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The present reading of Goethe's 'Prometheus' sets out to examine the new work to which the myth is put in the poem. His 'Prometheus' does not stand in a modern opposition to classical accounts of the myth. The poem rather establishes itself at the forefront of a long reinterpretative tradition engaging with the Prometheus story. Often read as an agent provocateur in the German Enlightenment project, Goethe's Prometheus nevertheless argues like a rationalist critic of religion while instructing humans in social behaviour. To an extent hitherto largely ignored, the poem significantly continues the work of the Enlightenment.
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In the history of modern literature, certain classical myths seem readily to suggest themselves as figures of identification. Not mere frequency, but the cumulative significance attributed to these myths makes them constant points of reference. George Steiner thus locates the modern importance of the Antigone myth in a period between 'the 1790s and the start of the twentieth century'. After 1905, 'under pressure of Freudian reference, critical, interpretative focus had shifted to the Oedipus Rex'. (1) What may seem like a marginal change of taste from one Sophoclean tragedy to another marks rather something like a paradigm-shift. Within a canonical body of texts known as classical mythology, they each offer distinct ways of cultural and political identification.
A further and earlier such cultural identification is offered by the Prometheus myth in the (late) eighteenth century. (2) Goethe made not one but four attempts at the myth, yet all but the poem remained fragments. Other scattered references to Prometheus throughout Goethe's works speak of his sustained preoccupation with the story. Carrying an already heavy baggage of literary treatments from antiquity through the Renaissance and up to the eighteenth century, the myth offered several angles from which it could be approached. (3) Without being able to pinpoint direct responses to Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound (the only one extant of his three Prometheus tragedies) (4) in Goethe's 'Prometheus', some critics read his belated reworking as 'den zweiten grossen Gipfel der Stoffgeschichte'. (5) Retelling the old story of Prometheus, Goethe comes to stand shoulder to shoulder with Aeschylus. Although Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris is more fully developed in its retelling of the Tantalus myth and in its formal approximation of Attic tragedy, the scattered fragments make Prometheus and not Iphigenie Goethe's 'personliches Symbol', (6) as Kommerell has it, and in many ways also a central figure of identification to the late eighteenth century. (7)
This article will examine the new use to which the myth is put in Goethe's poem (and drama fragments), as a response to earlier treatments and interpretations. Denis Feeney speaks of how most contemporary readings of classical myths 'begin and end in naturalistic realism, with a token circuit en route through the divine agency, as if the divine element in the narrative is something to be read through, purged, in a reading which arrives at acute novelistic insights'. (8) This reading will try to take Prometheus and the gods at, as it were, their face value, seeing them not as embodiments of something else, but as mythological characters that can be distilled neither from the narrative nor from the history of their reception. The 'Sinn des Gedichts', as one recent critic has it (Gaier, p. 154), is not to be sought merely where the poem, on a superficial level, may contradict earlier accounts, but in its reworking and further development of the mythological tradition, at the forefront of which Goethe's poem establishes itself.
The poem stands out as the pinnacle of Goethe's early hymns that represent and engage with ancient gods. 'Prometheus', like 'Ganymed', already presents itself as a Rollengedicht, where the title establishes the main role as a mythological one. Unlike 'Ganymed', however, the first person will stick closely to the mythological role established in the title. The voice of the speaker in the poem is always that of Prometheus. (9) The poem opens with an initial imperative directed at Zeus that is matched by an insistent 'ich' (l. 56) at the end of the last section. Where hymns traditionally invoke gods by listing their attributes and relating stories of their cult, Goethe's poem presents a god who insists on telling his own story (Roscher, Lexikon, iii/2, 2032). Where the speaker of hymns is traditionally and necessarily human, this poem presents a god raving against other gods. In eighteenth-century aesthetics a hymn is defined as 'une louange a l'honneur de quelque divinite' and 'la recompense, le salaire des immortels'. (10) Where hymns thus are traditionally 'Lobgesange' and their 'herrschender Affekt ist Andacht, und anbetende Bewunderung', (11) this poem is full of accusations against the gods--perhaps not the salary to which immortals are accustomed.
It has therefore recently been suggested that 'Prometheus' should be read as an 'Antihymne' that negates, or defies, the gods in a language and form that hymns employ to invoke and praise them. (12) In that sense the poem appropriates a form in order to undo the work to which that form has traditionally been put. (13)
Radically recoding the genre of hymns, 'Prometheus' is not a song of praise for that god, but his own song of blame against other gods. Taken out of its dramatic context, the poem becomes a Rollengedicht that speaks not only through the role of Prometheus, but moreover through the language of hymns.
As if the title had not spelt it out already, the opening section makes it immediately clear that the poetic speaker has left the traditional world of eighteenth-century German lyrical poetry for the Greek pantheon: (14)
Bedecke deinen Himmel Zeus Mit Wolkendunst! Und ube Knabengleich Der Disteln kopft, An Eichen dich und Bergeshohn! Musst mir meine Erde Doch lassen stehn. (ll. 1-7)
The first line with its initial imperative and the naming of the god irreverently scraps the traditionally elaborate invocations of gods in hymns. Prometheus immediately assumes a superior position from which he condescendingly grants Zeus some of his ancient attributes as weather-god. These attributes are already found in Homer, where the father of the gods is repeatedly given the epithets [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] (Iliad, xxi. 520, 'shrouded in black clouds'), [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] (Odyssey, v. 176, 'fair wind of Zeus'), and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] (Iliad, i. 419, 'delighting in thunder'). (15) Oak-trees (Iliad, vii. 60) and mountain tops, perhaps here suggestive of Mount Olympus, are also Homeric in their association with Zeus (Heden, pp. 56-57). Echoing a passage from Ossian, (16) the section makes Zeus's powers seem little more than childlike exercises in material destruction. (17 Zeus in the opening section cuts a rather sorry figure whose powers are fading (Weimar, p. 89).
The antagonism between the first person (Prometheus) and the second-person addressee (Zeus or the gods in general) not only defines the position of the speaker, but also structures the whole poetic argument. The division of heaven and earth, on Prometheus's terms, is stated almost as a historical necessity ('Musst', l.6) that Zeus will have to come to accept in time. What made such a division possible or necessary in the first place is only implied in the poem. Goethe's Prometheus drama, however, which remained a fragment of only two acts, reveals some of the underlying tensions of Prometheus's position. The division of power between Prometheus and Zeus is even more precarious in the fragment since Zeus, in a radical reinterpretation of the mythological tradition, is here seen as Prometheus's father. (18)
Acting as an emissary for the gods, his brother Epimetheus explains the gods' proposal of peace to Prometheus:
Sie wollen dir Olympus Spitze raumen Dort sollst du wohnen Sollst der Erdeherrschen. (Prom., ll. 64-66)
It seems remarkable that the gods themselves agree, and not for the first time, to relinquish most of their powers to Prometheus. The poem and the fragment both presuppose a situation where Prometheus has already established his own power over the gods, a power so strong that they are eager to negotiate an understanding with him. Prometheus, however, is not satisfied with the proposal of the gods. In an almost Epicurean fashion, he relegates the gods to a region where they cease to have any influence over human lives. As a demiurge Prometheus lays absolute claim to the world he has created (Prom., l. 90): 'Hier meine Welt, mein All!' (19)
Holding the Prometheus drama up against the poem is problematic, however, since there is still some debate over the genesis of the two. Goethe's 'Prometheus' shares with his later 'Mahomets Gesang' the ambiguity of form, being at the same time both part of a dramatic fragment and an independent hymn. Gundolf (p. 129) reads the Prometheus poem as a condensation of the mythological material from the abandoned drama fragment, and recent scholars have also come to accept that the drama was written before the poem. (20)
The condensation of the drama into the poem changes the presentation of the Prometheus myth from the discursive mode of drama to the deictic mode of hymns. The drama has gods and at a later stage also humans discussing with each other. As if in a literary salon of the Enlightenment, gods and humans alike engage in discussion, trying to reason their way to an understanding of human society and religion. In the poem all this gentle reasoning is swept away by Prometheus's soliloquy. The dialogues of the drama are condensed into a single monologue, and the different perspectives offered in the drama are collapsed into the single perspective of Prometheus. By making Zeus and the gods speechless and granting them only a few theatrical manifestations of their one-time power, Prometheus pushes them towards the edge of his world. Recalling again the poem's genesis from the drama, the gods seem to fade into the background, blending in with the stage set, while Prometheus steps forward to deliver his monologue. This is how the poem begins.
The second section (21) continues in the vein of the opening by pointing to the technical skills that the gods have now come to envy him:
Und meine Hutte Die du nicht gebaut, Und meinen Herd Um dessen Glut Du mich beneidest. (ll. 8-12)
A chain of synecdoches links the two sections closely together: what begins with his 'Erde' (l. 6) in the first section ties in with 'Hutte' (l. 8) in the second, followed by 'Herd' (l. 10)...
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