Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749 - 1832)

German poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer, essayist, critic, biographer, memoirist, and librettist.

Goethe is considered Germany's greatest writer and a genius of the highest order. He distinguished himself as a scientist, artist, musician, philosopher, theater director, and court administrator. Excelling in various genres and literary styles, Goethe was a shaping force in the major German literary movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His first novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther), epitomizes the Sturm und Drang, or storm and stress, movement, and his dramas Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787; Iphigenia in Tauris) and Torquato Tasso (1790), as well as the poetry collection Römische Elegien (1795; Goethe's Roman Elegies), exemplify the neoclassical approach to literature. His drama Faust is considered one of the greatest works of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Faust is ranked beside the masterpieces of Dante and Shakespeare, thus embodying Goethe's humanistic ideal of a world literature transcending the boundaries of nations and historical periods.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

The son of an Imperial Councilor, Goethe was born in Frankfurt am Main into an established bourgeois family. By the age of eight, he had composed an epistolary novel in which the characters correspond in five languages. Against his wishes, Goethe was sent to study law at the University of Leipzig, but he devoted most of his time to art, music, science, and literature. His university studies were interrupted by illness, and Goethe spent his convalescence learning about alchemy, astrology, and occult philosophy, subjects that would inform the symbolism of Faust. His earliest literary works, including the rococo-styled love poetry of Buch Annette (1767), are considered accomplished but not outstanding. A decisive influence on Goethe's early literary work was Johann Gottfried von Herder, whom the poet met in Strasbourg, where he continued his legal studies. Herder taught Goethe to appreciate the elemental emotional power of poetry, directing his attention to Shakespeare, Homer, Ossian, and German folk songs. Goetz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (1773; Goetz of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand) exemplifies Goethe's work of this period. Somewhat Shakespearean in its emphasis on action and high emotion, the drama was popular in its time, but modern critics generally consider it superficial.

MAJOR WORKS

While critics have debated whether certain of Goethe's works might be classified as Gothic, most agree that elements of the genre can be found in his work. Chief among Goethe's works noted for containing Gothic elements is his two-part retelling of the classic legend of Faust, the scholar who gives Mephistopheles, or the devil, a chance to claim his soul in exchange for unlimited knowledge and eternal life. Goethe began working on the drama during his student days in Strasbourg. In 1790 he published an incomplete version, known as Faust: Ein Fragment. In 1808, the complete version of the first part appeared. Goethe continued to work on the play, and Faust II was published posthumously in 1832. For its poetic power, formal variety and complexity, as well as its philosophical universality, the first part of Faust was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of mythic proportions. Faust II, however, was not fully analyzed or appreciated until the twentieth century. Goethe addressed the Gothic in his nonfiction writing as well. In his essay "Von deutscher Baukunst" (1773) and in book nine of his autobiography, Aus meinen Leben (1811–22; Memoirs of Goethe), he discusses at length his initial distaste for Gothic architecture, recalling that the wholeness and harmony he found in the cathedral at Strasbourg changed his views.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Following his death, Goethe's literary reputation diminished outside of the German-speaking world. Twentieth-century British and American critics have generally acknowledged Goethe's greatness. Generally more favorable to Goethe than their American and European colleagues, German critics have viewed their national poet as one of the central figures of world literature. Criticism of the Gothic in Goethe's work centers on Faust. Noting that the play "lacks almost totally the sadistic terror that was the visible hallmark of the gothic," critics Jane K. Brown and Marshall Brown identify several Gothic tendencies in the work, including the title character's pact with Mephistopheles, the appearance of supernatural figures (and human characters' reaction to them), and depictions of transcendental consciousness. The legend of Faust, and Goethe's telling in particular, has been credited with influencing such classic works of Gothic fiction as Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk. In the twenty-first century Faust continues to be regarded as Germany's great contribution to world letters and one of the most important works of Western civilization.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Buch Annette (poetry) 1767
Die Laune des Verliebten (play) 1767
Neue Lieder (poetry) 1769
Rede Zum Schäkespears Tag (criticism) 1771
Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand [Goetz of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand] (play) 1773
Von deutscher Baukunst (criticism) 1773
Clavigo (play) 1774
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers [The Sorrows of Werter; also published as Werter and Charlotte, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and The Sufferings of Young Werther] (novel) 1774
Stella (play) 1776
Die Geschwister [The Sister] (play) 1787
Iphigenie auf Tauris [Iphigenia in Tauris] (play) 1787
Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (play) 1787
Egmont (play) 1788
Faust: Ein Fragment (play) 1790
Torquato Tasso [Torquato Tasso: A Dramatic Poem from the German with Other German Poetry] (play) 1790
Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären [Goethe's Botany: The Metamorphosis of Plants; also published as Tobler's Ode to Nature] (essay) 1790
Beiträge zur Optik (essay) 1791–92
Der Gross-Kophta (play) 1792
Der Bürgergeneral (play) 1793
Reineke Fuchs [History of Renard the Fox; also published as Reynard the Fox] (poetry) 1794
Römische Elegien [Goethe's Roman Elegies] (poetry) 1795
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship] (novel) 1795–96
Venezianische Epigramme (poetry) 1796
Xenien [with Friedrich Schiller; Goethe and Schiller's Xenions] (poetry) 1797
Hermann und Dorothea [Herman and Dorothea] (poetry) 1798
Die natürliche Tochter (play) 1804
Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert (biography) 1805
Faust—Der Tragödie erster Teil [Faust. Part I.; published in Faust: A Drama by Goethe and Schiller's "Song of the Bell"] (play) 1808

Die Wahlverwandtschaften [Elective Affinities] (novel) 1809
Pandora (unfinished play) 1810
Wanderers Sturmlied (poetry) 1810
Zur Farbenlehre [Theory of Colours; also published as Goethe's Colour Theory] (essay) 1810
Aus meinen Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit [Memoirs of Goethe: Written by Himself; also published as The Autobiography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry from My Own Life] (autobiography) 1811–22
Des Epimenides Erwachen (play) 1815
Sonnette (poetry) 1815
Italienische Reise [Travels in Italy; also published as Italian Journey] (travel essay) 1816
Ueber Kunst und Altertum von Goethe. 6 vols. (criticism) 1816–32
Zur Morphologie (essay) 1817–23
West-öestlicher Divan [Goethe's West-Easterly Divan; also published as West-Eastern Divan] (poetry) 1819
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre; oder, Die Entsagenden [Wilhelm Meister's Travels; or, The Renunciants] (novel) 1821
Die Campagne in Frankreich: 1792 [Campaign in France in the Year 1792] (history) 1822
Trilogie der Leidenschaft (poetry) 1823
Marienbader Elegie (poetry) 1827
Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe [Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe from 1794 to 1805] (letters) 1828
Novelle [Goethe's Novel; also published as Novella] (novella) 1828
∗Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre; oder, Die Entsagenden [Wilhelm Meister's Travels: Translated from the Enlarged Edition] (novel) 1828
Annalen: Tag-und Jahreshefte [Annals; or, Day and Year Papers] (journal) 1830
Faust II [Goethe's Faust: Part II] (play) 1832
Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens: 1823–1832 [with J. P. Eckermann; Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life] (conversations) 1837–48
The Poems of Goethe (poetry) 1846
Goethes sämmtliche Werke. 30 vols. (poetry, plays, essays, novels, novellas, short stories, criticism, history, biography, autobiography, letters, and librettos) 1848
Goethes sämmtliche Gedichte (poetry) 1869
Goethe's Works. 9 vols. (autobiography, plays, poetry, novels, essays, travel essays) 1885
†Goethes Faust in urspünglicher Gestalt nach der Göch hausenschen Abschrift herausgegeben (play) 1888
Wilhelm Meisters theatricalische Sendung [Wilhelm Meister's Theatrical Mission] (unfinished novel) 1911
Werke. 14 vols. (poetry, plays, novels, novellas, short stories, autobiography, biography, criticism, essays, history) 1961–64

∗ This work is a revision of the earlier Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre; oder, Die Enstagenden.

† This work is generally referred to as Urfaust.

PRIMARY SOURCES

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (POEM DATE 1808)

SOURCE: Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. "Dedication." In Faust: Part One, translated by David Luke, p. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

The following poem serves as Goethe's dedication to his Faust I, first published in 1808.

Uncertain shapes, visitors from the past
At whom I darkly gazed so long ago,
My heart's mad fleeting visions—now at last
Shall I embrace you, must I let you go?
Again you haunt me: come then, hold me fast!
Out of the mist and murk you rise, who so
Besiege me, and with magic breath restore,
Stirring my soul, lost youth to me once more.
 
You bring back memories of happier days
And many a well-loved ghost again I greet;
As when some old half-faded legend plays
About our ears, lamenting strains repeat
My journey through life's labyrinthine maze,
Old griefs revive, old friends, old loves I meet,
Those dear companions, by their fate's unkind
Decree cut short, who left me here behind.
 
They cannot hear my present music, those
Few souls who listened to my early song;
They are far from me now who were so close,
And their first answering echo has so long
Been silent. Now my voice is heard, who knows
By whom? I shudder as the nameless throng
Applauds it. Are they living still, those friends
Whom once it moved, scattered to the world's ends?
 
And I am seized by long unwonted yearning
For that still, solemn spirit-realm which then
Was mine; these hovering lisping tones returning
Sigh as from some Aeolian harp, as when

I sang them first; I tremble, and my burning
Tears flow, my stern heart melts to love again.
All that I now possess seems far away
And vanished worlds are real to me today.

GENERAL COMMENTARY

KENNETH S. CALHOON (ESSAY DATE MARCH 2001)

SOURCE: Calhoon, Kenneth S. "The Gothic Imaginary: Goethe in Strasbourg." Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 75, no. 1 (March 2001): 5-14.

In the following essay, Calhoon studies how Goethe's recorded early encounters with Gothic architecture informed his representations of fear and horror in his later works.

In the spring of 1771 Goethe, on the mend after a long illness, and aching to escape the sphere of his father's influence, rode the mail to Strasbourg, where he would convalesce further and read the law. Immediately upon alighting—so he reports in Dichtung und Wahrheit —he rushed to view at close range what had been visible for miles, namely the great thirteenth-century cathedral at the heart of town. His encounter with this medieval colossus is described dithyrambically in the essay Von Deutscher Baukunst, which Herder included in his Von Deutscher Art und Kunst (1772). A hymn to master-builder Erwin von Steinbach, the essay mounts a diatribe against a prevaling Neo-Classicism whose tenets had left Goethe disinclined to appreciate anything Gothic. He admits to sharing the common prejudice that made the term "Gothic" interchangeable with every conceivable aesthetic flaw—the absence of proportion and definition, ornamental excess, a jumbled mess of naturally incompatible forms. It is thus with apprehension that he approaches, braced to confront an unsettling amalgam of ill-matched components, in a word, a "monster": "so graute mir's im Gehen vorm Anblick eines mißgeformten krausborstigen Ungeheuers."¹ To his surprise, Goethe discovers not a monster, but a structure suffused with a wholeness and harmony commensurate with the natural world. The building's formal integrity, moreover, seems an outgrowth of its creator's soul, in which the whole is one with its parts: "Er [der Genius] ist der erste, aus dessen Seele die Teile, in ein ewiges Ganze zusammengewachsen, hervortreten" (HA XII, 9). The facade, then, functions as a medium through which a wholeness, proper to the creator, is installed in the spectator: "Ein ganzer, großer Eindruck füllte meine Seele, den, weil er aus tausend harmonierenden Einzelheiten bestand, ich wohl schmecken und genießen, keineswegs aber erkennen und erklären konnte" (HA XII, 11).

This opposition of intuitive and cognitive faculties favors an immediacy of perception, which here smacks of oral pleasure and a concomitant unity of self and world. The physical connotation of the verb "schmecken" undoes the distance from necessity that conditions "good taste". To be sure, the canons of taste are present as Goethe, recalling his wary approach, enumerates the frightful attributes that supposedly awaited him: "Unter die Rubrik Gotisch … häufte ich alle synonymische Mißverständnisse, die mir von Unbestimmtem, Ungeordnetem, Unnatürlichem, Zusammengestoppeltem, Aufgeflicktem, Überladenem jemals durch den Kopf gezogen waren" (HA XII, 10). Goethe identifies the confused synonymy by which the eighteenth-century champions of Classical restraint invoked the monstrous as something common to a range of distinct styles and representational practices. When Batty Langley observed in 1742 that "every ancient building, which is not in the Grecian mode, is called a Gothic building", he echoed a Palladian Classicism, later embraced by Goethe himself, that had long defined itself in pointed opposition to the grotesque.² With its inorganic aggregates of human, animal and plant forms, the grotesque lent expression to forces of instability—of "disruptive or insurgent vitality"—embodied catastrophically by Dr. Frankenstein's "gothic" monster, who is stitched together out of disparate and aesthetically incompatible parts, both human and animal.³

Finding in the great Gothic structure a dynamic, organic integrity, Goethe absolves the cathedral of the "grotesque" promiscuity that an ascendant bourgeois order was prone to project onto the styles of the old régime. Indeed, the excessive and imbalanced ornamentation that Goethe anticipated is suggestive of the Baroque and Rococo. The latter was at hand when Quatremère de Quincy, writing in 1798, warned of an enduring taste for the bizarre, which he ascribed to a "satiety that comes from abundance". Bizarrerie he condemned as an "incurably immoral use of form"—one that "makes the simple beauties of nature seem insipid". De Quincy laments the wide-ranging influence that this predilection for the bizarre exercised over architecture: "[S]traight lines were replaced by convolutions; severe outlines by undulations; regular plans by over-elaborate, mixtilinear designs; the symmetrical by the picturesque; and order by the confusion of chaos."⁴

Straight, severe, regular, symmetrical, ordered—these normative values convey the moralism behind a new, ideal architecture governed by the language of geometry and the law of function. The doctrine that would subordinate the edifice to the principle of uniform visibility stood opposite an old régime whose revelry in the play of appearances was now understood as spiritual dissipation—as Zerstreuung. The anodyne of distraction, namely concentration (Sammlung), is aligned with Anschauung, which in its full anthropological import denotes a simultaneous, undivided seeing. Something of this kind is evoked by de Quincy when he extols an architecture that refuses to divide itself into a variety of dissociated effects: "To produce an effect of grandeur, the object in which it is to inhere must be simple enough to strike us at a glance, that is to say, in its entirety, and at the same time to strike us in relation to its parts."⁵ Commenting on these lines, Jean Starobinski cites "a nouveau régime of sensibility" that "set aside multiplicity of sensation in favor of the unity of one great spiritual intuition"⁶.

One great spiritual intuition: so closely does this echo Goethe's evocation of the informing principle of the Gothic that it seems possible to situate his essay within a discourse whose other is that same "multiplicity of sensation". Subverting the logic that made the Gothic synonymous with the dispersive energies of the grotesque, Goethe enlists this architecture as an amalgam by which to conflate otherwise dissimilar Baroque and Neo-Classical traditions. The Baroque and Rococo make more or less explicit appearances in the Baukunst-essay, Baroque in the form of Bernini's much-maligned colonnade in front of St. Peter's, Rococo in the guise of those whom Goethe decries as "geschminkte Puppenmaler". One thinks of the brightly painted figurines from Meissen and elsewhere, so popular at the time, which perfectly epitomize the minute elaborations of a waning aristocratic society built on delicacy, intimation, politesse, not to mention the studied effeminacy of the honnéte homme: "Sie [unsre geschminkten Puppenmaler] haben durch theatralische Stellungen, erlogne Teints, und bunte Kleider die Augen der Weiber gefangen" (HA XII, 14). Rejecting the precepts of trompe-l'oeil, Goethe removes himself from a specularity that would implicate him in so blatantly narcissistic a self-presentation. His own image fragmented, he proceeds from a lack that stands opposite the aforementioned "satiety that comes from abundance". He describes himself early on as a "patched up vessel" poised between death and prosperity but drifting toward the former: "eh' ich mein geflicktes Schiffchen wieder auf den Ozean wage, wahrscheinlicher dem Tod als dem Gewinst entgegen …" (HA XII, 7), etc. He goes on to recount his attempt to improvise a monument to Erwin, whose grave-marker he has failed to locate. The missing crypt marks an emphatic absence, which is offset by the vision of the cathedral, itself the product of an ostensibly undivided genius. In this context, David Wellbery notes the "semantics of verticality" that pervades Goethe's essay and specifies the symbolic position as phallic.⁷ The observation is doubly applicable to the cathedral in question, given that only one of its twin towers was finished, leaving the lone spire forever shadowed by a symmetrical lack.

Goethe's vision of the massive church as a natural, harmonious and eternal whole does not neutralize his anxiety but confirms it—in the way that, in a certain psychoanalytic regimen, the tension between belief and disavowal is sustained through hallucinations that represent both. The cathedral acquires a strangely hallucinatory quality, as when Goethe comments on how the huge building seems suspended aloft: "wie das festgegründete, ungeheure Gebäude sich leicht in die Luft hebt" (HA XII, 12). In Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe remembers how the church, at first sight, struck him as something monstrous—ein Ungeheures—which would have terrified him were it not so finely conceived and carefully wrought (HA IX, 357-58). In the same account, he describes his repeated climbs to the top of the tower. In one instance, he forces himself out onto the narrow platform, from which the vertiginous spectacle, which he likens to the view from a hot-air balloon, is not framed or foregrounded by any part of the church: "Es ist völlig, als wenn man sich auf einer Montgolfiere in die Luft erhoben sähe. Dergleichen Angst und Qual wiederholte ich so oft, bis der Eindruck mir ganz gleichgültig ward …" (HA IX, 374). He adds that this strategy of exposing himself to unpleasant or disturbing experiences for the purpose of mastering them served him well in other endeavors, in particular his anatomical studies, where he learned to bear even the most repulsive sight, i.e., "den widerwärtigsten Anblick [zu] ertragen".

A certain "compulsion to repeat" (Wiederholungszwang) defines a sequence of exclamatory gestures that build on Goethe's first close encounter with the Gothic giant: "Mit welcher unerwarteten Empfindung überraschte mich der Anblick, als ich davor trat!" (HA XII, 11). The experience is represented not only in terms of an unalloyed sensation but also as the resolution of the tension, indeed the suspense, that informs Goethe's approach. We have noted how Goethe, winding his way through town, virtually trembles at the prospect of confronting "a misshapen, curly-bristled monster" ("eines mißgeformten krausborstigen Ungeheuers"). And while the actual encounter does not initially appear fear-inducing, the long paragraph describing Goethe's reaction—in which the spirit of the architect whispers ("lispelt") his secrets to the visitor—builds to a point of equilibrium that supersedes fear: "Deinem Unterricht dank' ich's, Genius, daß mir's nicht mehr schwindelt an deinen Tiefen" (HA XII, 12). The intervening one-and-one-half pages take their structure from Goethe's repeated trips to the church—return journeys that here seem apocryphally condensed between evening and morning. The following sentences are not consecutive, but they convey the Steigerung that this passage achieves: "wie oft bin ich zurückgekehrt, diese himmlisch-irdische Freude zu genießen…. Wie oft hat die Abenddämmerung mein durch forschendes Schauen ermattetes Aug' mit freundlicher Ruhe geletzt, wenn durch sie die unzähligen Teile zu ganzen Massen schmolzen, und nun diese, einfach und groß, vor meiner Seele standen …" (HA, XII, 11). Not only is this repetitiveness made explicit, but the repetition also coincides with a refreshment of vision, which in turn corresponds to a melting of divisions that establishes the plenitude of presence. This presencing culminates in the image of the awakening Goethe, childlike, his arms outstretched toward the shimmering church, which is suddenly animated by the birds that inhabit its pierced and porous facade: "Bis die Vögel des Morgens, die in seinen tausend Öffnungen wohnen, der Sonne entgegenjauchzten und mich aus dem Schlummer weckten. Wie frisch leuchtet' er im Morgenduftglanz mir entgegen, wie froh konnt' ich ihm meine Arme entgegenstrecken, schauen die großen harmonischen Massen …" (HA XII, 12). These figures of fluidity, of masses melting into each other, and of organic wholeness, are juxtaposed to the spectacle of a church perceived to be incomplete, fragmented, discordant, constructed mathematically and piece by piece. This sense of incompleteness, like the anxiety it provokes, is not invalidated by the experience of wholeness, but is part of the dynamism that structures the suspense. Incidentally, Richard Sennett, in his study of visibility and urban design, takes issue with the common idea that the physical immensity of Gothic cathedrals served to make conspicuous the predominance of the Church over secular life: "God's power was in no need of advertisement; the problem was how humankind … can approach Him, a problem of how to bring the congregation to an apprehension of His presence rather than an affirmation of His existence."⁸

With rather less confidence in "His existence", the Baroque orchestrates apprehension on a grand scale. Secrecy and obscurity are used to engage subjects in processes of decipherment, as wonder and astonishment ensure contemplation by bringing it temporarily to a halt. In his defining study of Baroque culture, José Antonio Maravall identifies a technique of suspension (not unrelated to suspense)—a means of "[arresting] one's attention in a state of anxious instability so as to reinforce the consequences of emotional effects"⁹. Hence a taste for difficulty, one manifestation of which was anamorphosis, where geometrical virtuosity was used to predict and project—or correct—visual distortion. This is part of a more general technique of incompleteness that Maravall finds in the later works of Shakespeare, sometimes thought to be loosely constructed, or the paintings of Velásquez, which typically have an unfinished quality: "It is a process of suspension wherein one expects the contemplating eye to end up supplying what is missing…. All painting of 'splotches' or 'smears' … is to a certain extent an anamorphosis that calls for spectator intervention to recompose the image."¹⁰ Goethe supplies what is missing, his eye reassembling the image, finding completeness in place of "zerstreute Elemente" and "unzählig kleine Teile". The cathedral at Strasbourg, as it functions in his essay, is anamorphic, wavering between a wholeness, which Goethe hallucinates, and the monstrosity lurking behind it, whereby "monster" carries the connotation of something ill-born.¹¹ We may add that adjectives like "sinuous" and "flaccid", commonly applied to architecture at the time, superimpose onto the structure an image of the body. To the extent that Goethe finds in the church a counterpart to his own "geflicktes Schiffchen"—Schiff ("nave") being itself an architectural term—the stone edifice constitutes an imaginary reflection built around an internal sense of disunity. There is something here of Lacan's mirror-stage—of the child's jubilant recognition of his reflected image, which offers a semblance of wholeness that contrasts markedly with what the child experiences in himself. (The "disruptive or insurgent vitality" of the grotesque may here be thought of in analogy to the emerging I's sense of inner turbulence, which in dreams, as in the works of Bosch, takes the form of anatomical monstrosities.)¹² And there is Goethe—again childlike—roused from sleep to the sight of the church, redolent with the dawn, and shining back at him, i.e., entgegenleuchtend. The earlier feeling of fragmentation, now expiated, reappears through a doubling expressed as elective affinity: "Aber zu dir, teuerer Jüngling, gesell' ich mich, der du bewegt dastehst und die Widersprüche nicht vereinigen kannst, die sich in deiner Seele kreuzen …" (HA XII, 13).

Lacan is concerned with the manner in which living beings adapt to an internal bi-partitioning. This division is evident in the natural world in the phenomenon of mimicry, whereby the organism splits itself between its being and its semblance, the latter taking the form of masks, camouflage, alluring and threatening gestures. Lacan observes that the mechanism by which organisms assume the mottled coloration of the surrounding world is "the equivalent of the function which, in man, is exercised by painting"¹³. He suggests provocatively that if a bird were to paint it would do so by "letting fall its feathers"¹⁴. It is intriguing that Goethe, as an example of the "bildende Natur" that inheres in man and engenders artistic creation, refers to the self-decoration—the "body art"—of primitive peoples: "Und so modelt der Wilde mit abenteuerlichen Zügen, gräßlichen Gestalten, hohen Farben, seine Kokos, seine Federn und seinen Körper" (HA XII, 13). Art is atavistically derived. Lacan asserts that the stroke of the painter's brush is a gesture, meant to intimidate, calculated to make an impression. Maravall has said with respect to the gestural excess of mannerism that painters like Michelangelo and Vasari "understood that what was unrestrained, taken to the extreme, possesses an ability to impress"¹⁵. Likewise, Lacan affirms that "the [painted] picture is first felt by us, as the terms impression and impressionism imply, as having more affinity with the gesture than any other type of movement"¹⁶.

By ascribing an evasive function to the painting of "splotches" and "smears" (typical of but not limited to Velásquez), Maravall echoes the suggestion that "those touches that fall like rain from the painter's brush" are analogous to natural mimicry and thus constitute a screen.¹⁷ Ortega y Gasset, who locates Velásquez at the beginning of a series of "successive impressionisms", identifies a revolution in painting that "denied the pretensions of solidity", replacing tactile, corporeal shapes with "a mere surface that intercepts vision". Impressionism proper (Ortega's account has the tone of complaint) represents a more complete withdrawal from the visible world and into the subject. This gradual distancing from things favors the genre of landscape, which formalizes the separation between subject and object: "The point of view has been retracted, has placed itself farther from the object, and we have passed from proximate to distant vision…. Between the eye and the bodies is interposed the most immediate object: hollow space, air."¹⁸

As if to confirm Ortega's claim that distant vision issues from the increasing self-absorption of the modern subject, Goethe produces, literally in place of the cathedral, a landscape. Having just arrived in Strasbourg, and anxious to take advantage of remaining daylight, he climbs the lone spire to partake of the view. The rustic panorama that greets him unfolds in accordance with the movements of the eye as it traces the courses of rivers and contours of the land:

Und so sah ich denn von der Plattform die schöne Gegend vor mir, in welcher ich eine Zeitlang wohnen und hausen durfte: die ansehnliche Stadt, die weitumherliegenden, mit herrlichen dichten Bäumen besetzten und durchflochtenen Auen, diesen auffallenden Reichtum der Vegetation, der, dem Laufe des Rheins folgend, die Ufer, Inseln und Werder bezeichnet. Nicht weniger mit mannigfaltigem Grün geschmückt ist der von Süden herab sich ziehende flache Grund, welchen die Iller bewässert; selbst westwärts, nach dem Gebirge zu, finden sich manche Niederungen, die einen ebenso reizenden Anblick von Wald und Wiesenwuchs gewähren, so wie der nördliche mehr hügelige Teil von unendlichen kleinen Bächen durchschnitten ist, die überall ein schnelles Wachstum begünstigen. Denkt man sich nun zwischen diesen üppig ausgestreckten Matten, zwischen diesen fröhlich ausgesäeten Hainen alles zum Fruchtbau schickliche Land trefflich bearbeitet, grünend und reifend, und die besten und reichsten Stellen desselben durch Dörfer und Meierhöfe bezeichnet, und eine solche große und unübersehliche, wie ein neues Paradies für den Menschen recht vorbereitete Fläche näher und ferner von teils angebauten, teils waldbewachsenen Bergen begrenzt; so wird man das Entzücken begreifen, mit dem ich mein Schicksal segnete, das mir für einige Zeit einen so schönen Wohnplatz bestimmt hatte.

                              (HA IX, 356-357)

Heroic in its own right, the Gothic structure is less something seen than the source of a point of view. We might even venture that Goethe's first act in Strasbourg was to rush to the one spot from which the cathedral is not visible. The above landscape, which carefully adheres to eighteenth-century formulas, constitutes a screen—a holistic counterpart to the Gothic "monster", whose potentially grotesque features disappear behind a pleasing surface.

If Impressionism represents a culmination of the pleasing surface, it also manifests the triumphal gaze of the modern subject which, following Ortega, organizes visual phenomena into a certain mise-en-scène: "The eye of the artist is established as the center of the plastic Cosmos, around which revolve the form of objects."¹⁹ Hence Goethe's synoptic view from the mighty spire, which fixes a monumental vantage point.²⁰ While not impressionist as such, the landscape Goethe describes resembles those painted by John Constable, whose often rough application of color is consistent with the "technique of incompleteness" described by Maravall, and whose "Claudian" renderings of the English countryside depict not objects, but "objects transformed by atmosphere"²¹. Between 1892 and –95, a good hundred-twenty years after Goethe's arrival in Strasbourg, Claude Monet produced some thirty canvases depicting the cathedral at Rouen, each painted from the same point of view. Accommodations of ambient light, many of these paintings bear supplementary titles such as "Morning Effect", "Gray Day", or "Sunset"—appellations that identify the object as an effect of its surroundings. Camouflaged as it were, the great facade appears always on the verge of dissolving into flecks of color, which fade or deepen in accordance with the hour, season, indeed atmosphere. While not tethered to a single point of view, Goethe likewise celebrates the variety supplied by changing light: "Wie oft bin ich zurückgekehrt, von allen Seiten, aus allen Entfernungen, in jedem Lichte des Tags zu schauen seine Würde und Herrlichkeit!" (HA XII, 11). This exclamation illustrates what is apparent throughout, namely that Goethe describes little while saying much about his affective response to what he sees. His repeated returns to the building, and his repeated affirmation of its wholeness, has the effect of a compulsive disavowal, for that structural integrity does not reveal itself to the eye. Rather, it is fantasmatic, conveyed in darkness by the whispering spirit of the architect. Goethe's Baukunst-essay begins with an affirmation of a lack, his failure to locate Erwin's grave-marker inducing melancholy ("da ward ich tief in die Seele betrübt" [HA XII, 7]). The cathedral, rising into the air, seems little more than a substitute—an anamorphic ghost whose apparition oscillates between Abenddämmerung and Morgenduftglanz, hovering at the threshold of the visible.

Notes

1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz and Hans Joachim Schrimpf, 8th edition, Munich 1978, XII, 11. All subsequent references to the Hamburger Ausgabe are abbreviated as HA.

2. Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1920), New Haven 1983, 176. See William J. Lillyman, "Andrea Palladio and Goethe's Classicism", Goethe Yearbook V (1985), 85-102.

3. See Paulson (note 2), 178, 239-247.

4. Cited in Jean Starobinski, 1789: Emblems of Reason, trans. Barbara Bray, Cambridge/Mass. 1988, 74.

5. Starobinski (note 4), 75. Emphasis added.

6. Starobinski (note 4), 75.

7. David Wellbery, The Specular Moment. Goethe's Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism, Stanford 1996, 128.

8. Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye. The Design and Social Life of Cities, New York 1990, 13.

9. José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque. Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran, Minneapolis 1986, 216.

10. Maravall (note 9), 218.

11. In an essay from 1823 also entitled Von Deutscher Baukunst Goethe characterizes the cathedral at Cologne, which at the time was still substantially incomplete, as something monstrous ("so tritt uns hier ein Unvollendetes, Ungeheures entgegen"), the sight of which arroused apprehension ("eine gewisse Apprehension in mir erregte") (HA XII, 180).

12. Jacques Lacan: "This fragmented body … usually manifests itself in dreams … in the form of disjointed limbs, or of those organs represented in exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions—the very same that the visionary Hieronymus Bosch fixed, for all time, in painting, in their ascent from the fifteenth century to the imaginary zenith of modern man" (Écrits. A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York 1977, 4-5).

13. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York 1981, 109.

14. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts (note 13), 114.

15. Maravall (note 9), 211.

16. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts (note 13), 115.

17. Maravall (note 9), 219; Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts (note 13), 110.

18. José Ortega y Gasset, "On Point of View in the Arts", trans. Paul Snodgrass and Joseph Frank," in: The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture, Garden City, New York 1956, 111-112. See Albert Schug, "Über den Gegenstand der impressionistischen Landschaftsmalerei," in: Götz Czymmek (ed.), Landschaft im Licht. Impressionistische Malerei in Europa und Nordamerika, Cologne, Zurich 1990, 67 f.

19. Ortega y Gasset (note 18), 112.

20. That Goethe's view from the tower is paradigmatic is suggested by a comparison to Lynkeus, the tower-watch in Faust II. See Helmut J. Schneider: "Lynkeus … betreibt jene von [Joachim] Ritter analysierte Kosmos-Schau, die speculatio, die wörtlich nichts anderes als Turm-Schau bedeutet" ("Utopie und Landschaft im 18. Jahrhundert", in: Wilhelm Voßkamp [ed.], Utopieforschung. Interdisziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopie, Stuttgart 1982, III, 187).

21. Ronald Paulson, Literary Landscape. Turner and Constable, New Haven 1982, 112.

TITLE COMMENTARY

Faust

SYNDY M. CONGER (ESSAY DATE 1977)

SOURCE: Conger, Syndy M. "An Analysis of The Monk and Its German Sources." In Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans: An Interpretive Study of the Influence of German Literature on Two Gothic Novels, pp. 12-42. Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache unde Literatur, Universitat Salzburg, 1977.

In the following excerpt, Conger studies the influence of Goethe's Faust on Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk.

The Monk and Goethe's Faust

Various critics have noticed the Faust-like characteristics of Lewis's Ambrosio, but no one has gone beyond jotting down basic similarities between the two, nor has anyone even tried to establish whether The Monk stands more indebted to Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus or Johann Goethe's Faust. ¹ To students interested in determining the extent of German influence on English gothic fiction, this issue is crucial, even more so because the marriage of gothic fiction and the Faust legend, first performed by Lewis in The Monk, was one of the important events in the history of gothicism, producing some of the world's best-known gothic novels: Melmoth the Wanderer, Frankenstein, and Moby Dick.²…

While it cannot be said that Lewis's The Monk is a carbon copy of Goethe's Storm and Stress Faust either, there are nevertheless many more points of resemblance between these two works, making Goethe's influence on Lewis decidedly more pervasive than Marlowe's. At crucial points in his novel Lewis draws upon those scenes from Goethe's Faust which constitute the kernel of the Gretchen tragedy. Some of these parallel scenes have been noted by one critic, but none has analyzed them carefully.³ At first the parallels between characters are casual and fleeting, as if Lewis was unable to decide who should play the role of Faust to his "Gretchen," Antonia. For example, in the first scene of the novel, while Lorenzo is the obvious admirer of Antonia, Don Christoval speaks the lines that Faust speaks to Gretchen on first meeting her. Once Antonia meets Ambrosio, however, Lewis's indecision is over. Ambrosio becomes his Faust, and then parallel scenes follow one another in quick succession. But before we analyze these scenes, a closer look at the fragmentary version of Goethe's Faust available to Lewis is necessary.

What has not been widely recognized is that the Faust that Lewis had to draw upon was not the completed version we have today; it was Faust: Ein Fragment, published first in 1790, but despite the late date essentially a product of the Storm and Stress.⁴ Goethe had begun working on a Faust drama in 1771 or 1772 at the height of his own Storm and Stress period; and around the time he made his permanent move to the Weimar court in 1776, he was able to take with him a Faust manuscript of at least twenty-one scenes.⁵ For the next ten years, however, his new courtly duties and a gradual change in literary taste prevented him from working on the play, and not until he took his first extended vacation to Italy in 1786 was he able to return to it. Because "the material would not yield to Goethe," as one critic has put it,⁶ he decided to publish a version to which he had added two scenes, "Hexenküche" and "Wald und Höhle," but which as yet had neither the crucial pact scene nor a resolution. Important final scenes known to have been written at the time, among them Gretchen's mad scene in prison, Goethe omitted.⁷ A more complete version of the early play in manuscript form existed at Weimar; but whether Lewis saw it during his half-year in Weimar in 1792 is not known, though is there some evidence in The Monk to support such a hypothesis.⁸

This early Faust is hardly a scholar's tragedy at all, but a tragedy of love⁹ which was one of Goethe's unique additions to the Faust material.¹⁰ Responsive to Storm and Stress sympathy for unwed mothers or dishonored women,¹¹ he wrote the story of a simple middle-class maiden Margarethe (or Gretchen, as she is called by Faust) whose seduction and subsequent abandonment by Faust leads her to child murder, imprisonment, madness and death.¹² The central subject of Goethe's early Faust is, then, quite different from Marlowe's Dr. Faustus.

Even the initial discontent Faust feels and the solution he seeks are quite different from those of Marlowe's Faustus. Both plays do open with the scholars sitting in their studies, fulminating about how little they know, but for Faustus discontent springs from pride and a lust for near-divine power, while Goethe's Faust despairs because he has failed to learn nature's best kept secret, the Truth. Faustus rejects analytics because it will afford him "no miracle" (l.9), medicine because it cannot teach him Christ's gift for raising the dead (l.24-26), law because it's not worthy of his intellect (l.35), and divinity because it would teach him humility and penitence (l.40-45). On the other hand, Goethe's Faust has wearied of his studies because they have only taught him that he knows nothing ("Nacht," l.11), nor have they enabled him to teach or help others (ll.19-20). Even though he has cut himself off from the joys of living for years, ultimate knowledge is still beyond his grasp: he still has not seen "was die Welt / Im Innersten zusammen hält" (l.29-30).¹³ Faustus' solution to his discontent is to barter with the devil for the power he longs for. Faust's solution is to clap shut his books and barter with the devil to give him wisdom through experience:

     Und was der ganzen Menschheit zugetheilt ist,
     Will ich in meinem innern Selbst geniessen,
     Mit meinem Geist das Höchst' und Tiefste greifen,
     Und so mein eigen Selbst zu Ihrem Selbst erweitern
                               ("Nacht," ll.247-52)

¹⁴

Faust is not to blame that Mephistopheles interprets this reductively as a wish for wine, women and song.

FROM THE AUTHOR
SIR WALTER SCOTT'S TRANSLATION OF GOETHE'S "DER ERLKONIG" ("THE ERL-KING")

  O! who rides by night thro' the woodlands so wild?
  It is the fond Father embracing his Child;
  And close the Boy nestles within his lov'd arm,
  From the blast of the tempest to keep himself warm.
 
  "O Father! see yonder, see yonder!" he says.
  "My Boy, upon what dost thou fearfully gaze?"
  "O! 'tis the ERL-KING, with his staff and his shroud!"
  "No, my Love! it is but a dark wreath of the cloud."

[THE PHANTOM SPEAKS.]

  "O! wilt thou go with me, thou loveliest Child!
  "By many gay sports shall thy hours be beguil'd;
  "My Mother keeps for thee full many a fair toy,
  "And many a fine flow'r shall she pluck for my Boy."
 
  "O Father! my Father! and did you not hear,
  "The ERL-KING whisper so close in my ear?"
  "Be still my lov'd Darling, my Child be at ease!
  "It was but the wild blast as it howl'd thro' the trees."

[THE PHANTOM.]

  "O wilt thou go with me, thou loveliest Boy!
  "My Daughter shall tend thee with care and with joy;
  "She shall bear thee so lightly thro' wet and thro' wild,
  "And hug thee, and kiss thee, and sing to my Child."
 
  "O Father! my Father! and saw you not plain
  "The ERL-KING's pale daughter glide past thro' the rain?"
  "O no, my heart's treasure! I knew it full soon,
  "It was the Grey Willow that danc'd to the Moon.

[THE PHANTOM.]

  "Come with me, come with me, no longer delay!
  "Or else, silly Child, I will drag thee away."
  "O Father! O Father! now, now, keep your hold!
  The ERL-KING has seiz'd me—his grasp is so cold."
 
  Sore trembled the Father; he spurr'd thro' the wild,
  Clasping close to his bosom his shuddering Child;
  He reaches his dwelling in doubt and in dread;
  But, clasp'd to his bosom, the Infant was dead!

Scott, Sir Walter. "The Erl-King. From the German of Goethe. Author of the Sorrows of Werter." In An Apology for Tales of Terror. Kelso: printed at the Mail office, 1799.

As Goethe's Fragment springs over any conjuration or pact scene between Faust and Mephistopheles, the next important scene for the purposes of this comparison is "Hexenküche," added at the revision. Part of Mephistopheles' scheme for winning Faust's soul is to restore his youth and with it his youthful longings. While the witch brews the right potion, Mephistopheles makes sure Faust catches a glimpse of a beautiful woman in the witch's mirror. The potion and the mirror have done their job well, for the first girl he sees, as it happens Gretchen, he desires. "Hör," he barks at Mephistopheles the moment she has passed on the street, "du musst mir die Dirne schaffen!" ("Strasse," l.1080).¹⁵ When Mephistopheles balks, claiming he has "no power" over such a virtuous girl (l.1087), Faust responds with a threat to call off their deal and the boast that he could arrange it in seven hours without the devil's help (ll.1103-05). Even Mephistopheles' mockery ("Ihr sprecht schon fast wie ein Franzos," l.1106) doesn't budge Faust's resolve ("Hab' Appetit …," l.1114).¹⁶ The disillusioned professor is hungry for sensual experience.

The rest of the drama is the Gretchen tragedy. Mephistopheles arranges a rendezvous for Faust and Gretchen at a neighbor's house ("Marthens Garten"), Faust easily overwhelms the naive Gretchen with costly jewels and a display of affection and erudition, they arrange to meet at night at Gretchen's house by giving the mother a sleeping potion, the mother dies as a result, and the now pregnant Gretchen is separated from Faust. The Fragment stops abruptly at a very unhappy moment for both lovers. Faust is last seen in a forest ("Wald und Höhle"), deciding under Mephistopheles' pressure that he cannot resist seducing Gretchen even if it means her perdition. Gretchen is then seen in three moments of panic which follow her discovery that she is pregnant. We see her guilt-stricken at the village well ("Am Brunnen") when a neighbor slanders another girl in similar straits; then praying to Mary ("Zwinger"); and finally fainting in church ("Dom"), terrified by both the mass being sung for the dead and an evil spirit plaguing her for her crimes. Because the Fragment breaks off where it does, it is painfully pessimistic;¹⁷ the forces of evil appear to have total control at the end.

Much more than conjuration, pact, and ending are missing in the Fragment. Faust is also less sympathetic in this version, for Goethe has not yet included those scenes which will depict him as God's devoted "Knecht," the good man who "in seinem dunklen Drange, / Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst,"¹⁸ and the man who makes the clever wager he's bound to win with the devil. The Fragment also skips over the pathos of scholar Faust:¹⁹ his despair, his near suicide when he believes he will never know nature's secret, his self-revealing talks with his student Wagner, and with Mephistopheles, the adulation of the townspeople for their doctor. At the earliest possible moment in the Fragment, the reader sees Faust, raw and hungry, wooing Gretchen. Clearly, Lewis would not have had much difficulty seeing a likeness between this Faust, who abandons the recluse's life of contemplation for the pleasures of the flesh, and his Ambrosio.

Despite the fragmentary nature of the 1790 version, its ties to the Storm and Stress movement are unmistakable. Even though Goethe cast some of his earlier rhapsodic prose into verse during the revisions in the 90's, for the most part the form is typical of dramatic form of the movement. It is essentially non-neoclassical: the action is a series of loosely allied scenes with huge gaps in time and leaps in space.²⁰ The content even more markedly reflects the preoccupations of the Storm and Stress.

First of all, the fact that Faust is a drama drawn from German folklore identifies it as a response to Herder's plea for German authors to revive their own national heritage in literature.²¹ Secondly, the values which receive emphasis in the play are Storm and Stress values. Faust demonstrates an appreciation for both nature and the natural. The forest is where he retreats to regain some peace and control over his life; and for a few moments nature heals him and restores his virtue until Mephistopheles intervenes. Faust treasures Gretchen, too, for her unspoiled, spontaneous response to life, and she gives him the same peaceful feeling the forest does ("Abend," 11.1147-55). Faust is also an enthusiastic exponent of experience.²² It is this which first causes him to turn to Mephistopheles, and he admits in "Wald und Höhle" that the devil is now indispensible to him in gratifying what has become his quenchless yearning for one experience after another: "So tauml' ich von Begierde zu Genuss, / Und im Genuss verschmacht' ich nach Begierde" (11.1919-20).²³ It was not just physical experience that Faust initially longed for, but emotional or subjective experience. His conviction that "Gefühl ist alles" ("Feeling is all," from "Marthens Garten," 1.1756) is behind the special nature of his first request to Mephistopheles to "feel within" everything the human being has ever felt ("Nacht," 11.247-49).

Finally, the central conflict of the drama links it with the Storm and Stress: the conflict between unorthodox inner values and constricting social forms. Both Faust and Gretchen are caught up in this conflict, though not in the same way. Faust openly disregards the codes of church and society. He would rather bask in his own sensibility than contemplate God ("Marthens Garten," 11.1731-58), and he would rather seduce Gretchen than marry her. Gretchen is no conscious rebel, yet she too unwittingly violates the moral code, thinking Faust will eventually marry her.²⁴ When she realizes her love has made her criminal, something she imagined to be impossible, this tragic truth snaps her mind.²⁵ Both characters' attempts to assert their own private values are viewed sympathetically by Goethe, though it must be added that he does not paint their society as black as some of his fellow Stürmer und Dränger.²⁶ He leaves the impression instead that the conflict at the center of life is not one easily resolved by chang-ing laws. The persistent assertion of private values, the repeated search for gratification of self, always eventually lead to a tragic clash with society. If Lewis's The Monk is Storm and Stress, then it should at least share some of these characteristics.

What Lewis clearly shares with Goethe is an interest in the Gretchen tragedy; and this fact alone makes Goethe's influence on The Monk certain, since the Gretchen tragedy had been his own original contribution to the Faust legend. The first three scenes from Faust Lewis draws upon to create his opening episode are lighthearted, buoyed up by Mephistopheles' devilish wit: "Strasse," the initial meeting of Faust and Gretchen outside a cathedral; "Der Nachbarinn Haus," Mephistopheles' successful attempt to convince neighbor Marthe she's a widow, so that he and Faust can return to come courting (ostensibly to bring her the death certificate of her long-absent husband); and "Garten," the subsequent rendezvous at Marthe's house. Whenever possible, Lewis tries to approximate that tone in his forest scene. Faust is immediately fascinated by Gretchen when he sees her for the first time leaving a church, and he accosts her on the spot, asking if he may walk her home: "… darf ich wagen / Meinen Arm und Geleit Ihr anzutragen" (11.1066-67). Don Christoval and Lorenzo are just as taken with Antonia when they first see her in church, and Don Christoval asks her a very similar question: "Will you permit us to attend you home?" (p. 10). Gretchen and Antonia react similarly also. Gretchen has little to say, though what she does say is said with spirit: "Bin weder Fräulein, weder schön, / Kann ungeleitet nach Hause gehen" (11.1068-69).²⁷ Antonia is shy and taciturn: "… the Lady did not open her lips…. At last, in so low a voice as to be scarcely intelligible, she made shift to answer,—'No segnor'" (p. 10). Both also avert their eyes and when pressured to do something they think improper, plead they cannot because it is not "the custom." Gretchen rejects the suggestion from Mephistopheles that she take a lover; Antonia tries to keep on her veil:

Margarethe:	Antonia:
"Das ist des Landes nicht der Brauch." ("Der Nachbarinn Haus," l.1410)	"Dear Aunt; it is not the custom in Murcia." (p. 11)

In order to help Faust in his pursuit of Gretchen, Goethe's Mephistopheles makes friends with Gretchen's neighbor Marthe and arranges a rendezvous in her garden for the four of them. His task is to make sure Marthe's attention will be diverted so that Faust can woo Gretchen, a task which comically turns out to be much more painful than Mephistopheles expected. The aging Marthe, a woman whose husband left her long ago, is aggressively interested in men, money (Mephistopheles seems to be a nobleman), and marriage, and immediately begins an attack. Understandable in the light of his profession, Mephistopheles prefers the witch's bacchanals of Walpurgisnacht to holy wedlock, and deliberately misinterprets all her blatant advances. He does avoid committing himself, but is only too anxious to leave, muttering to himself as he goes: "Die hielte wohl den Teufel selbst bey'm Wort!" (l.1466).²⁸

In the first scene of The Monk Don Christoval functions in an analogous way. He is to divert Leonella's attention so that Lorenzo may make Antonia's acquaintance, and he also finds himself trapped. Leonella is as aggressive and man hungry as Marthe, and makes the clever rhetorical assumption that Don Christoval wishes to marry her (p. 23). In Lewis's description of Don Christoval's reaction to Leonella, an echo from Faust is audible: "… at the end of an hour I find myself upon the brink of matrimony!… Diavolo!" (pp. 23-24). Since Don Christoval's aversion to the old woman is so similar to Mephistopheles' to Marthe, Lewis's use of the word "devil" was probably not accidental.

..…

Besides the death of the mother, two other potentially sensationalistic scenes in Faust are never dramatized by Goethe: the seduction and eventual execution-death of Gretchen. No doubt he recognized that, since Faust was responsible for both to some extent, they would blacken his hero's character irreparably. Again, Lewis spells out what Goethe left out. In what are usually acknowledged to be the least palatable scenes in The Monk, Lewis depicts Ambrosio raping and murdering Antonia in the church vaults surrounded by moldering corpses.

No comparatists have yet noticed that these scenes yield something positive. They offer textual evidence that Lewis may have been familiar with the Faust manuscript at Weimar²⁹ which included Gretchen's prison scene. In this scene in the Urfaust, Mephistopheles has managed to get Faust into Gretchen's prison the night before her execution, and Faust has been trying in vain to convince the deranged girl to flee with him. At dawn Mephistopheles reappears and presses Faust to hurry or he is lost: "Auf! oder ihr seyd verlohren! Meine Pferde schaudern!" (italics mine, "Kercker," p. 65). Margrete (alternate spelling in Urfaust ) reacts hysterically, sensing she is in the presence of God's enemy: "Der! Der! Lass ihn, schick ihn fort! der will mich! Nein! Nein! Gericht Gottes, komm über mich …" (p. 65).³⁰ In Antonia's dungeon scene, Ambrosio is thinking of granting her liberty, when, like Mephistopheles, Matilda rushes into the vault to urge Ambrosio to take quick action: "We are lost, unless some speedy means is found of dispelling the Rioters" (p. 389). Antonia's response is a cry of joy followed by increased terror as she realizes that Matilda is no friend: "'Help! for God's sake.'" (italics mine, p. 391).

..…

Goethe's Faust helped Lewis move beyond a stereotyped villain to this more ethically complex one, a character one step closer to a Victor Frankenstein or a Melmoth. Melmoth and Frankenstein are admittedly closer to Faust than is Ambrosio, for they have Faust's insatiable, self-destructive desire to know. But the gothic novel with a villain-hero whose goal is to know the unknowable is a novel markedly different in plot and theme from pre-Lewis gothic novels, and it was Lewis, under Goethe's influence, who pointed later gothic novelists in this new direction.

Another innovation in the cast of characters which was inspired by Lewis's interest in Goethe's Faust is the addition of the devil. Bredvold heralds The Monk as the first gothic novel to exploit the "Satanic as a thrill,"³¹ and it may very well be true that Lewis did add the devil for the thrill of it.³² It is not true, however, that the devil's presence adds thrills only. It makes evil more absolute, more unmanageable, especially since Lewis's devil controls not only human actions, but also even the thoughts and dreams of the virtuous. Such ubiquitous and all-powerful demons encourage just as many unsettling questions as the villainhero Ambrosio does. Is life something we can never fully understand or control? Are we at the mercy of inexplicably demonic forces outside ourselves? Within ourselves?³³ These questions had not been raised so effectively in gothic fiction before The Monk.

Goethe's influence can be traced also in the plot of The Monk, where enough episodes of the Gretchen tragedy are reenacted to necessitate a basic tragic structure: the meeting at the church, the conversations about religion, the vision in the mirror, the visit to the bedroom, seduction for the girl, and death for the mother and the girl. Lewis does for the gothic romance, then, what Richardson did for the epistolary romance and Goethe did for the Faust legend: he introduces to it the pattern of a lovers' tragedy.³⁴ Such an innovation was an important one, again, bound to invite later gothic romancers to choose more serious themes. One needs only to look at the increasing thoughtfulness of such tragic gothic novelists as Mary Shelley, Maturin, Brontë, and Melville to realize that Lewis's tragic ending, however absurd or grotesque it is, freed future gothic romancers from the intellectually shackling concept of poetical justice and its conventional happy ending.

Notes

1. Of the four critics who discuss the subject, neither Railo nor Dédéyan specifies any particular Faust. Carré and Guthke deal exclusively with the relationship between Goethe's Faust and The Monk.

2. Robert D. Hume, "Exuberant Gloom, Existential Agony, and Heroic Despair: Three Varieties of Negative Romanticism," in The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, ed. G. R. Thompson (Pullman: Washington State Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 109-27, devotes considerable time to the discussion of Faust as an apt archetypal figure for the Dark Romantics, and mentions these three novels in the process (p. 112).

3. Carré, pp. 35-36, lists the following scenes in The Monk as partially derived from Goethe's Faust: the first in the church, Ambrosio's mirror vision, Matilda's getting him into Antonia's chamber, and the sacrifice of mother and daughter. Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, pp. 38-39, 133, concurs with just three: the mirror vision and the double sacrifice.

4. For an excellent discussion of the history of the composition and publication of Goethe's Faust, see "Introduction," Goethe's Faust ed. R-M. S. Heffner, Helmut Rehder, W. F. Twaddell (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1954), pp. 31-46. See also Pascal, p. 306. Only the German critics have noted that Lewis probably only knew Goethe's 1790 Fragment: Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, p. 34, and Otto Ritter, "Studien zu M. G. Lewis' Roman 'Ambrosio, or The Monk,'" Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 111, NS, 11 (1903), 117.

5. A copy of Goethe's 1774 manuscript, made by a lady of the Weimar court by the name of Luise von Göchhausen, was discovered in 1887 and published with the designation of Urfaust. See Heffner, et al, pp. 32-34, and J. G. Robertson, A History of German Literature, 5th ed., rev. Edna Purdie (Edinburgh: Wm. Blackwood & Sons, 1966), p. 271. It would have been available and certainly known when Lewis was in Weimar, as it was made sometime before 1786.

6. Frenzel and Frenzel, Vol. 1, 218.

7. To compare the three available versions of Faust (Urfaust; Faust: Ein Fragment; and Faust: Eine Tragödie) see Die Faustdichtungen. Referred to in notes as Artemis.

8. Lewis was well acquainted with Faust according to Byron's biographer Moore. See The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, author of "The Monk," "Castle Spectre," & c., with many Pieces in Prose never before Published (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), I, 73. Since Göchhausen's transcription was done sometime between 1775 and 1786, it would have been available.

9. Heffner, p. 33; Robertson, p. 271.

10. Heffner, p. 33.

11. Frenzel and Frenzel, p. 172; Garland, p. 144; Pascal, pp. 66-68.

12. Much of this is not shown in the fragment, however, which breaks off with Gretchen in church, the child not yet born.

13. "What secret force / Hides in the world and rules its course." I have used Walter Kaufmann's translation of Goethe's Faust (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1963), p. 95. Page numbers after translations are Kaufmann's.

14.

    And what is portioned out to all mankind,
    I shall enjoy deep in my self, contain
    Within my spirit summit and abyss,
    Pile on my breast their agony and bliss
    And thus let my own self grow into theirs, unfettered….
                                      (p. 189)

15. "Get me that girl, and don't ask why?" (p. 257).

16. Mephistopheles: "You speak just like a Frenchman"; Faust: "I've appetite …" (pp. 257, 259).

17. "Infinitely more pessimistic" than the Urfaust is Heffner's assessment of tone, p. 38.

18. "A good man in his darkling aspiration / Remembers the right road throughout his quest" (p. 89).

19. The Fragment contains only fifteen pages concerning the scholar's tragedy as compared to roughly fifty in the 1808 version.

20. See Frenzel and Frenzel, pp. 172-73.

21. Pascal, p. 266.

22. Heffner, p. 37.

23. "Thus I reel from desire to enjoyment, / And in enjoyment languish for desire" (p. 313).

24. When Faust tells Gretchen his love for her is "eternal" and will have "no end" (11.1648-49), he means the feeling will always endure; she thinks he means he will marry her. Lecture, Albrecht Schöne, 30 October 1973, Univ. of Göttingen.

25. Pascal, pp. 64-65.

26. Pascal, p. 145.

27. "I'm neither a lady nor am I fair, / And can go home without your care" (p. 257).

28. "She'd keep the Devil to his word, I fear" (p. 289).

29. See n. 5 above.

30.

mephistopheles:

    Up! Or you are lost.
    Prating and waiting and pointless wavering.
    My horses are quavering
                      .....

margaret:

   He! He! Send him away!
                     .....
 
   He wants me!
 
                     .....
 
   Judgment of God! I give
   Myself to you.
                                       (p. 421)

31. Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1962), p. 95.

32. I base this on Lewis's own admission that he strove for "strong colours" in writing The Monk, see above, n. 23.

33. An excellent discussion of the internalization of the demonic is Francis Russell Hart's "The Experience of Character in the English Gothic Novel," in Experience in the Novel, Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 83-105; Lowry Nelson, Jr., "Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel," Yale Review, 52 (1963), 242, also remarks that gothic novelists become ever more interested in the "presentation of the subconscious drama of the mind."

34. Sheldon Sacks suggests in "Clarissa and the Tragic Traditions," in Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 2 of Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1972), that all new literary forms may feel the "subtle influence" of poetical justice, p. 197.

JANE K. BROWN AND MARSHALL BROWN (ESSAY DATE 1994)

SOURCE: Brown, Jane K. and Marshall Brown. "Faust and the Gothic Novel." In Interpreting Goethe's Faust Today, edited by Jane K. Brown, Meredith Lee, and Thomas P. Saine, in collaboration with Paul Hernadi and Cyrus Hamlin, pp. 68-80. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994.

In the following essay, the Browns trace various common elements in Gothic fiction and Faust.

… un vampire, une goule, un homme artificiel,
une espèce de Faust …
                          (H. de Balzac, Sarrasine)

Our aim in the present paper is to conjure up an unfamiliar vision of Faust. So far as we know, our topic is nearly virgin, though Faust's vision of Gretchen appears for a moment at the start of Mario Praz's classic La Morte, la carne e la diavola.¹ Since, after all, Faust isn't a gothic novel, we are not inclined to call this neglect startling. Goethe's play lacks almost totally the sadistic terror that was the visible hallmark of the gothic, and what motifs it shares with the gothic novel are also Shakespearean or general romantic features. Yet while Goethe was cool toward the fashionable gothic, he was not ignorant about it.² Surely, for instance, he knew the work of the Jena professor of philosophy, Justus Christian Hennings, since he attacks Hennings in the "Walpurgisnachtstraum," both by name and as the "Ci-devant Genius der Zeit." Writing in the spirit of the Enlightenment about supernatural beliefs in his book of 1780, Von Geistern und Geistersehern, Hennings asks derisively, "Vielleicht denkst du, der böse Feind spucke zum Wohl des Menschen?"³—a possibility that the more imaginative Faust plays with. As Faust says in the last speech before his blinding, "Dämonen, weiß ich, wird man schwerlich los" (11491). Perhaps it isn't so foolish to wonder what the old men—Faust and his creator—thought about ghosts and those who see them.

Early readers of the play clearly perceived its gothic tendencies or potential. Despite their differences, Faust's devilish wager is readily assimilated to demonic pacts in works like Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer.⁴ When Balzac's Raphaël starts hallucinating in the old curiosity shop of La Peau de chagrin, it was, the narrator says, "un mystérieux sabbat digne des fantaisies entrevues par le docteur Faust sur le Brocken."⁵ In opera, too, there is no doubt that the Faustian witches' sabbath provided a stimulus for gothic creators. Der Freischütz, La Damnation de Faust, and Mefistofele are likely to leave spectators feeling they have missed something in Goethe's more pedestrian world. Or there is that quintessentially gothic concert piece, the Symphonie fantastique, where the hallucinatory witches' sabbath is accompanied by so many other representative features: the dream of an ideal beloved (with its ungrounded or immaterial consciousness evoked by unsupported treble melodies), primitive pastoralism, the dissolution of aristocratic society in a mad waltz that serves as a kind of "Walpurgisnachtstraum," and the concluding march to the scaffold.

A review like this calls to mind how many elements Faust really does share with gothic novels dating from before, during, and after its composition. Supernatural figures: devils, angels, witches, hags. Excessively natural figures: the innocent maiden, fatherless and ultimately orphaned, the warrior, the tormented natural scientist and philosopher. Figures of exceptional authority in church and state: rulers and holy men. Plot motifs: dangerous and illicit sexuality (though infanticide replaces the more common gothic incest), disguises and Doppelgänger figures, spying on actions near and far, religious rites and mysteries, political despotism and usurpation, a last-minute deathbed struggle of good and evil. Elements of setting: prison-like enclosures, gothic chambers, churches, and fortresses, vast, moonlit natural expanses through which the characters voyage in space and time. Psychodynamics: a feminine focus, regression to infantile states, haunted reverie, impending doom, with the clock either stopped or moving with unnatural swiftness, helpless unconsciousness. Formal characteristics: most obviously the inserted songs and ballads, but also the multitude of fictional frames, together with the combination of epic sweep and dramatic concentration that makes the gothic novel into its own peculiar kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. And, in addition to all these familiar gothic features, an important, but less well recognized one—a certain ambivalence of tone and a self-conscious playfulness that the gothic often reinforced with themes of playing or gambling. Unfamiliar as a Faustian device, wagers and contests are almost inescapable as a gothic one, whether centrally, or else—what is even more revealing—as an almost gratuitous kind of generic tag.⁶ In gothic play, it's often not even a step from the sublime to the ridiculous. If critics argue endlessly about how we are supposed to feel at different moments in Goethe's play, perhaps the moral is not the futility of critical analysis, but rather the affinity of the play with a mode in which such things are generically, uncannily undecidable.⁷ "Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten."

The wavering visions of the notorious "Proktophantasmist," for example, lead directly to the gothic milieu. Although commentaries correctly identify him as Friedrich Nicolai, Germany's leading rationalist, they do not mention that the story was originally reported (without the name, as in Faust ) in 1797 by Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, who at the time was court physician in Weimar and Goethe's family doctor.⁸ A delightfully prosaic vitalist, Hufeland was widely known for his lifelong preoccupation with the premature burial of the dead, a topic on which he wrote a book and numerous essays. Faust, like his epigones in the various sections of Melmoth, is prone to falling asleep at moments of crisis, in order to revive refreshed. And at the end, when Mephisto is in too much of a hurry to inter him, Faust rises like one of Hufeland's none-too-dead souls to complete the proof that you can't keep a good self down.⁹ Flea-bitten rationalism proves to be the nightmare from which even Goethe's gothic is always trying to awaken.

Mostly, when Faust approaches the characteristic gothic mood of terror, it veers off into satire—"Hexenküche," "Walpurgisnacht" with its dissolve into "Walpurgisnachtstraum," the scene with—or, better, without—the Mothers, "Grablegung." But then, the Burkean terror that is often identified as the defining characteristic of the gothic is, in our view, the least of the genre. Rather, the romantic gothic naturally interrogates or ironizes its worst imaginings. It presupposes Olympian detachment, whether in Goethe's apparent serenity¹⁰ or in the triumph of a demon confronting a shipwreck (Melmoth, ch. 4). Hence Radcliffe is full of reverie and reflection, Lewis and Maturin are full of exotic pageantry and meticulous exposition, Hoffmann of witty outrage. Whether underdone or overdone—or, typically, some of each—romantic gothic novels achieve their effects by testing, tantalizing, and teasing their characters and their readers alike. Like Faust they offer sophisticated pleasures of crafty, knowing superiority. The true focus is not on the supernatural, but on the human response and resistance to the supernatural. The conclusions, as in Faust, are characteristically rapid, and whether the victims ultimately triumph or fail, the issue is not so much suffering as survivability.

In their own way, then, romantic gothic novels are as much a critique of gothic terror as Faust is.¹¹ If works like Dracula bare the inhuman desires that gnaw at all of us, romantic gothic novels display the human face within their extraordinary events. Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" shows how much punishment the human spirit can take; Tieck's "Der blonde Eckbert" or Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon" show how much punishment it takes to overwhelm the human spirit. And though the back cover of our edition of Walpole's Castle of Otranto proclaims in red, "A Bleeding Statue, A Praying Skeleton, A Castle of Horror!," the author's preface has this to say:

The author of the following pages … wished to conduct the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability; in short, to make them think, speak, and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do in extraordinary positions. He had observed, that, in all inspired writings, the personages under the dispensation of miracles, and witnesses to the most stupendous phenomena, never lose sight of their human character.¹²

What Walpole wished in his book never to lose sight of is also what our approach to the gothic aims to keep in view. It is the humanity that matters, not the inhumanity. Consequently, in admitting that Faust is opposed to the gothic in its vulgar sense, we are also in a position to claim that it is allied with the deeper tendencies of the mode. Were we given to paradox, we might say that Faust is gothic precisely because it is anti-gothic.

Where the supernatural character of events lies in melodramatic externals, the human character of agents might naturally be expected to lie in their inward reserves. The mysterious physical powers of an overwhelming world are encountered by a mysterious spiritual integrity. The best language that we have discovered for analyzing this configuration is that of Kantian philosophy, and it turns out indeed that a direct line leads from Kant's own works to the abnormal psychiatry of high romantic medicine and into the tradition of the gothic itself. As the post-Kantian analysis develops, it relates the supernatural mysteries beyond our knowledge or control to the impenetrable world of things in themselves, and it locates the power confronting that world in what Kant calls the transcendental consciousness. Again, we cannot fully argue this thesis here, which will eventually be developed in a book on the gothic novel. But the terms that generate the analysis—and specifically the notion of a transcendental inwardness as defense against a supernatural outwardness—will provide the framework for our consideration of Faust, both in its partial affiliation with and in its distinctive response to the gothic mode.

Here, still as a series of largely undeveloped theses, are the basic features of the transcendental consciousness as they emerge in romantic philosophical and medical discourse, as well as in gothic representations. The first is the unity of the individual, or, as Kant terms it, the transcendental unity of apperception. In contrast to the heterogeneity of experience as envisioned by Enlightenment empiricism, romanticism envisions an integral self whose fundamental character is immutably generated from within. For Kant himself, the unity of the self is a universal phenomenon defined by the laws of experience that all humans share; for those who come after, it often appears as a psychological rather than a logical unity and may differ in character or mood from one individual to another. Second, as the unity of the self is removed from and precedes any possible experience, it cannot be manifested to ordinary consciousness. But those who followed Kant and tried to apply his conceptions to real life looked for the essence of the person in manifestations that lie beyond the conditioning of empirical existence. Specifically, it is in the dream state that we come into contact with our most inward and most fundamental self. Third, however, there also exist waking states in which the core of humanity surfaces. These are the states in which we are least responsive to the world around. Daydreaming and mesmeric states—such as, for instance, Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) explores—are borderline conditions where the inward self enters into a kind of contact with the outside world. But most commonly in the romantic period the inner self is brought into view by madness. Those driven beyond the bounds of normal experience are also not vulnerable to the pressures of experience, and they reveal instead the inviolable, transcendental basis of humanity. Hence, in Maturin, the more successful the devil's persecutions are in corporeal terms, the more he frustrates his endeavour to win over the minds of his victims. Fourth, then, there is a fundamental continuity to the self that cannot be broken by any force short of complete annihilation. The inward self reposes on a real, if indeterminate, inner sense of self, in its continuous and unbroken integrity. Kant's name for the inner sense is likewise that of those who come after him—namely, time. Our outer, spatial existence may be broken, fragmented, cut off—may be infringed in countless ways. But our true life is our life in time. So long as our mental existence continues—even in dreams, even in madness—so long do we continue to feel the pulse of existence. Fifth and finally, that pulse then beats through and despite all the forces that would destroy it. In the gothic, life often seems to hang by a thread. Yet the thread persists with a remarkable obstinacy that transcends the mere necessity to keep the narrative going. It becomes hard to keep even the dead down, starting with the ancestral ruler of The Castle of Otranto, who rises up after generations to restore his rightful heir to the throne. The gothic, in this period, is one of the most striking manifestations of the pervasive vitalism of the romantic period. There may be nothing else—not wealth, not health, not even sanity—but there is still life. "Des Lebens Pulse," these books keep insisting, "schlagen frisch lebendig."

In order to outline Goethe's complex stance toward this complex mode, we propose to scrutinize his use of the typically gothic terms schaudern and Grauen.¹³ "O schaudre nicht!" (3188) Faust tells Gretchen after she has plucked the last petal from the daisy and discovered that Faust loves her. Both recognize in this shudder the doom allegorically executed upon the flower that bears her name. Gretchen had already had a similar moment of premonitory terror in "Abend" (2757), right after Mephistopheles left the first casket of jewels in her cupboard; in "Dom" the evil spirit transforms her into an object of terror for others (3831). Faust also has his moments of terror—when the Erdgeist appears (473) and when he enters the dungeon at the end of Part I (4405), where the phrase "längst entwöhnt" connects his Schauer to his response to his study and to the Erdgeist. The conventional gothic sensationalism manifested in such moments is at its height in the prison scene at the end of Part I. "Kerker" predates the gothic fad, which began in the 1780s, yet the early text of the Urfaust contains the most explicit mention of terror, "Inneres Grauen der Menschheit," altered in the final version to the more sentimental, "Der Menschheit ganzer Jammer" (4406). And the Urfaust 's gothic stage direction, "Er hört die Ketten klirren und das Stroh rauschen," turns into self-conscious discourse: "Sie ahnet nicht, daß der Geliebte lauscht, / Die Ketten klirren hört, das Stroh, das rauscht" (4421-22). Thus, quite apart from the addition of Gretchen's abrupt salvation, Goethe distances himself from the gothic even as its popularity was spreading. And then, just a few lines before Faust terrifies Gretchen for the last time ("Mir graut's vor dir," 4610), Mephistopheles' horses shudder because dawn arrives (4599). Suddenly the supernatural is subject to nature, reversing the gothic norm. Indeed, natural and supernatural complement one another: for the archangels in the "Prolog im Himmel" night is "schauervoll" (254); for the devil day is. The process of terror is reversible; it can be part of building up a consciousness as well as of reducing one to its core.

As Part II unfolds, it becomes increasingly gothic on a cosmic scale. Despite its moments of uncanny terror such as the arrival of Faust's anti-masque or Mephistopheles's reference to the Mothers, Act I hardly evokes a full-scale gothic response. Indeed the gothic Mothers—regressive, awakening shudders—prompt Faust to say, "Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil" (6272), just as he had earlier told Mephistopheles "In deinem Nichts hoff' ich das All zu finden" (6255). Terror evokes the answering assertion of creation from the self. This is more explicit in Act II, where Schauer and its compounds occur nine times (of the total of twenty-two occurrences in all of Faust II ). First, terror is trivialized in a series of elaborate compounds from the beginning of the act ("Schauderfest" 7005, "Schaudergrauen" 7041, "schauderhaft" 7518 and 7788, "schauern" 7798, 7968—notice the progression away from absurd compounds once the point is made). The most specific moment of terror is the eruption of Seismos, who makes the earth itself shake. He unleashes human greed and violence, supernatural forces of destruction (the meteor that destroys the mountain), and dream (we finally learn that the entire affair was an illusion). Other gothic elements around this scene include descent, night, uncertainty, disorientation, and the demonic encounters of Mephistopheles, the Lamien, and the Phorcyads, where sexuality is a constant threat to identity. But the great oddity of these gothic elements is that terror is felt by the supernatural figures who themselves ought to evoke terror—the witch Erichtho, the sirens, Mephistopheles, the dryads, and Homunculus all experience Schauer. Whose consciousness is actually being narrated in Act II? Whose dream is it? Stuart Atkins (note 7, 142) has long since asserted that Act II is Faust's dream, but we might go even further. Somehow this is a dream Goethe dreams for the spectator, calling the very boundaries of the individual into question.

Act V is more traditionally gothic. The three mighty men terrorize the world about, especially Baucis and Philemon, who are also terrorized by the mysterious nighttime goings-on at Faust's castle. Here are the evil and violence we conventionally expect from the gothic. Faust himself has become part of this terrorizing mentality, so that the alien shadow of Baucis's and Philemon's trees makes him shudder. A "Schauerwindchen" (11380) brings the four ghosts Death, Care, Want, Need. In a gesture of stripping down to core consciousness Care blinds Faust; as Faust dies, Mephistopheles calls for the clock to stop. Faust's last moments in "Mitternacht" are perhaps the only moments of full gothic horror in Faust. Yet they too are soon ironized as angels descend to the rescue. Even here terror is rapidly commuted into play.

Crucial to Faust's death is the experience of time. Gothic time fluctuates between the extremes of frenzied disorientation and empty, rudderless waiting. The most revealing period terms come from Kant's student and close friend, the physician Markus Herz, who in the 1780s wrote a treatise on vertigo. Herz's term for proper time, like Goethe's, is Weile; Schwindel is the insane pace associated with supernatural action and Langerweile the aimlessness found in the demon's lost victims.¹⁴ Clearly Faust suffers at the beginning of the play from boredom; he is desperate to speed time up, to experience Schwindel ("das Rauschen der Zeit," "[das] Rollen der Begebenheit," 1754–55.). But the wager as formulated challenges Mephisto to instill in him a healthy, purified temporal Weilen. Similarly, though Care claims the power to stop time just before she blinds Faust (11455ff.), the night of his soul approaches apace, without terrifying suddenness (11499: "Die Nacht scheint tiefer tief hereinzudringen"). And though early in the play Care was associated with the shipwreck of hopes in the maelstrom of time (643-44), that is, with arrested time, even earlier yet the Erdgeist had awakened in Faust the courage to overcome shipwrecks (467). It follows, then, that Care now only provokes a counterspirit (11510: "ein Geist") into activity. Faust resists Care with his famous speech about slowing down to the pace of nature (11450: "Wenn Geister spuken, geh' er seinen Gang"): his absolute striving yields to a relation to transcendence mediated by his own imaginative consciousness. Thus Faust confronts the gothic challenge differently from the gothic novels: in place of a reduction to pure consciousness and internal selfhood, Faust outlines a healthy relationship to time extending beyond the self dynamically into the future.

Such reversals are characteristic of Faust 's response to the gothic. In the first line of "Zueignung" wavering forms approach us with their madness (4) and "Zauberhauch" (8), bringing in their train the temporal disorientation of the second and third stanzas. The moment of terror, however, comes only in the second half of the last stanza, "Ein Schauer faßt mich" (29), in the same language as the terror of the Erdgeist (472-74: "Es weht / Ein Schauer vom Gewölb' herab / Und faßt mich an!"). Yet in "Zueignung" the terror brings peace:

    Ein Schauer faßt mich, Träne folgt den Tränen,
    Das strenge Herz, es fühlt sich mild und weich;
    Was ich besitze, seh' ich wie im Weiten,
    Und was verschwand, wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten.
                                          (29-32)

The heart softens, consciousness releases its hold, yet what follows is the return of the whole world that had been lost. Gothic nothingness is nowhere to be found, let alone feared.

But if there is no nothingness, there is then no pressing need for the unconditional selfhood explored so intensely by the gothic. Gothic novels usually reach their climax in a prison, but Faust begins in one, feeling imprisoned in his "hochgewölbten, engen gotischen Zimmer." We know what the first word of the play proper is not: instead of "ich," Faust has only a depressive and paranoid "ach" to offer. Friedrich Kittler, who has called our attention to these words, sees in this opening a condition of "pure soul" preceding Faust's fall into writing, a change in mode vital to the action of the play.¹⁵ Yet Faust's initial condition of "pure soul" is as much an unhappy limbo as the successor condition is: whatever "pure" means here, it does not include healthy or effective. Suspended in such gothic chambers, "Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born" (Arnold, "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse"), the continuity of the self is tested and, very often, assured. The gothic novel is, generically, a thought experiment with premature burial, and Faust in his dark and narrow chamber, almost like a figure from Poe, starts off already dead and waiting to be reborn.

What normally symbolizes a late stage in the reduction to pure consciousness is here a starting point Faust rejects with vigor. Consciousness of self is not Faust's defense in the prison; on the contrary, it is itself the very prison to be escaped.¹⁶ Time and again the play unmasks self-consciousness as empty solipsism. Imprisoned Gretchen in her madness is a paradigm of gothic reduction to the essential core of the self: her continuing love for an infant and family and her unstained innocence are unchanged from her earlier, sane moments, and she desires only to return to the past. But in Faust this essential self represents the temptation to stasis articulated in the bet—"verweile doch." It must be rejected, and indeed, "Anmutige Gegend" brings growth and change through positive erasure of the past; as Emrich says, "Schlaf und spontan organisches 'Vergessen' sind Funktionen einer Natur, die nur darum 'mildert', versöhnt und 'heilt', weil sie ihren 'Liebling' bis zu den Grenzen des Daseins geführt hat, über die hinaus es nur Entsetzen oder—Vergessen geben kann."¹⁷ Faust's monologue once again contains all the themes of the post-Kantian gothic self. "Des Lebens Pulse schlagen frisch lebendig": the life force is the first thing to impinge on the consciousness of the waking Faust. Next comes continuity in time: "Du, Erde, warst auch diese Nacht beständig." But as Faust's awakening consciousness gathers force, it focuses less and less on a unified self, and more and more on a world that comes into being through the words he utters ("Ein Paradies wird um mich her die Runde"). By the end of the monologue his consciousness extends beyond the earth to the rainbow, a sign that is anchored both in scientific objectivity and in a tradition that evokes not gothic shudders but rather pastoral showers (as "Schauer" must clearly be translated in line 4726).

In such manner Faust adds layer after layer until consciousness of self disappears in consciousness of the world. The first three acts of Part II abandon self-absorption for a phantasmagoria of the history of our culture and bring Faust and Helena onto the stage only as literary figures in elaborate costumes, conscious at every moment of themselves as constructs from a long tradition (hence Helena: "Ich schwinde hin und werde selbst mir ein Idol," 8881). And what then of the apparent return to an authentic self when Faust resists Care? Faust grounds his satisfaction with time and his supposed identity in the labors of others who will do what he has done all through Part II—be conscious not of themselves but of the need to recreate the world each day through their own labor (11575-76).

Faust's death provokes a mock-epic battle in which each side looks gothic to its opponents. "Grablegung" gives us, of course, the devil's perspective.¹⁸ To Mephisto all the wavering rescuers (11723: "Schon schwebts heran"; 11740 s.d.: "Sich mit den schwebenden Rosen herumschlagend"; 11787: "Ihr schwanket hin und her") appear as demons; he calls them "ein überteuflisch Element," "Liebesspuk," and the like (11754, 11814). But the final scene revives the perspective of "Zueignung," in which wavering and swaying are associated with the uncertain, preconscious reawakening to life. The "Chor und Echo" that open "Bergsschluchten" begin the last revival of the song whose "erster Widerklang" resonated behind "Zueignung" (20). Answering to the gothic interior of Faust's monologue, the stage now presents a gothic exterior, a mountainous region reminiscent of the landscapes of The Mysteries of Udolpho. Yet the setting sheds the contamination by individualized conflict that polarizes the gothic self. Release proceeds in stages, without the cathartic shudder that would memorialize what is to be left behind. Hence, responding to Mephisto's mistaken boast, "Gerettet sind die edlen Teufelsteile" (11813), Goethe produces the following sequence. First angels "schwebend in der höheren Atmosphäre," emit a counterboast, "Gerettet ist das edle Glied / Der Geisterwelt vom Bösen" (11934-35). Next the more perfect angels correct them, complaining, "Uns bleibt ein Erdenrest / Zu tragen peinlich, / Und wär er von Asbest, / Er ist nicht reinlich" (11954-57). And then the purifying Doctor Marianus, "in der höchsten, reinlichsten Zelle," mediates the ultimate release, "Hier ist die Aussicht frei, / Der Geist erhoben" (11989-90), once more evoking "Zueignung," which ends, "Was ich besitze, seh ich wie im Weiten, / Und was ver-schwand [Faust's body, in the final instance], wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten" (31-32). Redeeming the blinded, haunted Faust, the clarified vision into the distance lifts spirituality to a new and higher level.

At the end gothic conflict gives up the ghost. The younger angels, who were there, appear to speak of victory: "Böse wichen, als wir streuten, / Teufel flohen, als wir trafen" (11947-48). But in truth their attack transformed the nature of the encounter: "Statt gewohnter Höllenstrafen / Fühlten Liebesqual die Geister" (11949-50). War has become passionate love, and the necessary lessons of human violence have forged bonds between individuals. "Und aus ätherischem Gewande / Hervortritt erste Jugendkraft!" (12090-91). Finally Faust is truly born—but not into a merely personal condition of separated consciousness: "Er ahnet kaum das frische Leben [not self-conscious], / So gleicht er schon der heiligen Schar [not personal]" (12086-87). A powerfully active response replaces the spiritual essentialism typical of the gothic, as the blessed youths say, with a circling motion, "Er überwächst uns schon / An mächtigen Gliedern" (12076-77). The professor has become a good learner, and hence a good teacher at last: "Doch dieser hat gelernt, / Er wird uns lehren" (12082-83). But he becomes a good teacher by virtue of confronting his Unmündigkeit. A powerful child rather than an independent adult, Goethe's counter-gothic personality does not free himself by force of will, for "Wer zerreißt aus eigner Kraft / Der Gelüste Ketten?" (12026-27). Rather, the gothic manacles lose their terror and become an ecstatic living union transcending any possible individualism. In the penultimate strophe of the play the Doctor Marianus describes the process thus: "Euch zu seligem Geschick / Dankend umzuarten" (12098-99), in a pair of lines whose collective plural is as essential as its perhaps unprecedented verb of communal response, "umzuarten."¹⁹

Faust, then, preserves the legacy of the gothic in the very process of transmuting it. There is, to be sure, no novelty in contending that Faust in some sense transvalues evil and that in some sense it honors collectivities. But it does make a difference if we stress the gothic tonalities that persist into the final scene, even as the play abandons a conventionally gothic vision. The gothic is the realm of the sublime, of the unspeakable and unperformable that the final "Chorus Mysticus" invokes. Consequently, the gothic bequeaths to the play's ideological convictions a sense of urgency and a restless energy beyond conceptual grasp.²⁰ Because it has passed through the gothic crucible, the world of Faust must always view love as passion—a better form of war and not a negation of it. It must always view maturity under the sign of power, breaking the bonds of earth, and not as settled conviction. And it must always view teaching as a stab in the dark: even through the desperate straits of Sorge and her companions men must risk the Hinanziehen and Hinangezogensein of and by the Eternal Feminine, formerly the spinning Gretchen whose rest is always and forever gone because she does not and cannot hold her beloved firmly on the spot. She knows, as the blessed youths in their blissful ignorance do not, that Faust has not really learned and cannot really teach: she answers them with a reminder that their new teacher is blind, with a blindness carried over from his prior, gothic existence into a new day that can never fully dawn for humans, since humanity lies in acceptance, not rejection, of their gothic fetters: "Vergönne mir, ihn zu belehren! / Noch blendet ihn der neue Tag" (12092-93). That is the sublime condition we transcend exactly to the extent that we learn to submit to it.²¹

What Faust rejects, then, is not the gothic as such—not human limitation, not the confrontation with evil, not fatality—so much as the rebelliousness that the gothic novels inscribe into their portrayal of the gothic condition. Gothic rebellion is contaminated by the forces it opposes; as Act V shows, if you command the devil, it is only to become a stronger devil yourself. Resistance is always tainted, whether by the perpetual melancholy of The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe's undercurrents of sexual indulgence, or the recalcitrant monstrousness of Mary Shelley's pure-hearted monster. Like his creators in the "Vorspiel auf dem Theater," Faust begins angry. Unlike his fellows in confrontation with forces of evil—and most unlike the increasingly angry Mephisto—Faust wins by losing, swallowing his pride, and submitting. The gothic mode is divided against itself, and Goethe rectifies it by refusing to bring its dialectic to a standstill.

Amid all the differences, then, Faust shares with the gothic a radical dialectic.²² Indeed, insofar as the gothic novels bring their dialectic to a terminus, Faust outdoes their radicalism. It is a dialectic because its values insistently come in competing pairs: good and evil, heaven and earth, man and woman. Its two-souledness is radical in the political sense that human structures will not satisfy its demands; radical in the moral sense that erring, sin, and care, hopeless blindness and the struggle against it remain inevitable; radical in the epistemological sense that mediations are relentlessly excluded or satirized in a series of ever more astonishing dramatic confrontations; and radical in the aesthetic sense that this is all a wondrous spectacle, of value precisely to the extent that it does not touch real—ordinary, petty—life. Faust consummates the gothic self-critique not by turning against the gothic but rather by pursuing the gothic impulse to its logical, bittersweet end.

Notes

1. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) 26, following only a long Shelley quote. Other bits of Part I figure very occasionally through the rest of the book as analogies to Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer and to victimized females.

2. Cf. WA I, 42.2:86-88 (Scott, Hoffmann); he made repeated references to Walpole's Castle of Otranto (WA III, 2:224; WA IV, 13:91, 343, 361; 14:54; and 15:50), also to Walpole's "Das Geheimnis der Mutter" (WA I, 35:86). He even translated a bit of Maturin's Bertram (WA I, 11:353-58) and was aware of Monk Lewis. Closer to home he knew both Tieck's "romantic" writings, as he refers to them (WA III, 2:259), and Schiller's "Geisterseher" (WA III, 3:124). On Kant as an ironist, WA II, 11:54-55 and 13:448.

3. [Justus Christian Hennings], Von Geistern und Geistersehern (Leipzig: Weygand, 1780) 368.

4. The most detailed comparison of Faust and Melmoth can be found in Syndy M. Conger, Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans: An Interpretative Study of the Influence of German Literature on Two Gothic Novels, Salzburg Studies in English Literature 67 (Salzburg: Institut für englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1977) 12-42.

5. Honoré de Balzac, La Peau de chagrin, in La Comédie humaine, ed. Marcel Bouteron, 10 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1950) 9:30.

6. On gothic play see Marshall Brown, "Kant e i demoni della notte," Studi sull'estetica 12 (1984): 155-65.

7. See for instance the "quite astonishing" claim by Jane K. Brown that the final moments of Part I derive from the comic-opera tradition (quoted words on p. 111). The more conventional reading can be illustrated with Stuart Atkins's emphasis on the "tragic defeat," "horror," and "tragic dignity" of Gretchen's "secularsentimental apotheosis": Goethe's "Faust": A Literary Analysis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964) 99-100.

8. We quote a sentence to illustrate the tone of Hufeland's narrative: "Es fängt wirklich diesem äußerst aufgeklärten und vorurtheilsfreyen Manne endlich an darüber zu schwindeln; nie allein zu seyn, sich ewig von sonderbaren und immer wechselnden Gestalten umgeben, ja angesprochen zu sehen, dieß raubt ihm endlich alle Gemüthsruhe, ja alle Gedanken, und es versetzt ihn in die peinlichste Agitation." C.W. Hufeland, "Sonderbare Geistererscheinung," in Kleine medizinische Schriften 2 (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1823): 378 (originally in Hufeland's Journal der praktischen Heilkunde).

9. Emil Staiger mentions Hufeland in connection with Faust's resurrection, 3:451.

10. Matthew Arnold's lines on Goethe in "Memorial Verses: April, 1850," note the gothic ground of his detachment: "And he was happy, if to know / Causes of things, and far below / His feet to see the lurid flow / Of terror, and insane distress, / And headlong fate, be happiness." Wilhelm Emrich (73-74) builds his passing mention of madness on a line from Egmont, "eingehüllt in gefälligen Wahnsinn versinken wir und hören auf zu sein"; his Hegelian bias toward redemptive Gefälligkeit leads him to slight the significance of Wahnsinn, a word that is absent from his index of concepts.

11. See Marshall Brown, "A Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel," Studies in Romanticism 26 (1987): 275-301, for a fuller presentation of the way that gothic novels test the limits of terror.

12. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. Marvin Mudrick (New York: Collier, 1963) 19.

13. As part of his demonstration of the thematic unity of Faust, Joachim Müller surveys representative occurrences of schauern and schaudern in the play, without discussing their significance: "Zur Motivstruktur von Goethes 'Faust,'" in: Sitzungsberichte der sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig: Philologischhistorische Klasse 116:3 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1972) 9-11.

14. Herz defines Langerweile [sic] as "ein einförmiger Spatziergang oder Reiseweg, auf welchem sich keine abwechselnde Mannichfaltigkeit darbietet," leading to despair; Schwindel is "der widernatürlich schnelle Fortgang der Ideen." Markus Herz, Versuch über den Schwindel, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Vossische Buchhandlung, 1791) 158-59.

15. Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990) 3.

16. See the groundbreaking general discussion of this phenomenon by Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness," Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970) 298-310.

17. Emrich 71. See further Peter Michelsen's nice analysis of "Anmutige Gegend" in relation to Faust's opening monologue, "Fausts Schlaf und Erwachen," Jahrbuch des freien deutschen Hochstifts (1983) 21-61. Michelsen identifies cathartic forgetting as the new motif at this point in the play, and he compares the action here to the procedures "des Experiments in der Naturwissenschaft" (38). For his theory of sleep Michelsen draws on the Aphorismen aus der Physiologie der Pflanzen (1808) by Goethe's friend and admirer Dietrich Georg Kieser. The passages he quotes (40-41) were, however, commonplace both among mystics and, in variants, among rationalists like Heinrich Nudow, whose Versuch einer Theorie des Schlafs was published by Kant's (and Fichte's) publisher Nicolovius in Königsberg in 1795. For a stronger account of the power of forgetting in the play, see Theodor Adorno, "Zur Schlußszene des Faust," Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1981) 129-38. Helmut Schanze presents the final scene as a theatrum memoriae in "Szenen, Schema, Schwammfamilie: Goethes Arbeitsweise und die Frage der Struktureinheit von Faust I und II," Euphorion 78 (1984) 383-400; however, Schan-ze's thesis differs less from ours than might appear, since he emphasizes collective memory and a transcendence of the individual perspective.

18. On the importance of perspective and point of view in Faust see Jane K. Brown, Faust: Theater of the World (New York: Twayne, 1992) 26-34.

19. Grimm's Deutsches Wörterbuch cites only this passage to illustrate a transitive use of "umarten." Its two prior instances of intransitive "umarten" do not appear to constitute a precedent. In a subsection (145-52) of his essay "Theatrum Mundi: Anfang und Schluß von Goethes 'Faust'" called "Umartung," Hermann Kunisch transmutes the reflexive into a passive, "ein Umgeartetwerden in dem gnadevollen Sichmitteilen der Liebe": Goethe-Studien, ed. Franz Link (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991) 131-58 (quotation is on p. 146).

20. We argue here against the type of idealizing reading canonized by Max Kommerell in "Faust II: Letzte Szene," Geist und Buchstabe der Dichtung (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1956) 112-31. "In Prosa aufgelöst" (116)—which is to say, substituting doctrinal pieties for human feeling—the conclusion seems to Kommerell a "Mysterium" that preaches "eine seraphische Geselligkeit und Kollegialität" (121) and that portrays "die Genialität des Liebeszustands in jener Allgemeinheit, wie sie der Stil des zweiten Teils mit sich bringt" (129). "D'un coup," writes one pygmy working the vein of this generalissimo and oblivious of the Ibycean cranes on the horizon, "les scènes de magie noire, les interminables promenades de la seconde partie à travers les diableries anciennes et modernes, pâlissent devant cette fin d'un centenaire aveugle et visionnaire," Pierre Grapin, "Faust aveugle," Etudes germaniques 38 (1983): 146.

21. Jean-François Lyotard has provided the most apposite analyses of the sublime as a darkness that wrings morality out of disintegration. See in particular "L'Intérêt du sublime," Du sublime (a collective volume with preface by Jean-Luc Nancy) (n.p.: Belin, 1988) 149-77. In the more concise formulation of another essay, "the sublime is the affective paradox, the paradox of feeling (of feeling publicly) in common a formlessness for which there is no image or sensory intuition," "The Sign of History," trans. Geoff Bennington, Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 176.

22. There are valuable comments about Faust as a dialectic in extremis in Jochen Schmidt, "Die 'katholische Mythologie' und ihre mystische Entmythologisierung in der Schlußszene des Faust II," Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 34 (1990) 230-56. See particularly the essay's last sentence: "So weitet sich das Spektrum der Entmythologisierung ins Totale, indem nicht bloß eine alte Welt von gestalthaft ausgeprägten Glaubensvorstellungen und Sinn-Figuren, sondern überhaupt die Vorstellung einer allumfassenden Sinn-Figur: die Vorstellung des ganzheitlich geordneten Kosmos als mythologische Vorstellungsform aufgehoben wird in einem Jenseits, das als Sphäre des irreal Gewordenen schon umschlägt ins Nichts" (256). Having let the genie out of the bottle, however, Schmidt simultaneously tries to nail it to the wall, claiming that Dionysius the Areopagite is the secret source that explains all. "Erst damit wird der Sinn der bisher unerschlossenen berühmten Verse [of the final chorus] exakt faßbar" (245)—a claim that would be more persuasive if the "exact" meaning that he finds were more than a conventionally hermetic approximation: "Daher ist Gott nicht in seiner Eigentlichkeit, sondern nur uneigentlich zu erkennen" (246).

FURTHER READING

Criticism

Hildebrand, Janet. "An Ecology of Elemental Spirits and Mortals in Goethe's Ballads." History of European Ideas 12, no. 4 (1990): 503-21.

Explores supernatural and folkloric elements in Goethe's ballads.

Wicksteed, Philip H. "'Magic'—A Contribution to the Study of Goethe's Faust." Hibbert Journal 10, no. 4 (1911): 754-64.

Contends that the magic practiced by Mephistopheles and Faust impedes Faust's search for intellectual and spiritual contentment.

Wood, Robin. "'Der Erlkönig': The Ambiguities of Horror." In American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Robin Wood and Richard Lippe, pp. 29-32. Toronto, Ontario: Festival of Festivals, 1979.

Analysis of the Goethe's handling of horror in his poem "Der Erlkönig" ("The Erl-King").

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of Goethe's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Concise Dictionary of World Literary Biography, Vol. 2; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 94; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Dramatists, Most-Studied Authors, and Poets; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Drama Criticism, Vol. 20; European Writers, Vol. 5; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1; Literature and Its Times Supplement; Literature Resource Center; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Vols. 4, 34, 90, 154; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 5; Reference Guide to World Literature, Eds. 2, 3, Short Story Criticism, Vol. 38; Twayne's World Authors; and World Literature Criticism.