Faust I & II

"Well, that’s part of the reason. It unfolds over an entire lifetime and, in that sense, it is a document of Goethe’s life. Perhaps the more important motivation, however, is that Faust is unquestionably Goethe’s most masterful and encompassing poetic achievement. It is a grand synthesis and in its grandeur it exceeds the limits of genre. Even to call it a drama doesn’t capture the achievement; it has epic and lyric qualities as well. “ Faust is unquestionably Goethe’s most masterful and encompassing poetic achievement. It is a grand synthesis and in its grandeur it exceeds the limits of genre” The time covered in Faust extends from the beginning of the world all the way to Byron’s death in 1824 following the siege of Missolonghi. The work has a theological frame, a cultural-historical frame, and an artistic frame. It draws on the imaginary forms of bourgeois tragedy, Shakespearean drama, Renaissance lyric, the folk song, Calderon’s theatre, and Dante’s poetic vision. It combines the classical and the romantic, the high and the low, the mystical and the burlesque. Remarkably, all this holds together. If one were to search for a literary work that could genuinely be called a Gesamtkunstwerk –a total artwork–then Faust in its two parts would be the leading candidate for that title. That’s a very difficult question. In a sense, it is the central question with which every interpretation of the drama must contend. Let’s start with the basic facts, with the Faust story as it is inherited from the 16th century. Our text is the so-called Volksbuch , a shrewdly conceived pamphlet that mythologizes the tale of a historical necromancer and con-man. Driven by an insatiable curiosity, this Faust makes a contract with the devil in order to be able to experience things otherwise inaccessible to humankind. The major thing is, of course, knowledge, but that knowledge takes various forms. It includes, for instance, carnal knowledge enjoyed with Helen of Troy. The Volksbuch makes its way to England where Christopher Marlowe comes across it and recasts the tale in tragic form as Doctor Faustus . Marlowe’s play, which includes a Helen episode (recall “the face that launched a thousand ships”) is the artistically most important rendition of the Faust material prior to Goethe. Into the 18th century and then after Goethe as well, the core idea remains that by entering into the pact, Faust makes a morally and spiritually disastrous choice. He turns away from God and toward this world in a fruitless effort to quench his thirst for knowledge, his curiositas . And the result of the pact he makes, of course, is that he forfeits an afterlife in heaven and the devil drags his soul off to Hell. Goethe transforms the contract (24 years and then I get your soul) into a wager. Faust bets that there is something Mephistopheles can’t provide and thus challenges him to provide it. That means that the ending of the play is an open question. The interaction between Faust and Mephistopheles becomes a sort of competition. Let’s take a look at the content of the wager. Faust sets the condition that a victorious Mephistopheles would have to meet with these words: “Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen: Verweile doch! du bist so schön! Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen.” (If I should ever say to a single moment: Linger on! You are most beautiful! Then you [Mephistopheles] can put me in chains [= ‘have my soul’].) Now, that’s a very strange wager. What Goethe has Faust say is something like this: Show me absolute fulfillment in time. Give me a moment of such perfect delight that I could wish it might never end. In saying this, Faust is actually quoting Rousseau. In the Reveries of the Solitary Walker , Rousseau employs a thought experiment in order to explain what happiness is. If you can say of the present moment that it should last forever, then and only then are you genuinely happy. For then there is no past that you long for, no future that could make your present condition more complete. Happiness is that which is fully present to you and absorbs you in that present in such a way that desire falls away, regret and longing fall away, and you are completely there. It’s the achievement of eternity within time–therein lies the sense of Faust’s wager. He is saying to Mephistopheles: if you can give me that, then you can have my soul. How could I possibly give a damn? I don’t believe in an afterlife anyway. Faust is a figure whose drive is such that he cannot imagine happiness. He cannot imagine fulfillment. His link with the devil is a link that is predicated on the unappeasable nature of his desire. Such desire is intrinsically transgressive. It is transgressive in the sense that Faust recognises no law, no norm or convention, but also in the sense that it must always go beyond, it must always seek something more. The Faust drama makes salient the boundlessness of desire as the condition of modern subjectivity. That is what Faust is about. This wager takes us to the core of the Faustian character. I have a way of thinking about this that I’ve inherited from a colleague who was very important in the early stages of my career, the literary scholar Ian Watt. Watt thought of the Faust story as a characteristic modern myth. Modern myths are not like those of classical antiquity. Their defining feature is that they are centred on an individual character. There are three such individual characters who generate mythical versions across multiple literary works, pictorial works, operas, poems, and now even comic books. Their stories are constantly being retold and reinvented. They tell us something of our modern, post-Renaissance world. Who are they? The one is Don Quixote , another is Don Juan, the third is Faust. “The Faust drama makes salient the boundlessness of desire as the condition of modern subjectivity. That is what Faust is about” My way of thinking about these modern mythic figures is to see each as rendering a certain human capacity absolute. They experience that human capacity as the driving force of their life. In the case of Don Quixote, it is the imagination. Don Quixote is in quest of a fantasy world that transcends reality. He lives in the mode of constant imaginary transgression. In the case of Don Juan, the absolutized capacity is, of course, erotic love, acted out in serial transgressions. Finally, with Faust the crucial issue is epistemic transgression, an insatiable desire for knowledge that strives beyond the limits of the human. Those are the three paradigmatic modern myths. And this makes clear what is implied in the wager. Through this ingenious dramatic device, Goethe gives us an account of our modern world in which happiness in the sense of fulfillment in the present is impossible. Our condition is transcendental homelessness. There is no state of the world in which we are complete. The second part is the work of a person who is looking back on an entire life and an abundance of scientific, intellectual, philosophical, and literary experience. It is remarkably different from the first part. The first part centres on a very tight, quickly moving drama of seduction and disaster; the seduction of a young girl, abandonment of her, and her persecution by society. And, of course, it centres on this wager with the devil. To be sure, there’s a prologue in heaven and so forth; there’s a framework to the whole thing that gives it a larger scope. But the wager is the centre of it and Gretchen is Mephistopheles’ first ploy. Anyone can read Part One and just be carried along by it. Part Two is a different kettle of fish altogether. It consists of five acts, each of which is quite long, and each of which has a kind of inner unity. “Anyone can read Part One and just be carried along by it. Part Two is a different kettle of fish altogether” The first act of Part Two takes place at the court, into which Faust and Mephistopheles introduce infernal powers. The first such power involves the invention of paper money, which undermines the economy of the imperial court. Second, the pair pull off a tour de force piece of entertainment. Faust descends down into the so-called realm of the mothers–the mythic domain of creative fecundity–and brings forth the image of Helen of Troy. Then, himself entranced by that simulacrum, Faust reaches out for her, causing an explosion that ends Act One. Act Two takes us back to Faust’s study at the University, where we had started off in Part One. Faust is lying unconscious following the explosion. A scientific experiment is taking place: the production of a homunculus figure, a human spirit in a beaker. That spirit will lead Faust in a dream through an incredibly complex world of ancient mythology that culminates in the conception of Helen of Troy. This is the Leda and the Swan moment that readers of Yeats will appreciate. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In Act Three, we suddenly find ourselves in Greece and, indeed, Helen appears and marries Faust. It is the marriage of modernity and classical antiquity, dramatized within an enclosure that is shielded from the violence of history. A child named Euphorion, for whom the timeless enclosure is not a satisfactory abode, issues from the union. He seeks to break out of the Arcadian fiction of perpetual love and to participate in the great emancipatory work of history, but his romantic-revolutionary enthusiasm finally crashes and he dies. Helen follows Euphorion to the underworld and Faust is left alone. The fourth act stages a gigantic military campaign in which Faust and Mephistopheles deploy their magic and secure victory for the Emperor. There is a good bit of military technology employed here and it alerts us to the fact that Goethe himself experienced war and, after the defeat of Austria and Prussia, met Napoleon himself. The victorious Emperor rewards Faust with a piece of land at sea’s edge where he can carry out his colonial project. The fifth act then stages the disastrous outcome of that colonial project and leads us up to the moment of Faust’s death with Mephistopheles attempting unsuccessfully to snag Faust’s soul. That’s the end of the play. But then there’s a coda in which Faust’s spirit is drawn upward in a spiritual ascent that feels Dantesque. He’s drawn upward not by Beatrice, but by the power of Gretchen’s unconditional love, neatly fusing Parts One and Two together. That’s where it ends."

"Faust is a play from the 19th century and it’s not the first variation of the Faust story. It actually began during the Middle Ages, about this possibly real-life magician called Faust, who supposedly sold his soul to the Devil. That led to a lot of stories about him developing over the centuries. It’s so interesting to trace these tropes that we have—like selling your soul to the Devil—and see where they came from. Goethe’s Faust is one of the most important and popular and influential of these works and, again, really humanizes both Faust and Mephistopheles. So Dr. Faustus is a scholar. He’s not an evil guy; he’s someone who wants to pursue knowledge. That’s another element that’s important in Satanism: seeking scientific knowledge, questioning and trying to find out the facts for yourself rather than believing in superstition. Dr. Faustus is very much that type of scholarly, curious character, who because he wants knowledge signs away his soul, in blood, to Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles then takes him around on these great adventures throughout the world. He has all these incredible experiences. What’s interesting is that in earlier works about Faust, the Devil ends up dragging Faust to hell at the end. Faust is doomed. But, in Goethe’s version, because it’s later, Faustus actually still ends up in heaven. It’s an interesting take. A person can sign their soul away to the Devil and have all these great adventures and seek knowledge but still end up in heaven. It goes with what we were saying earlier, about how Satan came to be seen as more of a sympathetic character. If you represent someone who rebels and seeks knowledge and questions what’s imposed upon them, it can lead to good things."