Goethe's Elective Affinities and the Critics (review)

280 Book Reviews age represents a kind of death, but it also represents a displacement of death by focusing the reader's attention on beauty instead of mortaUty. Unfortunately, a serious printing error on p. 145 causes a gap in the argument at a crucial moment . However, Brandstädter resumes this Une of reasoning in her final chapter, when she considers OttUie's ultUnate renunciation of speech in favor of images, which come to displace her Ui death. Brandstädter has constructed her analyses and close readings with the utmost care and attention to detaU. The book is exceedingly weU researched and demonstrates the author's thorough knowledge of the text and the vast secondary Uterature. However, there are times when an intriguing insight gets lost Ui a thicket of theoretical background. One wishes Brandstädter would trust her own voice more and not leave arguments dangling so tantaUzingly. The best example of this is her use of the term "melancholy" and its appUcation to the image. Following Freud, Brandstädter argues that grief (Trauer) is the longing for a specific lost object, whUe melancholy is the longing for an unidentified object. Further, Brandstädter suggests that OttUie's identification with images connotes something missing—melanchoUc—Ui images themselves. This argument, it seems, is of central importance and deserves to be developed beyond the readings of individual scenes. A related caveat is that the reader often finds it difficult to grasp the greater relevance of the book's many brUUant but discrete observations. The author recognizes this problem herself when she states in her introduction: "Die Erkenntnisse [dieser Arbeit, L .D.] gleichen zwar den Sternchen eines Mosaiks— doch mit jedem Steinchen wird dessen Erscheinung nicht stabUisiert, sondern das GesamtbUd verzerrt" (J). However, Ui choosing this approach Brandstädter passes up the opportunity to make some valuable contributions to Goethe scholarship beyond Die Wahlverwandtschaften. At the study's outset, she points out that one finds very few overt reflections on a theory of language Ui Goethe's oeuvre but suggests that we find them impUcitly in Die Wahlverwandtschaften . It would have been most worthwhile to return to this chaUenging and crucial argument at the conclusion of the book. Indeed, the fact that Brandstädter provides no formal conclusion summarizing her findings and suggesting their greater relevance is a major disservice to the reader. Nonetheless, Der Einfall des Bildes is an original, nuanced and weU supported reading of Goethes difficult novel. Heike Brandstädter has written an impressive work of scholarship and her wealth of insights deserves to be taken seriously by scholars of Goethe's fiction. Christopher Newport University Laura Deiulio Astrida Orle Tantülo, Goethe's Elective Affinities and the Critics. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001. 241 pp. This weU-researched and very readable study offers the reader several benefits at the same time. First, it gives a comprehensive overview of the critical voices and interpretations that have accompanied one of Goethe's most controversial works since its pubUcation Ui 1809 to the present day. TantUlo deftly arranges and lucidly interprets the immense amount of secondary Uterature on Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities) Ui chronological order, from the first private comments expressed Ui letters of Goethe's contemporaries to the most recent interpretive attempts. Such an expansive analysis, covering almost two hundred years of critical debate, also brings into sharp view the ideological and methodological paradigm shifts that effected such widely divergent assess- Goethe Yearbook 281 ments of the novel's thematic preoccupations and styUstic merits. Closely related to these ideological shifts, as TantiUo shows, are the vicissitudes of Goethe's own standing as a Uterary and cultural figure, the sharp osculations of his fame and reputation that find theft extreme manifestations Ui Wolfgang Menzel's petty refusal to write and pubUsh an obituary in the Literaturblatt when Goethe died Ui 1832 and, on the other end of the spectrum, Ui Goethe's apotheosis in the nationalist Wilhelmine era by biographers Uke Albert Bielschowsky and the critic Friedrich Gundotf. The study is divided into four chapters, three of which are bracketed by important historical or biographical dates. Chapter 1 spans the time between the pubUcation of the novel Ui 1809 and...