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Goethe's Faust
High Mountains
p 454-6 - “...The theme of love or erotic desire, however, which has manifested itself in Faust's responses to the Feminine with apparently negative results, now disappears categorically from the drama... [Like Clavdia's disappearance late in The Magic Mountain?] the realm of action for Faust after his return to Germany... his subsequent technological-industrial endeavors is curiously void of the Feminine and its effects. It may even be argued that the role of nature is now transformed, so that the productive and creative forces that emanate from the natural processes of life... are now replaced by forces that emanate from strictly human motives, defined by reductive politics and warfare in Act IV and by Faust's land reclamation project in Act V. The action of the drama from here to the end may be described as unnatural -- even antithetical to nature -- in the fullest sense, where the processes of nature are systematically perverted and circumvented into forms of destruction, deception, and corruption of all human values.”
p 460-461 - “... Faust is challenged instead by the prospect of taming the forces of nature -- pushing back the ocean and thus creating the space for the construction of a brave new world that will be the product of his will and over which he will have absolute power... the final act in Part Two, where Faust becomes identified with the development of modern technology and the effort to tame the forces of nature and control the urban world, in which human beings dwell... Faust wants to begin from nothing, imposing human culture on nature by defeating it through the power of his will (perhaps on the model of cities created from the wilderness in the new world of the Americas: New York or Washington)... What Faust proposes, even if it seems all too familiar to the world of modern urban technology and development, will involve a fundamentally unnatural act, imposing the demonic and volcanic forces that Mephisto provides against the creative processes of life that are symbolized by neptunic creation in the sea....”
Act IV
The battle passage is, indeed, strange... which is saying something in this work. The point is for Faust to win permission to do what he pleases with the land by the sea so that he can reclaim land from the sea and create his new world. The scenes with the Emperor and his underlings and opponents, do reflect on the usual way business was conducted at that level both in Faust’s time and in Goethe’s. It certainly isn’t an accident that of all the people who attempt to loot the Emperor’s wealth, it is only the Catholic church that succeeds. The Austrian Hapsburgs certainly saw the Pope as a principal threat throughout the 19th century.
The descriptions of satanic battle in this section could also be viewed as prescient. The noise and confusion and mists sounds surprisingly like accounts of warfare on the Western Front in the Great War. Again, the actuality of Mephistophelian war was less poetic, but not that different from what Goethe describes. Napoleonic soldiers transported to a Great War battlefield with “modern” artillery, gas, machine guns, airplane attacks and observation balloons overhead, would almost certainly think some kind of dark magic was involved.
Act V
p 472-473 - “The pushing back of the sea by building dikes and dams, the clearing of the land and its preparation, as also the construction of the city itself, have all occurred through the forces of technology, which should be associated with the devil and his henchmen,... the unnatural instruments of Mephisto [fire and subterranean energy], have been at work here, taming the more natural and productive neptunic force of the sea. The successful completion of Faust’s project in constructing this brave new urban world is just as questionable as the victory he achieved through the use of Mephisto’s magic in the war between the Emperor and his rival.”
p 474 - “...If the tragic dilemma of Faustian humanity in its boundless striving is never to secure the moment that is genuinely beautiful, the contrary condition appears to be that of the watchman-singer, who merely stands and observes the natural world as it lives and goes, affirming everything as beautiful and, through his song, affirming the continuing and constantly varied beauty of life itself....”
p 475-476 - “...A principle of freedom for the spirit is here invoked that knows neither limits nor scruples. The devil has no conscience on the high seas, and presumably in behaving so he merely puts the will of his master into effect [colonialism?]. Above all, he asserts that might makes right, that the ends justify the means; only the What matters, not the How (11184f.)... The rationale for expanding power and possession is thus definitively articulated, and Faust does not in any way object. Mephisto, indeed, merely defines the political and economic basis of which Faust’s empire is built... If this sounds familiar and characteristic of modern Western society, then the role of Mephisto should also be recognized as no more than a technological means to an end imposed upon it; the devil is merely the instrument for the Faustian will. Whatever the outcome may be, whether from piracy on the high seas or from the violent murder of the original inhabitants on the land, the full blame and responsibility must fall on the one who originated the action, not the one who carried it out.”
p 479 - “Goethe may... originally have intended Faust’s optimism about the future to be taken at face value. By the time he completed the drama thirty years later, however, the human and environmental implications of Faust’s development project had become much more complex and more sinister. This shift may reflect a shift in Goethe’s outlook on the world as he approached his own death, or it may indicate a more nuanced formulation of Faust’s final situation, whether or not the character is fully aware of what is happening. [Faust has by this point been blinded -- has lost his vision]... Faust’s utopian vision still includes an Edenic space for millions of inhabitants, though he now also acknowledges that this space depends upon constant vigilance against the natural force of the sea, which is held back by the dikes and where any breach must instantly be secured by ‘communal spirit (11572)... Only in the final lines does Faust reaffirm the utopian quality of the life he envisions as future goal for mankind....”
p 480 - “...The moment of death is simply that: a moment, which brings quite arbitrarily the sense of an ending, in which time alone triumphs, like the tick of the clock that stops... It is all over and thus pure nothing-at-all... totally meaningless... What does such constant striving -- as in Faust’s entire career -- such eternal creating... achieve other than what can be swept away to nothingness? Mephisto becomes even more categorical: ‘All over is as good as never was,/ And yet it whirls about as if it were’...”
Entombment
Seems to me Goethe is just playing to the cheap seats here, as he mentions in the “Prelude in the Theater”.
Mountain Gorges
p 483- - “...The soul, or immortal essence, of Faust which remains silent throughout and is apparently passive as recipient of divine grace, also enjoys the privilege of a spiritual rebirth, culminating in its response to the penitent spirit of Gretchen, which draws it upward toward higher regions in pursuit of the Glorious Mother. The possibility of a union between the Faustian spirit of desire and the Feminine establishes an ideal norm of creation against which everything else in Faust may be measured.”
“The attainment of such an ideal union between the questing spirit and the Feminine lies beyond human limits, as demonstrated by Faust’s entire career with all the error and suffering it causes... Death is the prerequisite of Faust’s salvation, and the cause for this dispensation of undeserved grace lies beyond anything Faust achieved in life, apart from remaining true to his constant striving... [And seducing Gretchen. The essence of the “masculine” clearly is a kind of sexual charisma]
p 491 - “...as for the devil everything [at Faust’s death] was then over and done, without any substance or value, content or meaning, so for us, by contrast, everything in the drama that may legitimately be described through the term ‘Eternal-Feminine’ affects us, and continues to do so, as a drawing onward....”
“All that is changeable
Is but reflected;
The unattainable
Here is effected;
Human discernment
Here is passed by;
The Eternal-Feminine
Draws us on high.”
FINIS
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