Poetry after Faust

Faust Changes everything. To say that it calls into question the very idea of poetic genres is to state the obvious. In this respect it belongs to the same general historical movement as the realistic novel; and it certainly shares with the novel what Bakhtin calls the latter’s “heteroglot” quality, its rejection of the general poetic preference for a maximally “unitary” language.¹ But on the other hand, Faust is definitely neither itself a kind of novel nor an instance of the “novelization” (in Bakhtin’s sense) of some other literary type. In fact it can reasonably be regarded as antithetical to the novel, insofar as it exhibits a resistance to the medium of the printed book. Novels take to the culture and exigencies of printed books like fish to water,² whereas poetry—given that it can never shake off at least a shadow of its historical affiliation with musical performance—is never entirely comfortable on the printed page. And in contexts that involve an opposition between poetry and the novel, I think we may expect to find Faust on the side of poetry—an expectation that is of course gestured at by the fact that practically all of Faust is in verse. But the relation between Faust and the print medium has a dimension that goes far beyond whatever musicality might be attributed to its form.

The resistance of poetry in general to print is a prior resistance, originating in conditions that obtained long before the print medium existed. The resistance of Faust to the print medium is a posterior resistance that is focused on one specific characteristic of an already existing culture of printed books: the permanence and unalterability of the texts contained in those books. In manuscript cultures it is understood that a book may be altered, accidentally or deliberately, every time it is read or copied; there is, strictly speaking, no definitive text. But when a printed book is published, ordinarily in a large number of identical copies, the text appearing in those copies simply is, definitively, the work—at least until another edition appears.³ This is the aspect of print culture that Faust resists. For Faust is not the kind of literary work that can have a definitive form. It is a complicated publicistic endeavor, extending over a long period of time and involving the publication of a great deal of ancillary material. If we count the final version, which Goethe finished preparing for the press but did not live to see printed, the work itself appeared during his lifetime in five different guises, all fragmentary but the last, and all of which were included in various editions of his collected “works,” thus implying, in each case but the last, that the endeavor was very likely destined to remain a mere collection of fragments.

For most of Goethe’s life, in other words, Faust was not a work, but rather a publicly available project awaiting revision—which is what practically every text is in a manuscript culture. And this impression—of a text somehow only provisionally finished, a text with ragged or blurry edges—is perpetuated even after his death by the “paralipomena” that he himself had carefully collected and preserved for publication. Indeed, if we can believe the testimony of Johann Daniel Falk, Goethe kept a “Walpurgissack” into which he threw little poems “die auf Hexenscenen im ‘Faust,’ wo nicht auf den Blocksberg selbst, einen nähern Bezug hatten,”⁴ poems that, if published posthumously, would have the character of both belonging to Faust and yet not belonging. Or inside the work “itself,” we think especially of the topical/satirical quatrains that make up the “Walpurgisnachtstraum.” Most of the allusions in those little poems would probably have been understood by spectators or readers more or less contemporary with their composition, whereas modern readers (including most readers in the 1830s, after the whole work’s final publication) will understand practically none of them without scholarly footnotes to help out. Can we say reasonably that the work is “the same” for those two audiences? Would it not be more like the “original” work for us...