SOURCE: “Organic Structure in Goethe's Novelle,” in The German Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 4, November, 1980, pp. 418-31.

In the following essay, Wells compares the literary structure of Goethe's Novelle to the metamorphosis of seed to flowering plant, which he argues Goethe intended to show “the necessary harmony and compatibility of natural law and poetic structure.”

Goethe's Novelle (1827) would appear to invite discussion of its form in terms of literary genre, especially since Goethe attached considerable importance to his title and in defending it bequeathed subsequent generations his enduring definition of a Novelle as “eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit.”¹ Yet the overall unity of form and content in his Novelle—without any preceding Eine, as he emphatically insisted—²exists apart from any theoretical notions of this genre, including his own, and points to the broader non-generic context of his ideas on the fundamental forms of life itself. Certain Urphänomene...