Goethe’s Petrofiction: Reading the Wanderjahre in the Anthropocene

Summary

THE PASSIONATE INTEREST IN ROCKS shared by several figures in Goethe's last novel goes well beyond a child's amusement or a collector's enthusiasm. This allure of the inorganic—what the novel refers to as die Neigung zum Gestein—also suggests an ontologically precarious propensity of life toward an inorganic state (FA 10:287). Insofar as ecological thinking today widely takes the form of what one ecocritic calls a “‘humiliating’ descent, towards what is rather abstractly called ‘the Earth,’” this unsettling inclination of Goethe's late work positions him as our forerunner. Heterogeneous and xenophilic, this Neigung contains at least four variant readings within the context of a geologic turn in the age of Goethe: it is the magnetic “attraction” of stone that for Goethe indicates the hangover of a primordial era in which the interaction between organic and inorganic forms was more dynamic; it consists in an erotic “affection” for a mineral other, which is observable in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (hereafter Wilhelm Meister's Years of Wandering) in Montan's desire for intimacy with mountains; it partakes in the widely held eighteenth-century belief in the “tendency” of the planet's climate toward a crystalline state of absolute zero, as proposed by Charles Buffon in Les époques de la nature (1778), which Goethe had read with great interest and which had inspired his abandoned Roman über das Weltall (Cosmic Novel) as well as many of the cold worlds of Romantic literature; and the Neigung consists of the “draw” of minerals in an emerging capitalist system based on resource extraction, while also literalizing the reification of social relations in such a system. The popular literary motif of the cold heart—disseminated throughout the age of Goethe but perhaps most prominent in the 1827 fairy tale of this name by Wilhelm Hauff—can be read quite effectively as an allegory of such capitalist exchange.