Werther, a passionate and tormented lover, embodies the martyrdom of love and extreme sensitivity. His death, elevating suicide to a tragic and poetic act, inspired the “Werther effect” and still today reflects on pain, melancholy, and human fragility.
Marina Tsvetáieva, my poet-medium, wrote that Goethe had freed Werther from the plague by granting his hero the death the character fervently desired: a shot to the head and a long agony before dying. The plague of love, she called it; Goethe frees him from the plague of love. And it is true: Roland Barthes made Werther the archetypal figure structuring A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. For Barthes, Werther embodies the passionate and tormented lover, the burning intensity, the absolute desire, and the final condemnation: suicide. But Werther functions above all as an example of something else: how the discourse of the lover is structured through myths, historical repetitions, and commonplaces. Barthes does not theorize the hero’s feeling, but dissects his emotive words. And it is death, that fatal destiny, which saves Werther from the plague of love, true. Yet death is, above all, another trope of unbridled passion. How else can unrequited love end?
However, Werther’s death is far more than the commonplace founded by the romantics, the bad star that haunts lonely lovers. Legend has it that it sparked a real pandemic of suicides among young Europeans who, after reading the book—and reading it rather poorly—dressed like the hero, held a pistol to their temple, and blew their brains out. From this arose the idea that writing about suicide is contagious, and that one should avoid speaking of it if we do not want everyone to end up killing themselves: the Werther effect. Its reverse is the Papageno effect, which draws on The Magic Flute and Papageno’s frustrated desire to hang himself, until the three genies magically appear to remind him that life is worth living. Writing about suicide can prevent it, and it is wise to speak of it if we do not want everyone to end up killing themselves.
All aside, Werther represents the martyrdom of love and extreme sensitivity, and also the foundation of a new international style of suffering, as Al Alvarez said. Living is not easy, and living intensely is even less so. He kills himself for a noble cause, one that is neither material nor pragmatic: love is the reason. His gesture turned suicide into an elegant and elevated declaration, removed from prosaic and banal discomfort, like money was.
Today, Werther’s gesture seems excessive to us: who kills themselves for passion? When young Europeans were committing suicide dressed as the hero, an officer said that someone who kills themselves because they cannot sleep with their beloved is an idiot, and that one more or less idiot in the world doesn’t matter at all. We understand what he meant. Even so, the young man’s suffering still serves as a mirror for us, it still draws us in. The reasons that lead someone to kill themselves are, today, inscrutable and mysterious: there is heartbreak and poverty, loneliness and misunderstanding, melancholy and fear, pain and anguish, illness. In any case, Werther’s pain, that unrestrained young man, still says something about us; it relates to those moments when existence falters, when living feels burdensome and vexing, when the future darkens badly and the past becomes a weight. This is also what happens to Werther: there are times when life becomes an unreadable language, when existing becomes unbearable. I believe this work is about that.
Pol Guasch
Writer