SOURCE: Swales, Martin. “‘Die neue sitte’ and Metaphors of Secular Existence: Reflections on Goethe's Iphigenie.” Modern Language Review 89, no. 4 (October 1994): 902-15.

[In the following essay, Swales surveys the major thematic concerns in Iphigenie auf Tauris.]

Whatever kind of work Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris may be held to be, it is not usually described as a ‘problem play’. On the contrary: in its (to invoke a famous phrase) ‘avoidance of tragedy’, in its conciliatory glory, it is frequently (and particularly by present-day students, in my experience) felt to be problematic only in virtue of its non-problematic condition: that is, in its serene transcendence of the darkness which its original material (that of the Greek legend) enshrines. Iphigenie lightens every darkness, psychological, political, and theological. In a gesture of thoroughly benign intertextuality, Goethe's play invokes the older (Euripidean) model, but only, it would seem, in order to banish it resolutely. No anxiety of influence here; rather, Goethe offers serene, even miraculous reinterpretation. Iphigenie auf Tauris is centred upon a protagonist in whom integrity is both an ontological and a moral category. That is to say: Iphigenie is true to herself, and that truth amounts to being true to others. Moreover, that truthfulness is an effective agent in the world portrayed; it triumphantly achieves conciliation and harmony at the end of the drama.

Let me for a moment concede the paradisal quality of the play, although I should admit at the outset that I wish in this article to suggest that (to borrow a phrase from Götz von Berlichingen) where there is much light there is also heavy shadow; that (in other words) the play fully, richly, and complexly acknowledges the darkness that it seeks to exorcise. But I want initially to trace the processes through which it fuses ontological and ethical discourses in a remarkable marriage of authenticity and relatedness. There are, I think, four key centres of import which articulate this synthesis.

First, feminine versus masculine. The play sustains an argument which suggests that women are closer to immediacy of feeling and response, less able to dissemble, to be tactical, politic, to be party to the power game than are men. In ways that often prefigure Christa Wolf's Kassandra, Goethe's drama argues that women are passive rather than active, sufferers rather than doers. They have to pick up the pieces, they grieve for fathers, husbands, and sons who are central to the heroic story. The women have no power, only frail humanity, only feelings, and their only weapons are words. Yet this weakness can entail strength; as T. J. Reed suggests,¹ their outward impotence may liberate their inward, moral autonomy and the courage that goes with it. In Act II Pylades, on learning that the temple is watched over by a woman, says:

Wohl uns daß es ein Weib ist! denn ein Mann,
Der beste selbst, gewöhnet seinen Geist
An Grausamkeit und macht sich auch zuletzt
Aus dem was er verabscheut ein Gesetz,
Wird aus Gewohnheit hart und fast unkenntlich.

(l. 786)

(To this issue of law and custom deriving from and enshrining cruelty I shall return much later).

The second theme, already intimated in the first, is that of language, speech, utterance. Much critical discussion has been devoted to this concern, most suggestively by Sigurd Burckhardt and Irmgard Hobson,² and I shall therefore be brief. In Act I Iphigenie, in part to keep Thoas's marriage proposal at bay, tells him of the dreadful lineage from which she is descended. ‘Vernimm’, she says, ‘Ich bin aus Tantalus' Geschlecht’ (l. 306). Thoas is quick to sense that the factual, propositional content of an utterance, however catastrophic, may be redeemed by its mode, and he expresses this perception in one of the most famous single lines from the play: ‘Du sprichst ein großes Wort gelassen aus’ (l. 307). Time and time again, Iphigenie speaks out, and her truthfulness persuades others to do the same. Her motto might be likened to E. M. Forster's dictum, ‘only connect’. In Act III Orest reveals his identity to her:

Ich kann nicht leiden daß du große Seele
Mit einem falschen Wort betrogen werdest. […]
                                                                                                              zwischen uns
Sei Wahrheit!

(l. 1076)

These last two words constitute a complete line of verse, and they come almost exactly at the midpoint of the play. It is as though the drama in its entirety pivots about that declaration ‘let there be truth’, an injunction of such weight that the two words are allowed to form a whole line in their own right. This is reminiscent of Goethe's poem ‘Das Göttliche’, which has its structural and thematic alpha and omega in the subjunctive mode of moral willing. The divinity in human kind is inseparable from the humanly felt imperative to live not only in material facts but also in the knowledge of what ethically can be. That moment of truth and truthfulness (once again the ontological argument interlocks with the ethical) prefigures the moment in Act V when Iphigenie speaks out to Thoas, telling him of the conspiracy:

                                                                                                                                  Wenn
Ihr wahrhaft seid wie ihr gepriesen werdet;
So zeigt's durch euern Beistand und verherrlicht
Durch mich die Wahrheit—Ja vernimm, o König […]

(l. 1916)

In Act I she has used the same imperative—‘Vernimm’, and the simple conditional clause ‘wenn Ihr wahrhaft seid’ seems to resonate with two possible meanings, again conjoining an ontological statement (‘if you genuinely are as you are praised as being’) and an ethical one (‘if you are truthful, as you are praised as being’). The force of the plural pronoun ‘ihr’ in the conditional clause is wonderfully indeterminate. At one level, Iphigenie is, of course, addressing the gods; at another level, she seems to be offering the challenge of her scandalous truthfulness to the corporate world, to Thoas as its most powerful representative, and by implication to all those who live by conventional worldly wisdom.

Iphigenie, then, is in a crucial sense about utterance as deed, as (in the case of Iphigenie's truth-telling) ‘unerhörte Tat’. But how does this theme contribute to the conciliatory purpose of the play? After all, deeds can be either good or bad, and language can be used to both good and evil ends. Here we come to the notion that there is one utterance that is finer, truer, more vibrant than any other, an utterance that, like Iphigenie herself, displays ontological and moral integrity. This is the utterance of the heart—and this is my third theme, to which Oskar Seidlin and Arthur Henkel have drawn attention.³ Iphigenie herself heeds the promptings of her heart. Consider the following quotations:

THOAS:
                    Es spricht kein Gott, es spricht dein eignes Herz.
IPHIGENIE:
Sie reden nur durch unser Herz zu uns.

(l. 493)

Or Iphigenie to Orest:

                                                            o sieh mich an wie mir
Nach einer langen Zeit das Herz sich öffnet [.]

(l. 1190)

Or Iphigenie's anguish at the falsity demanded of her:

O weh der Lüge! Sie befreiet nicht
Wie jedes andre wahrgesprochene Wort
Die Brust.

(l. 1405)

Her despair is deepened by Arkas's words:

Von dieses Mannes Rede fühl ich mir
Zur ungelegnen Zeit das Herz im Busen
Auf einmal umgewendet.

(l. 1503)

She will answer Pylades's blandishments with ‘Allein mein eigen Herz ist nicht befriedigt’ (l. 1648). Confronted with a world of adult dissembling, she can only invoke ‘mein kindlich Herz’ (l. 2005), yet that understatement does less than justice to what she believes and knows. In a crucial exchange with Thoas she makes the heart the guarantor of both intensity and humaneness of feeling:

THOAS:
                                                                                                    Du glaubst es höre
                    Der rohe Scythe, der Barbar die Stimme
                    Der Wahrheit und der Menschlichkeit die Atreus
                    Der Grieche nicht vernahm.
IPHIGENIE:
                                                                                                    Es hört sie jeder
                    Geboren unter jedem Himmel, dem
                    Des Lebens Quelle durch den Busen rein
                    Und ungehindert fließt.

(l. 1936)

This is a magnificent vision, fusing ontology and morality in the perception that humaneness is a property of untrammeled living and feeling. It is no wonder that Iphigenie's presence is a healing agency; for Orest the experience of being with her banishes the darkness that envelops him, and, once again, the heart is the essential agency: ‘Es löset sich der Fluch, mir sagt's das Herz’ (l. 1358).

Implicit in many of these quotations has been the fourth theme that I wish to highlight, and it is, as in Iphigenie's words to Thoas about the unimpeded stream of life, that of free flow. It dominates the healing of Orest in Act III:

O laß mich! Laß mich! denn es quillet heller
Nicht vom Parnaß die ewge Quelle sprudelnd
Von Fels zu Fels ins goldne Tal hinab,
Wie Freude mir vom Herzen wallend fließt
Und wie ein selig Meer mich rings umfängt.

(l. 1196)

The patterns come to the fore at the very end of the drama as Iphigenie pleads for a friendly leave-taking, one which makes the tears flow and which assuages the grief precisely by freeing it:

                                                                                                                                  gib
Ein holdes Wort des Abschieds mir zurück.
Dann schwellt der Wind die Segel sanfter an
Und Tränen fließen lindernder vom Auge
Des Scheidenden.

(l. 2168)

It is precisely this appeal that converts ‘So geht!’ into ‘Lebt wohl!’. The latter phrase transposes the ‘o/e’ vowel pattern of the former, and the final words ‘Lebt wohl!’ constitute a full line (as did ‘Sei Wahrheit’ at the pivotal point of the play). They sound as a benediction at the end of the drama, and we almost hear them as freshly minted and not just as a conventional form of leave-taking. At one level they are that, of course: they are gracious words, enshrining moral concern and fellow-feeling. But they also feel like an ontological injunction: that one should live aright. In a moment of extraordinary beauty, ontological and moral discourses blend for the final time. The conciliatory ending of the play is, then, not just dependent on an ingenious twist of the plot (the reinterpretation of the words of the oracle), on an ingenious afterthought.⁴ It is prepared for and articulated through a series of themes and images, and it enshrines an extraordinary vision that reconciles authenticity and morality.

But, even so, even granted the through-composed beauty of the text, we still have to confront the problem with which I began. The difficulty in essence is that the play itself would seem to raise issues that its paradisal ending simply brushes aside. The dilemma is this: the whole action of Goethe's play depends on previous events and patterns of behaviour which are constantly invoked. Above all there is the dreadful story of the House of Atreus and the curse that its bloodstained history so powerfully embodies. To all these horrors the themes I have been tracing would seem to be sublimely irrelevant. That hideous prehistory is not made from the inability of men and women to be true to their feelings, to heed the promptings of their heart, to live close to the unchecked flow of experience; it is made from the fact that they did all those things, but what the heart wanted and uttered, what the free flow of experience dictated, was appalling in its carnage. Goethe's play would seem, therefore, to contradict its own affirmations. By contrast, in The Tempest Prospero has to acknowledge Caliban, the thing of darkness, as his own. Yet it would seem that (with the exception of the ‘Parzenlied’, which is, significantly, more a quotation than a spontaneous outpouring) Iphigenie offers no sustained acknowledgement of the Tantalid darkness as part of her immediate experience. The Iphigenie who issues from this lineage can believe that it is given to men and women, if only they heed the deepest promptings of their nature, to find grace and goodness abounding. What kind of sense is to be made of this?

Goethe's drama is a modern reworking of old material from Greek tragedy. In Euripides's Iphigenia in Tauris, for all its concentration upon the human psychological drama, the gods and goddesses, the demons and furies are ultimately operative in the drama. They have decreed the banishment of Iphigenia, the torment of Orestes, and, at the end of the play, Pallas Athene will command Iphigenia's return to Greece. In Goethe's modern, ‘verteufelt human’⁵ version (one that Schiller found ‘erstaunlich modern und ungriechisch’)⁶ the centre of gravity, the mechanism of arbitration, moves unequivocally from the transcendental plane to the human one. Goethe's world, as Nicholas Boyle reminds us in his recent biography, is the product of an essentially secular temperament.⁷ Yet Iphigenie auf Tauris is replete with references to the supernatural plane, to deities and spirits as part not just of the prehistory but also of the present texture of human experience. If we ask what role this discourse of the transcendent realm plays in the action that is put before us, the answer surely must be that the gods now figure primarily as symbols, as metaphors by which human beings express the governing values of their lives. As Boyle puts it: ‘As Goethe revised the detailed wording of his play, so he associated more events, not fewer, with the divine dimension, but this divinity is always an image of a human moral reality’ (p. 449). Hence, the Tantalid curse functions within a radically secularized (that is, moral and psychological) context. To quote Boyle again:

At the centre of the idea of a curse is the idea that a man may not be wholly responsible for his own moral destiny but may, in spite of his own best will, be forced by an external power into committing crimes. For Iphigenie, who holds that the gods ‘speak to us only through our heart’, such a belief is indeed a curse, the only real curse there is.

(p. 450)

The modern secular world (Goethe's and ours) may have got rid of the gods, and thereby it has vindicated the realm of human choice, of cognitive and ethical autonomy, as Wolfdietrich Rasch and Hans-Dietrich Dahnke have shown.⁸ In consequence, it has radically shifted the parameters of the human drama. But it has not in the process resolved that drama. The darkness, in other words, is still there; indeed, the darkness may be the more profound because of the element of human choice. The infernal machine still functions, driven now not by the will of the gods but by the choices made by men and women. Goethe's drama tells us, as does Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and William Golding's Lord of the Flies, that the secular drama is not, in and of itself, more humane than the older, theologically driven one that it has supplanted. In Iphigenie auf Tauris the ancient Greek myth is present not as binding design but as a set of available, because transmitted, models and metaphors for human behaviour. The models are not determining, but they are ready at hand, dependent upon the human exercise of choice. The characters, like the Goethean drama in which they figure, are inheritors. The crucial question is what use they make of that inheritance. There are dark uses to which the mythological world, now operative as metaphorical instance, can be put, and there are also friendly, affirmatory, compassionate ones.⁹ For good and for ill, the secular imagination cannot, it seems, dispense with deities, avatars, and familiar (not to say familial) spirits.

What I want to consider now is the multiplicity of ways in which Goethe's drama reflects on the modes and processes of metaphorical thinking and perceiving that inform the secular consciousness.

Even modest phrases vibrate with the richness of this thematic constellation. In her opening soliloquy, Iphigenie speaks of herself as the daughter of ‘godlike Agamemnon’. The adjective ‘göttergleich’ suggests a likeness between human creatures and the gods. In what sense, then, was Agamemnon like a god? In his nobility of spirit? Perhaps. Or in that, as Iphigenie will discover later in the play, he was prepared to sacrifice his daughter to secure a fair wind for Troy? The seemingly harmless epithet invokes what will be a key preoccupation in the play, the extent to which, both for good and for ill, the kinship between humankind and the divinity is not so much ontologically given as metaphorically made: made, unmade, and remade in multiple acts of human perception, choice, and action.

The issue of the transmission of tradition, to which I have already drawn attention, is central to this whole process of making, unmaking, and remaking. It assumes immediate and urgent form in the second scene of the first Act. We learn that certain ancient traditions of Tauris (‘nach altem Brauch’ (l. 105), ‘den alten grausamen Gebrauch’ (l. 122)) have been changed by Iphigenie into a benign tradition whereby strangers coming to the island are welcomed. Moreover, with the change in ritual, the deities who were held to preside over that ritual have changed their aspect. Arkas says:

Hat nicht Diane, statt erzürnt zu sein
Daß sie der blutgen alten Opfer mangelt,
Dein sanft Gebet in reichem Maß erhört?
Umschwebt mit frohem Fluge nicht der Sieg
Das Heer und eilt er nicht sogar voraus?

(l. 128)

But this does not mean that for ever and a day, all is well. Customs and ritual, having been changed once, can be changed again, can be reinstated. It all depends on how men and women make and read the signs by which they live. When he is thwarted, even Thoas, the wise and generous king, seeks to remove the new custom and to return to the older one because he says that the death of his son clearly indicates Diana's displeasure with the new régime. But the claim to fundamentalist certainty is spurious. In the final Act Iphigenie will remind Thoas of an even older law, older than the one to which he wishes to return. And that law asserts another kind of sanctity, not the sanctity of sacrifice but that of hospitality:

Wir fassen ein Gesetz begierig an,
Das unsrer Leidenschaft zur Waffe dient.
Ein andres spricht zu mir, ein älteres,
Mich dir zu widersetzen; das Gebot
Dem jeder Fremde heilig ist.

(l. 1832)

Here very clearly we are asked to comprehend that the past, ‘Herkunft’, is a realm of multiple possibilities, symbols, values, from which we make a choice, and that choice establishes the governing images and metaphors by which our life will be lived.

The profound seriousness of what is at stake emerges in the exchange between Iphigenie and Thoas in Act I. She says:

Der mißversteht die Himmlischen, der sie
Blutgierig wähnt, er dichtet ihnen nur
Die eignen grausamen Begierden an.

(l. 523)

and the King replies:

Es ziemt sich nicht für uns den heiligen
Gebrauch mit leicht beweglicher Vernunft
Nach unserm Sinn zu deuten und zu lenken.

(l. 528)

Thoas, as we know, is a good and decent man. Yet here, under political pressure, afflicted by the death of his son, and thwarted in his wish to marry Iphigenie, he can disparage reason and human choice in order to affirm the sacred mystery of bloodletting. That somebody of his humaneness can advance the argument for the unreasoning worship of dark gods indicates the multiple and terrible ways in which seemingly banished deities can return to haunt the modern, secular imagination.

With the appearance of Orest in Act II we hear again of these dark deities. Again the metaphors fall thick and fast as Orest's anguished mind sets up the analogues of his own doom. The pursuing agencies are ‘wie losgelaßne Hunde’ (l. 584), and he envisages a bloodbath whose inevitability is given in the three-fold metaphor—twice ‘wie’, once ‘als’—

Soll ich wie meine Ahnen, wie mein Vater
Als Opfertier im Jammertode bluten.

(l. 576)

Just as, in Act I, Iphigenie's voice challenges Thoas, so in this Act it is Pylades who seeks to question the savage pattern which Orest perceives and underwrites: in an extraordinary statement, entirely contradictory of the infernal machine of the Tantalid curse, he opens up a territory of cognitive and moral freedom:

                                                                                                    Die Götter rächen
Der Väter Missetat nicht an dem Sohn.

(l. 723)

Pylades is forthright in asserting that the matrices of human behaviour are not given but made, and they are made by the act of human choice: ‘Ein jeglicher muß seinen Helden wählen’ (l. 763). At stake here is the choice of models and paradigms, of metaphors for living, generated by the autonomous human subject.

In one crucial sequence of images is encapsulated the whole complex argument of the play as it explores the interplay of literal fact and metaphor. Orest speaks of his torment as a state that means he always sees pictures of what he has done:

In seinen Wolkenkreisen wälzet sich
Die ewige Betrachtung des Geschehnen
Verwirrend um des Schuldgen Haupt umher.

(l. 1063)

The past becomes a vicious cloud wound round the head of the victim. Behind this metaphor we hear, of course, the awful literal event of the murder of Agamemnon, and his head and body tangled in a net. The metaphor sounds again late in the play, in Act V, when Thoas employs it to imply that Orest and Pylades have been deceiving Iphigenie by weaving their own wishes and desires round her head:

So haben die Betrüger künstlich dichtend
Der lang Verschloßnen, ihre Wünsche leicht
Und willig Glaubenden ein solch Gespinst
Ums Haupt geworfen!

(l. 1953)

In one of the supreme moments of the play, when Orest sees the double meaning inherent in the words of the oracle, he reinterprets the noun ‘Bild’ to mean not the literal statue but the image of the divinity enshrined in Iphigenie. He says:

Das Bild o König soll uns nicht entzweien!
Jetzt kennen wir den Irrtum den ein Gott
Wie einen Schleier um das Haupt uns legte.

(l. 2107)

The viciously enveloping material that decreed Agamemnon's death has now become the misconception that like a veil has clouded true vision. In a justly famous essay, Sylvia Jenkins has drawn attention to the theme of the ‘Bild’ in Goethe's drama.¹⁰ When, in the culminating twist of the plot line, the ‘Bild’ becomes not a literal object but a metaphor, the revelation is expressed in lines which, as it were, exorcise a vicious event from the past by making it a metaphor in the present. The ‘Bild’ moment is not merely a clever trick which removes an insuperable practical obstacle to the conciliatory conclusion; it thematizes and invites us to reflect on the densely metaphorical discourse of the entire play.

There is, for example, the intensity of metaphors that assert Iphigenie's kinship with the divinity. (I have already noted her reference to ‘göttergleichen Agamemnon’ in her opening speech.) Pylades speaks of her as ‘ein fremdes göttergleiches Weib’ (l. 772), he delights in her ‘göttergleiche Herkunft’ (l. 814). Orest will perceive her to be ‘gleich einer Himmlischen’ (l. 951). When, at the end of Act IV, Iphigenie prays that the hatred of the older world should not come home to roost in her heart, in her person and consciousness, she cries out: ‘Rettet mich / Und rettet euer Bild in meiner Seele’ (ll. 1716-17). She asks the gods to save not the literal statue but the metaphor, the likeness within her. The anguish and urgency of her prayer are amply justified because metaphors and images are not mere ornament, not mere linguistic and perceptual luxuriance; they are active, operative forces in human affairs. To vindicate these metaphors is to vindicate the person and the values by which she lives.

As is well known, the images are safe, this time, anyway. But the vindication is hard won. As Terence Cave so well puts it, ‘the extreme fragility of the dénouement is an essential aspect of the play's total effect’.¹¹ Cave is concerned with matters other than those which preoccupy me; he explores processes of recognition in the drama. But he too notes the interplay of benign, metaphorical recognitions, of humane relatedness on the one hand, and the literal recognition by means of the scar on the other. He is, in my view, right to insist on the delicate interplay between old and new forms of recognition because they enshrine the crucial interplay of old and modern worlds, of old and modern drama, that is central to Goethe's purpose. I illustrate the fragility of the happy ending¹² by drawing attention to a crucial passage that occurs a mere two pages before the reinterpretation of the oracle which brings resolution of the outer conflict.

As the antagonists Orest and Thoas confront one another, the former, brandishing the sword of Agamemnon, offers single combat to Thoas or any representative of his people:

OREST:
So weit die Erde Heldensöhne nährt
                    Ist keinem Fremdling dies Gesuch verweigert.
THOAS:
Dies Vorrecht hat die alte Sitte nie
                    Dem Fremden hier gestattet.
OREST:
                                                                                                                        So beginne
                    Die neue Sitte denn von dir und mir.
                    Nachahmend heiliget ein ganzes Volk
                    Die edle Tat der Herrscher zum Gesetz.

(l. 2043)

The possibility of which Orest here speaks is devastating in its implications. He envisages the invention of a custom which could rapidly, by imitation (‘nachahmend’), be transformed into a sacred law. Here the darkness and bloodshed of the old world enter the new world of choice, of metaphorical rather than predominantly literal thinking. If men and women so choose, a particular piece of ritual can be projected backwards into times immemorial; violence (a duel) can interpenetrate with notions of the sacred, of representative sacrifice. ‘Sittlichkeit’, the realm of morality, can reify into ‘Sitte’, age-old custom. At this moment we hear the whole ghastly possibility of cultic imaginings, of regressive thinking, of a darkness made the greater by the enlightened condition from which it proceeds. The modern, secular, human drama threatens to revert to (and to reinstate) the older forms. For this reason, the references to the mythological prehistory of the play acquire a present force, as Brown and Stephens, and Irmgard Wagner, suggest.¹³ The autonomous subject blissfully envisages the possibility of returning to binding ritual, to a sacred law that would banish autonomy from the human realm. We have heard this voice before in the play many times. I have already referred to the moment in Act 1 when, out of pique and wounded sexual vanity, Thoas advocates putting the clock back, returning to the older régime of human sacrifice. He says:

Es ziemt sich nicht für uns den heiligen
Gebrauch mit leicht beweglicher Vernunft
Nach unserm Sinn zu deuten und zu lenken.

(l. 527)

At the very end of the drama he, like Orest, will acquiesce in the modern agency of ‘Vernunft’ and in the reinterpretation of inherited imperatives that it makes possible. But the victory is precarious and may never be taken for granted. Pylades's words, which I have already quoted, indicate that man (in contradistinction to woman) can elevate brutality into law:

                                                                                                                        denn ein Mann,
Der beste selbst, gewöhnet seinen Geist
An Grausamkeit und macht sich auch zuletzt
Aus dem was er verabscheut ein Gesetz.

(l. 786)

Laws are made by human beings and, once made, they exert terrible sway over the promptings of human feeling and ethical response. That danger is one to which even the best of humans can succumb.

As I have noted time and time again, Goethe's play derives from the Greek world, and derivation (‘Herkunft’) is one of its central thematic concerns. In this sense, the mode of the drama interlocks with its theme, and the thematic import obliges us to reflect on the generic import of the text. When we do reflect in this way, the intertextual issue becomes infinitely more complex than a serene, monolithic assertion of an irreversible ‘over and done with’. Just as human beings can revert to older modalities of behaviour and cognition, so too, potentially the modern drama can revert to the older tragic mode. The avoidance of tragedy is, in other words, a close-run thing.¹⁴ In this case, Goethe's famous remark about Iphigenie auf Tauris (a remark which presumably must be taken to embrace both its mode and its theme)—‘verteufelt human’—begins to sound a shade less harmless (and colloquial). The qualifying adverb ‘verteufelt’ begins to resonate disturbingly. Perhaps devilishness is, after all, not that far beneath the surface.

A number of commentators have insisted that there is an important dimension of historicity in Iphigenie auf Tauris,¹⁵ in the sense that Goethe's understanding of the mechanisms of secularization means that, at one level, he exploits the contrast with the Greek original to show that the modern world is sustained by a degree of freedom and autonomy unknown to the ancient world: that freedom and autonomy have essentially to do with the ability to live in the ‘as if’ of metaphorical consciousness. But the debate about literal and metaphorical living is not a simple divide between then (literal) and now (metaphorical). There is a complex ambivalence to Goethe's understanding of both the historical and the theological issues in Iphigenie. René Girard's work on ‘violence and the sacred’, to quote the title of his well-known study, can help us to focus some of the key implications. We have to remember that the Iphigenie who is priestess in Tauris has narrowly escaped being sacrificed as an act of appeasement to the gods. That act would have been one of ritual. Iphigenie was not being punished for wrongdoing on her part. Rather, her status as sacrificial victim was one of pure surrogacy. She represented the community (the Greeks and their army) as the blameless victim who redeems corporate transgression. The sacred quality of the murderous act derives from its inherent paradoxicality, from its metaphorical interplay of identity and non-identity, of equivalence and its negation. Girard writes:

In many rituals the sacrificial act assumes two opposing aspects, appearing at times as a sacred obligation to be neglected at grave peril, at other times as a sort of criminal activity entailing perils of equal gravity. […] Because the victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill him—but the victim is sacred only because he is to be killed.¹⁶

If, then, so much ritual violence (whether in primitive or in modern societies) has to do with surrogacy, with the vicariousness of metaphorical substitution, the animal for the human sacrifice, the individual man or woman for the whole community, Goethe's Iphigenie explores this whole process of metaphorical displacement not as something over and done with, not as a primitive aberration, but as a mode of thinking that mutatis mutandis continues to function in the secular world precisely by virtue of its metaphorical consciousness. In his understanding of ritual (of, for example, ‘die neue Sitte’ which Orest proposes to Thoas), Goethe shows that metaphors have a tendency to be acted out, to be raised to the status of binding ritual and law. Then, devastatingly, the metaphors can become literal fact; real bloodshed can ensue, the kind of bloodshed from which Iphigenie was miraculously saved by the goddess, except that, in the modern world, there are no interventions ex machina, and salvation may be a long time in coming.

I want, by way of conclusion, to indicate the manifold ways in which Goethe explores in his literary work the metaphorical consciousness of the modern, secular world. I would suggest that both Götz and Egmont are concerned centrally with the role of metaphor and symbol in politics. In the opening scene of Götz two peasants in a tavern tell of Götz's exploits in outwitting the Bishop. One says to the other: ‘Erzähl das noch einmal.’¹⁷ The ‘noch einmal’ is crucial—the point of the story is not in its newsworthiness. Both speakers already know what has happened. The point of the narration resides in the act of telling it, in transmitting it as a legend of prowess and courage. The full title of the play (Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand) names both the man and the symbol that goes with him. As Goethe shows, that symbol can be both enlivening and deadening; it is part of the strength of the man and of the destruction that claims him. At the end of the play Götz perceives that he is, in the context of the historical world around him, an anachronism: “Du hast dich selbst überlebt’ (HA, IV, 175). What remains, of course, is the story, told and retold in the opening scene, and told again in Goethe's drama. The final line is ‘Wehe der Nachkommenschaft, die dich verkennt!’ (HA, IV, 175). As in Iphigenie, the issue of heritage is crucial, and Goethe's play is part of that heritage. It makes sure that those who come after do know Götz, know him as a figure who is historically doomed but symbolically validated.

In Egmont, too, the opening of the play reveals the symbolic stature of Graf Egmont for the Netherlands. The man himself does not appear for the whole of the first Act. But his presence can be felt everywhere, and what the people cherish and celebrate is less the actual person than what he stands for. He is the living symbol of their way of life, their integrity as a people. In terms of the immediate demands of the political situation, he may be less skilled as a tactician than is Oranien, the master chess player. But we feel that when the Netherlanders do revolt, it will be in the name of Egmont. As the end of the play suggests, Egmont as individual man is doomed, but the image, to employ a well-known metaphor, will go marching on. Indeed, the symbol may be strengthened by the death of the actual person who has nourished that symbol. Once again, the nexus of undeserved victimization and sacredness is central to the whole metaphorical traffic that generates the image in political affairs. In the early scenes of the play we learn that many of the radicals have desecrated the churches of the hated Catholic faith. They are ‘Bilderstürmer’. To destroy a sacred image, a ‘Bild’, can be an intensely political act, just as the worshipping of an image can be.

In Torquato Tasso, in ways that need no rehearsing here, Goethe explores with astonishing subtlety the interplay between practical social existence on the one hand and imaginative, metaphorical life on the other. The social world needs the poet for a whole number of reasons; some of these have to do with simple vanity, with the need to be (as we might say nowadays) put on the map. But others are more profound, having to do with the repressions of social living and the fact that art is an indispensable safety-valve that both acknowledges and accommodates socially inadmissible energies. When Tasso seeks to embrace the Princess, much of the horror felt by the court may seem prudish and silly, but what does make Tasso's behaviour a disturbing transgression is the sense that it alarmingly conflates metaphor and literalness. At the end of the play, Antonio offers Tasso the advice ‘Vergleiche dich!’ (HA, V, 166), and Tasso does ‘liken himself’ in the famous final speech, which is a statement of the total disarray of the man, but couched in metaphors (‘Gleichnissen’) drawn from the generality of human experience. The patterns of fluidity and fixity, of water, wind, rock, wave, and boat, universalize specific emotion by making it metaphorically articulate. The image both stylizes and intensifies human experience by means of a complex dialectic of literal and metaphorical statement.

Goethe's prose works also strikingly express the concern for metaphor as theme which I have been tracing. Werther is profound in its understanding of the cultishness and image-making of secular culture. It was a cult book about a culture in which the discourse of religious experience had become a set of metaphors for the radically inner-directed life. Die Wahlverwandtschaften is a shimmeringly metaphorical text about the play of metaphors in the consciousness of four characters. The two men and two women constantly make images, and perceive relatedness, likenesses all around them. Above all sexually, their responses are mediated through metaphors, and nowhere more so, of course, than in the spiritual adultery scene. In the late masterpiece, simply entitled Novelle, Goethe explores the images and metaphors in and through which civilized social beings enact the socio-psychological tensions of their existence, and, as in Iphigenie, the metaphors of their cognition are both benign and malign, both humane and regressively brutal.

To conclude, then: Goethe was acutely and scrupulously aware of the volatile play of metaphors (particularly theological metaphors) in a secular age. This is part of the intense historicity of his creative work, part of his response to what was one of the profoundest disturbances of his culture. It is also a concern that can speak eloquently to us as modern readers. Above all, in his understanding of the interplay of metaphorical and literal domains Goethe is wonderfully non-reductive. It is in these terms that I would want to understand the much-vaunted (and much disparaged) notion of Goethean wholeness. That wholeness is not something that he asserts as simple possession, as given birthright. The classic formulation of the Faustian dilemma (that two souls live, alas, in the same breast) is an expression of discomfort and not of serene self-possession. The two agencies at work in Faust's self (physicality and mental life, facticity and creative imagining, living in literalness and living in metaphor) are central to human experience, and particularly to human experience in the modern world. Goethe is non-reductive in the epistemological clear-sightedness which means that he refuses to absolutize one or other of the souls. Neither matter nor mind, neither literalness nor metaphor, is allowed to be the essential arbiter in human experience because of the complex and ceaseless dialogue between the two.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that Goethe's concern with metaphor and imagination finds its aesthetic correlative in the literary work which he produced. Where better to represent and explore the issue of the metaphorical creativity of the human imagination, of literal and metaphorical inheritance, than in art which is, by definition, its product and expression? To suggest, as I have done, that many of Goethe's works thematize and reflect on their own mode in the service of the themes being explored is not, I hope, to succumb to the modish pan-textuality of certain current theoretical orthodoxies. Equally, to insist that the literary work offers unmediated expression of extratextual experience is, I think, misguided in the extreme. Surely there is a course to be steered between the essentializing mode of the literal Scylla and the self-regarding playfulness of the metaphorical Charybdis. But that formulation returns me to my starting-point: to metaphors and myths drawn from the ancient world.

Notes

1. T. J. Reed, ‘Iphigenies Unmündigkeit: Zur weiblichen Aufklärung’, in Germanistik: Forschungsstand und Perspektiven, ed. by Georg Stötzel, 2 vols (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1985), II, 505-24. Quotations from Iphigenie auf Tauris are taken from Goethes Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. by Erich Trunz, 14 vols (Hamburg: Wegner, 1948-64), V, and are identified by line numbers in brackets.

2. Sigurd Burckhardt, ‘“The Voice of Truth and Humanity”: Goethe's Iphigenie’, in The Drama of Language: Essays on Goethe and Kleist (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), pp. 33-56, and Irmgard W. Hobson, ‘Goethe's Iphigenie: A Lacanian Reading’, Goethe Yearbook, 2 (1984), 51-67.

3. Arthur Henkel, ‘Iphigenie auf Tauris’ and ‘Die “verteufelt humane” Iphigenie’, in Goethe-Erfahrungen: Studien und Vorträge (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982), pp. 61-83, 85-101. Henkel is particularly perceptive in respect of the resistance that confronts Iphigenie's heartfelt humanity. See also Oskar Seidlin, ‘Goethes Iphigenie—“verteufelt human”?’, in Von Goethe zu Thomas Mann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963), pp. 9-22.

4. See Hans-Georg Werner, Text und Dichtung, Analyse und Interpretation (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1984), p. 157.

5. Goethe to Schiller, 19 January, 1802.

6. Schiller to Körner, 21 January, 1802.

7. Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Vol. 1, The Poetry of Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 449.

8. Wolfdietrich Rasch, ‘Iphigenie auf Tauris’ als Drama der Autonomie (Munich: Beck, 1979); Hans-Dietrich Dahnke, ‘Im Schnittpunkt von Menschheitsutopie und Realitätserfahrung: Iphigenie auf Tauris’, Impulse, 6 (1983), 9-36. See also Hans Reiss, ‘The Consequences of “Theological” Politics in Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris’, in Patterns of Change: German Drama and the European Tradition. Essays in Honour of Ronald Peacock, ed. by Dorothy James and Silvia Ranawake with Corbet Stewart, Studies in European Thought, I (New York, Berne, and Frankfurt A. M.: Lang, 1990), pp. 59-71.

9. See Denys Dyer, ‘Iphigenie—The Role of the Curse’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 50 (1979-80), 29-54, and R. C. Ockenden, ‘On Bringing Statues to Life: Reading Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris and Torquato Tasso’, PEGS [Publications of the English Goethe Society], 55 (1984-85), 69-106.

10. Sylvia P. Jenkins, ‘The Image of the Goddess in Iphigenie auf Tauris’, PEGS, 21 (1952), 56-80.

11. Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 386.

12. See Bernd Witte, ‘Iphigenie und Emilia: Kleine Etude über die Unvernunft der Aufklärung’, in Literatur in der Gesellschaft (Festschrift für Theo Buck), ed. by Frank Rutger Hausmann, Ludwig Jäger, and Bernd Witte (Tübingen: Narr, 1990), pp. 117-32.

13. Kathryn Brown and Anthony Stephens, ‘“Hinübergehn und unser Haus entsühnen”. Die Ökonomie des Mythischen in Goethes Iphigenie’, Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 32 (1988), 94-115, and Irmgard Wagner, ‘Vom Mythos zum Fetisch: die Frau als Erlöserin in Goethes klassischen Dramen’, Goethe Yearbook, 5 (1990), 121-43.

14. At this point I disagree with Nicholas Boyle, who criticizes the play for its psychological implausibility: ‘The last scenes mime a conversion—as if Iphigenia were affecting Thoas—which they render psychologically credible only by showing that Thoas is already of Iphigenia's persuasion. The reasons for Thoas's belonging to Iphigenia's school in the first place, however, are as private to him, and as unrevealed to us, as the reasons for his cure from belief in the curse are to Orestes: “my heart tells me so”. Heart after heart catches fire from the spark in Iphigenia's breast, but the process of communication itself remains unpresented and mysterious’ (Goethe, p. 452). The true drama of Iphigenie resides for me not in matters of individual psychology but in the exploration of cultural signs of (old and new) times.

15. See T. W. Adorno, ‘Zum Klassizismus von Goethes Iphigenie’, in Noten zur Literature (Frankfurt A. M.: Suhrkamp, 1981), pp. 495-514; Helga Gallas, ‘Antikenrezeption bei Goethe und Kleist—Penthesilea eine Anti-Iphigenie?’, in Momentum Dramaticum (Festschrift für Eckehard Catholy), ed. by Linda Dietrick and David G. John (Waterloo, Ont.: University of Waterloo Press, 1990), pp. 209-20; W. Wittkowski, ‘Tradition der Moderne als Tradition der Antike. Klassische Humanität in Goethes Iphigenie und Schillers Die Braut von Messina’, in Zur Geschichtlichkeit der Moderne (Festschrift für Ulrich Fülleborn), ed. by Theo Elm and Gerd Hemmerich (Munich: Fink, 1982), pp. 113-34; W. Wittkowski, ‘“Bei Ehren bleiben die Orakel und gerettet sind die Götter?”? Goethes Iphigenie—autonome Humanität und Autorität der Religion im aufgeklärten Absolutismus’, Goethe-Jahrbuch, 101 (1984), 250-68.

16. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 1.

17. Hamburger Ausgabe, Vol. IV, p. 74. Subsequently referred to in the text as HA with volume and page numbers.