8

Dramatic: Faust and the
Messages of Historicism

Faust II has the reputation both of being unperformable and also of being the privileged vehicle for some fundamentally humanist message of the Master, as famously in the verses:

Wer immer strebend sich bewegt

Den können wir erlösen.

The striver, the endeavourer, him

We are able to redeem¹ (249)

Neither of these accomplishments is very attractive for the contemporary reader: the first, precisely because it would seem to impose reading at the same time that it places insuperable visual and performative demands on the reading process; the second, because it turns Goethe into a nineteenth-century Victorian moralist and metaphysician in an age beyond metaphysics and moralizing and follows a practice of (nationalist) interpretation long since itself fallen into disrepute.

Both of these crippling reactions have been dispelled at one stroke by Peter Stein’s prodigious staging of both parts of Faust in 2000, which must henceforth be included in any reading of the original inasmuch as for most of us it is difficult enough to “stage” a script imaginatively in the mind without dramatic training.² Still, this means taking as the literal level of our allegorical analysis a multidimensional phenomenon offering us even more perspectives than the words-and-music of an opera, perspectives which would seem to interrupt the possibilities of allegorical analysis as disruptively as history does sociology or the event does structure (the great inner conflict in a Marxism which alone tried prophetically to do justice to both simultaneously). The absorption in the time of the spectacle crowds out the unwanted and obsessive search for multiple meanings; the medium becomes its own meaning and very much in the spirit of Goethe’s satire of academics (of whom Faust was once one) replaces interpretation with performance. But perhaps such a replacement is itself historical and deserves some second-level interpretation in its own right, as we shall see at the conclusion of this chapter. In any case, the two parts of Faust seem inconsistent with one another in any number of ways, which are not reconciled by Mephistopheles’s initial statement of the program:

Wir sehn die kleine, dann die grosse Welt.

First the little world, then the great one we’ll see.

(Faust I, “Studierzimmer,” 187)

The little world or village, and then the great one, the imperial court: a homogeneous milieu and then all the complexities of an already modernizing traditional world and its administration (Vienna and the Holy Roman Empire). Faust II will then raise innumerable topics and problems unsuspected in the “little world” of Part I, of the no-longer-aging scholar’s love for the country girl: that of paper money in Act I, which, for example, will set in place the great theme of the assignats in the French Revolution, and a pose crucial representational problem for all modern narrative literature, in which money is too impersonal and collective an institution to be dealt with in its fundamental structure; the theme of science, medicine, and humanism in the episode of the homunculus, where, as in Frankenstein or current information technology research, life is notionally invented by human beings; that of political structure in the survival, beyond the Revolution and the Napoleonic era, of the degraded imperial forms of the past (in our day, this problem takes the form of the superstate); finally, that of land tenure and of the commodification of the soil, of individual versus collective ownership, in the final drama of eminent domain and the wresting of land from the sea.

Faust I was to have been a simple, tragic story; Faust II is immediately, and in advance, episodic. Thomas Mann thought it marked a return to the schemes and swindles of the historical charlatan and magician, the Faust of the chapbooks (despite Goethe’s effort to place their onus on the diabolical partner who brings them into being). The effect was strikingly foretold in a remark by the author himself (in a letter to Schiller dated July 1, 1797): “If only I had a month of peace and quiet to work on it, Faust would suddenly, to the admiration and horror of mankind, grow into an enormous family of sponges.”³ And so it did by the last weeks of Goethe’s life. There are many reasons for respecting the autonomy of Faust I, rather than considering it a mere sponge among the sponges, an opening episode among the many others of what then becomes the central work itself: we will here do so only in the sense in which it embodies a unique historical style—that of what German literary history calls the Sturm und Drang, the youthful revolt of what is also called the “preromantic” generation, as epitomized by the private and fatal alienation of Werther and the public and historical uprising of Goethe’s Götz play. This hopeless rebellion of the last youthful subjects of an “enlightened” Absolutism soon to be shaken and delegitimized in real life by the revolutions in America and in France marks out the historical situation in which, according to the present essay, Faust and Goethe himself are to be read. Generational Sturm und Drang is however also the first of a series of distinct historical styles whose allegorical interplay gives the text its unique meaning, in a transition or historical interregnum unparalleled elsewhere.

At the same time, however, Faust I can be shown itself to be an allegory, albeit of a wholly different type. In fact, it is a version of the classical eighteenth-century “Gothic” paradigm in which a young woman is threatened, by seduction or outright rape, by a man of higher station or power. The bourgeois reader will scarcely expect this to be anything other than an allegory—political in the largest sense—of class fear and of the threat of another more powerful class, the reigning aristocracy in the period of bourgeois revolution, or of Roman Catholicism and the Spaniards in the English situation: villainy in the form of a Lovelace or a Don Giovanni. Gender is here mobilized politically, against the background of a universal subordination of women, by the deliberate assignment of the victim to a different class from her oppressor; and presumably the fear in question can be a pleasurable one aesthetically, insofar as it emphasizes and makes visible a more general power struggle that has in it the possibility of a happy ending, an overcoming of the oppression, a rescue of the threatened protagonist (as in Beethoven’s Fidelio): in other words, the frightening threat can also encourage the possibility of a political wish fulfillment, of Hope à la Bloch.

But all of this becomes more ambiguous when the bourgeoisie itself becomes a “rising class” and comes to consciousness of itself as a new subject of history. To be sure, Don Juan (Don Giovanni) can threaten all classes at once, noblewomen as well as peasant girls. But is it conceivable that a young bourgeois could assume the position of the licentious nobleman (the “libertine,” in the somewhat archaic language of the day)? In that case, the class allegory tends to turn against itself and to become an exercise in guilt and bad conscience; and this is what happens in the tragic situation of Faust I, where the memory of the aristocratic villain is invested in the evil counselor, Mephistopheles, and it is the oppressed bourgeoisie itself that becomes the oppressor of the popular classes, the peasants and the villagers.

In short, this revision of the original cautionary tale is calculated to fascinate a young bourgeois poet tempted by the anticipation of an upward class assimilation, an eventual ennoblement and the conversion to a court culture. For this is exactly what Mephistopheles’s travelogue offers him: not so much personal and physical youth as the historical youthfulness of an older social system, with its transparent power structure and its hitherto unimaginable security, its unambiguous roles and satisfactions. Was not Werther precisely the victim of a situation in which, as with the more energetic Wilhelm Meister, only court bureaucracy or bourgeois commerce were available options?

But in that case, Faust I and the dalliance with Gretchen are mere trial runs for the more ambitious tour d’horizon of Part II: the playful exercise of a class power and privilege that will have to be more dearly won, more explicitly strategized, than as some simple magical transformation. And when, in the new situation, Faust against all expectations confronts erotic temptation (along with the aesthetic vocation) once again in the person of Helena, he is traumatized, seized by a fit of rage and jealousy and then struck to the ground by the power of an unresolvable contradiction.

This is the sense in which we will read Goethe as the poet of a contradictory absolutism, as the subject of a uniquely transitional historical moment which, like the sun striking the statue of Memnon, releases him into an incomparable literary engagement with all the then imaginable genres.

But Faust I will have one more claim on our attention before we confront its enormous, sprawling successor: it stages what has most often been considered a psychological and biographical peculiarity of its author, a characterological flaw, generally downplayed in the celebration of his “genius,” namely the propensity to shun engagements, particularly on the affective level; to abandon the love affairs in mid-course when they become too serious, to flee the lovers who grow too attached to him (a propensity easily covered later on—in old age—by that ethical value called “renunciation”).

I am not alone in feeling that we would do better to insist on the dilemmas of this guilty practice, particularly inasmuch as it is abundantly underscored by Faust’s abandonment of the condemned Gretchen, who will be executed for a pregnancy out of wedlock. It will not do to blame Mephistopheles for this unattractive behavior: we do not find in Faust himself much convincing evidence for expressions of any great guilt or searing remorse. The play (and its sequel) is not interested in the thematics of guilt as such, but rather, in a somewhat different perspective on the matter, in how to escape it. This is Goethe’s Nietzschean side, the discovery of the life-giving powers of strong forgetting as a way of consigning guilt, the past, one’s own crimes and failures, to oblivion, in that endless resurrection and renewal of primal innocence which is the true ethical message and doctrine of the Faust story. If there is a moral to the tale, it is not exactly the stereotype of that boundless “striving” which constitutes Faust’s perpetual renewal and the precondition of that famous dynamism of an alleged modernity which has made this figure into the last of the modern myths. The true moral does not lie in the angelic Gretchen’s forgiveness at the end of Faust II; it is to be found in that reawakening to the world anew in the play’s idyllic beginning: a rebirth from sleep, which has the virtue of the river Lethe in Dante’s earthly paradise, namely to wipe away all traces of sin. Faust is the story of a genuine ethical and psychological discovery, which we would today no doubt express in terms of trauma and healing, but which is much more simply the power to forget, the energy to be drawn from the consignment of the past to oblivion. This is indeed the very meaning of the fateful wager, not so much a stake and a gamble, but a secret piece of advice: if you hold onto the present, you will never be able to get rid of the past. (I must not hesitate to add that this dynamism, this “magical” power of forgetting the past and thinking only of future projects, is proper not to “modernity” but above all to capitalism itself!)

Nor should we be unmindful of the play of aesthetization here, the (very postmodern) possibilities of derealization offered by the transformation of an event into a spectacle. That jumble of the isotopies that is Faust II is admirably described by Richard Alewyn,⁴ who warns us to distinguish between the imaginary Helen of Act I conjured by Faust in his role as court magician (and casting a baleful spell of obsession and infatuation on the magician himself) and the “real” Helen in her native habitat of Act III whom some equally “real” Faust, now in knightly guise at the head of a crusader army, advances to conquer. When we add in the past of the Iliad in which this same Helena was the stakes and the prize, along with the Greek War of Independence in which Lord Byron (Euphorion) died of fever, we confront a superposition of several time periods that comment on one another.

This is the temporal version of Spenser’s spatial overlaps: the Trojan war and its outcomes, the Crusades, the absolutist Imperial world to which Faust lends his services, and finally the altogether contemporary war for Greek independence, all stage a confrontation between East and West, or (if you prefer) Germany and the ancient world, which ends badly. Alewyn usefully points out that nineteenth-century research into archaic Greece, from which the grotesque simulacra of the Classical Walpurgisnacht of Act II derive, push the modern conception of Greek culture further and further in an Asiatic direction; and that the Greece of Byron is still literally part of the Ottoman Empire. We may add that Homer is himself the source of a fateful Western orientalism, insofar as the Trojan War anticipates the struggle between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire, and the single combat between Menelaus and Paris (in Book Three) mobilizes all the Orientalist stereotypes: Menelaus already ruthless and as brawny as any wrestler; Paris effeminate, cultured, cowardly, and sophisticated (Macauley’s stereotypes of Bengal).

So the archetypal centerpiece of Faust II, the “marriage of Faust and Helen,” is not only the allegory of the rediscovery by European intellectuals of Greece and the East (Goethe’s translations of Persian poetry as opposed to Winkelmann’s ignorance of anything but Roman copies): it is also associated with an imperialistic venture of Europe into the vast “house of Islam.” (France’s first incursions into Algeria date from 1827, in the very years in which Goethe was composing Faust II.) The death of Euphorion/Byron then signals the failure of this attempted synthesis of West and East and thereby marks yet another withdrawal of Goethe himself from an earlier avatar.

Faust, I have claimed, is the epic of strong forgetfulness, which cleanses Faust of guilt and frees him for further ventures, new selves, new projects, very much in the new capitalist spirit in which the past (and history) is supposed to play no part and the history of accumulation is blotted out in favor, not merely of accumulation of wealth in the present—for that must always be reinvested and increased ceaselessly under pain of stagnation, regression, and loss—but also of perpetual increase. The “make it new” of modernism applies fully as much to capital itself, and the Faustian dynamic, sublimated and glorified in the final scene, governs both, at the same time that it seems mildly chastened by the memory of Gretchen and the ambiguous spirit of an “eternal feminine” that can just as surely mean desire and the Lacanian death wish as it does eventual pardon.

This ambivalence—characteristic of the dialectic in general (as witness Marx’s praise of capitalism’s dynamism in the Communist Manifesto at the same time he is denouncing it)—clearly enough reflects Goethe’s ambiguous position between the old world of the absolutist court, with its enlightened despots, and the new world of capitalist production and expansion, even in the domain of letters, where Goethe’s attempted conceptualization of “world literature” is at one and the same time imperialistic and commercial (Sanskrit texts alongside literary periodicals and their mass public)—the conquest of Algeria alongside the worldwide fame and publicity of Lord Byron (and of Goethe himself). Nor should it be forgotten that Faust’s magic show, from which this whole adventure derived, was but one episode in the conversion of the Imperial Court to the world of simulacra, one organized around the novelty of paper money.

It is a dialectic that is dramatized in the very opening moments of Faust II, as Faust awakens to the rising sun of a wholly new existence, after the oblivion of sleep has healed him of the guilt of his previous sin in Faust I, the abandonment of the condemned Gretchen. Yet as the elfin chorus promises him the glories and renewed strength of this resurrectional awakening, the rising sun announces itself in a monstrous cacophony of deafening noises: “Welch Getöse bringt das Licht!” (I, 268). How could it be otherwise when the world’s alarm clock shatters this peaceful night of healing: Faust will himself reexperience the duality of life in the blinding light of the sun, to which he must turn his back, observing the waterfall and its rainbow dissolving into an appearance in which material reality and mesmerizing image are indistinguishable. The famous line is then ominous at best—“Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben” (“We have life only in its flung-off colours”; I/270/6)—a conjuring of the simulacrum which will derealize all the events of this play or pageant, from the assignats to the illusions of Greece, from the feints of warfare to the misprisions of the blind billionaire, who takes the agitation of the lemurs for the noises of his construction workers. Already in the first act of Faust II, the message is not the medium but rather the form, and as it were the fixed forms and outmoded genres of a rapidly obsolescent traditional world, beginning with the empire itself, whose vacuous ruler cannot even pay the bills accumulated by his own entertainment. Faust, then, remains the magician, as it were, the alchemist, on the brink of a new science (and Mephistopheles its jester): but as magician he remains an artist, the old art of the festival and the great baroque processions, masque, carnival, mummery and dumb shows, triunfi, Benjamin’s “funereal pageants,” all the way back to the mysteries and images of the great Pan. For these are all images, Schein, empty show, as their dispersal in fire testifies; and with them Goethe bids farewell to the spectacles of the past, and above all to their forms, which he manipulates with sovereign poetic power—the rhymes and adornments of a spectacle-oriented baroque culture still distantly resonant in Milton’s Comus and the Spanish Autos sacramentales; but wearisome for the new bourgeois publics and on the point of disappearing. The bourgeoisie craves history and authenticity, it wants to see the authentic ancient past, awakened to life by a taste for history and the new realism, as in the paintings of David. This is, however, a new and unexpected task for the Faust magician; Mephistopheles tries to explain to him that the dead realities of the heathen pre-Christian world of the Greeks are beyond his powers. History demands some new visionary energies, some new poetic power, for which Faust must descend to the “Mothers” (Act I, 311). Why does this word (“die Mütter”) “klingt so wunderlich?” (“sound so strange?”; 54). Why does it induce that “Schauer” (shudder) which is “mankind’s best part” (a line that has been unsurprisingly pasted into the “cultural literacy” of popular sayings)? I think it has something to do with the plural, which we so rarely use in any of the modern idioms, each of us having but one of these “mothers,” whose generic name or term is virtually a proper name.

We are, then, at one of the crucial paradigm shifts of history or modernity, which only the radical change in styles allows us to identify—a little more than a symptom, and less than a representation, the word culture offering little enough of either detail or conceptuality to grasp what was for Goethe both a lived experience and an observed one. To call this a shift from the baroque to romanticism scarcely helps us, either, insofar as Goethe’s freeing himself from the absolutist past was achieved at the very moment in which he was personally and professionally becoming ever more deeply integrated into that superannuated past and Weimar’s court culture. The critics and historians, the biographers and hagiographs, periodize Goethe’s life into several distinct symbolic styles: Sturm und Drang acts out a revolt against late-feudal society (even though it is really a refusal of commerce and bureaucracy): a kind of romantic realism, if you will; a classicism then emerges as yet another repudiation of baroque decoration but whose austerity recalls the styles of the great theater of French absolutism (an affirmation of the promises of enlightened despotism, perhaps). The trip to Italy is staged as a fundamental break with the provincial late-feudal life of this little principality; but it is bridged by unfinished projects in both styles (Faust, Tasso). From this perspective, the second Faust, with its Renaissance pageants, could strike one as a regression to the older Baroque culture itself, as it seems to Alewyn, who characterizes it as a retreat from

the clean separation of the arts from one another and in particular the limitation of theater to the spoken word, with a minimum of mimetic play, along with a withdrawal of art from the social realm⁵

or in other words from the emergence of aesthetic “autonomy.”

This cumbersome chronological schematism is useful only insofar as it helps us realize that all these styles are symbolically repudiated here: the Faust of the later panoramic work—vaguely analogous to the immense biographical epic of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt—is very far from the heroism of the Sturm and Drang figures (or even from Werther’s desperate gesture); but classicism is also foregrounded as a distinct language within the great reading play by assigning it a separate stylistic enclave—first as a representation of a representation, a play within the play, and then the experimental spectacle of the historic “Marriage” in its own right, its claims to universality reduced to those of some merely cultural option. And for all the excess of baroque decoration and generic mongrelization, the baroque has itself become an object of representation rather than a stylistic practice in its own right: this is already a historicist perspective on the baroque as such, and it is noteworthy that both these foregrounded styles end in catastrophe. In the pageants of Act I, each sequence of the festival so carefully planned by its master of ceremonies ends badly, its allegories disintegrate, its characters begin to infiltrate the neighboring processions, most notably with Plutus, the allegory of gold and greed; the final evocation of the great god Pan ends in conflagration. But the classical drama of the marriage of Faust and Helen also ends badly, with the death of their son, the return of Helena to the underworld, and the withdrawal from the whole experiment of Faust himself (characteristic of Goethe’s own frequent and repeated withdrawals and “renunciations”) in another therapeutic coma.

This episode is presumably meant to put definitive end to Germany’s fascination with Greece, the famous nostalgic “tyranny” of the cult of antiquity: in fact, it is a chapter in the development of the historical novel, the approach to realism through historicity. As in the conclusion of the “Querelle des anciens and des modernes,” which is revived here, the abandonment of the classical is not the end but merely the beginning of historicity, analogous to that of Balzac’s development of the Walter Scott historical romance into a new novelistic realism in which social and historical reality itself changes, not from period to period, but from year to year and decade to decade.

Whatever the transcendental conclusion the drama owes itself to stage, the raw exploitation and the land grab of the final act, the blind man’s delight at the commotion of the lemurs waiting for his death, which he joyously takes like any slumlord to be the sound of the erection of new buildings and the creation of new value—all this grimly marks the close approach of the centenarian to the unvarnished realities of his own postrevolutionary era. Even the great democratic salute to freedom (“a free people on a free land”) “Solch ein Gewimmel mocht ich sehn, Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn!” (V, 468) faithfully reproduces its liberal bourgeois illusions.

To be sure, much of Part II derives from the tradition of the pageant as it developed in the Italian Renaissance and became a symbolic staple of absolutist court culture (along with opera, which developed alongside it). But there is also another genre, relatively unnamed and unrecognized, which plays its invisible part here, and that is what I call the reading play. I’m not referring to the bad or unwieldly imitations of Elizabethan drama that flourished among the Romantic poets, sometimes among the very greatest. Rather, I have here in mind a specific hybrid that attempted to make its way among a literate bourgeois public, in rivalry with the descriptive freedom of the novel (an equally new form), yet longing desperately to retain the immediacy of drama, as though it could magically transform its readership of one into that living audience which the Germans at least, from Lessing to Goethe himself, took as an analogon of the nation as such, “le peuple à venir” (the nation-to-be). Such dramas are not to be characterized as epic either, for they do not really stage heroes as such (and Brecht’s much later use of this term in “epic theater” simply means storytelling or narrative drama). More anachronistically and prophetically, the reading play may be said to relate to the development of “special effects” in cinema, which for this older period are wholly beyond the resources of the theater to stage: later on, even Wagner would turn a stubborn denial of these practical impossibilities into a will as it were to summon forth future resources, to influence future stage machinery and technology in this visionary direction (something his heirs will have by now been successful in doing, theatrically drawing on just such “special effects” as modern technology has conjured up for film). Still, there remain the imaginary theaters of the individual writer, in which such fantasy projects continue to be pursued. In the East, the epics of Madan or Mickiewicz emerge, no doubt nourished by an intensifying nationalism, for which the analogy of the theater public with the nation has a more intense resonance than elsewhere; and no doubt the influence of the novel also plays its part in the emergence of a biographical spectacle as grandiose as Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.

But I am more inclined to think of the follies of Flaubert’s early project of a Saint Anthony, rewritten three times before his success as a popular novelist gives him the courage and the discipline to distill its final, extraordinary version. And then there is the Nighttown section of Ulysses, which no longer seems so exceptional an experiment in the light of what has been developing in the earlier chapters (and what is by now happening all around the lonely author in the heyday of symbolist and expressionist theater).

Still, these remain reading plays, and in them a peculiar thing happens to the visual. The normal transpositions of description are here subverted by the pretext of some hallucinatory immediacy; and even the written emergences and disappearances—for it is always in a strange space of unheard of visual spectacles that figures suddenly arise against their blank background and just as unexpectedly vanish—come laterally across the field of vision of the inner and imaginary eye like hallucinatory images which have their own momentum: the eye does not turn in their direction to observe them, as is the case with more mimetic written description, but submits to their passage from outside the immobilized gaze and across it into another nothingness. This inner eye posited by the reading play does not look (let alone read). It is passed through, and the reading of such works at its most intense approximates a drugged state, a pharmacological trance.

Goethe was of course himself a man of the theater; and in any case Faust began life as a dramatic spectacle, however much it already (in the Walpurgisnacht scene above all) strained the limits of its stagecraft. It may well be that Faust II set the scene for all those later purely written visionary productions I have mentioned above; but it was also certainly informed by all the practical experience of a craftsman who had staged court pageants fully as much as realistic or poetic stage plays and who no longer cared whether this one could or would be staged in its own right. (Nor must we forget the parallel evolution of operatic staging, which had at the same time to rely on a good deal of imaginative indulgence on the part of its audience, repaid by the riches of a different sense organ.) Yet the older Goethe, in his renunciation of classicism, was willing to drift back into the aesthetic abundance of the Gesamtkunstwerk of the baroque—without any of its later Wagnerian overtones, to be sure: no delirium here or real intoxication; if sublime there is, it is the chaste sublime of the ascent into heaven, without Wagnerian love-death nor even the transcendence of Vierzehnheiligen. On the contrary this “baroque” is the satiric baroque, which may be called the devil’s share.

What the pageants show us, in any case, is the persistence of the allegorical in the person of the hermeneut, the interpreter, and tour guide: it is said that in the early days of film, in peasant countries, remote from spectacle and often indeed from literacy itself, the film crew (now projectors and the like, rather than cameras) was accompanied in their tours by an explainer, who stood next to the screen on which the image was projected in order to identify the characters for the peasant audience and separate heroes from villains, so as to keep the public abreast of the moral of the tale itself. Virgil plays this role in Dante, but we sorely miss such a figure in Spenser (its place taken by the poet himself); and perhaps this is why the episodic temporality of the individual, finely wrought stanzas is there to bring us up short against the interpretive problem: each unity more like an emblem, heraldry, a coat of arms, than an unrolling landscape in the spirit of the classical Chinese scroll. In Spenser what remains medieval is the impenetrable forest, a Brocéliande where the hero has no map and wanders lost, sometimes for years, until he makes his fatal encounter. Dante, however, who already had a poetic guide to help him translate his new style into epic narrative, endows his Master with the additional task of explaining the geography, which remains somehow the original, the literal text to be deciphered and holds all the clues to the mysteries, even in heaven.

But in Faust II we glimpse the original allegorist: it is the master of ceremonies himself, who explains what he has planned and organized to the court as though it were a natural event and sometimes intervenes and sometimes takes the consequences, remaining as he does an actor within his own pageant: writer, director, and actor, like Goethe himself (or Shakespeare). What is prepared, however, in that lengthy parade calculated to fatigue the reader but not the spectator (when Peter Stein has designed it for him) is the role itself: and that will be taken by Mephistopheles in the second act, the Classical Walpurgisnacht.

Critics have complained that this interesting figure, more fascinating in many ways than Faust himself and beloved of the great actors, retreats significantly in Part II in proportion to Faust’s own advance. In Part I, Mephistopheles was an active party to the intrigue and the seduction; here, however, and with abundant complaints, he has had to be charged with the staging and the set design, the behind-the-scenes material arrangements, the tedium of the stagehand. (He has made it clear to Faust that bringing the past back to life is no small thing, even for the devil, and involves a good deal more than a few magic tricks and a flying carpet.)

Yet he has a whole act to himself during Faust’s paralysis; and I want to suggest that this long intermediate transition—itself a kind of pageant, drawn from the antique—is also a moment of linguistic transformation as well. Faust was not the only remnant of the Sturm und Drang style and culture: so was Mephistopheles himself. The “two souls that dwelt in one breast” were for Goethe as a wordsmith the language of “passion” (the individual self, love and flight, the anxiety of this transitional period in which the young bourgeois without a role or status finds a place to be invented in the now antiquated court principality); and the language of satire (distaste for late-feudal bureaucracies but also for petty and provincial Bürgertum, a taste for glamorous, sweeping nihilism and the proud youthful stance of refusal and denial). This last is the function of Mephistopheles (“Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint,” I am the spirit that always negates), and it affords a glimpse into creative destruction “der stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft” (that always wills evil and always brings forth the good; Part I, 168). Goethe was right: what was distinctive about him was the union of these two impulses, which, taken individually, risk the commonplace of a vacuous poetry of sheer feeling or a tedious whining and complaining about everything. The grand epigrams (which like those of Dante in Italian remain sedimented in the German language like natural formations) are born of the inseparable and unresolvable quarrels and carping at one another of these two functions.

Yet to this style—it has already been bleached and chastened by a Racinian classicism—there now must be added a practice reminiscent of the Greek epigram: the so-called Xenien, the potshots at your critics, little satiric couplets and stanzas that rival the venom and malicious humor of the best of Pope or Swift. But even more than from their classical letter, these verses spring from a less familiar sonorous richness of the German language in their multiple rhyme schemes and their decorative lightness: a dazzling exercise in specifically German wit quite different from the sarcasms of a Nietzsche or a Brecht, even though they sometimes tend proleptically in that direction. Unexpectedly, these begin to pour out of the hitherto lyric poet’s language production in a well-nigh terrifying and interminable richness. They make up the more authentically classical dimension of Goethe, but like all those Roman copies Winckelmann took for the experience of their Greek originals, they are so to speak retranslated from the Renaissance and equally mark a kind of historical, if not personal, regression.

Someone must then become the bearer of this new form of stylistic production, and unsurprisingly it is Mephistopheles who proves to be the appropriate choice. He must himself be translated from Sturm und Drang negation to witty Baroque court-commentator and fop, and it is through the long darkness of the Classical Walpurgisnacht that the transformation will be effectuated, as the Northern devil confronts the peculiarities of a Southern archaic mythology that is anything but “edler Einfalt and stille Grösse” (noble simplicity and tranquil grandeur) in Winckelmann’s influential phrase. This language will also carry with it the “scientific” commentaries (Vulcanist controversies and the like) to which we will return in a moment: but on the face of it such commentaries belong to the form itself. It is the inner formal destiny of the satire to opine on just such idle scholarly disputes and rancorous self-serving debates. (The appearance of Thales and Anaximander make it clear that if not eternal then they go back at least to the very origins of philosophy in the mists of time.) The animosity of Goethe and Schiller for their critics is nothing if not anti-intellectual and anti-academic. An ancient Greek style and form—the epigrammatic quatrain—is thereby adapted for polemical use in an essentially contemporary transitional state in intellectual life (the Enlightenment transformation of feudal and religious culture, within the sheltering integumen of absolutist court culture): the classical becoming satirical.

The purest form of this recourse to classicism is, however, French classical tragedy, with its Alexandrines and its unities: it, too, serves an essentially therapeutic purpose, in purging the remnants of the Sturm und Drang (which used to be called, in standard intellectual history, “pre-romanticism”). It is with the final full-blown exercise of this third style (after the baroque, and Sturm und Drang) that we arrive in the very heart of Faust II, with its most famous episode, the marriage of Faust and Helen, or, according to the standard allegory, of Germany and Greece, unless it is the central figure of the monstrous Phorkyas that is the more probable spawn of the marriage of Northern and Southern dark mythologies, the Christian devil and the classical teratologies.

This encounter puts into question the very concept of a play within a play: its first moment, indeed, is a kind of magical dumb show, in which, for the entertainment of the emperor, Helen of Troy and her lover Paris are called up in a phantasmagoric spectacle, which arouses in its master of ceremonies, the Faust now become a magician, an inexplicable and irrepressible jealousy and rage, a veritable fit (in the Elizabethan sense), in which, mesmerized by the prototype of classical Beauty, he intervenes between the pair and the spectacle disappears in an explosion, leaving Faust paralyzed in a coma. (He will have to be transported in that state to the real historical Greece in which he can alone be cured and awakened.)

But the “real historical Greece” is no longer a play within a play but has become the play itself (even though at its end, the courtly spectators reappear as though it had been one). Biographically, we are told, this final intensely concentrated classical effort, which ends, like so much in Faust, in disaster, may well represent Goethe’s judgments on his own earlier classical efforts, above all in Iphigenia, and his judgment on them, or better still his renunciation of them. For Helen faces the same fate as Iphigenia, Menelaus having ordered her, on arrival back in Greece after the Trojan War, to prepare the sacrificial knife, which will presumably serve as punishment for the dishonor she has brought on the kingdom and the multitudes of the dead already sacrificed to avenge it. In the austerity of this episode we find all the trappings of the earliest Greek tragedies: a chorus, the two interlocutors, the unity of scene and action, which will culminate in her escape to Faust’s “barbarian” camp and her rescue: followed by the onset of some properly Renaissance atmosphere in the Arcadia in which her marriage to Faust consists. But the child, Euphorion, proves too unearthly or unworldly to survive, bounding in the upper air, in partial flights, of which the final one culminates in his death and Helena’s return to Hades with the body. Euphorion (already a classical figure, the son of Helen and of Achilles rather than of Faust) represents—for in this episode he is clearly called upon to mean something—grace and beauty, Poetry, ambition, celebrity, and finally (in an intensification of the momentum of these terms and the rising movement aroused by all of them) War, the very source for the ancients of Glory. This is why on another level, according to Goethe himself, here he takes Lord Byron as his contemporary reference, whose apotheosis was reached by his attempt to intervene in the Greek War of Independence and resulted in his death (1824)—perhaps for Goethe the last gasp of the Napoleonic paradigm that dominated the turn of that century and was to be replaced only a year or two later by the return of revolution in 1830.

Apparently then, we have here a fable in which a relatively intelligible moral is drawn and offered to the public: poetry and celebrity (Goethe was after all himself the protype of those, well before Byron), substituting for the praxis of statecraft along with the exercise of military prowess. (War will in fact be the centerpiece of the next act.) And then there is the ephemerality of Arcadia itself and of love and beauty, along with the interesting formal problem: why the devil does not choose this moment—which Faust explicitly beseeches to persist and to arrest the flow of time (“Verweile doch, du bist so schön”; “Bide here, you are so fair!”; Part I, 238)—the very stakes of the initial wager—to seize the pawned soul and drag it down into his own realm: no doubt because the moment destroys itself under its own inner logic and momentum.

But I must follow Adorno here and insist that the “meanings” vehiculated by the work itself are in fact its raw material rather than its artistic significance; and we must claim that if you wish to call this episode an allegory, then one must call Faust II itself the allegory of an allegory, for it stages for its viewers, not the failure of ideas and ethical motivations, but that of style itself as a historical symptom. The play diagnoses this style—classicism—as carrying within itself a dialectic of essentially moral or ethical questions, which it cannot immanently resolve, just as the analogous problems Hegel found immanent to Greek tragedy (in the Antigone chapter in the Phenomenology of Spirit) could not be resolved either, but only replaced by new problems and new contradictions as History abandoned the moment of the city-state and moved toward the new universal horizon of Rome, of empire and its universal religion.

The outcome here is not that historical one of Hegel; yet the transversal movement of the episode from one war (Homer’s Troy) to another potential one (the resurrection and revolt of Greece) demonstrates the intervening Utopian interlude to have been a sham and a delusion, and this return of Faust to antiquity as having revealed only the omnipresence of Persephone, that is to say, of historical oblivion.

The wonderful seven-league boots of the next act are then, as in Hegel, the ineluctable succession of the historical periods, in this case, the medieval—legend and feudal reality all at once. Otherwise, there is something anticlimactic about this fourth act—the civil war in which the ageing emperor, confronted with an “anti-emperor,” is saved by Faust (or rather by Mephistopheles) and agrees to grant him (in the general deterioration of his kingdom and his authority) the one last desire he has, a barren strip of beach, an offshore domain, in order, in some grandiose ultimate project, to convert the polders into a fruitful new province, in effect to “magically” create a new world out of the sterile remnants of an already existing Nature.

The fourth Act of Faust II is, nonetheless, a necessary link in the “plot” of Faust II, Valéry once memorably having observed that what is “necessary” in art is always bad; and here the long bombastic declamatory speeches have their own style, no doubt, that of the rhetorical style of a late absolutist court bureaucracy, so that at best their hollowness can signal the passage of this social formation into historical oblivion. Kenneth Burke used to speak of artistic debates in the 1930s as to whether novels could represent boring people by being boring: here it is the degeneration of language that is perhaps meant to stand for the degeneration of a social formation and the end of that long transitional phase which was Goethe’s own life between two worlds. (This was indeed Auerbach’s judgement on the Latin of Imperial Rome.)

Nor is the logic of content absent from this formal dilemma, for the act deals with the phenomenon of war, something Goethe himself experienced personally during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. But war is not so easy to stage (or to represent generally), and here it must come through offstage descriptions in the classical manner, reports that are not enlivened by our discovery that most of the complexities of the battle scene have been invented as a kind of ruse and illusion by Mephistopheles for his own (and Faust’s) purposes. At best what rises to the fore here is that Kantian distinction between phenomenon and noumenon to which Goethe remained attached: the tangible and visible phenomenon through which we can alone sense the presence of that unpresentable Real or Ding an sich. This idealist Kantian dichotomy will paradoxically inspire the “realism” of the play’s last act, among the best things Goethe ever wrote, which constitutes some final approach to what one may characterize as a kind of historical realism (without becoming involved in scholastic disputes about the meaning of this term).

Still, the inconsistency of these last two styles—bombast versus the language of political economy—continues to foreground style as such, overleaping much of the nineteenth century’s anguished search for a single satisfactory stylistic medium (“le mot juste” being only one of the formulas devised in that long period in which a bourgeois culture seeks to find itself, without realizing that the search is itself a contradiction in terms). We do not need to summarize the events of this final act, in which Faust is unmasked as an unscrupulous land developer, endowed with a veritable mafia prepared brutally to evict all human obstacles to his projects; in which the great bet with the devil—no dwelling on the instant!—is revealed to be the imperative of strong forgetfulness demanded by capitalist accumulation, and Faust’s famous “Western” dynamism simply the dynamic of Western capitalism as such, demanding constitutive blindness to self and others. The transcendental irreality of the final assumption into heaven and the rebirth of this unwitting hero of his times amid the souls of the children who were never able to be born, constitutes in its very spirituality, in that strange and simple nature imagery (or Naturlaut) commented on by Adorno and others,⁶ something like a hypothetical sublime, the formal closure demanded by the bourgeois mind as it vainly seeks a way out of its own condition. It is this very irreality and impossible sublimation that is the Utopian message of the memorable ethereal conclusion—Utopian on account of its very irreality, yet realistic by virtue of the very fact that it exists and perseveres beyond the boundaries of what can be thought.

Goethe’s flight from guilt, Faust’s insistence on becoming the very symbol of Tätigkeit and productivity (that of what will shortly prove to be Western imperial expansion in business and in land), Mephistophelean “creative destruction,” the bankruptcy of historicism and the aesthetic—all these powerful drives express the courtier’s desire to break out of his unresolvable transition and the character’s vocation to become that impossible thing, a “myth.” They demonstrate that only allegory can accommodate these multiple levels into a single coherent work and image.

The director does not have to import any Brechtian spirit into these final scenes of Faust: it is all there already, sea shanties next to angelic tones, grotesque choruses and like-minded metaphysical outpourings, Mephistopheles as overseer and supreme master alike, and raging legal plaintiff, suddenly in prey to the unaccustomed human sexuality of concupiscence for angelic youth (“Selbst der alte Satansmeister / War von spitzen Pein durchdrungen”; Even the old Satan-Master’s heart / Suffered a cruel transfixation; V, 479), the melodramatic ashes of the little hut that contain both the old couple and the nostalgic traveler returning to thank them for their hospitality and cut down with them by Mephistopheles’s thugs, the The Threepenny Opera mingled with the solemnity of that Heideggerian Sorge alone able to penetrate the dwellings of the rich and powerful, and finally the transcendent tones of the unborn children to whom the Pater Seraphicus lends his sense organs so that they may feel the glories of the natural world. One would not say that Goethe was embarrassed, exactly, when he had to explain to Eckermann his choice of a Christian or religious language to convey the inexpressible, but his words do insist that the multiple and incommensurable codes of the traditions must nonetheless be used in order to convey the unrepresentable by way of our inevitable failure to represent.⁷ We can therefore privately name this final “ewig-weibliche” (eternal feminine) in whatever language we like, from vitalism to the inextinguishable Lacanian death drive, from sexuality to the life force, from the Spinozan conatus to whatever animal instinct of self-preservation: all are as ideologically and metaphysically tainted as they are indispensable. Even Victorian notions of eternal “striving” are allowed provided they are relativized by an absolute historicism, and their origin in Goethean and Hegelian “Tätigkeit” and Marxian productivism included, as long as we supplement them with the very spirit of capitalism itself. Faust can be reborn and even reincarnated, no doubt, but not as this “mythic” identity, which has been burnt away in a new kind of purgatorial redemption.

Allegory allows all such codes and yet reworks them by way of their juxtaposition and the acknowledgment of their multiplicity. The nature images of the finale, whose very simplicity and undecorative abstraction caused Adorno wonderment, are redeemed by a cunning inversion: for the Altitudo of the ecstatic tradition, which we humans traditionally associate with height, with a gazing upward, with the empyrean itself, literally means depth: and we here in these verses gaze down at valleys and rifts, at the downward plunging momentum of the great ancient forests, and the gorges and shafts, the ravines and gulleys of the earthly, as though seen from a great height, the celestial bird’s-eye view, the long look from Montaigne’s Épicycle of Mercury (the mountains, we remember from Act IV, having been consigned to the upward volcanic momentum of the diabolic at the heart of the earth’s core). All of which incites us to add Goethe’s scientific (and thought) experiments to our multiplicity of styles and codes: a Spinozan pantheism that we too often rashly pass over as mere literary description (clouds, stars, landscapes). We may include it—along with its debates, volcanic versus Neptunian, and so on—in the moral level, that of subjectivity and its awarenesses and lapses; or, alternately, in the anagogical, in which it can figure the Germanic lands themselves, nestled between the primitive Völkerwanderungen and the modernity of the West and its revolutions—the unspoken unity of Being which is that of a momentous historical transformation, of the suspension of a transitional moment between two ages.

So it is that we may also schematize the levels of Faust in more vertical fashion, as the allegory of those changing styles of culture that are the fundamental symptom:

ANAGOGICAL: Germany, capitalism, Nature

MORAL: strong forgetting, guilt and innocence

ALLEGORICAL: style as such, historicism

LITERAL: the search for bourgeois Myth, the transition from absolutism to the nineteenth century