Literature
It did not dawn on me, when I became acquainted with the
University of Illinois German faculty in the fall of
1952, what vicissitudes these
doctorates from pre-war Germany must have undergone. Helmut
Rehder from Hamburg had experienced the incineration of hundred
thousands in his home city. I never heard him speak of it, but I
later learned from his writings how he felt history cautioned against
enthusiastic or hasty judgment. His seminar taught a sober
assessment of art, by distinguishing the
categories Stoff, Form, and Gehalt, or subject matter, artistic
form, and the
sense or spirit of the work. He began by distributing Albrecht
Dürer's celebrated copper engraving Melancholia, and
asking us to draw
up a list of the objects depicted there. None of us could, of
course. But I think we all grasped how vacuous would be any talk
about the meaning, much less the artistic form of a picture before we
had even figured out what was in it.
Ernst Philippson loved to recall his
Protestant background in a sometime proud province of Frederick the
Great's empire. On his wall hung a forebear's portrait in the
19th-century uniform of a Prussian officer. Philippson had
written his dissertation on the most nationalistic of topics, The Genealogy of the Gods.
His teacher (my academic grandsire, as it were) was Friedrich von der
Leyen, a name today still
attached to the Rhineland dialect map. Philippson had married
into the family of architects who at last completed the "gothic" tower
of the Cologne Cathedral. Like many prominent
Rhineland families, Philippsons boasted Jewish ancestors. The
University of Cologne had rescinded Philippson's doctorate. He
once
mentioned how odd it felt to see family
possessions in a stranger's house. Philippson was now active in reviewing
books dealing
with Germanic mythology, mostly for the house organ, Journal of English
and Germanic Philology. He thought it important to nip in
the bud
any revival of "romantic interpretations," by which he meant anything
remotely nationalistic.
Henri
Stegemeier, wine connoisseur and son of a prominent Indianapolis restaurateur, taught German
culture. He was a great
Germanophile most enthusiastic about all the traditions just in these
same years being
abolished in Germany. Perhaps the most gifted
teacher was Mimi Jehle, educated as gardener and still with a
heavy Swabian dialect. This was a faculty which saw their task as
passing
on what
they had learned from their own teachers. An exception was
perhaps Raymond Phineas Stearns, who introduced me to history
of science. He touched upon the then developing field of
cytology. We discussed ribonucleic acid and
deoxyribose, their genetic function. Only many years later did I
learn enough to marvel that Stearns had taught me all this in the very
year that Cricks and Watson published their momentous paper. From Stearns I also found out
the importance of seventeenth-century England in intellectual
history. Seeking some such evidence in Germany
may have led me to my dissertation topic, a "baroque" novel. I really hoped to be
able to
relate German to a larger world.
In any case, I had settled on the study
of "literature," a term understood to mean a body of
writings. While I was a student, René
Wellek was formulating a much more articulated definition, now in The
Dictionary
of the History of Ideas. Wellek's was a generation fond of theory.
My own background was more pragmatic and laconic. I was
curious as
to what
might have actually existed, and how we might know about it. Much
as a physicist takes his field to be energy in space, or a
biologist deals with life
forms, I saw my own work to be in documentation. Taking
"literature" in its simple, ostensible meaning, I
understood my study to be of the written record and, by extension, of
the culture which both brings letters forth and is in turn
conditioned by them.
Writing came into existence as a
consequence
of agrarian life, and became an
expression of that new culture with its distinctive economic
base. We have yet to discover in what way literature
can live
over into an industrial, electronically meshed world--or whether it can
do so at all. In
neolithic times, farming
transformed warriors, who had followed many gods and religious
mysteries,
into
conquerors of arable land worked by their peasants. Here is no place
to expatiate on mankind's accommodation to settled, agricultural life
and
the manifold implications. But one was the invention of writing, at first perhaps only for
business and temple records. Eventually, though, warriors like
King David were worshipping
at an altar ministered by keepers of scripture. In my present
context, just a literary
example will do. My next page, "Deborah," illustrates what I take to be
the beginning of literature. It tells how a song was, after
many generations, captured
at last on the scroll.
Writing remained the medium for
literature
for nearly two thousand years. The printing press did not at
first change that. But the great religious debate which gave rise
to Protestantism was able to use the new technology to produce
a world of readers. My presentation of the Faust Book
illustrates this transition from
manuscript to print in the sixteenth century. It may be that yet
a third major shift, that from print to
electromagnetic network, constitutes an equally
decisive transition. I hope you have noticed in the present web site, while
still rudimentary, and
on the page before you, possibilities beyond scroll and
codex.