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.

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.

In 1750, in the first paragraph of his Aesthetica, Frankfurt professor Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–62) defines this brand-new intellectual discipline as “scientia cognitionis sensitivae” (the science of sensate knowledge). But unfortunately — at least for those who value neatness in history — most of the major thinkers who follow (Kant being the notable exception) either forget or neglect or simply discard this definition, concentrating instead on a pair of important, but subordinate concepts in Baumgarten's system — art and beauty — which are understood henceforward as the true content of “aesthetics.” Once this deetymologizing move has been made (aistheta, in Greek, are simply things perceived by the physical senses), the historical situation is also muddied, and the brand-new discipline is henceforth regarded as an age-old discipline, traceable at least as far back as Plato and Aristotle.

Needless to say, there are possibilities for confusion here, as well as for development; but the one possibility that is definitely excluded is that “aesthetics” should cohere as a single scientific discipline with a well-defined scope. (Do art and beauty even really belong together as objects of study?) This essay will, in fact, suggest that aesthetics is best understood not as an area of inquiry in the first place, but as a specific cultural project in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. For the time being, however, we can get a feel for what aesthetics does by considering the various issues it raises.

With respect to art, the opposition between imitative and expressive theories (traced back to the supposed founding instances of Aristotle and pseudo-Longinus) becomes increasingly important toward the end of the eighteenth century.

The title of course puts me out on a limb, but in fact I would be prepared to argue that the assertion it presupposes is a relatively modest one. Under different circumstances I might have written on “The Absence of Drama in the Nineteenth Century.” This chapter attempts to cover both the broad theoretical and historical points that support that larger assertion, and the specific situation in German-speaking Europe, including three particularly interesting cases from German literature.

The Literary-Historical Context

“Nineteenth-century German drama,” as it is viewed by most German historians of literature, develops largely in relation to a central tradition of works in the manner of Schiller's verse plays and, at a further remove, supposedly in the manner of Shakespeare. But even while the principal upholders of this classical tradition, Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) and Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863), spent most of their careers in Vienna — although performances of Hebbel took place mainly in Germany, and Grillparzer refused to show his work to a supposedly ungrateful public after 1838 — Vienna is also the home of theatrical conventions that have nothing to do with the classical. Especially prominent is the tradition of Viennese popular comedy, which in the nineteenth century produced two significant dramatic types, the “Zauberstück” (magical or fantasy piece), represented mainly by Ferdinand Raimund (1790–1836), and the “Lokalstück” or “Lokalposse” (dialect farce), represented mainly by Johann Nestroy (1801–1862). Aspects of this whole complex of conventions, including the use of singing, still operate later in both the comic and the more or less tragic works of Ludwig Anzengruber (1839–1889).

IN THE NOTEN UND ABHANDLUNGEN to the Divan, Goethe suggests repeatedly that poetry should be regarded as a natural function of the life of its language, rather than as an expressive endeavor carried out by an individual in language considered as a neutral or transparent medium with no inherent content of its own. “Hier sieht man, daß die Sprache schon an und für sich productiv ist,” he says, about Arabic as a poetic language, “und zwar, in so fern sie dem Gedanken entgegen kommt, rednerisch, in so fern sie der Einbildungskraft zusagt, poetisch.” He asserts, “daß … die Sprache als Sprache die erste Rolle spielt” (7:106), and suggests that even our personal feelings, our putatively unique experiences as individuals, are “ewig wiederkehrend” (7:130), and so may plausibly be regarded as in truth the property of a communal order of which language is the primary outward form and our individuality merely an organ. Nor may we dismiss this idea as referring only to near eastern poetry.

The cultural strategy of the Divan, in any case, the tension between its self-consciously German and its self-consciously Eastern quality, has the effect of exhibiting precisely the German language to German readers as if it were a foreign language, and so focuses the reader's specifically linguistic awareness upon his or her own situation.