Toward an Aesthetic of Reception.

Abstract

w h i c h e x t e n d e d e v e n i n t o m y p s t . . . n d d o u b t l e s s . . . t o w h t m i g h t b e t o . . . t o . . . come . . . t o co me . . . . ( I I , 5) The certainty of the cngito ergo sum is the error of Descartes and all philosophers who as philosphes sans mains et sans yeux overlook the fundamental role of the body in their systems, and thereby forfeit that certainty of present things as well as of present cohumanity, certainty that is not only subjective and that alone can fulfill the instant (here along past and future!) and make possible that is not only spiritual. The motif of the cothinking hand begins in jest Faust's while I 'm awaiting my thought . . . the distracted hand pets and caresses and Lust's a beautiful kitty, very soft and warm (1, 1). it is then elevated through the unexpected interpretation of the line from Lucretius—the hand which touches and which is touched (II, 5)-to highly serious significance (to introduce into the arid story of metaphysical discovery little bit of truth . . . secondly, nothing of life, of . . . live? . . . flesh 11, 5). Together, this gives Mori Faust an unmistakably anti-Cartesian turn. But perhaps it also allows one to think of still more distant origin. The philosophizing Faust who needs his hand and an objet de tendresse to escape, through Lust, from the illusions of abstract thought, 134 D GOETHE'S AND VALERY'S FAUST is not lacking in analogy to the Old Testament creation myth according to which God took rib from the sleeping Adam and made woman from it to provide the lonely man the missing object de tendresse (adiutor similis eius, Gen. 2:20-22). The Biblical narrative implies the creating hand of God (aedificavit . . . costam quam tulerat de Adam, in mulierem) without actually referring to it, just as later in the iconographic tradition the creator stretches his hand toward the arising creation only as sort of verbal gesture [Sprachgestus] (as Michelangelo's creation of Adam). Yet there exists alongside this literary tradition known to me from the Middle Ages, but also taken up by Milton, according to which it is the highest praise of female beauty to say that God himself created her with the mere hand. Even if the interpretation I am risking -that the co-thinking hand of the philosophizing Faust appears in the invented biographic-mythic narrative in the place of the co-creating (if already heterodox) hand of the Biblical god of creationcannot be supported through any historically concretizable filiation, it would presumably not have displeased Valery. This may also be concluded from the fact that he himself used the Biblical myth of the Fall to answer, this reprise, in his own way the old question of the possibility of happiness that springs from the fullness of human knowledge—through provocative inversion of the Satanic prophecy, Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum. The Christian myth that is supposed to explain the illegitimate curiosity through which mankind itself forfeited its happiness, winds up grounding Faust's and Lust's happiness at the end of Valery's four-act play. The common consumption of the fruit gets the jump on the traditional seducer (II, 6); seals an understanding inter pares that already began the hand-play (that is therefore born of you and me, and not of you or of me); and refutes the theology of original sin and salvation through the transformation (in the scene) of the state of Eros into the state of Nous that was foreseen for the fourth act. Thus, after the process of theoretical curoisity had been exhausted, Valery in Mon Faust concludes that older process that Goethe —as the album-verse, used only ironically for the student, shows (v. 2048)-did not yet dare to touch: the revision of the Biblical judgment on man's claim to be like God. The surviving drafts of fourth act offer to the state of affairs after the eating of the fruit meaning opposed to the Biblical tradition: We would be like the Gods, the harmonious, intelligent ones, in an immediate correspondence our sensual lives, without words —and our minds would make love one another as our bodies can do. GOETHE'S AND VALERY'S FAUST D 135