Notes To Literature

There is much in the current historical situation that speaks in favor of alexandrinism, interpretive immersion in traditional texts. Modesty resists the direct expression of metaphysical intentions; to venture such expression would be to expose oneself to gleeful misunderstanding. Objectively as well, it is not possible nowadays to ascribe meaning to what exists, and even the denial of meaning, official nihilism, has deteriorated to an affirmative message, a contribution to illusion, that tries to justify the desperation in the world as the world’s essential substance: Auschwitz as a boundary situation. And so thought seeks refuge in texts. What remains of what is one’s own is discovered in them. But these are not one and the same: what is discovered in the texts does not prove that something has been spared. The negative, the impossibility, is expressed in that difference, an “if only it were so,” as far from the assurance that it is so as from the assurance that it is not. Interpretation does not seize upon what it finds as valid truth, and yet it knows that without the light it tracks in the texts there would be no truth. This tinges interpretation with a sorrow wholly unsuspected by the assertion of meaning and frantically denied by an insistence on what the case is. The gesture of interpretive thought resembles Lichtenberg’s “neither deny nor believe”; to reduce this to mere skepticism would be to miss the point. For the authority of great texts is a secularized form of the unattainable authority that philosophy, as teaching, envisions. To regard profane texts as sacred texts—that is the answer to the fact that all transcendence has migrated into the profane sphere and survives only where it conceals itself. Bloch’s old concept of “Symbolintention,” symbolic intention, no doubt envisages this kind of interpretation.

In his late period Goethe found himself facing a contradiction which has now become an unreconcilable divergence, the contradiction between a language with literary integrity and communicative language. The second part of Faust was wrested from a deterioration of language whose course had been set at the point when a reified, facile discourse invaded expressive discourse. The latter proved so incapable of resistance because the two antagonistic media are nevertheless still one, never completely separate from one another. The elements in Goethe’s late style that are commonly considered forced are the scars poetic language acquired in defending itself against communicative language, and at times they resemble the latter. For in fact Goethe committed no act of violence against language. He did not break with communication, something which ultimately became unavoidable; he did not demand of pure language an autonomy that remains forever precarious, sullied as pure language is by its consonance with the language of commerce. Rather, his restitutive nature attempts to awaken that sullied language as a literary language. This could not succeed with even a single word, no more than a diminished seventh chord in music can ever sound like that mighty chord at the beginning of Beethoven’s last piano sonata after the disgrace it suffered at the hands of the vulgarity of the salons. But a run-down expression that has been eroded to the status of metaphor catches fire again when it is taken literally. This moment of catching fire holds within it the immortality of the language of the concluding scene of Faust.* The Pater profundus praises as “liebevoll im Sausen” [“tender in its roaring”] the “Blitz, der flammend niederschlug, / Die Atmosphäre zu verbessern, / Die Gift und Dunst im Busen trug” (lines 11876–81) [“the lightning that struck, flaming, / to improve the atmosphere / that harbored poison and fumes in its bosom”]. But since then the most pitiful conference communique justifies itself by stating its intention to improve the atmosphere when it wants to hide from an intimidated populace the fact that once again nothing has been accomplished. Even if this abominable custom is not itself already a cannibalization of a line from Goethe, someone with whom one would scarcely expect these quotation-happy gentlemen to be acquainted, even in Goethe’s day this readily accessible phrase can hardly have been a felicitous one. But he inserts it into his representation of the abyss and the waterfall, which, in an immense turnabout, transforms the expression of permanent catastrophe into an expression of blessing. “Improving the atmosphere” is the task of the dreadful emissaries of love who restore the breath of the First Day to those who are suffocating in the stifling air. They redeem the banality, which remains banality, and at the same time they sanction the pathos of the roaring natural images as a pathos of sublime purposefulness. A few lines before the end, the Mater gloriosa calls out, “Komm! hebe dich zu höhern Sphären!” (line 12094) [“Come! rise to higher spheres!”], and her slogan transforms the bourgeois mother’s idle lament about the lack of a sense of reality in her child, who is all too happy to linger there, into the sense certainty of a scenery whose mountain ravines lead to a “higher atmosphere.” “Weichlich” [flabby, insipid] is a pejorative word and probably was so then as well. But when the Magna peccatrix pleads “Bei den Locken, die so weichlich / Trockneten die heil’gen Glieder” (lines 12043–44) [“By the locks that so softly dried the holy limbs”], the form is filled with the literal strength of the adverbial qualifier, and receives the softness of the hair, sign of erotic love, in the aura of heavenly love. “Das Unzulängliche, hier wird’s Ereignis” [“here the unattainable becomes event”], in language.

The extremes meet. People find a line by Friederike Kempner charming: instead of “Miträupchen,” impossible even then, she says “Miteräupchen” in order to provide the missing syllable her trochees needed by means of a sovereignly inserted “e.” In the same way, an awkward boy breaks the rules and holds onto the egg in an egg-and-spoon race in order to get it to the finish line safely. But the final scene of Faust uses the same device when the Pater seraphicus speaks of the waterfall that “abestürzt” [plunges down; Goethe has inserted an “e” into the word “abstürzt”] (line 11911); and in Pandora Goethe uses “abegewendet” [turned away; for “abgewendet”]. The philological explanation that this is the Middle High German form of the preposition does not temper the shock that the archaism, sign of a metrical predicament, might cause. What does soften that shock, however, is the immeasurable detachment of a pathos that with its very first note is already so far removed from the illusion of natural speech that no one would think of natural speech, and no one would think of laughing. The distance between the sublime and the ridiculous, which is said to be extremely short, is crucial in elevated style; only what is brought to the edge of the abyss of the ridiculous contains so much danger that the force of salvation pits itself against it and it succeeds. Essential to great literature is the good fortune that preserves it from the plunge into the abyss. The archaic quality of the inserted syllable communicates not a futile romanticizing evocation of a lost stratum of language but an estrangement of the current linguistic stratum that removes it from danger. It thereby becomes the bearer of that unsociable modernity that characterizes Goethe’s late style even today. The anachronism increases the power of the passage. The passage carries the memory of something primordial, a memory which reveals the presence of passionate speech to be the presence of a world plan; as though from the very beginning it had been resolved that it would be so and not otherwise. He who wrote in this way could also, a few lines later, have the chorus of blessed boys sing: “Hände verschlinget / Freudig zum Ringverein” (lines 11926–27) [“Entwine hands joyfully to unite in a ring”]—without what later happened with the word Ringverein bringing disaster to the noun here. A paradoxical immunity to history is the seal of the authenticity of this scene.

In the stanza of the Johannine Mulier Samaritana one reads—again for the sake of the verse, again an extreme case of making a virtue out of necessity—“Abram” instead of “Abraham” (line 12046). In the illumination of the exotic name, the familiar Old Testament figure, shrouded in innumerable associations, is abruptly transformed into the Oriental nomadic tribal chieftain. The memory that is faithful to him is seized and wrenched out of the canonized tradition. The all too promised land becomes a present-day prehistoric world. Expanded beyond the tales of the patriarchs, which have shrunk to an idyll, it acquires color and contour. The chosen people is Jewish, just as the image of beauty in the third act is Greek. If the carefully selected designation “Chorus mysticus” in the closing stanza means anything beyond the vague clichés of Sunday metaphysics, then the content, whether Goethe intended it to or not, alludes to Jewish mysticism. The Jewish inflection of the ecstasy, enigmatically built into the text, motivates the movement of the spheres of the heaven that opens out above forest, cliff, and desert waste. It simulates divine power engaged in creation. The Pater ecstaticus’ lines: “Pfeile, durchdringet mich, / Lanzen, bezwinget mich, / Keulen zerschmettert mich, / Blitze, durchwettert mich!” (lines 11858–61) [“Arrows, penetrate me, / Lances, vanquish me, / Clubs, smash me, / Lightning, storm through me!”]; and certainly the Pater profundus’ lines: “O Gott! beschwichtige die Gedanken, / Erleuchte mein bedürftig Herz!” (lines 11888–89) [“O, God! quiet my thoughts, / Illuminate my impoverished heart!”] are the cries of a Hassidic voice, exclamations from the Cabalistic potency of gevurah.* That is the “Bronn, zu dem schon weiland / Abram liess die Herde fuhren” (lines 12045–46) [“the spring to which Abraham led his herds”], and the inspiration for Mahler’s composition in his eighth Symphony.

Anyone who does not want Goethe to end up among the plaster casts that stand around in the Goethe Haus in Weimar must face the question why Goethe’s writing is rightly called beautiful, despite the fact that the giant shadow of the historical authority of his work poses almost insuperable difficulties for anyone attempting to answer that question. The first such difficulty may well be a peculiar quality of greatness that should not be confused with monumentality but seems to defy more precise definition. Perhaps it resembles most closely the feeling of breathing freely in fresh air. It is not an unmediated sense of the infinite but rather arises where it goes beyond something finite, limited. Its relationship to the finite keeps it from evaporating into empty cosmic enthusiasm. Greatness itself becomes experienceable in what is surpasses; this is not the least of the ways in which Goethe is a kindred spirit to Hegel’s Idea. In the final scene of Faust this greatness, which is present in pure form in the language, once again becomes the greatness of the contemplation of nature, as it was in the lyric poetry of Goethe’s youth. The transcendent quality of this greatness, however, can be named concretely. The scene begins with the woodland that lurches forward, an incomparable modification of a motif from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, taken out of its mythic context: the singing of the lines causes nature to move. Soon thereafter the Pater profundus begins:

Limitation as a precondition of greatness has its social aspect, in Goethe as in Hegel: the bourgeois as mediation of the absolute. The two clash harshly. After the emphatic lines “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, / Den können wir erlösen” (lines 11836–37) [“He who makes an effort, striving, we can redeem”]—lines which are enclosed within quotation marks for good reasons, a maxim of inner-worldly asceticism—the angels continue: “Und hat an ihm die Liebe gar / Von oben teilgenommen, / Begegnet ihm die selige Schar / Mit herzlichem Willkommen” (lines 11938–41) [“And if indeed love has partaken of him from above, the blessed host will meet him with a hearty welcome”], as though the work’s ultimate aim were merely an accidental supplement to the striving; the word “gar” [indeed] raises its forefinger didactically. In the same spirit, Gretchen is praised with petty condescension as the “gute Seele, / die sich einmal nur vergessen” (lines 12065–66) [“the good soul who forgot herself only once”]. To demonstrate his own broadmindedness, the commentator remarks that the number of nights of love is not computed in heaven, and in doing so he calls attention to the philistinism of the passage, which splits hairs in excusing the one who has had to suffer the full humiliation of masculine society while her lover, the assassin of her brother, is dealt with far more magnanimously. Rather than gloss over what is bourgeois in bourgeois fashion, one should understand it in its relationship to something that would be different. It is perhaps this relationship that defines Goethe’s humaneness [Humanität] and that of Objective Idealism as a whole. Bourgeois reason is both universal reason and a particular reason, the reason of a transparent world order and the particular reason of a calculus that promises the rational man a secure profit. The universal reason that would supersede this particular reason is formed from it; the good universal would be realized only in and through particular situations in their finiteness and fallibility. The world beyond exchange would be one in which no one participating in an exchange would be cheated of what belonged to him. If reason were to skip over individual interests in an abstract way, without Aristotelian equity [Billigkeit], it would violate justice, and universality itself would reproduce particularity in the bad sense. Dwelling on—lingering with—the concrete is an inextinguishable aspect of anything that frees itself from particularity. At the same time, that movement of emancipation shows the specificity of particularity to be just as limited as the blind domination of a totality that does not respect particularity. The young Goethe celebrated “das anmuthige Beschränkte des bürgerlichen Zustands” [“the charming restrictedness of bourgeois circumstances”] in his sketch of the scene in which Gretchen first appears, and the restrictedness that was his early love penetrated into the language of the old Goethe. It no more fuses with that language than the individual fuses with the totality in bourgeois society. But the force of transcendence feeds on it as Nüchternheit, soberness. Language that remains self-possessed, dissonant even in the midst of the most extreme exuberance, examining and weighing itself, eludes the illusion of reconciliation that hinders reconciliation. It is only what remains calmly self-possessed and exercises restraint—as in the linguistic gesture of the more perfect angels, who say of their earthly remains, “Und wär’ er von Asbest, / Er ist nicht reinlich” (lines 11956–57) [“And even if they were made of asbestos, they are not neat and tidy”]—that saturates elevation with the weight of mere existence. Elevation rises above mere existence by taking it with it instead of leaving it behind as an impotent abstract idea. Humanely, language lets the non-identical—in the protesting words of the young Hegel, the positive, the heteronomous—alone. It does not sacrifice it to the seamless unity of an idealistic principle of stylization: in being mindful of its limit, spirit becomes the spirit that moves beyond its limit. Pedantry, of which there is a touch in the whole concluding scene, is not simply an idiosyncrasy; it has its function. It endorses the obligations that circumscribe the plot as well as those the poem incurs in developing the plot. But it is only because the expression “Schuldverschreibung” [ascription of debt or guilt] retains its heavy dual meaning—a debt to be settled and the culpability of one’s life circumstances—that the earthly can move in the manner required by the figure of the woodland lurching forward. The foundation formed by what is pedestrian, not fully spiritualized, is intended, through the difference between it and spirit, to vouch for the spirit’s capacity for rescue. The dialectic of naming from the prologue in heaven, where Faust is “doctor” to Mephistopheles but “his servant” to the Lord, reappears here. The soberness is that of the privy councillor and a holy sobriety in one.

The fictitious quotation “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,” like the lines of the younger angels that follow it, refers, as we know, to Faust’s wager with the devil, which has already been decided in the burial scene, where the angels carry off Faust’s immortal part. There has been so much fuss about the question of whether the devil won or lost the bet. People have clung so sophistically to the subjunctive mood of Faust’s words “Zum Augenblicke dürft’ ich sagen” [“I could say to the moment”] to infer that Faust does not really speak the words “Verweile doch, du bist so schön” [“Linger, you are so beautiful”] in the scene in his study. All the ways that people have distinguished between the letter and the meaning of the pact, with the most pitiful generosity! As though philological fidelity were not the domain of the one who insists on signing in blood because it is a very special juice; as though a thick-headedly exalted appeal to meaning had the slightest legitimacy in a work that accords language priority over meaning as scarcely any other work in the German language does. The wager is lost. In the world in which “es mit rechten Dingen zugeht” [“things are done properly”], in which equivalents are exchanged—and the wager is itself a mythical image of exchange—Faust has played a losing hand. Only rationalistic thinking—what Hegel would call “reflektierende” or reflecting thought—would want to twist his wrong into a right within the sphere of justice. If Faust were supposed to win the bet, it would be absurd—it would represent contempt for artistic economy—to put into his mouth at the moment of his death the precise lines that, in terms of the bet, deliver him over to the devil. Instead, law itself is suspended. A higher court ordains a stay to the eternal equivalence of credit and debit. This is the mercy to which the dry “gar” points: truly, that mercy which takes precedence over law, that mercy through which the cycle of cause and effect breaks down. The dark force of nature assists it but is not quite the same. Mercy’s response to the condition of nature, however much it may be anticipated in the latter, nevertheless emerges as something qualitatively new and marks a caesura in the continuity of events. Goethe’s work makes this dialectic quite clear through the old motif of the devil cheated: the devil’s own criterion, the calculating intellect which, like Shylock, insists upon appearances, denies him what he has been pledged. If the account balanced as neatly as those who think they have to defend mercy against the devil would have it, the writer could have spared himself the most daring stroke in his construction: the devil, who in Goethe was already a devil of coldness, is taken in by his own love, the negation of negation. In the sphere of illusion, of the “farbigen Abglanz” [colored reflection], truth itself appears as untruth; in the light of reconciliation, however, this reversal reverses itself again. Even the natural condition of desire, which belongs to the complex of entanglement, reveals itself to be something that helps the entangled man escape. The metaphysics of Faust is not the effortful striving to which a neo-Kantian reward beckons somewhere in infinity but the disappearance of the natural order in a different order.

Or perhaps it is not that yet either. Perhaps the wager is forgotten in Faust’s “extreme old age,” along with all the crimes that Faust in his entanglement perpetrated or permitted, even the last, monstrous crime against Philemon and Baucis, whose hut the master of the piece of ground newly subjected to human domination can no more tolerate than a reason that dominates nature can tolerate anything unlike itself. Perhaps the epic form of the work, which calls itself a tragedy, is that of form in the process of falling under the statute of limitations. Perhaps Faust is saved because he is no longer the person who signed the pact; perhaps the wisdom of this play, which is a play in pieces, a “Stück in Stücken,” lies in knowing how little the human being is identical to himself, how light and tiny this “immortal part” of him is that is carried off as though it were nothing. The power of life, as a power of continued life, is equated with forgetting. It is only in being forgotten and thereby transformed that anything survives at all. This is why Faust Part Two has as its prelude the restless sleep of forgetting. The man who awakens, for whom “des Lebens Pulse frisch lebendig schlagen” [“life’s pulses beat fresh and lively”], and who “wieder nach der Erde blickt” [“looks back to earth again”], can do so only because he no longer knows anything about the horrors that went on before. “Dieses ist lange her” [“That was long ago”]. At the beginning of the second act as well, which shows him once more in the narrow Gothic room, “ehemals Faustens, unverändert” [“once Faust’s, unchanged”], he approaches his own prehistory only as a man asleep, laid low by the phantasmagoria of what is to come, Helena. The fact that so few of the concrete details of part one are recalled in part two, that the connection becomes looser to the point where the interpreters have nothing to hold onto but the meager idea of progressive purification—that is itself the idea. But when, in an affront to logic whose radiance heals all logic’s acts of violence, the memory of Gretchen’s lines in the dungeon dawns on us, as if across the eons, in the invocation of the Mater gloriosa as the Unvergleichliche, the incomparable one, there speaks from it, in boundless joy, the feeling that must have seized the poet when, shortly before his death, he reread on the boards of a chicken coop the poem, “Wanderers Nachtlied” [“Wanderer’s Nightsong”], he had inscribed on it a lifetime before. That hut too has burned down. Hope is not memory held fast but the return of what has been forgotten.