B00ARI2G5C EBOK (6 page)

All this suggests that if we are to interpret the similar yet divergent figures of Faust and the Homunculus autobiographically, they must be held to represent the development and education of, respectively, Goethe’s poetic and his scientific genius. The symbolic role of Faust as the poet was already hinted at in Act I, as we have seen, and the hints continue in the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’, both in the finished
text and in the 1826 sketch. In both, Faust’s descent into the underworld is compared to that of Orpheus, the mythical inventor of song and poetry. In the final version, his guide Manto is also associated with the Castalian spring, sacred to Apollo and the Muses and thought to turn men into poets; Chiron (7461) urges Faust to drink from it. In the 1826 sketch Manto at one point, during their descent to Hades, suddenly casts her veil over him to protect him from the sight of the Gorgon (see Paralipomena, p. 249); this is a deliberate allusion to the similar remarkable incident in Dante’s
Inferno
(ix. 55-60), where Virgil saves Dante’s life in the same way as he is guiding him down through Hell. In other words, Faust is indirectly identified not only with the poet Orpheus but also with the poet Dante, who under the tutelage of another poet is making, like Faust, a spiritual or psychotherapeutic journey. Faust, as the Homunculus remarks ‘must thrive in this
myth-land’
(7054 f, emphasis added; literally, ‘in the kingdom of fable’,
im Fabelreich
). He must be healed by becoming a true poet; whereas the ‘chemical mannikin’ is to be made whole by becoming a scientist, by existentially discovering nature’s hidden yet manifest laws. The Homunculus-Galatea action is the scientist’s almost mystically passionate pursuit of insight into the natural world; the bodily fulfilment of the ‘entelechy’ is the maturing of this insight. The parallel between the Homunculus and Faust is thus complex and differentiative, without amounting to an out-and-out negative parallel or contrast. There is no need to turn the distinction between the scientist and the artist into a polarized antithesis, to the disadvantage of the latter, as Mommsen seems inclined to do. The ‘fable-kingdom’ of aesthetic vision, of poetic imagination, is not necessarily inferior to the ‘real’ world of natural existence and natural law; the ‘magician’ and the natural historian complement each other. In an essay
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written not long after his return from Italy, Goethe had argued that a mature, truly classical ‘style’ (he seems to have meant style in the visual arts, but with possible application to literature) can develop only on the basis of a deep study of the natural world: ‘
Style
rests upon the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the very essence of things, in so far as we are permitted to behold it in visible and tangible forms’. It must have been his wish to achieve a synthesis, or at least a working accommodation, between these two sides of his nature; whether he fully succeeded in doing so is another matter.

If the complex affinity between Faust and the Homunculus lends a certain unity of structure to Act II, can this unity also subsume the scenes involving Mephistopheles? The notion of bringing the Christian Devil into the world of Helen and Greek mythology, in the stylistically appropriate disguise of an aged hideous hag, belongs properly to the ‘Helena’ Act; the motif appears in paralipomenon BA 70, and the hag had already been identified in the 1800 ‘Helena’ fragment as one of the Phorcyads or Graiae. In the finalized ‘antecedents’ for Act III, Mephistopheles must be shown finding his way to this necessary transformation. In Wagner’s laboratory, the percipient Homunculus has predicted not only that Faust will be ‘in his element’ in the classical world, but that Mephistopheles will also encounter the notorious witches of Thessaly (6977 ff.). Accordingly, much of the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ has been devoted to his unfunny lustful adventures (a vein of half-hearted publishable indecency in which Goethe is not at his best); but he has been obliged to recognize that he is quite out of place in a remote pre-Christian world which knows nothing of good and evil or conventional morality. Thus Scene 10 as a whole, if it is a whole, may be said to follow out three thematic strands: Faust’s pursuit of Helen, the Homunculus’s pursuit of bodily existence and eventually of Galatea, and Mephistopheles’ pursuit of the Lamiae and other monsters, as if to demonstrate at his cynical level that all enterprises broadly describable as sexual are much the same. His lengthy contribution to the events ends in his
badinage
and comical negotiation with the Phorcyads and his metamorphosis into the appearance of one of them. The daughters of Phorcys, so old that they have only one eye and one tooth left between them, live in a place where the sun never shines, and embody a kind of absolute ugliness and squalor, the polar opposite of the absolute beauty represented by Helen. They describe themselves as daughters of the original Chaos, and as a spirit of negation Mephistopheles feels himself instantly akin to them. In Part One, after all, Faust had called him ‘strange son of chaos’ (1383), and he had defined himself as part of the original Darkness (1350). He has, so to speak, returned to his original void to discover a new identity as ‘Phorcyas’ (i.e. ‘a Phorcys-daughter’), and sardonically redefines himself as ‘the well-beloved son’ of Chaos—or possibly its daughter, since, as he also notes, he is now hermaphroditical (8029) like the Homunculus (8256). It is interesting, however, that in the
Phorcyad episode Goethe is making a possibly very significant use of a classical Greek parallel, the story of Perseus. The hero Perseus, a son of Zeus, is persuaded by his false friend Polydectes to bring him the head of the Gorgon Medusa, and first seeks out the Phorcyads, who have ancient and powerful connections and are related to the Gorgons; he compels them to help him in his dangerous task by snatching their eye and tooth from them. As Mommsen conjectures, Goethe is here perhaps tacitly suggesting (to readers learned enough to catch the allusion) that Mephistopheles has after all discovered a way of obliging Faust in the matter of Helen by fetching her from Hades himself (8032 f.). In BA 73 there is, in fact, an allusion to important unspecified terms in the agreement between him and the Phorcyads, over and above the loan of the eye and the tooth; and it may be that this explains the degree of magical power
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he appears to have over Helen when he reappears in Act III in the Phorcyad mask.

There is a certain mystery about the abrupt dramatic transition from the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ to the opening of the ‘Helena’ Act, which we should not try too hard to dispel. Some earlier commentators even sought to bridge the gap by identifying Helen with the (hermaphroditic) Homunculus, on the assumption that he will by now have undergone the ‘thousand, thousand forms’ of his evolution and become ‘the beautiful human being’ which Goethe had long ago, in his essay on Winckelmann (1805) called ‘the supreme product of nature’s perpetual self-enhancement’. While accepting the relevance of this Goethean remark, we need not be over-literal. As Goethe explained in the letter quoted above, his method was to be content with suggestive juxtaposition. Act III is at least structurally connected to its ‘antecedents’ (as Act II can unofficially be called) by a strong effect of contrast: the creative chaos and flux of the Sea Festival, a half-lit, lost-and-found scene of waves and moonlight, an operatic riot of voices speaking and singing in rhymed verse, suddenly give way to the static, sunlit figure of the heroine, emerging in high relief against this background, the single voice of the protagonist opening her Attic drama in stately trimeters. And there are other contrasts
and anticipations: the paradoxical world of the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ is not so much classical as pre-classical, archaic, pre-heroic, a pageant not of Olympian gods or Homeric heroes but of figures from earlier stories and a stranger demonology, Sphinxes who confess that Helen is not their period (7197 f.), Galatea who is not the great Aphrodite but her lesser heir, unobtrusive attendants who celebrate the timeless nature-rite regardless of passing centuries and cultures (8370-8); to say nothing, if Mommsen is right, of the hidden Oriental influence. This is a betwixt-and-between world, a condition between reality and fantasy, in which Faust re-experiences his vision of the begetting of Helen, but cannot decide whether he is seeing or dreaming or remembering (7271-312). Helen is, as it were, still in the making, not yet born, not yet ready to step ashore out of the rocking, intoxicating sea (8489 f.). The style is ambiguous, shifting ironically between lyric seriousness and persiflage (7080-98, 7426 ff.). Except for the sinister opening trimeters of the witch Erichtho (7005-39), the incongruous rhymed verse prevails: the ancient trimeter will not resume until Helen herself speaks and a drama in the fully classical style comes into being.

Although the 1826 narrative (BA 73) casts light on the events of the ‘Helena’ Act in certain important respects, it was intended as a preface to these events, and therefore stops short of the beginning of them. For comparison with an earlier (perhaps the earliest) version of what happens after Helen actually appears, we must go back to the 1816 document (BA 70). This relatively brief sketch (which, as we have noted, may represent an even earlier conception than the 1800 ‘Helena’ fragment) tells a fairly straightforward story, foreshadowing the final version at certain points. Faust, infatuated with Helen’s apparition at the imperial court, demands bodily possession of her: he is filled, we are told, with ‘infinite longing for the supreme beauty he has now recognized’. He does not, however, have to make a long journey in time and space to the classical Greek underworld in search of her. Helen, restored to life by the old device of a magic ring, meets him in a medieval German castle which she mistakes for her husband’s palace in Sparta; Faust is disguised as a crusading knight and Mephistopheles as an aged female housekeeper (not yet Hellenized as Phorcyas). A male caretaker with magic powers is also present. The theme of magic is prominent, though the symbolic implications have not been developed. The most important anticipation
of the final version is that in the 1816 scenario a magic circle has been drawn round the castle, and Helen can continue her ‘half-real’ existence only if she remains within it. Goethe’s final treatment of this motif of prohibition or restriction will be to take up an ancient Greek parallel: the legend according to which Helen was allowed to return from the dead on condition that she remained on Leuce, an island in the Black Sea. This dispensation had been obtained for her by the hero Achilles, himself now also dead, but permitted to meet Helen on Leuce and there beget from this ghostly union a son called Euphorion. Goethe will adopt the essentials of this story: Achilles as the classical precedent
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for Faust’s post-mortal union with Helen, Euphorion as the name of their son,
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and the similar stipulation restricting her to a particular territory (in this case Sparta).
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In the 1816 scenario the son (not yet named) is also subject to a prohibition: he may go anywhere he likes within the precincts of the castle, but must not cross the magic circle. Prohibitions are of course a very well-known motif in the
Märchen
and myths of the world (as when Bluebeard’s wife is allowed to open every door in his castle except one, or Adam and Eve may eat of every tree in the garden except one). In the final version, the one constraint on Euphorion is that he must not attempt to fly. In both versions the son disobeys and is killed, whereupon Helen vanishes (in the 1816 scenario because, wringing her hands in grief, she loses the ring on which her bodily shape depends). The 1816 version ends with a war between Faust and the monks who have dissolved the magic circle and tried to seize the castle;
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he defeats them and acquires ‘great possessions’, which seem to foreshadow on a simpler level the lands he eventually wins from the sea in Acts IV and V.

This early ‘inner
Märchen
about Faust and Helen is the relatively simple basis of the enriched, enhanced, elaborately allegorical final version: the three scenes (11, 12, 13) of Act III. Nor should we lose sight altogether of Goethe’s two earlier subtitles for ‘Helena’, both of which disappeared in the final edition. The 1800 fragment was called ‘Helena in the Middle Ages. A satyric drama. Episode for
Faust’:
this reminds us that the Helen affair is an ‘episode’, that it will span the centuries in a fantastic manner, and that it is not prima facie a tragedy (the classical Greek ‘satyr play’ was performed immediately after the tragic trilogy as a piece of vulgar light relief). The 1827 ‘Helena’, as we have seen, was announced as ‘a classical
romantic
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phantasmagoria’. The term ‘phantasmagoria’ is entirely appropriate, since the poet has chosen to operate wholly outside temporal constraints (7433). As Goethe himself pointed out (letter to Boisserée, 22 October 1826), the whole Act spans a period of some three thousand years, beginning with the supposed return of Helen from the Trojan War and ending with the death of Byron which the fall of Euphorion is supposed to symbolize. During all this compressed non-time Helen is ‘alive’ and can bear Faust a son, though at certain moments she wonders whether she is in fact ‘real’ or merely a phantom, as Mephistopheles tauntingly suggests (8876-81, 8930 ff.). These existential doubts give her a certain dramatic pathos, but we need not demand an exact ontology of her status in this Act, by comparison with her phantasmal manifestation in Act I, as some critics have done, insisting at one extreme that the Helen of Act III is real Greek flesh and blood born in the way of nature, or at the other that the whole thing, and perhaps Act II as well, is no more than a dream in Faust’s mind anyway. The point is not whether the Helen of Act III is ‘real’ enough, but whether Faust is by now educationally mature enough, whether he (or Goethe or the European mind) can now achieve a creative union with ‘Helen’, whether he is now qualified to reinstate for a time the fragile classical beauty and classical culture that she represents.
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Above all, it is not necessary to dismiss Faust’s encounter with Helen as merely a tragic, ghostly illusion. The basic logic of the traditional story demands in any case that Helen should appear to Faust twice and vanish twice, at least if the motif of the long quest is to be used and if this is to be an episode and not the end of Faust’s adventures; there is no question of her staying with him permanently, and a way must be found of returning her sooner or later to wherever she came from. This does not detract from the symbolic value of their meeting. On the allegorical level, it is a celebratory homage, the final homage of Goethe’s life, to that culture of Greek antiquity which for so long and so profoundly influenced the culture of modern Europe, not least the literary classicism of Weimar which was Goethe’s own personal version of the Renaissance. A celebration, yet also an elegiac recognition that there cannot be a lasting synthesis of ancient and modern. A meeting and mingling of two cultural traditions is allegorized as a magic love-story. The ‘union’ of the lovers could be called short-lived, if it were taking place in time. Nevertheless, the
ideal is restated; the high noon of Goethe’s experience, and of German cultural history, becomes that of the symbolic hero.