The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Goethes Last Novel

Abstract

The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Goethe's Last Novel MARLIS MEHRA Goethe regarded his artistic production as a continuous process of evo­ lution. In his view, each work of art had to transcend the previous one, because it had to pose new aesthetic problems and offer new solutions to them. Therefore no style — regardless of its degree of perfection or how much acclaim it had received — could be fruitfully continued for very long. Although many critics have considered Goethe's work during the period of German classicism from 1790 to 1805 as the peak of his artistic achievement, he himself did not do so. Most critics have also assumed that Goethe must have adhered to the aesthetic principles of the classical period for the rest of his life. This again is not so. After Schiller's death in 1805, Goethe attempted to transcend the classical style by experimenting with new devices of literary form and content. He strove for new forms of expression in his dramatic fragment Pandora (1808), his collection of poetry West-dstlicher Divan (written 1814-19 and published 1819), his last novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821; 1829), and his continua­ tion of Faust, which he finally finished in 1831 one year before his death. During the two final decades of his life, Goethe also wrote a number of theoretical essays on art and literature and many letters, in which he ex­ pressed opinions and principles anticlassical in nature and completely op­ posed to the aesthetic canon of German classicism. It is the purpose of this paper to show that some of Goethe's anticlassical principles were related to what I shall call "the aesthetics of imperfection" in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and that they formed the theoretical framework for his Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. 205 206 / M E H R A To illustrate this point, let me begin with a concrete example. I shall briefly compare the structure and content of Goethe's preceding novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (published in 1809), which is most representative of the classical style, with his last novel published twenty years later, which is totally opposed to it. Die Wahlverwandtschaften shows the sparse economy, the noble simplicity, the rigid regularity of form and structure postulated by classical aesthetics. This slim novel of approxi­ mately 250 pages is divided into two almost perfectly symmetrical parts of 18 chapters each. It is, moreover, a perfectly unified composition, based on a linear, tectonic structure, adhering strictly to the aesthetics of closed form. In her formal analysis of Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften, Edith Aulhorn has pointed out that the novel's structure is absolutely symmetrical.1 She has been able to show that the action expands in each third chapter, where either a new character appears or an important event takes place. Thus the Captain's arrival in chapter 3 is balanced by Ottilie's arrival in chapter 6. The secret illicit passion of the two couples is de­ picted in chapter 9 and their mutual declarations of love follow in chapter 12. Two festive events are also arranged symmetrically: Charlotte's birth­ day is celebrated in chapter 9 and Ottilie's in chapter 15. With Eduard's departure towards the end of Part One, the action comes to a standstill and does not resume its course until chapter 12 of Part Two when Eduard returns. This interlude of eleven chapters is filled by the appearance of several minor characters who dominate two or three chapters each. In chapter 13 the ill-starred lovers meet again and, because of Ottilie's negli­ gence, Eduard's and Charlotte's baby drowns in the lake. From then on, the action quickens toward its tragic conclusion, culminating in Ottilie's and Eduard's deaths in chapter 18. The tragic conflict of this novel basically resembles that of a bourgeois tragedy in which the heroine must perish because a man of higher social standing loves her passionately but cannot marry her. The novel's dra­ matic concentration on plot and action as well as its short length can be explained by the fact that it was originally conceived as a novella. When Goethe expanded it into a novel, he introduced the minor characters...