Goethe’s Grammar of Intimacy

This chapter opens with the pivotal scene in Goethe’s bestselling novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther , when Werther reads Ossian to Charlotte. In describing this moment, Goethe reproduces Ossian ’s patterns of rhythm and syntax in his own prose. The effect suggests that Werther and Charlotte share an embodied responsiveness to their reading. Goethe here seems to be drawing upon contemporary theories of universal rhythm and debates about prosody. The idea that poetic rhythm is a sensuous experience that can be shared between readers is then pushed to the extreme in the Roman Elegies , in which he playfully compares prosody to sex. The final section of this chapter focuses on Elective Affinities and shows how the novel’s comparison between chemical bonds and bonds of human affection extends also to a comparison between human relationships and the relational structures of language and metaphor.