Goethe's 'Faust' and European Epic: Forgetting the Future (review)

Reviewed by: Goethe's 'Faust' and European Epic: Forgetting the Future David G. John Arnd Bohm . Goethe's 'Faust' and European Epic: Forgetting the Future. Rochester: Camden House, 2007. 276 pp. US$ 75 (Hardcover). ISBN 13: 978-1-57113-344-1. This study claims that Goethe's Faust can be seen as an epic poem of grand international scope, thus far exceeding his lesser attempts at the genre in works such as Hermann und Dorothea and Reineke Fuchs. With a thoroughly original thesis, Bohm confronts the scholarly position that despite Goethe's range of accomplishments in other genres and subgenres, his oeuvre, without a major epic, remained incomplete in terms of its status as world literature. Bohm rests his case primarily, but not exclusively, on aspects of the "Auerbachs Keller" scene, particularly the image of the table "bleeding" wine at Mephisto's command, and its relationship to the symbolism of animate nature, bushes, and trees in selected authors and works of European epic literature. He includes Homer, Vergil, Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, and Milton, and their major epic works, the Iliad and Odyssey, Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Orlando Furioso, Jerusalem Liberated, and Paradise Lost. Bohm first argues that Goethe saw in his plans for Faust the chief elements required of the epic genre: a hero, a villain, the quest for knowledge, the conflict of good and evil, a love story, and elasticity or comprehensiveness of themes and experiences. He goes on to review the formal features of the European epic and how Faust aligns with them. Two chapters then focus on the connections between Faust and the epics of Tasso, Ariosto, Dante and Vergil. The book's second part concentrates specifically on "Auerbachs Keller," arguing in minute detail that the scene is a microcosm of the universe and the work as a whole, which sets the stage for Faust to explore the full range of the world's experience and attempt to understand its essence. Major thematic strands include the political crises of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and the Holy Roman Empire, elements of Christianity, and developments in science. Bohm argues finally that Faust fails tragically because of his melancholic nature and inability to relate the lessons of the past to his own future. The book's title might have been formulated more precisely as "Goethe's 'Faust' and the Western European Epic," for it disregards Eastern and Northern European (Slavic and Germanic) examples entirely. Its enigmatic subtitle, "Forgetting the Future" might have been better phrased as "Forgetting the Past," for it is argued primarily that both Faust as a character and we as readers need to be reminded of the epic legacy on which Goethe's tragedy is built and only then understand how it might portend the future. One is struck by the study's density. Although Bohm writes carefully and logically, it is a difficult work to read, and its genesis says much to explain why. In his preface Bohm traces the project from 1983 to 2006, a gestation period of almost a quarter of a century, a long process of knowledge gathering and sifting that has resulted in a work of extraordinary complexity and sophistication. Many of the stages included lectures and articles that became woven into the comprehensive thesis of this book, which testifies to its author's ceaseless intellectual curiosity and encyclopaedic knowledge of his subject. The meticulously crafted argument is consistently stimulating, but often weighed down by the ballast of an extraordinary number of footnote references and lengthy quotations. [End Page 476] It is not uncommon for a half to two-thirds of a page to consist of these. One wonders about appropriate balance. The valuable list of works cited is forty pages long, the index twelve, and it consists almost exclusively of names, thematic clusters assumedly too complex to include. One marvels at the author's erudition but at the same time despairs at the impossibility of doing justice to his argument without investing some decades in the subject oneself. It is like an iceberg, and going below the surface with Bohm is like descending into the realm of the mothers. One learns an enormous amount but needs to come up regularly...

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