Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century by Catriona MacLeod (review)

Catriona MacLeod's Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century analyzes the complex status of sculpture in the nineteenth century as, at once, defined by its materiality and theorized in literature but also vanishing from culture. MacLeod examines three types of sculptural vanishing: in the theoretical debates surrounding art and aesthetics; the physical and mass reproduction that strips meaning, context, and location away from the object; and the attempt to represent material objects within the nonmaterial medium of literature.

Through a survey of nineteenth-century cultural aesthetics, Fugitive Objects locates sculpture at a tenuous site of cultural anxiety as a form that embodies the concerns surrounding industrialization and reproducibility. MacLeod shows that even as sculpture was dismissed by the great thinkers of the age as boring, criticized as outdated, and accused of primitivism, it also captivated the aesthetic discourse and the literary imagination. This comprehensive study of literary sculptural renderings bridges the gap between sculpture removals, acquisitions, and reproduction in the art world with Romantic aesthetics and literary representation of sculpture. Additionally, MacLeod demonstrates how nineteenth-century Europe's acquisition of Greek and Italian art, such as the controversial relocation of the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon to Britain, the Venus de Milo brought to Paris 1820 and replicated by contemporary artists, as well as copies of sculptures such as the Medici Venus and Apollo Belvedere, became part of an intellectual psychosis as the relocation and copies of such works stripped the original sculptures of location, context, and meaning.

Yet, at the same time, MacLeod contends that this mass reproduction of high art reflects Germany's mercantile spirit at the end of the nineteenth century and forms a substitute cultural location for sculpture. Ultimately, she asserts that "the statue becomes a catalyst for active literary discourses on modernity, in particular owing to its newly problematic status as a dislodged, precarious object connected with mass production and consumption" (8).

Reading theoretical discourses of August Wilhelm Schlegel and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as "disappearing" sculpture in aesthetic debates, MacLeod argues for a "reappearance" of the statue on the literary stage in nineteenth-century works, such as Clemens Brentano's Godwi (1800–1801), Achim von Arnim's "Die WeihnachtsAusstellung" (1817) and Raphael und seine Nachbarinnen (1824), Joseph von Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild (1818), Adalbert Stifter's Der Nachsommer (1857), Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus im Pelz (1870), and Rainer Maria Rilke's short story "Die Menschenfabrik" (1890). Within these texts, classical sculptures mutate, wander, and resist linguistic definitions; and therefore, according to MacLeod, also demonstrate the significance of the sculpture as a symbol of both past and future.

The first chapter examines the inconsistencies between aesthetic theory and practice in the years between Weimar classicism and Romanticism as affected by consumerism, Napoleonic Wars, archaeological developments, and criticisms couched in Romantic aesthetics (45). Chapter 2 turns to Brentano's novel Godwi to elucidate the struggle between language and object in the Romantic narrative emphasized by its imaginary, mutating, and indefinable statues. The fictional author of Brentano's text attempts to translate female sculptural bodies into narrative through allegory and ekphrasis, but ultimately both material (statue) and narrative/language (novel) succumb to decay. Sculpture as an object for consumption and desire forms the focus of chapter 3. Arnim's Raphael und seine Nachbarinnen and Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild de- and recontextualize statues through literary narrative, but with different objectives and outcomes. In Raphael und seine Nachbarinnen, pagan sculptural encounters serve as the impetus for the great Italian painter's artistic development and inspire the Christian Transfiguration. Yet, MacLeod argues that the statues within the text resist authorial power and copying sculptures destabilizes the narrative rather than allow for a tradition of authenticity. Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild evokes a marble Venus statue as an ever-changing erotic female sculptural body that must be mastered through static language. However, this statue also resists complete control...