History and Historicity in Act II of Faust, Part II

JANE K. BROWN History and Historicity in Act II of Faust, Part II THE FOLLOWING COMES from a just-completed book, entitled Faust. The German Tragedy, which reads Faust as an extended meditation on Germany's place in the European tradition. In the preceding chapters the fundamental action of the play is seen as a series of attempts to integrate "spirit" ("Geist") or the ideal, symbolized by light, fire, or gold, with "world" (sometimes "nature") or the real, embodied in the principle of water. In Act I this effort is structured as a series of descents in search of gold, the Mothers and, finally, the past. Act II continues this pattern. If Act I was an effort to conjure Helen through the forces of fire, Act II is the attempt to conjure her from the water. At bottom it deals with the same problem as Act I, how to generate a graspable rainbow, to bring up creative force or spirit from the depths to validate appearances. Now that we have moved into the realm of myth and art—now that we are in some sense inside the allegories created in Act I—this attempt will be more successful. Act I characterized the goal in terms of fire, gold, myth, imagination, antiquity, and the beginnings of time. In Act II water imagery will predominate over fire; this represents a significant shift in focus. The emphasis will no longer be on the descent and the buried treasure, but on the ascent, on the continuity between lower and upper worlds, on how to go from spirit to concrete form. This is where both Faust and Emperor/Pan failed in Act I. The emphasis will appear to be less on creating art than on creating life; but we understand, of course, that the fundamental identity of art and Nature in the play makes the distinction spurious. Furthermore, both art and Nature have become, through the process of descent in Act I, projections of the seeking human mind. At least Acts II and III, if not IV and V as well, are continuations of the "show" begun with Faust's descent to the Mothers. It is a "show" created by Faust and stage-managed by that experienced director Mephistopheles. 70 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA The act begins with a series of "plunges" which indicate that it begins in the equivalent of the realm of the Mothers, at the end of Faust's descent. The curtains open to reveal Faust in the state of unconsciousness into which he had plunged at the end of Act I. But he has also returned to his study, which the audience has not seen since before Faust's departure into the world. He—and we—have thus plunged back into his past. Faust's old robe is still there, Wagner is still there, the student Mephisto led on is still there as well. As the travellers proceed to the Classical Walpurgis Night the act slips into a much deeper abyss: Erichtho's prologue takes us back to the origins of the Roman Empire in the fateful battle of Pharsalus, fought between Caesar and Pompey in 48 B.C. Erichtho is the witch Pompey consulted before the battle; the poet of whom she complains is Lucan, who portrays her most dreadfully indeed in his epic, Pharsalia. Lucan is important here, because he identifies the Thessalian setting both as a land of witchcraft and also as the cradle of history.1 Here Erichtho mediates the transformation of the historical world into a poetic or spirit world by reporting that the fires change color from red to blue (spirit fires burn blue). But this transformation plunges us even deeper into the abyss of time, into the prehistorical world of mythology. This is, in fact, mythology at its very oldest levels, for the sphinxes identify themselves as the oldest of mythological creatures, too old ever to have seen Helen. The relative antiquity of the sphinxes is especially significant. It may seem obvious to us, but it was a new idea in the eighteenth century. The first significant periodization of ancient art was made by JJ. Winckelmann in his Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums...