In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent

1. Building, Story, and Image

1. Building, Story, and Image The experience of Wahlverwandtschaften is the eradication of time—of ‘‘something’’ that is, in itself, nothing—and the activity that brings about the occasion for this obliteration is, ironically, the making of something in the place of ‘‘nothing,’’ building.1 As described by the characters that embody it, the notion of Wahlverwandtschaften —‘‘chosen’’ [wahl] but involuntary, improper but fitting ‘‘relations’’ [verwandtschaften]—constitutes a ‘‘misleading’’ ‘‘metaphor’’ for human and nonhuman interactions alike.2 As a general term for the forging of a new relation from discrete entities , Wahlverwandtschaften appears a false representation of any particular relation it names; such is the fate of any metaphor for metaphor, the give-and-take of figural relations, a fate shared by the crisscrossed lovers of the novel themselves.3 Yet building, the endeavor which brings those characters together in the first place, not only literally setting the scene but establishing the very theater 1. ‘‘Nothing’’ here is not another name for nature, but indicates rather no thing, i.e., no object, product or entity, of human making or conception. Building may order or re-order, stand for, or add to such things, but, in order to materialize as such, building must take place in the most literal—which is to say, concrete—sense, demarcating and constructing form in a space where no thing already is. 2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften: Ein Roman, in Goethe, Werke, VI:270–75. All subsequent quotations are from this edition. See the continuation of this note in the Appendix. 3. On ‘‘Wahlverwandtschaften’’ as ‘‘Metapher für die Metaphor’’ (a metaphor for metaphor), see Thomas Fries, Die Wirklichkeit der Literatur, p. 100. See the continuation of this note in the Appendix. 65 66 ‡ built time for their appearance, is not—even metaphorically speaking—a metaphor.4 In itself, building neither compares, nor substitutes, nor exchanges: it is not a structure for making meaning out of the logical conceptual tradeoffs (implicit for explicit, part for whole, absent for present, among the most frequent) engendered by every metaphor ’s double, or conventional and unconventional, reference. Building is instead the making of a structure out of materials having physical-mathematical, but no referential, function. Precisely because its component parts are independent of reference, building is as concrete as metaphor is fictive or immaterial, which is to say that the referentiality of metaphor, like its duplicity, is operative in language alone. In short, while a metaphor is solely conceived as such because of its apparent meanings, whatever a building may appear to ‘‘mean’’ has no bearing upon its being building. Peculiar to Die Wahlverwandtschaften, however, is its emphatic foregrounding of both metaphoric and architectural activity, whose co-presence, bordering on interdependence, brings the fundamental question of this study—that of the relationship of building to language —center stage. In steering clear of any synthesis or analogy between them, while making these modes of construction, more than its explicitly cipher-like characters, the main performers of its plot, the novel presents, in seamless literary form, not so much a story of bourgeois Sitten in conflict with irrational passions, as a masterful remix of Hegel’s history of spirit brought to consciousness and 4. The nonmetaphoric status of building in the novel is related to but not identifiable with Heidegger’s remarkable assertion, in the Letter on Humanism, that to name that which ‘‘thinking builds upon’’ ‘‘the house of Being’’ is ‘‘no figural transfer of the image of the ‘house’ onto Being’’; see Martin Heidegger, Platons Lehre von Wahrheit, p. 111; see also pp. 115–16: ‘‘‘Stay’ means in our language ‘keeping’ (or ‘custody’). Being is the keeping that watches over man in his ex-istent essence in the way of its truth such that it houses ex-istence in language. That is why language it at once the house of Being and the housing of human essence. Ex-istence resides, thinking, in the house of Being.’’ See also Identität und Differenz, p. 104: ‘‘In the event of appropriation oscillates the essence of that which speaks as language, language which once was called the house of Being.’’ building, story, and image ‡ 67 advanced by way of different art forms.5 The plot of Die Wahlverwandtschaften requires both building and ‘‘chosen relations’’ to develop , and these require each other if each is to occur at all, yet the two activities (and here one has no...