Interlude XLV. Faust + Lucile

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XLIV. Foucault - part 23

About Faust by Goethe...

p 715-6 - “Almost four hundred years after his debut [in “Johann Spiess’s Faustbuch of 1587 and Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus a year later”], Faust continues to grip the modern imagination...”

-Marshall Berman

Goethe started writing Faust around 1772, when he was a young university student/graduate and filled with wild new ideas that would come to fall within the Sturm und Drang school of German Romanticism. The Ur-Faust remained mere fragments of a much larger dramatic work until around 1800 when Schiller (Goethe’s literary co-conspirator) finally persuaded him to complete (more or less) the first part of the work. Then the work again lay fallow (Schiller was dead now) as literary and political history proceeded apace into the 1820s. Finally, around 1830, not long before he died, Goethe took up the project again and wrote part 2.

In 1775 Goethe lived in the intellectual shadow of Voltaire, by 1830 Goethe was the acknowledged intellectual master of the age. He was 55 years older and he had lived through the whole of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic adventure. What he wrote as Part 2 of Faust is as bat-shit crazy as anything Bataille or Foucault could have come up with. For starters, he took his 16th century hero (and Mephisto, Faust's satanic Sancho Panza) back in time to a fever dream version of Mythological Greece... it’s like Edith Hamilton on a really bad Acid trip.

Why? is the first question that pops into your head as you get started on this part of the book. And here I should probably mention that Goethe was entirely happy with his Faust being confusing. 

p 544 - Goethe 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!

Goethe refused to assist the reader or explain what he had in mind (assuming he had something specific in mind). He wanted it to be a free-for-all of interpretation and in this he was spectacularly successful. But, for why he went Classical Greece, there actually is a pretty simple explanation. Around this time the German Edith Hamilton (Benjamin Hederich, I think) had translated a great deal of Greek mythology -- which had previously been in Greek or Latin and hard to find -- into German. This became something of a national sensation and introduced the reading world (Goethe’s audience) to a (sometimes confused) view of Greek myth. Goethe, here, is mostly drawing on Hederich (?) to balance his story which otherwise would be grounded only in the Christian and Alchemist tradition of more recent Europe. Greek myth for Goethe (and for Foucault) seems to be a way of thinking outside the Christian box.

An overview.

PART 2: ACT II

Laboratory (3820/194): With the help of Mephistopheles, Faust's assistant Wagner creates Homunculus ("little man" in Latin, Hamlin 418) who sees Faust's dream of Helena's conception--when Zeus, disguised as a swan, seduced Queen Leda (6905/196)  [carnal bestiality, again]. In this way, Faust is--as in "Charming Landscape," the opening scene of Act I--again unconscious (Hamlin 415).

Classical Walpurgis Night (7005/199) is another symbolic interlude. Hamlin suggests that events in this scene represent "processes in nature" (422). This scene takes place in Classical Greece, first

On the Upper Peneios (7080/202) [a river in northern Greece], where Mephistopheles encounters the Sphinx, a creature with the head and upper body of a woman, and [lower] body of a lion. Faust appears in order to ask Mephistopheles for advice on how to find Helena of Troy, and the Sphinx tells him to try the centaur (half man, half horse) Chiron, who was her tutor (7200/205). Then the action changes to

The Lower Peneios (7250/207), where Faust finds himself surrounded by goddesses of the sea, nymphs. He again has a vision of Helena's conception (7295/208), perhaps because she is queen of the nymphs (Hamlin fn. 3). The centaur Chiron lets Faust ride on him so that he might search for Helen, and he introduces Faust to Manto, a soothsayer who tells Faust to look for Helen in the underworld (7470/212). Then the action returns to

The Upper Peneios, as before (7495/214), where an earthquake occurs. Hamlin notes that the earthquake and role of Seismos here indicate “Goethe’s scientific views and the contexts of natural science during his lifetime” (Hamlin 429), namely that subterranean volcanic explosions are responsible for the Earth’s topography. Hamlin attributes the fight between the pygmies, cranes, emmets, and dactyls (7606/217) as "an allegory for the violence and warfare in Europe during the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic campaigns" (430). Mephistopheles encounters the Lamiae (7695/219), which resemble vampires in their need for human blood, and then Homunculus, whom he addresses as "Sparkleface" (7830/222). Homunculus is searching, like Faust, for "the finest manner of becoming" (7830/222). In the conclusion of this scene, Mephistopheles meets some hags, and in lending them one of his eyes and a tooth, becomes ugly like them.

Rocky Inlets of the Aegean Sea (8035/228) includes the festival of the Aegean Sea, which culminates in the triumph of Galatea. Nereus, old man of the sea and father of Galatea, refuses to help Homunculus but introduces him to Proteus, who transforms into a dolphin that Homunculus rides (8325/235). According to Hamlin, in Classical mythology, Galatea was a sea nymph in love with Acis; the Cyclops Polyphemus fell in love with her, killed Acis by smashing him with a boulder, but a stream of water came out, joining the lovers (438). Here Galatea arrives riding the shell of Aphrodite, and like Acis, Homunculus joins her in death. In order to be with her, his glass shell breaks, and he dies (8470/239). Brown identifies Galatea as "the historicized goddess of beauty and therefore the spiritual equivalent of Helen and embodiment of perfect form" (181).

-Source

References to: Hamlin, Cyrus. "Interpretive Notes." Faust. Trans. W. Arnold. NY: W. W. Norton, 2001. 345-491. This is also the source for all my quotes below and at the top.

p 564 - Heinrich Heine [(1797 – 1856)] 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. [Also the age of Bosch and Erasmus] 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.”

At the Other Cafe.

The always welcome sounds of Lucile on the sound system here. (YES! Lucille   has a Wiki page) This version of “The Thrill Is Gone” is a little unsettling as it is BB King by himself, while I’m used to almost the same song but with Tracy Chapman doing most of the singing [link here]. You get used to even the slightest nuances of a song, much less a duet with another artist with a very distinctive voice. It took me a long time to get used to the BBC Sessions versions of Led Zeppelin's hits but now anything else sounds wrong to me.

By a pretty shocking coincidence (or something) the currently on-going painting of the outside of my building would be complete now except that Tracy Chapman is a diva when it comes to dealing with contractors -- in this case the same little painting company working on our building was delayed starting our project because they were also working on her house. And after over four weeks of having painters scraping and pounding on our walls, the thrill is definitely gone.

Next: Interlude XLVI. Foucault - part 24.

Autumn X-XI. Cosmogony and Brave New World

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Autumn IX. Scientific positivism

X. Cosmogony

It may well be that what we call the unknowable will be for ever the unknown. In that thought is there not a pathos beyond words? It may be that the human race will live and pass away; all mankind, from him who in the world’s dawn first shaped to his fearful mind an image of the Lord of Life, to him who, in the dusking twighlight of the last age, shall crouch before a deity of stone or wood; and never one of that long lineage have learnt the wherefore of his being. The prophets, and martyrs, their noble anguish vain and meaningless; the wise whose thought strove to eternity, and was but an idle dream; the pure of heart whose life was a vision of the living God, the suffering and the mourners whose solace was in a world to come, the victims of injustice who cried to the Judge Supreme -- all gone down into silence, and the globe that bare them circling dead and cold through soundless space. The most tragic aspect of such a tragedy is that it is not unthinkable. The soul revolts, but dare not see in this revolt the assurance of its higher destiny. Viewing our life thus, is it not easier to believe that the tragedy is played with no spectator? And of a truth, of a truth, what spectator can there be? The day may come when, to all who live, the Name of Names will be but an empty symbol, rejected by reason and by faith. Yet the tragedy will be played on.

It is not, I say, unthinkable; but that is not the same thing as to declare that life has no meaning beyond the sense it bears to human intelligence. The intelligence itself rejects such a supposition; in my case, with impatience and scorn. No theory of the world which ever came to my knowledge is to me for one moment acceptable; the possibility of an explanation which would set my mind at rest is to me inconceivable; no whit the less am I convinced that there is a Reason of the All; one which transcends my understanding, one no glimmer of which will ever touch my apprehension; a Reason which must imply a creative power, and therefore, even whilst a necessity of my thought, is by the same criticized into nothing. A like antimony with that which affects our conception of the infinite in time and space. Whether the rational processes have reached their final development, who shall say? Perhaps what seem to us the impassable limits of thought are but the conditions of a yet early stage in the history of man. Those who make them a proof of a “future state” must necessarily suppose gradations in that futurity; does the savage, scarce risen above the brute, enter upon the same “new life” as the man of highest civilization? Such gropings of the mind certify our ignorance: the strange thing is that they can be held by any one to demonstrate that our ignorance is final knowledge.

XI. Brave New World

Yet that, perhaps, will be the mind of coming man; if not the final attainment of his intellectual progress, at all events a long period of self-satisfaction, assumed as finality. We talk of the “ever aspiring soul”; 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... 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.

Alpha.

Wow. This really is Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World. And you can see Settembrini arguing for, and Naphta against, this idea in The Magic Mountain. And that “suffering and sorrow are the great Doctors of Metaphysic” is why Settembrini is so wary of Hans’ reverence for death and illness. But this also brings up the question of why I’ve always been so interested in cosmogony? You can’t get much more healthy and free of suffering and sorrow then I’ve been. I can’t explain it except to say I was apparently born that way.

Here Gissing seems to me to set the stage for both Brave New World and The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq. Both the Gissing, and this quote from Heinrich Heine (from Faust by Goethe, The Norton Critical Edition, page 564)...

...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....

...set the stage for The Magic Mountain. All these books are really about the same thing. And Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, would trace this trend toward positivism, 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)

Next: Autumn XII. Death and dying.