The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · a novel in two parts · eighteen chapters each, thirty-six in all · Cotta, Tübingen, 1809 · scored on Goethe’s German, read from knowledge; no text in hand, German quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own English glosses
Mode
The novel of marriage and adultery told as natural philosophy; experiment, social comedy and legend in one book
Mythos
Chemical affinity made the law of persons; signs that the characters read and the narrator never confirms; a schoolgirl who becomes a saint
Phase
Something more than a year on one estate: the attractions forming, then their consequences, from a conversation in a drawing room to a burial in a chapel
Presentation
Prose fiction in two parts of eighteen chapters each; an ironic narrator who withholds judgement; extracts from Ottilie’s diary set into the second part; one inset novella
Register
Cool, even and ironic throughout, from drawing-room talk and social comedy to the night on the lake and the close
Scale
One household, its land and its visitors; the state and history only at the edge
Governing Proposition
A rich baron and his wife, a captain and a young girl: four persons on one estate, and a conversation about chemistry that names the law they will obey. Two pairs exchange partners as elements do; a child conceived in an adultery of the imagination drowns in the lake the garden made; the girl renounces, falls silent and will not eat; and the lovers lie side by side in a painted chapel. The wager of the novel is that attraction between persons is as lawful and as indifferent as chemical affinity, that marriage, propriety and the improving plan neither abolish it nor survive it intact, and that the one escape is renunciation carried to the death of the body.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel names its hero in its first sentence and tells the reader that the name is a convenience: “Eduard … so nennen wir einen reichen Baron im besten Mannesalter”
“Eduard, so we call a rich baron in the prime of life.” The voice that speaks here holds to the end. It observes as a natural philosopher observes an experiment, with irony and without judgement; it reports what its persons believe without vouching for it; and it will report a night of imagined adultery and a child’s drowning at the same even temperature. The stance is the first of the novel’s departures from the inheritance it took up, the eighteenth-century novel of sensibility, Werther first among its books.
The work is Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Ein Roman, published by Cotta in Tübingen in 1809, in two parts of eighteen chapters each. It has four principals: Eduard and Charlotte, the Captain and Ottilie. Around them stands a fixed set of secondary figures: Mittler, Luciane, the Count and the Baroness, the Architect, the Assistant at the school, the English lord and his companion. The action runs over something more than a year on one estate. The symmetry is the design: the first part is the attractions forming, the second their consequences.
The estate is the medium of the experiment. Its owners lay out paths, build a moss hut and a new house on the hill, and reshape the ponds below into a lake: order imposed on nature by a plan. The novel sees what this leisure means. The freedom to choose, to rebuild and to plan is what exposes the four, who have nothing else to do. And it gives the plan its comedy in Mittler, whose name means mediator and who parts whatever he touches.
Movement II
Early in the first part there is a conversation about chemistry in a drawing room. The theory is Bergman’s, of elective attraction: an element bound to one partner will leave it for another to which it is more drawn, and where two pairs meet each may part and recombine with the other. The conversation is exposition of a science as talk among people who are already, without knowing it, its terms. The formula of two pairs exchanging partners is spoken among the persons it will describe, and from that point the plot behaves as the formula says it will.
Around the formula the novel sets signs, and the characters read them. At the laying of the foundation stone a glass engraved with the letters E and O is thrown into the air and caught unbroken, and Eduard takes it as a sign. He learns that the plane trees he planted were planted on the day of Ottilie’s birth. The name Otto belongs to Eduard, to the Captain and to the child to come. The narrator neither confirms nor refutes any of it, and the question whether the signs are true is built so as never to be answered.
Then the night. Eduard and Charlotte, husband and wife, each embrace the other while imagining the absent beloved. It is an adultery that the law cannot see and that no one commits in the body, and the child conceived that night records it: he is born with Ottilie’s eyes and the Captain’s features. The book puts its psychology of desire as a law and then lets a face show the law at work. The child’s drowning, in the second part, is the price of that night.
Movement III
In the second part Eduard is absent at a war, and the world beyond the estate arrives mainly as visitors. Luciane comes with her round of entertainments, and with her the social life of a house given to company; among the guests the novel shows, the English lord and the Count are set pieces rather than persons. The narrating voice keeps its evenness through all of it, and in these social chapters the evenness becomes a stiffness. Luciane’s visit runs long, and keeps a lighter law of its own for longer than the whole needs.
Art and the sacred come in together. In the tableaux vivants Ottilie is set as the Virgin of a nativity, and the artifice becomes for a moment devotion. The Architect paints the chapel with her face among the angels. Charlotte reorders the churchyard, and death and burial take their place among the orders the estate holds. The girl who did poorly in her school’s examinations is already being made into something the household looks at.
Into several chapters of the second part are set extracts headed Aus Ottiliens Tagebuche, from Ottilie’s diary. She speaks least of the four, and the diary gives her an interior that is never confessional: maxims where a heroine of sensibility would pour herself out, so that her inwardness is shown as restraint. Among them: “Es wandelt niemand ungestraft unter Palmen.”
“No one walks under palms unpunished.” Some of the maxims would sit as well in another book; the best are exact.
Movement IV
In the second part the novel stops to tell another story, Die wunderlichen Nachbarskinder, the tale of the neighbours’ children. They are brought together by a near drowning, and they live. It is the same configuration resolved the other way, a control set beside the experiment: what attraction does when it is let run, told inside a book about what it does when it is resisted and planned around.
Eduard returns from the war. Ottilie, hurrying back with the child after meeting him, crosses the lake by boat at night. She loses her balance, the child is lost to the water, and she holds him dead against her breast in the dark. It is the height of the book. The lake is the ponds remade by the improving plan, and the water redirected by design returns to take the child conceived in the night of the imagined adultery.
The narrator does not raise his voice. The drowning is told in the register in which the paths and the moss hut were told, and the coolness that keeps the middle of the book level is what lets this night strike. The garden, the inset novella and the comedy of Mittler all obey one law, and here the law is seen whole: an attraction the parties neither choose nor understand, working through the order built to contain it.
Movement V
After the lake Ottilie renounces. She falls silent and will not eat. The novel allows one escape from its law, and this is it: renunciation carried to the death of the body. The book does not stop to argue whether that escape is a victory or a defeat, and it does not stop to say whether the law it has uncovered is nature, fate or a figure of speech.
In death Ottilie passes into legend. Her body works a cure, and the miracle at her bier is reported as what people believed, by a narrator who has vouched for nothing, not for the glass with E and O, not for the plane trees. A girl who would not eat becomes a saint, and remains a girl who would not eat. The sacred close sits at an angle to the chemistry of the first part; the book intends the angle and leaves it unreconciled, and the attraction read once as nature is read here as grace.
The lovers are buried side by side in the chapel the Architect painted with her face among the angels. The close gives them rest and a hope: “So ruhen die Liebenden nebeneinander”
“So the lovers rest side by side”, and “wenn sie dereinst wieder zusammen erwachen”
“when one day they wake again together”. The symmetry closes: a pair exchanged, a child lost between them, and a union granted only in death, in a hope the narrator states and does not vouch for. Whether the signs were true the novel will not say, and two centuries of reading have not settled it.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine passes the subtractive test. The conversation on chemistry cannot go: it names the law every later chapter obeys. The child cannot go: conceived in a night when Eduard and Charlotte each embrace the other while imagining the absent beloved, he is born with Ottilie’s eyes and the Captain’s features, and his drowning is the price of that night. Mittler cannot go: his name means mediator, and he parts what he touches. What holds the axis at 8.3 is the estate business and the pace of the second part. The paths, the moss hut, the new house on the hill and the reshaping of the ponds are thematic, but given at more length than the theme needs; Luciane’s visit runs long; some of Ottilie’s maxims would sit as well in another book. About a tenth could be shorter without loss.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: attraction between persons is a force as lawful and as indifferent as chemical affinity, and the forms built over it, marriage, propriety and the improving landowner’s plan, neither abolish it nor survive contact with it intact. The one escape the novel allows is renunciation carried to the death of the body. It discloses as well that the freedom of the cultivated class is what exposes it: the leisure to choose, to rebuild and to plan leaves the four with nothing else to do. The adultery of the imagination, which the law cannot see, is recorded in a child’s face. Held below 9.0 because the novel will not say whether its law is nature, fate or a figure of speech, and the sanctity of the close moves from disclosure toward legend.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The register is cool by design, and elevation comes seldom but at height. The ceiling is the lake at night in the second part: Ottilie, hurrying back with the child after meeting Eduard, loses her balance in the boat, the child is lost to the water, and she holds him dead against her breast in the dark. Below it stand the tableaux vivants, where Ottilie, set as the Virgin of a nativity, turns artifice for a moment into devotion; her silence and her starvation; and the close, the lovers side by side in the painted chapel. What holds the axis at 8.2, the lowest of the twelve, is frequency: the middle of the book is level, measured and social, and the axis counts how often as well as how high.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Myth built, from a laboratory analogy. The formula of the conversation on chemistry, two pairs exchanging partners, is the plot, and the plot behaves as the formula says it will. Around it the novel sets signs that the characters read and the narrator neither confirms nor refutes: the glass engraved with E and O, thrown at the laying of the foundation stone and caught unbroken, which Eduard takes as a sign; the plane trees he planted on the day, as he learns, of Ottilie’s birth; the name Otto, shared by Eduard, the Captain and the child. Ottilie passes from a girl who does poorly in her school’s examinations to a saint whose body works a cure, and remains a girl who will not eat. Held below the top because the sacred ending is laid on more than grown, and its irony is left unresolved.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the eighteenth-century novel of sensibility, Goethe’s own Werther first among its books, and the novel of education he had written in Wilhelm Meister. The swerve is threefold. A novel of adultery is told by a narrator who observes as a natural philosopher observes, ironic and withholding judgement, and who names his hero in the first sentence as a convenience. The governing figure is taken from contemporary chemistry, Bergman’s theory of elective attraction, and made to bear moral weight. And the moral question is left open. The stake was real for a writer of Goethe’s standing in 1809. Held below 9.0 because the realist means are not new: the swerve is in the frame and the stance.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. Two parts of eighteen chapters, the first of the attractions forming and the second of their consequences, are the experiment and its result. The chemical formula decides the cast: four persons, two pairs, one exchange. In the second part the extracts from Ottilie’s diary give the one who speaks least an interior that is never confessional: maxims where a heroine of sensibility would pour herself out, so that her inwardness is shown as restraint. The inset novella of the neighbours’ children, brought together by a near drowning, who live, is the same configuration resolved the other way, a control set beside the experiment. Held below 9.0 because the diary sometimes carries what the form does not need, and the middle of the second part loosens the frame.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Demonstrated rather than promised. Walter Benjamin’s essay “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften”, written in the early 1920s and published in 1924 and 1925, is one of the founding texts of modern criticism and takes the novel as its whole occasion; its argument about myth, fate and the mythic in law is still contested. The novel has been read since as natural philosophy, as Catholicising legend, as a critique of marriage and as a defence of it, as a study of the leisure class, of landscape, of an inscrutable narrator. Each reading finds its particulars in the book and none closes it, because whether the signs are true is built so as not to be answered. The depth is formal too: the symmetry rewards a rereading that a first reading cannot give. At the top of what a novel of this length can show.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Intrinsic force is high. The novel reorganises what the novel of marriage could do: a narrator of scientific detachment, a psychology of desire stated as law, the unspoken adultery made visible in a child. It anticipates the cool, symbolic realism of the later nineteenth century and the psychological novel of the twentieth. The reach is real but narrower than the force: the book did not redirect the European novel as Werther redirected feeling, or as Flaubert would redirect the novel of adultery. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in German the novel stands at the head of the novel of marriage and adultery, and later German novels of marriage are commonly read against it; Thomas Mann wrote on it; Benjamin made it the occasion of his method; and outside German the phrase “elective affinities” passed into common speech in several languages.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The text survives whole: published in Goethe’s lifetime, in editions he oversaw, with no question of version or assembly. It has stood for 217 years. In German it has been continuously read, taught and edited as one of the central works of its literature. In English it is read mainly in the academy and by readers of Goethe, far less than Werther or Faust: translated and in print, but not common reading. The form is whole and the fabric is not at issue. The charge is for presence outside its language and outside the academy, and it sets the novel at the top of the band for a text of centuries read mainly by scholars, not in the band above it.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Goethe’s late prose at its most controlled: measured periods, an even and ironic narrating voice that reports the night of the imagined double adultery and the drowning at the same temperature, and a placing of symbols so light that a reader often notices them only on return. The conversation on chemistry handles the exposition of a scientific theory as talk among people who are already, without knowing it, its terms. The diary maxims are exact. Judged on the German as far as long acquaintance with it allows; the cadence of the prose is beyond what this reading can measure, and is neither credited nor charged. Held at 9.0 because in the social chapters of the second part the evenness becomes stiffness, and some secondary figures, the English lord and the Count, are set pieces rather than persons.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs the whole, and the range is wide. Take the two farthest elements, the chemistry lesson in a drawing room and the miracle at Ottilie’s bier: both are the working of an attraction the parties neither choose nor understand, read once as nature and once as grace. The garden obeys it, since water redirected by a plan returns as the lake that drowns the child; the inset novella obeys it in reverse; the comedy of Mittler obeys it. The narrator’s irony holds the tonal range together. Held below 9.0 because Luciane’s chapters keep a lighter law of their own for longer than the whole needs, and the sacred close sits at an angle to the natural-philosophical frame, an angle the novel intends but does not quite reconcile.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Held, not listed: the marriage; the estate and its management; the shaping of land; contemporary science; the education of girls, at the school Ottilie and Luciane attend; the cult of art and the tableau; the church and the popular sacred; death and burial, in Charlotte’s reordering of the churchyard. All of it is bound to the one law and the one household. The state and history enter only at the edges: Eduard goes to a war and returns, and the world beyond the estate arrives mainly as visitors. Labour is seen from the manor. The scale is one household and its land, held whole, and the narrowness of that scale is what holds the axis at 8.3.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Bottomless Well and The Made at 9.0. A text that survives whole after 217 years and stands among the central works of its language; a novel that a founding essay of modern criticism took as its whole occasion and that every reading since has left open; and Goethe’s late prose at its most controlled, even and ironic, its symbols placed so lightly that they are found on return.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 8.2, held by frequency: the height of the lake at night and of the close is near the top, but the middle of the book is level, measured and social by design. Next above it, The Inevitable and The Encompassed at 8.3: the estate business, Luciane’s visit and some of the diary say their thing more than once, and the scale is one household, with the state and history at its edge.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 8.8, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, The Swerve at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, the last exactly at it. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Ein Roman, scored as the novel published by Cotta in Tübingen in 1809, in two parts of eighteen chapters each, with the inset novella Die wunderlichen Nachbarskinder and the extracts Aus Ottiliens Tagebuche as part of it. Every axis is judged on Goethe’s German. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. German is quoted only where its words are certain, and the punctuation of the opening sentence is simplified here; everything else is paraphrased. Every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and none is taken from a published translation. David Constantine’s translation (Oxford World’s Classics, 1994) and R. J. Hollingdale’s (Penguin, 1971) are the English versions known to this reading, used for sense only and not quoted; nothing is charged to either. The cadence of the German prose is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. Walter Benjamin and Thomas Mann are cited as the record of the novel’s reception and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the chapter in which each episode stands, the history of the book’s composition, the length of the book in words or pages, the terms of its first reception, its adaptations and its particular successors, are not given.