Poetics of Containment: Goethe’sConversations of German Refugeesand the Crisis of Representation

Abstract

c 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2003/10003-0005$10.00 In the winter of 1794, while working on his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre ( Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship ), Goethe also writes the novella cycle Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten ( Conversations of German Refugees ). In a curious exchange of provenance, the former, which builds on the specifically German form of the bildungsroman, becomes a model for the great French and English novels of the nineteenth century, 1 while the latter, which borrows from the romancelanguage literary tradition, initiates the dominance of the novella form in Germany. 2 Neither the simultaneity of the two works nor the crossing of traditions is mere accident. Both the novel and the novella thematize novelty, though in importantly different ways: while the novel accommodates novelty within a regulatory framework, the novella insists on novelty’s intractability and resistance to symbolic integration. Goethe’s Conversations , though by title concerned with sociability and communication, begin with the French Revolution and the failure of traditional institutions. As the narrative unfolds, the threat to the order of the ancien regime is swiftly aligned with a more general challenge to the continuity of symbolic life. More specifically, the revolution is identified with the unruly forces of desire and its catastrophic disruption of communication. The problem, expressed in Goethe’s novella cycle and fundamental to the genre it gives rise to, can be put briefly: how to respond within communication to that which exceeds the resources of communication?