Metamimesis: Imitation in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Early German Romanticism by Mattias Pirholt (review)

In this ambitious monograph, Mattias Pirholt argues against those who find in German Romanticism a wholesale refutation of mimetic aesthetics. He proposes instead that Romantics reinterpreted ideas from eighteenth-century debates on representation, such as the productivity of both the artist and nature and the conception of art as a formation of alternative and ideal worlds. The Romantic work combines both mimetic and self-reflective practices; it reproduces mimesis metapoetically as a representation of representation and reflects on the very conditions of representation. As such, Romantic mimesis is inherently metamimesis, a transcendental investigation into the relationship between life and poetry.

The monograph has five main chapters. The first is a theoretical and historical introduction to the Romantic period, the concept of mimesis, and the genre of the novel. In Romanticism, mimesis represents poiesis. That is, it imitates not a static object but a creative process that strives for the unattainable. In this context, the novel is the mimetic genre par excellence due to its preoccupation with life in all its aspects. In striving for the absolute, the metamimetically self-reflective novel contains and reflects all forms of poetic expression. Its focus on the production of life transforms questions of aesthetics into questions of social relations and the form of society.

In the following chapters Pirholt analyzes four influential novels written around 1800. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is the starting point, both as irritation and inspiration, for the metamimetic novels of Romanticism. In Goethe’s novel Pirholt finds two modes of representation—narration and dialogue—which mirror Plato’s distinction between diegesis and mimesis. Goethe is unable to mend the rupture between these two modes except with a new kind of image, one that is indicated but never fully realized in the novel: the symbol. In the image and the symbol, one finds representation of the unity that supports and precedes difference. For Goethe, representational difference constitutes both a point of departure for the protagonist’s life story and a state to be overcome.

In subsequent chapters Pirholt focuses on Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde, Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Clemens Brentano’s Godwi, reading each as a metamimetic response to the problem that Goethe posed. In Schlegel’s text, repetition constitutes the principal aesthetic structure, and in this regard, the novel is intrinsically mimetic. This form of imitation does not signify a stable and essential identity; instead, the novel offers an allegorical-mimetic play of difference and repetition and thus rejects any form of original or ultimate unity. Representation and imitation become nonprogressive games performed within the world and are not signs of the absolute.

Novalis, in contrast, differentiates between two modes of representation: the philosophical, which derives from difference, and the poetic, which strives for similarity and unity. Pirholt draws on Novalis’s concept of the ordo inversus as a combination of similarity and difference and asserts that for Novalis, life is representable only in its opposite. Fiction is thus the production of truth through appearance. Novalis creates a hyperrealistic simulation of life through various figures of imitation (similarity, analogy, repetition, and recognition). He posits a utopian model in which truth and fiction imitate each other reciprocally.

The goal of Brentano’s Godwi, in contrast, is the fundamental negation of Romanticism’s ideological premises and its “representationalism.” Reflection for Brentano is a double image: it joins vitality and beauty with death and petrifaction, the desire for unity with the desire for separation and isolation. Pirholt focuses on Brentano’s notions of the symbol and of love, for in both he finds the simultaneity of unity and separation. In particular, Brentano’s notion of love disrupts bourgeois conceptions of marriage and is intended to constitute the basis of a new society, antithetical to bourgeois society.

Ultimately, Pirholt links these studies of metamimesis to a socially critical intention. The Romantics offered critical counterimages to the destabilizing context of modernity, thus creating a space for critical investigations...