Faust I & II, Volume 2: Goethe's Collected Works - Updated Edition (Princeton Classics) - Softcover

Von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691162298 ISBN 13: 9780691162294

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2014

Synopsis

One of the great classics of European literature, Faust is Goethe's most complex and profound work. To tell the dramatic and tragic story of one man’s pact with the Devil in exchange for knowledge and power, Goethe drew from an immense variety of cultural and historical material, and a wealth of poetic and theatrical traditions. What results is a tour de force illustrating Goethe’s own moral and artistic development, and a symbolic, cautionary tale of Western humanity striving restlessly and ruthlessly for progress.

Capturing the sense, poetic variety, and tonal range of the German original in present-day English, Stuart Atkins’s translation presents the formal and rhythmic dexterity of Faust in all its richness and beauty, without recourse to archaisms or interpretive elaborations.

Featuring a new introduction by David Wellbery, this Princeton Classics edition of Faust is the definitive English version of a timeless masterpiece.

About this title

About the Author

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was one of the greatest artists of the German Romantic period. He was a poet, playwright, novelist, and natural philosopher. David E. Wellbery is the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Faust I & II

By Johann Wolfgang von GOETHE, Stuart Atkins

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-16229-4

Contents

INTRODUCTION, xi, 
FAUST: A Tragedy, 
PART ONE, 
PART TWO, in Five Acts, 
Act I, 
Act II, 
Act III (Helen: Classico-Romantic Phantasmagoria. An Intermezzo), 
Act IV, 
Act V, 
Chronology of the Composition of Faust, 306, 
Goethe's Faust and the Present Translation, 307, 
Bibliographical Note, 314, 
Explanatory Notes, 315, 

INTRODUCTION

Due to its range and complexity, Goethe's Faust invites metaphors of all-inclusiveness. A vast continent, one is tempted to say, a world unto itself, a cosmos. World literature (a concept invented by Goethe) knows several encompassing works, but their formal principles typically make for easy survey. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are epics in twenty-four books, a pattern mimicked in Vergil's Aeneid, in which, of course, the number of books is halved. Dante's Divine Comedy unfolds in three parts, the cantos of each arranged according to theologically inspired symmetries. Milton's comparable world-historical poems yield cognate results. Moreover, all the mentioned works are cast in metrical patterns sustained from beginning to end. For Faust, a metrical jungle, no transparent principle of organization is available, and, for this reason, the reader engaging with the work for the first time (and the experienced reader, too) will do well to consult a map. Bare summary has its benefits. That's where we shall start.

Faust consists of two large, but asymmetrical parts. The first divides into what has come to be known as the "scholar's tragedy"—Faust's despair at attaining genuine knowledge, his near suicide, the formation of his alliance with the devil Mephistopheles—and the "Gretchen tragedy"—Faust's illicit and disastrous love affair with Margarete, called Gretchen. Between these two segments are wedged two transitional scenes, the zany "Witches Kitchen," in which the elderly Faust is rejuvenated by a magical potion, and the rowdy "Auerbach's Wine Cellar in Leipzig," a drinking bout that spills into violence. These two scenes anticipate the Satanic festival of "Walpurgis Night" that provides the Gretchen tragedy with its sexual subtext while delaying, in good Shakespearean fashion, the onset of the final catastrophe. The scholar's tragedy derives its internal coherence from Faust's mood swings, which find a kind of precarious stabilization in the agreement achieved between Faust and Mephistopheles. The Gretchen tragedy, by contrast, conducts the humble, inexperienced girl at its center to extremes of tragic experience worthy of an Oedipus or Lear.

Part Two of Faust is internally even more heterogeneous, consisting of five loosely connected acts, each of which takes place in a different sphere of experience. It opens with a scene titled "A Pleasant Landscape" that, although included within Act I, is clearly something like a metaphysical prelude to the entire second part. Faust, awakening from a healing sleep following the trauma of the Gretchen tragedy, attempts to look directly at the rising sun, the very source of life, but must turn away, temporarily blinded. This supplies the play with the central figure (blindness) of its tragic conclusion. Act I proper shows Faust at the Imperial Court, where, aided as always by Mephistopheles, he orchestrates entertainments, draws the shade of Helen of Troy from the abyss of the past, and pulls off a bit of financial wizardry (the invention of paper money).

Act II returns to Faust's Gothic study where the play began. Wagner, Faust's amanuensis and pedantic counterpart from Part One, has succeeded in creating a homunculus, a pure spirit whose only "body" is the test tube or "vial" he hops about in. We may take Homunculus, who becomes the leading character of Act II, as paradigmatic of the imaginary extravagance Goethe allows himself—and succeeds in making artistically necessary—throughout Part Two. As pure mind, Homunculus has telepathic talents and he puts them to use interpreting for us the dream unfolding in the mind of the sleeping Faust. No latency here: Faust's oneiric vision pictures the conception of Helen in the coital embrace of the swan-disguised Zeus and the bathing Leda. That dream gives the dramatic action its direction. Act II concludes with an elaborate "Classical Walpurgis Night" in which Faust, Mephistopheles, and Homunculus make their way across a series of encounters with somewhat obscure mythical figures. Mephistopheles finds his ancient counterpart among the one-eyed, one-toothed Phorcides. Homunculus, rejecting his purely mental existence, smashes his vial on the mollusk shell that transports the lovely Galatea over the waves. Absent from the stage, Faust sets off in search of Helen.

In Act III of Part Two, Faust finds himself in ancient Greece, where, in the guise of a late-medieval lord, he is joined in love with the beautiful but ghostly Helen only to see their offspring, Euphorion, fall from the cliffs to his death, at which point Helen too disappears. The act begins in the mode of Attic tragedy, transitions to Renaissance pastoral, and concludes as opera. The aesthetic theories of Goethe's time all revolved around the distinction between Classical (ancient) and Romantic (Christian, modern) forms of art and life. Viewed as a whole, Act III stages the momentary, but finally ill-fated synthesis of these historical-artistic worldviews. Act IV turns to the material forces that drive the modern world. Its subject is warfare and its dramatic action has Faust and Mephistopheles supply the technological and strategic innovations that secure victory for the emperor's forces. Faust's reward for this service is a swath of land at sea's edge, a province onto which he can impress his political will.

Consequently, in Act V Faust appears as a colonial lord who undertakes a vast project of engineering, both civil—building dikes to hold back the seas—and social—a utopian community of "autonomous" individuals. But Mephistophelian forces are at work here as well: piracy, slave labor, infernal flames. All of this ends with the murder of the ancient couple Philemon and Baucis, for which Faust bears responsibility, and then Faust's own death, when, blinded by Care, he mistakes the sound of the gravediggers' grim labor for the realization of his engineering enterprise. There follows a coda of sorts in which Faust's "immortal part" is snatched from Mephistopheles' grasp and borne upward through a medieval hierarchy of souls toward what appears to be a guiding feminine principle. Margarete makes her return as a penitent Beatrice serving as Faust's heavenly advocate and guide.

Our map must not neglect the fact that the entire work is introduced and framed by three extra-dramatic segments. The first is a poetic "Dedication," a puzzling designation since there is no dedicatee, no rhetoric of admiration and gratitude, nor plea for acceptance of the modest gift of the poetic work to follow. In fact, the dedicatory poem is inwardly directed, a meditation on the self-driven and ghostly nature of poetic creation. This is followed by a "Prelude on the Stage," a meta-theatrical episode that juxtaposes the views of Poet, Manager, and Player, the last mentioned clearly being a clown or fool. The operative fiction is that the play to follow is not yet complete, and the verbal exchanges among the three role-bearers bring out the clash of their individual conceptions of what a play should be. The reader is introduced to two essential principles of the entire Faust poem: the employment of ironic self-commentary and the juxtaposition of heterogeneous stylistic and ideological registers. The final preparatory segment is the "Prologue in Heaven," in which the three roles configured in the "Prelude" have metamorphosed into the triad of Archangels (Poet), Lord (Manager), and Mephistopheles (Player/Clown). If the "Prologue" provides the theological frame of the play (it recalls the dialogue between God and Satan in the Book of Job), it does so through a filter of irony and self-conscious theatricality. Nevertheless, the "Prologue" does introduce two concepts, the tense interplay of which will determine everything that follows: Faustian "striving" and Mephistophelian "negation." With these notions in place, the drama of Faust's life can commence.

For the reader who scans this map, the question that naturally comes to mind is: What is this Faust of Goethe's anyway? To what literary kind does it belong? Madame de Stael observed in her De l'Allemagne (1810) that the work belongs to no known genre, suggesting, somewhat desperately, that it is best considered the formless "dream" of its genius author. This stab-in-the-dark judgment is all the more notable because when de Stael wrote her influential defense of German letters the only published portion of Faust at hand was the relatively plot-driven Part One, which had appeared in 1808. Had she known Part Two, completed just six months before the poet's death on March 22, 1832, her perplexity would doubtless have been greater still. Here, every remnant of dramatic intrigue is cast aside and each of the five acts seems independent, a world unto itself. The "tragedy," as Goethe himself labeled the work, unfolds with the sweep of epic, although it obviously diverges from the pattern established by Homer and Virgil and modified by Ariosto, Milton, and Klopstock. An additional twist to the question of genre stems from the work's thoroughgoing lyrical intensity. From Margarete's folk-song tone in Part One, to Faust's artful love lyric in Act III of Part Two, to the visionary canticle of the Chorus Mysticus that sounds the play's last note, Goethe pulls out all the stops of lyrical expressivity. Should we infer, as some critics have, that Faust is a ragout, a stew in which float chunks of every literary kind? The gamut of styles Goethe draws on—from blank obscenity to mystical conceit, from ceremonious rhetoric to deeply personal lyricism, from learned allusion to ludic nonsense—would seem to support this assessment.

An alternative view is suggested by a thought Goethe advanced in the historical-critical treatise appended to his West-East Divan (1819). There he famously hypothesizes that beneath the apparently boundless variety of poetic conventions just three "natural forms" or modes establish the coordinates of verbal art: lucid narration, enthusiastic excitement, and personal engagement in an unfolding action. These abstract types achieve their most familiar embodiments as, respectively, epic, lyric, and drama. The thought culminates in the claim that the three modes, together with their various intermediate stages, constitute a "system" or "circle," much like the circular array of colors Goethe identified in his optical studies. Moreover, according to Goethe's account in the Divan treatise, individual poetic works can combine all three modes, the ballad and Attic tragedy being prominent examples of such fusion. The relevance of this to Faust is evident. Goethe's highly original genre theory supports the contention that Faust be regarded as a synthesis of poetry's three natural forms, along with their transitional or hybrid phases. Bending Madame de Stael's surmise toward a meaning she never intended, we might say that Faust is the dream of poetry in its totality. Its ambition is to reflect the full spectrum of possibilities intrinsic to the literary traditions Goethe so assiduously and productively labored to inherit. On its surface the work may seem farraginous, but its sponsoring vision is deeply holistic.

That vision, it is important to emphasize, was not there from the beginning. It realized itself across a protracted genesis, the phases of which punctuated some sixty years of Goethe's mature life. Four major periods of concentrated creativity can be distinguished. The initial period falls within the years 1772 to 1775. Goethe, born in 1749, was in the storm-and-stress exuberance out of which his historical play Götz von Berlichingen (1773) and his epistolary novel The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774), as well as some of the most memorable poems in the German language emerged. During that effervescent time he sketched plans for several plays tracing the destinies of exceptional individuals whose vocations shattered the conventions of their age. Dramatic fragments on Mohammed, Caesar, Socrates, and Prometheus testify to the feverish productivity characteristic of this phase of Goethe's artistic life. Of these early dramatic designs, the furthest advanced is a Faust fragment spectacularly discovered in 1887 among the papers of a certain Luise von Göschhausen, a Weimar lady-in-waiting who had made a copy from Goethe's own manuscript. This early version—the so-called Urfaust—contains the core scenes of the Gretchen tragedy of Part One, most of which found their way with surprisingly few alterations into the text that Goethe later published.

Goethe's literary mentor at this time was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1802), whose views had liberated the young poet from the supercilious artificiality of rococo playfulness and drawn his astonished attention both to the expressive power of folk poetry and to the amplitude of human experience that Shakespeare's dramas bring to the stage. Shakespeare became Goethe's model and "nature" his mantra for everything wonting in contemporary culture: original invention, emotional authenticity, the heights and depths of human possibility. Such was his state of mind when Goethe seized on the story of the late-medieval magician Faust, whose exploits he condensed into a searing love story rendered in a swiftly paced suite of momentary scenes.

This brings us to the second phase in the work's evolution. In 1775, Goethe accepted the invitation of the young Archduke Karl August to move to the small city of Weimar where the ducal court of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach is located. Apart from occasional journeys, Goethe would spend the remainder of his life there, acquiring a daunting portfolio of administrative positions that earned him the status of privy councilor. Goethe's manifold achievements in Weimar public life (it is fair to say that he transformed the provincial town into a center of European culture) are a story unto itself. That story concerns us here only insofar as the demands of his new position prevented Goethe from completing major literary projects. Thus, his Faust remained untouched while its author was preoccupied with worldly matters, taking up new interests and forging important personal relationships.

Then, in September of 1786, Goethe suddenly, and unbeknownst even to the Archduke, set out for Italy, where he remained until May of 1788. Goethe himself referred to his Italian sojourn as a "rebirth," and one might even say that he went there with the intention of making himself anew. His Italian Journey, based on his diaries and correspondence from the time, but written and edited between 1813 and 1817, gives a full account of this process of self-education beneath the Italian sky and in the presence of unimaginable natural and artistic abundance. Here, Goethe elaborated what is often referred to as his "classicism": a unified view of art, nature, and society that he would draw on, expand, and deepen for the remainder of his life. It was in Italy that Goethe encountered many of the paintings that would be alluded to in the immense cultural tapestry woven into Part Two of Faust. And it was in Italy that he grasped for the first time the lawful character of natural transformation, what he would later call "metamorphosis," the leading idea of the breathtaking array of scientific studies he pursued throughout his life.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Faust I & II by Johann Wolfgang von GOETHE, Stuart Atkins. Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0691162298
• ISBN 13: 9780691162294
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 360