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“Bild” and “Sinnbild”: The Problem of the Symbol in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften

1988; Routledge; Volume: 63; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/19306962.1987.11787305

1930-6962

Loisa Nygaard,

Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes“Einleitung zu ‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften’” in Goethes Werke, ed. Erich Trunz, 5th ed. (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1963; 1st ed. 1948–1960), vol. 6: 656. Further references to this edition will be included in parentheses in the text.“‘Ein wahrer Narziss’: Reflections on the Eduard-Ottilie Relationship in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften,” PEGS, N.S. 29 (1960): 54–55.See for example Heinz Schlaffer, “Namen und Buchstaben in Goethe’s ‘Wahlverwandtschaften,’” Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft 7 (1972): 84–102; and Stefan Blessin, Erzählstruktur und Leserhandlung: Zur Theorie der literarischen Kommunikation am Beispiel von Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’ (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1974).For general discussions of Goethe’s symbol, see Curt Müller, Die geschichtlichen Voraussetzungen des Symbolbegriffs in Goethes Kunstanschauung, Palaestra: Untersuchungen und Texte aus der deutschen und englischen Philologie, founded by A. Brandl and E. Schmidt, ed. A. Brandl, J. Petersen, and A. Hübner, No. 211 (Leipzig: Mayer und Müller, 1937); Wilhelm Emrich, “Symbolinterpretation und Mythenforschung: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen eines neuen Goetheverständnisses,” Euphorion 47 (19 53): 38–67; Hans Rudolf Schweizer, Goethe und das Problem der Sprache (Berne: Francke, 1959); Maurice Marache, Le symbol dans la pensée et l’oeuvre de Goethe (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1960); Manfred Jurgensen, Symbol als Idee: Studien zu Goethes Ästhetik (Berne: Francke, 1968); Werner Keller, Goethes dichterische Bildlichkeit: Eine Grundlegung (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1972); Andrew Jaszi, Entzweiung und Vereinigung: Goethes symbolische Weltanschauung, in collaboration with Michael Mann, Poesie und Wissenschaft, vol. 24 (Heidelberg: Lothar Stiehm, 1973); Robert Mühlher, “Wort und Bild bei Goethe,” Sprachkunst 6 (1975): 207–223; Bengt Sørensen, “Altersstil und Symboltheorie: Zum Problem des Symbols und der Allegorie bei Goethe,” Goethe Jahrbuch 94 (1977): 69–85; and Walter Strolz, “Goethes versteckte Sprachphilosophie,” Jahrbuch des freien deutschen Hochstifts ser. 2, 1981: 1–86.See for example Paul Hankamer, “Zur Genesis von Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’” in Festschrift für Berthold Litzmann zum Geburtstag, ed. C. Enders (Bonn: F. Cohen, 1920), pp. 38–62; rpt. in Goethes Roman ‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften,’ ed. Ewald Rösch (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), pp. 139–40 (this collection of essays henceforth referred to as “Rösch”); Jurgensen, p. 128; Klaus Köhnke “Untersuchungen zur Deutung der Welt in Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften,’” Acta Germanica 3 (1968): 111–33; rpt. in Rösch, 380; Hans Reiss, Mehrdeutigkeit in Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften,’” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 14 (1970): 391; and Mühler, pp. 222–23.Todorov in his Théories du symbol (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977) significantly discusses Goethe in a chapter entitled “La crise romantique” (pp. 235–43). In a recent article on Faust, Neil M. Flax actually states that he is using Goethe as a “test case” to illustrate “the complex relations between the idea and the practice of the Romantic symbol” (“The Presence of the Sign in Goethe’s Faust,” PMLA 98 (1983): 184). Mark A. Schneider (“Goethe and the Structuralist Tradition,” Studies in Romanticism 18 [1979]: 453–78) also sees Goethe as quintessentially a Romantic.See for example Jochen Hörisch, “Das Sein der Zeichen und die Zeichen des Seins: Marginalien zu Derridas Ontosemiologie,” introduction to Jacques Derrida, Die Stimme und das Phänomen: Ein Essay über das Problem des Zeichens in der Philosophie Husserls, ed. and trans. J. H. (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979, pp. 7–50. See also Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 179–232; J. Hillis Miller, “A ‘Buchstäbliches’ Reading of The Elective Affinities,” Glyph 6 (1979): 1–23; and several essays contained in Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften: Kritische Modelle und Diskursanalysen zum Mythos Literatur, ed. Norbert Bolz (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981), notably those by N. B., pp. 64–90; W. Kittler, pp. 230–59; F. Kittler, pp. 260–75; J. Schreiber, pp. 276–307; J. Hörisch, pp. 308–22; and R. S. Zons, pp. 323–52. (This collection of essays will henceforth be referred to as “Bolz.”) Studies by Claudia Brodsky (“The Coloring of Relations: Die Wahlverwandtschaften as Farbenlehre,” MLN 97 (1982): 1147–79), Waltraud Wiethölter (“Legenden: Zur Mythologie von Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 56 (1982): 1–64), and Clark Muenzer (“Eduard and Rhetoric: Characterization and Narrative Strategy in Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften,” MLN 94 (1979): 493–509; and Figures of identity: Goethe’s Novels and the Enigmatic Self, Penn State Series in German Literature, ed. J. Strelka [University Park: Penn. State Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 73–100) also show greater or lesser degrees of deconstructionist influence.Torbern Bergman, Disquisitio de Allractionibus Electivis (K. Ventenskaps Societeten i Upsala, Nova Acta Regiae Societatis Scientiarum Upsaliensis, ser. 2, vol. 2 (1775): 159–248); translated into German by H. Tabor in 1782.Blessin was the first to make this crucial point: “[Es] ist notwendig, sich zu vergewissern, daß in den ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’ die Symbole von den Figuren, von ihren Hoffnungen und Einsichten in die Zukunft nicht zu trennen sind … . Erst die handelnden Figuren geben den Dingen einen Sinn … .” (p. 47). Tanner later makes a similar observation: “ … .[I]n reading the book we should beware of thinking that we are interpreting a dimension of meaning of which the characters are unaware. lt is the other way around. We becume aware of the dimension of meaning that they inhabit. We are not interpreters; rather we are forced into a realization of the hermeneutics within which the characters move and have their being. What we might, as readers, consider too obvious, too significant, is a projection of the significances by which the characters define their existence and beyond which they cannot see” (pp. 179–80). Recently, Margarethe Beckurts has tried to distinguish between two types of symbols in the novel: “Es lassen sich zwei unterschiedliche Gruppen von Symbolen feststellen: einerseits solche, deren Symbolwert nur der Leser realisiert- der See, die Platanen u.a.-andererseits Gegenstände oder Ereignisse, denen die Romangestalten selbst willkürlich symbolische Bedeutung zumessen” (“Zur Bedeutung der Novelle in Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 103 (1984), Sonderheft: 72). The validity of Beckurts’ distinction is somewhat undermined by the trouble she has finding appropriate examples: Eduard clearly assigns the plane trees, which he believes were planted on Ottilie’s birthday, special symbolic significance; and Charlotte obviously becomes so upset during her boatride on the lake with the Captain, not because of any immediate threat that her watery environment poses, but because of what it means to her. These phenomena are “symbols” for the characters as well as for the reader.Ludwig Kahn in his essay “Erlebte Rede in Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften” (PMLA 89 [1974]: 268–77) made an analogous point about the discourse of the nove l: he observed that many passages in the novel that seem to be in the narrator’s voice are actually “erlebte Rede” from the perspective of one or the other of the characters.See for example Ernst Loeb, “Liebe und Ehe in Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften,’” Weimarer Beiträge 16 (1970): 163–80; rpt. in Rösch, p. 427.Hans Reiss, Goethes Romane (Berne: Francke, 1963), p. 165.H. A. Korff, Geist der Goethezeit, vol. 2: Klassik, 6th ed. (Leipzig: Koehler und Amelang, 1962; 1st ed. 1930): 359.William J. Lillyman, “Analogies for Love: Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften and PlatO’s Sym posium” in Goethe’s Narrative Fiction: The Irvine Goethe Symposium, ed. W. J. L. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983). p. 134.See for example Reiss, Goethes Romane, p. 186.There have been numerous discussions of the tableaux vivants in the novel in recent years. One of the earlier pieces was H. G. Barnes, “Bildhafte Darstellung in den ‘Wahlverwandtschaften,’” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 30 (1956): 41–70. See also August Langen, “Attitüde und Tableau in der Goethezeit,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 12 (1968): 194–258; Jutta Aubenque, “Goethe et la pretendue ‘Remonstrance paternelle’ de Terborch,” Études Germaniques 32 (1977): 437–40; Neil M. Flax, Written Pictures: The Visual Arts in Goethe’s Literary Works, (Diss. Yale, 1978), 147–58; Tanner, pp. 225–32; and G. Brude-Firnau, “Lebende Bilder in den Wahlverwandtschaften: Goethes Journal intime vom Oktober 1806,” Euphorion 74 (1980): 403–416.There have been several studies of time in Die Wahlverwandtschaften, notable among them Keith Dickson, “The Temporal Structure of Die Wahlverwandtschaften,” Germanic Review 41 (1966): 170–85; Paul Leu, “Time and Transcendence in Goethe’s ‘Wahlverwandtschaften,’” Monatshefte 60 (1968): 369–78; Gonthier-Louis Fink, “Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’: Romanstruktur und Zeitaspekte” in Rösch, pp. 438–83 (orig. pub. as “Les ‘Wahlverwandtschaf-ten’ de J. W. Goethe,” Recherches Germaniques 1971: 58–100); and Jutta Steinbiß, Der ‘freundliche Augenblick’: Versuch über Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften, Zürcher Beiträge zur deutschen Literaturund Geistesgeschichte, ed. W. Binder, A. Haas, and P. von Matt, vol. 57 (Zurich: Artemis, 1983): 48–110.Some version of this pattern may well be at work in the history of the lake, which was originally one body of water, later dammed to form three small ponds, and then finally recombined into a single expanse.See Erich Trunz, “Die Kupferstiche zu den ‘Lebenden Bildern’ in den Wahlverwandtschaften” in E. T., Weimarer Goethe-Studien (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1980), pp. 203–17. Trunz points out, for example, that the Ter Borch original shows three young people roughly of an age, whereas in the Wille etching the two seated figures are considerably older than the standing girl (p. 210).Muenzer also discusses the relationship between signifier and signified in the novel, but comes to an understanding of it that is the reverse of my own. He says of Eduard, for example: “To him a thought or design without an immediate consequence, a signifier that does not lead to a fulfilling embrace with a signified, a figuration that cannot recover the presence to which it points, are all intolerable limits of linguistic signification” (Figures of ldentity, p. 92). And again, more specifically of Eduard’s glass: “The true object, ‘das echte Glas,’ which Eduard willfully interpreted as the union of desire and fulfillment, could not withstand the pressure of his erotic investment and broke. lts life as a sign had to end once its signifier was absorbed into the consummate presence of its signified” (p. 96). And finally: “A sign will authentically reflect the formative will of an individual only as long as its signifier (which has been constituted in the desire to bring an unattainable goal into view) is not forcibly merged with its signified (which stands for presence, or the fulfillment of a goal, the elimination of desire and hence, of the signifier as well)” (pp. 94–95).Gail Finney in a recent book has praised the Tutor’s love for Ottilie and contrasted it with Eduard’s narcissistic attachment: “He [the Tutor] understands her better than anyone else does, sensitive observation having taught him the meaning of her every gesture and expression … . In this, as in so many respects, the assistant is the antipode of Eduard, who loves Ottilie not in and of herself but narcissistically, insofar as she mirrors him” (The Counterfeil Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Studien zur deutschen Literatur, ed. W. Barner, R. Brinkmann, and F. Sengle, vol. 81 [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer]: 70; cf. also her article “Type and Countertype: The Dialectics of Space in Die Wahlverwandtschaften,” Germanic Review 58 (1983): 71). But the nature of the Tutor’s attachment is not so dramatically different from Eduard’s as Finney asserts.Cf. Tanner, p. 181.See for example F. J. Stopp, pp. 52–85. For more recent discussions, see Hillis Miller, p. 17; and Wiethölter, p. 8ff.Muenzer very appropriately refers to this scene as a “semiotic crime” (Figures of ldentity, p. 92).Cf. Tanner, pp. 196–97; and Flax, Written Pictures, pp. 166–73.Cf. in this context Judith Ryan, “Elective Affinities: Goethe and Henry James,” Goethe Yearbook 1 (1982): 158–60.Cf. Flax, Written Pictures, pp. 171–72; and Hörisch, p. 26.William J. Lillyman in his article “Affinity, Innocence and Tragedy: The Narrator and Ottilie in Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften” (German Quarterly 53 (1980): 46–63) points out that Ottilie herself creates the image of herself as saint that dominates the end of the novel (55–57).Muenzer views the semiotic stance that underlies Ottilie’s death positively: “Ottilie’s decision to renounce Eduard, as a gesture of resistance to his commanding presence, implies an intuitive recognition of the priority that ‘dieses zweite Dasein,’ the figurative life, has over biological or literal life. Her refusal to speak and to eat signals her acceptance of a mode of being that can tolerate, even welcome the limitations of reading the world authentically through signs. Nor does this mode, as asceticism, suggest spiritual regeneration on her part. Instead, it embodies a resolve that is unique to signs to forestall fulfillment and facilitate discourse by keeping aspiration alive, and hence the idealized objects of aspiration as well. Ottilie’s faith, unlike that of the vulgar believers at her shrine, finds peace in textual derivations, in discursive writing, rather than in pragmatic speech. That this was also Goethe’s belief becomes apparent in his last novel … . ” (Figures of ldentity, p. 100).Horst Turk, “Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’: ‘der doppelte Ehebruch durch Phantasie’” in Urszenen: Literaturwissenschaft als Diskursanalyse und Diskurskritik, ed. F. A. Kittler and H. T. (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 202–22, esp. p. 213.Tanner, p. 221.At one point in the course of the action, Eduard also transforms himself into a sign of sorts, and, interestingly, the process seems to involve at least the risk of his death. He tells the Major that he used his survival in the wars to “test” whether he was really meant to have Ottilie: “Ein Glas mit unserm Namenszug bezeichnet, bei der Grundsteinlegung in die Lüfte geworfen, ging nicht zu Trümmern; es ward aufgefangen und ist wieder in meinen Händen. ‘So will ich mich denn selbst,’ rief ich mir zu…, ‘mich selbst will ich an die Stelle des Glases zum Zeichen machen, ob unsre Verbindung möglich sei oder nicht’” (HA 6: 447).Oskar Walze!, “Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’ im Rahmen ihrer Zeit,” Goethe-Jahrbuch 27 (1906): 181–206; abridged rpt. in Rösch, pp. 35–64. See also E. L. Stahl, “Die Wahlverwandtschaften,” PEGS, N.S. 15 (1945): 71–95; Elisabeth Stopp, “A Romantic Reaction to ‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften’: Zacharias Werner and Goethe,” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch II (1970): 67–85; and Lillyman, “Monasticism, Tableau Vivant, and Romanticism: Ottilie in Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 81 (1982): 347–66, esp. 361–66.An early version of this distinction occurred in “Über die Gegenstände der bildenden Kunst” (1797), where Goethe observed that in some works of art, the subject is determined “Durch tiefes Gefühl, das, wenn es rein und natürlich ist, mit den besten und höchsten Gegenständen koinzidieren und sie allenfalls symbolisch machen wird. Die auf diese Weise dargestellten Gegenstände scheinen bloß für sich zu stehen und sind doch wieder im Tiefsten bedeutend, und das wegen des Idealen, das immer eine Allgemeinheit mit sich führt. Wenn das Symbolische außer der Darstellung noch etwas bezeugt, so wird es immer auf indirekte Weise geschehen….Nun gibt es auch Kunstwerke, die durch Verstand, Witz, Galanterie brillieren, wohin wir auch alle allegorischen rechnen; von diesen läßt sich am wenigsten Gutes erwarten, well sie gleichfalls das Interesse an der Darstellung selbst zerstören und den Geist gleichsam in sich selbst zurücktreiben und seinen Augen das, was wirklich dargestellt ist, entziehen. Das Allegorische unterscheidet sich vom Symbolischen, daß dieses indirekt, jenes direkt bezeichnet"; Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, ed. Ernst Beutler, 2nd ed. (Zürich: Artemis, 1962–1965; Ist ed. 1948–1952), vol. 13: 124–25. (This edition will henceforth be referred to as GA in these notes.) A later essay (“Nachträgliches zu Philostrats Gemälden,” 1820) more clearly articulated the contrast: “Es [the symbol] ist die Sache, ohne die Sache zu sein, und doch die Sache; ein im geistigen Spiegel zusammengezogenes Bild, und doch mit dem Gegenstand identisch. Wie weit steht nicht dagegen die Allegorie zurück; sie ist vielleicht geistreich witzig, aber doch meist rhetorisch und konventionell und immer besser, je mehr sie sich demjenigen nähert, was wir Symbol nennen” (GA 13: 868).Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Berlin: E. Rowohlt, 1928), p. 158.Sørensen, p. 75.Uwe Pörksen, “Goethes Kritik Naturwissenschaftlicher Metaphorik und der Roman ‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften,’” Jarhbuch der deutschen Schillergeselschaft 25 (1981): 298. Pörksen is one of the few to give extensive consideration to Goethe’s critique of scientific discourse. Karl J. Fink has also produced an interesting article on the subject of Goethe’s scientific language: “The Metalanguage of Goethe’s History of Color Theory” in The Quest for the New Science: Language and Thought in Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. K.J.F. and J. W. Marchand (Carbondale: Southern lllinois Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 41–55. See in addition Pörksen’s essay “Zur Wissenschaftssprache und Sprachauffassung bei Linne und Goethe” in Sprache und Welterfahrung, ed. J. Zimmerman (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1978), pp. 110–41.GA 17: 722.Several commentators have attempted to expand Goethe’s attack on Newtonian science so that it in·effect becomes an attack on modern science in general, a regressive move to reject the whole scientific revolution or a “Romantic” revolt against the scientific age. But in thus broadening the scope of Goethe’s critique, they distort it. Goethe’s frequently expressed and obviously sincere respect for certain aspects of the science of his day should refute the view, which still has surprising currency, that Goethe feit a Romantic revulsion against science in general and was ready to revert to the days of alchemy and Swedenborgian spirit lore. “Alchemical” readings of Die Wahlverwandtschaften are still quite popular. See for example Schlaffer, pp. 95–100; Bettina L. Knapp, “Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften: An Alchemical Process from Fixatio to Dissolutio,” Symposium 35 (1981): 235–49; and Wiethölter, pp. 37–52.Cf. Schneider, pp. 469–70.This critique has not received the attention it deserves because studies of Goethe’s scientific writings have also long been dominated by a “Romantic” conception of the Goethean symbol. See for example Manfred Jürgensen, pp. 9–30; and H. B. Nisbet, Goethe and the Scientific Tradition, Publications of the Institute of Germanic Studies, vol. 14 (London: Univ. of London Press, 1972): 67.Werner Heisenberg offers a fascinating discussion of Goethe’s revolt against the increasing remoteness of modern science from sensory experience in his essay “Die Goethesche und die Newtonsche Farbenlehre im Lichte der modernen Physik,” Geist der Zeit 19 (1941): 261–75, rpt. in Goethe im XX. Jahrhundert: Spiegelungen und Deutungen, ed. Hans Mayer (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1967), pp. 418–32. Cf. also Christoph Gögelein’s critique of Heisenberg’s position in C.G., Zu Goethes Begriff von Wissenschaft: Auf dem Wege der Methodik seiner Farbstudien, (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1972), pp. 178–92.See HA 12: 399; HA 17: 586; and also the famous passage on “das Dämonische” in Dichtung und Wahrheit, HA 10: 175–76.Several studies have linked Die Wahlverwandtschaften and the Farbenlehre. Some of the pioneering work was done by Grete Schaeder in Goll und Welt: Drei Kapitel Goethescher Weltanschauung (Hameln: Fritz Seifert, 1947), pp. 276–323. Thomas Fries (Die Wirklichkeit der Literatur: Drei Versuche zur literarischen Sprachkritik, Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1975). pp. 47–130) has also elaborated the connection. More recent studies include Uwe Pörksen, “Goethes Kritik Naturwissenschaftlicher Metaphorik und der Roman ‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften’ “; Claudia Brodsky, “The Coloring of Relations: Die Wahlverwandtschaften as Farbenlehre”; and Werner Schwan, Goethes’ Wahlverwandtschaften’: Das nicht erreichte Soziale (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1983), pp. 54–69.Pörksen (“Goethes Kritik”) also links Goethe’s critique of scientific language to certain basic concerns of Die Wahlverwandtschaften, but concentrates exclusively upon the problem of “Vermengung der Sphären.” I have not dealt with this issue because of his thorough treatment of it.See J. A. Schufle’s excellent introduction to his English translation of Bergman’s study, Dissertation on Elective Allraction, Sources of Science, no. 43 (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968), pp xi-xxvii.Bergman, pp. 1–2.Bergman, p. 3.Bergman, pp. 3–4.Modem structuralism and post-structuralism have deep roots in the scientific tradition described above. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s great work “The Raw and the Cooked,” for example, was subtitled “lntroduction to a Science of Mythology,” and here and elsewhere Lévi-Strauss often used a highly abstract, almost algebraic system of notation to describe social and human relationships. He observed in a recent course of lectures (1977): “[W]hat we call structuralism in the field of linguistics, or anthropology, or the like, is nothing other than a very pale and faint imitation of what the ‘hard sciences,’ as I think you call them in English, have been doing all the time” (C. L-S., Myth and Meaning, [New York: Schocken, 1979; Ist ed. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1978). p. 9) Hugo G. Nutini has explicitly linked the structuralist revolution in anthropology to the Newtonian and subsequent Einsteinian revolutions in the sciences (“Lévi-Strauss’ Conception of Science” in Echanges et communications, ed. J. Pouillon and P. Maranda, vol. 1 [The Hague: Mouton, 1970]. pp. 543–70). Greimas, a structuralist of a very different stamp, has a similar desire to bring a new scientific rigor to his field, semantics. The first chapter of his Structural Semantics is appropriately entitled “The Conditions for Scientific Semantics,” and the models that he advocates are also logico-mathematical rather than empirical (Structural Semantics: An Allempt at a Method, Trans. and introd. R. Schleifer [Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983]; orig. pub. as Semantique structurale: Recherche de methode [Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1966]). To turn to an earlier figure more loosely associated with the movement: Gaston Bachelard’s Le nouvel esprit scientifique (10th ed. [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968; Ist ed. Paris: Felix Alcan, 1934]) praises exactly those trends in the sciences that Goethe deplored. For example: “Toute vérité nouvelle naît malgré l’évidence, toute expérience nouvelle naît malgré l’expérience immédiate (p. 7); or again: “Après avoir formé, dans les premiers efforts de l’esprit scientifique, une raison à l’image du monde, l’activité spirituelle de la science moderne s’attache à construire un monde à l’image de la raison” (p. 13). One of Jacques Derrida’s earliest works was an introduction to Husserl’s l’Origine de la géométrie (1962). And of course, developments in abstract geometry earlier in the century were an important influence on the emergence of structuralism.Mark Schneider has tried to argue Goethe’s affinity with the structuralist tradition, but has managed to link them only by forcibly bringing structuralism close to Romanticism, by exaggerating Goethe’s antiempiricism, and by stressing the influence upon him of Platonism and Neo-Platonism. In his scientific work, however, Goethe was most strongly influenced by Aristotle, especially in his conception of color. The ticklishness of stressing Goethe’s distance from the empirical tradition in the sciences, with its emphasis upon experimentation and observation, and of aligning him with the more theoretical and formalist trends is evident from Schneider’s own description of the Farbenlehre: “His researches in this area [the theory of colors] are complex and fascinating. They are fascinating because they place a marvelous capacity for detailed observation and experiment at the service of a single-minded theoretical wrongheadedness of stunning proportions and because their theoretical orientation is determined by opposition to the major methodological tradition of Western science as exemplified in the work of Newton” (p. 459).Interpretations of Die Wahlverwandtschaften that focus narrowly on signifiers within the text ironically reflect many of the pitfalls inherent in such an emphasis as they are depicted within the text. Heinz Schlaffer, for example, who says of his study: “sie hält sich an die kleinsten Einheiten ihres Gegenstandes, an Buchstaben und Namen, und will die größten, Bauprinzip und ‘durchgreifende Idee’, daraus hervorgehen lassen” (p. 85), arrives at a rather disheartening assessment of the novel as a whole (“Daß in Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’ der bedeutendste deutsche Kunstroman vorliegt, sollte nicht bestritten, vielmehr an einem Detail erhärtet werden. Doch angesichts des Ganzen, wofür das Detail steht, wäre zu bedenken, um welchen Preis dieser Rang erkauft wurde” [p. 102)), which is not surprising, as the novel itself reflects a critical attitude toward the sort of reductionist symbols that he decides to make the center of his analysis.“Einleitung: Goethes Wah lverwandtschaften: Analysen zum Mythos Literatur” in Bolz, pp. 12–15.Jochen Hörisch, “Das Sein der Zeichen und die Zeichen des Seins,” p. 15.David Wellbery has pointed out in a recent book on Lessing that “direct appropriation of Lessing’s Laocoon is no longer possible: Lessing and his contemporaries were quite simply speaking a different language-that is, a different theoretical language-about art, language, and signs from that which we speak” (Lessing’s ‘Laocoon’: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason, Anglica Germanica Series 2, ed. M. Swales [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984], p. 238). A similar awareness on the part of critics dealing with Goethe’s writings would be helpful.HA 13: 378. Brodsky among others overlooks this imponant point, which leads her to misinterpret the true nature of Goethe’s controversy with Newton (pp. 11 56–58). She argues that Goethe tries to “objectify” color, which is not at all the case.Even the terms “symbol” and “allegory” in Goethe’s thought do not seem to define a sharp opposition, but rather two poles of a slidin g scale. Goethe observed of allegory, for example, that it is “immer besser, je mehr sie sich demjenigen nähert, was wir Symbol nennen” (GA 13: 866–68).