On "The Sorrows of Young Werther"

Goethe was one of the first literary figures to become an overnight success. Though he had already gained notoriety with previous work, “The Sorrows of Young Werther” made him a celebrity. ‘Werther Fieber’ culminated in one of the first recorded examples of copycat suicide. This book, written by Goethe at 24, would haunt him for the rest of his life.
In the foreword, W.H. Auden describes a paradox in Goethe’s feelings toward his hero:

The novel seems to me to be one of those works of art in which the conscious and unconscious motives of the creator are at odds.

On a certain level, he sympathized with Werther, but he also used Werther’s character as an exercise in excessive, narcissistic egoism. Auden posits that in conceiving a piece that used all of the themes of urge, longing and impulse that defined Sturm und Drang, Goethe was able to find his true poetic self, one which diverged from that movement. He went on, of course, to write his famed closet drama, "Faust".
This book and the story of its publication remind me of that illustrious coming of age novel that sits on almost every American 9th grader’s bookshelf: Catcher in the Rye. You can hear the unmistakable rhythm of Holden Caulfield’s speech flowing from the mouths of protagonists in the many indie films about teen alienation that have graced the screen in the past decade.
Salinger is a famous Refuser. He denied Sam Goldwyn, Billy Wilder, Harvey Weinstein and Jerry Lewis the film rights to this book. The specter of that teenage misfit seemed to chase Salinger doggedly, forcing him finally into a hermetical existence. Holden wouldn’t let Salinger share him, and the burden that he’d become, with anyone else. Like a ghost of his boyhood-a Peter Pan refusing to have his shadow sewn back on.
When thinking about both authors and the characters that defined them, I am tempted to alter a famous Chinese proverb, and curse, adapting it for fledgling writers: may your first novel be a success.

One Desperate Voice

Yesterday my friend sent me this video clip entitled "emotional britney fan," (I've posted the link for those of you who have not yet had the pleasure) Wonderful, I thought. Something to make me feel better about myself. About forty seconds into the clip, I stopped laughing hysterically at the spectacle of a flaming 'pretty boy' with long, blonde locks, which he tore at dramatically as he delivered an emotionally furious plea to the press to stop hounding Britney Spears, while holding up a sheet for a makeshift background (unsucessfully.) The responses on Gawker were on point, and I had every reason to enjoy them. This guy looked like a trainwreck, along the lines of a delusional American Idol wannabe, Miss Teen South Carolina, or, indeed, Britney Spears herself. One of the comments on Gawker simply said, "his name is Chris Crocker, and he's pissed."

But something made me pause the video, (a mixture of shock and pity, perhaps). His emotional honesty was alarming. Uncomfortable, even. Assuming he was the genuine article, of course. I was skeptical, but when I researched him, I found him to be quite a celebrity on YouTube. One of his video clips has over one million hits. Most of his clips were messages to his 'haters', with the same emotionally-charged, confessional tone. Agressive, angry, and still very poignant.
I read an interview with Chris in The Stranger (a decent newspaper from my hometown, Seattle). Chris is an internet god, (or maybe he'd prefer the term 'goddess'?) but an outcast in his intolerant Southern town. He lives a Napoleon Dynamite-like existence with his religious grandparents, who homeschooled him. This 19 year-old boy has haters, real ones. He has been ostracized his entire life.

Watching his videos after reading about him, I was struck by the urgency in his voice, it was almost Cassandra-like. There was something so bald-faced about his manner; he was hyperbolic, dramatic, yet devoid of theatricality. And isolated. Isn't there something a bit Rousseauian here? Chris lives both inside himself and outside himself, simultaneously an outcast of 'real' society and a celebrity of a much larger, virtual society. In light of who he is, it's not then so strange to me that Chris Crocker would come to the defense of Britney Spears; both underdogs, in their own strange ways. And in the future, I might think twice before mocking Star-worship, reflecting that people are so antisocial these days, sometimes the only love you can find is in a pop song sung by a doped-up, burned out twenty-five year old teenager who seems barely conscious of the fact that she is responsible for two infant children.


here is the link for the video...
http://gawker.com/news/the-marketplace-of-ideas/emotional-fan-defends-britney-spears-298684.php


here's the article from the stranger...

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=232684

and finally, if you're interested, his other videos on youtube...

http://www.youtube.com/user/itschriscrocker

THE GAZE OF OTHERS

I couldn’t resist. I had to read them. The others. Theirs. I had to know what I was up against. What angle they would take. What lens. What narrative voice. What would ordinarily be a fleeting response paper had become somehow more vital, more formidable. There would be others. Not just my words, suspended in time and space and on my computer screen, glowing like newborn babies. (Or maybe it’s eyes of the parents that glow, as they stare greedily down on their creation.) No longer my words, they were communal now. I had just arranged them in a particular way. Nothing permanent. Not so much as a watermark. The words have their own history, independent of mine. Who knows to how many minds and mouths they’ve been born?

A strange sensation, as if my blood has turned to milk. A thumping noise in my ears and in my throat as I read. Some of them are good. Perhaps, better? My voice disappears, it is impossible to separate myself. I hold up the tiny pieces and look at them and try to reassemble them. But I’m no longer complete. There are pieces missing, pieces that I didn’t know I possessed. THEY have them, though.
This isn’t love, it’s magnetism.
Then it hits me: this mimetic desire, this theater of vanities is an ocean apart from pure, unaffected sensation.

Such is, in fact, the true cause of all these differences: the savage lives within himself; the social man lives outside himself; he knows how to live only in the opinion of others, it is, so to speak, from their judgment alone that he derives the sense of his own existence. (Rousseau, 136)

Of course, I am born into myself. A victim of circumstance. My imagination paints pictures, and my heart yearns for they and them and theirs. No different from the others, I suppose. Like Emma Bovary or that man from La Mancha. We all fall beneath it. Bending under the yoke. We try to make the stars weep by beating out tunes on our cracked cauldrons. After all, the Noble Savage is a conceptual device we use to evaluate our society. He never existed.

So I am going to be exposed. Not just to one pair of eyes, as before. To infinite pairs, perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps, it’s that uncertainty, that feeling of being watched, that disquiets me…