Michael Lipkin attempts to pinpoint the German writer’s guiding philosophy through a reading of his third novel, Elective Affinities:
His great ambition, in his life and in his art, was to take the indefatigable work ethic of the bourgeoisie and apply it not to business, but to life itself, as only an eighteenth-century aristocrat could. [Elective Affinities characters] Eduard and Charlotte don’t bother composing music or writing novels. The object of their artistic aspiration—as their fascination with botany, landscape architecture, and tableaux vivants attests—is reality itself. Considering that by the novel’s end two of the main four characters are dead, it might be persuasively argued that Elective Affinities is a meditation on the vanity of our desire to mold reality to our liking. But no matter how grim the plot, Goethe’s narrators are never shaken in their values. There is no surer sign that we are to admire one of his characters than when we learn that, through tireless labor, they have restored some room or building that has fallen into disuse, or that, by applying their considerable expertise, they have revealed the beauty dormant in a grove of plane trees or a garden path.
The great mystery, then, is that despite its fixation on death, loss, and the inscrutability of fate, Elective Affinities never wavers in its optimism.
At no point does the narrator ever concede his claim to the final truth of life, which he offers to the reader piece by piece, in one brilliant aphorism after another. (To take just one example: Ottilie’s famous observation that no one is more fully a slave than when they believe themselves to be free.) It’s easy to confuse Goethe’s Stoic acceptance of life’s vicissitudes for a lack of feeling. But in his first work to his last, renunciation has always gone hand in hand with emotion—as when Ottilie, in a sign of devotion to Eduard, hands him the portrait of her father she wears around her neck. For Goethe, true happiness is not simply a religious or ethical abstraction, but something palpable and real. Art’s ambition, as Goethe saw it, was to still the rush of the world to reveal those vertiginous instants when all of eternity seems to be gathered into what is nearest at hand, and, no longer ruing the past or fearing the future, we finally feel at peace. The highest feeling in Elective Affinities is not ecstasy, but serenity.
The Dish 