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Goethe's Faust
“It [Faust] starts in an intellectual’s lonely room, in an abstracted and isolated realm of thought; it ends in the midst of a far-reaching realm of production and exchange, ruled by giant corporate bodies and complex organizations, which Faust’s thought is helping to create... In Goethe’s version of the Faust theme, the subject and object of transformation is not merely the hero, but the whole world. Goethe’s Faust expresses and dramatizes the process by which, at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth, a distinctly modern world-system comes into being.”
p 716-7 - “The vital force that animates Goethe’s Faust... is an impulse that I will call the desire for development... What this Faust wants for himself is a dynamic process that will include every mode of human experience, joy and misery alike, and that will assimilate them all into his self’s unending growth; even the self’s destruction will be an integral part of its development.”
He quotes lines 1765-75 where Faust claims to want to savor the whole of human experience, a passage I was originally excited about but that didn’t seem to go anywhere.
(Also, let me just note here that it has been hell differentiating between Faust the work and Faust the person for the purposes of italicizing. If you are ever tempted to write an iconic book or poem or play, please don't use your character's name for the title. Thank you.)
“...The only way for modern man to transform himself, Faust and we will find out, is by radical transforming the whole physical and social and moral world he lives in, Goethe’s hero is heroic by virtue of liberating tremendous repressed human energies... But the great developments he initiates... turn out to exact great human costs... human powers can be developed only through what Marx called ‘the powers of the underworld,’ dark and fearful energies that may erupt with a horrible force beyond all human control. Goethe’s Faust is the first, and still the best, tragedy of development.”
This brings us back to the nature vs politics debate: is the volcanic imagery about natural sciences or political-economic sciences?
p 718-9 - “...Why should men let things go on being the way they have always been? Isn’t it about time for mankind to assert itself against nature’s tyrannical arrogance, to confront natural forces in the name of ‘the liberal mind which cherishes all rights’? (10202-05) Faust has begun to use post-1789 political language in a context that no one has ever thought of as political. He goes on: It is outrageous that, for all the vast energy expended by the sea, it merely surges endlessly back and forth -- ‘and nothing is achieved.’ (10217)... Faust’s battle with the elements appears as King Lear’s, or, for that matter, as King Midas’ whipping of the waves. But his Faustian enterprise will be less quixotic and more fruitful, because it will draw on nature’s own energy and organize that energy into fuel for new collective human purposes and projects...”
That there are currently a multitude of attempts being made to harness tidal and wave energy as the latest form of Alternative Power, only adds to the relevance of Faust and this analysis.
p 723-4 - “At this point [after line 11272], Faust commits his first self-consciously evil act. He summons Mephisto and his ‘mighty men’ and orders them to get the old people [Philemon and Baucis] out of the way. He does not want to see it, or to know the details of how it is done. All that interests him is the end result: he wants to see the land cleared next morning, so the new construction can start. This is a characteristically modern style of evil: indirect, impersonal, mediated by complex organizations and institutional roles... Faust has been pretending not only to others but to himself that he could create a new world with clean hands; he is still not ready to accept responsibility for the human suffering and death that clear the way... It appears that the very process of development, even as it transforms a wasteland into a thriving physical and social space, recreates the wasteland inside the developer himself. This is how the tragedy of development works.”
I can’t believe how much this guy is reading into what is presented about Faust’s reclaimed world, though I tend to agree with him.
p 725 - “For the developer, to stop moving, to rest in the shadows, to let the old people enfold him, is death. And yet, to such a man, working under the explosive pressures of development, burdened by the guilt it brings him, the bells’ promise of peace must sound like bliss. Precisely because Faust finds the bells so sweet, the woods so lovely, dark, and deep, he drives himself to wipe them out.”
“Commentators on Goethe’s Faust rarely grasp the dramatic and human resonance of this episode. In fact , it is central to Goethe’s historical perspective. Faust’s destruction of Philemon and Baucis turns out to be the ironic climax of his life. In killing the old couple, he turns out to be pronouncing a death sentence on himself. Once he has obliterated every trace of them and their works, there is nothing left for him to do. Now he is ready to pronounce the words that seal his life in fulfillment and deliver him over to death... Once the developer has cleared all the obstacles away, he himself is in the way, and he must go... Goethe shows us how the category of obsolete persons, so central to modernity, swallows up the man who gave it life and power.”
p 726 - “...Faust banishes Care from his mind, as he banished the devil not long before. But before she departs... her breath strikes him blind... she tells him that he has been blind all along; it is out of darkness that all his visions and all his actions have grown...”
I only read Faust because my new edition of The Magic Mountain claimed it (along with The Birth of Tragedy) were important influences on Mann. When I finished reading Goethe I have to admit that I was very little the wiser. Mainly I thought that the early nineteenth century must have had better drugs than I had realized because it really is just a crazy series of stories.
But what all these scholars found in Faust was very interesting. Rarely have they agreed with each other, but everyone seemed to find something of value. There has been a bias against the bourgeoisie in most of the books I've written about -- The Brothers K., for example -- and some I haven't quite written about -- like Parade's End -- but keep referring to. Faust has made it much clearer to me what Dostoyevsky and Ford were incensed about and why. But when it comes back to The Magic Mountain, it is not Settembrini but Naphtha who abhors the Mephistophelean world -- this, again, supports my suspicion that it is Naphtha who speaks for Mann in that book.
While Dostoyevsky's The Brothers K. now gets my vote as the most significant book of philosophy from the second half of the nineteenth century, this edition of Faust -- including all the LitCrit -- has probably changed the way I view the world more than any other book. An interesting question is how much of this is Goethe? I really don't know.
Another interesting question is what am I going to blog next. It may finally be time to tackle The Magic Mountain itself. There may be a pause in the posting here.
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