Mörike's Muses: Critical Essays on Eduard Mörike ed. by Jeffrey Adams (review)

248Rocky Mountain Review JEFFREY ADAMS, ed. Mörike's Muses: Critical Essays on Eduard Mörike. Columbia: Camden House, 1990. 223 p. Jeffrey Adams has assembled an impressive collection of "heavyweights" in poetics and nineteenth-century German scholarship as well as a few relative newcomers who, nevertheless, prove they belong in this distinguished company. The result is a solid collection of essays employing varied approaches but organized around the theme of Mörike's poetic inspiration—his "muses," be they an "other" in the Freudian sense, a Jungian "anima," or a "precursor," in the context of Harold Bloom's reception theory. The collection begins and ends with English translations ofpoetry. Howard Stern renders six poems in English, followed by a concise commentary in which he theorizes upon poetic translation in general and justifies liberties he has taken with Mörike's original text. The liberties prove indeed to be the translator's strength, not his weakness, for, as he aptly states, one must avoid at all costs "the sort of translation which adheres faithfully to the original except for one liberty: that the original is a good poem and the translation is not" (46). In the closing article of the collection, Joseph Dallett translates "Wald-Idylle" after painstakingly demonstrating what he calls the "transparent symmetry" paradigmatic ofMörike's poetry and exemplified by "Wald-Idylle." He proves his point, although in his exuberance at uncovering concentric symmetries, Dallett leads the reader line by line through parallels that are often obscure and forced to the point of threatening the credibility of his argument. He would have been better served to concentrate on the skeleton of symmetry which he has amply demonstrated and not to attempt to coerce every line in the poem into parallelism with its mirror image line. Nevertheless, Dallett's basic premise, that the symmetry is often subtle and contributes on a subconscious level to the poem's artistry, is cogent and convincing. It is also no coincidence that the collection concludes with an article on poetic symmetry. Jeffrey Adams' homage to Mörike is itself a symmetrically arranged collection of articles—admittedly not a perfectly concentric distribution. The centerpiece of the collection, the sixth of eleven essays, is Hal Rennert's "Mörike's Lichtenberg Reception." Here the precursor is not Goethe, Mörike's poetic father-elect, but rather the essayist and aphorist of the literary rococo, G. C. Lichtenberg. He is the oldest of Mörike's muses presented, and Rennert impresses the reader with just how important a muse Lichtenberg was before and after the Cleversulz-bach period, as demonstrated especially in Mörike's relationship with Luisa Rau. In the "Bruchstücke eines Romans," Mörike gives literary form, Rennert argues, to Lichtenberg's insightful ideas ofthe inversion ofthe relationship between the observer and the observed and of the primacy of self-observation over external education as a means to becoming an individual. In so doing, Mörike completes the work of his precursor. Two treatments ofthe Mozart novella frame the Lichtenberg article. While Ursula Mahlendorf studies Mozart's three creative episodes from a psychoanalytic standpoint as representing the oral, phallic, and oedipal stages, Wolfgang Wittkowski examines the novella in light of Eichendorffs categories. Book Reviews249 Following Melanie Klein's psychological theory ofrestitution, Mahlendorfsees Mozart's creation as a gesture of restitution for the "broken law of the father" (111), that is, oedipal transgressions. Thus through his creation he overcomes his oedipal striving. The results are positive, culture-building. The feminine muse, however, proves deadly for Mozart, and in an artistic sense, for his creator Mörike, who lived two more decades without another major opus. Wittkowski lets Mörike's contemporary, Eichendorff, be the imaginary critic on Mozart's journey through eros and rebellion, a journey through which Mörike reveals the sadness, self-control, self-denial, and quiet heroism behind "the Biedermeier ethos of moderation" (148). Eichendorff, the conservative Catholic, would not have approved, Wittkowski concludes, of the erotic sources of Mozart's creativity, glorification of sin, veiled Christ-imagery in reference to Mozart, and the elevation of art to a secularized religion and of Mozart to the status of a God...