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Goethe's Faust
p 617 - “... Mephistopheles shields Faust from the violence of the seduction [of Margarete] and, in effect, from all violence. Thanks to him, a strategy is born that will be fundamental for the modern epos, indeed for the whole of Western culture: a strategy of denial and disavowal -- a projection of violence outside oneself. Goethe’s brilliant and terrible discovery: the rhetoric of innocence.”
“...’war and trade and piracy’ form an ‘undivided trinity’ (11187-8). Faust is the poem of primary accumulation, Lukacs writes in Goethe and his Age: it tells us of ‘capital running with blood.’ Quite true, and Mephistopheles is there to take upon himself the curse of that blood. In the counterpoint between him and Faust, there is thus established that blend of truth and lie... typical of a West that is proud of its own world dominion, but prefers to overlook the violence sustaining it....”
p 618 - “...Against this background [Menelaus supposedly intending to make Helen a sacrificial victim], the arrival of Faust takes on a wholly different value. It is no longer an act of conquest, but a liberation from barbarism: an ideologically very effective reversal, that for good reason appears in one way or another in all the masterpieces of colonial imagination....”
p 619 - “...To battle the waves, and even consign them to exile (10229 ff.), is certainly no crime. More than a concrete act of conquest, moreover, this is just a seashore reverie: once again, the activity of a ‘passive’ hero. And what harm can it ever do to dream?... No, it is a wholly innocent way of preparing oneself for something else, which is not innocent at all.”
p 620 - “...Faust has not repented at all: he has merely shifted his field of action, transforming himself into an economic seducer....
“To separate work from capitalism, in short: to hide the alien, violent forms work is assuming, and thus save it. This is a true constant of Goethe’s work....”
“... Faust is a kind of Europe in verse, full of ruined castles and pointless conflicts, and literally invaded by the past: characters, places, metres, stories, allegories, phantasms....”
p 623 - “...Digression... is the technique that seeks ‘to fit the whole world inside a single text’: just what is needed for the modern epic. Faust’s movement from world to world is a sign of his power, it indicates the freedom of movement, the spiritual mobility, the cynicism even, that are necessary in the new world-system....” Digression also worked for Lawrence Stern.
Faust has the virtue of being all things to all people. A considerable virtue. It’s like a Rorschach test [I think I've said this before]. This is better than the blind men and the elephant idea I mentioned to K.
p 624 - “The ideology of progress, as we have seen, privileges non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous: the ‘Alongside’ becomes a ‘Before-and-After,’ and geography is rewritten as history....” ‘the fuck?
p 626 - “Voices that talk and talk without paying any attention to one another, as almost everywhere in Faust, Part Two....” Also the Modern Critics .
God, you couldn’t make this shit up... p 629 - “The construction of an aesthetic form consonant with new social relations is a long and rocky process... that Goethe should find -- immediately -- the form perfectly appropriate for capitalist reality [allegory] is something so odd as to appear frankly unbelievable. Perfection ill becomes history -- and it becomes materialism even less well....”
I dare you to read that last passage out loud.
p 632 - “...The world text was born: which had no ‘political’ responsibilities, and which therefore allowed multiple readings... Everyone will find a different truth in the poem -- and they will all be valid. And this pulverization of the world text’s audience will be my point of departure for a few provisional conclusions.”
Re: The Director’s view of theater from lines 91-103 of “Prelude on the Stage” in which the Director urges the poet to, “give the audience a solid eyeful,/So they can gasp and marvel all the time,”:
p 633 - “Was it an ironic way of preparing us for Part Two, to have it announced by a small capitalist of letters?”
“... the basic components of the modern epic do not emerge as desirable innovations, but as problems to be solved. The all-encompassing hero makes his appearance as an idle chatterer; polyphony as an infernal din; the episodic plot as a collapse of action; allegory as an incomprehensible legacy of the past. And now the overall structure of Faust is heralded in a poetics of mercantile inspiration, which emphasizes its mechanical nature....”
Finished at last! He is interesting but, may the next critic be more fun to read.
Or not. This is full of intriguing quotes without citations. I have no idea who he’s quoting and nothing turns up in Google.
p 644 - “...In the quest for the signified of a Something that {logos} means, without its yet being the verbal meaning, hence like ‘the symbol which is the thing, without being the thing, and yet the thing’ -- Faust has a method.”
I can’t take any more of this so I’m skipping to the next person.
"The Economics of Translation in Goethe’s Faust" - Marc Shell
p 678-9 - “Goethe’s analysis of the relationship between language and money had a remarkable influence on social theorists from Wilhelm von Schutz to Oswald Spengler. The theorist for whom Faust was a dominant influence throughout his life, however, was Karl Marx. In his ideological analyses of the alienation that obtains in linguistic and monetary appropriation, Marx returns again and again to Faust; and many works by Marx can be understood as attempts to interpret and develop Goethe’s concern with the relationship between linguistic and monetary alienation and with Hegelian idealism (which Marx calls ‘mind’s coin of the realm’).”
p 681-2 - “...Although the aim of some translation is to make familiar what was strange, no middleman... can translate or appropriate the Hellenic treasure... to Germany in such a way that the alien Helen can become homily fare... In Faust, the apparent union of the German and the Greek falls apart. Its product and sign, Euphorion, is too much an outburst of divine spirit, which, as Longinus noted, is difficult to bring under control. Prefigured in the masque as Boy Charioteer, or Poetic Dispensation, Euphorion is as little at home in Germanic Greece as was the Boy in the masque. His end, like that of the child of Faust and Gretchen in Part One [drowned by Gretchen], is swift, Euphorion flies too high (9821), as does paper money, and, like Homunculus, he ends in the sea. The bond between Helen and Faust is shattered. Poetry, it turns out, is illusive and inflationary. Whatever necessity impelled Euphorion to break the lawful but dreamy bond (9883), his leave-taking precipitates that of Helen herself.”
"The Spirit of Water" -- Jane K. Brown
This section may have the best exegesis of what’s happening in Faust, but none of it is particularly striking and to use it at all would mean quoting pretty much all of it.
p 697-8 - “...But the Nereids and Tritons... bring gold and treasure from the depths of the sea where it has lain in ships wrecked by the singing of the sirens. This is, of course, the gesture of Act I, the recovery of gold from the depths. Now it seems to be much easier to bring the gold back... In Act I it was suggested that the gold in the depths had been buried at the fall of Rome, as the result of cataclysmic historical events. The mythical equivalent here, shipwreck, is less than cataclysmic. Indeed it is a repeated, common event for the sirens. Destruction, as well as generation, belongs then to the force of love. This is a perspective that readily embraces the Gretchen tragedy; indeed, from this point of view Mephisto’s comment that Gretchen is ‘not the first’ (‘Dreary Day. A Field’) appears rather less cynical. The power of love is the power of nature, which encompasses death as well as birth... Nereus defines humans as beings who ever strive to become like gods (8096), though they consistently fail to transcend themselves... Striving seen from the larger context of the temporal flux becomes evolution, while the circular motions of the cosmos become the cycles of repetition brought about by the complementary generative and destructive powers of love.”
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