Character, Silence, and the Novel: Walter Benjamin on Goethe's Elective Affinities

Abstract

Walter Benjamin's 1924-25 essay on Goethe's Die [The Elective is widely acknowledged as standard-setting in the reception history of one of the most important European novels of the nineteenth century. Yet the essay Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften [Goethe's Elective Affinities] has re ceived more thorough discussion as a work of critical theory than as a reading of a novel.1 Recent studies of Benjamin explicate the essay as an elaboration of the con cept of immanent described in Benjamin's dissertation on early German Romanticism. Immanent criticism completes the literary artwork by articulating or unfolding its own internal tendency to reflection; it was developed and practiced by Romantic critics in close relation with the literary production of Goethe, its critical language a reflection of his literary language. Benjamin's early criticism likewise de velops in a closer engagement with Goethe's literary works than is always acknowl edged. The following article seeks to supplement recent considerations of Benjamin's essay with an account that remains more closely tied to the text and re ception of Goethe's novel.2 When Goethe published Die in 1809, the novel produced an immediate and lasting bafflement that was only to be deepened by the author's comments on his own work. Die is a novel of manners, but its title, drawn from the terminology of eighteenth-century chemistry, seems to indicate a departure from the social rules that govern manners. Instead, this strange title refers readers to a scientific law according to which elements with innate affinities will choose, or elect, to bond together, even if they must break out of previously formed unions in order to do so. The symmetry that marks the transformations expressed in