5 - Faust

Summary

COMMENTATORS ON GOETHE's dramatic work have often noted that he tends to focus on the workings of one particular sensibility and to explore whether that sensibility can be true to itself, can keep some kind of faith with the deepest promptings of his or her being. Although there may be an element of truth to this, plays such as Götz, Egmont, Iphigenie, and Tasso are dramas, not monologues. As the preceding chapter has suggested, the self has its antagonists, characters that are truly distinct, not mere extensions of the central subject. In other words: there is a world outside that self, a world of history, society, politics, institutions. Moreover, in his dramas, Goethe argues and understands through the medium of the theatre. In the discussion of Faust, we shall pay particular attention to this dimension.

To begin at the beginning: Goethe did not invent the Faust figure, nor did he invent the primary fable in which he appears. There was a real Faust, who was born some time around 1480. He seems to have made a living as a wandering scholar, practicing medicine, perhaps also hypnosis. He cast horoscopes and he no doubt dabbled in alchemy and magic. He was also a showman, a flamboyant and, in the eyes of many, disreputable, irreligious character. In a variety of ways, then, he was manifestly the kind of person to whom legends readily attach themselves. So, when in 1587 the prose chapbook Historia von D. Johann Fausten appeared in Frankfurt am Main, published by Johann Spies, it brought into narrative and psychological and theological focus a colorful cluster of stories, anecdotes, rumor, gossip that all had to do with the emergent restlessness of early modern European culture. The 1587 tale recounts how Faust, an arrogant intellectual and speculator of the elements and necromancer, sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for twenty-four years of service which give him access to all manner of erotic, social, and cosmological adventures. At the end of the allotted time he dies gruesomely, and his soul is forfeit. The story, not least because it concerned itself with a figure who was known to, and firmly anchored in, the popular imagination, caught on. It was translated into various languages, one being English, and came to the attention of Christopher Marlowe. It also provided the stuff of popular adaptations for the theatre and puppet shows.