9 - Die Wahlverwandtschaften: Romantic Metafiction

Summary

IN HER PRIZE-WINNING ESSAY “Hierogamy versus Wedlock,” Evelyn Hinz discusses the generic classification of prose fictions in terms of the kind of marriage plot they employ. Hinz refines Northrop Frye's scheme of classification, in which Pride and Prejudice counts as a novel but Wuthering Heights is a romance, and offers the term “mythic narrative” for lengthy prose works organized by a marriage plot and portraying the “hierogamous” union of disparate partners whose love mirrors a cosmic conjunction like “the union of earth and sky.” According to Hinz, marriage in a mythic narrative implicates the non-social as well as the social universe, while “novels” restrict themselves to portraying wedlock as a social contract and occasion. Hinz echoes a contemporary of Goethe's, Friedrich von Blanckenburg, in relating diverse literary genres to “einer Verschiedenheit in der Denkungsart der Menschen,” as Blanckenburg puts it, and derives the difference between the mythic narrative and the novel from the difference between ancient and modern “man.” As described by Mircea Eliade, “the former feels himself indissolubly connected with the Cosmos and the cosmic rhythms, whereas the latter insists that he is connected only with history.” Hinz agrees with Frye that Pride and Prejudice is an exemplary novel. The Rainbow and For Whom the Bell Tolls, by contrast, are mythic narratives. The conventions of the genre determine that the earth moves under Maria and Robert Jordan.

The question of its genre, like the bigger question of the character and literary-historical “location” of the work and its author, is never far from the center of discussions of Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften.