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  • Von der Eitelkeit der Einbildungskraft. Die ästhetische Sendung des jungen Goethe im Spiegel von "Faust II."
  • Victor Fusilero
Von der Eitelkeit der Einbildungskraft. Die ästhetische Sendung des jungen Goethe im Spiegel von "Faust II." By Christian Sbrilli. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010. Pp. 326. Paper €48.00. ISBN 978-3826043727.

Christian Sbrilli's Von der Eitelkeit der Einbildungskraft: Die ästhetische Sendung des jungen Goethe im Spiegel von "Faust II" examines how Goethe's view of the artist changed from that presented in his earlier works to that in Faust II. Sbrilli reads Faust II not only as a dramatized conversation between Goethe and his younger self, but also as a record of his own artistic development and his earlier attempts to overcome bouts of hypochondria through the recuperative power of aesthetic creativity. Finally, Sbrilli reads the figure of Faust against those of Prometheus and Wilhelm Meister.

Sbrilli begins by noting that the figure of the subject who achieves self-emancipation vis-à-vis objective reality is an important theme in the works of Goethe and his contemporaries. Possessed by the desire to dramatize reality, writers fixated on representing the sovereignty of the subject over and against external reality were in danger of falling victim to the boundlessness of their own subjective thoughts and, consequently, to melancholy and hypochondria. In a conversation with Friedrich Riemer (May 3, 1814), Goethe defines hypochondria as a "sinking into one's own subjectivity" and, indeed, as "the universal sickness of the present time" (conversation with Eckermann, Jan. 28, 1826). Goethe's letters during his work on Die Leiden des jungen Werthers show the young author conversing with the silhouettes on the walls of his Frankfurt apartment and how his later engagement with the epistolary novel form grew out of this solitary predisposition and the desire to fashion a conversational partner and an idealized self. In this regard, Prometheus figures in Goethe's early works as an important example of the power of creative genius and art. If literature is a means of coping with life (Lebensbewältigung), then the roles of the imagination and the beautiful that come into play can serve as a therapeutic against hypochondria. [End Page 159]

In Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe describes how his arrival in Leipzig was marked by bouts of hypochondria, a tendency that had begun during childhood. According to Christian Wilhelm Hufeland—a Kant specialist as well as Goethe's family doctor—hypochondria arises when the individual subjectifies all things. Consequently, Hufeland believed that the best cure for this condition was the objectification of oneself, and it is through art, especially literature, that the individual can best achieve this. With the revaluation of sensuality (Sinnlichkeit) in the eighteenth century, the aesthetic came to be recognized as being equally as important as the religious or the spiritual, and literature and poetry rose in stature as a mediator of the divine.

Both Goethe and Faust find a solution to their existential suffering in the sensual beauty of artistic creation. It is through Mephisto—the possessor of alchemical, religious, and aesthetic knowledge—that Faust comes into contact with sensuality. But in Sbrilli's interpretation, Faust represents an earlier faith that Goethe had in the power of art and the artist. In contrast to Faust, the figure of Wilhelm Meister—the aspiring dramatist who gives up his dream profession in favor of becoming a surgeon—represents the older writer's abandonment of this belief in the recuperative power of the aesthetic.

Sbrilli puts forward an interesting reading of Goethe's theory of the creative genius and of the power of the beautiful and their roots in Goethe's own biography. Although Sbrilli places too much emphasis on the biographical origin of Goethe's aesthetic theories, his connections are nevertheless intriguing and thought-provoking. By presenting a strong knowledge of the secondary literature, of eighteenth-century discussions surrounding hypochondria, and of the critical debate on the organizational structure (or lack thereof) in Faust II, Sbrilli weaves a compelling argument for a more nuanced interpretation of Faust II and how Wilhelm Meister—and not Faust—represented Goethe's view of art and the artist in his final years.

Victor Fusilero
Los Angeles...

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