B00ARI2G5C EBOK (3 page)

(German readers) come and ask me, for instance, what ‘idea’ I tried to embody in my
Faust
. As if I knew that myself and could put it into words! … And a fine thing it would have had to be, if I had taken the rich and colourful and varied life I had expressed in
Faust
, and tried to string it onto the thin thread of a single idea running through it all!… It has not been my way as a writer to try to embody
abstractions
.

In a later conversation (13 February 1831) Eckermann earns Goethe’s emphatic endorsement by taking up the same point, ‘thread’ metaphor and all, and giving an excellent summary of the theory of the epic mode.
*
None the less, Goethe’s remarks in 1806 to Luden and his remarks in 1827 to Eckermann are plainly both expostulations against one or other sort of academic philistinism (pulling a poem to pieces or hanging it on an abstraction), and need not be taken to represent a radical change of view. In any case, both in the Schiller period and in the last years, he would often retreat into a convenient irrationalistic position, declaring that
Faust
is ‘fragmentary’ or ‘incommensurable’, and that this indeed is how poetry should be in any case: ‘the more incommensurable and elusive to the understanding a work of literature is, the better it is’ (conversation with Eckermann, 6 May 1827; cf. also their conversation of 3 January 1830 and Part One, Introd., p. xlvi).

A possible identification of the missing central ‘idea’ in
Faust
suggests itself if we consider further Goethe’s paradoxically non-tragic, ‘Salvationist’ treatment of the old Dr Faustus story: paradoxical in that it reverses a tradition going back to the legend’s beginnings and which has revived since Goethe’s time. From the sixteenth until the later eighteenth century the unquestioned assumption of the story was that Faustus was to be ‘damned’.
*
It is not clear at what stage Goethe decided otherwise. When writing his youthful version of it, the
Urfaust
, in the 1770s, he may well have intended a more traditional conclusion: the stark ending of the Gretchen tragedy, when she bids Faust an eternal farewell and Mephistopheles drags him off with the terrible and untranslatable cry (added in the 1808 text) of
‘Her zu mir!’
, could be read in this sense. It may be that his instinctive aversion to even such an approximately hellish denouement, and the difficulty he had devising one that would be more modern and optimistic, together account for his long delay and hesitation in continuing and completing
Faust
. In the 1797-1801 period he seems to have felt that he had at last solved the problem; we might say that the drama, or epic- dramatic poem, now had a centre, a dominating if not strictly unifying theme. The complex modern hero, the ‘superman’ as the Earth Spirit has mockingly called him, the creative personality beyond good and evil, who has thrown himself into earthly experience of all kinds and inevitably incurred serious guilt, this
magnus peccator
was at the very end to qualify for
divine endorsement—but in some paradoxical and mysterious manner, quite unconnected (or as unconnected as was artistically possible) with the ordinary Christian ways of salvation. Eudo Mason (1967, 312) suggests with some plausibility, though perhaps with some overstatement, that during all the stages of the composition of
Faust
this issue was Goethe’s central preoccupation, the unchanging ‘essential purport’ of the work. How was the superman, the Earth Spirit’s protege, the Devil’s disciple, to be ‘saved’? The ultimate fate of Faust was certainly a matter of public curiosity after the publication of Part One, and Goethe in embarrassment or irritation would decline to gratify it. Unable, perhaps, to cast off the last vestiges of Christian belief, he may still have thought of the question in theological terms, certainly in terms of some kind of metaphysical realism, such as the theory of the selective survival of the more powerful entelechy or monad.
*
Perhaps we may in any case rephrase the question as a psychological one: How does a complex and creative human psyche achieve maturity? What are the integrative, relaxing, ‘epic’ processes of growth in an exceptional and developing personality? What kind of poetic or spiritual journey (an
epic
journey, comparable to that undertaken by Dante in the
Divine Comedy
) must be made by this new explorer? Was such an exploration the central ‘idea’ which Goethe declared he did not know or could not put into words?

The gradual creation of the text of
Faust
is something like an analogue of the gradual creation of the ‘text’ of Goethe’s own life. It would be convenient if we could with confidence add here ‘and that of his hero’, but the distinction between author and ‘hero’ must not be overlooked. In considering the later stages of Goethe’s work on Part One during his mature ‘classical’ period, we have already noted that the poet’s own development involved the emergence of a certain ironic distance between himself and the figure of Faust.
*
In Part Two, the distance is least in Acts I—III, where Faust’s development symbolically but recognizably parallels Goethe’s own, and greatest in Acts IV and V, where Goethe’s ambiguous presentation of Faust is such as to have provoked much critical controversy. Many earlier commentators discerned in the poem as a whole a unilinear progress of its hero, through both Parts and the successive Acts, towards moral perfection, maturity, and enlightenment, a point at which his salvation would be ‘deserved’ (and therefore, indeed, unnecessary). Such a view, whether relying on Marxist theories of
perfectibility or on the unassailable optimism of the Lord in the ‘Prologue in Heaven’, will now scarcely bear examination. But, while avoiding simplistic identifications, we can still say that the poem grew with the poet, even if the poet grew away from the hero. All three (the hero, the work, the author) intertwine in this dimension of
growth
, of living development: an area having less to do with logic or morality or artistic design than with a complex, only partly conscious inner evolution of the genius of a personal existence. We can still apply Goethe’s own much-quoted words to
Faust
and call it yet another ‘fragment of a great confession’, or endorse his description of it as the expression of ‘a rich and colourful and varied life’ (whether we read that ‘life’ as Faust’s or Goethe’s or that of humanity). In all this, the critic must proceed delicately, inspecting, but not putting asunder, these unique symbioses. We should note, moreover, not only the
Entstehungsgeschichte
or genetic history of the text but also the fact that
Entstehung
, genesis, the process of coming into being, is itself a major theme
in
the text, perhaps its central theme. This gives an added tilt to the continuing debate in
Faust
criticism between the ‘unitarian’ or aesthetic-integrationist tendency and its opposite, the historicist-genetic method.
*
That we might claim Goethe’s own endorsement for the latter (a thought suggested by the ‘Dedication’ preceding Part One, which entwines the poem with his biography, as well as by the prominence of the theme of development in Part Two) seems confirmed by his remark in a letter of 1803: ‘We do not get to know works of nature and art as end-products; we must grasp them as they develop (
im Entstehen
) if we are to gain some understanding of them’ (to Zelter, August 1803). (The implied comparison of a poem to a plant here is noteworthy.) A genetic approach does not in any case commit us to extreme ‘fragmentarianism’: it is compatible with the working assumption, which respect for the author requires of us until proof of the contrary, that
Faust
does have both some degree of unity overall and some coherence or pattern within its component parts. Actually, it is less difficult to maintain this assumption in the case of Part Two, which apart from some tentative beginnings was essentially written in Goethe’s last six years, than in the case of Part One, on-which he was intermittently engaged for about three decades; and this throws some light on his retrospective assertions that Part Two was designed to be ‘less fragmentary’, more rationally coherent than Part One
(letter to Meyer, 20 July 1831, and conversation with Riemer,? 1831). His method in Part Two is, however, deliberately enigmatic and allusive, operating with hints and half-hidden parallels (letter to Iken, 27 September 1827, and to Meyer, 20 July 1831). If interpretations are to be offered that will, in Nicholas Boyle’s welcome phrase, ‘stand the test of common sense’ (Boyle 1982-3,136), they must usually take account of matters external to the finished and published text, such as the author’s earlier versions and variants, his known intentions and reading, events in his life or in history. The biographical method and the traditional enquiry into sources (
Quellenforschung
) have been decried as theoretically outmoded and merely ‘positivistic’ for much of this century, but were brilliantly vindicated by Katharina Mommsen, whose 1968 study in particular (
Natur- und Fabelreich
[The Realm of Nature and the Realm of Fable]
in Faust II
) is a landmark in
Faust
studies. Concentrating on Goethe’s treatment of the Helen story, and especially on the extraordinary and fantastic second Act, Mommsen adduces in an interpretatively fascinating way his earlier versions of the material, his sources in classical Greek mythology, and notably also his sources in the
Arabian Nights
tales, which he reread intensively in a new translation just before resuming work on
Faust
in 1825. By scrupulous examination of the text against this background, she identifies a number of underlying themes, parallels, and patterns that might otherwise pass unnoticed, and reveals an unexpected degree of unity and continuity in Part Two which has usually been lost in the general mass of conjectural exegesis. I here follow gratefully in her footsteps.

In the same letter to Meyer (20 July 1831), written eight months before his death, Goethe states that he had carried the Part Two material about with him for many years ‘as an inner fable [
inneres Märchen]’
. His use here of the word
Märchen
(fable, folk-tale, tale of magic; the usual debased translation ‘fairy-tale’ is misleading) has been given added significance by Mommsen’s investigations. The ‘many years’ extended at least from the turn of the century, when some of Part Two was written or sketched, to the last creative period (1825-31) when the whole work was finished. So far as we know, not a line of the published text was composed between April 1801 and February 1825. In 1816, however, Goethe dictated to his secretary Krauter a scenario or synopsis (see paralipomenon BA 70) of the ‘tale’ he was carrying in his mind; this interim report (or perhaps final report, if
he did decide then, at the age of 67, that he would never be able to finish
Faust
) was at first meant for inclusion in
Poetry and Truth
, the autobiographical account of his early life (up to 1775) which he was then writing. The scenario was in fact left unpublished, but survives as a fascinating record of Goethe’s early plan for what we now know as the contents of Acts I, III, and IV of Part Two. It is not clear how early this raw material is; some or all of it may even have existed since the 1770s, as the intended context of
Poetry and Truth
seems to suggest. It also differs markedly from the fragmentary opening of Act III written c.1800, which closely resembles the final version; this too suggests that the 1816 scenario perhaps records a conception dating back to Goethe’s youth (for which the term ‘Ur-Helena’ should really be reserved). In any event, it is one of the two most extensive and important documents to have survived among the unpublished earlier versions and variants, the many notes, sketches, and fragments that Goethe kept until his death for the benefit of future editors and commentators: a mass of manuscript material collectively known as the ‘paralipomena’.
*
The 1816 scenario is referred to in the present edition as BA 70 (using the numbering of the paralipomena adopted in the Berlin edition
*
). The other item of special importance is paralipomenon BA 73 (q.v.), the much longer and more detailed sketch or scenario for Act II only, dictated in December 1826 and probably conceived at that time, although Act II itself was not finished until nearly four years later. These two prose scenarios are indispensable, especially the first, for the insight they give us into the metamorphoses undergone by Goethe’s ‘inner
Märchen
over a period of anything up to fifty or sixty years between its initial conception (whenever that was) and the last few years of his life; and we should take note of these metamorphoses not merely by way of historicistic pedantry, but because the process of creative change, the
process
of Goethe’s life and work (and more generally of life, of nature, of European culture) may itself be regarded as the ‘essential purport’ of the final version of Part Two, the version published some months after its author was no longer in a position to change it.

One very notable passage that underwent this process may serve as an example of what happens many times in the genesis of Part Two.

The opening scene (‘A beautiful landscape’) is officially the first scene of Act I, but stands out sharply from the rest of the Act, and has rather the character of a prologue to Part Two generally, as I have editorially suggested. It was written partly in the spring of 1826 and partly in the summer of 1827, but its germ was the brief and crude prose version, conceived at least ten years earlier, which we find in BA 70 (q.v.). At the beginning of Act I, or to introduce it, Goethe needed an intelligible transition, a way of breaking the connection with Part One and continuing the Faust story in a quite different style and milieu; the tragic ending of the Gretchen drama must be decisively left behind, and Faust launched on a new career. A hero haunted by remorse would not suit Goethe’s purposes; but one who could simply put the matter callously out of his mind would not do either. The solution, as Goethe explained to Eckermann in 1827,
*
was to plunge Faust into a trance-like or death-like sleep in which he would forget his recent experiences completely; and as had been done more than once in the 1797-1801 stratum of Part One, a chorus of spirits could be introduced, to practise on him a kind of suggestion therapy or hypnopaedia, after which he would wake refreshed and in a mood for the positive resumption of life. All this is common to both versions, the early sketch and the finished prologue. In the former, however, the spirits are merely tempting demons, urging Faust on to great deeds with dreams of worldly power and glory; their flattering propositions are ‘in fact ironical’. Moreover, in this relatively banal earlier narrative, everything happens indoors, in an unidentified town from which Faust and Mephistopheles at once travel to Augsburg to present themselves to the Emperor Maximilian. In the final version, by contrast, the scene takes place quite literally ‘in higher regions’. Faust lies asleep in a beautiful mountain landscape, watched over by nature-spirits whom Goethe identifies as elves, and who are compassionate and beneficent (Eckermann, same conversation). The theme of worldly action has disappeared (unless we read 4662-5 as a faint echo of it); the imperial court is not mentioned, and Mephistopheles is conspicuously absent. A different theme has developed, or (as other evidence from the paralipomena suggests) has suddenly taken over after long unconscious preparation,
*
and now dominates the material: that of the beauty of nature and its healing, integrative powers, which Goethe celebrates here in two of his greatest passages of lyric poetry, the elves’ chorus evoking
the passing night and the reborn Faust’s speech hailing the sunrise. The theme of natural processes, including that of Faust’s unconscious growth and healing, is thus identifiable as the important—indeed, central—element in the finished scene, in which the basic situation has been retained, but has undergone an inspired transformation and enhancement.