How Seriously Should We Take Goethe's Definition of the Novelle?

JOHN M. ELLIS How Seriously Should We Take Goethe's Definition of the Novelle? No DEFINITION OF the Novelle has been quoted more often, or examined and interpreted more industriously, than that of Goethe: "Was ist eine Novelle anders, als eine sich ereignete, unerhörte Begebenheit?"1 It may not seem surprising that every nuance of this utterance has been scrutinized with the greatest diligence, even though the formulation is Eckermann's from memory, and some of those nuances may be due to him. Anything that seems to be the considered view, by Germany's greatest poet, of that genre of literature which is most distinctively German in the modern period, must necessarily attract a good deal of attention—whether or not the process of transmission through Eckermann may have distorted its formulation somewhat. But is this really a well-considered attempt on Goethe's part to define the Novelle in general, and the genre arising in his own land in particular? The context of Goethe's remark, rarely if ever included in discussion of his definition, suggests quite the reverse. Goethe and Eckermann are discussing Goethe's story which was first called "Die Jagd," and later simply "Novelle." The focus of this discussion is on the story's ending, which for Eckermann constitutes something of a stumblingblock . Eckermann (18 January 1827) finds the ending unsatisfying; too much of the plot is left without explanation and resolution. In place of the needed plot resolution, there is an ending that is "zu ideal, zu lyrisch"; in other words, Eckermann thinks that symbolism quite suddenly and without adequate preparation takes over the entire ending of the story and seems quite to exclude the practical business of bringing its plot to an end: the reader is not allowed to follow its characters through to the conclusion of the sequence of events which has been the story's plot. Eckermann suggests that some of the other figures of the story should have appeared at its end to help round out the ending. Goethe responds with an elaborate explanation of the sudden shift of gear in 122 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA the conclusion; to understand the way the story ends, he says, "denken Sie sich aus der Wurzel hervorschießend ein grünes Gewächs, das eine Weile aus einem starken Stengel kräftige grüne Blätter nach den Seiten austreibt und zuletzt mit einer Blume endet.— Die Blume war unerwartet, überraschend, aber sie mußte kommen; ja das grüne Blätterwerk war nur für sie da und wäre ohne sie nicht der Mühe wert gewesen." Eckermann's reader might suspect that this is all an ingenious, spur-of-themoment attempt to justify an ending that he, too, might feel to be an illconsidered and unexpected lurch into a symbolic mode. But there is no doubt that he would be wrong to do so. For there exists strong evidence that Goethe had thought through what he was doing very carefully, and that the ending had always been for him the unexpected but natural conclusion for this story. Fully thirty years earlier, he had written to Schiller about the story (then called "Die Jagd"), that "die Entwicklung auf eine Weise geschieht, die den Anstalten ganz entgegen ist, und auf einem ganz unerwarteten, jedoch natürlichen Wege."2 And it was his rereading his correspondence with Schiller in 1826 that reminded him of "Die Jagd," which he had long since laid aside and left unfinished. Far from being an extemporaneous justification of what he had done, then, Goethe's explanation of the ending to Eckermann was consistent with his thoughts on the story over a period of thirty years. It was quite genuinely an exposition of what for Goethe had always been the whole point of the story and the reason for his own very high degree of satisfaction with it. When he thought of his "Novelle" this was what was always on his mind. Goethe's famous definition of the Novelle emerges from this context of his discussing "Novelle" with Eckermann. Only a few days after the discussion of the story's ending, they are talking of a title for...