Originality and Intertextuality

GOETHE READILY acknowledged his indebtedness to tradition. “Goethe ist kein Prophet,” writes Friedrich Sengle, “sondern ein gewaltiger Erbe der Tradition.” In “Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort,” Goethe says he took into the repository of his memory the themes for several of his most famous ballads and let them incubate there for forty or fifty years, until they ripened toward a new representation. “Ich will hievon nur die Braut von Korinth, den Gott und die Bajadere, den Grafen und die Zwerge, den Sänger und die Kinder, und zuletzt noch den baldigst mitzuteilenden Paria nennen” (FA 1,24:596). Elsewhere he employs weaving metaphors to denote the interactions of life and the intertextuality of literature, their pertinence being apparent in the very idea of “text” and its derivatives. The Earth Spirit describes his incessant activity as weaving: “So schaff' ich am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit, / Und wirke der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid” (Faust I, lines 508–9). It is impossible to keep the strands of tradition out of one's weaving, but loose ends may be tied up and given a place in a new tapestry. The inverse of Goethe's metaphor, which exalts the writer as the agent of incorporation and representation, is the assignment of agency to tradition itself, which incorporates the writer and gives him or her back to the world in a series of new incarnations. To understand the ways in which traditions engage or are engaged by a poet and weave or are woven together to yield what Stephen C.