Goethe's Elective Affinities: The Robe of Nessus (review)

Goethe Yearbook 265 of certain texts with a language and especially a reservoir of metaphors uniquely characteristic of certain historical periods and schools emerges as one of Goethe's main contributions to the historiography of science. The other, surprisingly modern sounding, perspectives are Goethe's views on the psychology and sociology of scientific knowledge. Newtonian optics, as Fink describes very well, bears the features of Newton, the individual, of Newton in relation to British society of his time, of England and her position in the world. Goethe also clearly saw that scientific authority, scientific dogma, scientific paradigm, but also popularizers like Voltaire, played a key role in shaping the history of Newtonian science. This history—as the members of the guild would have it and the unsophisticated public had accepted it—did not, as it were, write itself as a logical progression of discoveries devoid of psychological and sociological aspects. It is Goethe, as Fink convincingly shows, who appears to be the first historian of science to have depicted scientific developments in the context of subjective-psychological, objective-sociological, and linguistic fields of forces. Therefore, it may be that while Goethe's contributions to science are usually regarded as marginal , his contributions to the historiography of science are of central importance . Fink's concise and readable study belongs to a rather small but distinguished body of scholarship on Goethe as a historian, and the book concludes with a brief survey of just that scholarship. Karl Fink is at his best and illuminating indeed when he analyzes Goethe 's scientific texts per se; when he draws occasionally on poems and plays (including Faust), I find his brief interpretations less convincing. Finally , it is a pity that the illustrations accompanying the color theory had to be in black and white, and I am sure nobody regrets this more than the author. The University of Texas at Austin Walter D. Wetzels Steer, AG. Jr., Goethe's Elective Affinities: The Robe of Nessus. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1990 (Beiträge zur neueren Literaturgeschichte, Dritte Folge, Band 101). Steer is very clear about the purpose of his study: his primary aim is not to make an original contribution to the scholarship on Goethe's Elective Affinities (though he does claim some new insights), but rather to render more accessible to readers of English an important German work which, as he rightly notes, has been insufficiently read or appreciated in the Englishspeaking world. To some extent, he fulfills his goal. His own style is for the most part lucid and free of jargon. He is careful to cite passages from Elective Affinities both in German and in English translation. Quotations from other works by Goethe tend to receive the same treatment, though some are given only in English. Steer likewise finds a workable solution to the vexed question of how to handle the voluminous critical literature on this 266 Book Reviews text in German, briefly summarizing key points or translating relevant passages into English for his readers. Steer manages to pull together a great deal of useful material about the novel and about its background and sources. He also demonstrates for the most part a good command of the extensive secondary literature on Elective Affinities, though he remains silent about more recent critical departures, such as the numerous deconstructive and poststructuralist analyses produced during the 1980s. In many respects, his study offers a thorough introduction to the text. Steer devotes a chapter to each of the central characters and gives considerable attention as well to lesser figures such as Nanny, Mittler, or the Count and Baroness. As is indicated by his various chapter titles ("The Island of Idleness," "Nomen et Omen," "The Chemical Conversation," "Garden Park and Lake," "Art," "Irony and Ambiguity," "Renunciation," "Marriage and Family," "Symbols," "Style—Narrator," "Death," "Fate," etc.), he manages to touch on most major aspects of the text addressed in the previous critical literature. But rather than constructing a cohesive analysis of Elective Affinities, Steer tends all too often merely to list and catalogue important elements of the text or significant points made by earlier commentators, with the latter sometimes expanded or carried further by his own insights. He several...