Elective Affinities

"Goethe’s literary work cuts across all genres. He was a great dramatist, a great lyric poet, and he wrote four important novels. Elective Affinities is what one might call a novel of manners. It is the depiction of a very, very closed society. Its repertoire of characters is basically four. There are some others, of course, who enter in and exit, but the core repertoire consists in the four characters. You have the married couple, the Baron Eduard and his wife Charlotte. You have Eduard’s friend, the so-called Captain, whose given name is Otto. The Captain has just been let off military duty; he is scientifically trained, an engineer of sorts, an overseer. And then there is Ottilie, a young, enchanting, wounded, and fragile girl. The plot involves an amorous crossover: on the one hand, Eduard and Ottilie fall in love, on the other hand, Charlotte and the Captain are drawn to one another. This leads to a number of complications, including the death of a child and later the death of Ottilie herself. The novel is meticulously constructed. It depicts a social sphere in which everyone is unfailingly polite and tolerant and where unconscious motivations of an almost demonic energy hold sway. The characteristic feature of the core group of four is the thoroughgoing self-delusion in which they live. The aristocracy appears here in a frozen state, a historical dead-end devoid of purpose and creativity. “Goethe’s literary work cuts across all genres. He was a great dramatist, a great lyric poet, and he wrote four important novels” If I were to compare Elective Affinities with the work of another novelist, I would choose Henry James. James portrays a society that exists in the mode of sophisticated conversation, beneath which currents of desire, resentment, and anxiety flow. His novels likewise exhibit an artfulness of structure and a density of symbolization that is similar to Goethe’s style. Yes, Goethe creatively exfoliates a scientific metaphor. The term ‘elective affinities’ refers to a chemical phenomenon. If we take a compound A-B and a compound C-D and we bring them into proximity to one another, a strange thing can happen. A pulls away from B and bonds with C, and D pairs with B. This crossing of the elements is the organizing metaphor for the pattern of love and affection that unfolds across the novel’s plot. The chemical metaphor brings out the fact that human relations are often governed by patterns of unconscious attraction and rejection, that there is something deeply natural, almost ‘magnetic’, in our affections. This is a novel about the social and psychological unconscious and the chemical metaphor as well as its formal rigor lend the work a very modern, let us say: experimentalist quality, even as it depicts a way of life that from our vantage seems long gone. That’s another charm of the novel. It portrays an aristocratic social sphere–the scene is a Baron’s country estate–but that life form is captured in the phase of its historical decline. Its mode of authority, its rituals, its art, and its eros are all gradually being transformed. The center of paternal sovereignty no longer holds, genealogical succession comes to an end. Eduard, the Baron “in the best years of manhood,” is a captive of adolescent fantasy, his moral compass spins, he is impetuous, spoiled, and at the end morbidly melancholic. The novel is symmetrically composed and often self-reflective. Due to its unabashed artfulness, its profound ambiguities, and its psychological complexity, the novel may be considered the most modern and the most troubling of Goethe’s prose works. It inspired Walter Benjamin to write what might be the deepest and most tortuously difficult of his essays on literary works. I think that has principally to do with the novel’s systematic subversion of the idea of marriage. No divorce takes place in the novel, of course, but divorce is discussed. There is even a scene in which it is suggested that marriages should not be thought of as life-long bonds, but as contractual unions of limited duration. The novel shakes the foundations of marriage in another way by depicting an act of dual adultery in the imagination of the married couple. Conjugal union issues in a male offspring who bears the features not of his parents, but of the partners each parent imagined embracing at the moment of conception. This is quite literally monstrous! And it all ends, needless to say, tragically. Elective Affinities should be seen together with such nineteenth-century novels of adultery as Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina . Indeed, it may be the most troubling of the three. I have recommended David Constantine’s translation for Oxford World Classics. I advise reading the novel twice, the second time slowly, so that its intricacies come fully into view."