Goethe's Urfaust and the Enlightenment: Gottsched, Welling, and the "Turn to Magic"

Abstract

The Urfaust, composed in the early 1770s, is the first draft of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's (1749-1832) masterpiece, Faust, Teil I (1808). While this early draft is relatively unexamined in its own right, an examination of this work in the context of its original creation offers insights into Goethe's creative processes at the time in relation to the Enlightenment poetic debates of the eighteenth century, through which literary critics, such as J.C. Gottsched (1700-1766) attempted to define the rules by which poetic construction should operate. In examining the Urfaust, one can see how Goethe's poetic aims transcended those of the Enlightenment debate, going far beyond the Enlightenment critics of Gottsched, such as J.J. Bodmer (1698-1783) and J.J. Breitinger (1701-1776) in making the case for additional room for the fantastic in poetic construction. Goethe's criticism of the limits of the Enlightenment to know and explain reality via reason and language leads him to a different approach to the mythological, one based on the primacy of image to language in approximating nature, in which the poet is free to construct a new mythology based on the manipulation of images into a new narrative. In Georg von Welling's (1652-1727) cabbalistic work he finds a cosmogony rich with images, images that he borrows and transforms in creating his own new Faust mythology. In Welling, Goethe finds the counterpole to Gottsched, whose image-rich language provides Goethe with inspiration to respond to the poetic debates of the Enlightenment poetically, as opposed to discursively, through his approach to constructing a mythology.