Poetologie in Goethe's west-östlichem Divan (review)

350 Book Reviews naturalist), that Part I has a unique form but is Shakespearean, that Part II is fundamentally different from Part I because it is Calderonian (compounding the confusion as to what is meant by tbeatrum mundi tradition). Sometimes several paragraphs of material are offered and then declared only marginally relevant: after a full page on the history of Mistra, for example, we are told that such information has little bearing on Act III, and that Goethe probably did not have access to the main book on it (168). At a more significant level, there is not only a fundamental split between the two parts of the play, but Part I separates into the tragedies of the scholar and that of Gretchen, and Part II into aesthetic concerns (Acts II and III) and political concerns (Acts I and IV). These are all aspects of a pervasive insecurity about the quality of the play. This book is a genuine commentary: passages are rarely quoted, the discussion proceeds scene by scene, often speech by speech. Since Williams only occasionally draws connections from one scene to the next, the details of scholarly discussion on the play are communicated more successfully than the main issues. We get a good sense for the particularity in which the Faust scholarship has often confined itself, but less for what is exciting or important. The superfluous plot-summary and narrowly text-bound structure interfere with the presentation of larger issues. Interpretation in this book repeatedly involves the gesture that gave positivism a bad name, converting analogies into allegories. Lines like the following are common: "this experience might reflect Goethe's own immature classicism" (140), or, "the desertion or prevarication of the Emperor's allies [...] corresponds to the hesitancy of the Rhine Confederation" (190) —in each case without a word of text adduced to justify the association. Some of the most interesting material about Part II deals with allusions to contemporary politics, but only once, with reference to the Baccalaureus, is evidence offered to validate the analogy as an allusion. This tendency to locate meaning in events outside the text rather than in statements made by the text risks reducing Faust II to inspired journalism, or less: such sections conclude that Goethe was quite conservative in his political opinions. Although Williams is a clear, usually dispassionate, reporter of his impressively wide reading in the scholarship, the book leaves the unfortunate impression that non-specialist readers oiFaust would do better to stay away from the experts. University of Washington Jane K. Brown Lemmel, Monika, Poetologie in Goethe's west-östlichem Divan. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1987. The premise of Monika Lemmel's book is that Goethe's Divan poems express a new, anti-classical poetology informed and influenced by the unsettling political events of the early 19th century: "Es soll vielmehr gezeigt werden, wie die Poetologie des Divan unter anderem aus der Auseinandersetzung mit dem beunruhigenden Weltgeschehen ganz wesentliche Züge gewinnt" (13). Above all, Goethe Yearbook 351 Lemmel contends that Goethe's Divan has a significant political relevance as direct response against the anti-Napoleonic "Freiheitslyrik" written by many of his contemporaries. Indeed, the harmony and "unity" oftheDivan is, as Lemmel sees it, a Goethean counterproposal to the sundering brutality of the "real" political world. For Lemmel, the cornerstone of Goethe's poetology is the search for and construction of a unity — a type of "Ur-Einheit" through poetry. This unity will in turn transcend the separation and violence of the political world. In the Divan this unity finds its culmination in "Buch Suleika," in the "Ansicht der ursprünglichen Einheit aller Gegensätze" (253). It is, after all, according to Lemmel, love which is "an sich [...] schon die Einheit von Gegensätzen" (254). By and large, Lemmel's book is convincing and the interpretations of individual poems provide new insights into Goethe's Divan. However, her concentration on poetry as a means to unity causes her to neglect an important aspect of the poems. Her interpretations give the impression that Goethe's poetry is static — that it presents a complete, transcendent state, rather than the dynamic "bewegte Vollendung" which Ingeborg Hillmann illustrates so thoroughly.1 As...