Paintings in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister Novels: The Dynamics of Erecting and "Eroding" the Paternal Law

INGRID BROSZEIT-RIEGER Paintings in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister Novels: The Dynamics of Erecting and "Eroding" the Paternal Law1 APiCTURE is not just a textual ornament, and collecting is not just a matter of accumulating beautiful things. "This important theme [i.e., the art collection] in the symbolic texture of the novel [Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre] most probably occurred to Goethe Ui the autumn of 1793, as his mother began to break up the family home and to sell the objects familiar to him from his childhood, which he had seen for the last time on his way back from Mainz a few months before—among them his father's pictures."2 The treatment of artwork in the novel not only provides a referential subtext toWilhelm's struggle for identity Ui his very own Oedipal drama but also functions as an allegorical representation of the sociopsychological motivations and meanings attached to the activities of acquiring, displaying, and discussing art. In this context, paintings veil as well as expose characters' desire to embody, posses, and/or control the content expressed in their pictorial images. Above aU,Wilhelm's passionate attachment to his favorite painting, Der kranke Königssohn, haunts the reader throughout the Lehrjahre and fuels scholarly interest to investigate nuances of signification informed by the intertextual complexity between painting and plot. Even though this one painting stands out prominently due to the novel's multiple references to it, the examination of all artwork, including works of art that only seem to appear marginally, such as family portraits in private homes and historical allegories in the Pedagogic Province, exposes a layer of meaning that illuminates the relationship between art, literature, and Goethe's construction of human identity. The painting of the king's sick son, grounded as it is in an historical account and in the Oedipus story, links art to literature and psychoanalysis. When this painting from Wilhelm's grandfather's art collection is sold to purchase other household furnishings for the family, art and psychoanalysis are joined by a third discourse, namely, that of utility, production, and value. Considering these broad concepts, I intend to go beyond the mere discussion of artwork in the Meister novels as a topic or motif in order to illuminate the structural function of art within the texts' process of signification.3 Furthermore, I hope to contribute to psychoanalytic scholarship on Goethe Yearbook XIII (2005) 106 Ingrid Broszeit-Rieger Goethe by showing that an appreciation of psychoanalytic concepts in the Meister novels not only enhances the textual complexity of structure and meaning, but, as pictorial content and as a method of assigning social value to people, psychoanalysis itself can become a commodity with an assigned value among other currencies.4 This connection is made by the simultaneous merging of three paradigms: 1) when the picture of the king's sick son assumes monetary value as part of the art collection that gets sold, in addition to T) the low aesthetic value it has Ui the eyes of the connoisseur, and 3) the high emotional/psychological value it gains in Wilhelm's Oedipal struggle. As the fundamental psychoanalytic Oedipal scenario merges with the physicaUty of the painting, an object undergoing a commercial transaction, psychoanalysis itsetf becomes commercially objectified, even if in an indirect manner. Linked with economic discourse , psychoanalysis appears at risk of being treated as a replaceable theory and method of socialization, just as one currency can be replaced with another. Through reference to artwork, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre' create a fundamental tension between the implementation of systems of paternal signification as weU as instances of rebellion against them. In this context, the collection and circulation , indeed the institutionalization of art, pose questions of identity, genealogical continuity, and the creation and preservation of meaning.6 Thus, collecting means the accumulation of artwork for the purpose of self-representation; the circulation of artwork refers to the path of changing ownership; and institutionalization implies that art is integrated into an established belief system for representational purposes. From the beginning, the Lehrjahre appears to be at odds with its own symbolic order consisting of pictorial signifiers, because the painting of the king's sick son...