In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent (review)

When a critic as original and thoughtful as Claudia Brodsky takes up again a work she had treated over twenty years ago, we may be sure that she has something new to say. And indeed, Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften is a very different work in the book chapter published in 1987, "The Coloring of Relations: Die Wahlverwandtschaften as Farbenlehre,"¹ and the book here under consideration. The earlier study developed an analogy at the level of discursive figuration between Die Wahlverwandtschaften and Goethe's theory of color as put forth in the Farbenlehre—an innovative undertaking which foregrounded intentionality and agency, normally components of works of fiction, in the theoretical approach to natural phenomena in the Farbenlehre, while the fictional characters of the novel were viewed relatively abstractly, as functions of the "errant passions" that provide the work's premise. This approach is well justified by what Goethe himself termed the "irony" embedded in his theoretical practice in the Farbenlehre and it enabled Brodsky to focus on the novel's modes of mediation and figuration. The new book deals with the more familiar thematic repertory of Goethe's novel—landscape, building, art works, and graves—but its analysis is no less original than that of the essay. It traces the circulation of Ottilie, the central figure of the novel, through a series of frames of which the last, the crypt (Schatzkammer) in which she is placed and preserved, marks a conclusion, but only a provisional one, since the narrator projects the image of a future awakening of the lovers, Ottilie and Eduard. It is difficult to say whether this construction has the effect of providing an end-point or, on the contrary, suggesting an endless referential series. For logically, a referent should mark a definitive terminus, but narrative structure may be fashioned so as to elide any resolution.

Gravestone, cornerstone, crypt—all these are to be understood alongside architecture, the book argues, as instances of "building," this word used as both noun and gerund. "By constructing a basis for deixis, building provides the nonlinguistic grounds for both literal and figurative reference, a marker of 'where' without a proper name of its own, and so twice named: foundation and memorial stone" (129). Brodsky thereby claims a semiotic and ontologic status for that feature of this novel that has always attracted the greatest attention from interpreters: the characters' preoccupation with decorating, constructing, and reconstructing of landscape as well as buildings, a process so persistent and yet weakly motivated within the diegesis as to call for a more fundamental explanation.

This is what Brodsky wants to provide, as indicated by the extensive references to other interpretations, often quoted at length and evaluated in light of her own position. In the process, attention to Goethe's novel is suspended here and there with considerations of loosely related philosophical questions, e.g., Heidegger on technology and poiesis or Agamben on the extermination practices in the Shoah. The concluding chapter, "Gravity: Metaphysics of the Referent," labeled as "Afterword," most directly addresses the question of the referent. Here Brodsky surveys the semantic range of grave in multiple functions—as enclosure, as action, as qualifier—and then evokes instances in the novel that put into play one or another of its applications. The aim here is to demonstrate the status of the referent "not within language alone." Then she continues, in the concluding passage of the book, "Language calls that earthly pull from itself 'the referent,' and so do we all, even as we only refer to it, but its force is made available to the individual mind when its place in space is encountered in time, and that place is never given, by language or the earth, but marked, unearthed, built" (143).

In characterizing the referent as "that earthly pull from [language] itself," I am not sure whether Brodsky elucidates the issue or provides yet another formulation of its intractable nature. In ordinary discourse...