CLASSICAL FACADE, THE - A NONCLASSICAL READING OF GOETHE'S CLASSIICISM

This exploration of the kinship between Faust and Goethe's classical works makes no attempt at a healing resolution between the two Goethes, but offers a suggestion for the relocation of the sense of dichotomy.

Faust, Iphigenia in Tauris, the Roman Elegies, and Hermann and Dorothea all share a sense of the disunity of the modern world, and this sense is conveyed in each case through a rewriting of older literature. Faust is no longer the denizen of the chapbooks: he is now trapped in a new world where earlier distinctions and certainties no longer apply, where the difference between redemption and damnation has been blurred; his contours as a personality, as well as the existence of any external moral order, have been rendered ambiguous.

Margarete, Faust's own literary project and the victim of his fragmentation of self, begins her existence as a whole and healthy individual, but ends as torn and fragmented as Faust himself. Implicit in this trajectory from wholeness to disunity is a growing awareness that her life is being made the material of literary transformation and, like so many of Goethe's characters, she dies a death without progeny, and one fraught with dimensions of consuming "literariness." The book then moves to Iphigenia who, like Faust, finds herself in a world where the ancient moral order has been relocated from the external to the internal, and the interiorization has rendered ambiguous any grounding for moral decision.

With the Roman Elegies, we see Goethe raise the literariness of Iphigenia to a higher level as the author makes his own awareness of his relationship to the literary traditions of the past a constituent element of the text itself. Like the other literary figures of the earlier works, the poet of the Elegies is revealed as a person caught in the meshes of literature, unable to make a clear distinction between art and life, and so condemned to a reflected existence within an ambiguous frame.

Finally, Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea is presented as a brilliant subversion of the optimistic idyll of middle-class life through a parody of earlier German literary works, themselves parodies of Homer. Goethe's result is an ironic comedy where resolution is proclaimed while at the same time disunity and disharmony are revealed to be as powerful as ever.

Fragmentation and the resuscitated literary text is a theme throughout all these works of Goethe. Each work treats it differently and ingeniously; it is a theme that brings Faust squarely into the critical preoccupation of our own day, and it renders the classical works less formidably monumental and therefore more readable to us.

Kenneth Weisinger teaches German and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.