In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent

Appendix: Continuation of Notes

appendix  Continuation of Notes part i, n. 2 Considering ‘‘the fundamental concerns of the play to be epistemological and aesthetic’’ (26), rather than the illustration of one man’s (failed) moral education , Brown indirectly suggests an inherent conflict between artificial forms of knowledge and Goethe’s recognition of the unartful movement of time: ‘‘to enter time is to enter change . . . Nature and temporality are inseparable . . . To enter the world is to enter the temporal flux. While it may seem obvious that to live in the world and to live in time are identical, it was not obvious to Faust in ‘Night,’ when as a human subject to time he sought to transcend the world’’ (81). Such ‘‘transcend[ence],’’ however, can only be effected in a complete identification with ‘‘temporal flux,’’ one that preempts the very experience of temporality, and, as Brown rightly points out, such identification must lead in literary terms not to the imitation of nature but rather to naturally ungrounded artificiality. As this study argues, and Brown, however, does not emphasize, it is precisely the architectural project of constructing a ground independent of nature and history that ends Faust’s immersion in the temporal world. On the pointedly allegorical mode of the Faust II, cf. also Heinz Schlaffer , Faust Zweiter Teil. Victor Lange interestingly interprets the openly ‘‘allegorical,’’ ‘‘symbolic,’’ and ‘‘citational character’’ of Faust II as ‘‘exceeding all figural and scenic representation ’’ to compose a play whose real subject is its own staging of poetic acts: more than a drama, Faust II, Lange argues, is a dramatic poem, ‘‘a poem precisely about language, about the possibilities of communicative speech within an encompassing, realized system of rhetorical and poetological means of representation and expression’’ (Lange, ‘‘Faust’’ pp. 287, 293–94). See also the fine essay by Clark S. Muenzer, ‘‘Goethe’s Goethic Classicism,’’ in which the ‘‘abruptly changing stage’’ of the play, like the figure of Helena herself, ‘‘dragged across time and space as Übertragung into Faust’s palace,’’ are shown to enact Goethe’s ‘‘essentially historical aesthetic’’ in Part Two (pp. 188, 200). 145 146 ‡ continuation of notes Although Muenzer does not treat the building project of Act V, his observation that ‘‘Goethe has layered the Faust- stage temporally’’ provides an especially fitting description of the very layers of temporal nonidentity—of theory and practice, conception and vision—that Faust would violently collapse in the construction of a ‘‘newest earth’’ ‘‘free,’’ precisely, from all previous stagings of time. A consonant view of Helen’s spectral identity in the play, and of all identities in a ‘‘state’’ of war, is offered in Jan Miekowski’s excellent ‘‘Faust at War’’ (forthcoming). Brown—whose interpretation of the play’s many internal stagings as pointedly artificial, world-literary and allegorical, rather than mimetic or narrative in intention, Muenzer’s ‘‘historical aesthetic’’ most resembles—returns to Faust in the context of opera in The Persistence of Allegory, pp. 214–15. part i, n. 13 Gernot Böhm, while clearly taking into account the destruction of the existent context that is part and parcel of Faust’s building project—‘‘The project of Faust is violent and ruthless with regard to that which exists, the elderly, represented by Philemon and Baucis. It is totalizing’’—oddly interprets Goethe’s indirect or reported descriptions of the bloody, unindividuated labor of Faust’s ‘‘slaves,’’ ‘‘called up’’ from ‘‘their camp’’ (V. 11503) as ‘‘a magical technological process,’’ an ‘‘allegorical representation’’ (see Böhme, Goethes Faust, pp. 159–60). In a related comment on Goethe’s rejection of Newton’s forceful production of prismatic color from light in favor of a process of experimentation within the ‘‘realm of nature,’’ ‘‘the immediate region of the living,’’ Werner Heisenberg compares the modern theoretical physicist, who ‘‘leaves behind the realm of living perception,’’ with an ‘‘alpinist’’ who must steadily climb higher ‘‘in order to oversee the land beneath him in its contexts’’: ‘‘the higher he climbs, the wider the land opens itself to his view, but the sparer also becomes the life that surrounds him,’’ until ‘‘finally, he reaches a blindingly clear region . . . in which all life has died’’ (Heisenberg, ‘‘Die Goethesche und Newtonische Farbenlehre,’’ p. 432). Claiming ‘‘we can be sure that to Goethe, the poet [rather than scientist], this last and purest clarity, toward which science strives, was fully known,’’ Heisenberg ascends higher than Goethe writing as poet or as scientist—Goethe, who represents the desire for such an exhaustive visual perspective in Faust...