Faust zweiter Teil. Die Allegorie des 19. Jahrhunderts (review)

Abstract

ion brought about by the alienation tendency of capitalist society. This is a sociological definition, not a literary one. It is hard to wonder what it has do with Goethe, Lessing, Hegel or even Friedrich Theodor Vischer on allegory: surely it was not what they had in mind. Nor is it always what Schlaffer has in mind, for while he claims that Benjamin's historically conditioned definition of emerges of its own accord, nevertheless he repeatedly calls on readers to supply their own general sense of what involves. This general sense turns out to be totality, generality and abstraction, which are referred to as the Formprinzipien of (67). Not only does this procedure allow Schlaffer to control the reader's general sense of what is, but the categories are also vague, to say the least. And the further one proceeds, the vaguer they become. At one point Schlaffer discovers, apparently with some surprise, that is not a but a parasite genre (147). What he means is that any can be allegorical. Later he talks about allegorical themes (151). In an unacknowledged distortion of the traditional rhetorical definition, is the opposite not of the literal but of the natural ( 154)— whatever that is. Allegory burgeons beyond the bound of all rhetorical and stylistic categories when we are told there is an behind (165); and in a final flight of fancy is asserted to be in fundamental opposition to abstraction (169)! Despite the astonishing freedom with which he wields the term and despite his apparent eagerness to justify Faust II, Schlaffer shares the nienteenth century's typical hostility to allegory. It is artificial, negative, not dramatic, unnatural, absurd, the allegories in Faust ate Traumkitsch (161), and, worst of all, not aesthetic (168). Schlaffer argues that Goethe knows this and chose as his form? genre? theme? mode? because he wanted to demonstrate the same qualities in modern culture. This mode of argumentation could rescue almost anything, but it fails to do justice either to allegorical writing as a mode or to in Faust in particular. This inadequacy in Schlaffer's thinking about surfaces right in the first chapter and thus fundamentally flaws his argument about the social bases of allegorical form in Faust. In this chapter Schlaffer reconstructs (his answer to deconstruction ?) Goethe's famous letter to Schiller of August 16, 1797, to show the importance of socio-economic concerns in the formulation of the symbol-allegory distinction. Essentially Schlaffer tries to argue that the definition of symbol is a confused attempt to avoid in the face of an obvious interest in it and need for it. But this reconstruction depends on three serious failures. First, Schlaffer ignores the use of the words Idee and ideal in the letter. These are clearly used in their Kantian meanings and refer to the incommensurable objects of reason. Here as elsewhere in the book Schlaffer ignores the Kantian context and argues as if Goethe were concerned only with phenomena directly accessible to the sense and the understanding. Second, Schlaffer ignores Goethe's normal use of terms like Anschauung, which he reduces to its most concrete and literal levels of meaning, while Goethe consistently uses it to include the mental activity that the observer brings to bear on the world. The demonstration of the fundamental absurdity of Goethe's definition of symbol depends on this pattern of reductiveness in the reading. Finally, Schlaffer does not take account of what Goethe has in mind with the word allegory As elsewhere, he fails to distinguish between the word and the phenomenon. He ought to know better, since he