(Haunted) Cosmopolitan Spaces

Abstract

Goethe's modern concept of world literature and Scott's modern ghost story, both the first of their kind, emerged only months apart, in January and October of 1827, respectively. 1 A connection between the concept and the literary form, or between the two authors, seems cursory at first glance. Certainly, Goethe and Scott were contemporaries: they died 13 days apart in 1832, were described by Thomas Carlyle as the "two kings of poetry," and were continuously familiar with each other's work (qtd. in Scott 1891, 379, n 1). Yet Scott never mentioned world literature in his journal or letters and even seemingly opposed the ideal of world literature in practice. As he wrote in his journal, he made it "a rule seldom to read, and never to answer, foreign letters from literary folks"-with the exception of letters from Goethe, "a wonderful fellow, the Ariosto at once, and almost the Voltaire of Germany" (Scott 1891, 234). Goethe admired Scott for his essays on the supernatural as well as for his novels, and said that Scott was "a great genius; he has not his equal, [his] art [is] wholly […] new, with laws of its own" and "so high that it is hard to give a public opinion about it" (Goethe 1901, 358; 360). But there appears to be no evidence that Goethe read Scott's ghost stories, much less that they had been of influence on his world literature. As Eppers has argued, the Goethe-Scott relationship remained an "encounter from afar" (2006, 166, my translation). As I aim to show in this essay, however, there is a connection between Goethe's modern world literature and Scott's modern ghost story. This connection, I argue, is historical rather than personal, by which I mean to say that both Goethe and Scott draw on the same raw material in the form of what I call the cosmopolitan space-it becomes a space of anticipation in the former and one of monstrosity in the latter. I propose the cosmopolitan space as an instance of an 'ideologeme,' a concept first used prominently by Bakhtin and Medvedev (1981) and later developed by Kristeva as a way to analyze ideology intertextually, at "the different structural levels of the text" (1980, 36). Jameson, building on those accounts, specified ideologemes as the "smallest intelligible" (1983, 61) units or building blocks of ideology-the "ultimate raw material" (73) of cultural products. For him, they are "amphibious formation[s]," because they can manifest themselves conceptually and as a "protonarrative" or "collective class fantasy" (73). The cosmopolitan space, then, is an (ideological) unit of meaning, which can be expressed on various textual levels and in various media-in our case, Goethe's concept of modern world literature and Scott's literary form of the modern ghost story. 1 The concepts of world literature used before Goethe, like those of Wieland and Schlözer, were classicist. As I will argue in the second section of this essay, Scott reinvented the form of the ghost story with "The Highland Widow."