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Goethe's Faust
From a personal email of mine: "I'm working my way through the Modern Criticism section of this edition of Faust and just came to an insufferably academic piece by a Benjamin Bennett. After reading the introductory paragraph ("Probably the most vexed question in traditional Faust scholarship is the question of 'unity.' At a certain level of generality, the attempt to answer this question, to assert that Faust (or for that matter any text) is or is not a unified artistic work, necessarily involves petitio principii... and the crucial question becomes not whether the work is unified, but why it apparently presents its own unity as a particular kind of problem.") I almost skipped it and went on to the next one, but then it quickly turned into the most interesting interpretation of the book I've run into...
"If The Magic Mountain was my original problem, Faust may turn out to be the pneumonia-like secondary condition that kills me."
by Benjamin Bennett
This is excerpted from:
Goethe's Theory of Poetry: Faust and the Regeneration of Language
Benjamin Bennett (Itheca: Cornell UP, 1986), 19-39.
p 599 - “...The immediate goal Faust has set himself, an escape from dead learning into an intimate, active contact with living nature, corresponds to the Erdgeist, but his approach to this goal by way of learning, even magical learning, bears an inescapable resemblance to the mere intellectuality of Wagner...”
If you look at this as a rejection of the (male) intellectuality in favor of the (female) unity with nature, this gets interesting. And given Goethe’s fondness for “young women” also makes a great deal of sense.
“The Earth Spirit and Wagner, then both represent aspects of Faust, and the whole scene is the dramatization of an inner tension. That Faust despises Wagner only corroborates this point, since he obviously also despises himself as an intellectual; and that in Urfaust the Earth Spirit appears ‘in a revolting form’... corresponds to the recognition that Faust, despite his boasts, is also not truly in sympathy with that ‘genius of the world and of deeds.’ ...for the only way to establish real contact with the ‘spirit of activity’ is simply to act, not to observe and seek enjoyment in observing. Two tendencies in Faust’s nature appear: the desire to realize his existence as vigorous activity (Erdgeist) and the ineradicable habit of critical intellect (Wagner) that thwarts this desire in the very process of generating it. Faust is repelled by both tendencies for the simple reason that both exist [in him] and each repels the other.”
Back to my note, until the final (monotheistic) portion of the book, it’s all about uniting somehow with the feminine to get in touch with nature and the real.
p 600-1 - "Neither is it insignificant that Wagner approaches Faust with the words 'I take it you were reading a Greek tragedy' (523), for the inner duality dramatized in 'Night' possesses a fundamentally tragic character that is already wholly prefigured in the vision of the Macrocosm. Man's perceiving and thinking mind provides him with an idea of 'how everything weaves itself into the whole, how each thing is operative and alive in the other' (447-48) as well as with an idea of his own central position in this universal harmony, his quasi-divine nature as microcosm to the macrocosm. It is our nature as thinking beings, the nature of the perceiving and thinking mind as a reflection of the universe, that constitutes our quasi-divinity in the first place... But at the same time, the very act of thinking, of envisioning this macro-cosmic harmony, also alienates us by placing us in the distanced position of mere knowers or viewers, no longer within what we envision, and the vision is thus reduced to a mere object of knowledge, 'but a show' (454), no longer the actual world that surrounds and includes us. The trouble with man is that his nature is quasi-divine, that he is 'an image of the godhead' (516,614), but that the immediate experience of his own divinity eludes him like Tantalus's fruit. To the extent that he knows of it..., he is also alienated from it and fails to experience it directly. Like Faust, he then becomes 'resentful' (after 459), and desires to cast aside his knowledge in favor of an utterly passionate involvement in natural existence. But this is impossible, since what he seeks can have significance for him as an achievement (in other words, can be found, as the thing sought for) only in relation to a continuing of the knowledge that must supposedly be obliterated. Hence the incongruous image of Faust's seeking nature with a book in his hand...."
"Man's tragic dilemma is that he is in truth a kind of god yet can achieve in experience no direct contact with his own divinity... The two distinct states in which we exist, physical and spiritual, do not remain mere states but are transformed by the tension between them into opposed drives."
AAAAND we're back to the Apollinian and Dionysian again. This is what Nietzsche was talking about in The Birth of Tragedy.
[Faust quote]
You are by just a single urge possessed:
Oh may you never know the other!
Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,
And either would be severed from its brother;
The one holds fast with joyous earthy lust
Onto the world of man with organs clinging:
The other soars impassioned from the dust,
To realms of lofty forebears winging. (1110-17)
"Our quasi-divine, potentially infinite consciousness, by detaching us from natural existence, presents us with nature as an object of nostalgic yearning, while on the other hand the actual experience of our narrow physical existence generates a need for spiritual self-development. Our condition is thus hopelessly in conflict with itself, for both nature and spirit are objects of yearning yet at the same time forms of confinement that we seek to escape as soon as we experience them. 'Thus I careen from desire to enjoyment, as in enjoyment I pine for desire' (3249-50)."
p 602 - "...Can the man-god (Faust as Christ) really somehow manage to arise from the deadly despair into which his human divinity must lead him?"
“... Gretchen has already in effect lost her innocence when her conversations with Faust open for her an unaccustomed perspective on her own person, so that her thinking is divided against itself... the Helen-Euphorion tragedy is the disintegration of an ideal synthesis of the intellectual-Nordic with the physical-Hellenic; and the Emperor’s trouble is that he cannot renounce the desire to combine ‘ruling and at the same time enjoying’ (10251), which is parallel to Faust’s desire for an unreflecting immersion in experience without renunciation of his intellectual mastery of it....”
p 602-3 - “Let us consider Gretchen’s tragedy. First there is a more or less cohesive dramatic action leading to a form of guilt that, while not objectively unambiguous, is subjectively unquestioned (‘Cathedral’); then this action is sharply interrupted... and only after this interruption does the tragic action proceed to its inevitable conclusion (Gretchen’s death), which is alleviated, however, by a hint of ultimate salvation, ‘Redeemed!’ (4611). The significant point about this sequence is that the structure of Faust as a whole, considered as Faust’s tragedy, repeats it exactly on a larger scale... The sequence... is the same as that in the Gretchen tragedy: dramatic action leading to guilt, symbolic interruption, then resumption of the action leading to a catastrophe that is modified by a vision of ultimate salvation.”
p 603-4 - “... the typical Faustian character, unreasonable self-dissatisfaction coupled with absurd impatience (‘A curse on patience, above all!’ {1606}), is not fully reestablished until we hear the old man [Faust] ranting in act 5 about the ‘damned ringing’ (11151) from the nearby chapel, where we are reminded of the work’s first tragic pulse, the ‘Night’ monologue, which had been interrupted by church bells. Only in act 5 do we again receive in fully developed form what we immediately recognize as a characteristic Faust-Mephistopheles action, Mephistopheles exploiting Faust’s impatience in order to saddle him with the murder of yet another inoffensive family, as Gretchen’s family had been destroyed earlier.”
p 604 - “... I contend that the invitation to laugh at an aspect of our own situation, as spectators or readers, [in Walpurgus Night and Walpurgus Night’s Dream] is calculated to distract us (precisely by showing us an image of our distraction) from the otherwise presumed aesthetic involvement in the fiction as an illusion of reality. What interrupts the Gretchen tragedy, in other words, is both an image and an immediate instance of our own distracted consciousness, our awareness of an actual and a literary world beyond the imaginary reality on stage. The work adopts an ironic perspective relative to itself as a symbolic illusion; it becomes self-reflexive, no longer wholly involved in itself as a cohesive, psychologically plausible experience.... for practical purposes the distinction between poet and spectator disappears here anyway [1st three acts of Part 2]. If the author appears in the work as a consciousness clearly outside the normal limits of fiction, then his perspective is essentially the same as a spectator’s; and if the spectator’s detachment is an effective force in the fiction, then the state of being a spectator has become part of the process of poetic creation or invention.”
p 605 - “...Thus a curiously direct relationship is created not only between the spectator and poet, but also between the audience and Faust; for the two main interruptions in the Faust action... are referable not only to the audience’s detached consciousness with respect to the fiction, but also to Faust’s own detached consciousness with respect to himself. Faust is held back from suicide not by the actual message of the angelic chorus but by the memory, the complication of self-consciousness, that it awakens in him (781-82)... The audience’s consciousness, in the interruptions, thus functions in the same way as Faust’s own; actual consciousness (the audience’s) and fictional consciousness (Faust’s) merge. By an ingenious dialectical twist -- which belongs, incidentally, to the inventory of literary devices employed by Goethe’s contemporaries as well -- our very detachment from fiction is made to generate a kind of identification with a character in the fiction.”
p 605 - "...Faust is driven to despair, to the brink of nonexistence, by the dialectical operation of the inescapable self-consciousness that alienates us mentally from ourselves in every instant of existence, so that we never truly experience our ideal knowledge of ourselves and are never intellectually in command of our experience; no sooner do we begin to experience our being as a significant whole than our knowledge of this experience separates us from it, and our being is thus no longer whole after all..."
p 607 - "...What we would actually see at a performance of Faust is exactly what Mephistopheles describes [when the Emperor's enemies are routed by a magical flood that doesn't actually exist], even the highly developed stage machinery of the nineteenth century could not produce the optically convincing illusion of a flood. But it is more important to recognize that what we see in a theater is always essentially what Mephistopheles sees: people (the actors) responding passionately to a state of affairs that we, from our extrafictional perspective, know to be mere illusion. No audience is ever really swept up in a stage illusion; we are always detached at least to the extent of knowing who we are and what we are doing in reality. The Director in the Faust 'Prelude' makes a point of this fact, and Mephistopheles, to the extent that we recognize the relevance of his words to our situation, now reminds us of it at the decisive point in our interruption of the Emperor's tragedy, thus reminding us that this interruption also has to do with our own consciousness as spectators."
p 608 - "...The structural anticipation of catharsis, however, has the effect of denying us any actual catharsis by denying us the 'reconciling closure' in form that catharsis depends on. The anticipation of catharsis in structure deforms or dedramatizes the tragic process and so prevents catharsis. And this idea of an intellectual anticipation of experience, which modifies the experience itself, is of course also central in the makeup and unfolding of Faust's own character...."
p 609 - "...The tragic in Faust is not a particular pattern of actions or events that might conceivably be either finished or replaced by an alternative pattern. It is, rather, an atmospheric quality that pervades every imaginable human situation, including that of the audience."
"It is the ironic aspect of Faust, paradoxically, that reflects the tragedy of the human condition at its deepest, the truth that in real life there is no real or lasting catharsis, no cleansing, the truth that our existence, by virtue of self-consciousness, is ineluctably tragic, but that precisely because of our self-consciousness we are always as it were one step ahead of ourselves and so never undergo our own tragic destiny in a definitive, knowable, cathartically satisfying form, that we never actually experience the wild joy of the 'shipwreck' Faust longs for. Human nature requires, but never satisfactorily receives, a violent tragic destiny as a test or proof of itself... The same perspectival flexibility that always relieves human anguish... also always entangles us in it again, but never quite deeply enough, just as the original threat to the Emperor's court is eventually made more serious by the trick (paper money, in act 1) that relieves it, but still not serious enough to test the Emperor as a hero (in act 4)..."
p 610 - "The trouble with theatrical catharsis, with the satisfying enlightenment produced by a conclusive tragic ending, is that it uplifts us only to put us down again in the place we started, 'none the better'; and I contend that catharsis is avoided in Faust for just this reason. By not carrying out the poet's supposed 'duty,' Goethe in Faust is attempting to do more, to create a tragedy beyond tragedy, a work that will leave us in a sense dissatisfied and so make a difference in our real life -- a work that will convey the tragic dimension of our existence not in a climatic revelatory flash, but as an unrelenting atmospheric quality that follows us even when we leave the theater."
p 610-11 - "... The mere fact that we nevertheless continue to exist, therefore, constitutes an arbitrary rejection of Mephistopheles' otherwise irrefutable argument, a kind of resurrection from the deadly despair in which his logic... must otherwise entrap us. [reminds me of Whedon's "if nothing we do matters... , then all that matters is what we do" from Angel (the TV show) ]... The ironic involvement of the audience with the fiction has the effect, ultimately, of transforming even our daily existence beyond the limits of the work into a kind of imitatio Christi [imitation of Christ], a constant resurrection from the constant tendency toward nonexistence that is generated by our inevitable self-conscious condition. Catharsis is denied us; we do not leave behind the tragedy of Faust; rather, the work compels us to continue living in the atmosphere of the tragic. And that we continue living at all, therefore, takes on the quality of a moral achievement."
"Or to look at it somewhat differently, tragic anguish and tragic pleasure are traditionally separate, the former enacted on the stage and the latter experienced in the audience. But Goethe attempts a synthesis of the two in a single polyphonic complex of activity that is realized not only within the envisioned fiction, but also in the magnetic field of conscious tensions that arises between work and audience..."
All this ties in nicely with The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche. It is a mystical connection with Dionysian divinity that gives us, or at least Attic theater goers, a degree of catharsis outside our “quasi-divine” self-consciousness.
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