Authors: Rollo May
The Cry for Myth (28 page)
Faust:
When you are labeled Lord of
Flies, corrupters, liars.
All right—who are you, then?
Mephistopheles: …
Part of that force which would
Do ever evil, and does ever good.
Goethe,
Faust
W
HEN WE HEAR THE NAME
“Faust” in our day, we immediately assume the speaker is referring to Goethe’s great drama. This masterpiece occupied Goethe, who lived during the Enlightenment in Germany, his whole life long, and he finished it only when he was in his early eighties. It was his work of destiny, as Schiller, in the heated correspondence between these two giants of literature, kept insisting to Goethe. This telling of the myth is great because it is done in such wonderful poetry; everyone seems to quote from this aesthetic triumph.
The drama is great also because it deals with the profound and forever-new problems of how we should live. Faust is a philosophical poem in that it centers on what life could be—its temptations, its catastrophes, and its joys. Goethe asks the profound
questions, What is life and what are damnation and salvation? As a great humanist, he seeks at every point to deal with the question, What does it mean to be a human being?
Goethe’s
Faust
is a poignant and powerful expression of the myth of our modern age in which people yearn to believe that the God of progress—our great machines, our vast technology, our supernational corporations, now even our nuclear weapons—all these, we yearn to believe, will have a beneficent effect upon us and will bring vast gains to humanity. Goethe was caught up in this dilemma, as were his confreres in the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. On his desk he kept a model of the new steam engine and its track which stretched from Liverpool to Bath as a constant symbol of this great hope.
This myth grips the minds of people today because it demonstrates that evil, which in the puppet shows expressed Marlowe’s fierce damnation in a literal hell, is now changed in Goethe’s poem to good. This amazing tour de force is revealed early in Goethe’s drama when Faust demands to know who Mephistopheles is. The devil answers that he is the spirit which seeks to do evil but it always turns to good. Yes, Satan is the apostle of strife, intense activity, even cruelty, but he still ends up after the killings in goodness, according to Goethe’s position here.
The intelligentsia of Europe respected Goethe as their titular head. Indeed, Matthew Arnold wrote of him at his death,
When Goethe’s death was told, we said:
Sunk, then, is Europe’s sagest head;
Goethe has done his pilgrimage.
Physician of the iron age.
*
He took the suffering human race,
He read each wound, each weakness clear;
And struck his finger on the place,
And said, “Thou ailest here, and here!”
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
.
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;
Is this why Ortega wrote that Goethe had never really found himself, never lived out his own indigenous form, his true destiny in life?
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.
