Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften. Kritische Modelle und Diskursanalysen zum Mythos Literatur (review)

250 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA long last—we are finally offered the right answers. Mephistopheles, for example, is the spirit of the modern age; the answer to the riddle of Faust II as a whole is, as Schlaffer's subtitle indicates, the nineteenth century. One cannot help being reminded of those solutions to the riddle of the "Märchen" which Goethe himself circulated, tongue in cheek of course. Unfortunately Schlaffer means this quite seriously; precisely in this simplified mode of reading he identifies his great advance over Goethe-Philologie, personified naturally in Emrich, which has remained imprisoned in Goethe's concepts of symbol and incommensurability. Emrich is attacked on the issue of the comprehensibility of the masque of Plutus, which Schlaffer, unlike either the Herold or Emrich, finds perfectly lucid. Schlaffer's analysis is quite lucid, but it does not address all of the questions—it only skims, for example, the relation of Verschwendung and Poesie, overlooks the fact that Knabe-Lenker has here already defined two levels of meaning for himself, fails to explain the difference in ontological status between Plutus and Geiz, on the one hand (costumes donned by Faust and Mephistopheles), and Knabe-Lenker (who seems to be only himself) on the other. Here, as elsewhere, Schlaffer displays an extraordinary capacity to cut Gordian knots by ignoring the rich multi-valence of Goethe's imagery; comprehensiveness is sacrificed to comprehensibility. Yet for all Schlaffer's hostility to the Goethe-Philologie the careful reader will find its pre-suppositions and methods in the most unexpected places. The simplifying, one-toone pattern of reading, the commentary structure of the chapters on the text are familiar from the Goethe-Philologie that Emrich tried to supersede. So, too, are the fundamental assumptions about the nature of poetry. Allegory is first introduced as a way to consider the relation of poetry to world opposed to that of Goethe-Philologie; it is not sensual imitation but abstraction. Nevertheless, by the time Schlaffer has proved that the world had lost its concrete reality in the nineteenth century and become theoretical, allegory is no longer divergent from the world but imitation of it: "Sie verweist nicht länger auf Bereiche außerhalb der Realität, vielmehr auf die Realität selbst, die quasi eine allegorische Gestalt angenommen hat" (126). Thus Faust II is, at bottom, Erlebnisdichtung. And because Goethe's allegory is able to address its own inner tension between abstraction and sensuality (Sinnlichkeit) to the senses, it can even be considered "aesthetic" (168). Even the empiricism of the young Goethe myth is rescued! Small wonder, then, that Schlaffer finds the ultimate limits to Goethe's allegory in "true Nature" and love. But in a way it is a relief to see Schlaffer return to the fold of the Eternal Feminine: it reassures us that beneath the theoretical pretensions and inconsistencies there is a real sense for what happens in Faust, so that we can make the best of his interesting readings in all good conscience. University of Colorado, Boulder Jane K. Brown Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften. Kritische Modelle und Diskursanalysen zum Mythos Literatur, hrsg. von Norbert Bolz. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981. When Goethe's group of four in Die Wahlverwandtschaften lay the foundation stone for their summer house on the hill, the assembled company throws into the stone's hollow Judith Ryan 251 center an assortment of objects typical of their time. Were this book to be similarly placed in some foundation stone, one wonders what a future generation would make of today's "Institution Germanistik," the book's explicit target of attack. One wonders even more what the future would make of the counter-institution proposed by the contributors to the volume. An underlying assumption that runs through almost all the essays is that the profession is sunken in admiration of the "saintly" figure Ottilie and paralysed by the awesome spell of Goethe's symbolism. But the vehemence with which these critics attack this "Mythos Literatur" seems somewhat out of kilter with the actual state of Goethe scholarship today. It is easy to see how Die Wahlverwandtschaften, with its multifacetted structure, lent itself to the kind of analysis that, by revealing layer upon layer of...