Aufbau und Krise der Sinn-Gestalt: Tasso und die Prinzessin im Kontext der Goetheschen Werke (review)

Goethe Yearbook 253 Ammerlahn, Hellmut, Aufbau und Krise der Sinn-Gestalt: Tasso und die Prinzessin im Kontext der Goetheschen Werke. New York, Bern: Peter Lang, 1990 (Germanic Studies in America, No. 58.). 172 pp. Its meticulously objective analyses of the implications of character portrayal in Torquato Tasso make this monograph, whose persuasive conclusions all ultimately derive from close reading of the drama's text, an exemplar of illuminating literary interpretation. Its author's methodological premises, carefully explained and justified in his somewhat abstractly theoretical Einleitung (11-32), attach primary importance to the "Kontext der Goetheschen Werke sowie der besonderen geschichtlichen Situation, in der Goethe sich zur Zeit der etwa zehnjährigen Entstehung des Dramas befand "—a context that, it is argued, demonstrates that characterizations in Goethe's works are not marred by inconsistencies. In any case, Ammerlahn 's scrupulous attention to and, when necessary, skillful countering of the views of previous critics and scholars give his monograph a philological solidity that further strengthens his arguments and conclusions. The nine chapters of analyses that constitute Ammerlahn's interpretation of Torquato Tasso (33-162) concentrate at first on the figure of the Princess as a "Leitbild," a term perhaps englishable as "reified ideal." The Princess, whose complement is Leonore Sanvitale, is seen as a character so selflessly idealistic as to be perforce blind to—and, unlike Wilhelm Meister's Natalie, helplessly passive when confronted with—Tasso's practical needs; her nearest counterpart in Goethe's works is thus the "Schöne Seele" of the Lehrjahre; and what vitality she does have derives from her contact with the life-enhancing power of poetry that is embodied in Tasso. Particularly illuminating and rich in fresh insights is Ammerlahn's analysis of the symbolic contrast between the Princess and her sister Lucretia, the significance of whose admiration of Tasso as poet of both the Real and the Ideal is convincingly demonstrated. Other insightful parallels are drawn between Leonore Sanvitale and Pylades, and between her and the Baroness who is the Countess' companion in the Lehrjahre; between a basically noble-minded Alfons and the same novel's Lothario (with nice incidental correction en passant of socialist and sociological readings of Goethe's play that misrepresent its protagonist as an oppressed bourgeois poet in courtly servitude); and between Antonio—despite all his faults Tasso's "edler Mann" of v. 3434—and Werther's Albert, Pylades, Thoas, and Wilhelm Meister's Werner and Jarno. Ammerlahn's last three chapters concentrate on Tasso—allied by the heroic impulses that make him a misfit in a post-knightly world with Götz and Orestes, and by his idealism with Lothario—and on the action of the final two acts of Goethe's drama, in which the Princess ceases to function as "Leitbild" for Tasso (hence his vividly imagined regressive return to his sister in Sorrento). His close readings, and the contexts and parallels he has made evident, permit Ammerlahn to reject interpretations of the play's dénouement as conventionally tragic—examples would be those of Emil Stai- 254 Book Reviews ger and Lawrence Ryan—and to argue convincingly that Torquato Tasso ends with its protagonist at a Wilhelm Meister-like "Scheideweg" recognizing "in seiner Lebenskrise auch das Heilbringende seines Talents" (138f.). What might be objected to as insufficiently clear textual expression of an expectation that Tasso is destined for still greater poetic stature than he has already enjoyed as (a mere) court poet is explained by Ammerlahn not as a consequence of the Weimar courtier Goethe's private discretion, but—with adduction of new parallels from the Lehrjahre, Das Märchen, and the first act of Faust II—as properly consistent with his characterization of a still developing young writer whose Mephistophelean prod is Antonio Montecatino . In any event, Ammerlahn seems to me to confirm Susanne Langer's acute observation in Feeling and Form that a drama lacking "absolute close" cannot be a tragedy, can like much so-called French classical tragedy be only heroic comedy—an observation that reconciles non-tragic interpretations of Goethe's play with his categorization of it in 1823 as a "tragédie selon les regles." No brief review can do justice to Ammerlahn...