Goethe’s Faust and Cultural Memory: Comparatist Interfaces ed. by Lorna Fitzsimmons (review)

Lorna Fitzsimmons lays out an ambitious and exciting research agenda with this new collection of essays by leading Goethe scholars from North America and Australasia. Her introduction, “Magian Mnemotechny,” rushes through an impressive gallery of scholars of cultural memory and intertextuality. Each paragraph tantalizingly introduces a new set of theorists from sociology, anthropology, or literary studies before plunging on to the next cluster of citations (the endnotes and bibliography rival the body of the essay in length). By the end of the introduction, readers are looking forward to nine explorations “of the multifarious and increasingly intercultural mnemonic functions of Goethe’s canonic text” (9). They are treated instead to nine interesting essays that make little pretense to any explicit analysis of Faustian mnemonology or collective memory (the one exception is Susanne Ledanff’s contribution, which invokes the Assmanns’ work on cultural anamnesis).

Perhaps a more accurate, if less lofty, way to characterize what all of the widely disparate articles in this book have in common (aside from Faust) would be to think of them as explorations of different modes of reception, whether academic or theatrical; individual or national. The first three chapters focus on scholars’ interpretations; the fourth turns to one poet’s complex relationship to Goethe’s Faust (Coleridge); Chapters 5 and 7 examine the reverberations of Faust through two national cultures (Argentina and Canada); Chapters 6 and 8 describe recent theatrical productions of (or inspired by) Faust; and the final chapter is a scientist’s meditation on Faust’s relevance to modern AI research.

Alan Corkhill’s “The Faustian Contest with the Authority of the Word” is a comparative journey through the genres and institutions of the written word in Goethe’s Faust and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Corkhill’s principle contention is that especially Goethe’s text offers a deconstructive critique of the authority of the word in its various guises. This claim and the other interesting arguments to which he alludes along the way seem to have been made more completely elsewhere (Corkhill refers readers to five of his own previous studies). Nevertheless, the chapter provides a helpful concordance of all the instances in the two plays that deal with language as a communicative endeavor, with brief but suggestive comments pointing readers to the relevant scholarship on each.

In “The Enigmatic Eternal-Feminine,” J. M. van der Laan provides a similar service for the mystic figure of the feminine in Goethe’s Faust. His chapter amounts to a compendium of scholars’ attempts to propose allegorical candidates for the meaning of the play’s final lines. He helpfully points out the links between interpretive strategies for the eternal-feminine and gnostic thinking. Like Corkhill, van der Laan comes to the conclusion that the play’s hermeneutic resistance prefigures postmodern obsessions with the inherent insufficiency of representation. “If the contradictions […] can be harmonized at all,” he claims, “it is with the unsolvable paradoxes and ironies of life itself” (44). This chapter would have benefited, however, from more careful copy editing for style, citations, and to eliminate repetitions.

Robert Norton’s “Herder as Faust” stands out as a particularly excellent article about a fascinating chapter in the history of academic scholarship. Norton examines the reception of Herder by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics and makes a clarion call to the ethics of research and teaching in the humanities. It turns out that what we write and lecture can have consequences after all! Norton convincingly shows how Germanists misread and misappropriated Herder—whom they inaccurately styled as an antirationalist, counter-enlightenment Faust figure—with diabolical results. His analysis is a cogent demonstration of the ways that scholarly characterizations both reflect and shape ideologies. Although Isaiah Berlin’s influential reading of Herder does not fit strictly into this chapter’s trajectory of German critics, I would be curious to hear Norton’s assessment of it. Berlin could hardly be accused of the dangerous ideological...