It is indeed something like that we are dealing with here. It is demonstrated even more clearly when Goethe turns back toward Strasbourg to put on his finery again, not without feeling, a little late, how indelicate it was to have presented himself in a form that was not his own and thus to have deceived the trust of those people who welcomed him with charming hospitality; one has a real sense in this narration of a truly gemütlich atmosphere.
He comes back, then, toward Strasbourg. But far from following through on his wish to return to the village ceremoniously arrayed, he arrives at nothing better than substituting for the first disguise another that he borrows from a servant boy at an inn. This time he will appear in a disguise that is even stranger, more out of place than the first and, on top of it all, in make-up. To be sure, he treats the whole thing as a game, but this game becomes more and more significant. In fact, he no longer places himself on the level of a theology student, but slightly below. He plays the buffoon. And all of this is deliberately entangled with a series of details which create in all those who collaborate in this farce a sense that what is happening is closely linked to sexual behavior, to the courting display.
There are even certain details that take on importance, if one can put it that way, from their inaccuracy. As the title Dichtung und Wahrheit indicates, Goethe was aware that he had the right to organize and harmonize his memories with fictions that filled in the gaps which no doubt he was powerless to fill in otherwise. The ardor of those I mentioned earlier who follow the tracks of great men has demonstrated the inaccuracy of certain details which are all the more revelatory of what one might call the real intentions of the entire scene. When Goethe presented himself made-up and in the clothes of a servant boy, enjoying at length the resultant misunderstanding, he also delivered, he says, a christening cake that he had likewise borrowed from the boy. Now, the Goethesforscher have demonstrated that for six months before and for six months after the Frederica episode, there were no baptisms in that locality. The christening cake, traditional gift to the pastor, can only be Goethe’s fantasy and, as such, thus assumes in our eyes its entire significance. It implies the paternal function, but precisely inasmuch as Goethe specifies that he is not the father, but only the one who delivers something and who has only an external relation to the ceremony—he makes himself the petty officer, not the principal hero. In the end, the whole ceremony of his concealment actually appears not only as a game but much more profoundly as a precaution which can be placed in the category of what I called before the splitting of the subject’s personal function in the mythic constructions of the neurotic.
Why does Goethe act this way? Very obviously because he is afraid—as what follows will show, for this affair will henceforth do nothing but fade. Far from lifting the spell, releasing the original curse by daring to transgress its sanction, Goethe only deepened his fears—one perceives this in all kinds of substitutive forms, the idea of substitution being introduced into the text by Goethe—with respect to the fulfillment of this love. All the reasons one might give for this—desire not to get involved, to protect the poet’s sacred destiny, even perhaps the difference in social standing—are only cleverly rationalized forms, the surface of an infinitely deeper current which is, in fact, the flight from the desired object. We see again, when he confronts his goal, this splitting of the subject, his alienation from himself, strategies by which he provides a substitute for himself on whom the deadly threats are to be carried out. The moment he reintegrates this substitute into himself, it is impossible to reach the goal.
Here I can give you only the general thematic analysis of this adventure, but you ought to know that there is also a sister, Frederica’s double, who is there to complete the mythic structure of the situation. If you go back to Goethe’s text, you will see that what may appear to you in this sketch to be a construction is confirmed by other diverse and striking details, even including the analogy suggested by Goethe with the well-known story of the Vicar of Wakefield, a literary, phantasmatic transposition of his own adventure.