Goethe's "Faust." The German Tragedy (review)

Robert Spaethling 347 information. It is also a model of succinctness, clarity, and comprehensiveness —ideaUy suited to conclude the review of this fine volume. Lange not only presents Goethe's comments on literary subjects and die art of writing, but Goethe as a literary phenomenon, a writer who embraced in his art antiquity as well as "modernity." From beginning to end, Lange notes, Goethe's tiieory of writing and reading rested upon his faitii in the artistic and moral value of "shaped speech." This is one reason why Goethe admired Shakespeare, whom he considered the great articulator of the universe. We may weU think the same of Goethe. University of Massachusetts Boston Robert Spaethling Brown, Jane K., Goethe's "Faust." The German Tragedy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986. The aim of this important study is to problematize two interpretative clichés diat have been part and parcel of Faust-criticism since its inception and that are neady brought into focus by the subtitle—"The German Tragedy." Jane Brown argues that Goedie's Faust is neidier. That it is not a tragedy in the Aristotelian and neoclassical sense is obvious. But if it is not a tragedy as it claims to be, than how do we come to grips with its unorthodox form? Taking clues primarily from Stuart Atkins, Brown places Faust in the tradition of Calderon's El gran teatro del mundo, noting correctly that Goethe's use of die world-theater tradition "is not only self-conscious revival of an already self-conscious mode but meditation on die mode itseff and on die proper nature of drama" (p. 25). Her second contention is that "Faust is in significant respects less German than it is often taken to be" (p. 254). Brown is, of course, too sophisticated a critic to base her thesis on Goethe's personal utterances about Germany and the Germans. Rather, her argument is grounded in the rich and far-ranging intertextuality of the work. Here Brown focuses on die manner in which Goethe reviews not onfy the Faust mytii but, in fact, the entire European literary tradition. What exactly is the function of the non-Faustian material in Goethe's transformation of die Faust myth? Brown's book opens up fascinating new perspectives on precisely this question, arguing that "the constant allusions to die larger European tradition, taken together widi die consistent subversion of the values of the Faust legend, represent a concern to integrate Germany into a broad tradition and not to establish a separate national Uterature" (p. 31 ). At an earlier point she even attributes to Goethe the "desire" (by which is meant, I take it, some conscious, programmatic intention) "to situate German literature in the European tradition" (p. 29). Brown is, however, unable to explain such desire; it can only be postulated. She would like us to view it as somehow related to Goethe's concept of "Weltliteratur." But must one not wonder about the chronology here? Goedie articulated his ideas about a world literature rather late in life, and casuaUy, after Part I and most of Part II of Faust had been completed. And besides, Goethe's conception of "Weltliteratur" does not imply the 348 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA kind of internationalization of German literature to which Brown's argument seems to point. Her thesis would be more persuasive ff German nationalism had indeed been a serious problem confronting Goethe. It was not. Nationalism in the political sense of the term, an essentially post-Napoleonic phenomenon in Germany, could tiius hardly have shaped, direcdy or indirecdy, the conception of Faust as a kind of antidote to nationalism. Nor could it have motivated Goedie to tie German literature more closely to its European context. Brown has an admirable command of die apparently unlimited intertextual horizon of Faust, and she speaks rightly of Goethe's "internationalism" (p. 109). But these qualities would radier seem to be an expression of his "natural" cosmopolitanism as an 18th-century homme de lettres—natural because he lived in a world in which, as yet, neither German nationalism nor, in fact, Germany as a political entity, existed. Nonetheless, the merits of this study do not depend...