Goethes Mythische Denkform: Zur Ikonographie der 'Wahlverwandtschaften.' (review)

260 Book Reviews daring, though less pereuasive. He argues that the four central figures represent the four leading social classes around 1800: the nobility, bourgeoisie , military, and civilian class. The classes are embodied respectively by Eduard, Charlotte, the Hauptmann, and Ottilie, even though Charlotte is not a member of the middle class. And one may well ask if the "civilian population " is a distinct class. Winkelman's rationale for designating Charfotte the representative of the middie class is to my mind somewhat tortured: "she may be said to represent the bourgeoisie in the sense of symbolizing it through the implication of the situations in which she is involved" (60). In sum, this is a book to be read by all interested in Goethe's novels. The author's arguments are ingenious and based on close attention to the text, but will by no means convince all; they will, however, provoke much scholarly debate in coming years and will have to be taken into consideration in all future research on Goethe's novels. University of South Carolina James Hardin Buschendorf, Bernhard, Goethes Mythische Denkform: Zur Ikonographie der 'Wahlverwandtschaften.' Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. In recent years it has become clear that there are two discernible major tendencies in the criticism of Die Wahlverwandtschaften. The firet is to read it as a realistic, social novel or novel of manners à la Jane Austen. This approach is, not unexpectedly, dominant in Anglo-Saxon interpretations (notablyJane K Brown). Thus the novel can be seen, in part, as the ill-fated story of an older male seeking to regain his youth in the arms of an attractive, young anorexic girl (Peacock, Nygaard, etc.). The second tendency is to see every detail and every aspect of Goethe's novel as symbolic. The true meanings are hidden and always beyond the primary statement, no matter how "symbol" may be defined by the various critics who take this approach and no matter how often many omit or refuse to explicate the symbolic meaning of the text, taking refuge in an ill-defined concept of irony or an appeal to "das Numinose." This has been the dominant tendency of German criticism of Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Thus Emil Staiger rejected a possible connection between Goethe's novel and the novel of manners because in Die Wahlverwandtschaften Goethe did not portray the world "as it is," rather "es handelt sich um Symbole" (Goethe II, 476-78). Buschendorfs book is resolutely in the "symbolic" tradition, yet, like Waltraud Wiethölter's long essay (DVJs 56, 1982, 1-64), it displays a penchant for free association not present before. Buschendorf ascribes to Aby Warburg's thesis that every European author since the Renaissance inescapably creates, consciously or unconsciously, within and from a tradition of symbols and images derived ultimately from Greek and Roman antiquity (20). Warburg's investigations of the survival of antiquity were to provide examples for his unwritten book provisionally entitled 'Von der Unfreiheit des europäischen Menschen" (20). Given Goethe's self-proclaimed proclivity for images and symbols, Buschendorf writes of his 'Verfahren bildhafter Realitätsbewältigung" (29) and, following Goethe Yearbook 261 Warburg, of Goethe's "Empfänglichkeit für die Semantik des europäischen Bildgedächtnisses" (26), "sein immenses Bildgedächtnis" (53), a memory oriented, moreover, on the central aspect of the European tradition, namely that derived from classical antiquity. Die Wahlverwandtschaften is thus in essence a highly symbolic work for Buschendorf and only superficially a contemporary novel of manners (42). Goethe's whole technique in this novel was aimed at inserting in key places "die vorgeprägten Formeln der bildkünstlerischen Gebärdensprache" in the sense of Warburg's tradition from classical antiquity (57). Thus in the form of Die Wahlverwandtschaften Goethe ultimately wished, according to Buschendorf, to achieve a union of the semantic potential surviving from antiquity with Christian modernity (61). Other critics have argued for iconography, for culturaf references and symbofs, for the presence of "Bildgedächtnis" and historical semantics from classical antiquity and beyond in Goethe's novel, though Buschendorf does so with far greater pereistence, not to say single-mindedness. His adoption of Warburg's theories does not appear to me to be an advantage in...