‘Prince Poli & Savant’: Goethe’s Prometheus and the Enlightenment

Abstract

TRINCE POLI & SAVANT': GOETHE'S PROMETHEUS AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT In the history of modern literature, certain classical myths seem readily to suggest themselves as figures of identification. Not mere frequency, but the cumulative significance attributed to these myths makes them constant points of reference. George Steiner thus locates the modern importance of the Antigone myth in a period between 'the 1790s and the start of the twentieth century*. After 1905, 'under pressure of Freudian reference, critical, interpretative focus had shifted to the Oedipus Rex'.1 What may seem like a marginal change of taste from one Sophoclean tragedy to another marks rather something like a paradigm-shift. Within a canonical body of texts known as classical mythology, they each offer distinct ways of cultural and political identification. A further and earlier such cultural identification is offered by the Prometheus myth in the (late) eighteenth century.2 Goethe made not one but four attempts at the myth, yet all but the poem remained fragments. Other scattered references to Prometheus throughout Goethe's works speak of his sustained preoccupa? tion with the story. Carrying an already heavy baggage of literary treatments from antiquity through the Renaissance and up to the eighteenth century, the myth offered several angles from which it could be approached.3 Without be? ing able to pinpoint direct responses to Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound (the only one extant of his three Prometheus tragedies)4 in Goethe's 'Prometheus', some critics read his belated reworking as 'den zweiten groBen Gipfel der Stoffgeschichte'.5 Retelling the old story of Prometheus, Goethe comes to stand shoulder to shoulder with Aeschylus. Although Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris is more fully developed in its retelling of the Tantalus myth and in its formal approximation of Attic tragedy, the scattered fragments make Prometheus and not Iphigenie Goethe's 'personliches Symbol',6 as Kommerell has it, and in I thankDr Paul Kerrvand ProfessorT. T.Reed forreadingdraftsofthisarticle. 1 Antigones:TheAntigone Mythin Western Literature, Art,and Thought (Oxford:OxfordUni? versity Press,1984),pp. 18,6. 2 Cf. The OxfordGuide to Classical Mythology in theArts,ijoo-iggos, ed. by JaneDavidson Reid, 2 vols (New Yorkand Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press,1993), n, 923-37, 'Prometheus'. 3 Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher,Ausfiihrliches Lexikonder griechischen und romischen Mythologie , 6 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1884-1937), 111/2 (1897-1902), 3032-110, 'Prometheus'; Paulys Real-Encyclopddie der classischen Alterthumswissenschaft, ed. by Georg Wissowa and others,66 vols (Munich: Metzler,1841-1963), xxxiii/i(1957), 653-730, 'Prometheus';Lexiconiconographicummythologiae classicae,ed. by HeidelbergerAkademie der Wissenschaften (Zurich: Artemis, 1981- ) vii/i (1994), 531-53, and vii/2(1994), 420-30, 'Prometheus';Olga Raggio, 'The Myth of Prometheus:Its Survivaland Metamorphosesup to the EighteenthCentury',Journalofthe Warburg and CourtauldInstitutes, 21 (1958), 44-62; RaymondTrousson, Le ThemedePromethee dansla litterature europeenne, 2 vols (Geneva: Droz, 1964). 4 I referto the play throughoutas by Aeschylus(in accordance withGoethe's assumption), althoughmanyclassicalscholarsnowbelieveittobe theworkofanotherpoet.Cf.MartinL. West, 'The AuthorshipofthePrometheusTrilogy', in West,StudiesinAeschylus (Stuttgart:Teubner, 1990),pp. 51-72. 5 Hartmut Reinhardt,'Prometheus und die Folgen', Goethe-Jahrbuch, 108 (1991), 137-68 (P- 138). 6 Max Kommerell,GedankeniiberGedichte(Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann,1943), p. 435; cf. FriedrichGundolf,Goethe(Berlin:Bondi, 1916),p. 111. JONAS J0LLE 395 many ways also a central figure of identification to the late eighteenth cen? tury.7 This article will examine the new use to which the myth is put in Goethe's poem (and drama fragments), as a response to earlier treatments and interpre? tations. Denis Feeney speaks of how most contemporary readings of classical myths 'begin and end in naturalistic realism, with a token circuit en route through the divine agency, as if the divine element in the narrative is some? thing to be read through, purged, in a reading which arrives at acute novelistic insights'.8 This reading will try to take Prometheus and the gods at, as it were, their face value, seeing them not as embodiments of something else, but as mythological characters that can be distilled neither from the narrative nor from the history of their reception. The 'Sinn des Gedichts', as one recent critic has it (Gaier, p. 154), is not to be sought merely where the poem, on a superfieial level, may contradict earlier...