Faust Read Free

on the other hand, Mephisto’s suggestion may be only partially ironic, because it is aware of the “as if” condition of the stage. Mephisto’s radical critique opens unsuspected avenues into our minds and nerve centers. We are compelled to measure the distance between fantasy and quotidian reality and “get inside” the process of poetic transformation. We might indeed take upon ourselves a share of Faust’s own frustration:
                   
Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast
,
                   
each seeks to rule without the other
.
    (
1112–13
)
    as we come upon the one explicit and unironic expression of Faustian ambivalence.
    While a diversity of approaches to the
Faust
poem have, over the approximately century and a half of its existence, produced indispensable insights, critics with an all too single-minded perspective tended to obscure values that are accessible only to a different optic. The poem’s philosophical problems—for example, those having to do with the nature of truth and of cosmic governance—have been explored perhaps more intensively than any other aspect. Psychological analyses of the characters have been carried out, as well as researches dealing exclusively with the rich field of Faustian imagery. We are fortunate in having comparative studies dealing with the literary and spiritual influences that went into the composition of both parts of the poem. A considerable body of evidence also has been marshaled in support of the proposition that a far-reaching analogy exists between Goethe’s vision of life-forms in the earth’s flora—such as dicotyledonous plants—and the principles governing the structure
of Faust
.
    When all is said and done, however, the simple question, What is
Faust
about? is still capable of eliciting fresh responses, if only for the reason that by looking for meaning we are implicitly searching for some underlying coherence or for a metaphor that might convincingly convey a sense of structure. To find textual confirmation for one’s own intuited image of unity in
Faust
is the exhilarating reward of devoted study. Certainly, even after only a fleeting acquaintance, one must ask the question: What is it that keeps Faust dissatisfied, even though he has mastered allthe academic disciplines of his day? Why could he not be proud of his accomplishments and have faith in human progress like his redoubtable assistant Wagner? At least part of the answer may be found in the most concentrated symbol of Faust’s imperious need: the all-encompassing Moment, the
Augenblick
, that is the subject of the wager with Mephisto and the thematic undercurrent of the entire drama. To experience, in a single instant, the succession of events that mark our existence in time is equivalent to eliminating time altogether; it means an existence in a continuous present tense. As temporal creatures, nervously feeding a shortening future into a lengthening past, we attribute to the gods a timeless mode of being and an existence in total simultaneity. Therefore Faust’s craving for the “highest moment” really amounts to the ultimate
hubris;
he is reaching for more than mere superiority among men—more than Macbeth, who would be king, and more than Oedipus, the incomparable solver of riddles who
was
the king and came to know it too late. Faust reaches for divinity and is “hell-bent” to burst out of his imprisonment in temporality.
    Since Goethe’s death, in 1832, the Faust story, through its various transmutations, has become one of the central myths of the Western world. The theme fascinated composers like Wagner, Schumann, Berlioz, Gounod, Boito, and Mahler, all of whom created important operatic or orchestral scores inspired by Goethe’s drama. American writers have recently paid renewed attention to the earlier chapbook accounts. Stephen Vincent Benét’s play
The Devil and Daniel Webster
and the musical comedy
Damn