{"id":70145,"date":"2014-04-22T15:57:03","date_gmt":"2014-04-22T19:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=70145"},"modified":"2014-04-22T22:21:49","modified_gmt":"2014-04-23T02:21:49","slug":"an-irresistible-almost-magical-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/04\/22\/an-irresistible-almost-magical-force\/","title":{"rendered":"An Irresistible, Almost Magical Force"},"content":{"rendered":"

Goethe\u2019s strange, elusive third novel, <\/em>Elective Affinities.<\/p>\n

\"Goethe_Campagna\"<\/a>

Johann Heimlich Wilhelm Tischbein, Goethe in the Roman Campagna<\/i>, 1787.<\/p><\/div>\n

There were no best-seller lists in 1809, but it was quickly clear to the German reading public that Goethe\u2019s third novel, Elective Affinities<\/em>, which appeared in the fall of that year, was a flop. His first, The Sorrows of Young Werther<\/em>, had inspired a fashion craze and copycat suicides, and had fired the heart of a young Napoleon. His latest effort, on the other hand, received befuddled notices from critics and little love from the coterie of writers and philosophers drawn to the Great Man. Everyone from the Brothers Grimm to Achim von Arnim to Wilhelm von Humboldt agreed that the book was a bore, that its plot made nearly no sense, and that its treatment of adultery bordered on the distasteful.<\/p>\n

At sixty, Goethe was not one to let bad reviews get him down. The universally beloved Faust <\/em>had appeared in 1808, and by 1810, Goethe was to have completed his Theory of Colors <\/em>as well as his autobiography, Poetry and Truth<\/em>. Nonetheless, in the correspondence he sent out around the time of publication, Goethe found himself compelled to admit that he had as little idea as anyone else of what he was trying to accomplish with his most recent book, or of what it had finally become. Then as now, Elective Affinities<\/em> is an incredible, deeply mystifying read, the headstone of a man who hoped to groom the wilderness of life into an English park where even loss, pain, and death have finally found their proper place. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s difficult to pinpoint what makes the novel so elusive, in our time as in Goethe\u2019s. The book is neither long nor dense; its characters\u2019 motives are not hard to fathom, its plot not difficult to follow. In fact, Elective Affinities <\/em>is the rare book that opens by spelling out what will happen by its end. The protagonists, Eduard and Charlotte, are aristocrats who have overcome loveless marriages to find true love with each other. At the start of the story, they invite Eduard\u2019s childhood friend, the Captain, to live with them, ostensibly to help out with various projects around the estate. Soon after his arrival, the Captain, a dilettante scientist, explains the principle of elective affinities to the couple\u2014how the elements of a seemingly stable compound, such as limestone, will separate and form a new combination when introduced to sulfuric acid. With Charlotte\u2019s beautiful but withdrawn niece Ottilie due to arrive shortly, the company observes how amusing it would be if, like the limestone and the sulfuric acid, Eduard rushed to Ottilie while Charlotte paired up with the Captain. (No points for guessing what happens next.)<\/p>\n

Chemistry is, to be sure, hardly the most inventive metaphor for romantic feeling. And yet, as Charlotte observes, we often forget just how much of natural science, which we take to be the inalienable reality of our existence, is informed by the human experience it is meant to illuminate. Elements don\u2019t elect<\/em> to do anything; they just rush together blindly, machinelike. Nor are the \u201claws\u201d of thermodynamics freely legislated\u2014they just are<\/em>. Everywhere Goethe\u2019s characters look, they see portentous signs that give the action a sense of fatefulness, as though it were being propelled by an \u201cinvisible, almost magical force of attraction.\u201d Eduard discovers that he and Ottilie have the same handwriting; a visiting Englishman reads from a novella that perfectly describes the plot up to that point. All the while, Goethe reminds us, via the supporting cast, how often we misread the world in order to dress up self-serving behavior for which we are reluctant to take responsibility. What begins as a rather slight take on the romantic tribulations of the moneyed class gradually unspools, in Goethe\u2019s hands, into a meditation on the murkiness of the laws that rule us\u2014on the \u201criddle of life,\u201d as the narrator calls it, for which we only ever find the answer in one another.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

The biggest obstacle between Goethe and his American readership has always been his style. Only Goethe could write a sentence like \u201cHe took note of all the beauties which the new paths had made visible and able to be enjoyed,\u201d skipping, in typical Goethe fashion, right past the actual beauty to linger on the sensibility of organization that makes it possible. When his dialogue and scene direction are not delivering one perfectly crafted aphorism after another, they\u2019re bare and utilitarian. (At a dinner party, Charlotte, \u201cwishing to get away from the subject once and for all, tried a bold shift of direction and was successful.\u201d) And then there is Goethe\u2019s strangely limited vocabulary, which favors simple yet maddeningly untranslatable words\u2014like bedeutsam<\/em>\u2014that never sound quite right, no matter how they are rendered. (\u201cThese wondrous events seemed to her to presage a significant <\/em>future, but not an unhappy one.\u201d) Goethe\u2019s English translators have always turned the clarity and placidity of his prose into something flat and wooden\u2014although, in their defense, Goethe was never really one to wrangle for le mot just<\/em> to begin with. By the time of Elective Affinities<\/em>, he dictated his works entirely to his secretary. The privy councilor to the Duke of Weimar was simply too busy to spend the day trying to decide if scarlet<\/em> sounded better than vermillion<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t help Goethe\u2019s case that how his characters spend their days seems, for lack of a better word, insane. The newest Oxford Classics edition of Elective Affinities<\/em> misleadingly promises a scathing critique of aristocrats \u201cwith little to occupy them.\u201d If anything, Eduard and Charlotte have too much to occupy them. Their music-playing and constant replanning of the grounds of their estate seem straightforward enough; before long they are reorganizing their graveyard, examining old Germanic weapons, and planning birthday parties with all the seriousness of imperial coronations. In the book\u2019s most famous scene, Charlotte\u2019s party-girl daughter, Luciane, arrives home from boarding school and insists that everyone dress up and pose as their favorite painting. Just before that, she has Charlotte\u2019s architect draw a mausoleum behind her while she pretends to be the queen of Casia, mourning for her lost husband. When that gets boring, she pages through an illustrated book of monkeys and compares each one to someone in the room. (\u201cHow can anyone bring himself to do such careful pictures of those horrible monkeys?\u201d a horrified Ottilie asks her diary.)<\/p>\n

A recent piece in n+1 <\/em>astutely observed that though Goethe was enough of a nineteenth-century author that we expect to understand him easily, he was ultimately too much of an eighteenth-century author to really like. Nowhere is this clearer than in Elective Affinities<\/em>\u2019s very slippery sense of what it means to do<\/em> something. Occupation, in the middle-class sense that would come to define the nineteenth century\u2014making things, buying things, selling things\u2014held little interest for Goethe. His great ambition, in his life and in his art, was to take the indefatigable work ethic of the bourgeoisie and apply it not to business, but to life itself, as only an eighteenth-century aristocrat could. Eduard and Charlotte don\u2019t bother composing music or writing novels. The object of their artistic aspiration\u2014as their fascination with botany, landscape architecture, and tableaux vivants<\/em> attests\u2014is reality itself. Considering that by the novel\u2019s end two of the main four characters are dead, it might be persuasively argued that Elective Affinities <\/em>is a meditation on the vanity of our desire to mold reality to our liking. But no matter how grim the plot, Goethe\u2019s narrators are never shaken in their values. There is no surer sign that we are to admire one of his characters than when we learn that, through tireless labor, they have restored some room or building that has fallen into disuse, or that, by applying their considerable expertise, they have revealed the beauty dormant in a grove of plane trees or a garden path.<\/p>\n

The great mystery, then, is that despite its fixation on death, loss, and the inscrutability of fate, Elective Affinities<\/em> never wavers in its optimism. At no point does the narrator ever concede his claim to the final truth of life, which he offers to the reader piece by piece, in one brilliant aphorism after another. (To take just one example: Ottilie\u2019s famous observation that no one is more fully a slave than when they believe themselves to be free.) It\u2019s easy to confuse Goethe\u2019s stoic acceptance of life\u2019s vicissitudes for a lack of feeling. But in his first work to his last, renunciation has always gone hand in hand with emotion\u2014as when Ottilie, in a sign of devotion to Eduard, hands him the portrait of her father she wears around her neck. For Goethe, true happiness is not simply a religious or ethical abstraction, but something palpable and real. Art\u2019s ambition, as Goethe saw it, was to still the rush of the world to reveal those vertiginous instants when all of eternity seems to be gathered into what is nearest at hand, and, no longer ruing the past or fearing the future, we finally feel at peace. The highest feeling in Elective Affinities <\/em>is not ecstasy, but serenity.<\/p>\n

Goethe\u2019s age was, in retrospect, the last time when literature might credibly have claimed that it could reconcile the different sides of life into a happy, harmonious whole. In a letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter in 1825, seven years before his death, Goethe wrote, \u201cThe world admires wealth and velocity\u2014these are the things for which everyone strives. Railroads, the post, steamboats, and all possible modes of communication are the means by which the world overeducates itself and freezes itself in mediocrity. We will be,\u201d he concluded, \u201cwith a few others, the last of an epoch that does not promise to return any time soon.\u201d If Goethe is alien to us now, as he was to the crop of writers who replaced him in Germany, it is because we are the children of the \u201cclever minds and quick, practical men\u201d who took over the reins of history from the \u201cenlightened\u201d despots he preferred to see in charge. Just the same, it is a testament to the depth of feeling that suffuses Elective Affinities<\/em>\u2014an incredible patience with life, rather than a hatred of it\u2014that Goethe\u2019s optimism is still legible to us today.<\/p>\n

Michael Lipkin is a student and writer living in New York City. His writing has appeared in <\/em>n+1,\u00a0<\/em>The Nation, and\u00a0<\/em>The American Reader.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Goethe\u2019s strange, elusive third novel, Elective Affinities. There were no best-seller lists in 1809, but it was quickly clear to the German reading public that Goethe\u2019s third novel, Elective Affinities, which appeared in the fall of that year, was a flop. His first, The Sorrows of Young Werther, had inspired a fashion craze and copycat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":496,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[13632,13631,71,247,892,747],"class_list":["post-70145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-chemistry","tag-elective-affinities","tag-fiction","tag-germany","tag-goethe","tag-novels"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJohann Wolfgang von Goethe\u2019s Strange, Elusive Third Novel<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Michael Lipkin on the history behind Goethe\u2019s \u201cElective Affinities,\u201d which was published in 1809 and the first flop of his writing career.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/04\/22\/an-irresistible-almost-magical-force\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"An Irresistible, Almost Magical Force by Michael Lipkin\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 22, 2014 \u2013 Goethe\u2019s strange, elusive third novel, Elective Affinities. 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