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"Sardanapal!"-The French Connection: Unraveling <i>Faust II</i>, 10176

1996; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/gyr.2011.0129

1940-9087

Peter Bloom, Hans Rudolf Vaget,

Decadence, Literature, and Society

PETER ANTHONY BLOOM AND HANS RUDOLF VAGET "Sardanapal!"—The French Connection: Unraveling Faust 11,10176 ii"pv as GROßE Schmerzenskind" of Faust scholarship, as JL/ Wühelm Emrich aptly labeled Act IV over fifty years ago, continues to perplex modern critics. In a more recent study, for example, Jane Brown characterizes the act as "the least accessible part of a generaUy inaccessible work."1 Two questions in particular seem to require further elucidation . First, what is the nature of the historical framework that Goethe constructed for his hero at this stage of the drama? And second, what is the precise relation of Act TV to the conclusion of the drama in Act V? It is our hope to cast new Ught on these questions by attempting to unravel one conspicuously enigmatic Une—a Une thus far Uttle heralded, but one that points to the heart of the historical matter fti the final sections of Goethe 's summum opus. At the opening of Act IV, awakening from his "classical-romantic" dream-journey to a mythical Greece, Faust returns to Germany and thereby reenters the realm of history—on the very stage from which he was spirited away at the close of Act I. Here, fti surroundings generaUy thought to evoke the early sixteenth-century Holy Roman Empfte of MaximiUan I, Goethe's hero is for the second time about to get involved fti the affairs of the empire. At the outset of his traversal of "die große Welt" (2052), he and Mephistopheles miraculously rescued the empfte from impending ruin. Now they wül discover that the empire is tottering on the verge of coUapse even more precariously than before the imposition of their fraudulent economic reform. The stage is thus set for the reenactment of the agony of the empire and, eventuaUy, for its transformation into a system of absolutism. The reverberations of that historical process were stiU vividly felt in the earUer nineteenth century. It is in no way surprising, therefore, that Goethe took great pains to define a role for Faust on that highly contested stage of history. Having bid fareweU to the Greek world in the magnificent monologue that opens Act IV of Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, Faust once again finds himself in the company of Mephistopheles. The former has been traveling "over land and sea" fti some sort of futuristic and airborne "cloudy vehicle ," whUe the latter has caught up with him by striding forth fti magical Goethe Yearbook 253 and bizarre "seven-league boots." The setting of their encounter, the rugged terrain of the high mountains, provides the cue for Mephistopheles to engage Faust in a deUghtful conversation about the origins of the Earth—a conversation couched in the famiUar terms of the then competing theories of "Vulcanism" and "Neptunism." By its imagery, this conversation is clearly linked to the previous disquisitions on geological matters fti the Klassische Walpurgisnacht of Act II; it also complements the meteorological frame of reference of Faust's opening soüloquy. Above aU, it reveals some of the fundamental poUtical markers associated with the two protagonists . It is now generaUy accepted that the whole geological discourse in Faust is ideologicaUy coded in terms of the tension between the notions of evolution and revolution. At this point fti the drama, the adversarial and antagonistic relationship between Faust and Mephistopheles is redefined: Mephistopheles advocates the volcanic theory of the origin of the Earth, associated with revolution; Faust, the Neptunist theory, associated with evolution. This preliminary differentiation proves by and large to be definitive , but not before Faust's ideological orientation is thoroughly tested and more precisely focused by the events that transpire fti Act TV. It is the purpose of Acts TV and V to show how Faust navigates between the ScyUa of restoration and the Charybdis of revolution to the safe shores of a territory upon which he can buUd an empfte of his own. Such questions of fundamental ideological orientation were at the time (and remain today) of far-reaching consequence. They were of especial topicaUty in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when writers and philosophers throughout Europe were virtuaUy consumed by the debate over the virtues...