Hidden in Plain View: Another Look at Goethe's Faust

GEZA VON MOLNAR Hidden in Plain View: Another Look at Goethe's Faust When Goethe wrote one of his oldest confidants, Karl Friedrich Zelter, on 1 June 1831 that he was finally able to put the finishing touches to Faust, he also expressed the expectation that this product of a life-long preoccupation would remain "ein offenbares Rätsel."1 With this definition, Goethe challenges his readers to look closely at the obvious and apparent because it provides hints to what it may hide. Even his choice of "offenbar" leads by itself to the same coupling of revelation and concealment because "Offenbarung" is the common designation for Scripture, the very text that exemplifies the word that conceals what it conveys. Just as Faust found out in his attempt to translate the Gospel of St. John (1224-37), revelation is itself an act of concealment. And so it is with Faust. It, too, meets the limits of linguistic revelation and retains something that must necessarily remain unsaid. This is its unfathomable or "incommensurable"2 character, which Goethe recognizes with a faint air of surprise at the result, once the entire work has effectively been completed. His attitude is strikingly similar to one in which he presents findings in the natural sciences gained by experiment. The way Faust was composed in separate starts and segments over some sixty years is itself reminiscent of the fitful periods of work and partial publications that contribute to Goethe's thoughts regarding a theory of chromatics. On an equally obvious but less apparent level, this kinship between his literary and scientific enterprises actually determines the overall structure of Faust. This is one of the revelations that Goethe has hidden in plain view and entrusted to his text, which means that Faust has to be read as an experiment. To do so is the task at hand. We will take our direction from four questions that constitute offenbare Rätsel of their own; a brief introduction to Goethe's reception of Critical Philosophy will precede examination of the text itself. On reading Faust, at least four questions stand out that are fairly obvious but have attracted little attention: Goethe Yearbook XI (2002) 34 Géza von Molnár 1. What do "Vorspiel" and "Prolog" seek to accomplish or why were two introductory scenes thought necessary? 2. What, specifically,3 merited the final text's categorical division into two parts? 3. What is the significance of having the drama of Faust's life range from monologue to monologue? 4. And, what point is made by framing an existence consciously dismissive of "the beyond" (1660) within imagery traditionally associated with it? For all their obviousness, these questions either have never been asked at all or were approached in terms attuned to the obviousness of their appearance . In one of his last statements, a letter of 17 March 1832 to Wilhelm von Humboldt, Goethe refers to his final product as "dieses seltsame Gebäu," and voices his concern that it will be viewed in bits and pieces only and that its unifying form will not be readily appreciated by his readership. As Albrecht Schöne comments on these remarks: "Darin hat die Wirkungsgeschichte ihm recht gegeben" (FA 1.7:392). Less apparent are the components of Goethe's intellectual and theoretical "Hausgebrauch"4 that have contributed to the comprehensive contours in the erection of "dieses seltsame Gebäu" and to the puzzling questions with which it confronts its beholders. The foremost gains made for this "Hausgebrauch" derive from Goethe's growing interest in Kant after he had returned from Italy. It culminated by late 1790 in an intensive study of the first and third Critiques, and thirty years later he still views the pencil marks that trace the course of his readings with evident acknowledgment of their lasting significance.5 In his 1820 survey of the impact of recent philosophy, "Einwirkung der neuern Philosophie" Goethe singles out Kant's teachings as decisive for his continued intellectual development. In the same essay, he also promises a future description of his debt to Fichte but this did not come about; however, just as in Kant's case, he left a multitude of...