Seeking Meaning for Goethe's Faust (review)

Van der Laan's Seeking Meaning for Goethe's "Faust" consists in eleven chapters covering a wide range of issues elaborated through immanent readings of Faust as well as by juxtaposing the drama with affiliated texts and authors. The study begins with an overview of the persistence of the Faustian tradition from Antiquity to popular culture and then moves on to explore Goethe's unique contribution to this tradition through such diverse topics as Faust's affinity to Job, the question of a Faustian ethics, Faust's theology, Faust II's instrumentalization of technology, Faust's relation to Nietzsche's Übermensch, the drama's enactment of a form of virtual reality, and the unanswerable question of Faust's salvation, to name just a few of the topics addressed in the study. The approach, therefore, is indeed "more thematic than exegetical" (32).

Given their kaleidoscopic diversity, the individual chapters, while often displaying shared and recurrent concerns, are ultimately held together by van der Laan's repeated emphasis on the universality of Goethe's Faust as well as on its unparalleled complexity, which has the dual effect of remaining always open to interpretation and thus in need of interpretation. The Faust myth in all its permutations throughout the ages "gives voice to something [. . .] elemental or intrinsic to our human experience, whatever our national or cultural identity" (5). Goethe's Faust, however, stands apart for van der Laan, because it is "by far the most intricately woven, most ambitious and most ambivalent of all the Faust stories" (12). This combination of ambiguity and universality seems to drive van der Laan's readings, for he postulates the drama's ineluctable pull on a Germanist (ix) due to its elaboration of the endless depths of humanity's 'great themes': "Goethe's Faust is a grand and playful collage of the great texts and stories of the Western tradition" (13); or, a few pages later: "Goethe's play confronts its audience with problems of good and evil, innocence and guilt, reward and punishment" (15). This emphasis on the universality of Faust and what it can teach us today lends Seeking Meaning a certain throwback quality, a conscious apology for a great work because of its timelessness.

Seeking Meaning's strength lies in van der Laan's notable familiarity with an abundance of scholarship on Goethe's Faust. Scarcely a page goes by in which the author does not draw upon and mobilize previous exegeses. Van der Laan is well-read, and his readings consistently profit from his erudition. Moreover, he is adept at tracing both Goethe's possible sources and the persistence of the Faust problematic in literature post-Goethe. When van der Laan sticks close to the text, the readings profit from his combination of hermeneutic precision and erudition. For example, in exploring the difficult question of form in Faust, van der Laan nicely brings the question of literary form together with Goethe's work on plant metamorphosis; drawing on the thought of Paul Böckman, Michael Neumann, John McCarthy, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Peter Salm, van der Laan argues for a modified or stunted form of metamorphosis structuring Faust, a spiral movement lacking a vertical trajectory, which additionally holds for Faust's character (29–32). The fruit of this formal argument can be found later in the text when, for example, van der Laan interprets the famous final lines of Faust II and emphasizes the immanence of the "Hier"—the 'here' of textuality, the 'here' of metaphoricity—that denies transcendence and verticality (154–55).

The more speculative moments, i.e., those that step further away from an immanent textual basis, tend to cause more problems. One striking example is chapter four, "The Divided Self," where van der Laan explores the question of why Faust "does not or cannot act morally" (73). While the Gretchen question concerns faith and the Faust question his seemingly undeserved salvation, van der Laan poses here what one could call the Blue Velvet question: 'Why are...