Mignon's Afterlives: Crossing Cultures from Goethe to the Twenty-First Century (review)

In this delightfully informative, leisurely, and sophisticated study, Terence Cave traces the multiple re-embodiments of a relatively minor character from Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. The scope of the investigation is impressively broad, spanning more than two centuries and covering the English, French, and German cultures in particular, with occasional references to other traditions such as that of the early Mignon precursor, the gitanilla figure in Spain. An extraordinary array of major and minor writers and artists is shown to have dallied with the tantalizing and ubiquitous figure of this adolescent girl, with her acrobatic skills, her dancing flair, and her musical talent, notably when she sings the hauntingly lyrical ballad 'Kennst du das Land'. As the author points out, it is the particular combination of what he calls the 'overdetermination' and 'underspecification' of the features of this character, or what might be termed her elusive resistance to categorization, that explain her broad and lasting appeal and her inexhaustible adaptability to a full spectrum of generic and modal transpositions. Just as, in her versatility, the character is far more complex and interesting than such figures as Verdi's clichéd donna mobile, the author's tracking of Mignon's multiple manifestations is far more than a catalogue of her appearances. With impeccably instructive contextualization, the critical analysis emphasizes degrees of difference and levels of reformulation as much as similarities, with the result that Mignon is shown to be as much a cultural catalyst as a recurrent case of influence, even justifying the claim that she 'is a crossover figure par excellence, commuting between genres and modes and styles, as comfortable (or perhaps one should say uncomfortable) in a world of popular entertainment as she is in the canonic novel or the Lied' (p. 31). She becomes no less than 'a personification or symbol of cultural translation itself ' (p. 41). She is even shown making an appearance, in parodic guise, in the sleazy world of Zola's Nana and her friend Rose Mignon, although she would be far more at home in the company of the same writer's more anodyne Ninon. From a French perspective, the reader may well be surprised at the almost total lack of theoretical works, and in particular of French theoretical works, in the bibliography of this exercise in what Gérard Genette (in Palimpsestes notably) and others have thoroughly studied and referred to as hypertextualité. Some of the definitions, categorizations, and modes of correlation of Mignon's Afterlives could well have taken on a sharper definition by reference to some of these works. Nevertheless, there is much to be said for a corpus-based approach that generates its own definitions, particularly in the case of such a vast range of instances.