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In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent (review)

When a critic as original and thoughtful as Claudia Brodsky takes up again a work she had treated over twenty years ago, we may be sure that she has something new to say. And indeed, Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften is a very different work in the book chapter published in 1987, “The Coloring of Relations: Die Wahlverwandtschaften as Farbenlehre,”1 and the book here under consideration. The earlier study developed an analogy at the level of discursive figuration between Die Wahlverwandtschaften and Goethe’s theory of color as put forth in the Farbenlehre—an innovative undertaking which foregrounded intentionality and agency, normally components of works of fiction, in the theoretical approach to natural phenomena in the Farbenlehre, while the fictional characters of the novel were viewed relatively abstractly, as functions of the “errant passions” that provide the work’s premise. This approach is well justified by what Goethe himself termed the “irony” embedded in his theoretical practice in the Farbenlehre and it enabled Brodsky to focus on the novel’s modes of mediation and figuration. The new book deals with the more familiar thematic repertory of Goethe’s novel—landscape, building, art works, and graves—but its analysis is no less original than that of the essay. It traces the circulation of Ottilie, the central figure of the novel, through a series of frames of which the last, the crypt (Schatzkammer) in which she is placed and preserved, marks a conclusion, but only a provisional one, since the narrator projects the image of a future awakening of the lovers, Ottilie and Eduard. It is difficult to say whether this construction has the effect of providing an end-point or, on the contrary, suggesting an endless referential series. For logically, a referent should mark a definitive terminus, but narrative structure may be fashioned so as to elide any resolution. Gravestone, cornerstone, crypt—all these are to be understood alongside architecture, the book argues, as instances of “building,” this word used as both noun and gerund. “By constructing a basis for deixis, building provides the nonlinguistic grounds for both literal and figurative reference, a marker of ‘where’ without a proper name of its own, and so twice named: foundation and memorial stone” (129). Brodsky thereby claims a semiotic and ontologic