Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften: Romantic Metafiction

ELUSDYE Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften'. Romantic Metafiction The question of its genre, like the bigger question of the character and literary-historical "location" of the work and its author, is never far from the center of discussions of Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften . Stuart Atkins addresses both questions in "Die Wahlverwandtschaften : Novel of German Classicism,"1 claiming that the work is both classical (in the sense of deutsche or Weimarer Klassik)2 and a novel. The present essay ponders both questions again. Atkins believes Die Wahlverwandtschaften can be described as classical by virtue of its "idealized naturalism" (151) rather than "naturalistic imitation " (155), its "broad human significance" (149)—it stresses the unity in human diversity—and its articulation of "Goethe's secular, strongly ethical humanism" (153)3 The work exhibits "the classical ideal of harmony of form, style, and substance" (174). Thematically, Die Wahlverwandtschaften explores a threatened marriage and a spiritual "double adultery," but also treats of "manners, ethics, landscape, music, acting, architecture, art, social pastimes, scientific and educational ideas, and socio-economic activities (social work, village betterment, estate improvement)" (173). Die Wahlverwandtschaften did not arise out of a mature culture and thus lacks an attribute stipulated by T.S. Eliot as essential to the classical, but, as Atkins shows, it bears most of the traits commonly associated with the classical. "Goethe responded most warmly" to Rochlitz's opinion that '"classische Gediegenheit, Rundung, Sicherheit und Harmonie' . . . made Die Wahlverwandtschaften the most perfect of Goethe's narrative works" (180). Although it is generally held that Die Wahlverwandtschaften was conceived as a novella and that, in its final form, it preserves its novellistic character, Atkins doubts that the work was ever meant to be a novella. It is "the only work [that] Goethe actually subtitled 'Ein Roman'" (172), and, more successfully than any other work of Goethe's, it conveys "the broad, even universal significance of themes treated with [the] scrupulous attention to truth of detail" that is essential to the novel—albeit "significant detail only" (137). He sees it as a novel, evincing "meticulous verisimilitude" of "motivation and milieu" (175)4—its action "largely coincides with the Goethe Yearbook 67 latter part of the War of the Third Coalition, viz., the War of Prussia and Russia against France in 1806-07" (140 & n. 6)—"normalization of diction" (174), and conscious use of the set epithet (such as himmlisch and herrlich for Ottilie—161-62; n. 43 & n. 44). "Dramatic elements are subordinated to a deliberately epic tone in accordance with Goethe's and Schiller's essay 'Über epische und dramatische Dichtung' . . . , and an unhurried , steadily progressive mode of narration serves to minimize dramalike effects in passages of dialogue ... or in climactic episodes" (176). It is precisely because of the breadth and precision of Atkins's learned essay and the strength of his argument that one is provoked to think further about the issues he raises. It is as one of the many grateful beneficiaries of his exemplary scholarship that I here venture to make the contrary claim that Goethe's narrative is better described as a Romantic metafiction. The German term "Roman" may refer to any long prose narrative and, in earlier discourse, to a real Liebesabenteuer as well.5 A student of English narrative fiction, Evelyn Hinz, has refined Northrop Frye's scheme of classification of prose fictions—in which Pride and Prejudice counts as a novel but Wuthering Heights is a romance—and provisionally offers the term "mythic narrative" for lengthy prose works organized by a marriage plot and narrating the coming together of disparate partners whose union is "hierogamous"—that is, an aspect of cosmic conjunction like "the union of earth and sky." ' According to Hinz, marriage in a mythic narrative implicates the non-social as well as the social universe, while "novels" restrict themselves to portraying wedlock as a social contract and occasion. Hinz echoes a contemporary of Goethe's—Friedrich von Blanckenburg—in relating diverse literary genres to "einer Verschiedenheit in der Denkungsart der Menschen,"7 as Blanckenburg puts it, and derives the difference between the mythic narrative and the novel from the difference between ancient and modern "man" as described by Mircea Eliade. "The former feels himself indissolubly connected with...