Histrionic Nationality: Implications of the Verse in Faust

Summary

IN MY BOOK ON FAUST, twenty-three years ago, I made the point that by leaving, in the finished text, exactly one scene in prose, Goethe contrives to draw our attention in a special way to the fact that the work as a whole is in verse. If there were no prose scenes, then verse would simply be the work's stylistic medium, to be questioned (if at all) primarily with respect to the traditions it might inhabit or evoke. If there were a number of prose scenes, then the same sort of questioning would be directed at the “alternation” of verse and prose, and of course the comparison with Shakespeare would arise. But the presence of only one prose scene, one obvious anomaly, draws our attention to the work's verse as such, and provokes the question: why is the work in verse to begin with, what role does the verse, as such, have in its meaning?

I attempted an answer to that question on a very general level, starting from the quality of verse “as an imposed artificial order in language,” and arguing—on the basis of specific textual features, especially in the Gretchen plot—that “it is only a short step from the idea of verse as an artificial order in language to the idea of language itself as an artificial order imposed on our presumed immediate perception of reality.” The argument thus quickly moved away from the realm of style and rhetoric and toward that of more or less abstract philosophy. In particular, from the hypothesis that “contact with the real” is a central concern in Faust, I concluded: “The drawing of our attention to the verse as such reminds us that our inability, as an audience, to make contact with the real is a direct result of the communicative process we are involved in.”

I do not intend to retract that argument now. In fact, I think I can add another dimension to it, and to the idea of “the real” that it presupposes, by taking the obvious next step and asking about the significance of the specific kinds of verse that are used in Faust.

I will begin by suggesting a general theorem about verse drama in the age of Goethe.