Goethe's Faust. Theatre of Modernity (review)

The majority of the twenty articles collected in this anthology were presented at the symposium "Faust in the 21st Century: Modernity, Myth, Theatre" at the University of Toronto, Canada, in 2004. With the addition of a few more contributors, this collection brings together a most impressive group of eminent Goethe and Faust scholars from North America (e.g. Jane Brown, Daniel Wilson), England (Martin Swales), and Germany (e.g. Dieter Borchmeyer, Ulrich Gaier, Ernst Osterkamp, and Albrecht Schöne). While some of the individual essays may indeed foreshadow new trends of Faust research, as a whole, this multifaceted collection certainly represents the culmination of the rich history of Faust scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century.

As with any comprehensive anthology, it is difficult to define a common theme that unites the broad range of scholarly interests elicited by the complex and rich archive of the human imagination and poetic forms that is Goethe's Faust. The editors' decision to direct the focus of attention to "the phenomenology of modernity presented by Goethe as 'theatre'" (1) wisely liberates Goethe from the classicist prejudice and introduces him, the master of role play both on the literary stage and in real life, as a strikingly modern, at times even pre-postmodern poet. As the collection circumscribes modernity not as a historical category but as a certain mode of theatrical existence, Goethe's, respectively Faust's, altercations with Greek mythology, Christian theology, the Renaissance culture of Faust's 'original' domain, and eventually the romanticist and industrialist fantasies of the author's own revolutionary era appear in the light of a playful reckoning with the contingencies and possibilities of the human condition. Goethe knew that no single biography or era encapsulates the essence of humanity; he was Kantian enough to concede that no single experience could possibly capture the essence of a thing of nature; and he was Faustian enough to acknowledge that even the most beautiful moment would not arrest the always curious fantasy, the ever-engaging imagination. In short, Goethe was a phenomenologist, and - alongside his science - his poetry should also be recognized as an always preliminary, still oscillating manifestation of his lifelong dedication to observation and experimentation with both the creative forces of external nature and the poetic genius within. In fact, as I would like to suggest in response to Jane Brown's excellent contribution, theatricality is just another, exponential form of phenomenological experimenting with the poetic self that manifests itself by assuming roles and observing the reactions that the masquerade has triggered in others. As such, theatrical experience is a formative experience yet located in the virtual, hyperreal space of poetic experimentation.

Faust is the quintessential product of this experimental, poetic method; in fact, the play itself generates dramatic experiments by creating spaces and even dimensions of virtual reality through the multiple framing of action on various levels of reality and imagination, plays within the play, role plays within scenes, and intra- and intertextual references. (Martin Swales brilliantly summarizes these poetic and metapoetic strategies.) As a result, however, Faust is also a highly precarious poetic entity, and the oscillating nature of this play of virtual and phantasmagoric reality causes intriguing hermeneutic difficulties as well as practical problems concerning its staging, of which three main strains are addressed in this collection.

First, there is the problematic status of the work's genre. Goethe himself entitled the play a tragedy. Martin Swales emphasizes the presence of tragic conflicts ("human self-division," "human desire," and "human cultural destructiveness", 208) at the core of the play, whereas Ernst Osterkamp recognizes a hidden tragedy of modernity in the irrevocable loss of ancient beauty, as embodied by Helena, and in her replacement by "the laws of economy, ofmilitary might and of technological progress" (172). In an exclusive interview about "directing Faust," Peter Stein fervently asserts the continued relevance of tragedy, even though many postmodern theatre productions have pronounced or rather...