Goethe and his Faust

In Faust's opening monologue in 'Night', whose source material is mainly Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Faust rejects book learning in favour of magic. However, the positive lights towards which he then turns, first the moon shining outside his window, then the Macrocosm and Earth Spirit, evoke from him the language of eighteenth-century sensibility. Faust is interested primarily in his emotions, and his narrow gothic room, emblem of his dry intellectual world, offers no space for them to overflow.

Faust’s extreme subjectivity explains why the love affair with Margarete, so quickly displaces the original plot. The scene between Mephistopheles and the student adumbrates the turn to love, and after a brief traditional episode from the Faust chapbook in ‘Auerbach’s Tavern’ – into which Goethe inserts a few gratuitous love songs – the tumultuous love plot leaves ample scope for Faust’s titanic feelings. Faust’s speech welcoming the twilight in Gretchen’s room in ‘Evening’ echoes both the rhyme sounds and motifs of his first emotional speech to the moon. Thus Gretchen, disappears as an individual in the plethora of emotions and ideals Faust projects onto her. Her tragedy is that she does not really exist in the face of Faust’s subjectivity.

The more obvious aspect of her tragedy is that she is seduced and abandoned by a lover above her in rank. Faust is another of the well-meaning but undependable heroes of the bourgeois tragedies popularized in Germany by Lessing , and indeed the Gretchen tragedy is the most compelling example of the genre in Germany. Goethe himself had Werther commit suicide with a copy of Emilia Galotti open on his desk, so it is hardly far-fetched to see Faust in the role of Lessing’s indecisive prince, torn between ...

... middle of paper ...

... spirit, his magic powers are really to keep the play moving efficiently, as when he explains that Faust could dig in a field for eighty years instead of drinking the witch’s potion (2353–61). They also are a shorthand to express the basic relationships in the play: when Mephisto’s wine turns to fire in ‘Auerbach’s Tavern’ we recognize that wine is literally as well as figuratively ‘fire-water’ or ‘spirits’, and that everything in this play is to be understood allegorically. Even though God is ineffable, language and art in Faust carry meaning of the most important kind. Such certainty about the possibility of access to the order of the cosmos, however ineffable it may be, explains why Goethe can change the end of ‘Dungeon’; instead of ending with Mephisto’s condemnation of Gretchen, a voice from above declares her saved: in Part I Faust has become world theatre.