by May, Rollo
He looked on Europe’s dying hour
Of fitful dream and feverish power.*
The drama of Faust begins just before Easter. Goethe describes this as the time when people
… exult in raising of the Lord
For they are resurrected themselves,
Freed from the shackles of shops and crafts,
From stuffy dwellings like narrow shelves,
From smothering roofs and gable lofts,
From the city streets with their smothering press,
From out the churches reverend night,
They have all been raised to light.†
This great vision of Goethe’s of what industrialism could bring was shared by a multitude of his fellow writers in this period. His life spanned the Enlightenment in Germany, an enviable time to be alive. Mozart was still living, Beethoven was in his prime, there were important philosophers like Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer. The Declaration of Independence was written in America when Goethe was twenty-seven. It is indeed thrilling to realize that out of the same milieu came our own political proclamation: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” To read the drama of Faust is to participate in the period when vast numbers of people were dedicated to interpreting evil in such a way that it would eventuate in good.
Faust thus ponders the age-old question of the meaning of evil in a world presided over by a beneficent God. Does creative effort involve the kind of strife which inevitably brings destruction? It is the ancient problem of Job: is there a servant of God so devoted that he will remain true to God even in the worst of human suffering? This fundamental question of human existence has been pondered by almost every sensitive person, a modern one being C. G. Jung in his book, Answer to fob.
GOD AND MEPHISTOPHELES
The drama opens with a heavenly council in which God is questioning Mephistopheles, to whom He makes this friendly overture, “I never did abominate your kind.”* What does Mephistopheles think of things on earth? The devil answers that he “feels for mankind in their wretchedness,” and humans have become “more bestial than any beast” because they have “reason.” The Lord agrees that human beings too easily become lax; they need vigilance, even though “man ever errs the while he strives.” God proposes that human beings should be “ever active, ever live creation.”
These opening lines introduce the theme that is crucial to Goethe’s whole drama: action, striving, effort. Forever the active deed takes supremacy over other forms of human existence. Goethe pictures Faust pondering the Biblical sentence, “In the beginning was the Word,”† and Faust shakes his head at that; the “word” is too intellectualistic. Perhaps sensibility will do, so he proposes “in the beginning was the Sense.” But that is to be refused as well. Finally he comes up with, “In the beginning was the Deed.” That is it! The expression of action and perpetual striving Faust accepts as final.
As the myth—or drama—unfolds we find ourselves immediately in the consulting room of the therapist. This demonstrates again that, when the would-be patient gives his complaints, he is talking about myths that in his way of life have collapsed. Here Faust is groaning over his failure to gain position or splendor or fortune, and he tells how this makes him feel:
Each morning I awake in desperation
Sick unto tears to see begun
Yet one more day….
I dread to bed me down, wild visions cumber
My dreams and wake response unblessed.
Existence seems a burden to detest
Death to be wished for, life a hateful jest.*
He sums up these morbid imprecations which have led him to consider suicide,
A curse on faith! a curse on hope!
A curse on patience, above all.‡
Mephistopheles then appears and tempts him with a very different way of life:
Be done with nursing your despair,
Which, like a vulture, feeds upon your mind.**
The pact is made. Faust agrees that he will be forever unsatisfied, forever moving, forever striving.
Should I ever take ease upon a bed of leisure,
May that same moment mark my end!
When first by flattery you lull me
Let that day be the last for me! …
Then forget the shackles to my feet,
Then I will gladly perish there!‡
Faust signs this pact with a drop of his blood, saying,
So may then pleasure and distress,
Failure and success,
Follow each other as they please
Man’s active only when he’s never at ease*
Goethe here reflects the essence of the behavior of modern man: rarely serene, always striving, always heaping task on task and calling it progress. The myth shows us the way of life for which Faust sells his soul.
Faust’s first adventure is to fall in love with Gretchen, an innocent “child in bloom,” and in their lovemaking he impregnates her. This affair between Faust, man of the world, with the fairy-like girl is all directed from the wings by Mephistopheles. Goethe reveals his own ambivalence in that his sympathies and his heart are with the unfortunate Gretchen, who, in her pregnancy, becomes driven out of her mind by her sorrow and by the condemnation of her fellow villagers. Faust, piling cruelty upon cruelty, then fights Gretchen’s brother, Valentine, a soldier who has come back from the war to protect Gretchen. In the fight Mephistopheles holds back the brother’s rapier so Faust kills him in cold blood. As he dies, Valentine adds his imprecations against the poor Gretchen.
One could make a case for the damnation of Faust simply out of this relationship with Gretchen, even though he so far expresses his love for her. This is the first revelation of Goethe’s radical problem with women, which will be visible all through this drama; it is indeed a myth of patriarchal power. Goethe pictures Faust as experiencing a foretaste of damnation from the suffering of this fairy-child whom he has made pregnant. Faust, however, grieves at the agony of this fairy-child and is enraged by Mephistopheles’ cold remark, “She’s not the first.” Faust cries,
I am rent to the living core by this single
one’s suffering; you pass with a carefree
grin over the fate of thousands.*
It is clear that Faust has some love, however inadequate, for Gretchen, and he is deeply shaken when she must have her baby in jail. But she cries only that Faust doesn’t kiss her with the passion he used to have.
Having the keys to the jail, Faust begs her to come out. Gretchen can leave the jail “at will,” but she has no will to leave; she takes responsibility for her pregnancy and lives out her punishment.
The final scene grows in intensity toward its climax. Gretchen cries out from the jail, “You’re leaving now? Oh Heinrich,† if I could too!”
FAUST: You can, Just want to! See, the door is open.
GRETCHEN: It must not be; for me there is no hoping.
What use in fleeing? Still they lie in wait for you....
FAUST: Oh love,—you rave! One step and you can leave at will!**
But Gretchen, in her mental derangement, sees the day as both her wedding day and her day of execution. “This day is my undoing,” she cries. Mephistopheles can only sneer “Womanish mutter! … Vain chatter and putter.”‡ When Gretchen catches a glimpse of Mephistopheles, she knows he is a devil who has come to take her to hell, but Faust cries out a phrase which links him again with our contemporary therapy, “You shall be whole!”***
How is this denouement to be solved? Goethe feels profound sympathy for this creature and her troubles which he has created, yet he must, for the sake of his own integrity as writer, lead her to condemnation. He has Mephistopheles call out, “She is condemned.”*
But Goethe inserts the exclamation, “Redeemed!” The notes tell us that this word was not in the first version but was inserted only in a later edition. In
other words, Goethe must finally yield to the dictates of his own heart. And he must have some voice cry out “Redemption,” whether it makes any sense or not. Thus Gretchen is condemned and redeemed in the same moment.
The first book ends with a voice: “[from within, dying away] Heinrich!”
The myth of unlimited power leads Goethe into the greatest of human complications. We can imagine his remembering another verse in his Faust, and we wonder if it applies to himself and this drama;
Spirits sing,
Woe! Woe!
You have destroyed it,
The beautiful world,
With mighty fist.†
Is this why Ortega wrote that Goethe had never really found himself, never lived out his own indigenous form, his true destiny in life?
MYTHIC AGONY
Part Two was put together during the forty years following the publication of part one. We marvel at the thoughts Goethe must have had during all the years when he was turning this myth over and over in his mind. How was he to conclude this myth?
In this second part he deals centrally with the problems of sexuality and power. Some of the verses are slapstick, as when Mephistopheles molds magic gold into a gigantic phallus, with which he threatens and shocks the ladies. But on a deeper level power and sexuality are essential aspects of the Faustian myth. Sex has largely become an expression of power. This is partially seen in our own day with our pornography, our sexy commercialism, our advertising built on luscious blondes and shapely brunettes. There is a curious relationship between our society’s attitude toward power on one hand and sexuality on the other.
In the Industrial Revolution there began the radical separation between the product of the worker’s hands and his relation with the persons who use his product. Indeed, the worker normally saw nothing at all of the product he helped produce except his own little act. The alienation of labor added to the alienation of persons from themselves and from other people. Their personhood is lost. With the growth of industry and the bourgeosie, sex becomes separated from persons; one’s sexual responses are bought and sold, as is the product of one’s hands.
Faust demands to see and have for his lover Helen of Troy, the symbol of beauty and ultimate fulfillment in love.* He thinks it will be easy for Mephistopheles to conjure up Helen.
FAUST: I know it can be done with but a mutter,
Two winks and you can have her on the spot.Ӡ
But Mephistopheles has a very different view. Faust must go through the Mothers, a strange group which has raised an infinite number of questions since Goethe wrote the play. The Mothers seem to be the only ones who have the power to threaten and to frighten Mephistopheles.
MEPHISTOPHELES: I loathe to touch on more exalted riddle—
Goddesses sit enthroned in reverend loneliness,
Space is as naught about them, time is less;
The very mention of them is distress.
They are—the Mothers.
FAUST: (starting) Mothers!
MEPHISTOPHELES: Are you awed?
FAUST: The Mothers! Why it strikes a singular chord.
MEPHISTOPHELES: And so it ought. Goddesses undivined
By mortals, named with shrinking of our kind.
Go delve the downmost for their habitat;
Blame but yourself that it has come to that.
FAUST: Where is the road?
MEPHISTOPHELES: NO road! Into the unacceded,
The inaccessible; toward the never-pleaded,
The never-pleadable. How is your mood?*
We pause, for the above lines are for all the world like a session in psychotherapy, especially with that aside, “How is your mood?” The mother, from whom one is born, who gives us form to start with, who carries the survival of the race in her womb—no topic could be more important. Every patient, in learning to love, must confront the psychological remains of his or her mother’s imprinting. Mephistopheles presses the point home by making Faust take responsibility for his own anxiety and his own distress—“Blame but yourself that it has come to that.”†
Is Goethe writing in this myth to relieve his own guilt? And what does this passage have to do with assuaging the guilt of his age? The Mothers certainly seem hostile in this description. I am informed that Goethe never went to see his own mother from the time he was twenty-five until her death, even though he went through Frankfurt, where she lived, often enough. We also know that Goethe was enthralled by women and they by him. Going into a relationship like a storm, he would use the woman up and then leave her. He puzzled his whole life long as to why he could write significant poetry only when in the presence of some femininity. He married late in life and then to his mistress, the last person who would seem suitable; he called her his “bed rabbit.” Sixteen years his junior, she was a small vivacious girl, not really pretty or particularly intelligent, but full of spontaneity.
And now to Helen.
May we emphasize again that Helen has a mythic quality in each of these three approaches (Marlowe, Goethe, and Mann). Goethe has Helen herself say when she is questioned about her relationship with Achilles,
I as a myth allied myself to him as myth
It was a dream, the words themselves
proclaim it so.
I fade away, becoming to myself a myth.*
This tells us that Helen was a myth all the way back in history, and the Greeks, in the Trojan War, were fighting for a great myth, the myth of ultimate form. Helen stands for the feminine form, not in the sexual sense (although she may be given that role often enough) but rather in the sense of the Hellenic aréte, with all the ideal quality that her name stands for in Greek culture.† Hence the phrase “form of forms” does indeed fit. It refers to feminine beauty raised to an ethical level, a goal for one’s development of the virtue, aréte, so prized by the ancient Greeks. The path to Helen, as Mephistopheles has already told us, leads only through the Mothers, i.e., it can be followed only by those who have confronted their own mother problem.
When he mentions the Mothers, Mephistopheles asks, “Are you awed?” The awe that Faust feels indicates that some deep conflict has been touched.
Mephistopheles then gives Faust a key with the counsel, “Follow it down—it leads you to the Mothers.” At this Faust, like any sensitive client in therapy, shudders,
FAUST: The Mothers! Still it strikes a shock of fear.
What is the word that I am loath to hear?
MEPHISTOPHELES: Are you in blinkers, rear at a new word?
FAUST: Yet not in torpor would I comfort find;
Awe is the finest portion of mankind:
However scarce the world may make this sense—
In awe one feels profoundly the immense.
MEPHISTOPHELES: Well then, sink down! Or I might call it,
soar! It’s all one and the same.*
Indeed it is all the same whether one reaches the Mothers by sinking or soaring, so important are they. Now that Faust has the key, he can “make them keep their distance,” and he is suddenly enraptured by the challenge: “Yes, clutching it I feel my strength redoubled, My stride braced for the goal, for heart untroubled.”† Mephistopheles informs him,
A glowing tripod will at last give sign that
You have reached the deepest, nethermost shrine;
And by its light you will behold the Mothers….
Some may be seated, upright, walking others,
As it may chance. Formation, transformation.
The eternal mind’s eternal recreation.**
Then he directs Faust, “Sink down by stamping, stamping you will rise.”* And Faust stamps and sinks out of sight.
The next scene is in a ballroom filled with persons exhibiting jealousy and repartee. Mephistopheles suddenly cries out, “O, Mothers! Mothers! Won’t you let Faust go?”† Did he sense some abnormal tie to mothers on the part of Faust? And as Faust continues to seek Helen through the Mothers, Mephistopheles cries, “Mother! Mothers! it is yours to give!�
� So something of importance is occurring beyond the achievement of Helen, something that makes the “Mothers” of ultimate importance. The form of forms participates in the universe of reproduction of the species. There is in the smile of the Giaconda on Leonardo’s canvas, though his insight is projected from the artist onto the painting. The one in whose womb life is created, the one who carries the implantation of new life, also has these powers such as intuition that alternate between knowledge and magic.
Here we must fall back upon the fundamental truth that Goethe, great poet that he was, possessed a degree of prescience, a capacity to speak from the unconscious depths of his society. The poets as well as the other artists of any culture tell us of myths that go quite beyond anything they consciously know. In this sense they are the predicters of the future. Wizards of femininity, they (the Mothers) must be rescued to help form and reform the new culture. The Mothers have, by nature of reproducing the race, whether they are conscious of it and take responsibility for it or not. They have the key to transformation as they had for the forming of the fetus in the womb at pregnancy.
But this Industrial Age is one of patriarchal power. Such power is gained by overcoming its competitors; it works by thrust, by attack, by mechanical activity. The seamy side of the Industrial Age is sweatshops, life-killing assembly lines, child and women labor, smoke-filled skies over Liverpool and Detroit, the whole arsenal of competitive, adversarial systems. The feminine characteristics ideally are receptivity rather than aggression, tenderness and creating rather than destroying.
Is Goethe doing penance for his worship of progress and for his epiphany of industry? Ostensibly he believed in this patriarchal gospel and he had a long drawn-out battle within his soul as to whether it was good or bad. Faust’s later building of the great dike to “give life to millions,” where he is on the creative side, is one aspect of the acting out of these beliefs.
Power, attack, the thrusting mode—all these are called, somewhat as a cliche to be sure, masculine and patriarchal. Goethe was in a paradox about this chief myth of modern times, which includes our time in the twentieth century as well as his. The paradox comes out of his poetic soul in dealing with the Mothers as the source of love, tenderness, caring, instead of toughness, cruelty, slaughter. Could the “magic” be the hope that the transformation could occur without great loss of life and without cruelty? The episode of the saving of Gretchen at the very end of the drama would seem to rectify Faust’s original cruelty; and the ultimate saving of Faust by having his immortal remains carried to heaven by flocks of angels—all this gives a positive answer to the question. Goethe may have meant it as an affirmative cheer for “progress”; this is the overall impact of this great poem. We take the drama here as a demonstration that sole patriarchal power is bound to come to grief. *