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Goethe's Faust: The Making of Part I (review)
- Goethe Yearbook
- North American Goethe Society
- Volume 3, 1986
- pp. 228-230
- 10.1353/gyr.2011.0311
- Review
- Additional Information
228 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA "classical temperament?" Is the implication warranted indeed that Goethe's writing of the Bekenntnisse was specifically triggered by Humboldt's conservative Horen essay "Ãœber den Geschlechtsunterschied?" To what extent does self-consciousness obscure the object under study rather than elucidate the Standortbedingtheit, and isn't such selfabsorption once again removing Goethe into a misty distance, this time not of veneration but of the incommensurable? Are any of the ways presented here—structuralist or Lacanian readings are missing and hardly the answer—doing justice to Goethe's admonition, given in reference to antiquity but equally applicable nowadays to himself, namely that he is past, and fully so? This collection of diverse essays, as little as any other, conclusively explicates "the significance of the heritage of Goethe" (Foreword) for our days, and one is actually grateful that the essays do not directly address this problem with its dangerous undertow of specious "relevance." They steer a good course between blind attack and equally misguided eulogy, and between the image of a Germanisten-Goetht and that of the unflappable sage. It is a worthwhile contribution in the effort to see the supposed Olympian on level ground rather than on a pedestal. Emory University Erdmann Waniek Gearey, John, Goethe's Faust: The Making of Part I. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1981. It seems puzzling at first that a study of Faust written for a contemporary American audience in the 1980s should use a translation from the 1880s, a version which offers the following examples of the translator's art: Since here avails nor argument nor prayer Thee hence by force I needs must bear. Though fathom thee no angel may. Reason he names it and doth so Use it than brutes more brutish still to grow. Ever too prone is man activity to shirk In unconditioned rest he fain would live. But after reading Gearey's study one is convinced that the choice of translation was perhaps not entirely inappropriate. Gearey's book offers some useful observations on Faust, but its main arguments and even its stylistic quirks seem more attuned to an audience at home with "fain" and "doth" than to the actual concerns oÃ- present-day readers. This is not to say that every new study on Goethe has to be thoroughly trendy; but our discipline does have a history and there are risks, as Gearey's work suggests, in disregarding whole chunks of it. Neil Flax 229 Given the nature of the translation, it is understandable that the poetry of Goethe's play is not an overriding concern for Gearey. The author's argument is rather that the manner in which Faust was composed—through several incomplete versions and over a long period of time—is the clue to the essential meaning of the work, which is "the recognition of life as process" (p. 187). The idea that literature of the Romantic era is concerned with ongoing "process" as opposed to static "being" is of course one of the more familiar themes of modern cultural history. Gearey doesn't exactly claim that his application of the idea to Goethe is original, but at the same time he takes little notice of the fact that he is covering well-worked critical ground. It is a measure of the curious insularity of the study that the first hint that "process" is a standard notion in the history of the period comes in a footnote a few pages before the end. We learn there that Werden and Sein are "concepts upon which the distinction between the romantic and the classical view of life and of art is often built" (p. 204). But apart ftom its over-familiarity, the argument as applied hete is questionable in its basic premise. No criticism in any of the arts has succeeded in establishing a necessary connection between the way a work is composed and its essential meaning. The sense of a poem written in a single burst of inspiration is often perfectly contradictory and openended , while a work labored over for years and through numerous interruptions can end up as a model of classical closure and harmony. This does not mean...