6 - Intrusions of the Supernatural

Summary

WITH THE FELICITOUS OXYMORON “Natural Supernaturalism” Meyer H. Abrams captures a coincidence of opposites constitutive of Romanticism. Not only do nature and the natural have pride of place on Romanticism's scale of values, but its fascination with the supernatural is itself natural. As Goethe enjoyed pointing out, every manifestation of culture is natural. Dress, manners, habits of mind and behavior, traditions, rituals, language and its rules, and the generic and thematic conventions of literature, religion, and philosophy are all natural.

The love-death theme is especially at home — it is not a “guest” — in Goethe's ballads. These ballads transgress many boundaries of theme, style, genre, and levels of abstraction as well as the threshold between “high and low culture.” In “Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort,” Goethe names several ballads that illustrate how he incorporated traditional material into his consciousness and let it ripen there toward a purer form and a more definite re-presentation: “die Braut von Korinth, den Gott und die Bajadere, den Grafen und die Zwerge, den Sänger und die Kinder, und … Paria” (FA 1,24:596). He borrowed the ending of Clavigo from an English ballad and “ganze Stellen” from Beaumarchais. The image of absorbing, incubating and re-presenting an inherited theme, such as the theme of the Prodigal Son in Werther, is a good illustration of the “inside-outside” dichotomy, which Derrida regards as the basis of all other binary oppositions.