. Afterwards, Teresa backtracks and warns him: ‘Never can I belong to you!’22 After all, she is already promised to Odoardo, a boring and pedantic man whose political connections ensure that her father, also a patriot, will not be persecuted. Although Jacopo and Teresa’s love is mutual, it is tragic by design.

After paying a final visit to the graves of Dante, Galileo and Michelangelo, he returns to Teresa – and kills himself.

Deification of the beloved

Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis is steeped in Wertherian sentiment, starting with the protagonist’s all-or-nothing stance towards life through to stylistic features that, as Chapter 2 mentioned, contemporary Italian Werther translations failed to reproduce. A notable distinction from the original is that in Foscolo’s work, ‘political, economic and sexual repression go together’.26 While this nexus is left to the reader’s imagination in Goethe’s text, its literary adaptation in the Italian context makes the connection unmistakably clear. Given the dominance of political concerns, however, scholars have also speculated about the gratuitous nature of the tragic love story in Ortis. According to Glauco Cambon, the protagonist’s affection for Teresa only functions as a distraction from the hero’s greater pain, the loss of his motherland. Consequently, there is no organic development: ‘in Ortis […], the chips are down from the start. […] The opening clause of the novel […] already hints at the final sacrifice’.27 Teresa can only help delay the predetermined catastrophe. In this light, the love story comes across as a concession to a literary fashion of the time, sentimentalism, that allows Foscolo to stage a political conflict for an audience that prefers tearful letters. According to this line of argument, the Wertherian echoes are just a means to conceal ideological contraband.

In this startling passage, Teresa, no longer a biographic subject, has become a cypher of nationhood. First of all, Jacopo’s horror at her hypothetical transformation from saint into whor* appears rather far-fetched; after all, the prospective loss of her dear friend, Jacopo, might leave her sad and dejected, but the newlywed bride does not look inclined to join the ‘ranks of those other women’ whom Jacopo has in mind. Instead, she yields to a metonymic function that connects the individual and the nation. Here, the beloved, an otherwise powerless political subject, transforms into the allegorical virtuous virgin whose chastity is synonymous with the country’s fortune. Jacopo no longer strives for spiritual intimacy but turns the ‘holy’ woman into a proxy who is valuable only in her relations with other men (or armies) who seek to corrupt her.30

Jacopo’s deification of Teresa is inspired by the rise of the feminine civic allegory, a symbolic device first celebrated by the National Convent in Paris, which conceived of ‘the Marianne’ as an allegory of the French people.31 Such allegories became closely associated with the budding nationalist movements across Europe, as in Italy where Italia turrita appeared, a female figure whose head is graced by a mural crown.32 Laying the foundation for the artistic tropes of the Risorgimento, Foscolo’s novel pioneers the substitution of the physical female idol promising marital bliss for the abstract construct of the nation foreboding patriotic awakening.

For patriotic Jacopo, the transmutation of Teresa is advantageous, even exceeding the bliss that the lover Jacopo could have enjoyed. While the real person only alleviates his fate, the deified woman provides comfort as an elevated image of nationhood, a spiritual ideal that renders all other forms of existence secondary. By sacrificing himself to ‘Teresa turrita’, Jacopo performs a private ceremony that pursues a political project through spiritual means: the liberation of Italian territory from foreign troops. In highly symbolical terms, the Wertherian hero finally achieves what any budding revolutionary hopes for: salvation through martyrdom. There is also a practical dimension of his exemplary action, as such symbolical acts inevitably aim to inspire imitation. If the Italians follow Jacopo’s exemplary self-sacrifice but, unlike him, find the support and encouragement of other countrymen, they can change the fate of the people.

In contrast to Giacomo Leopardi’s early patriotic poems, which will be discussed in the next subsection, Foscolo avoids the pathos of directly addressing Italy itself. Through the pragmatic marriage of Teresa to Odoardo, Foscolo reproduces one of the immutable rules of the Wertherian nursery, in which romantic love is not meant to blossom. In Ortis, this impossibility is not put into place by the overused tropes of sentimentalism, such as the assumed sanctity of the beloved’s marriage; instead, the protagonist finds himself embroiled in a conflict without solution. In contrast to Goethe’s Original, which caused some readers to raise their eyebrows at Werther’s reluctance to pursue Lotte, Foscolo’s conflict is transparent. Hegel’s ‘conflict between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of circ*mstances and the accidents of external situations’ is reconciled in Jacopo’s tragic patriotism. His downfall implies the promise of a better world achieved through national rejuvenation. Should Italians finally join forces instead of collaborating with foreigners, they will have achieved something more comprehensive than whatever scenario Jacopo and Teresa dreamed up under the mulberry tree where they first kissed. At the onset of the 19th century, love is replaced by nationhood.

Digression: dissolution of the graft (Leopardi)

At one point, after his snub and subsequent resignation, Werther dreams of sacrificing himself on the battlefield. The letter dating from 25 May 1772 reads: ‘I had a plan in my head of which I did not want to speak to you until it was accomplished; but now that it has not materialized, I may as well mention it. I wanted to go off to war, and had long been thinking about it’ (L 52). When he discusses the idea with the Prince, he is quickly talked out of it. Nevertheless, the dream of dying on the battlefield holds a seductive promise for the Wertherian hero, who longs to be cleansed of his personal sorrows. While Werther could have only joined the ranks of a regiment commanded by a German feudal warlord in 1774, when the novel was first published, the situation changed after the invention of the modern nation state. Werther’s successors took up arms in pursuit of a nobler goal: the protection of their motherland.

First of all, this possibility was embraced by the poetic personas conceived by Giacomo Leopardi, another writer who is frequently linked to Werther and Ortis.33 In the case of Leopardi, the poet who lastingly shaped the Italian language, to claim linguistic indebtedness to Goethe’s epistolary novel would be preposterous. However, a non-linguistic aspect of Leopardi’s work is indeed deserving of such comparative scrutiny: the motif of unconsummated love, as explored in both Werther and Ortis. The Canti, a poetry collection written between 1818 and 1836, juxtaposes this theme with martial heroism in an intricate manner. In scholarly literature, the heterogeneity of the Canti is often discussed in the light of the poet’s changing aesthetics, as he moves from his early heroism to multi-layered explorations of cultural memory and strokes of fate.34 Yet the dualism of love and nationhood continues a conceptual link that could already be observed in Foscolo: the analogy between the nation and the beloved.

On the one hand, Leopardi’s collection revolves around Wertherian scenes of frustrated love. The elegy ‘Consalvo’, for example, features the confession of a dying man who finally opens up to his beloved on his death bed and asks for a single kiss. Upon obtaining his humble request, he raves: ‘I was happy above all happy men. / Ah, but heaven does not permit / any being on earth to be blessed this way. / We can’t love this deeply and with joy.’35 In ‘To His Lady’ (‘Alla sua donna’) and ‘To Sylvia’ (‘A Sylvia’), the situation is reversed, as bereaved male lovers mourn their deceased beloveds. The latter are addressed like benevolent ghosts who now inhabit a happier sphere, inspiring the speakers to further withdraw from worldly life and prepare for their own deaths. Throughout the Canti, love and death are as inseparable as in Ossianic song, but the author follows in the footsteps of Werther by transferring Macpherson’s archaic imagery into the realm of muted, private suffering. There is no bloodshed, just the conviction that ‘the law of love / inclines toward death’ (C 229).

Her sons, the speaker laments, are recruited to die in wars fought far away from home, probably as mercenaries for foreign armies. This portrait of Italy’s lamentable present recalls Jacopo’s observations about the miserable living conditions of his countrymen, including Teresa, who he fears could be ruined and robbed of her self-respect. Instead of invoking suicide as a solution to such suffering, Leopardi’s speaker looks for inspiration in antiquity. In this spirit, the second part of the poem invokes the Battle of Thermopylae (480 bce) to illustrate the Greeks’ exemplary resistance against foreign aggression when ‘battalions / raced to die for their country’ (7). The speaker praises the courage of the Spartans, who overpowered the Persian aggressors despite the prospect of certain death. Such heroism contrasts unfavourably with Leopardi’s fellow Italians. Yet the speaker hopes his people will feel galvanised by meditating on ‘how, drenched / in barbarian blood, the hero Greeks, / […] defeated by their wounds, fall on one another’ (11). The drastic image of the raped nation and its rejuvenation inspired by a glorious past are rare ingredients in the poetry of Leopardi, who never returned to such themes. Meanwhile, such imagery became common currency in nationalist poetry throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Leopardi’s patriotic canzone ‘To Italy’ dates from 1818, a time when anti-Napoleonic sentiment swept the country. Around the same time, Alessandro Manzoni’s unfinished poem ‘Rimini Proclamation’ (‘Il proclama di Rimini’, 1815) also invoked the allegory of Italy, calling for Italian unification.

After Foscolo contaminated romantic love with notions of patriotic awakening, Leopardi’s collection advanced the dissolution of the graft by, once again, separating the two motifs. Even if sad lovers cannot transform into heroic soldiers overnight, both the romantic and the patriotic gestures share a rhetorical feature: their quintessential use of apostrophe. Lonely speakers invoke addressees who cannot answer back but offer redemption in a conceptual space outside the real world. To invoke Foscolo’s words, the dead maidens and Italy herself are meant to not only ‘alleviate’ the speaker’s fate but also ‘provide comfort’. There is a clear tendency towards self-aggrandisem*nt in this gesture. When a typical line in the love poems invokes the self as the ultimate subject of grand suffering, ‘Another love like this will never be’ (139), the patriotic poem addresses Italy in the same absolutist manner: ‘Weep; for you have reason to, my Italy, / born to outdo others / in both happiness and misery’ (3).

Why does Leopardi separate the voices that Foscolo so successfully combined? Possibly, the answer lies in the structural dynamics of the Canti. While Jacopo moves from individual love to patriotic ecstasy, the Canti invert this chronological sequence. The patriotic poems, penned between 1818 and 1820, come first and are followed by the poetry of ricordanza, in which the Romantic lament for lost youth and love exemplifies the inevitable fate of human experience. The overarching structure of the Canti infers a speaker who is carried away by the hopes of political awakening at first, then retreats into the world of individual grief. The link is retracted.

After Foscolo contaminated the Wertherian novel with explicit politics, poets such as Leopardi used the conceptual pair of romantic love and national rejuvenation for pathos-laden invocations of salvation and self-sacrifice. Within the love–nation complex, amorous passion and patriotic ambitions appear interchangeable. Werther, Ortis and the speakers in Leopardi’s poetry are ready to die for their beloved – or their country. Such continuities, however, should not gloss over a significant rupture between the kind of nationalism that is articulated in poetry and its equivalent in prose. Once literary realism started to dominate the aesthetics of the novel, as seen in Manzoni’s The Betrothed (I promessi sposi, 1827), tragic pairs of lovers found themselves embedded in more down-to-earth settings, leaving little room for the deification of the beloved and the high-strung pathos of self-sacrifice.

East Asian Werthers

In reaction to Goethe’s sensational debut novel, the poet Matthias Claudius issued an unsolicited piece of advice, suggesting that a change of scenery would have sufficed to alleviate Werther’s suffering: ‘Poor Werther! Had he only travelled to Paris or Beijing!’36 While Paris was a common destination of European grand tours, Claudius’s idea about an East Asian extension is somewhat eccentric but predicted the actual history of the novel’s reception.

The plight of Foscolo’s Italy arguably evinces some similarities to the colonial situation in China and Korea, thereby providing an ideal ground for further reinterpretation and rewriting. As in Foscolo’s fragmented pre-Risorgimento Italy, foreign aggression had eroded territorial integrity during the 19th and the early 20th centuries. Despite their rich local cultures and highly stratified societies, East Asian empires had to rethink their relations with the world after feeling the effects of Western gunboat diplomacy. But while Japan quickly modernised in reaction to the Perry Expedition (1853), China and Korea felt the yoke of foreign domination and fell under semi-colonial and colonial administration respectively. Across East Asia, literati embraced occidental literature as a tool to modernise the three territories – with Werther playing a prominent role. In contrast to their Japanese peers, who placed more emphasis on the subjective sentiment in Werther, Chinese and Korean authors pursued the book’s patriotic reinterpretation, thus reasserting the lingering connection between love and the nation. While Ortis figures as a unique case in Italian letters and only assumed canonised status after the book’s endorsem*nt by Risorgimento literati, Chinese Wertherian texts emerged from a broad cultural movement that set out to reform social and cultural norms between the end of the Great War and the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Since the Korean situation is addressed in a separate subchapter, the following overview focuses primarily on China.

While the imperial Qing administration never thought of its subjects as Chinese nationals, political figures such as Sun Yatsen, Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei began to promote the idea of China as a self-governing and unified nation state at the end of the 19th century, primarily as a reaction against both the perceived incompetence of autochthonous imperial rule and continued foreign interference.37 Their idea was that only China’s immediate modernisation, modelled after Western and Japanese examples, could prevent their country’s collapse, even if it would come at the expense of cultural loss. In addition to the linguistic shifts during the first decade following China’s transformation into a republic in 1911 (which were discussed in Chapter 2), socio-political movements became a powerful force that shaped the cultural self-understanding of the country at the same time. Confronted with the results of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, students and literati reacted strongly to their administration’s apparent failure to advance the country’s territorial interests. Following pressure from Japan, the Kiautschou Bay concession, a Chinese territory previously governed by Germany, was awarded to the island empire instead of being returned to China. Throughout the 19th century, China had gradually lost its status as an important geopolitical power, as its port cities were successively split up among American, European and Japanese authorities. Much to the chagrin of students and literati, the Paris Peace Conference suggested that this trend would only continue.

In reaction, the ‘Manifesto of all the Students in Beijing’ (北京學界全體宣言 Beijing xuejie quanti xuanyan) called for radical action and painted a bleak picture of the country’s future: ‘Today we swear two solemn oaths with all our countrymen: 1) China’s territory may be conquered, but it cannot be given away; 2) the Chinese people may be massacred, but they will not surrender. Our country is about to be annihilated! Up, brethren.’38 The second point articulates a fear that indicates the social Darwinist concerns of Chinese intellectuals, who saw a struggle for survival playing out between nations, races and civilisations.39 In reaction to this threat of extinction, some resorted to direct political action, as evinced by the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Meanwhile, others continued the transcultural work started by late Qing reformers. In a country where only a small minority had completed the minimum schooling necessary to master the administrative language, Classical Chinese, it became imperative to develop a vernacular.

Although the pessimistic undertones that permeate Lu Xun’s prose contradict this emancipatory proclamation, the preface places great hopes in the revolutionary power of literature. Hoping to enhance the relevance and mass appeal of literary writing, many writers modelled their texts after Western examples, which were considered less elitist than the domestic tradition. The great scepticism towards the Chinese literary heritage was rooted in a somewhat simplistic juxtaposition: while no Chinese commoner existed who spoke in a way that resembled Tang poetry, an aesthetics that continued to inform contemporary poetics, many Norwegians used the language of Ibsen’s characters. This programmatic rejection of old forms led to a creative explosion. Between 1919 and the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War (1927–37), writers enjoyed unprecedented freedom to navigate new modes of expression, ranging from popular romance to realist portraits of contemporary society and from psychological diaries to quasi-Romantic poetry.

Werther was received most enthusiastically by the members of the Creation Society, a literary circle founded in 1921 and largely based in Shanghai, the country’s publishing centre. While strongly identifying as Romantics,42 Gou Morou and Yu Dafu pursued a free interpretation of the term. Next to Goethe’s epistolary novel and British household names, their preferred readings also included Ibsen’s dramas and the poetry of Walt Whitman, thus expanding conventional – that is, European – notions of Romanticism considerably. By focusing on complex psychological issues and contextualising them socio-politically, the Society promoted, in Xiaobing Tang and Michel Hockx’s words, a ‘potent admixture of nineteenth-century German Romantic discourse and a more amorphous fin-de-siècle neo-Romanticism that could range from aestheticism to proto-socialism’.43 In addition, Guo and Yu’s interest in non-canonical strands of the Chinese literary heritage allowed them to imagine continuity between European cultural artefacts and Chinese modernity.

The following sections consider the early narrative works of Yu Dafu, Guo Moruo, Ba Jin and Jiang Guangci. Although their narrative texts follow a highly specific aesthetics, the Werther trope is integral to their literary celebration of the linkage between complex subjective emotions and ecstatic visions of national rejuvenation. After the first full translation of Goethe’s book in 1922, Wertherian protagonists started to populate Chinese modernist texts, reaching a saturation point during the 1930s when Werther transformed from hero into caricature.

Postcolonial Werther

In retrospect, the proliferation of Chinese Werthers led to a confusing situation: during a time when Goethe was celebrated as an icon of national culture in Wilhelmine Germany, an empire with considerable colonial possessions, Werther was embraced as an emblem of the struggle for national liberation in China, a country that was partially colonised by Germany. Between 1898 and 1914, Berlin administered the Kiautschou Bay concession, covering a third of today’s Shandong province in eastern China. Although English, French, American and Japanese powers were certainly perceived as greater threats, German troops carried out punitive expeditions in Shandong not only against the rebels of the Boxer Rebellion, but also against the broader civilian population.44

In the light of Werther’s warm reception in China, it is difficult to ignore the fact that the novel originates in an intellectual tradition that conceived of the Sinic realm as culturally inferior and in need of foreign rule. Herder, who exerted a considerable intellectual influence on the young Goethe, contradicted Leibniz and Voltaire, who had nothing but praise for Confucian rationalism, and insisted that Chinese culture and society were hopelessly backward. Accordingly, the country’s culture and its people were caught in a state of eternal paralysis: ‘This empire is an embalmed mummy, adorned with hieroglyphs and clad in silk. Its inner circulation resembles the life of hibernating animals.’45 According to Adrian Hsia, Herder’s disregard of the Sinic realm stands out negatively among his comments on non-European peoples, for its people and culture evince inferiority in both physical and spiritual terms.46 Foreshadowing the cultural chauvinism of the 19th and 20th centuries, Herder established an image of China that would become common currency at European universities, with Hegel and Friedrich W. J. Schelling further elaborating on the country’s deplorable lack of development. Although in later life Goethe would develop an interest in Chinese literature,47 his early poem ‘A Chinese in Rome’ (‘Der Chinese in Rom’, 1797) reiterates Herder’s clichéd views that Orientals are so used to their eternally repetitive patterns that they cannot even appreciate the superiority of Western antiquity.48

Notwithstanding Herder’s cultural chauvinism and racism, these elaborations articulate concerns that were in fact shared by the activists of the May Fourth era. But where the German thinker only saw immaturity, ignorance and even animality at work, Chinese literati saw the long-term effects of an oppressive culture, Confucianism, that had joined forces with foreign aggressors to subjugate the population. Their pronounced antipathy to the lingering cultural heritage is most strikingly articulated in one of Lu Xun’s most celebrated short stories, Diary of a Madman (狂人日記 Kuangren riji 1918). In view of the institutional and interpersonal cruelty legitimised through tradition and habit, the narrator accuses Chinese society of systematic cannibalism.49 In a toned-down way, the same hostility towards an ossified heritage also informs Hu Shi’s recommendation for modern writers: ‘Don’t imitate the ancients.’50 It appears that Herder’s chauvinism was, to some degree, vindicated by modern Chinese thinkers.

Despite such superficial parallels between Herder and May Fourth writers, the latter departed considerably from Europe’s distorted image of China. After all, they embarked on a revaluation of the Chinese tradition by de-emphasising the Confucian tradition, supposedly the force behind cultural stagnation, in favour of less orthodox letters, ranging from the Zhuangzi, an ancient Daoist text full of ‘contempt for social values, hierarchies, and conventional reasoning’,51 to the poetry of Tao Yuanming, through to the vernacular classics, which have become synonymous with the literary canon up to the present. In contrast to Herder’s verdict about the ‘embalmed mummy’, China’s critics were the most enthusiastic promoters of the ‘other’ China.

As the intellectual forays of Hu Shi and Lu Xun demonstrate, the adaptation of Western models and the revaluation of the classical heritage were simultaneous operations. At the same time, when Hu introduced Ibsen to the Chinese audience, he also issued modernised editions of vernacular novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Only a few years after ‘Diary of a Madman’, Lu published his Brief History of Chinese Fiction (中國小說史略 Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe, 1925), a text written in Classical Chinese. In sum, May Fourth writers used the prestige attributed to Western letters to shake up their own literary heritage, but instead of advocating their native tradition’s wholesale replacement, they pursued a nuanced programme of transcultural integration.

Arguably, such factors distinguish the Chinese situation from the prominent cases analysed by classical postcolonial criticism. In the light of China’s linguistic continuity, the established concepts of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak or Homi K. Bhabha fail to make sense of the country’s situation. In contrast to the fate of English in Ireland and India, the Chinese language remained the unquestioned means of communication, a language considered in need of reform but not risking replacement. Instead of writers reappropriating the coloniser’s language, the Chinese situation allowed literati to put transcultural and transhistorical sources to use at the same time.

In Guo Moruo’s preface to Werther, the translator returns to his idea of a universal language of the soul, claiming that Werther articulates the same insights that inform the Zhuangzi. Referencing the letter of 18 August 1771, Guo regards the protagonist’s view of the universe as an ‘all-consuming, devouring monster’ (L 37) as indication of a quasi-Daoist philosophy: ‘If you embrace this force, then you will only see life and no more death, then you will only see permanence and no longer mere changes. You are surrounded by paradise everywhere, the heavenly kingdom commences anytime, there is eternal joy, the heart overflows.’52 From an occidental perspective, this sounds like a forceful interpretation of pantheism, but Guo’s free associations integrate Werther’s enunciations into a native Chinese framework. Indeed, Lü Tongzhuang has argued that one must not overestimate the role of Western learning in Guo’s aesthetics; after all, his early essays evince stronger connections to the Zhuangzi than to Goethe or other Western writers.53

In comparative scholarship, the deliberate adaptations of foreign concepts in 1920s China have already received considerable attention, for example in Haun Saussy’s study of Xu Zhimo’s interpretation of Baudelaire, which was discussed in Chapter 1. Guo’s conceptual toolkit contains the idea that discrete cultural sources tap into a universal aesthetic source: spontaneous inspiration. Werther’s eruptive literary style and Zhuangzian epistemic scepticism have, to equal extent, the ability to shake up ossified structures. In this light, what Engels considered the ‘lamentations of a delusional whiner’ no longer indicate a solipsistic trait of bourgeois self-pity; here, Wertherian writing forms part of a larger socio-political movement that has the values of liberty and the pursuit of happiness as fundamental points of reference. While such values first appeared in the North American political context, they later also spread to France and Europe. Eventually, they also arrived on Chinese soil.

From sexual frustration to patriotism

Once grafted into a new cultural context, the Wertherian protagonist moved beyond his narrow scope of self-pity. Other than Jacopo Ortis’s straightforward patriotic awakening, his Chinese peers would only express patriotic sentiments after first taking a detour into a realm of human experience that, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, was difficult to address in direct terms: the individual’s wayward sexual desires. The prominence of libidinal frustration became emblematic of the frictions between socio-political oppression and the individual’s desire for a fulfilled life. This subsection holds Guo’s novella Caramel Girl (喀爾美蘿姑娘 Ka’ermeimeng guniang, 1924) against one of the most celebrated texts of the Creation Society, Yu Dafu’s Sinking (沈淪, 1921), which is routinely compared to Goethe’s Werther in criticism.54 There is a smooth transition between expressions of subjective grief that do not move beyond the individual’s scope and those that envision personal frustration as metonymic for the nation itself.

In Wertherian fashion, the protagonist follows the spontaneous stirrings of love but, unable to talk to the girl, shirks from any step that could lead towards fulfilment. As the promise of erotic love turns sour, the unhinged individual is left with no other outlet for his sorrows than sleeping pills and a gun. Here, the successful emulation of Western models heralds the suicidal impulses that also played such a pertinent role in the French and Japanese reception of Werther, as discussed in Chapter 4. Although the preface to Guo’s 1922 Werther translation celebrates the protagonist as a rebel, the narrator remains committed to the portrait of highly subjective grief and despair.

Meanwhile, the self-destructive trajectory of the protagonist in Yu Dafu’s Sinking moves beyond the realm of subjective sentiment. Acting as a catalyst of psychological suffering, the lure of sensual fulfilment exacerbates his suffering, until a powerful compensatory idea emerges that promises comprehensive relief: national rejuvenation. The narrative perspective of the text differs markedly from Guo’s first-person narrative, as Yu opts for an ambiguous personal narrator who switches between the protagonist’s meandering thoughts, hurried descriptions of his actions and distanced judgement. Sinking is steeped in intertextual references to occidental authors but treats their potential for salvation critically. After moving to Japan at the age of nineteen, the Chinese protagonist is initially portrayed as a loner who passionately reads and translates Romantic poetry, such as William Wordsworth’s ballad ‘The Solitary Reaper’ (1807). Soon, however, he arrives at the realisation that there is a clash between European languages and Chinese.

In Yu’s original Chinese publication, the cultural designations ‘English’ and ‘Chinese’ are rendered in their national equivalents (中國詩 Zhongguo shi, 英國詩 Yingguo shi), thus invoking the fundamental polarity of two antagonistic nations, China and the West. Since Wordsworth does not have anything else to offer than English words for English readers, the protagonist must give up translation altogether. He is fated to write in Chinese for a Chinese audience.

The protagonist subsequently turns to a new outlet for his tormented soul: torturous eroticism. His excursions into the realm of the senses only exacerbate his situation. As a Chinese man in Japan, he feels like a second-class citizen, a status that thwarts all attempts to relate to other people, especially women. When he walks past two local girls and registers their interest in him, he is suddenly paralysed by fear and runs away. At home, he has second thoughts about their interest in him: ‘Oh, the girls must have known! They must have known that I am a “Chinaman”; […] Why did I come to Japan? Why did I come here to pursue my studies? Since you have come, is it a wonder that the Japanese treat you with contempt?’ Switching from Chinese to English, he reproaches himself: ‘You coward fellow, you are too coward!’ (S 35). One day, he seizes the opportunity to peep at the landlord’s daughter while she washes herself. Now the narrative accelerates: after nearly fainting from excitement, he feels so ashamed that he runs away, leaving his rented room for good. He then moves into a remote hut deep in the woods, hoping to find peace in natural surroundings. Finally, the place’s tranquillity appears to soothe his tormented soul. He experiences Wertherian ecstasy in the greenery of Japan’s countryside for some time, then old habits reappear; this time, he eavesdrops on a couple making love out in the open. He rushes to the city’s harbour, where he enters a demi-monde establishment. Left alone with a pretty girl, probably a prostitute or lowly geisha, he is transfixed by her attractive features: ‘He wanted to look closely at her and confide in her all his troubles. But in reality he didn’t even dare look her in the eye, much less talk to her. And so, like a mute, all he did was look furtively at her delicate, white hands resting upon her knees’ (51). After Lotte’s multiple transformations, from national allegory to shop girl, Yu dramatises her most dejected incarnation, as a demi-monde figure. She still remains out of reach.

The reader is left to imagine whether he really drowns himself.

There are obvious connections between Sinking and its literary precursors: solitary walks, bookishness, ecstasy in nature and subjective monological style. In Goethe’s original, sexual repression is latent but never addressed directly. Meanwhile, in Foscolo’s work, political and sexual repression go together but are resolved through the erotic neutralisation of Teresa as Italia turrita. In Yu’s text, the crushing experience of sexual rejection culminates in the hero’s desperate invocation of a nation that is worth dying for. Expressed after the protagonist feels rejected by a lowly Japanese attendant, Yu’s text advances the birth of nationalism from the spirit of frustrated libido.

Can this call for national rejuvenation be taken seriously? In fact, the consensus of Western scholarship is that Yu’s novella contains a psychopathological argument rather than a patriotic tale.59 Despite the protagonist’s irritating behaviour, the canonisation of Yu Dafu in modern Chinese literary history cemented Sinking as a tale of heroism. Up to the present, the protagonist is singled out as a martyr who dies for his motherland.60 Kirk Denton, one of the few Western scholars who positively reiterate this approach, argues: ‘For Yu Dafu, the libidinous act is the critical site at which national identity is in crisis.’ The inner realms of both Yu and the protagonist are no longer cut off from the social environment or enclosed within an isolated ego but represent the node where self and society meet. The author’s patriotism emerges from his ‘realization that his individual identity is profoundly threatened by the collapse of the cultural whole’. Longing for his motherland, he establishes the absent cultural and national whole as the true desideratum of his metaphysical desire: ‘Suicide executed may stand either as a form of sexual union with, or a complete rejection of, the object.’61

According to Denton, Sinking contains two socio-political propositions. Firstly, there is the idea that sexual perversion is not a question of individual psychology but connects to the realm of geopolitics. Secondly, sexual frustration can be cured by the patriotic rejuvenation of one’s motherland. Embedded into the grand narrative of national humiliation, this nexus holds the prospect of a comprehensive liberation, spanning the political and the sexual realms. These propositions are highly contestable but created an ideological amalgamation that had a lasting effect on Chinese Wertherian texts. Sinking is one of a long series of texts that embrace the heroic subject and consciously reject a psychological reading of the subject’s sorrows – in favour of their solution in the political sphere.

Second digression: the first modern Korean novel

Before this chapter turns to the patriotic revenants of the Werther who took up arms in China, it is worthwhile to consider the inception of literary modernism in a country where intellectuals faced a similar situation: Korea. Here, the intersection between romantic love and patriotism is best exemplified by Yi Kwangsu’s Heartless (무정 Mujong), a novel from 1917, commonly regarded as the first modern Korean novel.62 It is fair to say that it occupies a position in the national literary canon similar to Werther in the German, Ortis in the Italian and Sinking in the Chinese contexts. Although Werther and Heartless have been discussed in tandem in critical literature,63 the text is not strictly Wertherian. In Yi’s novel, an omniscient narrator dominates the text and relates the fate of three characters whose lives intersect with historical events. Nonetheless, there are features that make Heartless worthwhile to consider in the present chapter. There are two Wertherian characters, one male and one female, with the latter pondering suicide throughout the text. Despite the text’s lack of subjective prose, the novel’s language, modelled after Japanese genbun itchi, was also considered ground-breaking at the time and continues to be described as ‘easy-flowing and natural, free of stylistic mannerism and classical allusions’.64 Sexual desire and patriotism, the game-changing additions of Yu’s text, also take centre stage.

The narrative is set on the Korean peninsula, where the native population finds itself in an even worse position than those in Foscolo’s Italy or Guo Moruo and Yu Dafu’s China. In Korea, foreign rule intensified throughout the 19th and the early 20th centuries: in 1876, a coalition between Japan, France, the United States and Russia forced the dynastic kingdom of Joseon to open several ports to international trade.65 As Japan increased its territorial claims, the peninsula was formally annexed by its aggressive neighbour in 1910. As in the case of the Kiautschou Bay concession, the Paris Peace Conference brought no geopolitical compromise and only confirmed Japanese claims to power. In response to the perceived injustice, Korean literati turned to direct action and publishing. The antagonism between the Japanese colonial masters and the Korean people’s search for a national identity culminated in the short-lived March First Movement of 1919, when protest leaders gathered in Seoul to read out the Declaration of Independence. At the same time, popular protests spread across the country, turned violent and embroiled the police in deadly battles. Taken by surprise, the colonial forces put down the uprising by force, resulting in tens of thousands of casualties.66 Today, this period is regarded as a major turning point in Korea’s cultural history. Responding to the crushing political reality of Japanese colonial rule, members of the March First Movement took advantage of modern print, thereby hastening the development of modern literature. Translations from Western languages, often mediated through Japanese, played an important role in this process. The first full translation of Werther into Korean appeared in 1922 and became so popular with Korean readers that up to fifty additional translations have followed up to the present.67

Dotted with references to impurity and shame, her farewell letter exemplifies the mindset of old Korea, as she nevertheless clings to Confucian values. Since Youngchae’s only reference system is two ancient texts, Biographies of Virtuous Women (列女傳 Lie nü zhuan, 18 bce) and Elementary Learning (小學 Xiao xue, 1127–1279 ce), she is unequipped to address, let alone critique, her social environment. If it were not for a timely intervention on the part of a representative of a renewed Korea, Pyeongyuk, her life would have culminated in suicide. Confronted with a new set of values, she can break away from her past.

The other Wertherian figure is Hyeongsik. Stylistically, the chapters that centre around him primarily paraphrase his repetitive thoughts that oscillate between his frustration with the society he lives in and the social norms that he cannot help but reproduce. With a dose of irony, the narrator introduces Hyeongsik as ‘a pioneer with the most advanced thinking in Korea. Within his modesty was a pride and arrogance towards Korean society. He had read Western philosophy and Western literature’ (M 229). Yet his intention to ‘bring the Korean people to the same level of civilization as that of all of the most civilized peoples in the world’ (129) clashes with his actual behaviour. Torn between traditional values and modern individualism, he not only fails to prevent Youngchae’s suicide but also accepts it as a fait accompli when he receives her farewell letter. All of this is reminiscent of the Wertherian Either–Or impasse, with the notable difference that his deluded sense of self-worth prevents him from harbouring suicidal thoughts.

During a prolonged stay with Pyeongyuk’s family, a growing awareness of her own value manifests in her plan to attend university. But before she can actually proceed to realise her dreams, her resolve is tested during the novel’s climax, when she encounters her ex-fiancé and his new wife on a train. Her pent-up feelings resurface and threaten her new-found rationality, when an extraordinary event neutralises the love triangle, as the train is caught in a thunderstorm. Looking out of the windows, the four young people witness how mudslides destroy the fields of a nearby village. The misery of the helpless villagers, they realise, mirrors the fate of the Korean nation, and it sets a transformative process in motion in them. The four young citizens forget about their petty individual feelings and organise a charity concert for the villagers. Strengthened by the success of this operation, the four are now determined to devote their lives to a new purpose: ‘Let us work so that when we are old, we will see a better Korea’ (342). During the final quarter of Heartless, the narration suspends all irony in favour of an unmistakably educational tone. The text closes with an upbeat exclamation: ‘now, with happy smiles, and cries of “long live Korea!” let us bring to a close this novel […] and its mourning for a world of the past’ (348). Overall, this turn of events in the final quarter of the text is somewhat surprising but establishes a clear progression from the lowly realm of individual subjectivity to salvation through patriotism.

This narrative node, connecting the individual and the nation, is reminiscent of Yu’s Sinking. The basic assumption that informs Heartless is, as Michael D. Shin points out, ‘that the discovery of interiority and the recovery of national identity were one and the same thing’.70 Like the protagonist of Sinking, Hyeongsik is a loner who experiences sexual frustration. While he initially feels that he has to accept social convention in order to get along in life, the thunderstorm allows him to pursue a more proactive approach in regard to his place in the world. In the face of the mudslide, the unsolvable complications of the love triangle disappear alongside the characters’ egocentrism. In the four young people’s quest for collective rejuvenation, nationalism facilitates their transformation from confused individualists to mature idealists.

In literary history, the lives and works of authors are rarely consistent. This applies not only to Goethe’s rejection of Werther’s subjectivism, but also to the political optimism of Yi Kwangsu’s Heartless, which conflicts drastically with the author’s political career; after all, he became a collaborator with the Japanese colonial government. Since the discrepancy between Yi’s role as inventor of modern Korean literature and his pro-Japanese writings, especially the derogatory ‘Theory of Reforming National Character’ (국가전환론 Minjok kaejoron) from 1921, is so difficult to reconcile, Yi’s complicated career is the object of lengthy discussions. Peter Lee’s explanation suggests that this shift was triggered by the defeat of the March First Movement. Infatuated by the cultural advances of Japan, Yi had second thoughts about his optimism for Korean rejuvenation and started to fall for ‘quietistic cynicism’.71 In the same vein, John Withier Treat argues that Yi perceived Japan positively as the beacon of enlightenment, believing that the annexation was the only way for Korea to modernise.72 Regardless of Yi’s intentions, his change of mind contributed to the violent end to his life: North Korean forces abducted and probably executed him in 1950.73 Unimpressed by his complex legacy, there are scholars who argue that his pro-Japanese convictions are completely unrelated to his literary production.74

Placed in the context of revolutionary Werthers, Yi Kwangsu’s Heartless connects to the other texts in three ways. Firstly, while the text reaffirms the love–nation nexus, it exhibits a transformative patriotism that channels an individual’s determination to commit suicide into the task of nation building. Secondly, the love triangle articulates the sociopolitical transition from traditional mores (Youngchae, Hyeongsik) to modern notions of love and individualism (Pyeongyuk, transformed Youngchae). Contrary to expectations, the aim of individualistic self-discovery is the creation of a positive affiliation with the national collective. And thirdly, political Wertherian texts, including Heartless, are inevitably evaluated against the lives of their authors. Sometimes, the comparison leads to positive judgements, as in the case of Yu, who was canonised by Chinese literary criticism. At other times, however, the tension between life and work invites criticism or even condemnation, as evinced by Yi’s fraught status in Korean literary history.

Revolution, not love (Ba Jin, Mao Dun)

In the works of Yu Dafu and Guo Moruo, the Wertherian hero remains aloof from actual political struggle. This changes in the 1930s, when his revenants channel their passion for justice into violent action – as terrorists or soldiers.

Renmin’s hard-boiled pledge invokes the ‘New Life’, a cipher for a rejuvenated China.76 Nevertheless, Trilogy of Love lives up to its title, as Renmin soon falls in love with a girl and takes a break from his revolutionary career. When he asks his revolutionary colleagues to lend him money for his wedding, however, they have a good laugh and wait for his misguided passion to dissolve. Indeed, the girl’s premature death does not inaugurate Renmin’s transformation into a dejected Wertherian hero; instead, he saves his life for a patriotic mission.

Following in Werther’s footsteps, Rushui pursues a woman who is already taken. In Peizhu’s case, however, what stands in the way of his success is not her engagement to another man but her commitment to the improvement of society. In contrast to the classic scenario in which the beloved remains positive or ambiguous about her suitor, Peizhu is wholeheartedly devoted to the revolutionary cause and completely renounces romantic love.

For Rushui, her diehard Wertherian lover, this statement boils down to a death sentence. Walking back home, he drowns himself in the Huangpu. At this point, the narration abandons Rushui and only cites a news report: ‘The next day, the evening news featured a notice that was placed so marginally that nobody took notice: “anonymous young man drowned himself.”’83 Although Rushui and Yu’s protagonist opt for the same mode of death, the status of their deaths differs radically: one dies longing for a motherland, the other one merely dies of frustrated love.

Anti-love

Contrary to Lei’s claim that he will die in battle, he returns unharmed. What is more, he is promoted, which allows him to become an associate at the factory owned by Mrs Wu’s husband. Transformed from penniless soldier to associate, Lei does not think twice about his beloved. While Mao Dun’s Midnight regards Wertherian love as a social practice that exhausts itself in grandiose statements, Ba Jin’s Trilogy of Love highlights a different danger: that love can serve as a dangerous distraction for budding revolutionaries. Falling in love means contributing to the continuation of the status quo.

Yao finds that Ba Jin’s text seduces readers into forming opinions that deviate from the comprehensive political instrumentalisation of literature, as laid out in Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art (延安文藝座談會 Yan’an wenyi zuotanhui), held in 1942, which required literature and the arts to be repurposed for propagandistic aims.88 Isolated writers who pursued individualist visions of justice overstepped their competence and threatened the goal of comprehensive centralisation.

Ba Jin’s text is at odds with the official party line in the passages where Renmin and Peizhu (and Du Daxin in Destruction) act on their personal dissatisfaction with the existing system. Although anarchists and members of the CCP long fought a common enemy, the reactionary military government of the Kuomintang, their united front broke in 1949 when anarchists became the target of purges. From a party perspective, Wertherian figures such as Yu Dafu’s protagonist represent a lesser evil because their case is rather simple: they lack guidance. This interpretative frame can even be applied to Rushui, the dejected lover who commits suicide. Such belated Wertherian echoes presuppose that individuals require the leadership of party officials, and that otherwise their individual efforts will lead them to self-destruction.

The battlefield as liberation (Jiang Guangci)

In the early 19th century, the invocation of death on the battlefield remained vague. Leopardi’s nostalgia for the Battle of Thermopylae does not flesh out the new political alliances that could roll back the country’s foreign rule. Chinese novels from the early 20th century such as Yu’s Sinking and Ba Jin’s Love Trilogy also remain somewhat vague, even as resentments against Japanese society and the desire for heroic action dominate the narration. Jiang Guangci’s The Young Wanderer (少年漂泊者 Shaonian piaobozhe) from 1926, however, breaks with this kind of vagueness. Here, the protagonist learns to identify his country’s oppressors and maps out a path of direct action.

Considered the first example of proletarian revolutionary literature in China,89 The Young Wanderer actively invokes Goethe’s Werther by echoing the title of Guo Moruo’s translation: Shaonian Weite zhi fannao.90 In contrast to Werther and Jacopo Ortis’s aristocratic and Yu Dafu and Ba Jin’s petit-bourgeois backgrounds, Jiang Guangci’s protagonist has roots in the lowest echelon of society. The first-person narrator is, in fact, the son of peasants. Zhuzhong’s infancy takes place during the difficult period following the fall of the Qing dynasty, when the abolition of feudal privileges failed to change the living conditions of ordinary people, as warlords ruthlessly confiscated their land. In The Young Wanderer, the protagonist first experiences life through the lens of a passive subject. Like Youngchae in Yi Kwangsu’s Heartless, Zhuzhong’s story abounds with abuse. When a harvest fails and his parents cannot afford their lease, the cruel landowner simply murders them. Left on his own, the orphan seeks refuge at a Buddhist temple, where he is promptly molested by a lustful priest. After contemplating suicide for a while, he starts living on the streets and survives on alms. Closing in on scenes of cruelty and injustice, the letter writer rarely allows himself to engage with his own feelings in more depth. There are episodes of sorrow and despair, but the pace of the narration is steadily approaching the turning point in Zhuzhong’s life, his patriotic awakening. The only exception is his lament about Yumei, his lover.

The Wertherian routine that sees initial happiness thwarted by external interference commences when the protagonist takes up an apprenticeship at a shop and falls in love with the owner’s daughter. Unfortunately, her father has already arranged for her to marry the son of a land-owning bureaucrat. In protest, Yumei, who had hoped to marry Zhuzhong one day, falls severely ill. Hoping to save her, Zhuzhong confesses their secret love to her father, who reacts by promptly sending him away with a recommendation for a placement in a distant city. Broken-hearted, Yumei dies.

Yet Zhuzhong is still far from committing himself to the revolutionary cause because he still connects his lot to a metaphysical agent. Unable to blame anyone for this tragedy, the young man directs his anger at the demiurge who created this unjust world: ‘You devil, you ruthless thing, you creator of all the darkness in this world! Your crimes are deeper than the ocean, greater than the highest mountain, they burn hotter than fire!’92 Since there is little he can do about it, he simply endures the pain and starts a new life. Unlike Werther after his first departure from Lotte, who remains caught in the vortex of his own thoughts, the change of scenery exposes Zhuzhong to new social circles.

Vietnam has already been turned into a French colony and Korea into a Japanese one, and the world powers appear determined to subdue China next. This catastrophic scenario awakens Zhuzhong’s political consciousness and prepares him to internalise the students’ message. Quitting his job in protest against his boss’s opportunism, his frustration starts to translate into concrete social analysis and a patriotic consciousness. He joins a labour union, becomes an activist himself and organises a strike at an English-owned silk factory.

Although Zhuzhong does not elaborate on whom he considers ‘vermin’, the novel suggests that the enemy is comprised of foreigners in the international settlements, local collaborators of the Japanese government and capitalists in general. Eventually, the narration is taken over by the recipient of Zhuzhong’s letters. Intrigued by the young man’s further career, an investigation brings his premature death to light. As expected, Zhuzhong fell on the battlefield.

As a novel, The Young Wanderer makes for reliable propagandistic reading. The melancholic and decadent hero of old, as portrayed in Yu Dafu’s work, is replaced by a revolutionary martyr. Instead of waxing poetic about heroic deaths like Ba Jin’s male heroes, he vows to do something meaningful with his sorrowful life. What is more, there is a notable difference to Ba Jin’s anarchism, as The Young Wanderer emphasises the importance of joining centralised institutions: first the Central Trade Union of Jinghan Railways, then the Whampoa Military Academy. The novel portrays the idealised development of an unenlightened peasant boy into a revolutionary fighter, a linear development that is afforded by a loss of psychological complexity. The fateful love triangle, the root cause of many literary suicides, is neutralised by active participation in the revolution. This inaugurates a new phase of May Fourth-inspired writing. Once Zhuzhong detects the origins of life’s misery – capitalism and imperialism – he joins the revolutionaries, fights oppression by joining the army and dies a heroic death. Finally, the martial gestures of Leopardi’s early poetry translate into a socio-political reality.

In spite of The Young Wanderer’s revolutionary fervour, the book has received a mixed assessment in Chinese literary history. Irrespective of his novel’s commercial success and critical acclaim upon its publication, Jiang Guangci’s heterodox political views stood in the way of the book’s canonisation. Jiang studied at Moscow’s Oriental University and became a lecturer in Marxism in 1924 after his return to China, which left him better informed on the orthodox position than most of his peers, including members of the CCP. Certainly, The Young Wanderer anticipated communist literary discourse for years to come,96 especially after the foundation of the Republic in 1949, when Jiang’s novel continued to serve as a blueprint for revolutionary novels. This applies to popular texts such as Yang Mo’s Song of Youth (青春之歌 Qingchun zhi ge, 1958) and Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan’s Red Cliff (紅岩 Hong yan, 1961). At the time of their publication, however, Jiang’s own follow-ups to The Young Wanderer had made him suspicious in the eyes of party officials. They departed from the optimistic model of his early novel, for example Lisa’s Sorrows (麗莎的哀怨 Lisha de aiyuan, 1929) and The Moon Forces Its Way Through the Clouds (衝出雲圍的月亮 Chongchu yunwei de yueliang, 1930). In the light of the failure of the communist insurgency in 1927, the ideological confidence of characters such as Zhuzhong gave way to ambiguous protagonists. Instead of heroic resistance against imperialists and capitalists, these texts dwell on decadence, prostitution and syphilis. Eventually, Jiang’s ideological unreliability contributed to his exclusion from the CCP and his elision from histories of modernist literature in China.97

Conclusion

Over the course of 150 years, authors detached Werther’s frustration from a purely personal tragedy, transforming it into longing for national rejuvenation. In this process, Wertherian novels moved from Engels’s ‘halfhearted lamentation’ to blunt calls to action. In Foscolo’s elegy for Italy’s lost greatness, the answers were exile and death; Yu Dafu’s observation of China’s weakness and Yi Kwangsu’s portrait of Korean misery indicated the possibility of national rejuvenation; finally, Jiang’s enlisted protagonist completed the semantic nexus that Werther set in motion in 1774 by sending him off to the battlefield. Revolutionary Werthers stand in pronounced opposition to the German reception of the text, which was dominated by readers who found the socio-political implications of the texts negligible. Benefitting from the cultural remoteness of the Original, Italian and Chinese Werthers depart from conventional positions in three ways: firstly, these novels posit that there is dignity in Wertherian suffering; secondly, the heroes’ desperation is often transformed into martial aggression; and thirdly, the entire corpus, beginning with Foscolo and ending with Jiang, regards revolution as a patriotic project.

To end this chapter, I will discuss three outstanding features of the novels – their ideas about dignity in suffering, martial aggression and patriotism – to unsettle the cliché of Werther as the ‘delusional whiner’.

Dignity in suffering

After 1789, the suffering of an individual indicated that the body politic was in disarray, turning literary characters, especially lachrymose ones such as Werther, into barometers for societies that were undergoing radical change. Jacopo Ortis’s lamentations about his sad fate do not stand in the way of meaningful political observations. On the contrary, his tragic love story sharpens his awareness of the social ills caused by Austrian occupation. While ‘nincompoops, scoundrels and villains’ are rewarded, he sees that the common people are dying of hunger and exhaustion. With Foscolo unable to propose a political solution for the predicament of his nation, Jacopo elevates Teresa, his beloved, into a paragon of female virtue, convinced she will, somehow, herald the country’s return to glory. In this sense, Foscolo uses Wertherian sentimentalism as a rootstock and adds the glorification of violent self-sacrifice as a scion. Together, they form a new literary constellation. While the patriotic tone of Jacopo Ortis was championed by the cultural masterminds of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Pecchio and Giuseppe Mazzini, the protagonist’s fate is still a far cry from the heroic deaths of, say, the Belfiore martyrs, whose execution in 1852 and 1853 marked the climax of the Italian independence movement. Jacopo remains confined to the limits of personal tragedy, which is metonymic for the fate of Italy without actively participating in a political movement.

In the East Asian context, Werther’s revolutionary reinterpretations are unrelated to Foscolo. In fact, the reception of Goethe’s text skips European strands of reception altogether, allowing readers to simply ignore the text’s most dominant lines of interpretations, namely its narrow identification with sentimental tropes and biographical detail. Readers such as Guo Moruo pursue reinterpretations that can be called, depending on the viewpoint, hopelessly naive or uncompromisingly creative. Free from irony, suffering is elevated into a rite of passage that heralds greatness. This affirmative attitude also informs Yu Dafu’s Sinking, a text in which a self-centred young man sacrifices himself for his country – by drowning outside a brothel. According to canonical Chinese criticism, his final words have a cleansing effect that overrides all previous follies and idiosyncrasies. In Yi Kwangsu’s Heartless, the protagonists also act in a self-absorbed manner but are redeemed by their belated commitment to ‘the tens of millions of Koreans of past generations, our 1.6 [m]‌illion fellow countrymen in the present, and the tens of millions of our descendants in future generations’. Once again, in the absence of narrative irony, the protagonists embed their individual fates into a comprehensive vision of national rejuvenation. The same also applies to Jiang Guangci’s Zhuzhong, whose moral enlightenment, resulting in his unapologetic death on the battlefield, is considered worthy of imitation. Reiterating this pattern, Ba Jin’s Trilogy of Love also features plenty of admirable characters who overcome their isolated individual lives in order to pursue a higher goal. Renmin and Peizhu strive for martyrdom, supposedly to the benefit of a future generation of free citizens; meanwhile, the suffering of the loner Rushui remains void of socio-political meaning, as he dies without articulating a grandiose statement regarding China’s future. In a way, he is the only suicide in this cohort who does not bring himself to believe in a higher purpose for his death.

In contrast to Engels’s chiding remarks on Werther, the protagonist’s victimhood was enthusiastically embraced in China. Here, the delusions of victims had a different currency. The young Mao Zedong, for example, interpreted suicide as a legitimate form of protest against inhumane living circ*mstances. Prior to his political career, when he was working as a journalist for a newspaper in Changsha, he discussed a woman’s suicide as the symptom of a perverted social order. Even if the victim’s self-murder was motivated by outdated Confucian prejudices, he understood her act as an expression of psychological vitality.98 This stance endows the suffering individual with a kind of dignity that also explains why the gritty psychological detail in Yu Dafu’s Sinking does not put his proclaimed ideals into jeopardy. Psychological imbalance is always also an effect of social phenomena.

In the Chinese context, the nexus between individual and collective psyche appears with great clarity: in geopolitically weak countries, young men’s libido is frustrated; only in strong ones is sexual desire fulfilled. While European or Japanese letters feature no literary work analogous to the positive nexus that Yu establishes, German literature indeed features critical analyses of the psychosexual ramifications of collective identity. Yet Heinrich Mann’s biting satires of Wilhelminian society, such as Man of Straw (Der Untertan, 1918), claim precisely the opposite: that collective identities are in fact sources of sexual repression. In psychoanalytical theory, Wilhelm Reich and, later, Herbert Marcuse placed great emphasis on the libidinal dynamics between sexual repression and people’s vulnerability to a ‘fascist’ mindset.99 In the light of this contradiction, one can see that sexual frustration inspires spectacular visions of salvation, even if they cannot deliver on their promise to save the modern individual from psychological alienation: Yu’s protagonist requires a collective identity, but once in place, it would infallibly become the source of new libidinal frustration. Werther knows: ‘Only remember one thing: in this world it is seldom a question of “either … or.”’

Martial aggression and patriotism

In Goethe’s Original, the use of violence only appears at the margins of the text, in the story of the farmhand who murders his rival. Realising how quickly frustrated libido can transform into violence, Werther sympathises with the farmhand, even tries to defend him, but is in the end just as shocked about the murder as the narrator, who reflects: ‘Love and attachment, the noblest feelings of human nature, had been turned to violence and murder’ (L 67). Goethe’s text includes reveries about rage and murder, for example when Werther confesses to Lotte that his ‘heart, excited by rage and fury, has often had the monstrous impulse to murder your husband – you – myself!’ (L 73). Overall, however, the narrative stresses that violence must be avoided, even if it means directing such rage and fury against oneself.

Among Werther’s revolutionary offspring, the latency of violence is brought to centre stage, as the connection between frustrated libido and the call of the battlefield provides orientation for the troubled individual. Foscolo’s synthesis of love and nation steers clear of the battlefield and confines itself to the privacy of solitary death, but this changes in Leopardi’s poetry. Here, the themes of love and patriotic sacrifice are juxtaposed in a single volume of poetry, allowing bereaved lovers and imitators of Spartan courage to engage in a troublesome dialogue. As mouthpieces for oppressed nations, Werther’s continuations in East Asia imagine suffering from unrequited love and dying for one’s nation as intimately connected factors. Yu Dafu’s Sinking, Ba Jin’s Trilogy of Love and Jiang Guangci’s The Young Wanderer protest against injured personal dignity and deprivation of love. Aside from the literary genealogy that connects Werther with Chinese modernism, the protagonists’ excursions to the battlefield also have some significance in the German context. As grand heroic gestures came into fashion, the currency of liberty-minded suicide only increased in value.100 This nexus places Goethe’s text in an unexpected vicinity with Friedrich Hölderlin’s ‘Death on the Battlefield’ (‘Der Tod fürs Vaterland’, 1800), possibly also with Friedrich Schiller’s tragedy The Maid of Orleans (Die Jungfrau von Orleans, 1801), in which Joan of Arc is mortally wounded on the battlefield. Was it a mistake that German soldiers kept a copy of Faust (1808), Goethe’s most acclaimed drama, in their knapsacks during the Great War?101 As this chapter demonstrates, Werther would have possibly been a more befitting choice.

Goethe’s degradation from worshipped poet to opportunistic kisser has important ramifications for the Chinese wave of popular Wertherian writings. Guo’s comment follows a larger trend: Mao Dun’s Midnight reserves the role of the sentimental young man for an aloof portrait of schmaltzy love talk; Jiang’s The Young Wanderer keeps its borrowings from the Wertherian cosmos in check by a reduction of psychological complexity. Only Ba Jin, the anarchist, continues to place subjective outbursts of feelings at the centre of his politics.

Although the revolutionary interpretation of Werther is primarily put forward by Marxist critics, one cannot fail to note the dominance of patriotic themes over class analysis in this corpus. For Foscolo, social injustice is only of tangential relevance; in Yu’s Sinking, such concerns are completely absent. While Yi Kwangsu’s and Ba Jin’s texts indeed ask how individuals can contribute to the progress of society, they prioritise the nation over class solidarity. Evidently, this contrasts with orthodox socialist positions on nationalism; after all, Marx regarded nationality as an irrelevant category for the international working class and Engels hypothesised that the nation state would ‘wither away’ once communist society was established.104 The course of the 19th and 20th centuries, however, was difficult to reconcile with Marx’s underestimation of nationalism.105 In the 1920s, Lenin abandoned the internationalism of early socialist utopianism, a development that Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin further elaborated in the theory of ‘socialism in one country’.106 After 1945, when the colonies of the Global South turned against foreign rule, revolutionaries also relied on idiosyncratic blends of nationalism-cum-socialism, regardless of the inner contradictions that arose from such conceptual amalgamations.107

Like a foreign guest who easily blends in with local customs, Werther played a significant part in the marriage of revolutionary zeal with patriotic projects. According to Lukács, Goethe’s novel documents the tension between revolutionary commitment and the deferral of political action. This is not the case with Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis and Werther’s East Asian revenants. They press for the immediate suspension of the status quo. The pursuit of national sovereignty dominates and provides the missing piece that embeds the protagonists’ personal delusions into realities that were still in the making.

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