B00ARI2G5C EBOK (5 page)

As he knew from his youthful reading, the alchemists of the late Middle Ages believed that it was possible to create artificial miniature human beings by mixing human sperm with other ingredients according to mysterious and disgusting recipes;
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the homunculus would resemble a tiny human body, but would be transparent and incorporeal. The difficult
opus
of making such a creature was closely associated with the search for the Philosophers’ Stone which would turn base metals into gold; the homunculus was indeed often symbolically identified with the Stone. He was usually born with some deficiency, such as the lack of a solid body or an unintegrated sexual duality, and thus signified potential metamorphosis, growth to full stature or to a higher, more perfect state. This is already enough to suggest that the Homunculus and Faust are intended as parallel figures, but Goethe’s development of this point is complex. Both Faust and the Homunculus are also associated, in his
conception, with what (very loosely adapting a term from Aristotle’s metaphysics, with some Leibniz thrown in) he called the ‘entelechy’: the unit or monad of discarnate spiritual force which survives the death of the body or precedes physical existence. In the final scene of Act V, after Faust’s death, the angels are carrying his ‘immortal part [
Fausts Unsterbliches]’
, which in a manuscript variant Goethe here also calls ‘Faust’s entelechy’; and he is reported to have told Eckermann that the Homunculus represented ‘the pure entelechy, the intelligence, the spirit as it comes into being before all experience; for man’s spirit is already highly gifted when it arrives here’.
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But Goethe’s original Homunculus, in the 1826 sketch BA 73, does not have this lofty symbolic role. For one thing, the ‘chemical mannikin’ (not yet dignified by his Latin name) has here evidently been ‘begotten’ by Wagner, Faust’s pedantic research assistant whom we encountered in Part One, who still works in his former master’s quarters and has taken to alchemy. Wagner’s function in Part One was to be the target of the young Goethe’s constant satirical parodying of dry academic learning, scholarship remote from life; his progeny, therefore, is in the first instance fittingly conceived as the embodiment of excessively cerebral qualities. The original Homunculus’s approach to classical antiquity is historicistic, greatly preoccupied with dates; as he flies to Greece on the magic carpet with Faust, Wagner, and Mephistopheles, he entertains them on the way with ‘an unending flood of geographical and historical detail on every place they pass over’. He knows not only the correct date of the battle of Pharsalus but also its chronological coincidence with the recurring Classical Walpurgis Night; we are told that ‘his head contains a general historical universal calendar’. He is in fact uncannily like what we now call the
idiot savant
, the autistic prodigy with a freakish gift of memory or calculation. It may be that Goethe perceived this (could he ever have encountered the phenomenon or read about it?) as the initial defect of a purely ‘spiritual’ or cerebral, not yet physical, being. The point is not developed further in the prose sketch, where indeed the mannikin’s only real function seems to be that of proposing the trip to classical Greece, in which as a scholar he is naturally interested. All this has led some commentators to suggest that the ‘learned’ Homunculus satirically represents the intellectually limited scholars of Goethe’s time, busily travelling for their professional self-improvement. The mannikin of the prose
sketch travels in his learned progenitor’s breast pocket, and seems to share Wagner’s hope that a female homunculus can perhaps somehow be scraped together out of the dust of the Thessalian battlefield. Both he and Wagner disappear from the narrative at an early stage.

The final version of the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’, written in the earlier months of 1830 about three and a half years after the BA 73 sketch, greatly enhances and elaborates the role of the Homunculus, increasing its prominence and seriousness. Although still presented with a trace of irony, he is now no longer simply the offspring of Wagner: Goethe makes it clear, or almost clear (6683 f, 7003 f.
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) that Mephistopheles has had a hand in his making. He now (Sc. 9) has magical vision enabling him to see Faust’s dream about Helen’s parentage as Faust is dreaming it (6903-20
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). He instinctively understands Faust’s longing for classical Greece, and feels actively impelled to travel there with him. Wagner, the mere antiquarian, is left behind in his Gothic surroundings. The Homunculus’s story is similar to Faust’s: he pursues a distant goal, not a princess but the bodily existence which he still lacks. His freakish artificiality is emphasized by the fact that he does not at once break his glass retort and step out of it, as in the sketch, but floats carefully about inside it.
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There are repeated, slightly comic expressions of his apprehension that the glass might break (6881, 8093, 8235 f.): this must not happen until the right moment comes, and yet he is impatient for that moment (7832). The philosopher Thales, seeking advice on his behalf from Proteus, the god of metamorphosis, explains that the Homunculus
‘môchte gern entstehri
(8246 in the German text)—he would dearly like to come into being, to be born properly, to acquire a body:

His intellectual qualities are many,
But earthly solid life he has hardly any.
This glass retort’s still all that gives him weight;
His wish now’s to become incorporate.

(8249–52)

He will achieve this only by undergoing the natural processes of evolution, beginning in the sea. His programme, as Thales puts it, is to

Move onward by eternal norms
Through many thousand thousand forms,
And reach at last the human state.
(8324-6)

The moment at which the Homunculus begins this long journey is the moment of his sudden passion for the goddess Galatea, as she comes riding Venus-like over the waves. Moved by ‘Eros, first cause of all’ (8479; literally, ‘Eros who began it all’), he leaps on the back of Proteus, who has now changed into a dolphin, and shatters his glass against Galatea’s chariot, in creative self-immolation. The final version culminates in a kind of pageant of the elements, a festive setting for this ‘marriage’ between the Homunculus and the sea.

Both the Homunculus and Faust, on their parallel but diverging journeys, encounter a series of advisers (the ‘helpers’ of the
Märchen
tradition), and in this respect they both resemble the questing hero of the
Arabian Nights
tales. The characteristic pattern is that each of the helpers (they are usually older figures, called in the
Tales
‘spirit teachers’ or ‘spirit uncles’) passes the hero on to the next, until finally he is shown how to reach his goal. Faust is carried by Mephistopheles to his first effective helper, the Homunculus himself: a magic omniscient creature suspended, like Petronius’s sibyl, in a glass vessel. (In an
Arabian Nights
story one of the helpers or talismans acquired by the heroine is a magic omniscient talking bird which never leaves its cage.) Arriving in Thessaly (the land of magic
par excellence
, as the ancients believed), he recovers consciousness, and first consults the Sphinxes, who advise him to ask Chiron, the divine centaur, wise pedagogue to so many heroes. Unseduced from his quest by the nymphs of the river Peneus, he meets the galloping Chiron, who carries him down the Peneus to a temple near Mount Olympus, where he hands him over to the aged prophetic sibyl Manto, recommending him to her as a psychiatric patient. Manto, like Erichtho, is also a Thessalian sorceress with necromantic powers, and at one stage (according to another of the 1826 fragments) Goethe’s plan was to have Helen’s release negotiated at a high level with Persephone, the queen of the dead, by ‘daemonic sibyls’ from the mountains of Thessaly. The final version, modifying this, has Manto conduct Faust into a dark cavern in the mountain base, an entrance to Hades which (as BA 73 tells us) gapes open every year on the anniversary of Pharsalus, remembering how many dead it swallowed up on that day. By this route Faust and Manto will descend to Persephone and together plead with her to let Helen go, citing various precedents in Greek mythology for such a dispensation. Here the
Arabian Nights
parallel and source is again the story
of Prince Asem: nearing the end of his quest, the prince is helped by an aged woman who takes him to the court of the Spirit Queen. There his beloved is being held captive, and is about to be condemned to death for marrying a mortal; but the old woman, who is the queen’s nurse, defends the princess and secures her release.

Goethe evidently attached importance to the similar dramatic climax of his own hero’s journey; but for reasons which have been much debated by critics, the Faust-Manto-Persephone scene was never written, with the result that, about a third of the way through the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ sequence, Faust merely disappears underground with his guide, and we lose sight of him for about a thousand lines. Instead, we witness the foolish adventures of Mephistopheles in this unsuitable Greek setting, until he too disappears underground (8033) two-thirds of the way through the sequence. The last third of it is dominated by the continuation and elaboration of the story of the Homunculus, which has thus effectively replaced that of Faust as the centre of attention. As late as February 1830 Goethe still planned to end Act II with the scene in Hades; in June he thought of transferring it to Act III as a prologue; but in the end he simply left it out altogether. The easygoing view of this omission or rearrangement, adopted by some critics, is to accept it as another ‘epic’ licence, whereby (in defiance of the classical laws of dramatic proportion) Goethe omits what might be thought to be dramatically central material but digresses elaborately at other points. Or we may call it a further example of Goethe’s occasional cavalier treatment of the ‘characters’ in
Faust
, who are at times not so much psychologically realistic persons as convenient mouthpieces uttering whatever general theme may at the time be in the forefront of the author’s interest: an instance in Part One is Faust’s dramatically irrelevant soliloquy about natural phenomena at the beginning of the ‘Forest Cavern’ scene (Sc. 17). This tendency is especially pronounced in Part Two, and is indeed one of the features that mark it as a product of Goethe’s old age. It has been pointed out, by Anthony Storr for instance (1989, esp. ch. 11), that in his ‘last period’ a writer or other artist will characteristically be less concerned with empathetically creating an interpersonal ‘drama’ than with expressing his thoughts, setting up and exploring an inward synthesis of his own. As well as the move from the dramatic to the epic mode which we have already noted, we thus have in
Faust
Part Two a move from realistic drama
to allegorical or symbolic expression. In the present instance, Goethe seems in the latter part of the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ to be chiefly concerned with the theme of natural processes and metamorphoses: did he judge that it could be better expressed with Faust absent and the Homunculus doing duty for him? Or that it might seem repetitious, since Faust has been down to mysterious lower regions once already, to lay undue emphasis on a second such descent? In any case, he seems to have felt that the missing link between the Sea Festival and Menelaus’s palace, like that between the Act I prologue and the Emperor’s court and other such transitions, could be left for the reader to supply.
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And this may be all there is to it. Reporting the completion of the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ to Zelter (letter of 4 January 1831), Goethe writes: ‘Enough! At the beginning of Act III Helen enters without further ado.’ On the other hand, it may be that the Homunculus’s adventures in search of
Entstehung
are not so much a spontaneous digression from the story of Faust as a calculated symbolic continuation of it. The latter view is sustainable in so far as we can broadly establish the already noted parallel or equivalence between the alchemical sub-hero and the official hero himself, notwithstanding the former’s Mephistophelian provenance, or perhaps even precisely because he is a cross between Wagner and Mephistopheles. Both the Homunculus and Faust, we might say, are moved by the sudden erotic vision of a unique and Hellenic beauty to embark, each in his own way, on a quest which is to bring about the
Entstehung
or self-fulfilment of each of them, and in Faust’s case also the
Entstehung
of his beloved. The process is similar, though the Homunculus ends at the point of his vision and Faust begins with it, at Helen’s phantom appearance in Act I. After this fiasco in the world of the imperial court and Wagner’s laboratory, the helpless Faust must accept the assistance of the Homunculus, who is making a similar transition from the sphere of mere learning to that of the central mysteries of life. Both of them, each in his own way, have to experience a kind of education or growth. This, incidentally, means that the old satirical interpretation of the Homunculus as a caricature of mere learning is not basically incompatible with the official interpretation of him as the symbol of the striving ‘entelechy’: as such, he represents the desire to become what he potentially is, to grow out of cerebrality into a bodily and emotional self. The

Homunculus is, so to speak, a doctor to Faust who heals himself as well.

There can be little doubt as to the significance of these themes on the autobiographical level. In 1828-9 Goethe was putting together and editing, from old letters and diaries, the third and last part of the
Italian Journey
, his own record of an experience (1786-8) that had been not only the threshold of his mature ‘classical’ work as a poet and dramatist, but also probably the most important turning-point in his personal life. On the ‘classical soil’ of Italy, as he was to call it in the
Roman Elegies
of 1790, he had felt transformed, healed, reborn; his memories of that time were clearly alive as he began writing the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ early in 1830. Faust’s reaction as Mephistopheles and the Homunculus set him down on the soil of Greece is similar: reviving again out of his death-like state, as in the Prologue, and finding himself in Greece as if by a miracle, he feels like the giant Antaeus, whose strength was increased every time he touched his mother Earth (7070-7). At this point the three travellers separate, and each moves off in a different direction. Faust and the Homunculus are both still questing heroes, but there is a difference of emphasis between them in the series of helpers they consult. In Faust’s case the recurrent theme is that he needs ‘healing’ or ‘cure’ (a suggestion which he himself of course indignantly repudiates, 7459 f.): Mephistopheles has already referred him to the Homunculus for this purpose (6901), Chiron judges him to be mentally deranged (7446-8, 7487), and in order to emphasize this motif Goethe has in the finished version deliberately changed the traditional mythological parentage of Faust’s final helper Manto, making her a daughter not of Tiresias but of the god of medicine Aesculapius and a sister of his aptly named daughters laso, Hygiea, and Panacea. The Homunculus, on the other hand, consults the natural philosopher Thales, the wise sea-god Nereus, and lastly Proteus, who is both a sea-god and the god of transformation. They all advise him about physical
Entstehung
, the process of coming into being, the natural birth of form out of the unformed. And it is noticeable that this enquiry into natural laws is now extended from the organic to the inorganic sphere: into the geological argument about the formation of the earth’s crust. The sea, as the creative element in which all things originate, is now in the forefront of attention. The philosophers Thales and Anaxagoras, representing
respectively the rival geological theories of ‘neptunism’ and ‘vulcanism’ in Goethe’s day,
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were already ironically played off against each other in the prose version; in the final text the neptunist Thales has gained greater prominence and seriousness as the Homunculus’s preferred mentor, who introduces him to Proteus and thus to his marine and evolutionary destiny. Even the name ‘Proteus’ is a small clue to the connection between all this and Goethe’s own scientific interests. Quoting, in 1829, what he had written from Italy in 1787 about his botanical theory of the ‘primal plant’ and his hopes of discovering it in the luxuriant gardens of Palermo or Naples, he recalls his sudden insight (as he believed it to be) into leaf form as the unifying principle underlying all plant morphology: his realization that in it ‘the true Proteus lies hidden, able to conceal and reveal himself in all possible shapes’. ‘Proteus’, in this comment written not long before the Homunculus scenes, is Goethe’s metaphor for the natural processes, their personification. Incorrect though his botanical theories may have been, there is no denying the importance for Goethe, and to some extent also scientifically, of his intensive preoccupation with a number of natural sciences from about 1780 onwards. The list of them, extending through the rest of his life, included geology, mineralogy, comparative anatomy (leading to his discovery in 1784 of the human intermaxillary bone), botany, optics, and meteorology. His scientific writings occupy many volumes of his collected works, and he was even inclined to value his controversial
Theory of Colours
(1790-1810) more highly than anything else he had written. His Italian journey, offering him as it did a wealth of new observations, was a landmark on the scientific as well as the literary side of his development. It was in the context of this visit to Italy that he wrote the already mentioned ‘Forest Cavern’ soliloquy of Part One, Scene 17; here it was not so much Goethe the dramatist as Goethe the natural historian who spoke through Faust, giving thanks to the Earth Spirit for revealing its secrets to him.