‘… without losing sight of the whole’: Said and Goethe

Summary

This chapter retraces the development of Edward Said's position on Goethe, beginning with Orientalism but then moving on to more recent texts which, partly for chronological reasons, have been considered less when Said and Goethe have been examined. More often than not, discussions focus on the defence of Goethe and argue that Said does not do justice to the West-östlicher Divan [West–Eastern Divan] (see, in particular, Fink, 1982; Birus, 1992; Weber, 2001; Bosse, 2005; Kreutzer, 2005). Instead, the present study pays closer attention to the tensions and transformations in Said's position while also reading Said's treatment of Goethe as a reflection on the relationship between the formal and generic qualities of the literary text and its political dimension.

Goethe in Orientalism

Appropriating the title of Said's autobiography (Said, 1999), one could say that Goethe and his Divan are slightly ‘out of place’ in relation to most of Edward Said's writing. When he discusses works of literature, Said's main focus is on English and French authors and on the ways in which their texts are linked to the political domination exercised by the colonial powers of the nineteenth century in particular. This more or less excludes Germany, which in Goethe's lifetime did not exist as a unified country and only became a colonial power later. In addition, Said focuses mostly on novels and rather little on poetry, although it would of course be an exaggeration to allege that Said does not address poets and poetry at all.