Interlude as Anastomosis in Die Wahlverwandtschaften

J. HILLIS MILLER Interlude as Anastomosis in Die Wahlverwandtschaften That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me onto Edenville. Afeph, alpha, nought, nought, one. (fames Joyce, Ulysses) The issue of translation, carrying over, transference, displacement, or BiId in the double sense of representation in another medium and metaphorical transposition, is present everywhere in Die Wahlverwandtschaften. It is not too much to say that the novel is not only difficult to translate but that it is about translation, in the broad sense of that term. In this sense the novel contains its own oblique commentary, before the fact, on the problems that will be encountered in translating it or commenting on it, that is, in creating a new text in a different fanguage that will be grafted on the original and draw its life from that original, while being as different from it as a grafted tree is from the rootstock on which it grows. The rhetorical name for this interpolation of a graft is anastomosis, the insertion of one word within another word, as in "underdarkneath," the example Joyce gives in Ulysses. An anastomosis, more broadly, is the insertion of one organ or vessel within another, or their connection by a tube, channel, or canal, as in Joyce's example of the navel cord or telephone line connecting us to Eden by a number combining zeroes and the straight lines of A or 1: AAOOl. A list of the diverse examples in Die Wahlverwandtschaften of such insertion by anastomosis would almost be a recapitulation of all the thematic and linguistic material that makes up the novel. The novel opens with a scene in which Edward is grafting new shoots on his trees, carrying the life of the old trunk into the new growth, just as Ottilie's diary and the interpolated novella are grafted within the normal third person narration of the text, translating its concerns into other languages, as do the two scenes oÃ- tableaux vivants that occur at crucial moments in the action, and just as the apparently irrelevant attention to landscape design and to the question of portraits and gravestones translates into other thematic domains the central concern of the main action. That central action, finally, along with its fundamental interpreta- 116 J. Hillis Miller tive figure, the image in the title, has to do with the question of what is involved in the transfer of affections from one person to another and with what is involved in the use of a terminology (Wahlverwandtschaften , "elective affinities") to name such displacements that is carried over from the necessitarian realm of the natural sciences (that borrowed it in the first place from the human realm) to personify the irresistible affinities of one element for another as if they were "elective" or wilfully "chosen" (gewählt). In all these realms two asymmetrical readings of such transfers, translations, graftings, or interpolations are intertwined in Goethe's language, forbidding a choice between one or the other, though they cannot be reconciled, put in a hierarchy, dialectically organized, or made the themes of a coherent narrative moving from one to the other. In one reading the transfers are grounded, whether in the authority of one of the elements (as the original text may seem to have indubitable authority over the translation) or in the supervision of the transfers by some hidden law or power presiding over the exchanges (as the attraction of Edward and Ottilie for one another may seem governed by irresistible chthonic forces that are like laws of nature). In the other reading there is no such originating or presiding authority. The exchanges themselves posit the phantasm of such an authority over the abyss of its lack in their movements of displacement. Edward, on this reading, narcissistically projects on the silence and lack of self-presence of Ottilie the other half of himself that will complete him and satisfy his desire. The figure for the first of these readings is the transparent substitutions of proportional metaphor, governed by the presupposition of literal language: A is to B as C is to D. If Edward is to Charlotte as the Captain...