Goethe's Theory of Poetry: "Faust" and the Regeneration of

Language (review)

Clark S. Muenzer

Goethe Yearbook, Volume 6, 1992, pp. 217-225 (Review)

Published by North American Goethe Society

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/gyr.2011.0241

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/377537/summary

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 Goethe Yearbook 217

universal genius — everything but the fact that readers around the worfd still
find his works of compelling interest.
Thus the book is deeply ambivalent toward Goethe. Sengle wants to read
him literally, and to focus exclusively, or at least largely, on his concern with
the real. Whenever possible he avoids Goethe's idealism, formalism, and
commitment to aesthetic autonomy. He does not want to see, in other words,
what connects Goethe to the Romantics, and devotes two essays to equivoca-
tions on Goethe's relation to them. Not surprisingly, Sengle finds nothing
more misguided or more pernicious than the idea of an "Age of Goethe" as
advocated by the great scholars of Geistesgeschichte.
While I do not have much use for Korff myself, I prefer to use period
designations that encompass afl the writere of the period; hence I follow
normal Anglo-American usage and refer to Goethe as a Romantic. Since this
term is unacceptable to Sengle largely for reasons of cuttural politics in
Germany during his formative and mature years, there seems little point in
taking issue with such a deep-seated motivation. One can, however, take issue
with Sengle's readiness to buy into the very terminology he attacks. The
discourse of Geistesgeschichte was liable to extreme political abuse because it
was imprecise and consistently reified. If Sengle were not so ready to believe
in Classicism and Romanticism, Enlightenment and Biedermeier, Aristokratis-
mus and Bürgerlichkeit as concrete entities, he would not have to begin the
Restoration in the 1790s (136). He repeatedly praises Goethe for his
opposition to "-isms" of all sorts, but his own book abounds with the very
ones promulgated by the anathematized Geistesgeschichtler.
There is, finally, something touching and profoundly significant in this
inconsistency. Sengfe appears in this book as a man of strong and decent
political convictions. He is sensitive to the enormous difficulty of freeing
Goethe from the tangles of his reception, and feels a moral compulsion to
rebel against the Goethe myth promulgated by his teachers before the war and
against any revival of it. At the same time, he cannot free himself from its
power or from its discourse. This book documents the tragic quagmire any
responsible German writing about Goethe must still negotiate.

University of Washington Jane K Brown

Bennett, Benjamin, Goethe's Theory of Poetry: "Faust" and the

Regeneration of Language. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1986.

Benjamin Bennett treats Faust as the immensely complicated rehearsal of

Goethe's philosophical anthropology. According to Bennett, the essence of
poetry is to reveal "a world-originating 'power' in all language" (17)· Over
time, however, poetry increasingly asserts its revelatory power as privileged,
and cultural communities experience expectations for literature that can no
longer be fulfilled. Hence, poetry also "periodically arrives at crises" (16).
These existen tial crises, Bennett asserts, can only be overcome by provisionally
defeating "the ironic process" (16) that defines the poetic tradition. But such
defeats finally also occasion redemptive reversals. Thus, in the "antipoetic"
218 Book Reviews

Faust Goethe's collective audience comes to the crucial recognition that "its
excessive demands on poetry are in truth already fulfilled even by common
language, and poetry, for both the producer and the recipient, is restored as
a possibility" (16).
For Bennett, Goethe's Faust — "in its own way a work of literary theory"
(232) — exemplifies this efficacy of the antipoetic. As a project on the margins
of literature, which traditionally anchors its epistemology in the individual's
ironic consciousness of truth, Faust repeatedly demonstrates "the unavaila-
bility of an adequate individual point of view from which [it] can be
understood" (290). Its "sibylline" text, which "says too much" (291), does not,
therefore, constitute "a work of poetry, at least in Goethe's underetanding of
the term" (290). By refusing to be silent, it in fact occupies every possibfe
individual standpoint through which a reader might achieve a detached
perspective to judge it: "The point is thatFaust does not make the characteris-
tic poetic gesture of rounding itself off and leaving us alone to think about it.
It makes, rather, the gesture of attempting to swallow us up" (292). Unlike
poetry, which produces its meanings by ironically undercutting any single
perspective upon reality, Faust anticipates the "whole of our consciousness"
(292) by articulating every possible standpoint outside of the text, including
the ironic one of the poetic tradition.
Goethe's Theory of Poetry persistently absorbs us in this kind of character-
istic difficulty by intentionally basing its arguments on an explanatory
framework of increasing self-complication. Accordingly, its last five chapters
require us to redirect our attention from textual hermeneutics to an all-
encompassing metaphysics of literary reception. At the same time, however,
the book's macrocosmic desire to include everything in its field of vision at
times obscures its numerous points of interpretive power. We thus remain
discontent with it as work of criticism or of literary theory. Because Bennett
does not avoid essentializing his own critical vocabulary, moreover, termino-
logical slippage becomes inevitable — as he occasionally acknowledges
himself. As a result, we often feel dazzled by the book's epic plot and
allegorical agents. "Irony," in particular, but also "reality," "poetry," "the
antipoetic," "language," and "community," together confront us as loqua-
ciously as Homunculus in search of his corporeal substance. But Bennett's
pageant of terms finally fails to re-establish any sustaining contact with the
body of Goethe's text and the historical conditions of its production. Having
noted this difficufty, I will nonetheless recapitulate Bennett's critical shaping
of the Faust text through Chapter Seven, which in turn prepares his
arguments of Chapters Eight through Twelve iorFaust as Goethe's paradigma-
tic construction of a communally based theory of language and poetic
tradition.
Chapters One, Four, Five, and Seven address the perennial scholarly
question as to the "unity" of Faust by presenting a series of arguments on
what Bennett calls its "rhythmic structures" (167). Of these, we learn, there
are "at least four: tragedy and interruption, activity and withdrawal, articula-
tion and submergence, the trajectory of despair" (167). Furthermore, "each
of the rhythms manifests a different aspect of the problem of self-conscious-
ness" (167). The "master pattern" of interrupted tragedy (17-39), for example,
presents the opening "Nacht" scenes by analyzing self-consciousness as a
 Goethe Yearbook 219

"tragedy rooted in the internal division of the self' (24). As a scholar, we

learn, Faust knows about the divine aspect of his nature. Yet he receives his
knowledge "as torment, not joy" (24). When the drama begins, this tormented
knowledge quickly brings him to the brink of suicide, but the Easter bells
forestall his action, and his tragedy is "interrupted," Bennett correctly points
out, if not altogether avoided. Hence the "Zwei Seelen" speech first specifies
the nature of Faust's inescapable division as one between body ("Erdgeist")
and spirit (Wagner), while 'Vor dem Tor" and "Studierzimmer I" next refigure
it, respectively, as Nature vs. Wagner and Mephistopheles vs. the Bible
translation. In the more extensive "Gretchentragodie" the same pattern
pertains: Faust's submergence into the world of the senses and the guilt that
it engenders are interrupted by the "practically actionless realm of symbolism
('Walpurgisnacht,' 'Walpurgisnachtstraum')," and these interruptions of "a
more or less cohesive dramatic action" are followed, in turn, by a "resumption
of the action leading to a catastrophe that is modified by a vision of ultimate
salvation" (26).
What we have through Part One, then, is what will be "repeated exactly
in the whole of the Faust tragedy [...]" (27). Accordingly, Part Two continues
the "Walpurgisnacht" interruption of dramatic action through its first three
acts, where Faust assumes a "sort of symbofic existence" (27) — as Plutus,
court magus, Antaeus, Orpheus, medieval nobleman, and Arcadian lover and
father. Because Faust, moreover, as we knew him, fades into the background
until Acts Four and Five, this second major interruption requires us to
imagine "not the fictional self-consciousness of a character, but the actual self-
consciousness of a spectator or reader [...]" (27). Consequently, two equally
important, though opposing, dimensions of consciousness have been revealed.
Faust's detached self-consciousness in the "Nacht" scenes first produces his
tragedy. The complication of his self-consciousness as memory in the "Easter"
scene and in "Anmuthige Gegend," however, together with the foregrounding
through Part Two, Act III, of the audience's consciousness, interrupt that
tragedy as well. Bennett can therefore conclude "that the source of the
interruption of tragedy in Faust is the same as the source of the tragic itself
(29).
From this point Bennett goes on to identify a series of lesser interruptions
that he connects with "the work's own ironic, self-aware illusoriness" (30),
and so, too, with the increasingly dominant role in the play of "our detached
perspective as an audience" (31). And subsequently, the structural question
as analyzed in Chapter One reappears in three additional chapters to establish
Faust's insistence on certain rhythmic patterns that bear some analogy to
"interruption and tragedy." Thus, in Chapter Four ("Tragedy and Masturba-
tion: The Audience as a Community") Bennett articulates a structure of
"activity and withdrawal" by first critically reading Faust's seclusion and nature
communion in "Wald und Höhle" as "the intellectual equivalent of masturba-
tion" (85). This structure, he summarizes,

has three major phases: a period of committed, though apparently

futile earthly activity, before Part One opens, is followed by the scene
"Nacht," in which Faust attempts to become more effectively active by
means of magic but only really succeeds in withdrawing contempla-
220 Book Reviews

tively from the worfd; then, with Mephistopheles's aid, he embarks on

a new active phase, the seduction of Gretchen, and at the beginning
of Part Two, despite the catastrophe, is apparently convinced that he
is moving in the right direction; his need to justify his activity in
universal terms, however, leads him away from activity into the Helen
quest, which, after it has run its course, gives way to a new Mephis-
tophelean vision of emptiness, the futile cycle of the tides, and a new
challenge to active endeavor; but in the very midst of his final project,
the paradox of human activeness appears via the idea of "Sorge, " and
Faust's efforts in the end are essentially contemplative or speculative,
not outwardly effective. (102-03)

The arguments continue in Chapter Four that mediation between the poles
of our material and intellectual aspects is philosophically possible for us as
individuals. Yet "activity and withdrawal" can be mediated practically, Bennett
further concludes, only through "the idea of human community" (107). Hence
the importance of religion in Part Two, Acts Four and Five, and the increas-
ingly crucial role played by Faust's audience, which Chapter Five ("Levels of
Consciousness: The Audience as Individuals") begins to analyze by examining
the third rhythmic structure: "submergence and articulation."
The firet of these oppositional movements, which is downward, occurs
"when consciousness, in the process of ascending to higher levels, becomes
intolerable" (117). Such reversal of direction satisfies, because here the
content of consciousness has become more restricted, finite, or particular.
Iconographically, Bennett goes on to associate "submergence" with images of
blindness, costuming, sleep, and insanity. Motivationally, he links it with
poetry and embodiment. By contrast, "articulation," which traces an upward
movement and involves increasingly disparate contents, arduously strives
toward the general until consciousness "embraces contradictions deep enough
to threaten its existence" (117). Articulation ends, as an extreme, therefore,
with "Sorge" or care, "which poisons all action or resolve" (123).
Following this initial discussion of movements of consciousness within
individual characters, Bennett describes "submergence and articulation" as the
"way a poetic work initiates movements of consciousness in its audience"
(126). This enables him, in turn, to argue that the experience of the audience
in Faust involves privileged moments "of simultaneous detachment and
involvement" (131) and that such moments resemble Schillerian "Spiel." But
they are still limited, he concludes, to the consciousness of "the ideal
individual spectator" (134-35). That is, the question of a communal mediation
still remains unanswered — until it is reopened in Chapter Seven ("The
Reality of the Real: InterpretingF««*f asa Poem"), where Bennett presents his
fourth and most encompassing rhythmic structure, the "trajectory of despair. "
To discern its overall pattern he suggests a pairing of scenes (cf. charts,
187-88) that demonstrates his remarkable originality as a reader. Their overall
trajectory, he argues, "represents the inevitable cyclical process by which the
mind repeatedly experiences its incommensurability with nature, its imprison-
ment within its own conscious mechanism, its inability to achieve firm contact
with [...] anything unequivocally real." Firet the mind turns "outward, to
discover some compelling object or fiefd of activity, in the contemplation or
 Goethe Yearbook 221

prosecution of which it can forget itself." But it also "reexperiences, in reverse

order and as a travesty, the stages of its own upward struggle, thus recogniz-
ing in itself, tormentedly, a frustratingiy seff-contained and self-mirroring
process with no solid external contact by which to stabilize or measure or
define itself (166-67). And this trajectory, Bennett concludes, also reflects
something that takes place within the audience, which is constantly denied
lasting contact with the reality oÃ- Faust:

Now, however, we can say something about how [...] Faust mobilizes
its audience's sense of itself as a community. The technique is the
same as that by which the spectator or reader is made aware of the
conditions of his individual existence; the quality of community in the
audience is permitted to interfere with what appears to be a definite
goal both of the work and within the fiction. Despite his absence in
much of the second half, we initially refer the trajectory of Gretchen
scenes to the operation of Faust's mind; he develops, through her, a
relation to the solidly real that then inevitably deteriorates. But [...] it
is clear that we must refer the trajectory to our own situation as well,
to our conventional expectation that poetry must procure for us an
especially intense contact with the real, an expectation that is thwarted
by the quality of poetry as convention, as an affair of the community.
(173)

Clearly, the limits of a review will not permit my rehearsing Bennett's full
complication of such broad critical terms as "community," "the real," and
"poetry," or even the more familiar "irony," and "consciousness," with the care
each requires. But the very need for complication so often in his argument
symptomatically suggests that he has chosen the terminological issue to
connect our own self-consciousness as critics with Faust's tragic self-conscious-
ness as a figure in drama. Indeed, Goethe's Theory of Poetry deploys an array
of critical constructions, each of which seems to have the motivational force
of Faust's striving toward something essential. That is, each appears to reach
for some knowledge about the essence oÃ- Faust that it approaches only at a
point of failure. But this failure is forestaffed by the term's further self-
reflection, and the book's search for an essential terminology is momentarily
redeemed. To illustrate how far Bennett reaches to articulate his theoretical
framework, I would like to offer an extensive (though only partial) catalogue
of the crucial term "irony," which his plot insistently moves through a
labyrinth of contexts and usages. Certainly, long familiar with the rhetorical
and philosophical maneuvers of Faust, we might nod in assent to any one of
the following conclusions about the function of irony in Faust. But their sum,
or how they are afl connected, as well as their connection with other related,
and similarly complicated constructions, too frequently remains obscure:

Poetry is simply a use of language that becomes revelatory for us,

because we agree to treat it [...] with a particular kind of irony. (16)

By the antipoetic I mean a type of verbal stratagem that defeats the

ironic process — the ironic attitude or method of reading preserved
222 Book Reviews

in language by poetic tradition — and that by defeating this irony

articulates it, throws it into relief, restores it. (16)

The work adopts an ironic perspective relative to itself as a symbolic

illusion; it becomes self-reflexive, no longer wholly involved in itself as
a cohesive, psychologically plausible experience. (28)

It is always possible to assume a point of view from which the tragic

no longer appears tragic after all [...]. This is the principle that
operates in Faust through the repeated interruption of a tragic
process by some reminder of the work's own ironic, seff-aware
illusoriness [...]. (30)

Tragedy, once interrupted, returns to itself not byway of an imaginary,

fatal mechanism within the fiction but by way of an ironic mechanism
built into the relationship between fiction and audience. (35)

It is the ironic aspect oÃ- Faust, paradoxically, that reflects the tragedy
of the human condition at its deepest, the truth that in real life there
is no real or lasting catharsis, no cleansing, the truth that our
existence, by virtue of self-consciousness, is ineluctably tragic, but that
precisely because of our self-consciousness we are always as it were
one step ahead of ourselves and so never undergo our own tragic
destiny in a definitive, knowable, cathartically satisfying form [...]. (35)

The ironic involvement of the audience with the fiction has the effect,
ultimately, of transforming even our daily existence beyond the limits
of the work into a kind of imitatio Christi, a constant resurrection
from the constant tendency toward non-existence that is generated by
our inevitable self-conscious condition. (37)

Irony in language is thus a kind of imitatio Christi by which the divine

essence in us clothes itself, as it were, in the flesh, in the idiom of its
"Mitwelt," [...] instead of seeking absolute enjoyment of the divine.
(50)

"Am I a god?" Every person, or at least every inquiring mind of the

type represented by the Poet and Faust, must know that the answer to
this question is yes, but must say that the answer is no. Hence the
need for irony, or discretion, or indeed "error," in all verbal expres-
sion, especially in poetic expression. (50)

The poet's task is to establish life in the precinct of death, in that

coffin of hopelessly self-complicating intellect in which Faust later
entraps himself; his task is to transform death into fife by irony, to
affirm the "whole circle" of mortality and Becoming just as God
counteracts deadly Luciferian "concentration" by accepting mortality
as Christ [...]. (54)
 Goethe Yearbook 223

[...] only if the impulse toward truth is understood as "Werden," as an

impulse to realize truth by irony, does this impulse imply a vigorous
and pleasurable affirmation of deception. (55)

[...] authorial irony in poetry, especially dramatic poetry, is a source

not of alienation but of harmony between the artist and his audience.
(56)

All people are always essentially artists, ironically at play, keeping their
vitally necessary distance from the truth, and in the actuai work of art
it is therefore man's power that is revealed. (57)

Our knowledge of the truth [...] itself constitutes an unceasing "flood"

of potential confusion or chaos that constantly threatens and must be
kept at a distance, as it were, by the seawalls of the ironic communal
game of errors that is life. (59)

Faust's last project thus symbolizes not only the Poet's error but also
his true task: to keep truth at a distance, but never at so great a
distance that it ceases to threaten us and require of us constantly the
deepest of all ironies, our committed participation in natural human
life. (60)

But in Faust we are shown an individual who is entirely lacking in

irony [...]. We might resort to the idea of allegory and conclude that
[...] the true hero of the work is a composite personality including
both Faust and Mephistopheles, that Faust and Mephistopheles
together make up an allegorical diagram of the ironic personality, a
picture of tension between its positive and negative moments. (90)

[...] the tension between contemplation and action, when realized in

time as an oscillatory movement, manifests tragic futility; but the same
tension, I will argue later, is the structure of a culturally valuable
irony. (96)

[...] if we could once learn, as the jokes in Faust would teach us, to
appreciate the cultural value of myth, but without taking it too
seriously, then myth in a sense would genuinely come alive for us, for
we would experience it with the same cheerfully creative irony as did
its originators. (141)

[...] we can actually reexperience the mythical, but only by keeping it

at a distance, only by treating it with a free anachronistic irony that
reenacts its original irony. (146)

In its Classical aspect irony is an assent to the inherent ironic tendency

of memory or language, an enforcing of the absence of unreflected
experience, a movement in the service of submergence, community,
reconciliation. But irony is also renunciation of the truth of human
224 Book Reviews

divinity, a renunciation [...] by which that truth is validated and so

maintained as a source of anguish; irony in this sense, as it were, is
our repeated Romantic self-crucifixion. (148)

The Romantic traverses the same path as the Classical, but downward,
with a bad conscience, with its self-detached irony expressed as
torment and reproach rather than as a communal and communicative
spirit. (179)

Irony in its Romantic aspect renounces knowledge of divinity and

insists on finitude, just as mimesis insists on striving to represent the
strictly finite and real; irony in its Classical aspect assents to the
inherent ironic potential of memory or language and so achieves a
maximum of "objectivity," a maximally settled communal humanity,
just as antiphany assents to the inaccessibility of the real and so
achieves a reality as close to the real as we can come. (180)

Faust's failure is a movement of irony with respect to his vision

considered as an image of the situation of the audience, and therefore
it entails an avoidance of perfected antiphany. (194)

What Friedrich Schlegel dreams of in his "Rede über Mythologie," a

realization of individual, ironic self-consciousness as itself the basis for
a new community, is thus in a sense accomplished in Faust. But [...]
in relation to the work oÃ- Faust, by way of its indefinable genre [...].
(226)

We shall expect the polar relationship between dependence on

established form and originality of expression to produce something
like the irony that is handed down in the history of science. (268)

Irony, then, is transmitted in poetic tradition in much the same way as

scientific tradition; and poetic tradition, like scientific tradition, thus
contributes to the maintenance of a gênerai verbal irony that consti-
tutes our human totality and our knowledge of truth. (285)

The style of Faust is sibylline in the sense that it refuses, every

available way, to be one-sided. It does not articulate a segment of
consciousness in relationship to which we might develop an ironic
perspective; it insists on becoming the whole of our consciousness. We
cannot read the text against itself, because the text insists on reading
itself against itself, in ways that at every turn anticipate our conscious-
ness of it. There is no special need to rehearse more examples of this
tendency [...]. (292-93)

My own burdensome rehearsal of Bennett's mapping of Faust's ironic path

suggests why Goethe's Theory of Poetry does not ultimately succeed as a work
of criticism or theory. For at no point in this confusing trajectory do we as
readere find any release or relief from its sibylline complications: Poetry is
 Goethe Yearbook 225

ironic, but Faust, as an antipoetic work, defeats irony. Faust accomplishes

ironic self-consciousness, while the antipoetic restores irony. Ironic illusori-
ness interrupts the tragic process, but an ironic mechanism returns tragedy
to itself. Irony is the deepest reflection of the human tragedy, yet it also blocks
our cathartic experience of the tragic. Irony submerges us, Christ-like, into
life, while ironic seawalls keep chaotic reality at a distance. Irony can be
cheerful, or it can be a source of anguish. Poetic irony fails when excessive
demands are placed on it, but a general verbal irony constitutes our human
totality and our knowledge of truth.
According to Bennett, sibylline language "avoids enunciating any particular
thought to the exclusion of others, but rather says everything at once. The
sibylline speaker [...] seeks to realize his speaking as [...] a conscious
movement of submergence; the conscious totality from which he speaks is not
subjected to analysis [...]" (257). Certainly this pervasive stylistic quality of
Goethe's Theory of Poetry also has something to do with its ambition to say
everything by anticipating every possible response to its positions. Hence its
related tendency to produce in us a sense of hermeneutic crisis that nothing
more can be said. Anyone conversant in the secondary and tertiary literature
on Faust can easily recognize this as a symptom of degeneracy — so far as the
critical tradition is concerned. Unlike Faust, however, which, according to
Bennett, initiates a moment of linguistic renewal by preparing us once again
to "speak simply," his own epic work, so far as I am able to tell, does not —
in its totality — secure any new ground from which we, as a community of
critics, can ironically free ourselves from its high seriousness, thereby enabling
us to speak with critical authority again. Goethe's Theory of Poetry — while
often splendid in certain approaches it takes to individual problems of
interpretation — must finally be read (ironically, I suppose) as a magnificent
failure: and this according to the very terms that it has offered us by way of
reading Goethe's Faust.

University of Pittsburgh Clark S. Muenzer

Weisinger, Kenneth D., The Classical Facade: A Nonclassical Reading of

Goethe's Classicism. University Park, London: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1988.

Decrying the pernicious influence of classicism in architecture, Adolf

Behne blamed it on the academics: "Nein, die griechische Harmonie ist ein
Trugbild brillentragender Philologen!" (Die Wiederkehr der Kunst, 1919, 74).
A similar sentiment pervades Weisinger's comments on Goethe's image as a
"classical" writer. Philologists and critics, either because they did not look
closely enough or because they were blinded by Goethe's reputation, have not
seen that the harmony of his texts conceals tensions, fractures and ruptures.
"It is possible," he suggests, "that beneath the polish of their surface these
works reveal a moral ambiguity which is of greater interest to contemporary
readers than the cool monumentality Heine found so decorative and
uninspiring" (11). But if Weisinger undertakes to disturb the apparent surface
calm of the texts, it is not with the intentions or methods of ribald deconstruc-