08.4 PP 54 67 Schwankende Gestalten Virtuality in Goethes Faust

chapter 4
‘Schwankende Gestalten’: virtuality

in Goethe’s Faust
Ulrich Gaier
Ask Goethe whether you should put Faust on the stage: he will tell you flatly
‘No!’ He never supported efforts to do so,1 even though readers and theatre
people urged him to stage the piece. When the actor Pius Alexander Wolff
and Goethe’s adlatus Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer planned a representation in
Weimar around 1810, Goethe was angry, saying that if he had wanted, he
could have staged it himself.2 Later he described his attitude towards it as
‘passive, if not suffering’.3 Finally he consented to draw sketches for some
scenes in Part i and revise the stage version, adding lines here and there in
order to stress the operatic character which Wolff had intended (FT 582–
90). When, in 1829, Weimar and Leipzig rehearsed for a representation of a
revised version of Part i, Goethe contributed a chorus for the ‘Study 2’ scene
and a final chorus for the ‘Prison’ scene (FT 591 ff.), again to enhance the
operatic character which he always had in mind. We think of the multitude
of musical inlays in the text, but also of his remark that only Mozart could
have set the play to music, and that after his death only Meyerbeer was
capable of rendering its more terrifying aspects.4 He consented to train the
actor LaRoche to portray Mephistopheles; indeed, LaRoche confessed that
each gesture, each step, each grimace and each word came from Goethe.5
Wilhelm Holtei, an aficionado of the Weimar stage, noted on LaRoche’s
Mephistopheles: ‘It was a symbolic appearance, fully on the level of the
poem. To tell the truth: it was an appearance which perhaps was as little
suited to the real stage as the poem itself.’6
Referring to the Leipzig production, Goethe himself wrote that it
revealed the old truth that one should not ‘paint the devil on the wall’,7
that is, one should not try to create a realistic image of that figure.
Apparently, it is not so much the difficulties which the stage technicians
might encounter in realizing Goethe’s ideas and imaginations, but the
symbolic nature of the figures, events and scenes. ‘Symbolic’ refers to a
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‘Schwankende Gestalten’ 55
plurality of aspects and relationships in which a phenomenon has to be
understood, and such plurality will always exceed the spectator’s ability to
perceive a stage figure.
mephistopheles
LaRoche played Mephistopheles, and he succeeded in giving the figure a
symbolic appearance. Let me go into some detail with this figure. First,
Mephistopheles constantly changes costume, mask and function. In the
‘Prologue to Heaven’, we have his name only as a stage name for the figure
who, in this re-make of the biblical Book of Job, plays the role of Satan. But
at the same time this figure appears modernized in the same way as the
figure of the Lord, since the eminent object of their wager is not the pious
Jew any more but a non-believing Doctor of Theology. So, the intertextual
reference to the Book of Job suggests that the unknown opponent to the
Lord is Satan. Faust as the modern object of the wager, however, denies the
Satan identity, as does the stage direction that the actor of Mephistopheles
has to play this part. Before Faust conjures Mephistopheles in ‘Study 1’, he
calls for spirits in the air who might lend him wings on which he could
follow the sun. Such spirits, as Wagner warns, are dangerous because they
carry all the evils of the four winds. Just as Faust took the Earth Spirit as an
elementary daemon, Wagner speaks of the air demons and forgets that Saint
Paul had warned of the devil, the evil spirit who rules in the air between
earth and sky (Ephesians 2:2; 6:12). Thus the poodle who follows upon
Faust’s request is not only the dangerous shepherd’s dog with a predilection
for water, drawing behind himself a tail of fire and spiralling in on Faust
through the fields; it is also a spirit of the air and at the same time the devil
who rules in it, an animal composed of the four elements and possessed by the
evil spirit. When Faust conjures this creature, we see it swell and assume ever
larger form, filling the room as a cloud and finally appearing in human form
as the travelling scholar. All these, we learn, are masks of Mephistopheles.
Faust, seduced by an apparition he takes for a colleague, stops conjuring,
although he already had to use the holy cross for the exorcism. Had he gone
on, the devil would have had to show himself in his dreadful shape. The
scholar’s mask, however, which Faust takes to be the poodle’s core, offers his
services, appears easy to communicate with, and above all useful. It is the
domesticated nature of the poodle with some devilish spice in it, clad in viable
academic form – exactly what Faust had longed for when he asked for
technical assistance in flying. Already, the forms and functions are multi-
plying; Mephistopheles is becoming a symbolic figure.
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Here, we can go on indefinitely: the outward appearance of Mephistopheles
changes continually. In ‘Study 2’, he is dressed in Spanish travelling attire; in
the ‘Witch’s Kitchen’, the Witch does not recognize him any more because the
‘Nordic phantom with horns, tail and claws’ has been relegated to the realm of
fable, and the horse’s leg and hoof are concealed. Here, Mephistopheles wants
to be called a baronet like the rich bankers of the era of the French Revolution
and the ensuing wars, Necker and Rothschild for instance (2490–513).8 In the
Gretchen scenes, Mephistopheles even reflects on his masks: ironically, he
praises Margarete for her physiognomic competence in reading his mask and
feeling that he is either a genius or the devil (3537–41). On the Blocksberg, he
appears in traditional costume; in the first act, he is a fool; in the second and
third acts, he is Phorkyas, first by distorting his face, then with a tragical mask
in the third act’s play within the play. In the fourth act, he mimics a medieval
knight, as does Faust. In the fifth, however, he is the captain of a war, pirate
and commerce fleet, and the overseer of the modern dyke project. Finally, he
falls back into the late medieval devil’s gear, following the imagery of the
paintings of the Camposanto in Pisa which inspire the scenery, figures and
content of the two final scenes.
Looking back on this constant play of masks and costumes, of animal,
human and daemonic figures, we detect a diversity which symbolizes the
infinite and unexpected, often unrecognizable ways in which we encounter
evil. We also find reflections on outdated and modern forms and figurations
of evil: ‘The Evil One / They may be rid of, evil ones still have not vanished’
(2509). Evil in the singular belongs to the realm of fable; now we have evil in
the plural. Or we see, in the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’, Mephistopheles’
attempt to transport himself, with a fake Phorkyas identity, back to the
mythical beginnings of the world (8010–33). Here Eros–Phanes and Lucifer
play the same role of creating from chaos a beautiful organic world while at
the same time contradicting its Greek beauty by ugliness – disrupting its
living biblical coherence by negative isolation.
Alongside the diversity of masks and chronological variations, we
encounter the fact that in each culture there are specific figures that negate
the principle and basis of that culture – beauty in Goethe’s view of ancient
Greek culture, and pious elevation to the divine in Christian culture.9 The
praise song at the beginning of ‘Prologue in Heaven’ even shows how this
principle of negation enters the world: the Archangels, in their function as
angeloi (messengers) to other angels and mankind, are at a loss in the
beginning because they are confronted with incomprehensible phenomena,
with two world models, encompassing both constructive and destructive
processes. They cannot but see these as ‘works’, but they cannot trace them
back to a single will. Michael, the angel to sing the last strophe, finally
decides that these ambivalent and incomprehensible, albeit magnificent and
strengthening, works may be the Lord’s works, but what the messengers
revere and communicate is a Lord of slowly wandering daylight and benign
gentleness.
At this point, the Satan figure of Mephistopheles pops up; the negative
principle is provoked, even created by the reductive view of the Archangels.
And to confirm this, the Lord employs the satanic rogue as an instrument to
keep mankind from becoming lazy. Mephistopheles consents to this func-
tion, but not as a simple servant and dependant of the Lord. His final words
in this scene indicate that he could very well dissolve the treaty with the
Lord (351). It is only under this condition that a wager can be made between
the Lord and Satan/Mephistopheles in which the goal is to preserve or to
seduce Faust, and where triumph and lordship over the cosmos is at stake.
This initial situation in analogy to the Book of Job is overturned in an
ironic way at the end of the play. In the last chapters of the Book of Job,
Satan is not mentioned any more, the Lord is triumphant and Job is
rehabilitated after his submission. But in Faust the Lord is not to be
found at the end, Mephistopheles has no court of appeal – Faust’s entelechy
meets a kind of apotheosis. The Lord has given up lordship, and there is a
Lady, a heavenly queen and goddess, we are told by Doctor Marianus
(12103). And from Mephistopheles’ bitter complaints concerning the deceit-
ful methods of cheating the devil of his claims on a soul (11612–35) we
understand that with the new management in heaven, the customs and
principles have changed completely. Thus, at the end of the play,
Mephistopheles in the old devil’s function is an outdated figure, objectively
comical because he has been radically overtaken by the new developments.
We must not forget, however, that Mephistopheles, at the end of the
‘Interment’ scene has once again assumed the late medieval devil’s costume
and function, and is assisted by the grotesque daemons and hell’s jaws as
depicted by Buffalmacco in the Camposanto in Pisa. So it is only this
outdated phantom of evil which has become obsolete and objectively
comical, a mask that Mephistopheles has already ridiculed in the ‘Witch’s
Kitchen’. For Faust, the Doctor of Theology who is not afraid of hell or the
devil, Mephistopheles must match his modernity. As we saw in the
‘Prologue in Heaven’, Faust is a decidedly modern version of Job, and
Goethe seems to be asking how it is still possible for a modern man, a non-
believer, to be diabolically tempted. We saw that Faust asked for technical
assistance in flying, to follow the sun, and what he received was a contem-
porary with the devil inside. But after this devil in scholar’s clothing has
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escaped him once, Faust becomes wary and does not simply renew the
twenty-four-year pact which the Renaissance Faust made with the devil.
Instead, he offers a wager that Mephistopheles could never divert him from
his infinite goal, and from his restlessness and dissatisfaction with himself
and everything that is offered to him. In accepting this wager,
Mephistopheles is reduced to a kind of sparring partner for Faust.
Actually, Faust makes a wager with himself, reducing Mephistopheles to a
provider of highest-quality solutions to every wish that Faust may have and
a constant source of new wishes. The pact itself seems to consist in Faust
giving himself up to Mephistopheles, should he pronounce the words of
Rousseau’s formula for happiness and say to the present moment ‘Verweile
doch! du bist so schön!’ (1700, Tarry, remain! – you are so fair!).10
In offering the wager, Faust replays the wager on Job, but Faust has read
the Book of Job and knows that Job is an exemplary figure, and that the
wager on Job is potentially made on every human being. The reader knows
from the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ that Faust is the object of such a bet and is
right in assuming that it will also apply to himself. It is a modern Faust who
can make a wager with his counterpart by himself. He is really challenging
himself; Mephistopheles (as we have seen) is reduced to a sparring partner
and technician. Faust is fully aware of the difficulty of keeping a promise to
himself through a lifetime, in view of the rapid changes the world is going
through (1720–3). With this kind of wager, compared with the story of Job,
Faust is not only his own Lord, but also Satan and Job in one. This devalues
Mephistopheles even more. The former devil can do nothing more than
provide high-quality treats, arouse wishes whose fulfilment might make
Faust forget his promise, let him ‘tarry’ and make him succumb to pleasure.
By embracing restlessness and dissatisfaction, Faust keeps not only
Mephistopheles but also himself on the move and unknowingly assuages
the Lord’s fear that man may get lazy. Here, too, Faust makes the devilish
rogue superfluous and becomes his own rogue.
How, then, could there be a temptation for a man who is so autono-
mous – even in making himself unhappy? In ‘Forest and Cave’, for the first
time, Faust understands that he cannot do without this technician and
fulfiller of wishes, and that he becomes more and more dependent on that
hateful cynic who constantly debases him and his ideal feelings. This
dependence is the temptation which, until the end, usurps Faust’s will
and decision-making completely. We may think of the way in which
Mephistopheles and his three terrible servants do away with Philemon
and Baucis, or how he makes fun of Faust, the blind and nearly deaf old
man who orders a ditch to be dug (‘Graben’) whilst they dig a grave (‘Grab’,
11555–8). It is this growing autonomy of the instrument, the irresistible
magic of technology, commodities and wealth that can be termed tempta-
tion and evil for modern man.
This is also why, in the Nordic ‘Walpurgis Night’, Satan with his strategy
of tempting man with sexual sin has to step down from his reign in hell.
Faust, whose behaviour decides over the lordship in the world, warns
himself not to forget himself in that Walpurgis mass (4114), and when he
dances with the young witch, he is again warned by his disgust of a red
mouse, by enlightenment in the shape of the ridiculous Proktophantasmist
and by his projective memory of Gretchen (4124–209). With modern man,
Satan’s strategy of seducing Adam by the magic of sexuality is no longer
effective. So, as in heaven the Lord is replaced by the Lady, Satan in hell is
replaced by Mammon – on the roof of the illuminated palace (3915, 3932)
where the Walpurgis festival takes place. And it is Mammon who dominates
the world, as Acts 1, 4 and 5 of Part ii show clearly. Mephistopheles,
especially with the three terrible servants, works for Mammon and rebuilds
his hellish palace as Faust’s palace in which the world’s wealth is piled up.
And Faust cannot bear the sound of the sweet old couple’s bell, and the idea
that this little patch of land with a hut, a chapel and two lime trees does not
belong to him. Faust has been successfully seduced by this modern evil. The
only possibility of liberating himself from this magic is to pronounce the
ominous sentence (wishing the ‘beautiful’ ultimate moment to last) in a
situation that cannot qualify. The new land is poisoned by a stinking swamp
and endangered by the next flood; the colonists who are going to live there
are lemurs, half-natures sewn together from dead bodies, or workers of the
type found in the English coalmines of the time. Or in the immense
building project of Bremerhaven in the 1820s, which Goethe followed
with great interest: exploited workers with emaciated bodies, incapable of
organizing their own defence against the elements. And for them to be free,
on liberated land, and for Faust to be free with them, Mephistopheles, his
terrible fellows, and Faust himself would have to be eliminated. Would it be
possible for Faust, who cannot bear to leave a patch of land to its owners, to
consider giving away land where many millions can live and which he
himself has created?
What Faust describes in his final speech (outlining the wish that the
moment may last) contradicts all facts and possibilities in the present and in
the future. But Faust pronounces the sentence, using the magic of word-
charm, and falls dead as the pact foresaw. But Mephistopheles has not won
the wager with Faust, he has not put him to rest, not made him complacent,
not cheated him with pleasures; on the contrary, Faust enjoys his highest
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moment in devising a future contrary to all given facts and even contrary to
his own existence. Thus Mephistopheles hears words, and Faust falls dead,
but the devil has been tricked out of a wager which would have given him
the right to take the soul he had worked for. As in medieval spiritual plays,
the devil is the dupe of a tricky human and an astute Lady in heaven. We
must not forget that this is part of the cheerfulness in which Goethe wanted
this tragedy to end,11 and that the dupe is the traditional devil who wants to
catch a soul, not the absolute ruler of the world who, with his three terrible
companions, rules and ‘colonizes’ the world. To be sure, he does this in the
service of Faust, but he performs all these tasks and carries out all his orders
in his own manner. As we shall see when we discuss the spatial aspects of the
play, after the beginning of the fourth act, this world has become hell, with
Mammon as its absolute monarch, and Mephistopheles as Mammon’s
obedient and Faust’s disobedient servant.
I have discussed the Mephistopheles figure paradigmatically in order to
show what Goethe meant when he intended the actor LaRoche to give the
figure a ‘symbolic appearance’. This appearance was – as Holtei observed –
on the level of the poem itself, and neither figure nor poem was suitable for
the stage. We have seen the diversity of costumes and masks, and found
chronological and cultural reasons for this diversity and elusiveness. I have
dealt with Mephistopheles’ functions in various religious systems of the
play, his decidedly modern relationship with Faust, an experimental figure
whose behaviour in the face of temptation and seduction decides the change
of rulership in hell and the character of evil in the world. On the one hand,
Mephistopheles – whose name, throughout the entire text, is never pro-
nounced fully (see 4183) – is a figure who appears, with some exceptions, as a
variable human figure on the stage. On the other hand, he is what men in
different times and cultures think of as ‘evil’ (1342–4). Then again, he seems
to be just a principle of negation or negativity, complementary to the ruling
affirmative principle of the Lord. He represents the male principle, together
with the Lord in Part i, as well as the opposite female principle in Part ii.
Mephistopheles is one of those ‘schwankende Gestalten’ of which the first
line of Faust speaks and which the Lord extends to the whole of creation
when he orders the Archangels to pin down by permanent thoughts what
floats in undecided appearance (348).
To be sure, what the Archangels pin down, define and solidify with their
thoughts is only meant for a certain duration; what embraces them eternally
is the love of what is eternally living, becoming and creating (346–9) – we
have seen this constant process of shaping and reshaping in the heavenly and
hellish governments. This is what I would like to call ‘symbolic’ and ‘virtual’
in Goethe’s figures and, indeed, in the whole play: symbolic in the sense
that a multitude of aspects is present, as in the figure of Mephistopheles. It
makes him infinitely readable and elusive; virtual in the sense that all these
aspects are embedded in one principle (or tendency, or vector) which
remains ungraspable in terms of a visible figure or definable concept. It is
experienced, in Mephistopheles’ case, in the sheer force of negation, in
examples which are only a fraction of what is, in fact, one aspect of the
whole world.
faust
With Faust, we could go into similar detail; he is no less symbolic, elusive and
virtual than Mephistopheles. Let me mention some aspects of this. Most
prominently, there is the chronological line from the Renaissance to the time
around 1830, which we can follow from act to act, and of which Faust is the
exemplary representative. The Nordic Walpurgis complex, for instance, can –
by way of various textual hints – be dated to the time around 1800. This
shows that Goethe situated the main change in hell’s strategy – the shift from
the temptation by sin to the temptation by capital – in the years after the
French Revolution, allegorized in the ‘Witch’s Kitchen’. The search for
Helena in the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ and the play within a play, the
birth and death of Euphorion during the ongoing Peloponnesian war, refers
to the Greek wars of liberation in the 1820s and to the Philhellenic movement
which absorbed the attention and interest of European intellectuals to the
detriment of the political and economic situation at home. Faust is the
exponent of European history; his seemingly private experiences are an
allegory of what were, in Goethe’s interpretation, the crucial developments
in general history. This applies as well to his symbol of domesticated nature –
the poodle as a well-trained animal comprising the four elements. Evil is its
real core, but Faust ceases conjuring as soon as the human shape appears, and
does not disclose evil. Nature, whose workings had, from the sixteenth
century onwards, been investigated with increasing success by science and
made useful by technology, proved a wonderful instrument to improve
human life and to increase the effects of action. Nature harnessed by tech-
nology, machines, electricity, chemical plants and artificial breeding suddenly
presents destructive consequences. But above all, it makes individuals and
societies dependent, creates coercions, channels human activity, deprives man
of free decisions. Faust complains in ‘Forest and Cave’ that he cannot do
without Mephistopheles who, while procuring commodities and delights,
debases him continually and reduces to cheap mechanics what Faust had
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embraced as gifts of the Great Spirit, and for which he wants to feel gratitude.
One can easily see how, in Faust, Goethe not only registered historical events
from about 1500 to 1830, but also represented and made plausible the
enormous changes in spirit which took place during these two-and-a-half
centuries.
To make these changes plausible, Goethe continually sets up a confron-
tation of the two epochs between which Faust oscillates, ‘schwankende
Gestalt’ that he is. Take for instance the beginning, where Faust speaks his
first monologue in Hans Sachs’ old-fashioned Knittel-verse, which auto-
matically dates the figure back to the early bourgeois period of the German
renaissance. But after the first thirty-two lines the tone changes, the verse
runs smoothly, making way for Ossianic reminiscences: Faust speaks as a
sentimental youth of the late eighteenth century. The change is so audible
that, in the nineteenth century, Gustav Röthe hypothesized (with his
so-called ‘paper-scrap theory’) that Goethe had written a couple of lines
from time to time, then simply taken the scraps and copied them without
harmonizing them in a consistent character. Röthe has apparently not read
the first line of Faust: there is no consistent character in the play, only
‘schwankende Gestalten’. Here, Faust can be regarded as a Renaissance
man, ingeniously anticipating the coming centuries, or as a contemporary of
the eighteenth century stubbornly harking back to the old days and finding
no language for the new developments. For instance, the magic he uses for
the Macrocosm and the Earth Spirit signs is Renaissance magic, but Faust
counteracts its ecstatic character with ‘inward’ magic developed in the
eighteenth century. Consequently, both magic experiments fail half-way.
In Part i, the scholar’s tragedy, light falls especially on the Renaissance
aspect; in the Gretchen tragedy, the contemporary aspect is stressed. In Act 1
of Part ii, the Renaissance aspect of the Emperor Charles IV is blended
with the modern creation of paper money. In Act 2, structures of time and
history from the beginning to the end of the world are construed. Faust
becomes less and less active, and action is taken over by his aides and
partners, as we have seen. His last concrete action is at the end of Act 1,
when he presents images of Helen and Paris – which he obtained from the
Mothers – with a kind of slide projector. Infatuated with Helen and furious
at Paris who is about to abduct her, he tries to shoot him out of the show,
causing an explosion of the projector which places him in a coma. The next
two acts take place in his head, a situation which is impossible to reproduce
on the stage. In the fourth act, we have radical virtuality: a combination of
two historical periods – the struggle of Emperor Charles IV against Günther
von Schwarzburg, and the battles between Emperor Franz II and
Napoleon – and the allegory of the three giants of aggression, greed and
avarice. It is explicitly stated that these figures are allegories (10329), but
when they fight in battle, they dissolve into a mass of individual fighters
(10581–3), like the ‘artificial man’ in the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’
Leviathan. In the fifth act, we are completely absorbed by virtual reality –
antique mythological figures watching an ultra-modern dyke-building proj-
ect in which armies of workers and magical powers are at work: half-dead
lemurs singing Shakespeare, devils and angels, pious fathers and children
who died before they could be baptized. All these figures have stepped out of
the late medieval frescos in the Camposanto of Pisa, and all of them are
mixed with Faust’s utopia, which in turn depicts the plans of the Saint-
Simonists in the 1820s for a social and industrial revolution. If we are led, at
the beginning of the play, to experience certain historical developments,
such historical presence is consequently and consciously dissolved into
virtuality in the course of the play, right up to the end. Faust is at the
centre of this process. He is present on the stage at first as an individual man
whose uneasy situation between progress and regression can be understood
psychologically; he is also present on stage at the very end as an entelechy –
not as an individual soul, but as accumulated energy which is about to take
ethereal shape for a new form of posthumous existence. As we can see, Faust
is as multivalent in his aspects and forms of existence as his counterpart,
Mephistopheles.
female figures
Turning now to the female figures – Margarete and Helena, not to speak of
the Mothers, the Hades goddesses and the Mater gloriosa in Part ii – we see
that they are elements of a series of configurations which starts with the
vision of the reclining female in the magic mirror of the ‘Witch’s Kitchen’.
According to Mephistopheles’ explanation that this female is the result of six
hard days of God’s creative work, it must be understood as the beauty of the
world enclosed in a female body; it is therefore not just any woman’s picture
presented to a naïve scholar who has until then seen nothing but books.
Actually, he has seen beauty in the scene ‘Outside the City Gate’ already:
the beauty of the evening sun gilding the mossy green huts. He experienced
beauty (in the sense of Goethe’s colour circle) as the unfolded totality of the
seven basic colours. What Faust perceives in the ‘Witch’s Kitchen’, then, is
Frau Welt, the medieval representation of the alluring world in a female
figure. Inflamed by the Witch’s potion, he wants to take possession of this
heavenly image. Margarete is the compromise between those extreme
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spiritual and sexual desires with which he leaves the ‘Witch’s Kitchen’, with
Mephistopheles quoting Duke Theseus’ remark in Act V, Scene 1 of
Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream that the frantic lover will see
‘Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt’.
Margarete thus is not only a compromise between heavenly beauty and
sexual attractiveness, but also a Proto-Helena who is the mythical image of
god-like beauty and sexual attraction. Margarete, little more than 14 years
old, cannot unite the two projections of angel and whore thrown upon her
by Faust, although she tries hard to meet both desires. Goethe reveals the
split in her personality by using two stage names for the figure, Margarete
and Gretchen. In Goethe’s day, ‘Gretchen’ was still used as a generic name
for a girl of easy virtue, or even a prostitute, and it is in the scenes where this
aspect is prominent that Goethe uses this stage name. Margarete, on the
other hand, is the name of two saints, Margaret of Antioch and Margaret of
Cortona. The latter is the patron saint of prostitutes who returned to virtue;
her fate is very close to that of Margarete, while Margaret of Antioch with
her successful defence against the devil in her gaol gives the pattern for the
end of Part i. Thus, in a way, this figure has to be played by two actresses or
by one actress playing two parts. The saintly background of Margarete is not
just a pious reminiscence: in encountering Mephistopheles, Margarete
develops a bodily feeling of Mephistopheles’ radical negativity, his funda-
mental hatred and incapacity for love. This religion of the body also works
in gaol, where she feels similarly suffocated when Faust cannot kiss her any
more, and it is this religion of the body which, at the end of the scene ‘At the
Well’, makes her confess that what impelled her to sin was all good and
loving (3585–6). The same God–Father whom she prays to in this con-
fession contradicts Mephistopheles at the end of the ‘Prison’ scene.
Traditionally, the devil rightfully anticipates condemnation, but the
Lord’s voice from above confirms that she is saved. Or, as I would prefer
to put it, parallel to the change of management in hell, the Lord has already
stepped down, possibly because of Margarete’s new religion, and the Lady
with her new theology saves what was a sinner for the old Lord.
Helena, to whom Margarete is a stepping-stone, appears in the first act
on transparencies which Faust has obtained from the Mothers in the
universal archives of shapes, together with the poetic tripod which functions
as projector. This explodes when Faust, in his folly, takes the projected
image for reality – but this is the same folly that in the same act makes
people take a piece of paper money without the backing of real value. In the
second act, which already plays in Faust’s head, he projects Helena’s
conception by Leda through Zeus in a swan’s shape. Moments later he
meets, in his dream, Chiron the centaur and learns that Helen is a mytho-
logical figure whom the poets shape and reshape according to their needs.
Feeling that he is a poet himself, Faust shapes a poetess Helena who can
shape herself according to the needs of the situations in which she finds
herself. This is experimented with in the third act, a stage play consisting of
three fragmentary plays: an antique tragedy in the manner of Euripides, a
medieval chivalrous drama, and an Arcadian opera in a literary landscape
but set during the Greek wars of liberation of the 1820s. In this act, Goethe
wanted the Helena figure to be played by two actresses, a tragical heroine
and an opera singer.12 So again, the character is split, albeit between a
theatrical and an operatic appearance.
These remarks may be sufficient to indicate first that the female figures
are ‘schwankende Gestalten’ as well, in the sense of multiple characters;
secondly, that they possess iconic depth (like Margarete referring to and
commenting upon the two saints); thirdly, that the mirror-woman,
Margarete, and the various figurations of Helena are parts of a series; and
fourthly, that all of them are expressions and allegories of the sensual beauty
of the world and of the principle of female attraction which is complemen-
tary to the principle of male expansion.
form
I have analysed the main characters of Goethe’s tragedy as variables being
held together only by a stage name and, in the case of Margarete, not even
by a single stage name. Now, the whole play is immensely variable in its
structure, form and Gestalt. To conclude, let me give some indications of
this. I have discussed the time problem in Goethe’s interpretation of history
from 1500 to 1830, and in his superimposing of epochs which contradict or
comment upon each other. Goethe was proud of the phantasmagorical time
span of 3,000 years in the third act which stretches from the battle of Troy
to the Greek wars of liberation, and to Lord Byron’s death in 1824.13
Similarly, there is immense variability and layering in terms of spatiality.
The ‘Prologue on the Stage’ speaks of encompassing the whole orbit of
creation, and of a passage from heaven through the world to hell (239–42).
Scholars have always wondered if Goethe had not somehow forgotten hell,
since, with the ‘Prologue’ and Faust’s passage through the small and the
greater world, only heaven seemed to rule. An important subtext of Part ii is
Dante’s Divina Commedia. Part ii starts with the characteristic situation at
the outset of Inferno, and Dante’s triplet verse. But Faust has no poet Virgil
to guide him through hell. He returns to the world, then to the world of his
66 ulrich gaier
head with its conflation of times and places, until at the beginning of the
fourth act, after orbiting the world in Helena’s garments, he lands on top of
the highest mountain. According to Mephistopheles’ serious myth, this was
originally the deepest point in hell, now turned downside up by a revolution
which transformed Dante’s funnel bottom of hell into this mountain top,
bringing all the damned sinners, as well as the devils who plagued them, into
full daylight. In climbing down the mountain, Mephistopheles calls the
three terrible giants with whose help the war is fought and Faust’s worldly
possessions are acquired. This means that hell is right here, that the nine-
teenth century, with its colonization, imperialism and exploitation of peoples
and nature itself, is hell in the sense understood by the elderly Goethe.
Poetically, Faust is the text with the highest calculated variability in all
literature. Apart from one or possibly two prose scenes, Goethe uses all
kinds of verse, not only with expressive inner variability, but also with the
value of a cultural or social index. Margarete’s naïve Knittel-verse differs
greatly from Faust’s high-tension use of the metre. Margarete’s use of the
French courtly Alexandrine verse is a proof intended for Faust that she is
educated and can move in higher society. But when he is gone and she
returns to her domestic Knittel, it is like kicking those painful high-heels off
and walking around in an old pair of slippers.
So much for the verse. As far as poetic genres are concerned, Goethe is
constantly quoting genres of literature from all times and cultures, again not
at random, but in calculated series or conflations. In Part i, for instance, we
find a number of genre inlays, from the late medieval Easter play in the first
scene to Margarete’s folk song in gaol, which the Romantic artist Philipp
Otto Runge had published in the fairy tale of Machandelboom. I have
already mentioned the three fragments of plays in Part ii, recalling the
epochs and cultures of antiquity, the Middle Ages and the present. Parallel
to the Renaissance and contemporary aspects of the Faust figure in Part i,
the scholars’ drama becomes a Renaissance drama of admonition in the
manner of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, on which, in turn, a modern drama of
social conditions developed by Diderot and Lessing is superimposed. In the
Gretchen drama, a domestic tragedy in the tradition of Lillo’s London
Merchant is projected onto a Renaissance legend. The ‘schwankende
Gestalt’ extends from the figures, times, spaces and cultures to the poetic
form. The first line in Faust already reveals much of its poetics.
As I noted at the beginning, Goethe was convinced that Faust was not
stageable. I have tried to explain why: too many perspectives, surface
appearances and multiple readabilities, interfaces of reality and virtuality
come together and are symbolically bound up by a stage name which, like
Mephistopheles, is never fully pronounced in the text. Finally, there is that
ungraspable deep reality in which all these aspects are one, and which
I called virtual. We saw how, in Mephistopheles, the force of negativity
appears as the negation of the central values of a certain culture – Greek
beauty, Christian piety, modern freedom – and which then works in
countless manifestations of that culture. Similarly, we have a virtual prin-
ciple of affirmative Lordship or Ladyship, virtual principles of male and of
female humanity, and a virtual principle of poetry.
not es
1. Hans Gerhard Gräf, Goethe über seine Dichtungen. Versuch einer Sammlung aller
Äußerungen des Dichters über seine poetischen Werke, vol. ii:2, Frankfurt am Main:
Rütten & Loening, 1904, repr. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1968, 511.
2. Ibid., 468.
3. Ibid., 494.
4. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines
Lebens, ed. Otto Schönberger, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994, 325.
5. Gräf, Goethe über seine Dichtungen, 185.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 511.
8. All further references to Faust are by line numbers from FT.
9. See the myth at the end of Book viii in Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit.
10. For the Rousseau reference, see Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust-
Dichtungen, ed. Ulrich Gaier, Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999, ii, 256.
12. Eckermann, Gespräche, note 4, 233.

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chapter 4

‘Schwankende Gestalten’: virtuality

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