Filo Rosso Red Thread Goethe

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Red Thread
The webbe of our life is of a mingled yarne, good and ill together.
Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well
A thread will tie an honest man better than a chain a rogue.

Scottish proverb
Why Red/Why Thread.—In 1924, the Berlin writer Kurt Tucholsky, alias Peter
Panter, writing for Die Weltbühne, addressed those who liked to visit monkeys
behind bars at the Berlin Zoo. The conscience was disquieted when a child asked
what the Red Thread was that was hanging from the monkey’s arse. The mother
replied: it is the red thread (der rote Faden) pulling itself through the whole of world
history. The words, while echoing the coarse beggar’s gruel in Faust I, drew from
Goethe’s 1809 Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften). For there, monkeys
were likened to the members of the best society, after which a red thread was
pulled out of a sea full of rogues further to bring the best society into question.
Goethe wrote:
We hear of a peculiar arrangement (Einrichtung) in the English marine. All

ropes of the royal fleet, from the strongest to the weakest, are spun (gesponnen)
so that a red thread runs through the whole (das Ganze) which cannot be
extracted without undoing all parts, so that even the smallest pieces (die
kleinsten Stücke) are recognizable (kenntlich sind) as belonging to the crown.
Nothing more was rendered explicit about the marine analogy. Instead,
Goethe drew on the thread to make sense of how Ottilie, the youngest in his
quartet of characters, wrote philosophical reflections and maxims into her diary
to internalize each (von innigerem Bezug) as her own. From the strongest to the
weakest, the woven thoughts made the diary a mirror of her mind. Were one
thought extracted, the whole would unravel, as a musical quartet undoes itself
when its voices fall asunder. Later in the novella, Goethe used the thread without
color to capture the devotion and affection (Neigung und Anhänglichkeit) that as
one binds all and marks the whole (der alles verbindet und das Ganze bezeichnet).
Red Sea—Red Square—Red Thread. Lydia Goehr, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197572443.003.0017
Red Thread 457
Goethe did not say what most mattered. If the thread was recognizable as
belonging, in the marine case, to the Crown, and, in the novella, to Ottilie, the
recognition of its unique or authentic belonging demanded an honest eye or a
feeling heart. The thread running unseen through world-history was fine: the less
discerned, the more its twists by the best of modern society set it awry. With dis-
cernment came a care for the smallest pieces (die kleinsten Stücke), the weakest
link without which no measure of strength could be taken. The metaphors of
measurement suited a stable architecture on land tested by battles on the seas.
This chapter completes Part IV. In pursuing Goethe’s Red Thread, I read his
novella not in detail but as contextualized by a surrounding literature of high
and low wit. Bringing out the double perspective of land and sea, the literature
exposes breaches in a society beginning at home. I explore the marine terms
of a threaded rope and its strategic adaptation of something foreign and com-
monplace into a divine or poetic thread for life, thought, and art: invisible and
unbroken. What bearing has the twist of the thread in the making of personal
relationships, family tapestries, and a nation’s bonding? We know why the thread
must be red (as the color of all colors). But why a thread (Faden) and not a line, a
yarn, or a fiber?
True to the Letter.—Goethe often invoked the thread when discussing mor-
phology, art, drama, and religion without a color term. Sometimes it was twisted
(verdreht) and sometimes spun (gesponnen). With all the twists and spinning, it
carried the destiny drawn from the East-West mythology of the spinning Morai
whose thread determined the span of a life. And then, from the one-in-three
threads construed as daughters of anatkh/Ananke so as to give their footprints
to so many writers of modern capital cities. The thread was further worked into
chains that were linked and screws turned, hairs plaited and bread braided;
and into the ropes pulled as by Charon the boatman or by anyone taking the
rope to invent too much on the way. The metaphor took yet more from Socratic
images of the polis: when the navigator or guardian was called upon to control a
ship’s cables to avoid the truth of the one slipping into the many of unanchored
opinions; or when the cut of the umbilical cord let thieves or pirates run off with
ideas to which they were unentitled. Piracy, tied to infidelity and treachery, is the
running motif for this chapter. It lets us pursue the wit in the transformations by
which Goethe gave color and design to a novella drawn from an allegory of a tap-
estry well spun with a secret contained therein.
Goethe’s book, a novella, has a young woman Ottilie catching the eye and heart
of Eduard, a husband and country Baron, while his wife Charlotte, also Ottilie’s
aunt, finds company with the Hauptmann (Captain). The quartet stages an ex-
periment: an open marriage played out on comfortable sofas in a self-enclosed
country home with an English garden. The outsiders test not only the freedom
458 Red Sea—Red Square—Red Thread
and choice (Wahl) of the insiders but also their boredom. Through concealed
and revealed affections, new chemical compounds, states, and arrangements
(Verwandtschaften) question what is natural and what conventional. The chem-
istry draws from the Latin sense of adultery or infidelity: as a contamination of a
compound by something foreign; as a challenge to what is or has become law-
like. A final conversation on the Ten Commandments reaches the prohibition on
adultery just when Ottilie enters the room. The interruption marks a blushing of
the lovers’ thread and a break of what binds a husband and wife indissolubly to-
gether (unauflöslich verbindet).
Behind the experiment is a Schlegelian wit working like a chemistry of felt
qualities between an understanding that is mechanical and a genius that is or-
ganic. Overtly, the public conversations in Goethe’s novella highlight a modern
conspicuous consumption while the more secretive moods lead to a diminish-
ment unto death. If Heraclitus’ fragment is at work, the ending, while issuing a
harmony out of dissonance or a unity out of division, is tied as a knot, suggestive
of a temporary or provisional ending toed on the threshold toward a new begin-
ning. Here, we might think also of the red thread that publishing houses once
put in books for readers to divide the read from the unread pages. Or the rav-
eling and unraveling of knots in the entire musical ensemble when Tieck put the
inverted world onto the modern stage. Or the love-bond that Hugo put into the
last line of his Notre-Dame, perhaps having followed Goethe’s own final inscrip-
tion of the love-letters O and E onto broken glass. We know that while Ottilie
starves and Eduard grieves, a comet crosses the tested and untested skies as an
allegory of a life and work of art, each put together as a tapestry of chosen and
unchosen affinities. When Ottilie writes in her diary that art needs to withdraw
for its survival, something is held back about life that cannot die, even in the
best society gone awry.
Letters for names and concepts give off the grammar of a period as do letters
purloined or held in secret: so that a (philosophical) detective is called for. We
see this in Gottfried Keller’s story Die missbrauchten Liebesbriefe, when the love
letters are misused one evening in an ordinary German town, when several aged
men gather to discover the compositional secrets (Kompositionsgeheimnisse) of
the Red Thread. The scene, without the Red Sea anecdote, is akin to Dumas’ de-
scription of academics deciphering the indecipherable content of the ruined mo-
saic in Naples. Each scholar seeks a source in the likes of Cervantes, Rabelais,
Sterne, Jean Paul, and Tieck. Only the lone gentleman sitting quietly in the pro-
verbial corner, with newspaper in hand, understands the unlikelihood of the
thread giving itself away in the black and white of the daily print. His under-
standing accords with one of Goethe’s maxims: that the truth of the whole when
brought to the full sufficiency of explicit consciousness or articulation mostly
makes of knowledge a dangerous weapon.
Red Thread 459
Curious Work.—What sort of sea battle, we will keep wanting to ask, is at stake for
the Red Thread and what has it to do with the Red Sea? Many readers of Goethe’s
novella return to Homer to find Penelope spinning her wheel in preparation for
her wedding. In Alexander Pope’s translation, Penelope’s whirling spindle glows
with crimson threads while busy damsels call the snowy fleece or twist the purpled
wool. With a whiteness woven into a red-purple wool, the spindle produces a tap-
estry that draws nature into the human artifice of dyed fabrics. When Penelope
is said to engage a curious work, it might be this that motivates translators of
Goethe’s phrase von einer besonderen Einrichtung—literally of a peculiar arrange-
ment—to suggest the more poetic sense of a curious contrivance. The translation
carries the literal stock of terms from the seas to thoughts privately held by the
one who brings infidelity into the home.
In her A Perfect Red, Amy Butler Greenfield quotes John Donne’s poetic line
by which the diseased pilgrim, with red-black Soule reaches a white state of grace,
when the shame of sin is washed away by Christ’s blood. The poet lets the washing
away draw from the trading of cochineal on the seas, where the dye was what
brought honor and prosperity to a nation. Honor was brought home, however,
only if the prosperity was not stolen on the way by sea-beggars, by pirates who,
wanting to avoid a rope, had copious reasons for running off with the thread.
Twinned Legacies.—The painful threads that determine contrasting destinies for

persons and nations are described in Homer’s Odyssey as bearing twins e’en from
the birth as Misery and Man! So, too, in Genesis 38, when a young widow, Tamar,
dressed as a prostitute and covering her face, acts in a way chaste but outwardly
unchaste, to bear twins by her father-in-law, who, sitting in judgment at her sub-
sequent trial, determines to bury her alive. Holding up his signet of royal lin-
eage, his cords of justice, and his guiding staff—the very things that had swapped
hands in the trade of sex—she reveals him as the incestuous seed bearer. In her
labor, a hand and wrist appear around which the midwife ties a red thread. But
the hand withdraws, allowing the hand of the other son to take its place. For the
breach in the natural order, the second born is named Peretz, for the one who
came first; while the first who comes now second is named Zerach for the red
thread. When, in French, the thread is translated as fil, it ties the feet of anyone
who claims to be a true son (fils).
In early English translations of the Old Testament and in Luther’s Bible, we
read of the twin’s thread as the redde threde and as the rothe Faden, while modern
English translations offer a scarlet or crimson thread. In Böhme’s Theosophia
Revelata, the breach at birth is likened to the first splitting of word from deed
and to the shedding of blood in Adam’s first assertion of will. Suggestive of a dis-
cord of the First principle, the thread awaits its re-accordance with the coming of
Christ. The sense of a thread is further felt in Matthew 16:19 when Jesus gives the
keys of the kingdom of heaven to his disciples with the understanding that what-
ever binds or loosens them on earth follows from what is bound or loosened first
in heaven.
With further twinned and entwined meanings, the red thread is already spun
for the first families of legitimate and illegitimate birth. Joshua 2:18 recalls the
instruction for the last plague, for the Israelites to bind a red thread or cord (in
Latin, funiculus coccineus) to their windows as a sure sign of a home of observ-
ance. In exile, after the bloody persecution and destruction of the Temple, the
Israelites are told to walk in remembrance with a scarlet tongue and a red string.
In a sermon, Augustine quotes from Genesis 22:18: In your seed shall all the na-
tions be blessed, to note the seed becoming a thread to be sewn into the Queen’s
gown of diverse colors and into the many languages that make the complex
weave for our witnessing. The witnessing becomes the testimony of our conscience
given all that is seen and heard.
A differently doubled use of the red thread is found in Hans von Gersdorff ’s
illustrated trench-book of 1517 on the art of mending wounds: Feldbüch der
Wundartzney. The cover drips with red blood. The red thread designates a red
thing (rote Ding), when, in water, it disperses into many red threads (rote Fäden).
The plain empirical description is of what is seen while the diagnosis points to
the disease of leprosy. Whereas it was said for Jesus, that his touch alone could
cure the disease, it was too often said of Moses that his red sores proved him to
be a renegade Egyptian, an impostor and prating mountebank leading a colony of
lepers. More pertinent here than the later description of so-described vile lepers
entering Paris disguised as bohemians is the thesis of the Red Sea expulsion of the
Israelites rationalized as a need to remove from Egypt a diseased people. Many
who considered the thesis found an unexpected outcome: that being expelled
was enough to turn the chosen people’s mind toward the promise of a nation
well-founded anew. The thesis of expulsion was sourced to Tacitus’ record of
King Bocchoris who, obeying the veiled oracle of Hammon, threw out a race
detested by the gods apparently for their own good.
A later medical report, drawn from Simon Tyssot de Patot’s 1710 Voyages et
avantures de Jaques Massé, addressed the vermillion veins and arteries running
through a body that, with every sense in play, becomes agitated by spirit. To prove
the primacy of touch with its so very discriminating sense, an almost electrical
shock of vibrating nerve fibres is described as when one thread is pulled from out
of a thousand threads being held in the hand. An interruption of the explanation
then notes the fine affinities among all things: the Connexion in the great Work of
Redemption, the Harmony and Relation betwixt the Passages of the Old Testament
and the New, through all the great events, including the Passage over the Red Sea.
The human body serves as an allegory for a natural history of metamorphoses
and transactions, its Types, Allegories, Emblems, Figures, and Shadows.
Red Thread 461
In 1775, when Torbern Bergman published his Disquisitio de attractionibus
electivis (Dissertation on Elective Attractions), all the threads (Fäden) of the
early science were brought to the modern chemistry that informed Goethe’s no-
vella. Despite all the threads and all the colors floating in the water, however,
the early dissertation did not give Goethe his poetic transference of the marine
allegory for the Red Thread even if he found there the way to turn basic elective
attractions into chosen affinities of mind and heart.
Threads for the Pen.—When E. T. A. Hoffmann took up Goethe’s Red Thread for
his 1821 novella, he joined two young men Ludwig and Euchar in the kinship of
friendship. Contrasting mechanism and destiny, nature and myth, they sought
to unpack the novella’s title Der Zusammenhang der Dinge: the connectedness
or coherence of things. An early English translation inflated the title to capture
not the prosaic but the more poetic meaning: The Chain of Destiny. Hoffmann’s
point, however, was to keep the twinning of the prosaic and poetic meanings in
play.
The story opens in medias res: “No! a thousand times no!” exclaimed Ludwig,
pressing his friend Euchar’s arm. The early translation omits what comes next in
the original: Tieck’s contribution from Fortunat regarding the accidental and co-
incidental threads (Zufalls-Fäden) that inject chance and contingency into the
perfectly designed and determined universe. The translation jumps straight to
Goethe’s beautiful thought about a red thread which weaves itself through our life
like the thread in the rope of the English navy. It then adds a skeptical rejection: I
like not the metaphor of the red thread, it is borrowed from a custom in the English
navy, and I make a profession of hatred to all that comes directly or indirectly from
perfidious Albion. Albion is the poetic name for England, while the term perfid-
ious stems from a French description of a coinage that, around 1790, was said
to belong to a country (here, England) in need of chastisement. Hoffmann’s
original reads: the red thread ist mir anstössig, weil es von der englischen Marine
entnommen. What the original translation says is more subtly in German re-
stricted to what comes directly or indirectly from England as a foreign fleet: as ob-
jectionable or obnoxious to me because taken from the English Navy. The metaphor
is disliked, as the word das Gleichnis is repeated to render suspect for embattled
nations the import of what is foreign. The play between the native and foreign
becomes the running thread that, precisely in this moment (in dem Moment),
is cut, so that the philosophical conversation can give way to a tale of four lives,
two men, two women, beginning with a Spanish bohemian (eine Zigeunerin)
arriving to challenge a seated world of nobility through seductions of music,
dance, and charm. Adventures follow across land and sea until, returning home,
a happy marriage and an unhappy one sustain the quartet of pained and beau-
tiful affections. So it is, reads the last line, or so is the lay of the land or so is the way
of the world given the connectedness of all things (Das alles lag im Zusammenhang
der Dinge).
Hoffmann twisted Goethe’s Red Thread through idea and allegory finally
to reflect on the new ways to secure the unity of literary form. Beyond Goethe,
however, he looked over the Channel to address how foreign infusions (as we
saw this with Emerson, Hugo, and so many others) allow for productive inac-
curacies and exaggerations that defamiliarize habits and expectations at home.
Hoffmann described Walter Scott as a master given his ability both to spin a
narrative without snapping the thread and to paint a form of life (Lebensform) by
single brush strokes. In Scott’s 1815 novel Guy Mannering or The Astrologer, one
finds the evidence for Hoffmann’s assessment, when the narrator witnessing the
bohemians holding their secrets close to their chests cries out: if I had but hold of
the slightest thread of this complicated skein, you should see how I would unravel it!
His cry carries echoes of Sterne and Hogarth, and of so many others who regard
literary narration with its subtle translation as how authors become, in Scott’s
words, refractory witnesses of their own times.
In 1848, Hans Christian Andersen picked up the thread to tell the story of one
of two noblewomen, De to Baronesser. As a young girl, she pines for her lover at
sea. Consoled, she hears of the red thread (rød Traad) as coming from the British
navy, but of its truth belonging to the invisible (usynlig) divine. With gratitude,
the girl matures with her acceptance of all the sea changes of life. After her death,
a casket of written papers is found, which when opened reveals to the writer his
task: to open the eye to the poetical in the everyday life that surrounds us; to dis-
cern the invisible in every person’s life, the impress of God, even when hidden
under the fool’s dress or the beggar’s rags. Divining the Red Thread sustains the
union of the all however threadbare the coat.
Golden Threads and Red-Sea Ropes.—Many who divine the Red Thread find the
red compound mixed with yellow and gold. Anything mixed can be corrupted
by greed without touching the fine thread of divine luminescence. So said the
English sermonizer Sir Isaac Watts as he found the Golden Thread running thro’
the whole of our Religion uniting the several Parts . . . in a sweet Harmony, and
cast[ing] a Lustre over them all. He recalled the golden legend of immaculate con-
ception, leading to a cure in a cordial against sinking in despair, as the soul’s deep
crimson stains are washed away.
Aphrodite carried a different golden thread as a ribbon concealed in the
fold of her bosom to learn the inlay of all things, how the heart’s desire can go
(not) unaccomplished. Clemens Brentano respun this thread in his novella Der
Goldfaden, whose publication Goethe supported in the same year as the publi-
cation of his Elective Affinities. Contributing to the revival of troubadour tales
and master-singing as models for the modern arts, Brentano told Jörg Wickram’s
Red Thread 463
sixteenth-century story of the son of a Portuguese shepherd who sets off to ex-
pose the corrupt ways of nobility. As a typical chivalric romance contextualized
by the religious wars, the tale paints a world of rivalry, roguery, and disguise.
The key episode has the young man singing of his wretchedness to the maiden
who hasn’t given him what he desires, the key to her heart. She supplies him a
golden thread pulled from her weaving frame. To protect the thread, he sews it
into a wound that he cuts into his chest. His subsequent song spins the thread in
the six ways of suffering until the suffering (Leiden) turns to a joy of love (Liebe),
at which point the thread is removed and returned to the maiden with the hope
of greater rewards. First, however, the low born youth must take the proverbial
journey toward a true nobility of character. The thread is knotted into the prover-
bial happy end of a novella made as a tapestry that is well prepared to produce a
good offspring.
Many early hermetic stories of a black or Egyptian magic used the spinning
of a red thread by gypsies, rogues, sorcerers, and witches. An old superstition
warns men on horses that if ever they meet on the path a woman spinning a
thread, they should change direction. Or, in Macbeth, the play Goethe regarded
as Shakespeare’s best, the Witches’ scene has a sailor’s wife faced with a witch’s
brew while her husband is away at sea. With chestnuts in her lap, the witch
munches three times until—quoth I—Aroint thee, witch! . . . Her husband’s to
Aleppo gone, master o’ the Tiger: But in a sieve I’ll thither sail. The speech con-
tinues until, with a pilot’s thumb, she directs the husband Wreck’d as homeward to
come. Some early interpreters read the Aroint thee, witch! as a get away from me,
an echo of the old Scottish expression I’ve rantree, witch! alluding to the rowan-
tree known also for its red thread. In Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft,
Scott reported the 1618 witch trial of Margaret Barclay, when accusers declared
the rowan-tree and red thread the cause of her extreme distemper. But what for
some was the cause of distemper was for others its cure. A red thread around
a pole for dancing and singing on May Day once marked a sacred celebration
with no suspicion.
Many stories, wherein a threaded wit yielded desirable rewards, prolonged
allusions to a red sea if not also to the Red Sea. For Aesop, a bored tortoise
complains that no one has taught her to fly, so she offers all the riches of the red
sea for a good instructor. An eagle promises her a flight, but with every attempt
she falls and breaks her shell. An Old Norse legend has a farmer’s son wanting
to marry a princess. Reaching a sound (a body of water), the son hasn’t the wit
to cross it until his companion instructs him to unreel a yarn to catch a rock on
the other side and then spin it back and forth to make a bridge. Having crossed,
the farmer’s son rewinds the yarn with all his might and main so that the pur-
suing witches, trying to snatch the thread’s end, can’t get hold of it, and so, like the
Egyptians, are drowned in the sound.
A Grimm Brothers tale has a king forbidding the alliance of his son to
a daughter of a suspect queen. When the king relents, the son must reach the
queen’s castle and picks up a range of serviceable body parts to help him: a sto-
mach and mouth, a pair of legs and of eyes. (Contra The Wonderful Wizard of
Oz, no borrowed heart is in play.) The queen sets him the proverbial three tasks.
First, to fetch the ring she’s dropped in the red sea. The Stout One consumes the
waves leaving a dry ground, allowing the Tall One to espy the ring. Second, to
consume a large quantity of food and wine, which the Stout One easily satisfies.
Third, to keep his arms around the maiden all night without taking advantage of
her. Being good, he falls asleep, to find the maiden kidnapped in the morning. All
ends well for the thread of good union when the Stout One spits back just enough
of the water to drown the kidnappers’ carriage, leaving the maiden safe on the
other side.
Thread without Red.—For his philosophy of history, Herder surveyed the world
of insects and animal life to describe the strongest and weakest links: where even
the finest elasticity of the spider or silkworm allowed a little world-soul (kleine
Weltseele) to stimulate its drives or instincts (Triebe) toward a social organiza-
tion. He saw in the spider the potential of an artist, and in the spinning the poten-
tial for a well-made work of art.
In 1799, Wilhelm von Humboldt reviewed Goethe’s epic poem, Hermann
and Dorothea. With Schiller also in mind, he described the movements of things
that reach a resting point (Ruhepunkt) suggestive of a freedom that has no break
(Abbruch) in the course of an investigation. The freedom was the thread (Faden)
held fast (fest) despite cuts by wit or accident. In allegories and analogies of em-
battled nations, languages, marriages, and artworks, he saw all the many threads
of connectedness (alle Fäden des Zusammenhangs).
Lichtenberg countered the harmonizing end with a borrowed British wit.
Bemoaning how little the emerging science of physiognomy was bringing love or
life to any understanding, he quipped: how often a bridge that is built to connect
a series of ideas (Ideen-Reihen) collapses when a thinker contracts a head-cold or
falls on his head. How often false conclusions (die falschen Schlüsse), due to slips
of the memory, lead to false threads being pulled out of mere grains of sand. He
warned against promoting family resemblances to what was universal, rational,
or divine when in truth they were made only from the most familiar of idiosyn-
cratic preoccupations.
Jumping forward, we find Wittgenstein turning his philosophical investiga-
tion to meanings that are sustained through kinships and affinities of use within
a form of life. A thread is spun (beim Spinnen) by twisting fiber on fiber (Faser
an Faser drehen), but where, from the turns of the many fibers (viele Fasern),
one must not suppose there to be one thread (Faden) running through the whole
Red Thread 465
(durch seine ganze Länge läuft), not even where there seems to be, as in mathe-
matics, a strong single thread (Stärke des Fadens). The supposing is the error of
an essentializing or divining mind. In Zettel, he wrote: A red thread must run
through all these phenomena. It is, so to speak, entangled with them and so it is dif-
ficult to pick out.—And (or But) that is not true either. For Wittgenstein, the many
twists were enough for a form of life to sustain values of a culture all the way back
to Homer’s marine sea.
Wittgenstein certainly knew about the movement and course of world-
knowledge as described by James Frazer in The Golden Bough. Frazer had
described a web woven of three different threads—the black thread of magic, the
red thread of religion, and the white thread of science. If one surveyed the whole
web, one saw first a chequer of black and white, a patchwork of true and false
notions, hardly tinged as yet by the red thread of religion. But with religion’s rise,
the shade darkened to a deep crimson stain that science then whitened to give
off a lighter tint. Given the state of modern thought, with all its divergent aims and
conflicting tendencies, the web, shot through with threads of diverse hues, kept the
question open for the future: what will be the color of the web which the Fates are
now weaving on the humming loom of time? will it be white or red? Understanding
the pattern, Wittgenstein turned to the twists and overlaps of fibers in significant
part, so I would suggest, to deflate the overwhelming force of magic, religion,
and science when absorbed triadically into a philosophy of world-history.
Thread Inner and Outer.—Goethe gave Ottilie the following thought for her
diary: One changes foreign speech (fremde Reden) so much when repeating it only
because one has not understood it. When Goethe repeated what he had heard
about (Wir hören von) of something done by a royal fleet, the coming from
England not only compounded the foreignness, but also allowed him quite wit-
tingly to misunderstand its use from abroad to serve a new poetic work at home.
Here, an episode from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister Apprenticeship is instructive
(also for reproducers of thought and theater today). Staging Hamlet as a foreign
play in Germany, the question is whether one needs to carry over the strongest
without also the weakest threads, or the inner without also the outer. (Today,
we would unlikely use this language.) The conversation begins with Wilhelm
claiming to find no defect in the play and hence nothing to meddle with in the
production. Serlo responds that a play, being an imperfect whole, requires one to
separate the wheat from the chaff. Wilhelm fears that the decision will lead to an
arbitrary garbling (Verstümmelung) of the play, produced only to suit fashions
of public taste. Still, if telling details are lost anyway in translation, why not leave
them aside—as externals, trifles, or as slack and slender threads—to concentrate
on what matters more—the internal relations that stamp themselves deep into
the soul. Is it necessary, say, for the Germans to hear the letter Horatio reads to
Hamlet about a kidnap by pirates, or how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hold
their course for England? Goethe’s selected examples are subtle in bearing on
what a ship, as an allegory of the soul, gains and loses at sea in comparison to the
landed castle walls where the security of identity and inheritance is being put
into so deep an existential questioning for humanity and art. Are external details
merely the props and scaffolding that one removes when the meaning is made?
Goethe’s secure wall refers to the feste Mauer of God, God being the first archi-
tect or stage director. Serlo’s conversational interruptions, far from being props,
temper Wilhelm’s great vision—comparable to Hamlet’s great monologue—
when Wilhelm stands alone watching all minor motives being cast away in a
great dispersing. In the dispersal, does the vision turn to an all or nothing seen,
as when Hamlet asks: Do you see nothing there? to answer Nothing at all, yet all
that is I see?
In 1771, when the young Goethe was honoring Shakespeare’s Day, he
described a beautiful rarity in which the history of the world passes by our eyes on
the invisible thread of time (an dem unsichtbaren Faden der Zeit). Shakespeare’s
genius, he explained, was to make his plays revolve around an invisible or se-
cret point (um den geheimen Punkt) as an inner characteristic of our selves
(das Eigentümliche unsers Ichs). Shakespeare had shown the will in its freedom
coursing its way through the entire sweep of relations: the inevitable/necessary
course of the whole—the whole being the world and nature. Goethe thought the
theater in Germany had forgotten Shakespeare’s secret thread and that the fog of
the forgetting had turned the modern stage grey.
In Faust I, the modern forgetting was carried by the line: Thought’s thread
is (smartly/slyly) cut (ist gerissen) to bring to disgust to knowledge unspoken.
Mephistopheles heard the new knowledge heralded from the collegium
logicum: The scholars are everywhere believers, But never succeed in being weavers.
Reason was spinning a thread only with a cold indifference— Gleichgültig
drehend, auf die Spindel zwingt. And the rhyming result: a modern cacophony
on the streets: Verdriesslich durch einander klingt. But then the comedian stepped
forth to note the largest error in the most colorful pictures (in bunten Bildern),
the failure to let the tiniest spark (Fünkchen) of truth speak. Here is the micrology
of detail in the wit toward which the argument of the present chapter is leading.
For it is one thing to look for the wit; another to seek a unifying, even if not a di-
vining, thread. One gives us the tensions and breaks for a reproductive justice;
the other a working assumption of the artwork being worth producing.
Borrowed Threads.—In Tristram Shandy, Sterne asked: Shall we for ever make
new books, as apothecaries make new pictures, by pouring only out of one vessel
into another? Are we for ever to be twisting, and untwisting the same rope? for
ever in the same track—for ever at the same pace? Scott then remarked on what
Red Thread 467
everyone knew, that Sterne had lifted this thought almost verbatim from Burton’s
Anatomy. Seemingly without humor, Scott wondered at the coolness with which
Sterne could transfer to his own work so eloquent a tirade against the very arts
which he was practising. This, however, was the point: to be outwardly cool and
inwardly inspired when lifting a thought to make it one’s own. Balzac comparably
observed how little sense it made to accuse Goethe of aping Shakespeare when,
with every borrowed thought, he consecrated a novel form or the form anew (une
forme nouvellement consacrée).
Burton wrote of no cord or cable drawing so forcibly or binding so fast, as this
which charming passion can do with only a single thread; for when formed on just
and rational principles, it possesses the virtues of the adamant, and leads to an in-
exhaustible source of increasing pleasure. It renders the union perfect and complete.
To this, he added a view of apothecaries who, making new mixtures every day,
pour out of one vessel into another; and as those old Romans robbed all the cities
in the world to set out their bad-sited Rome, we skim off the cream of other men’s
wits, pick the choice flowers of their tilled gardens, to set out our own sterile plots.
We weave the same web, still twist the same rope again and again. Burton’s thread
was pulled in contrary ways to unify and divide, to make and unmake the good.
He chided those from whom he was borrowing, those who, with too capacious
a wit, compounded substances from the Red Sea to produce cures or quick fixes
more dangerous than the illness. When, in the late nineteenth century, Burton’s
Anatomy was republished, its editor noted the necessity for the new edition
to counter its fate in having endlessly been plagiarized by the likes of Samuel
Johnson, Milton, but mostly by the ludicrous Sterne who had openly plagiarized
as a diversionary tactic. But if the plagiarism had been so evident, why was it so
condemned?
In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche borrowed Goethe’s own assessment
of Sterne as a truly free spirit, the most liberated writer of the eighteenth cen-
tury, perhaps of all time. Nietzsche contrasted Sterne to all the stiff and square-
toed writers who were too open and direct. Sterne’s mastery, Nietzsche added,
was of the double entendre: he thrust aside definite meanings to engage the in-
definite, ambivalent, and doubtable; he left readers floating above the surface,
not walking, not lying, not standing, but playing within plays. Praising Sterne,
Nietzsche expressed his fear of the readerly reduction of his own pages to plod-
ding lines, square readings, and flatfooted thoughts.
In his study of fraudulence turned into a fine French art, Scott Carpenter
strings out the very idea of fiction as falseness, the false, artifice, ruse, sim-
ulacrum . . . I could go on—there are tricks, swindles, . . . monkey business,
mystifications, impostures, supercheries, fumisteries, canulars. Fiction engages the
free marketplace of ideas so that, with Baudelaire, the general condition of coun-
terfeit money is to make a fiction pass for the “true.” Carpenter notes the analogy
between authors signing their names as stamps of ownership and the minting of
coins, but how the analogy became twisted when the rogue’s prosaic crime be-
came the writer’s poetic misdeed. Between fiction and fact, or between metaphor
and stock commonplaces, lay the wit of foraging, pastiche, and persiflage, plus all
the subtle shades of grey as regards copyright law. For, when the law first found its
feet, there was one plagiarism or borrowing admired and another condemned.
John Dryden would condemn signpost daubers and fairground fools for pulling
a low rope when copying the same tricks that masters so dexterously performed on
the high rope. He reported his exasperation when, reading a new book, he felt he
had read it all before in a better language, and in better verse. One must smile, for
he expressed this thought when introducing his own englishing of Virgil’s Aeneid.
The wit of copyright was soon carried over to the early French Encyclopédie the
moment the plagiarist was declared the one who, with talent, wants at all costs to
become an author. The costs, or at least the stakes, were equal here for the bor-
rower and the borrowed.
In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard exposed the plagiarist’s pathology
as when, without shame, one’s only fear is to be caught. Running away with the
words of others, the thief fails the test that grants humanity its pass only in rec-
ognition of God as sole author and architect of the soul. In Either/Or, we read
next: So I am not the one who is the lord of my life; I am just one of the threads to be
spun into the calico of life! Well, then, even though I cannot spin, I can still cut the
thread. Here, the can granted a freedom to choose one’s death as a mastery of life,
where the freedom was the divine task. To be free was to be able to distinguish
the one who paints his family tree with an umbilical cord (Nabelschnur) from the
impostor who pulls only a rogue’s tail/tale (Schnur/Schnurre). Soon enough, we
will see all the cords of fraudulence drawn into Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-mode.
Piracy and Shipwreck.—According to the myth, three Fates controlled the

thread of a life from birth to death: the first spun, the second measured, and
the third cut. The myth of the midwifery inspired Wagner to his Prologue in
Götterdämmerung. Spinning at dawn, the three Norms sing of a golden rope to
be twined around the world’s ash tree, to encircle a rock, to be sent off then east,
north, and west as wind, fire, and water. At first with the gods in mind, they guide
the rope’s movement, but lowering their sights, darkness falls to blind their senses
to the individual strands. As they pull and pull, the rope, evermore entangled in
the human web, ropes them off from eternal knowledge. When, at daybreak, the
rope snaps (Es riss!), they see only a world gazing downward in grub and greed.
Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer pulls another rope. We already know about
Senta spinning her fated life into a song. But more telling now are the singing
sailors spinning a thousand stormy threads until an ancient phantom ship with
blood-red sails and black masts crashes into their boat. The phantom captain
Red Thread 469
seeks redemption from his endless wandering in the settlement of a marriage
contract. While borrowing from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
Wagner was also reading Heine’s deeply ironic story Memoirs of Herr von
Schnabelwopski. Heine claimed the fable’s source in Amsterdam, where naming
Amsterdam was enough to raise a red flag.
The eternally Wandering Jew, a Dutchman, travels on an enchanted ship
seeking a port. On board, sailors send letters home to loved ones long dead.
A pact between the Dutchman and devil exposes man’s doubt as to the fidelity
of woman. Each attempt at marriage lasts the proverbial seven years, after which
the man happily returns to sea. The marriage settlement begins with a diamond
trading with a Scottish merchant—all for a ridiculous price (or, for Wagner, a
mere song). A weathered painting, a true/counterfeit (ein getreues Konterfei) of
the Flying Dutchman, is described as from Scotland a hundred years before, in
the time of William of Orange. The portrait carries the agony of the Wandering
Jew of the Ocean as deep as the sea (tief wie das Meer). But the picture warns
its viewers to trust as little in copies of an original (Werktreue) as in a wife’s fi-
delity (Weibertreue). Heine sees in the bride in white the secret sewing of Eve’s
thread, slightly curved in her rosy red lip to suggest a slippery gliding lizard.
Heine connects this lizard-or serpentine-thread (from Hogarth’s S-line) to the
elective affinity that, with a thorn’s poison prick, can undo a man. ---The dashes
are the man’s last breath as the woman promises her love unto death (bis zum
Tod). Heine warns impressionable young women (like Mimi) not to stand before
archaic portraits of suffering men while he persuades gullible men to take to the
sea every seven years as the way to avoid going to ground (zugrunde gehen)!
Going to ground was what happened to the Medusa, as well as the colliding
ships in Sue’s Le Juif errant’s episode titled The Tempest. (This scene, to recall, in-
spired Murger’s Marcel to his Red Sea.) Shakespeare’s Tempest had opened with
a shipwrecked boat pulled onto land. Gonzalo saw in the boatswain a perfect
gallows complexion, yet no drowning mark upon him. Stand fast, good Fate, to his
hanging: make the rope of his destiny our cable, for our own doth little advantage. If
he be not born to be hanged, our case is miserable. Sue’s miserable case concerned
a ship, the English Black Eagle, that was homeward bound from Alexandria with
passengers who have variously traveled from India and Java, via the Red Sea.
Wanting to reach Portsmouth (and we must keep this port in mind), the wind
diverts its course. The ship is about to collide with the German steamer from
Hamburg, the William Tell. Their collision is destined by the will that, asserting
its freedom, discovers that it is not the navigator of the total course of the world.
The travelers pull on life-threads of rope and hope. They have visions: a coming
savior young and radiant, a guiding man of age. The hopeless see only the grim
reaper. For some, the horror turns sublime in a reddening tableau illuminated by
a flash of lightning. The sea rages—La mer est affreuse: Of widespread lamination,
a dark marbled green with white foam formed the undulation of the waves, alter-
nately high and deep, to spread over the horizon as a broad band of red light (une
large bande de lumière rouge). (One senses the painting of a Red Sea): for while
some feel a religious ecstasy, the others are swallowed by the waves, which rise
so high that nothing more is seen (Et puis, l’on ne vit plus rien). A wreck of wood
splinters and limbs floats on the surface. The few wretched survivors approach
the shore.
Knotty Problems of Identity.—In the marine source for the Red Thread, there
is a boat on the Pharaonic Sea built with planks held together without nails, but
bound together with ropes from the fiber of the coconut tree. This boat is not so dif-
ferent from the ship captained by Theseus that arrived at port to raise one of the
knottiest problems of identity. As Plutarch told, the Athenians, aware of the ship’s
natural aging, decided that the best way to honor and preserve the ship was to
replace the original planks with a younger, stronger timber. Philosophers there-
after asked after the identity or meaning of a ship, person, or city state if the parts
were constantly replaced. Had one to seek a single retaining soul, will, or wall, or
(with Wittgenstein) would the overlapping binding of old and new parts suffice?
Plutarch wrote: He of yesterday has died unto him of today; he of today is dying
unto him of tomorrow.
The entangled terms inspire J. Hillis Miller to read Goethe’s story lines
as lines of family and affection spun from Ariadne’s thread. He parses die
Wahlverwandtschaften into the choice (Wahl), relations (Verwandten), and
conditions or states (-schaften). His parsing recalls the movement between
the German -schaft and the English -ship made from strong and weak fibers.
From the bindings come friendships, kingships, landscapes (Landschaften),
and sciences (Wissenschaften); as well as the dialectic between master and slave
(Herrschaft and Knechtschaft). But also hardships when wills or threads are
broken. Entering a labyrinth to kill the minotaur, Theseus finds his way out only
because Ariadne provides him a thread to track his path. The thread (as Leibniz
picked it up) is supposed to carry the constancy of reason and virtue, and the
keeping of a promise. The song of the Sirens tempts Odysseus at sea so that he
may come comparably to comprehend the bonding (σειρά/seirá) in the firm
tie by rope or cord (εἴρω/eiro) that attaches him to the mast. When, however,
Arachne challenges Athena with her extraordinary capability to spin, her will to
live or die is denied by her metamorphosis, eternally thereafter to spin as a spider
on a thread. In a sisterhood of the good, Pallas-Athena brings reason, law, and
the wealth of trade to the city. Olive trees grow and ships are built.
Regarding the term for King and Emperor, Herr, Lutz Röhrich notes the power
it draws from Herrschaft and the original legitimacy and birthright it draws
from Herkunft. In Children of the Earth, Marc Shell explores the Red Thread in
Red Thread 471
connection to legitimate offspring and inheritance and to the kinship or lawful-
ness that preserves the liberty, from lib-ere, in the chosen or elected affinities.
In The Red Sea Is Your Blood, the theosophist Alvin Boyd Kuhn explains how
prefixing a word in ancient Egyptian with an s or sh carried the active sense of
bringing about a state, a confirmation, or a making true, as when s was added to
ma to make sma. In Italian, the addition became a negation. Which is why per-
haps when in a Yiddish joke (and Nietzsche understood this) a mucker became a
Schmucker, more truth than at first suspected was cloaked by the Prussian loafer
who offered quick cures on the streets.
The Schiff (ship) that Goethe saw landing at port was the completion of a
course measured in nautical fathoms and knots (Knoten). The terms carried the
cargo of metaphor back to Homer with a significant porting in Sebastian Brant’s
Ship of Fools (Narrenschiff). This fifteenth-century satire of human folly prop-
agated the true measure of humanity as well as the first actions or steps taken,
when, from possum, one’s legs are pulled. To pull a leg was to measure or fathom
a step (Vadem), as related to Faden. On his ship, Brant placed piles of useless
books, useless learning, useless opinions, useless emotions, and useless plans
to capture the uselessness (Unnutzen) in a multitude of sins associated with the
good-for-nothing who believed nothing and did nothing—inspiring the printer’s
motto: nothing without cause (nihil Sine Causa). From the quick exit/sign-off
came the effect-without-cause complaint in so much modern criticism.
Jarred Rope.—Most readers explore the Red Thread, as I have been doing, as a
device of storytelling, claiming Goethe the first to make its poetic potential ex-
plicit. Many investigate Goethe’s numerous references to threads to show a fabric
of life and a state of knowledge threatened in dark times. However, pursuing
more the poetic device than its prosaic origin on the seas, scholars tend to tell
only half the story. They overlook how far the ship of changing relations in his do-
mestic novella of elective affinities draws a prosaic thread from the unsafe seas,
from tales of shipwreck and sabotage, from tales of false patronage or navigation.
But shipwrecks and sabotage were much favored metaphors for Goethe, as when
he asked whether the free sea has ever freed the spirit from the holy triad of war,
trade, and piracy.
A catalogue produced in Weimar for the bicentenary of Goethe’s novella
afforded one of the editors, Helmut Hühn, the opportunity to note many ori-
ginating references for Goethe’s thread, with and without its color of red. The
catalogue cover shows a gift sent to Goethe in 1813 by a Scottish ship-master
doctor, John Forbes, via another doctor, Johann Abraham Albers. Sent in ap-
preciation for Goethe’s novella, the gift was a piece of used marine rope. Goethe
responded to Albers with gratitude, noting that with its smell of fish oil, the rope
allowed him to reach back in his solitude to the free and open ocean that for
many years he had not seen. But which free and open ocean? Was it a metaphor
for the Red Sea where General Bonaparte nearly met his end, or for the sea of
great encounter when the French fleet met the English fleet? Or was it a meta-
phor for a sea that became an ocean with quite another embattled significance?
Forbes was a naval surgeon in port and on ship in England and far afield in
the West Indies and the Americas. From his own broad experience and reading,
Forbes would have known his ropes with their marine twists of the thread as a
unique belonging to a crown. Yet the twisted thread would only very occasionally
have been red, being usually white, green, or blue. When, then, he sent his token
of appreciation to Goethe, did he send a rope threaded by red? Did Goethe,
smelling the rope, also check the color beneath the dirt? Or did the actual color
not matter in the way that the poetic transference to red as metaphor did?
Consider a late nineteenth century report of a banquet speech from Australia,
where Lord Rosebery reported an old tradition that in the British Royal dockyards
every rope that is manufactured, from the largest cable to the smallest twine, has
a single red thread through it which pervades the whole strand, and which, if
unpacked, destroys the whole rope. While he generally distrusted metaphors, so he
then added, he had found this one perfect for capturing the sense of the British
Empire as a true union of races, a marriage of affections between Great Britain and
her colonies. A footnote for the speech affirmed what everyone was thinking by
then: that if the commonplace red thread belonged uniquely to the British Fleet,
the metaphor belonged uniquely in Germany to Goethe.
Rogues-Yarn and Flag-Ships.—The most quoted source for Goethe’s Red Thread
is Georg Büchmann’s 1860s Geflügelte Worte. In later editions after the 1770s,
Goethe’s Red Thread is declared alone the common reference point (Jetzt ist der
rote Faden allein üblich). Biblical sources are cited, as well as a quotation incon-
sistently sourced to 1855 or 1865 from Lothar Bucher, who, it turns out, knew
a great deal firsthand about England’s art, wit, and industry, his having lived
there in exile. In reality, Bucher apparently wrote, the thread is not red at all but
yellow (sieht in Wirklichkeit gar nicht rot aus, sondern gelb). An explanation then
followed: while red only in Portsmouth naval yard, the thread was otherwise col-
ored in Chatham, Plymouth, and Pembroke.
Independent confirmation from the 1860s comes from an English sermonizer
with a twist, a call to Ecclesiastes 4:12 that the threefold cord is not quickly broken,
which one would know if one went to Portsmouth—I know it was so, some years
ago, I am not sure whether it is so now, I think it is—, in the Dock-yards where they
make the queen’s ropes, you would see a little red thread running along the centre of
the rope. Always have a little red thread—shewing your royalty—that you love the
King of kings, the Son of God—Jesus Christ. It is a good color—red: and it is the red
blood of Christ that makes every thing good.
Red Thread 473
So what had Portsmouth to do with Goethe’s Red Thread? In Geflügelte Wort,
we read that the marine use for the red thread went back to England’s fleet in
1776—Seit 1776 besteht der Brauch in Englands Flotte. No evidence was offered
for the date. Being one of those watershed years, perhaps none was needed. Yet,
well before 1776, it was documented, as by the Scottish poet and midshipman
William Falconer in his 1769 Universal Dictionary of the Marine, that the rope-
yarn was, by a long-standing act of Parliament, of a particular construction, as
placed in the middle of every strand, in all cables and cordage in the king’s service—
and differed from all the rest, as being untarred, and twisted in a contrary manner,
by which it is easily discovered. The contrary twist made it easily discoverable re-
gardless of color. The twist was there for better preventing the Imbezlement of His
Majesties Stores of Wars, and preventing Cheats, Frauds, and Abuses, in paying
Seamens Wages. Only officials were allowed access to any storage, viz. Cordage of
3 Inches and upwards, with a white Thread layed the contrary way . . . [or] with a
Twine in lieu of a white Thread.
The rope of royal belonging and identity was inextricable from those who en-
gaged a back-breaking labor in the ports or on the ships. To keep themselves
going, they spun yarns or told tales that, falling into the wrong hands, fell under
the rubric of the Rogues or Thieves Yarn. This was reported in dictionaries around
1800, although, from Laurence Whyte’s poem of the 1740s, The Broken Mug, we
already get the wit of repetitive industry: for even when they’re doom’d to jail, they
devote themselves to Punch and die, so that it shall light those who spin a Tale, with
Wit and Humour over Ale, with others who exhaust their Store, and tell one Story
ten times o’er.
In Francis Grose’s 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, which
claimed itself a steal of Monsieur Le Roux’s French Satyrical and Burlesque
Dictionary, the roguery was rooted to the devil who sometimes appeared as a
small streak of blue thread in the king’s sails. Why now blue? Had the color some-
thing to do with the history of national flags, where, color, line, and shape com-
peted for domination? Britannia’s flag, red, white, and blue, for which never,
never more would there be slaves, was modeled on the English red of St. George
overcoming the blue and white of Scottish rule, where the red recalled the mere
streak of a red thread in St. Andrew’s Cross. But what, it still needs to be asked,
has all this to do with Goethe’s Red Thread as originating in a marine analogy
from 1776?
Trials by Fire and Hot Air.—After much searching, my best guess goes back to
a story dated to 1776 that spread far and wide. It concerned the notorious rogue
James Aitken/Hill (Fig. 17.1), whose alias was John the Painter not because he
painted, but because he was a common noodler or macaroni painter who made
trouble for the sake of great achievement. Jessica Warner notes of this figure: He
Figure 17.1 Frontispiece engraving of James Aitken, alias John the Painter, 1777.
Courtesy of JCB Archive of Early American Images, The John Carter Brown Library
at Brown University.
did not paint portraits. He did not dabble in watercolors. Instead, he painted houses
and the occasional sign. His story became well known given the transcription of
his extraordinary trial. Siding with the American Revolutionists, he determined
to burn down Portsmouth naval yard, the yard with the red thread. Scoping out
the building for rope-making, he accidentally locked himself in the flammable
hemp-house and had to call for help. When, eventually, the fire took, he escaped,
only later to be caught red-handed for robbery. His trial, mostly for Portsmouth,
followed the new Arson Act. Hanged on a rope hoisted so high at sixty feet, eve-
ryone thereafter remarked on the rope. Twenty thousand gawkers watched him
hang with beating drums and flying colors—a band of robbers and murderers of all
guilt.
Serious questions followed: Does it signify as to the nature of the crime, whether
he who commits it wears a red coat or brown? whether he holds a painter’s brush in
his hand, or a general’s truncheon? Aitken’s name, with many aliases, marked him
as the first terrorist, encouraging many political thinkers like Edmund Burke to
Red Thread 475
question the right of a government to imprison someone on the mere suspicion
of treason or piracy on the high seas. How, Burke asked, had the worst (blackest,
he said) of pirates come to include anyone today acting as a rebel against govern-
ment or crown, as though every rebel acted without good cause? (Do we not still
ask this question today?)
In Germany, Lichtenberg picked up on the rope in a mock piece for the
November 1783 issue of the Wöchentliche Nachrichten. His target were brothers
in France, les frères Montgolfièr, who, experienced in paper manufacturing, de-
cided to build large hollow bodies (grosse hohle Körper), otherwise called hot-air
balloons, literally to ascend high into the sky. While appreciative of the new air-
electricity (Luftelektricität), Lichtenberg recalled the many great sinners who, in
all quarters of the globe, had been hanged by a rope a thousand times higher than
that which hanged Haman and John the Painter. We know who John the Painter
is, though rarely is he siblinged to Haman from the Book of Esther, the min-
ister in Persia who, seeing a Jew refusing to kneel before him, determined to have
all the Jews killed. Hoisted by his own petard, Haman was hanged on a gallows
built by himself notably high for everyone to see. Another version foretold his
hanging by a tree, but no tree wanted to be soiled by his body!
Goethe’s free and open ocean was likely, then, the ocean separating England
and America. America’s promise of liberty in 1776 was worth fighting for, as
Goethe’s Lothario exclaimed in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: Here or no-
where is America (Hier oder nirgends ist Amerika)! Goethe likely knew about
John the Painter and certainly about Haman, and for sure he knew the many tales
spun from artful pulls of ropes on ships crossing the largest and smallest bodies
of water. With these tales, we arrive at the source for the wit that I have had in
mind all along: the source in a string theory shared by the Red Thread and the
Red Sea anecdote.
Hanging by a Thread.—When John the Painter died, no one better made the
genealogical string theory explicit than an English poet who grieved for the
painter’s ever waking theme. . . . Is there not ancient John of B—, Who boasts of
lineage high; Not us from Kings but Kings from us, So sam’d in ancestry. The an-
cestral string theory, with which this chapter began, with the mother and child
at the Berlin Zoo, drew from the medieval and later court contests of wit, with
a main source back to the contest between Solomon and Marcolf. The king is
a sage and prophet; Marcolf, a jester, rogue, and blasphemer. Solomon has his
rich head in the clouds; Marcolf rummages in poverty and dirt. S moves upward
on the path—Of abundance of the heart the mouth speakest—while M descends
down the vine to the commonest (monkey’s) fount—Out of a full wombe the
arse trompeth. Tricked into looking up M’s arse, S decrees M’s punishment, to be
hanged from a tree. Granted permission to choose the tree, M crosses land and
sea to find no tree to his liking. Through the Valé of Josaphath to where fewer and
fewer trees ever grew—ovyr the Flome Jordane and alle Arabye through, and so
forth all the great wyldernesse unto the Rede See (Mare Rubrum). At the Red Sea,
the road taken from Deuteronomy 1:1 finally hangs up its last sign and line: And
nevyrmore cowde Marcolph fynde a tre that he wolde chese to hange on.
The S and M contest adapted by many wise and foolish rogues affords a com-
mentary on capital punishment and social subversion. The wilderness is com-
pared by recent scholars to the plains of Pharan, because where things are plane/
plain or literal, one finds nothing to tie a rope. Moving into metaphor, Israel’s his-
tory of repetition beginning and ending with the Red Sea finds kinship with the
dust-to-dust tree of life, a life then told through the red reeds in a sea of gossip.
Through Aesop’s mirror, Marcolf receives his first description as short and squat,
with a great big head; a very broad, red, and wrinkled forehead; ears that were
hairy and hung down all the way to the middle of his jaws . . . stubby hands; short
and squat fingers; round feet. The familiar figuration of ugliness plays to the later
courtly banquets of conscience where the king who holds himself wise or true is
revealed to the contrary. The typical pattern is the claim of noble genealogy back
to the twelve generations of prophets when Judas begot Phares, Phares begot Esron,
Esron begot Aram, . . . Obed begot Isaiah, Isaiah begot King David. Moreover king
David begot Solomon, and I am Solomon the king. To which Marcolf responds
with a mimetic string of nonsense names: And I come from twelve generations of
boors (all Rs and Ms): Rusticus begot Rustan, Rustan begot Rusticius, . . . Marcuil
begot Marcuart, Marcuart begot Marcol, Marcol begot Marcolf, and I am Marcolf
the fool.
Given the exposure of dubious ancestral threads and a suspect umbilical
cord, Marcolf finds cousins-in-wit lined up along a very long wall: from Piers
Plowman to Till Eulenspiegel, the latter being the owl-like rogue who, with a
mirror in hand, arrives one day disguised as a painter to take down a nobleman
who asks for his ancestry to be painted on a wall. He is not the first but the second
macaroni dabbler who, not really being a painter, figures in a tale that, in the mid-
eighteenth century, triggers the first telling of the Red Sea anecdote, and, after
this, every telling about anyone obsessed with legitimate birthright and brother-
hood. When I name the first painter in my last chapter, we will know the history
of all these rope-related tales.
Goethe knew Till Eulenspiegel’s tales. The version told here is drawn from
Charles de Coster’s 1860s glorious adventure of Tyl Ulenspiegel. Though written
after Goethe’s death, it is worth telling for the rope remark it adds to the tra-
ditional ending of a speedy exit. Journeying with a donkey, Till E arrives at
the noble house of the Landgrave of Hesse, tired and hungry. The Landgrave
is quickly persuaded that before him stands an excellent painter. Till E (like
Murger’s Marcel) carries paintings picked up secondhand. Commissioned to
Red Thread 477
paint a royal portrait, he suggests an entire family-scape with all present court
members and ancestors—naturally for a higher fee! The Landgrave is expectant,
and off Till E goes, to work—except for the constant interruption and threats
from court members who fear their portraits will reveal their ignoble origins.
Better, he decides (because he is no painter), not to paint any family member at
all, yet to pretend that he has. He requests a curtain to protect the painting on
the wall. No one can peep behind it. For sixty days, he feasts aplenty with his
apprentices. Evermore impatient, the Landgrave demands to see the painting.
Till E warns that only those of true noble birth can see themselves painted on the
wall; everyone else will see nothing. When drawn, the curtain (exposing or being
only a bare wall) courts only flattery by the entire court: what fine colors, what
a great design! The fool, with nothing to lose, claims to see nothing but the bare
wall. Trying for a speedy exit, Till E is told by the Landgrave that soon a rope will
hang him for his free speech. Till E retorts that if the hanging rope is as good as
gold, it will break at his approach. Appreciative of the impromptu wit, whereby
a rogue first steals only then to steal away, the Landgrave packs him off with fif-
teen florins—as the first bit of your rope. Till E promises to deliver the florins to
the landlords of taverns, to make them as rich as Croesus. To hang by the neck
is what bottles of liquor also do. But the traditional ending, as we will see, offers
no rope or bottleneck, only a crisscross instruction never again to take up the
painter’s brush.
Stealing Away with the Literal.—In his Maxims and Reflections, Goethe
described Till E’s wit: Alle Hauptspäße des Buches beruhen darauf, daß alle
Menschen figürlich sprechen und Eulenspiegel es eigentlich nimmt. Hauptspäße
was a relatively uncommon term. It captured the wit’s main course in the books
as consisting in this: (what) everyone speaks or instructs figuratively, Till E takes
literally. This was the wit of punning and equivocation, but a way also of raising
topsy-turvy the prosaic or commonplace to a sublime poetry for the skies, if, that
is, it did not descend into the sewer merely of base ridicule.
Till E’s painter’s tale shared with every tale of disguise, as Till E assumed the
professional shoes of a tailor, cobbler, professor, or clergyman. Moving between
the literal and figurative, the familiar and unfamiliar, the wit shows him taking
instructions too literally to subvert expectations. Not only does the expectation
get challenged; the literal also turns out to be more than merely literal. Every
time he turns the figurative back to the literal, it isn’t because he doesn’t get it,
but because he gets it (and its potential for abuse) all too well. So when a master
tailor says he wants to see nothing of the labor or stitching of the cloth, Till E
gives him nothing to see. The same is said to go for bad writing: when too many
stitches or signposts suggest the lack of an internal thread! When the master asks
for a cut of the cloth to make of it a wolf for a peasant’s jerkin (akin to Balzac’s
wild skin ass), Till E cuts the cloth to replicate exactly the wolf ’s shape. For this,
Till E is declared a loafer, a good-for-nothing. So what better than to sign off with
a speedy signature leaving no coat, no mask, and no trace, other than an invisible
thread: hic nunc, here and now—one minute here, the next minute gone.
Wit is widely condemned if it results in nothing: a mere froth of banter or
persiflage. Many suspect this is all of which Till E is capable, that the wit itself,
the more it enters the modern public sphere, is a mere pretense. There is a deep
tension between demoting the jokes while raising the wit to the working of phil-
osophical thought and literature. More subtle thinking, however, follows the
turns between the literal and figurative to sustain the prosaic trace of language as
the waste and fragmentation without which the literary genre cannot do: the wit
in the marrowbone. Forgetting the prosaic, the turn is lost that gives the wit its
twist. Without the commonplace, the art loses its matter, and without matter no
gain for the metaphor or metamorphosis. This is the thread of the argument for
my entire book.
So what was the gain for Goethe when, for his marine analogy, he wrote of
something commonly known (Wir hören von). First, he made the familiar hand-
wave: you all know the story. But then he copyrighted a rope easily pirated into
something that could never again be stolen: something invisible of his own
making holding all the parts of his novella together. The double connotation of
eigentlich mattered: meaning literal and one’s own. Repossession without a bad
plagiarism or piracy created no fear in him of being caught. His furniture art be-
came the art of his own copy, his property and right.
Importing a foreign wit, Goethe domesticated a metaphor for the liberty of a
marriage divided and united. In his novella, the many poetic contrasts of water
and land brought the quartet to their changing relations of affection, to conso-
nance and dissonance, as water turned to wine or oil; or when a fountain of life
was sensed on the surface like a transparent sheet to contrast with the sense of
sinking or drowning into a depth in shallow waters; or when water was how to
be with others or alone as one’s own ferryman; or when the water melted the
solidity of the walls standing as rocks; or when it reflected a vision so far yet so
close to hand. The water, we further read, was a friendly element to the one who
was at home in it, but what happened then when the home allowed something
foreign through its door? Here, the imported wit remained as a residue not to
be forgotten as Goethe poeticized the faraway promise of freedom in 1776. But
what was this promise if not an infidelity for the sake of fidelity or a breaking of a
contract to keep the marriage (of nations) intact?
To read Goethe’s novella only for its chemistry of high sentiment risks missing
the twists and turns of the critique of a society or nation that overly controlled the
workings of infidelity within the four square walls of a bourgeois home. When
the same was then claimed of the bourgeois work of art, what was the purpose
Red Thread 479
of the critique or of the experimentation if everything was left squarely in place?
Evidently, in this novella, the question remained on the table as to what the result
of liberty and wit could be in any watershed moment of love and war.
Lost and Found.—Lichtenberg described Till E’s wit as a making of great things
(große Sachen) out of little things, mountains from molehills. Schopenhauer
stressed the incongruity: asking how long one needs to walk to the next vil-
lage, Till E retorted with a “start walking, for then you will know your pace.”
Likewise: “start reading if you want to know whether a book has its own reward.”
Lichtenberg had already remarked that it is no art (keine Kunst) to say some-
thing brief if, like Tacitus, one has something (etwas) to say. Only when one has
nothing (nichts) to say, and writes a book anyway, does one upend the truth that
from nothing comes nothing: ex nihilo nihil fit. That, Lichtenberg concluded, I call
a service (Verdienst): a result.
My life result, wrote Kierkegaard in thinking through every act of writing and
acting as a pursuit of a self-knowing. He recalled from Phaedrus the paradox that
if one does not know from the outset what one is deliberating about, one won’t
know when one has gone astray—just as Till E observed of any tailor who had
to know the thread if he was not to lose the first stitch. But how does one know
the first line if one hasn’t yet reached the last? In 1835, Kierkegaard also noted
of the lowborn master thief that, given his profound wit of discontent, he found
alliance at the grassroot level of the nation. In some cases, he added, he will re-
semble an Eulenspiegel. This thought recalled Hegel’s description of prose’s start
in a slavery or a slave culture (Im Sklaven fängt die Prosa an): hence the prosaic
character of the entire genre (und so ist auch diese ganze Gattung prosaisch). The
slave culture referred to Aesop speaking in symbolic animal riddles to save his or
someone else’s skin.
In his 1826 lectures on art, Hegel described Aesop as a slave in an adult body
living in the times of Croesus and telling artisan jokes (Handwerksburschenwitze)
equal to those of Till E. Hegel took the comparison from an appreciative letter
on epigrams written in the 1770s to Lessing by the Arabic scholar Johann Jakob
Reiske. Commenting on a new edition of Aesop’s life that had pictured Aesop as a
Greek Eulenspiegel, Reiske asked whether Aesop had come from or was given to
the Jews. He subsequently figured Till E as a composite figure of proverbial char-
acteristics: the cunning intelligence of Ulysses, the wisdom of the owl of Athens,
and the wiles of a mountain spirit from Bohemia named Rübenzahl. In the
1840s, Karl Rosenkranz noted particularly the contrast that Hegel had offered of
a wit that was once possible when the old Germans were a funny people, whereas
the new wits (die Neueren) were merely contemptuous; and mostly, he added,
because as ernsthaften Behandler und Begreifer, they too seriously sought for the
wit its concept.
Lifelong seeking for art its concept, Danto introduced Testadura with a hard-
wiring that prohibited access to a world of wit, where turns between the lit-
eral and the metaphorical, the commonplace and the transfigured, kept sense,
color, and meaning in play. Taking the literal literally, Testadura could appar-
ently stand before a wall with a stubborn insistence that he saw it only as painted
red. But even this is to grant the hardwired figure too much capability if walls
and colors are already worlded terms. Such was explored more convincingly
by Nelson Goodman, with his figure named Mary Tricias. She is made minded
enough to learn by her mistakes or at least, according to Katherine Elgin, to be
concerned with the minimal appearance of value, as in meretricious. Studying a
sample book, she ordered enough cloth to cover a sofa. Asking for the cloth to
be exactly as the sample, she received not a single whole cloth but a multitude of
samples. Entering a bakery to order this time a delivery of the cupcake on dis-
play, enough for fifty guests, she received a giant cake. And one possible motto
to be drawn: beware what you order if what you want is the many rather than the
one—or vice versa!
We know already that when Nietzsche wrote about truth traveling through
history as a mobilized army of metaphors, the sum of human relations could come
after long usage to seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. To this
Nietzsche added that through misuse and overuse, metaphors could become
aged, worn, and colorless. Like coins, they could lose their currency to circulate
henceforth as worthless metal. When Freud addressed Goethe’s Red Thread, he
duly pulled on its wear and tear in an overuse of its translation. That Goethe had
brought the metaphor from England to Germany secured its poetic life, though
not for all time. Freud wrote of fashions fading when the measure of feet become
faddish or foul, as when words spilled from the mouth of a mind whose thoughts
had become squared, ordered, and dull. Looking around Vienna, he found a
journalist, a roter Fadian, endlessly repeating boring stories about Napoleon.
Importing the letter “i” into the word Faden, la tête de l’homme had become la
tête de la bête.
In the office of the lost and found sits a last proverb that having falling into
disuse proves the disuse to be its point. Documented in 1616 in the Germany
dictionary Teutsche Sprach und Weißheit, it reads: Ist der faden bloß, so ist er
dennoch roth, so lobt man das rothe Garn—If the thread is bare, it is still red, so you
praise the red thread.
Endgame.—Moses was said to be the only or last one whom the Lord knew face
to face. His last gaze before the eyes of all Israel became a passing over a boundary
where, in the modern words of Sholem Asch, Moses could now perceive nothing.
He was steeped in a sea of clouds black as night. He felt himself becoming light; it was
as if wings had sprouted under his garment; he felt himself able to fly. And almost
Red Thread 481
before he was aware of it he was indeed flying and had risen above the night-black
cloud. Zora Neale Hurston concluded her own Moses novel differently, with the
reddest mood, as fire and flame played to the voice of the thunder. Bidding fare-
well, Moses turned with a firm tread to descend the other side of the mountain
and to head back over the years.
Heading back over the years is what I do one more time to seek the many
threads of red invested in the Red Sea anecdote as it took shape in the middle
of the eighteenth century, when, in London, liberty was said to have found its
wit to give sense to all the world. It is the wit of the micrology, of the telling de-
tail, that will bring us to the end with laughter and tears. Today, many attribute
the micrological method first off to Giovanni Morelli, a critic who, with an ano-
nymity Freud much admired, exposed other critics for not finding the authentic
touch of the painter in the unnoticed details of a painting. But the method was
already at work in centuries prior, in the art of satire that was taking on a world
that was seen as handing over its future to bad copies (those monkeys and cats)
of old masterpieces.
Goethe certainly had the method in hand when, in 1775, one year before 1776,
he subtitled a farce Hanswursts Hochzeit, Oder der Lauf der Welt. The title is not to
be ignored: it presaged at least one witty source for the Red Thread. Never written
to completion, the farce survived best as a cast list: countless guests at a wedding
feast. As a mockery of the best modern society, the cast of rude figures was drawn
from the sausage culture of early modern Europe. Subtitled a mikrokosmisches
drama, the micrology mattered more than the drama. Borrowing the guest list
decades later, Heine allowed a king to pose a riddle for a queen. Asked of all
rogues (Lumpen) in the German states who is the master, the queen answered
one hundred times with the name of a rogue. But because to each answer the
king responded that this rogue and that rogue was not yet the greatest, the master
appeared finally as no greater than the king himself. And who was the king if not
the would-be master of modern prose?

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17

A thread will tie an honest man better than a chain a rogue.

We hear of a peculiar arrangement (Einrichtung) in the English marine. All

Twinned Legacies.—The painful threads that determine contrasting destinies for

In 1775, when Torbern Bergman published his Disquisitio de attractionibus

Hamlet about a kidnap by pirates, or how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hold

Piracy and Shipwreck.—According to the myth, three Fates controlled the

seeks redemption from his endless wandering in the settlement of a marriage

connection to legitimate offspring and inheritance and to the kinship or lawful-

So what had Portsmouth to do with Goethe’s Red Thread? In Geflügelte Wort,

question the right of a government to imprison someone on the mere suspicion

of the critique or of the experimentation if everything was left squarely in place?

You might also like

Filo Rosso Red Thread Goethe

Uploaded by

Copyright:

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Filo Rosso Red Thread Goethe

Uploaded by

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Original Description:

Copyright

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Did you find this document useful?

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Filo Rosso Red Thread Goethe

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17

A thread will tie an honest man better than a chain a rogue.

We hear of a peculiar arrangement (Einrichtung) in the English marine. All

Twinned Legacies.—​The painful threads that determine contrasting destinies for

In 1775, when Torbern Bergman published his Disquisitio de attractionibus

Hamlet about a kidnap by pirates, or how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hold

Piracy and Shipwreck.—​According to the myth, three Fates controlled the

seeks redemption from his endless wandering in the settlement of a marriage

connection to legitimate offspring and inheritance and to the kinship or lawful-

So what had Portsmouth to do with Goethe’s Red Thread? In Geflügelte Wort,

question the right of a government to imprison someone on the mere suspicion

of the critique or of the experimentation if everything was left squarely in place?

You might also like

Twinned Legacies.—The painful threads that determine contrasting destinies for

Piracy and Shipwreck.—According to the myth, three Fates controlled the