114. Faust - IX. "Interrupted Tragedy... in F."

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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." 

"Interrupted Tragedy as a Structural Principle in Faust" 
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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113. Faust - VIII. "F. as Doctor of Theology" & Saipan

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Goethe's Faust

"Faust as Doctor of Theology" by Jaroslav Pelikan

p 587 - “...a drama written by a poet who freely admitted that he found the charms of young women irresistible and who went on pursuing them when he was well into his seventies....” 

“...Despite the several nineteenth-century efforts to make him into one, Goethe was not a orthodox Christian theologian, nor did he want to be seen as one. But he did want to be seen as standing, in some sense, within the Christian tradition -- and within the Classical tradition and within the humanistic tradition and within the scientific tradition!”

p 594 - “... Carl Gustav Carus, in a letter dated 26 December 1834: ‘And have you not often in spirit drawn the parallels between the great work of Dante and this work of Goethe? Except that in the former the most painful and most blessed conditions of the soul pass by the viewer (which is why it is called a “spectacle,” Divine Comedy), whereas in the latter the protagonist is constantly being moved and must restlessly pass through all the anguish and joy of life.’”

p 595 - From Faust, “The capacity for awe is the best feature of humanity. The world may extract a heavy payment for such feelings, but someone who had been stirred feels the Numinous profoundly” [lines 6272-74 but of a very different translation. Why are the other translations quoted here all so much better than this one ?] 

Goethe in a letter “...For my part, I cannot be satisfied, amid the manifold directions of my being, with only one way of thinking. As a poet and an artist, I am a polytheist; on the other hand, I am a pantheist as a natural scientist -- and one of these as decisively as the other. And if I have need for one God for my personality as a moral man, that too [monotheist], is provided for.”

I don’t know who is here quoted, “...This is because ‘in reality, Goethe’s Faust has not in any way renounced God.... Therefore Faust is a God-seeker, not a God-denier.’ As Faust says to Margarete [Margarete=Gretchen] in his credo, ‘Who can perceive God and then presume to say:”I do not believe in him”? The All-comprehending, the All-preserving, does he not sustain and embrace you and me and himself?’ (3435-41).”

p 596-597 - “...For the three periods of his development in the drama correspond to the sequence of Goethe’s writing, beginning with the early ‘pantheistic’ sections belonging to the author’s original conception, continued with the ‘polytheism’ of Walpurgis Night and Classical Walpurgis Night as written in the first quarter of the 1800s, and closing with the ‘monotheism’ of the sections written near the end of Goethe’s life.”

“...The director in the Prelude at the Theater speaks about the drama as ‘a sort of ragout’ (100), and Faust uses the same word in the opening scene (539): a ragout cannot have only one ingredient...”

p 597 - “...the species of morality, and thus the definition of monotheism, through which Faust finds salvation, though it transcends both his scientific pantheism and his poetic polytheism, does so not by negating either of them but by fulfilling both of them and making them sublime... These nobler intents, higher aspirations, and earnest yearnings are the expression of an intellectual and spiritual ‘Eros, which started everything’ (8479) and which finds fulfillment in God....”



I was going to put something else here, but I seem to have set this up, so I'm going back to the Pacific War again. 

Saipan

Everyone knows about D-Day and the Allied invasion of Normandy, but the total story is so much more amazing. The Normandy fleet first sailed on 4 June 1944, then returned because of bad weather, and finally sailed for real on 5 June. On the other side of the globe, another -- all American -- invasion fleet also sailed on 5 June for Saipan in the Marianas Island Chain. While the D-Day force included five battleships, twenty cruisers, and over 5,000 vessels of all kinds; the Marianas force included 15 battleships and 32 cruisers. While the D-Day landings were covered by aircraft flying from England, the Marianas invasion force included 15 fleet carriers plus 8 CVEs to provide air support for the Marines and infantry going ashore while also defending against enemy fleets that were bound to attack. 

Only three reinforced divisions of Marines and infantry were committed to the Saipan invasion but they were to be followed by and supported by additional units bringing the troop total for the operation to 127,571 + the reserve 77th Infantry Div. At Normandy, over 156,000 were landed on the first day with hundreds of thousands more to follow in the coming weeks and months. But the remoteness of the Saipan battlefield made the invasion remarkably difficult. Instead of taking hours to cross the English Channel, the Saipan force took 10 days to sail across the Pacific.

And there was another huge difference between these battles. In Normandy the Germans fought desperately and casualties were high, but in the end the survivors retreated further into France and over 50,000 surrendered just at the Battle of the Falaise Pocket. On Saipan, the 30,000 defenders fought almost to the last man (only 921 surrendered) and even the Japanese civilians were encouraged by Imperial edict to seek glory in suicide rather than surrender.

The story I want to tell is not about the battles on land or at sea (in the air, really), I want to tell the usually ignored story of how the invasion forces gathered and approached the battle. This was the moment when all the plans the U.S. Navy had made since the mid ‘30s and all the sacrifices the navy had made in 1941 and 1942 finally paid off -- the perfect blending of the old and new navies. Old battleships, some re-floated after the Pearl Harbor attack, pounded the beaches and provided devastating artillery support when needed ashore. (This was true in Normandy as well. The USS Nevada was hit by bombs and run aground at Pearl Harbor yet she was one of three U.S. BBs supporting the invasion of France.) At sea, the new BBs, CVs, and CVLs held off the attacks of the Japanese fleet at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, eliminating the IJN's naval air power for the remainder of the war. This, though no one realized it at the time, was the "Decisive Battle" everyone had been planning for... it just didn't look the way they had anticipated. As at the Battle of the Coral Sea, no ship got within visual range of an enemy ship except for the U.S. submarines, which sank two Japanese aircraft carriers.

Jump to Next: Faust. IX. "Interrupted Tragedy in F."

112. Faust - VII. "Survey of the F. Theme"

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Goethe's Faust

Now we get to the LitCrit of Goethe's Faust. It is impossible to exaggerate how peculiar Faust is. It was Goethe's intention that the work should be a puzzle and he said little about its meaning (before he died shortly after completing it). Every critic finds something different in the poem/play and much of what they write is far more interesting than the original -- at least for me, given the English translation of Faust I've read.

The difference, perhaps, is that the critics are trying to make very specific points -- based on their particular hobby-horse or the dog they brought to some academic fight -- and they are trying to make their interpretation comprehensible to their readers. It's a pity that only a fraction of the people who read Faust read the LitCrit. 


"Survey of the Faust Theme" by Stuart Atkins

p 573 - 1507 - "Magister Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus junior..." 

"... he was appointed schoolmaster at Kreuznach because of his vaunted academical learning, but had to flee when his debauchery of his pupils was discovered."

1532 - "Dr. Faust, the great sodomite and necromancer."

p 574 - "...died in 1540 or 1541 at a village in Wurttemberg."

"Popular interest in Faust thus coincided almost exactly with the heyday of general belief in witchcraft as a punishable heresy [1587-1726]."

p 575 - "...he quickly became the protagonist of a modern magus myth -- its hero insofar as he represented the thirst of an age of geographical and scientific discovery for new knowledge and power, its villain insofar as these threatened accepted religious and theological assumptions. For although some men thought of magic as applied science... (H.C. Agrippa... 'Natural magic is... nothing but the chief power of all the natural sciences... -- perfection of Natural Philosophy and... the active part of the same';... Giordano Bruno... 'A magician signifies a man of wisdom with the power to act'), science itself seemed frightening for many more, so that even the most reputable alchemist or other scientist could arouse ambivalent feelings."

"...As oriental religions permeated the Greco-Roman world, however, and their exponents vied for influence, a literature of theological propaganda developed in which rival magics occupied a central place. The most important of these religions was Christianity, which claimed exclusive rightness of its own magic, labeling all other 'illicit' (Augustine, [De Civitate Dei ...)."

"Like the theologians of Faust's century, that of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the early Church Fathers used great learning and subtlety to demonstrate either the illusory or the evil nature of alien divinities, and there were soon many stories vividly illustrating the greater efficacy of the true faith..." Discussion of Simon Magus and possible confusion with Simon the Gnostic. "Gnosticism, moreover, introduced forms of dualistic thought that continued into Manichaeism, a still greater threat to Christian orthodoxy, and various Saints' legends illustrate the dangers of regarding any power of darkness as the equal of the one God..." Stories about Cyprian. "There were also legends of another Cyprian (of Antioch -- later confused with the Carthaginian martyr) who repents his vain use of illicit magic to achieve knowledge and love and later dies a bishop-martyr...."

p 576 - ..."Until after the Reformation... the repentant mortal regularly found redemption through contrition, penance, and good works even if he had signed away his soul in blood (a motif introduced in the thirteenth century) and even though, from Saint Thomas Aquinas on, witchcraft was more and more often officially considered heresy."

"If Faust was less fortunate than his precursors, the blame must be placed not on him but on the religious schism that began with Luther. For those who obdurately clung to 'false' doctrine there was now no alternative to eternal damnation. Copernican astronomy cast doubts on a traditional cosmogony, humanism glorified pagan moral philosophers and much morally dubious pagan literature, Neo-Platonic and Pansophic mysticisms taught 'natural' revelation and even the possibility of man's unaided achievement of salvation, Trinitarianism was openly repudiated -- leaders of the Unitarian movement were Laelius Socinus and his nephew Faustus (1539-1604) [“Unitarianism is a theological movement, named for its understanding of God as one person, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism, which defines God as three persons coexisting consubstantially as one being. Unitarians maintain that Jesus is in some sense the "son" of God, but not the one God. Unitarianism is also known for the rejection of several other conventional Christian doctrines, including the soteriological doctrines of original sin and predestination, and, in more recent history, biblical inerrancy.” - Source  It appears that there are currently 5 competing organizations of Unitarian congregation in the U.S.: UCC USA, UUCF, ICUU (International), AUC, UCMI] -- and advocates of libertinism and atheism were beginning to be less cautious than in the late Middle Ages. With so many rival beliefs urging irreconcilable claims, witchcraft could exert a more powerful spell than ever before over the minds of persons of all social and intellectual classes. The Council of Trent might reaffirm 'Saint Thomas' doctrine that neither charms nor conjuring can have affect on the free will, but Protestants accepted Luther's denial of absolute human freedom at the very time they were deprived of all effective external intercession with their God. For them, Faust's eternal damnation was only too real a possibility: significantly, sixteenth century legend associated Faust with Wittenberg, where Luther had taught the reality of the Devil and where Giordano Bruno was allowed to lecture...   

[Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) - “born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, and astrologer. He is celebrated for his cosmological theories, which went even further than the then-novel Copernican model: while supporting heliocentrism, Bruno also correctly proposed that the Sun was just another star moving in space, and claimed as well that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited worlds, identified as planets orbiting other stars.

Beginning in 1593, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges including denial of several core Catholic doctrines (including the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and Transubstantiation). Bruno's pantheism was also a matter of grave concern. The Inquisition found him guilty, and in 1600 he was burned at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori. After his death he gained considerable fame, particularly among 19th- and early 20th-century commentators who regarded him as a martyr for science...” 
- Source. ]  

...after having been denied that privilege at the theologically stricter university of Marburg. Faust represented many things that were anathema to good Christians, but above all a new and challenging secular intellectualism... [Faust's identification with Fust, Gutenberg's collaborator, shows an unconscious recognition of the importance of printing in the dissemination of new ideas.]

"In the Historia, although he is an 'Epicurean' or sensual materialist, Faust's greatest fault is 'speculation' -- scientific theorizing and skeptical philosophizing that make him intellectually and spiritually incapable of faith; he may fear Hell (Catholic-theological attrito) but will prove incapable of contrition as preached by Luther..."

Mann certainly played with this in Doctor Faustus. Ours would be a world of magic to anyone from that time, or from Goethe's. And you can say we have largely given up our claim to everlasting life in exchange -- that we've exchanged one magic for another that pays off sooner. 


p 578 - "In the age of Enlightenment... damnation was no longer a matter of wide vital concern. Evil, for Luther the instrument of God, had become an obscuring of truth by passion (Descartes) or even, with Leibniz, a sensed deprival of perfection grounded in awareness of a discrepancy between any part of the whole. (Ugliness and incongruity were to be integral to the visual and literary arts in G.E. Lessing's aesthetics, and the essential function of dissonance had long been recognized by musical theorists.) To relativistic and materialistic thinkers, evil was but a necessary concomitant of the good; an obdurate sinner like the traditional Faust no longer seemed to have serious human significance."

p 579 - "... He replaced the traditional -- and theologically unsound -- pact with Hell by a challenge: if Faust, who regarded himself as representative of all men, is ever satisfied by shallow pleasures or by a sense of having achieved all he would and could, he will gladly renounce this life, the only meaningful existence he can conceive of... The Lord (God, the Good) is also anticipatorily defined -- in terms that reflect the historical-genetic interests of the Enlightenment and the increasing importance of evolutionary biology in the later eighteenth century (Buffon; Lamarck; Goethe's own theories of metamorphosis) -- as creativity, becoming (Werden), and love, the potentialities of self-realization on every level of being to which man has access by virtue of his innate impulse to strive and aspire...."

That this work is based on contemporary science relating to biology and light/color, is worth keeping in mind. Are there similar works now that deal in an artistic way with quantum physics or string theory? Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Brave New World, and even Cat's Cradle (ice 9) also have contemporary scientific foundations to some extent. 


p 580-581 - "...His irritation is momentarily directed against pious Christian neighbors, whose destruction he causes by his impatient eagerness to resettle them elsewhere; although not directly guilty of their death -- the agents of his will are Mephistopheles and (men of) violence -- he now abjures further recourse to supernatural assistance and again accepts human mortality...."

I don't think I had noticed before how important this passage is. As Wendell Berry has pointed out, we are all of us guilty for the crimes committed in our interest by proxies, when we consume products without any concern for their production. We are happy to have the blessing of our Mephistophelean world and would rather not know (as with sausage) what goes into it. 

A more obvious parallel would be with the people in San Francisco today losing their homes -- and conceivably in some cases their lives -- to make way for larger scale, and upscale, development. I would say this change is positive and inevitable, but the consequences are very real and something we would rather not dwell on. We are happy to let the "men of violence" do what has to be done. 


"...Faust... still hopes to complete his grandiose reclamation project, but he dies even as he envisions its benefits enjoyed by future generations of self-reliant men, like himself free from subservience to a purely speculative-transcendental or a merely primitive-magical system of belief. His formation of a social-religious humanistic faith is his supreme insight, but the conclusion of the drama insists that it be recognized as an expression of faith (rooted in the feeling that men can know the divine only as immanence)..."

Wow. I seem to have missed a LOT here. 


"In its cautious optimism Goethe's Faust is still a work of the late Enlightenment, but in its communication of the sense of the unfathomable complexity of human experience it is also an expression of European romanticism. Goethe was not, however, consciously a romantic, and so he sought to represent a totality of critical, emotional, aesthetic, and ethical experiences not as a romantic infinitude, but as a symbolically comprehensive finitude (German Classicism)... If Goethe presents Faust sympathetically as an aspiring idealist, he also makes clear that idealism and aspiration can be the expression of dangerous subjectivity, of alienation from reality: only Faust's insight into his own finiteness, his recognition that lofty intentions do not guarantee the avoidance of error, seems to be represented without dramatic -- or other ironical -- ambivalence. Man is redeemed by insight, not by achievement, and only through consciously directed activity, wise or foolish, successful or unsuccessful, can this insight be gained."

Not sure about most of this but I really like that last sentence. 


p 583-4 - "...'Faustian' could thus variously mean 'Promethean,' 'superhuman' (Herman Hesse lectured on 'Faust and Zarathustra' in 1909), ' dualistically torn between (or simultaneously impelled by) pleasure principle and cognitive desire,' 'mystically monistic,' 'socialistically progressive' ... as well as 'German in its best -- or, at the height of World War I, worst -- sense.'"

"With the publication of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918 and 1922) 'Faustian' acquires a new meaning. In his morphology of civilizations (Kulturen) Spengler opposed the Faustian culture-soul of the West to the Apollonian (or Euclidean) and Magical souls of Greco-Roman and Arabian culture. His Faustian soul knows the lure of infinitude and transcendence, has an ethic of instinct or voluntarism rather than of reason, and its heroes are men of action with Nietzsche's morality of masters... Although the importance that Spengler's concept of the Faustian attributes to practical achievement is that of later historicism and scientism, romantic elements predominate in his thought, which is thus more German than Western...."

p 584 - "Simultaneous with the explanation of history in symbolic and mythic terms was an ever more frequent reading -- and even creating (Thomas Mann) -- of literary works as forms of symbolic and mythic expression. Beginning with his Psycologische Typen (1921), C. G. Jung encouraged the interpretation of Goethe's Faust as a visionary work, i.e., not as mere poetic invention, but as the expression of archetypal truths (Faust variously as hysteric, as magus-magician, as savior-sage, and -- after World War II -- as sub-humanly ignorant of ethical emotion, the protagonist of a work revealing a characteristically 'German' alienation from all concrete realities)...."

p 585 - "...Leverkuhn's [in Mann's Doctor Faustus] pact with the devil is his fantasy that syphilitic infection is the price of heightened creative powers. (Mann had long thought to discern a connection between disease and artistic creativity, and had first conceived in 1901 the idea of portraying a syphilitic artist as a Faust figure.) [Doctor Faustus repudiates nationalistic and nihilistic interpretations of Faust  and the Faustian; parallels in it to recent developments in historical, philosophical, theological, psychological, and scientific speculation insists that the cultivation of musical abstraction by its coldly intellectual hero also symbolizes a general alienation from humane values that only a spiritual breakthrough may possibly overcome."

"... Some theologically-minded critics, still reading it [Goethe's Faust] as a glorification of ruthless activity, condemn it as an expression of humanistic amoralism, while others interpreted it as a morality play warning against the destructive consequences of human effort unredeemed by theological grace. Although Marxists largely continued to see in it a paean to progress and secular human values... Goethe, however, interpreted the Faust story in a tragedy, not in a morality play, and the lasting significance of the Faust legend will surely again be recognized as deriving not from the theme of existential despair (which it shares with many other tales and myths), but from the paradox of self-limiting and even self-destroying aspiration which, as Goethe knew, the legend symbolizes with apparently unique distinction."

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111. Faust - VI. & In praise of SciFi

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Goethe's Faust

People comment on Goethe and Faust

p 565 - Margaret Fuller - Her translation of the wager, 

  Canst thou by falsehood or by flattery
Make me one moment with myself at peace,
  Cheat me into tranquility? Come then
And welcome, life’s last day.
  Make me but to the moment say,
Oh, fly not yet, thou art so fair,
  Then let me perish, &c.

p 568 - Emerson, “...He is the king of all scholars. In these days and in this country, where the scholars are few and idle, where men read easy books and sleep after dinner, it seems as if no book could so safely be put in the hands of young men as the letters of Goethe....” 

“Goethe, then, must be set down as the poet of the Actual...the poet of prose...”

Heine has the most interesting things to say here so I'm going to quote him at greater length: 

p 564 - Heinrich Heine points out that,  "...with [the "historical"] Faust ends the medieval religious era, and there begins the modern, critical era of science. It is indeed very significant that at precisely the time when by public belief Faust lived, the Reformation began, and that he himself is supposed to have founded the art which secures for knowledge a victory over faith, namely the printing press; an art, however, which also robbed us of the Catholic peace of mind and plunged us into doubt and revolutions -- or, as someone else would put it, finally delivered us into the hands of the devil. But no, knowledge, the understanding of things through the intellect, science gives us at last the pleasures of which religious faith, Catholic Christianity, has cheated us for so long; we apprehend that men are called not only to a heavenly but also to an earthly equality; the political brotherhood preached to us by philosophy is more beneficial to us than the purely spiritual brotherhood which Christianity has procured for us...."

“The German people in its profundity long ago intuitively surmised this: for the German people is itself that learned Doctor Faustus, that spiritualist who through his intellect has grasped the inadequacy of the intellect and demands material pleasures and restores to the flesh its rights; yet, still caught up in the symbolism of Catholic poetry where God is considered the representative of the spirit and the devil representative of the flesh, they characterized that reinstatement of the flesh as a fall from God, as an alliance with the devil.”

“It will still be some time, though, before what was prophesied with such profound meaning in that poem [Faust] materializes among the German people, before it understands, by the intellect itself, the usurpations of the intellect, and vindicates the rights of the flesh. That, then, will be the revolution, the great daughter of the Reformation.”

Ignoring for the moment any consideration of the unimaginable price the people of Europe paid for the Reformation -- the darkest period in the history of almost every nation, especially in the north, from France to England, to the Netherlands, to Bohemia and the rest of Germany -- let's move on to this, that I ran into just yesterday in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft: [keep in mind most of my notes here were written over a year ago]


“...we take for granted that if one religion passes away, another must arise. But what if man presently find himself without spiritual needs? Such modification of his being cannot be deemed impossible; many signs of our life to-day seems to point towards it. If the habits of thought favoured by physical science do but sink deep enough, and no vast calamity come to check mankind in its advance to material contentment, the age of true positivism may arise [See Brave New World] ... the word supernatural will have no sense; superstition will be a dimly understood trait for the early race; and where now we perceive an appalling Mystery, everything will be lucid and serene as a geometric demonstration. Such an epoch of Reason might be the happiest the world could know. Indeed, it would either be that, or it would never come about at all. For suffering and sorrow are the great Doctors of Metaphysic; and, remembering this, one cannot count very surely upon the rationalist millennium.”

The Gissing seems to me to set the stage for both Brave New World and The Elementary Particles. Both the Gissing and the Heine set the stage for The Magic Mountain. (And Heine is clearly one of those secular European "sirens" that Dostoyevsky believed were luring Russia to her doom.) All these books are really about the same thing. And Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, would trace this trend toward positivism and an emphasis on the scientific and on this world rather than the next, back to Socrates. But of all these writers, only Nietzsche really seems to have any confidence in the ultimate success of this trend. (Insert syphilis joke here.) 

This may also be a good time to remind people that there is a Chronology at the end of the Introduction. I actually started working on that while researching Faust. Entries relating to so many other books have been added since then, but the original basic information, placing both the "historical" Faustus and Goethe in the context of Modern European history, remains.

In praise of SciFi

Over the course of my reading life, SciFi has been like jazz -- something I really like and, from time to time, consume in massive doses and then ignore for years at a time. When I feel my tear ducts need flushing out, I pick up one of Anne McCaffery’s “Ship who...” series. The original, The Ship Who Sang, and also The Ship Who Searched, have an uncanny ability to play with my emotions. (There must be something here similar to the emotional aspect of music that Mann writes about in Doctor Faustus. These stories are as dependable for me as is the "Ode to Joy.")

But as much as good SciFi is about telling good stories (like any good fiction) what sets it apart is the ideas -- the “science.” Good SciFi is almost always a kind of thought experiment: What would life be like if we could communicate or travel faster than the speed of light? In the case of McCaffery’s stories, what would life be like if we could take people with brilliant minds but bodies ruined by birth defects or disease and encapsulate them in a life-support “shell” and connect them directly to the sensors and instruments and controls of a space ship or space station. So that they could “become” the ship. How would they relate to the world, each other, and the humans who supported them?

In the past I’ve read most of the best known SciFi authors, even the not-as-popular ones who specialize in telling stories from non-human points of view, and I mean nothing like human. I wish I could find, or even better remember this author's name.

Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is probably the first SciFi I read and for a long time Ursula K. Le Guin was my favorite author. The first four of her “Hainish Cycle” books are everything SciFi should be. (Her contributions to the thought experiment genre is the concept of “mind speech” where people can communicate mind to mind.) One of these novels, The Left Hand of Darkness, also does an amazing job of examining gender.

My next favorite author was Norman Spinrad. He was such a 1960s-1970s author I’m not sure how well his writing would hold up today. Of his titles my favorites were two that shared the same fictional ‘verse (as we would say today): The Void Captain's’ Tale and the amazing Child of Fortune. (Songs From the Stars would get an honorable mention.) If some young reader would agree only to reading a single SciFi title at my suggestion, I would go with Child of Fortune and not just because it is another massive book. This one novel contains so many uniquely imagined and different worlds that, as with Pulp Fiction, one tends to forget that the various parts belong to the same work. It’s probably no accident that Spinrad writes so much about drugs (and sex) because I just don’t believe a single, sober mind could dream up all these vivid and amazing worlds. (The colonized little world where each neighborhood decides on the strength of gravity and the brightness of the sun, among other things -- I seem to recall banzai volcanoes -- has stayed with me for decades.)

I need to say a few words about Dan Simmon’s Hyperion Cantos series, though I’ve only read the first two titles: Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. Here cyberspace is one of the “worlds” the story takes place in. The conflict is between humans and a hierarchy of Artificial Intelligences (AIs) that human society has become dependent on. But the fun features are portals that connect two different places in space; so that a wealthy person can have a house on one planet that includes rooms on other planets. To give a terrestrial equivalent, you could have a house in Beijing with one balcony overlooking the Aegean from a Greek island and another balcony overlooking the Alps at Davos. There is also a spaceship built around a giant redwood tree.

Finally, there’s Ian Banks. Banks died a few years ago, which is part of what got me thinking about this. That and learning that Elon Musk named his robotic ship (the platform his first stage rockets are attempting to land on) “Just Read the Instructions.” I literally burst out laughing when I read that as it is so obviously a “Culture” reference. (The 2nd ship, still under construction I believe, is named "Of Course I Still Love You." I hadn’t realized these were “actual” ship names from The Player of Games) I’ve only actually read one Culture novel but a friend told me the plots of several others. The Culture is a phenomenally advanced civilization employing nanotechnology and god knows what else in very clever ways. In one memorable passage there is a Culture assassin who breaks up into what appears to be a swarm of insects (or mini-drones) and then reforms into a human shape. Here’s a nice summary from Wiki, “The main theme of the novels is the dilemmas that an idealistic hyperpower faces in dealing with civilisations that do not share its ideals, and whose behaviour it sometimes finds repulsive. In some of the stories, action takes place mainly in non-Culture environments, and the leading characters are often on the fringes of, or non-members of, the Culture, sometimes acting as agents of Culture plans to civilize the galaxy.”

But the fun thing in these novels is the names the powerful AI ships choose for themselves (see Here; but my favorites are: “No More Mr Nice Guy,” “Kiss My Ass," “Just Testing,” “Funny, It Worked Last Time...” oh, I give up. There are so many good ones).

Anyway, just another series of thought experiments... which would be a hell of a Culture ship name.

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110. Faust - V. & Escort Carriers

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Goethe's Faust

Eternal-Feminine
I started thinking about what Goethe actually meant by the “Eternal-Feminine” since it seems to be a kind of universal victim for Faustian man to seduce (this from reading the biographies of the Romantics as much as their writings). I found some interesting info on Wikipedia: 


“The eternal feminine is a psychological archetype or philosophical principle that idealizes an immutable concept of ‘woman’. It is one component of gender essentialism, the belief that men and women have different core ‘essences’ that cannot be altered by time or environment. The conceptual ideal was particularly vivid in the 19th century, when women were often depicted as angelic, responsible for drawing men upward on a moral and spiritual path”

“The concept of the ‘eternal feminine’ (German, das Ewig-Weibliche) was particularly important to Goethe, who introduces it at the end of Faust, Part 2. For Goethe, ‘woman ' symbolized pure contemplation, in contrast to masculine action. The feminine principle is further articulated by Nietzsche within a continuity of life and death, based in large part on his readings of ancient Greek literature, since in Greek culture both childbirth and the care of the dead were managed by women. Domesticity, and the power to redeem and serve as moral guardian, were also components of the ‘eternal feminine’. The virtues of women were inherently private, while those of men were public.”

“In the history of Christianity, and particularly in Catholic theology, the ideology of the ‘eternal feminine’ replaced older views of women as inherently inferior and more sinful than men.”

But I have to say my favorite gloss comes from Simone de Beauvoir: 


“Simone de Beauvoir regarded the ‘eternal feminine’ as a patriarchal myth that constructs women as a passive ‘erotic, birthing or nurturing body’ excluded from playing the role of a subject who experiences and acts.”


From Goethe's letters & conversations

p 539 - Writing about how the implementation of the conception for Faust has changed and improved over the 50 years he spent on it: “I am like one who in his youth has a great deal of small silver and copper money; which in the course of his life he constantly changes for the better, so that at last the property of his youth stands before him in pieces of pure gold.”

This reminds me of my own thoughts on how my mind seems to find more in texts now than when I first read them in my youth. Turning base metals into gold is an apt way of putting this, especially considering Goethe’s interest in alchemy.

This reminds me of something I read recently about a NASA satellite mission where the original satellite was destroyed so that they had to build a 2nd one. In the years this took, a similar, but less powerful Japanese satellite went into service and they learned so much from that data that they were able to revise their original plan for the NASA satellite so that they now expect to get much better information than they would have if the original launch had been successful. Good luck, bad luck.... 


p 540 “The French... now begin to think aright on  these matters. Classic and Romantic, say they, are equally good: the only point is to use these forms with judgement, and to be capable of excellence -- you can be absurd in both [I would have said “either”], and then one is as worthless as the other. This, I think, is rational enough, and may content us for a while.”

p 541 - Talking about spectacular theatrical effects like elephants and fire and dragons reminds me of Michael Bey. Faust would have been the Transformers of the early 19th century.


The Boy Charioteer is Euphorion! Sounds silly until you think about it and then it makes perfect sense. The corollary is that, while “poetry which spends itself without reserve” (Source HERE) is doomed, it is also immortal. 


p 542 - “Some singular thoughts pass through my head... [after reading the French translation of Faust] This book is now read in a language over which Voltaire ruled fifty years ago. You cannot understand my thoughts upon this subject, and have no idea the influence Voltaire and his great contemporaries had in my youth, how they governed the whole civilized world. My biography does not clearly show the influence of these men in my youth, and what pains it cost me to defend myself against them and to maintain my own ground in a true relation to nature.”

I had just been thinking about translation. Again. Since I only read one language, I can’t really judge this for myself, but, it stands to reason, that there are occasionally translators more talented than the original author. There must be at least some passages that sing in translation but plod in the original. Also, translators have an opportunity to “tune” books for a different time. I’m reminded about an idea I ran into in college of a writer in the 20th century sitting down and writing Don Quixote, I think it was, word for word as an original text. But it wasn’t the “same” book because writing the same words centuries apart means something very different. Much of this particular text would read as ironic or surreal if written today.  

A translator might even insert ideas into a book that are not the author's. And in some cases no one would be the wiser. In fact, I suspect this happens all the time since people read what they want to read in some books -- Faust being the perfect example -- and if they then translate the text they will emphasize that interpretation.


X p 544 - On his approach to composing Faust “... the only matter of importance is, that the single masses [discrete sections] should be clear and significant while the whole always remains incommensurable -- and even on that account, like an unsolved problem, constantly lures mankind to study it again and again.” Mission accomplished! 

He talks about having the manuscript of the 2nd part “stitched together” and I thought he was speaking figuratively but he meant literally. 


X p 559 - Madame de Stael describes Mephisto as, “a civilized Devil... his figure is ugly, low, and crooked; he is awkward without timidity, disdainful without pride...” Sounds like Naphtha. 

X “In the character of Faustus, all the weaknesses of humanity are concentrated: desire for knowledge, and fatigue of labour; wish of success and satiety of pleasure... Faustus has more ambition than strength; and this inward agitation produces his revolt against nature, and makes him have recourse to all manner of sorceries, in order to escape from the hard but necessary conditions imposed upon mortality.”

Escort Carriers

Here's the final chapter (ha!) about naval aviation during the Pacific War. As I said before, the U.S. Navy was reluctant to accept anything but large, high speed aircraft carriers at the beginning of the war. But the Battle of the Atlantic (against German U-boats) had suggested the need for smaller carriers that could either escort convoys or sail in independent hunter-killer groups along with destroyers and destroyer escorts. In either case, the small carriers would carry aircraft that would spot and then attack enemy submarines with depth charges.

Relatively quickly, new shipyards started by businessmen like Henry Kaiser and Stephen Bechtel started churning out hundreds of small freighters and tankers to replace the hundreds of merchant ships sunk by the enemy. It was realized that some of these relatively inexpensive vessels could be converted into tiny aircraft carriers. These ships were slow and had short flight decks so required a catapult to launch aircraft. For self defense they mounted a single 5” gun, usually placed on the stern -- referred to as “the peashooter.” The ships, designated CVEs, helped turn the tide against the U-boats in the Atlantic and then, as they were commissioned in ever greater numbers (eventually over 100), were used in the Pacific both in an anti-submarine role, but also as auxiliary support for the many amphibious landings. Instead of the Navy’s big fleet carriers being tied down to provide air support for the Marines and Army troops ashore, this dull but important task was turned over to swarms of little CVEs. Or at least that was their intended role.

In the crucial phase of the Battles of Leyte Gulf, what the U.S. Navy came to call the Battle Off Samar, three task groups of these converted merchant ships (sixteen CVEs all together, in three groups designated Taffy 1, 2, and 3), accompanied by a modest escort of destroyers and destroyer escorts (abbreviated destroyers with reduced speed and armament designed primarily for the anti-submarine role) were busily doing their assigned job of providing air support to the troops recently landed on the island of Leyte while providing anti-submarine sweeps around the many ships involved in supporting the landing. The tiny airgroups aboard these little CVEs consisted of second line aircraft (for example, an improved version of the F4F designated FM-2 with which the Navy started the war instead of the newer F6F) and pilots trained to perform the limited tasks expected of these ships -- but not to attack enemy warships at sea. Since this invasion was also protected by the four task groups of the massive Third Fleet, all those Essex and Independence-class carriers mentioned above and now deployed in large numbers, there was no reason for the CVE crews and the crews of their escorts to think about facing the main force of the IJN... until the morning when enemy shells started landing around the six CVEs of Taffy 3 and the lookouts reported a massive force of enemy battleships and cruisers -- the largest force to engage in a surface battle over the whole course of the war -- not far away and closing at high speed.

For generations, Japanese and American naval officers had planned for and envisioned a “decisive battle” to be fought in the western Pacific by their respective navies. Ships and weapons of all kinds had been designed and built with this battle in mind. This was It, or as close to It as reality was going to give them, but it was unlike anything anyone had imagined. On the American side, all the new battleships, cruisers, and aircraft carriers were hundreds of miles away chasing illusions. On the Japanese side, the commanders hadn’t known that these task forces of tiny carriers existed, so they assumed that they were facing Third Fleet -- that the CVEs were CVs and CVLs. That the DDs were cruisers and the DEs were destroyers. Because they misidentified the ships, they also overestimated the distance to the targets (the ships must be further away to appear so small). As a result they tended to overshoot their targets. In short, everyone was at a loss.

In this most improbably battle (possibly of all time) the small and slow U.S.N. ships managed to dodge and spar with the vastly (ridiculously) superior IJN fleet. The Japanese ships sunk one CVE, two DD, and a DE (13,000 tons of shipping) before giving up the fight in frustration. (A second CVE was sunk by a kamikaze later in the day.) But the American DDs and a very bold DE launched torpedo attacks that scattered the Japanese formations and damaged some ships while the bombers attacked with depth charges or anything they could find (instead of the usual torpedoes and armor piercing bombs) while fighters strafed decks and bridges, sometimes zooming around the ships even after they ran out of ammunition just to confuse and distract the Japanese. In the end three Japanese heavy cruisers were sunk (44,000 tons of shipping) and another limped home after losing her bow to a torpedo. Arguably, this was the U.S. Navy’s finest hour during the Pacific War -- or at least Seventh Fleet’s finest hour, it was not a great day for Third Fleet.

When Admiral Kurita, the Japanese commander ordered his ships to turn away to re-group, Admiral Sprague, the American commander of Taffy 3, heard a nearby sailor, who seems not to have grasped that they had been fleeing for their lives for two and a half hours, exclaim: "Damn it, boys, they're getting away!"

Let me re-word this: The Imperial Japanese Navy had spent a generation building up and training a fighting fleet for the purpose of annihilating the U.S. Navy in the Western Pacific. The closest they came to realizing this dream involved not the U.S. "Big Blue Fleet" or even Seventh Fleet's Battle Force, but the U.S.N. Junior Varsity -- designated "Taffy 3" and commanded by Rear Admiral Clifton (Ziggy) Sprague -- and the "capital" ships were only converted freighters. And still they are driven off after suffering greater losses than their surprised American foe.

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