A Film Canon

A far more elegant philosophical-sentimental novel than Julie, The Sorrows Of Young Werther fuses discursion and sentiment into the voice of Nature - or, at least, its conduit, as evinced in Werther's constant regret that he stands between the reader and his own objects of perception and description. Not only does this make it one of the first novels to deal with an unreliable, or at least inadequate narrator - let alone in which the object of inadequate narration is that narrator - but it atomises the 'book' into those organic, perishable fragments so precious to the proto-romantics. Given that these correspond to the canon of natural and inanimate objects that Werther feels compelled to ceremonially remember, Sorrows ultimately confirms that the sheer act of writing, and encountering writing - especially in the confessional mode outlined here, Confessions' most immediate forerunner - is inherently melancholy, retrospective and, above all, morbid, with Werther's suicide drawing attention to a textual as much as a theological limitation. From this perspective, the genius of Goethe's authorial voice lies in its invocation of a subject that, at his most solipsistic, seems to lose the use of language altogether and, at his most eloquent, is capable of summoning up sufficient ekphrastic power to elide himself in the name of a series of extraordinary, proto-romantic tableaux, fusing his pen with the paintbrush that represents his true artistic calling. This fusion of introspection and extroversion, again, recalls Julie, and provides the most elegant instance of the pathetic fallacy in the novel to date, if only because the correlation between Werther's perpetual uncertainty and meterological flux is so inevitable as to shift that uncertainty to the meaning of the correlation itself, producing the ambiguity that is one of the novel's key registers, and the symptom of Werther's futile efforts to escape the projections of his pathological 'sensibility'.