Merinder's House

In 1810, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe took issue with Newton and the scientific establishment. Not that Newton was not a brilliant man, but he was influenced by methods which tried too hard to define and did not stop to glance out of the corner of the eye, for this is how people are sometimes prone to do things.

Newton saw darkness as simply an absence of light, but Goethe had seen it sideways and had noticed that darkness and light work together, and only then does colour appear on the margins between the two. What is more, we have to stand back a little to see them and, in doing so, should simply observe. Anything else will be too much and the image will fade, as anyone who has enjoyed the works of Turner or Kandinsky will know.

Colours, according to Goethe, are the result of how we perceive light, which cannot exist without its opposite, much as Taoist philosophy considers that:

When beauty is abstracted
Then ugliness has been implied;
When good is abstracted
Then evil has been implied (Dao de Jing)

And, of course, the other way around. This is why the Romantic poets and the great writers of Gothic fiction, if they had grasped the point, did not try to define but only to seek words to convey the beauty and ugliness they saw working together to produce colour. This way, the image would be different depending on who was reading it, because the words would react with the light and darkness in the reader’s own mind.

In the language of Novelle in particular, Goethe brings forth this very colour from darkness and light, and herein lay his genius, though he himself did not agree. Lamentably, Goethe’s only fallibility was believing he needed to prove Newton wrong, as this was not necessary. He had already done so in his poetic works.

Jane Coutts, who recently wrote Merinder’s House, Scottish fiction with a European flavour.