Transformationen. Über Himmlisches und Teuflisches in Goethes Faust (review)

La correspondence des parties avec le tout est parfaite—Seroux d'Agincourt's dictum is evidently not a description that applies, as Johannes Anderegg observes, to Goethe's Faust, a text that, while not being "classical," or even being "anti-classical," is nevertheless a "classic." Goethe himself compared the text to a tragelaphus or to a cluster of toadstools, he even described it as "barbaric": here, a term with positive connotations he himself applied to Shakespeare and Calderón. Whereas the entirely heterogenous nature of Faust was evident to, say, F.Th. Vischer, Goethe's remark to Eckermann that Faust was "ein aus schweren Verirrungen immerfort zum Besseren aufstrebender Mensch," could serve (and has done so) to encourage others to search for a linear coherence in the work. If anything, the art-historical concept of Polyfokalität (Werner Hofmann) offers a concept with which to grasp the work as a totality, although the real key to understanding Faust, as Anderegg's study suggests (in Chapters 1 to 7), is to see the continuity in its very lack of continuity, in its enactment of a sequence of (to use the book's title word) transformations. And no one figure is more transformational (even more so than the text's controversial, eponymous hero) than Mephisto: not just his amazing incarnations in Part Two, Act I, as Zoilo-Thersites, then a gigantic egg hatching an adder and a bat, and then Avarice (or Greed), to say nothing of his gender-switching shift into Phorcyas; rather, his various roles as commentator, clown (Schalk), facilitator, and (most problematically of all) the embodiment of evil. Just as Mephisto's nature exceeds our understanding (he is der Ungreifbare), so the linguistic symbolism of Goethe's play on zugreifen/Zugriff and begreifen/Begriff, on griffins and riff-raff ruffians (Raufebold, Habebald, and Haltefest), structures the text and contextualizes Faust's attempt, in various ways, to "grasp" life and—so to speak—"get a grip." (Significantly, the Lamiae in the Classical Walpurgisnacht elude Mephisto's grasp, just as a girl literally goes up in smoke when Euphorion makes a grab for her in the Helena Act.)

In Act IV, Mephisto cries: "Wir sind die Leute, Großes zu erreichen: / Tumult, Gewalt und Unsinn! sieh das Zeichen!," but the precise significance of this Zeichen is, like other motifs, not immediately obvious: Anderegg teases out the various possibilities (115–121). He also reads the famous monologue delivered by Lynceus the Watchman in the light of the opening chapter of Ecclesiastes, which casts a different light on this text and its function; indeed, Mephisto's cynical comment on the fate of Philemon and Baucis, "Auch hier geschieht, was längst geschah," recalls his callous disregard for Gretchen in Part One, "Sie ist die erste nicht." Transformationen contains an appendix of 26 illustrations, and Chapter 8 uses the notion of polyfocality to investigate a variety of possible visual intertexts to the scene in which Faust dies, while Chapter 9 tackles the montage of images assembled by Goethe in the Bergschluchten scene; Chapter 10 offers an excursus on the "poetological concept" of these final scenes, drawing on Goethe's conversations about art. The theological framework of Faust as a whole obviously draws on the biblical Book of Job, and Chapter 11 explores the intellectual and art-historical uses of this biblical motif, while Chapter 12 places Bergschluchten in the context of eighteenth-century ideas about immortality and Chapter 13 returns to the theme of transformation(s) in the final scene. The very last word of Faust, "Finis," points to the limits of the expressible—or the conceivable—to which Goethe has brought us.

Anderegg casts his net widely, and with a lightness of touch not always associated with scholars of Germanistik writing in their mother tongue. Throughout, his discussion is thought-provoking, and never more so than when he draws our attention to Phorcyas/Mephisto's lines when Helena dematerializes, leaving behind her robe and veil: "Die G...