In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent

1. Faust’s Building: Theory as Practice

1. Faust’s Building: Theory as Practice with the exception of the remarkable discussion of Faust by Marshall Berman, whose classic, still searing dialectical analysis of modernity as both constitutive and destructive of history, concluding with Robert Moses’ devastation of the Bronx, departs from ‘‘the tragedy of development’’ defined for Berman in Goethe’s play, scant if any critical notice has been made of the fact that, of all the acts of transgression Faust commits over the duration of his colorful drama, it is neither seduction, nor desertion, nor even murder that brings about his wager’s loss.1 The erotic ‘‘pull’’ of ‘‘the eternal feminine’’ 1. Berman, All That Is Solid, esp. pp. 60–86. In an essay devoted to the final scene of Faust II, and which itself opens, as if by way of analogy, with a discussion of textual study after Auschwitz, Adorno argues that the piecemeal quality of composition in Faust II derives from its necessary ‘‘forgetting’’ of Part I. While Adorno ultimately refers to Faust’s intended founding of a ‘‘new ground’’ for mankind and consequent destruction of the cottage of Philemon and Baucis, he does not note the contradiction between Faust’s exhaustive desire to redesign the world he sees, excepting no part or place in it from his plan, and the purported saving grace of the pointedly underschematized dramatic structure of Part II. Identifying Faust with Goethe on his deathbed and, perhaps, with Europe on its own, Adorno instead argues that Faust is saved because, by mere ‘‘force of living on’’ and ‘‘forgetting,’’ he has changed: ‘‘Is not Faust saved because he is no longer at all he who signed the pact; does not the wisdom of the play in pieces lie in how little man is identical with himself . . . ? The force of life, as a living on, is equated with forgetting.’’ (Adorno, ‘‘Zur Schlussszene dest Faust,’’ p. 366). While Adorno, at the time—and place—of the composition of the essay on Faust II, had every reason to engage in (uncharacteristic) wishful thinking regarding both the possibility of forgetting and its balming effect, there is no 29 30 ‡ goethe’s timelessness and contrasting pastoral fealty of Philemon and Baucis may offer the most fertile ground for commentary on Faust’s impassioned trajectory , but it is a decidedly impersonal act that brings the eventful course of his actions to an end. Sitting before the sea toward the close of Faust II, a world-weary Mephisto at his side, Faust regards natural phenomena—here, the repetitive ‘‘play’’ of the advancing waves (‘‘With time the play repeats itself’’ [Die Stunde kommt, sie wiederholt das Spiel] [Faust II, IV.10209])—with the same contemptuous impatience he had reserved for verbal phenomena in Faust I. The thrust of Faust’s final complaint reflects and reverses his first and, in that inverted symmetry, the arc of development spanning both plays first appears revealed. For, standing with Wagner before the city gate at the opening of Faust I, the disgruntled scholar had described as ‘‘a beautiful dream’’ the natural scene he now rejects: ‘‘I rush to drink the [goddess’s] eternal light, / Before me the day and behind me the night, / The sky above me and under me the waves. / A beautiful dream’’ [Ich eile fort, ihr ew’ges Licht zu trinken, / Vor mir den Tag und hinter mir die Nacht, / Den Himmel über mir und unter mir die Wellen . / Ein schöner Traum] (Faust I, 1086–89). ‘‘Waves’’ rolling ‘‘below’’ him, and ‘‘the sky above,’’ it is no longer the uselessness of human learning and knowledge that inspires Faust’s anger (‘‘Precisely what evidence, but rather a life’s works of counterevidence (Die Wahlverwandtschaften first among these), that Goethe viewed oblivion as anything but a visually induced state of aberrancy, a temporary absence of mind issuing in unsuspected and permanent concrete loss. In Goethes Faust, Peter Brandes endorses what he characterizes as Adorno’s view of forgetting as the ‘‘power of transformation,’’ and traces such a concept of forgetting taking place ‘‘beyond the economy of guilt’’ from Nietzsche through Kommerell, Adorno, and Derrida: ‘‘Faust has become another not through his becoming as striving but through his forgetting, whereby his forgetting is hardly to be designated his own, but is rather the gift, the gift of forgetting’’ (200–204). Although Brandes recognizes that Derrida’s conception of ‘‘radical forgetting’’ includes its own contradiction of oblivion in the trace, and uses Derrida’s notion of trace to...