Poetry after Faust

Summary

FAUST CHANGES EVERYTHING. To say that it calls into question the very idea of poetic genres is to state the obvious. In this respect it belongs to the same general historical movement as the realistic novel; and it certainly shares with the novel what Bakhtin calls the latter's “heteroglot” quality, its rejection of the general poetic preference for a maximally “unitary” language. But on the other hand, Faust is definitely neither itself a kind of novel nor an instance of the “novelization” (in Bakhtin's sense) of some other literary type. In fact it can reasonably be regarded as antithetical to the novel, insofar as it exhibits a resistance to the medium of the printed book. Novels take to the culture and exigencies of printed books like fish to water, whereas poetry—given that it can never shake off at least a shadow of its historical affiliation with musical performance—is never entirely comfortable on the printed page. And in contexts that involve an opposition between poetry and the novel, I think we may expect to find Faust on the side of poetry—an expectation that is of course gestured at by the fact that practically all of Faust is in verse. But the relation between Faust and the print medium has a dimension that goes far beyond whatever musicality might be attributed to its form.