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Goethe's Faust
From the Interpretive Notes: p 370 - “[Faust] ...an aging academic... generally assumed to be about fifty years old...” Ouch!
The Gretchen Tragedy
There are two ways of looking at Faust’s keenness to deflower an innocent girl as his first act after the Bargain. On the one hand it shows he’s attracted to innocence and purity and beauty. On the other it’s quite perverse, though in keeping with what many would think seeking a “beautiful moment of fulfillment” might entail.
From the Interpretive Notes: p 373 - “...the theme of seduction, predominant in domestic, middle-class drama and a preoccupation of the age... [lists examples including Marriage of Figaro, Liaisons dangereuses, Don Giovanni, Casanova’s Memoirs] was united with the essential dynamic power of will in Faust, his striving for infinite knowledge and experience...”
p 374 - “Gretchen, in her authentic love for Faust, emerges as the most powerful embodiment of the Feminine in the drama, the principle that defines the highest object of Faustian desire and ultimately serves... as the instrument of Faust’s salvation.”
p 375 - “Gretchen is far more complex than a mere innocent victim. Her social status... clearly reflects all the virtues of bourgeois life, even if under simple circumstances. She also represents genuine Christian virtues... Yet Gretchen proves susceptible to temptation in response to the jewels secured by the devil as a gift to her... Even more, she is subject to Faust’s flattery and apparent devotion... Goethe himself commented that, however much she may be the victim of Faust’s seduction, she is nonetheless guilty of infanticide... [she kills the baby since she can’t raise it as an unmarried girl] Her irresistible power and fascination as dramatic character, however, resides in the manner in which she grows and is transformed by her love for Faust and by the suffering it causes her. She is in truth the only character in the drama who evolves and develops in the course of the action... her love for him [Faust] proves to be a redemptive force, which is finally stronger than the devil’s wager with Faust.”
Gretchen and Christiane from The Elementary Particles -- what would they make of each other?
Part Two
Charming Landscape
From the Interpretive Notes: p 392 “...What unites these other moments in the drama with this scene, and indeed unites the drama of Faust as a whole, is a fundamental attempt by Faust to comprehend human existence in its constantly varying temporal dimensions and its constant dependence on shifting forces of mind and will, which motivate all actions and thought, with reference to some ultimate and absolute power of spirit or divinity, either within nature and thus accessible to human experience or else above and beyond the natural world, transcending all knowledge and understanding. ”
p 394 “...The arrival of dawn solicits in Faust’s mind a reciprocal response, which manifests itself in his renewed desire, indeed in his (Faustian) ‘striving’ toward the highest mode of existence...”
“...The second stage delineated the heroic, ultimately tragic thrust of Faust’s mind toward a confrontation with divinity as it manifests itself in the light of the rising sun. Instantaneous blindness results from the overwhelming brightness of the sun, forcing Faust to turn away his gaze, thus reversing his basic stance in what amounts to a tragic turn of the mind.”
p 395 “...When he confronts the sun, Faust retreats, not to escape exposure, as was the case with Ariel and the spirits of nature, but to secure the conditions for reflective thought, which -- as Goethe knew from the entire history of German idealist speculation -- is the necessary condition for all conceptual knowledge and understanding...”
This would also seem to be a case of Faust going for Apollinian insight instead of the more profound Dionysian. And to expand on that thought, while Faust goes for the Apollinian, Zossima and Dostoyevsky's other surrogates in The Brothers K. seek the more mystical (if Christian) Dionysian.
“The final section of the monologue introduces one of Goethe’s most archetypal images of human experience. The life of a human being is symbolized by the waterfall as it plummets downward, crashing from rock cliff to rock cliff... [The Magic Mountain picnic?] The force of the flowing water corresponds to the will or drive that constitutes Faustian striving. The clash of water and rock, however, produces a spray or mist that hovers above the waterfall. The fine water droplets, though in constant motion, are suspended as a constant veil, indistinguishable by the eye as either rise or fall. The term Wechseldauer... ‘in variance lasting’... applied to the resulting rainbow, indicates a central concept for Goethe with regard to the value of art as permanence in change... This mist is described as life’s ‘most youthful veil’... the concept of a veil is central to Goethe’s view of art, as indicated at the end of Act III, when Helena’s veil is transformed into a cloud that carries Faust back from Greece to Germany.”
“In this mist Faust discovers the ultimate symbolic sign for his reflections on the meaning of human existence. The mist catches the light of the sun as it shines through the air, each tiny droplet of water serving as a crystal from which the light is mirrored back and refracted, forming for the perceiving eye in the totality of this process a rainbow in its varied color. The image of the rainbow serves as symbol for the aspect of human creativity that constitutes art and poetry, indeed, human culture in the most general, all-inclusive sense of the term. This form of visual experience also remains accessible to Faust after he has turned away from the blinding light of the sun, providing a comprehensive and reliable mirror or ‘reflection’ of human striving... ‘This mirrors all aspiring human action.’ The depiction of the rainbow in its accurate scientific detail reflects Goethe’s extensive study of optics and color theory....”
p 396 - “The striving that constitutes Faust’s essential nature is thus sublimated into a reflection upon itself, a representation of itself as model or analogue for the work of art, in and through which the authentic light of the divine, which -- like the sun -- overwhelms human vision in direct confrontation, is refracted into the many-hued spectrum of the rainbow. In this sense the final line of Faust’s monologue describes the highest possible achievement of human art and culture, in Goethe’s view. That quality or aspect of life accessible to human experience -- the same force that beat again anew in Faust’s pulse at the dawn of this new day, affirmed at the outset of his monologue... is this multicolored refraction, which we may have and hold... Three levels of reflectivity are thus included in the symbol of the rainbow: 1) the mirroring and refracting of the sun’s light; 2) the cognitive perception of the refracted colors by the human eye; and 3) The conceptual comprehension of this visual experience by the mind, as demonstrated by the several reflective structures in the language of Faust’s monologue.” [Fuck me!, I didn’t get any of that reading the original lines. I think I need to quote lines 4698 to 4727] Here are the lines just interpreted:
Faust: “...But now the alp’s green slants have also shaken
The dusk, for gleam and contour newly minded,
And light descends triumphant, stepwise darting; --
He clears the rim! -- Alas, already blinded,
I turn aside, my mortal vision smarting.
“Thus also, as we yearningly aspire
And find at last fulfillment’s portals parting,
Wrung within tender reach our prime desire,
There will erupt from those eternal porches,
Dumbfounding us, exorbitance of fire;
We only meant to kindle up life’s torches,
And flame engulfs us, seas of torrid blazes!
Love? Hatred? Which? envelopes us and scorches,
Sends pain and joy in vast alternate phases,
Till we gaze back upon our homely planet
And shelter in most young of youthful hazes.
“So, sun in back, my eyes too weak to scan it,
I rather follow, with entrancement growing,
The cataract that cleaves the jagged granite,
From fall to fall, in thousand leaps, outthrowing
A score of thousand streams in its revolving,
From upflung foam a soaring lacework blowing.
But in what splendor from this storm evolving,
Vaults up the shimmering arc, in variance lasting,
Now purely limned and now in air dissolving,
A cooling fragrance all about it casting.
This mirrors all aspiring human action.
On this your mind for clearer insight fasten:
That life is ours by colorful refraction.”
Imperial Residence
Line 4895-4908
Mephisto: “...And who can raise it [underground gold] to the light of day?
Man’s gifts of Nature and of Mind, I say.
Chancellor: “Nature and Mind -- un-Christian address,
Your atheist burns at the stake for less,
Because such talk is dangerous and wild.
Nature is sin, the Mind is Satan,
Doubt they engender in their mating,
Their epicene misshapen child.
Not for this Empire! Only two professions
Have graced of old His Majesty’s possessions
And worthily support his throne:
Divines and knights -- they quell upheaval,
And as twin shields against all evil
Call justly church and state their own...”
Truly a Tory position.
Narrow, High-Vaulted Gothic Chamber
p 415-418 - “...This sense of distance in time and experience is more important than any change within the character of Faust -- assuming that any change has occurred! -- since Faust himself is unconscious and unaware that Mephisto has brought him back [to his academic rooms]. We have no precise idea how much time has elapsed within the drama; but Goethe himself has in the interim developed from a youthful radical, experimenting with the legend of Faust, into the leading literary figure of Europe, the elderly sage of Weimar. During this time, furthermore, Europe itself, which serves as the cultural and social basis for Faust’s existential dilemma as man of learning, had been radically altered by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era into what might best be described as the new bourgeois world of the nineteenth century, an era of technological industrialization and conservative retrenchment...”
“...Mephistopheles pulls a bell rope that causes a great clangor and opens all doors, signaling an epochal moment of great significance... The Famulus stands for the status quo of learning, a symbol of trivial pedantry, whose primary function is to preserve all Faust’s scholarly materials as he left them; the Baccalaureus [previously the starting student] storms in with a blatant and boundless arrogance, measuring his own sense of growth against what seems to him a static world of dead learning [not unlike Faust’s]... The politics of the so-called Burschenschaften [radical student groups in German universities after the Napoleonic wars] reflected a boundless self-confidence that quickly came into direct conflict with the conservative and even reactionary powers of the state [the process that resulted in my ancestors migrating to the U.S.]... the Baccalaureus demonstrates also an intensification of Faust’s original rejection of all academic learning and authority. His assertion that all who have passed their thirtieth year are useless and might as well be put to death elicits an ironic aside from the devil... In writing this scene... Goethe reaffirms his radical critique of academic learning in the context of the Faust legend, though here with a sophisticated and pertinent sense of the ways in which the modern university had developed during the great gap of time since he first began work on the drama. In 1770, the model university for Goethe would have been either Leipzig or Strassburg, where he had recently been a student; in 1829, the model had shifted to the University of Berlin, founded in 1810 by Wilhelm von Humboldt, which by this time had become the center of Hegel’s philosophical school and where modern experimental science was quickly assuming a central place....”
“Epochal significance may be ascribed to Mephistopheles’ ringing the bell, which shakes the entire structure of the Gothic hall with its sound and causes all the doors to fly open, doors hitherto locked and sealed shut, as if to symbolize the imprisonment of dead knowledge from which Faust first suffered [Though it is interesting that it is Mephisto who does this] ... Wagner [Faust's Famulus] associates the sense of epoch with the critical moment of his chemical experiment, in which -- like a modern alchemist, closely resembling Dr Frankenstein in Mary Shelly’s novel, published less than a decade earlier -- he seeks to synthesize a human being. The emergence of Homunculus in the next scene, which succeeds (we surmise) only because of the infernal assistance provided at the last moment by Mephistopheles, is merely the external sign of what this epoch signifies for the drama. The true liberation of the Faustian mind from imprisonment in itself is about to occur through a radical physical and spatial displacement into the festival of the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night,’ leading to the ‘Phantasmagoria’ of the Helena act, in which Faust and the ideal of classical beauty are married and produce their offspring, Euphorion, the self-consuming spirit of poetry. Liberation of the reflective self through erotic longing for the Feminine... Mephisto’s ringing the bell is thus a signal of liberation, not only for the spirit of Homunculus in Wagner’s experiment but also for the unconscious Faust in his dream quest for Helena....”
Laboratory
p 419 - “...according to a natural impulse that is eminently Faustian, the disembodied spirit of Homunculus [a being of pure spirit created in a test tube] strives from the moment of its creation and appearance on the scene to achieve substantiality, to become material, that is, to find a body and become alive within the world of nature. In this regard, Homunculus’s quest for physical existence is analogous to Faust’s search for Helena....”
But more than that it contrasts with the usual drive to escape the body into pure spirit. Homunculus is the anti-transcendentalist and, like Nietzsche’s Olympian gods, affirms “life” through his desire to participate in it. I do wonder, however, what makes “him” male? It would make more sense to me if it was female spirit. This is all the more true as Homunculus is god-like in most every way. Am I going to have to read Mary Shelley, too? [Yes, I did.] Goethe also makes clear that Homunculus is untainted by Christianity and the Medieval mind-set that shaped Mephisto.
This afternoon I had something like Marcel's Madeline & tisane moment... but different. I was walking past the neighborhood hospital, as I do multiple times a week, and have done for decades, when I found myself face to face with someone being rolled into the Emergency room from an ambulance. I've seen this many times before but perhaps my angle was different or I was simply in a different state of mind. At any rate, I suddenly was aware of how odd this arrangement of a hospital Emergency entrance is.
Normally, the Emergency room has it's own separate drive-in entrance with a parking area reserved for emergency vehicles. But this is a very urban hospital that is built-out to the sidewalk. Aside from some loading docks on the opposite side, the only way to enter is through the doors. It isn't at all unusual to see the curb lined with ambulances and, because this is a very busy facility, to even see ambulances double parked. There isn't even an awning so if you arrive on a rainy day you are going to get wet on your way in. I can imagine times when that could either be a lovely thing or the last straw. This hospital is home to the regional burn center. If you're burned badly enough to be transported here a little rain would be the least of your worries. Probably you wouldn't even notice.
A new, much bigger, hospital is under construction five blocks away. When it opens I imagine much of the traffic that currently comes to my hospital will go there instead -- except for the burn cases. I'm sure the new facility will have a separate Emergency vehicle entrance and off-street space for ambulances -- though I haven't seen detailed plans for that yet (none of the images I can find online show the Emergency entrance).
Despite never having thought about it in over 20 years, I do like that this hospital is so very urban and odd. Here's something, from Wiki, to ponder the next time someone tells you how they wish they could have lived in some idealized era before the 20th century:
Accident services were already provided by workmen's compensation plans, railway companies, and municipalities in Europe and the United States by the late mid-nineteenth century, but the first specialized trauma care center in the world was opened in 1911 in the United States at the University of Louisville Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, and was developed by surgeon Arnold Griswold during the 1930s. Griswold also equipped police and fire vehicles with medical supplies and trained officers to give emergency care while en route to the hospital.[1][2][3]
Go U-of-L!
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