Faust through Four Centuries: Retrospect and Analysis; Vierhundert Jahre Faust: Rückblick und Analyse (review)

Goethe Yearbook 235 recorded (rare examples are "enine" for "eine" on p. 88 and "im" for "in" in a Goethe quotation on p. 31)· The book is typical of German scholarly writing in its excessively nominal style (e.g. "Das Faktum der Nicht-Vernichtung der 'Ephemerides' läßt auf Aufbewahrung des Nich tausgeführten im Sinne einer späteren Nutzung schließen," 19) and in its dissertation-like character overall. Occasional instances of mild sarcasm vis-à -vis traditional scholarship faii to disguise the essentially conventional approach. With all due regard for the concern for substance underlying the widespread German fear of seeming "essayistisch," Schanze could profit from a study of the elegant prose found in Publications of the English Goethe Society. The author invites supplementation of his bibliography-appendix B—"im Blick auf eine Literaturdatenbank zu Goethe" ("Vorwort," V). Appendix A contains his reconstruction of Goethe's Schema for Faust. Macalester College Ellis Dye Faust through Four Centuries: Retrospect and Analysis; Vierhundert Jahre Faust: Rückblick und Analyse, ed. Peter Boerner and Sidney Johnson. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1989· This volume of essays in English and German grew out of the symposium held at Indiana University in 1987 to commemorate the publication of the famous chapbook, the Historia von D. Johann Fausten. About a third of the total pages are devoted to examining the Faust tradition before Goethe and placing it in its European context; another third to Goethe's seminal work and its reception up to 1900; and the last third to the still accruing legacy in the twentieth century. The team of contributors is comprised of five Germans, one Japanese, and one Brazilian, who are all Germanists, many with comparatist interests, and eleven scholars based in the United States, who divide about evenly into experts in German literature and in English and comparative studies. Needless to say, no single book of a few hundred pages could hope to include all the relevant topics which merit attention. But general readers as well as specialists will find that the approaches here to key works and cultural sharings and misprisions make a very effective combination. The comparatist Harry Levin sets a high standard with his compact introductory essay, gracefully sketching a Faustian typology from the Renaissance birth of the durable mythologeme to its reimbeddings in our times. As the volume's opening gambit, his overview clearly demonstrates the enormous advantages which Faust criticism since World War II derives from a selective (as against narrow doctrinal) use of anthropology, psychology, and myth studies, when we approach the complex of "Faustian" attributes (scholar, trickster, magus, rebel, etc.) and their metamorphoses. Levin highlights Marlowe's grasp of the tragic potential of the story swaddled in its original folkloric and biblical motives and his crucial fusion of the I carian and Luciferic prideful falls with the Promethean drive and (Dantesque) Odyssean quest. By the time of Lessing, whose plans and fragments Hans Henning examines in a separate essay, Faust could readily be understood to be a perplexing incarnation of the humanist hero as a force in the eventual 236 Book Reviews enlightenment of the race. Levin sees Goethe's reenergizing of the secularized archetype as decisive in the epochal shift toward the liberal, humanitarian view of Faust as modern everyman. The prominence of the divine wager (Job) and of woman as an animating principle accents the universal role of the representative striver in the "tragedy." Most important, Levin asserts from our vantage near the end of the twentieth century, was Goethe's far-reaching analysis and conflation of myths in a post-Romantic theater of the mind. Faust's rise as a secular "culture hero" was thus more or less coextensive with the rise of the daring cultural self-scrutiny associated with the "Nietzschean" era. Mann'sDoktorFaustus, in which the demonic aspect of the modern mind and the challenge to the idea of progress are confronted, may well mark the postmodern watershed. In their preface, the editors regret that the volume contains no commentary on some major reinterpretations of Faust such as Az ember tragédiaja (The Tragedy of Man, 1835) by the great Hungarian Romantic, Imre Madách. Such materials would indeed illuminate...