Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel and the Art-Romance Tradition (review)

Jonah Siegel, Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel and the Art-Romance Tradition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.285 pp. Jonah Siegel describes his Haunted Museum as a book about literary form and the desire for the South. It is also an essay on the vexed relations among originality, convention, and passion.Though largely concentrating on the nineteenth century, my aim is to describe the links uniting a set of works running from the eighteenth century to our own day and constituting a tradition whose force and longevity are due in no small measure to the overdetermined nature of the desires shaping the form. The literary tradition that developed around the representation of the encounter with the South of genius is what I call the art romance. Despite its multifaceted title, despite its manifold stated purposes, this is primarily a good book about the challenge of Rome and Europe in general to Henry James. Had it been titled "Henry James: Longing,Travel and the Art-Romance Tradition" and structured accordingly, it would be even stronger. Goethe, de Stael, Byron, Letitia Landon, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Hawthorne, Freud, James, Forster, Proust, and Thomas Mann are all discussed as contributors to an admittedly amorphous narrative genre in which an artist of mixed origin travels or wants to travel to Italy or to Europe in search of objects of art. At play are fantasies of access to creative origin, of erotic fulfillment. Goethe's character Mignon serves as model for later characters with "her mysterious origins in a complex tale of incestuous family romance, her passion, her disappointment, and her death." Her dislocation from Italy is from a country "where longing is always alive and satisfaction and death are closely allied." Siegel begins his discussion of what he calls the "art-romance tradition" with a mistake and with an unfortunate choice. He states that the poem "Kennst du das Land, wo die Citronen bluhn""opens book 4" of Wilhelm Meister (it is book 3).The problem arises when Siegel fails to distinguish carefully between Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung (in which, as Siegel's source Nicholas Boyle points out, the poem indeed appears "at the opening of book 4 of the novel") and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (further, the note referring to Boyle confuses volume 1 of Goethe, the Poet and the Age with volume 2 and a later note fails to give a volume number at all).These are minor problems, of course (see also typographical errors on pages 103,119,141,142, and 169), but they undermine a reader's confidence. …