The Classical Facade: A Nonclassical Reading of Goethe's Classicism (review)

Goethe Yearbook 225 ironic, but Faust, as an antipoetic work, defeats irony. Faust accomplishes ironic self-consciousness, while the antipoetic restores irony. Ironic illusoriness interrupts the tragic process, but an ironic mechanism returns tragedy to itself. Irony is the deepest reflection of the human tragedy, yet it also blocks our cathartic experience of the tragic. Irony submerges us, Christ-like, into life, while ironic seawalls keep chaotic reality at a distance. Irony can be cheerful, or it can be a source of anguish. Poetic irony fails when excessive demands are placed on it, but a general verbal irony constitutes our human totality and our knowledge of truth. According to Bennett, sibylline language "avoids enunciating any particular thought to the exclusion of others, but rather says everything at once. The sibylline speaker [...] seeks to realize his speaking as [...] a conscious movement of submergence; the conscious totality from which he speaks is not subjected to analysis [...]" (257). Certainly this pervasive stylistic quality of Goethe's Theory of Poetry also has something to do with its ambition to say everything by anticipating every possible response to its positions. Hence its related tendency to produce in us a sense of hermeneutic crisis that nothing more can be said. Anyone conversant in the secondary and tertiary literature on Faust can easily recognize this as a symptom of degeneracy — so far as the critical tradition is concerned. Unlike Faust, however, which, according to Bennett, initiates a moment of linguistic renewal by preparing us once again to "speak simply," his own epic work, so far as I am able to tell, does not — in its totality — secure any new ground from which we, as a community of critics, can ironically free ourselves from its high seriousness, thereby enabling us to speak with critical authority again. Goethe's Theory of Poetry — while often splendid in certain approaches it takes to individual problems of interpretation — must finally be read (ironically, I suppose) as a magnificent failure: and this according to the very terms that it has offered us by way of reading Goethe's Faust. University of Pittsburgh Clark S. Muenzer Weisinger, Kenneth D., The Classical Facade: A Nonclassical Reading of Goethe's Classicism. University Park, London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. Decrying the pernicious influence of classicism in architecture, Adolf Behne blamed it on the academics: "Nein, die griechische Harmonie ist ein Trugbild brillentragender Philologen!" (Die Wiederkehr der Kunst, 1919, 74). A similar sentiment pervades Weisinger's comments on Goethe's image as a "classical" writer. Philologists and critics, either because they did not look closely enough or because they were blinded by Goethe's reputation, have not seen that the harmony of his texts conceals tensions, fractures and ruptures. "It is possible," he suggests, "that beneath the polish of their surface these works reveal a moral ambiguity which is of greater interest to contemporary readers than the cool monumentality Heine found so decorative and uninspiring" (11). But if Weisinger undertakes to disturb the apparent surface calm of the texts, it is not with the intentions or methods of ribald deconstruc- 226 Book Reviews tionists such as Avital Ronell. Nor is Goethe to be brought to account from a Gramscian perspective for perpetrating hegemonic control over German literature. Neither of these strategies would be appropriate, for Weisinger's Goethe is to be redeemed against misreaders, is to be refurbished as a writer whose ironies should not deny him a place as a major canonical figure even when the claims and concepts of Klassik will no longer do. Not to be repressed is a slight wry grin, as we follow the twists required in debunking Goethe's classicism in order to keep him alive as a classic. Many teachers of German may also sigh wistfully at Weisinger's confident assertion that "Goethe's Faust rests secure as one of the handful of major literary monuments of the Western world which will be read and reread, interpreted and reinterpreted, by every new generation" (25). Would that it were so! The shiftiness inherent in the term "classical" is displayed by Weisinger in the introductory chapter. In some contexts, it refers to the ideals represented by Greek and Roman civilization. At other...