INTRODUCTION

Due to its range and complexity, Goethe’s Faust invites metaphors of all-in-clusiveness. A vast continent, one is tempted to say, a world unto itself, a cosmos. World literature (a concept invented by Goethe) knows several en-compassing 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 counter-part 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 meta-morphosed 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.

The Italian sojourn afforded Goethe the sustained concentration needed to resume the various literary projects he had been unable to complete in Weimar. Most important from our perspective was the work on what would become his series of “classical” dramas. Iphigenia in Tauris was recast in verse, the historical drama Egmont was brought to completion, and work on the play Torquato Tasso advanced, although it would only be finished after Goethe’s return to Weimar. In Italy, Goethe came to view his career as an unfolding unity and began to assemble an edition of his collected writings. In this context he returned to the Faust drama begun in the early 1770s, a work stylistically and, for that matter, ideologically quite distant from his newly earned sense of classical moderation. Nonetheless, he drafted a plan for the entire play and began a labor of expansion and alteration that lasted until January of 1790, when he sent a manuscript entitled Faust. A Fragment to his publisher. The Fragment rearranges the Urfaust sequence and supplements it with new scenes, notably the magical rejuvenation of “Witch’s Kitchen.” “Auerbach’s Wine-Cellar in Leipzig” is rendered in verse and—surprisingly—the final “Prison” scene is excised, thus breaking off Margarete’s tragedy with the dramatically impressive, but inconclusive scene titled “Cathedral.” The first generation of Faust readers, a generation that included the early Romantics, encountered the drama in this fragmentary form.

Beginning in the mid-1790s, Goethe again resumed work on Faust. This is the period of what might be called his “programmatic classicism”: the collaboration with Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), the publication of his second novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795/96), as well as the novella collection Conversations of German Refugees (1795), and the modern (or bourgeois) epic poem in hexameters Hermann and Dorothea (1797). It is also a time of intense scientific activity. Goethe’s Morphology of Plants had appeared in 1790, followed by his Contributions on Optics (1791–92) that would, after much experimental work, flow into the brilliant Theory of Colors (1810) mentioned in passing above. During this period, Goethe promulgated his systematic views on art in the periodical Propylaea (1798–1800), co-edited with his most important mentor in matters of the visual arts, the Swiss painter/writer Johann Heinrich Meyer (1760–1832).

In the background of this cultural-scientific program, of course, lurked the French Revolution and its aftermath, soon to spill over into the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) that would change the face of Europe. Goethe’s work on the Faust project during this period included the addition of the “Dedication” and the “Prelude on the Stage” and the gradual solution of the delicate problem of Faust’s “wager” with the devil. The “Prison” scene was reintegrated into the drama, its drastic emotionality now tempered by rhymed verse. During the first years of the new century, virtually all of Part One found its final form, a plan for Part Two was sketched, and even a quite polished first version of what would become Act III of Part Two was composed. Publication was delayed, however, as the turbulence of war—in 1805/6 Napoleon’s troops defeated the Austrians at Austerlitz and the Prussians at Jena—spilled into Goethe’s own life. When Faust Part One did appear in 1808 in the new edition of Goethe’s Works, the Holy Roman Empire, which had defined the political order of Central Europe for more than a thousand years, had come to an end.

In the main, the composition of Part Two of Faust fell between the years 1825–1831. It is, then, the work of a man in the eighth decade of his life. The productivity of Goethe’s late years is awesome to behold. At the age of sixty he brought out his profound and intricate novel, Elective Affinities (1809). At seventy he published his greatest lyric achievement, the cycle in the spirit of classical Persian poetry, West-East Divan (1819). His scientific work, issued regularly between 1817 and 1824 in the serial On Morphology, achieved an international following. A second serial, On Art and Antiquity, appeared in six compendious volumes between 1816 and 1832. And in 1829, the definitive version of his fourth novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, reached its uncomprehending readers. Throughout this last phase of his life, a phase that knew both serious illness and shattering personal loss, Goethe maintained that the completion of Faust II was his “main piece of business.” In August of 1831, almost eighty-two years to the day from his birth, Goethe wrapped up and sealed the package containing his Faust manuscript. He would not live to see it published. The year of the poet’s death had not yet passed, though, when Faust II appeared as the first volume of the Posthumous Works.

As the foregoing brief narrative of the work’s genesis demonstrates, Goethe’s Faust unites diverse temporal strata within its finished form. However, not only Goethe’s personal history—his maturation, loves, travels, and artistic projects—influences the shaping of the play. In the course of the work’s arduous production, the European world, too, was utterly transformed: politically, scientifically, economically, philosophically, and aesthetically. These changes, refracted through one of the most expansive and agile minds Europe has ever known, enter into the Faust drama and achieve there a complex, and yet internally consistent, fictional embodiment. For this reason, it is often said that Goethe’s Faust is the poem of modernity. The thought is that the entire work is sustained by a forward-moving drive epitomized in that key word introduced in the “Prologue in Heaven”: striving (Streben). Faust’s character consists of just this: that he incessantly reaches beyond the satisfactions of the present moment, that he shakes off inherited structures of thought and morality, that his every accomplishment is merely the platform for the next undertaking. Whereas dramatic characters are typically defined by the substantive goals they pursue, for Faust, pursuit itself, regardless of goal, is primary. Exactly this open-endedness, this movement of self-transcendence, is the form of modern subjectivity. Aristotle had imagined that every being—including humankind—is endowed with a goal toward which its efforts are directed and the attainment of which is its unique perfection. This concept of a universe of preordained “places,” in which action realizes its purpose and thereby achieves rest and fulfillment, was carried over into the Christian Middle Ages. With modernity, however, the closed universe opens onto infinity. In the anthropology of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the Aristotelian principle of internal purpose (entelechy) is replaced by a principle of self-aggrandizement that Hobbes called “restless desire.” Such restlessness is at the center of the philosophies of subjectivity that were formulated by Goethe’s contemporaries. It is recognizable, for example, in Fichte’s notion of the subject as self-constituting activity, in Hegel’s notion of negativity, in Schopenhauer’s concept of Will. Faust is an exploration of how human life unfolds when it emancipates itself from the ordinations of tradition and embarks on a project of energetic self-assertion and self-optimization. The decisive point, of course, is that Goethe stages the dynamic of modernity that his protagonist embodies as a tragic process.

The examination of a single thread of its intricate fabric must suffice here to illustrate how the poem gives tragic shape to the transformation of the world modernity brings about. In the scene entitled “Forest and Cave,” Faust compares himself to a mountain “cataract” crashing down from the heights and sweeping the idyllic “cottage” that symbolizes Margarete’s life into ruin. The metaphor has its immediate pertinence within the disastrous love story of the so-called Gretchen tragedy. But in the course of the entire poem, the shattering effect Faust’s passion has on Margarete’s world comes to exemplify a more encompassing cataclysm: European man’s self-emancipation from a world order at once cosmic, religious, and political. The manifold effects of this historical process—from a volatile economy of credit to the violence of mechanized warfare, from colonization to forced resettlements—are unfolded across Part Two. In the figure of Faust, modernity is imagined as a thirst that won’t be slaked, a process of creative destruction. In “Forest and Cave,” Faust figures his condition as one of metaphysical “homelessness” (3348). We may interpret this to mean a self-willed exile from the world as the site of hospitality and welcome. Such is Goethe’s account of modern subjectivity. Once this is seen, we can comprehend why the play’s final act begins by summoning from the depths of time the mythic couple Philemon and Baucis.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the elderly husband and wife are the paradigm of hospitality; the gods Jupiter and Mercury, pausing at the pair’s impoverished cottage to request refreshment, recognize that there is no richer gift than the couple’s spontaneous generosity. But Goethe evokes the mythic couple to an altogether different dramatic effect. The opening sequence of Act V shows the torching of their cottage merely because Faust covets their little piece of real estate. The sweet death that Ovid’s story affords Philemon and Baucis is replaced in Goethe’s drama by their murder at the hands of Mephistopheles’ thugs. Thus, Margarete’s ruination, which derives from the earliest stage of the poem’s composition, is mirrored in the immolation of the gentle couple’s cottage, conceived probably during the first months of 1831. The thought that finds its way to poetic articulation across sixty years of creative life is, finally, a single thought. Modernity explodes the very idea of the world as hospitable home. It deprives us of the experience of the world as a gift and chokes the pious gratitude that responds to such experience. This is merely one strand of Goethe’s synthetic achievement, but it provides an important clue for the reader. For what the exfoliation of the cottage metaphor shows is that the implacable logic governing both parts of the Faust tragedy is rooted in the insatiable character of Faustian striving.

From its beginnings in the sixteenth century (the first chapbook relating Faust’s bargain with the devil appeared in 1587), the Faust legend gave voice to a broadly shared anxiety that hunger for worldly knowledge and power could displace humankind’s most urgent concern, preparation for eternal salvation. The story of Faust’s pact with the devil was clearly meant as a cautionary tale. However, already in Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy (ca. 1590), especially in the conjuring of Helen of Troy, the rewards of magical empowerment are so compellingly imagined as to threaten subversion of the plot’s moral and theological point. Even in the chapbook’s final scene, which shows a Faustus rueful of his horrible error and eager to convince his fellow academics not to follow his example, the moralizing has a tinny ring. Ambivalence of this sort, oscillating between vicarious delight and terror, is the source of myth. The chiaroscuro of fascination provokes a cultural repetition compulsion, the incapacity to be done with the tale once and for all. The cultural life of myth consists in transformative retelling. Since Johann Spiess published his chapbook in 1587, Faust’s story has been reconceived countless times in virtually every literary form and with multiple refractions in image and music. Goethe made his first acquaintance with the legend in a puppet show; Heinrich Heine recast it as a “dance poem”; today the mythic complex is elaborated in a series of lurid comics. As the critic Ian Watt observed, the modern world has produced few myths of such abiding appeal. Perhaps only the legend of Don Juan evinces comparable regenerative potency.

Throughout its variegated history, the idea of a pact or contract has remained the myth’s foundational premise, motivating both the devil’s service during Faust’s exploits and the frightening dénouement. This narrative device, however, becomes increasingly difficult to deploy as the progressive disenchantment of the world hollows out belief in the devil’s personal existence. Thomas Mann’s novel Dr. Faustus (1948) is a telling example. There the contract is still in place; the price the Faustus figure must pay for unheard-of artistic inspiration is the hell of syphilitic madness. However, Mann attenuates the premise of devil and pact with such irony that readers understand it as a self-consciously employed fiction, an extended metaphor for historical horrors so extreme as to defy literal depiction. A second historical tendency in the evolution of the Faust myth likewise comes to the fore in Mann’s novel. The protagonist is no longer classifiable simply as a sinner. To be sure, he is deeply flawed by what seems an inborn coldness or incapacity to love, but his aspirations are nevertheless directed toward the highest cultural values, and his unstinting refusal of compromise is meant to elicit the reader’s respect. Indeed, the very features that render Mann’s Faustus figure admirable are at the source of his transgression.

The historical record shows, then, that a myth born out of a straightforward moral and theological parsing of the world achieves its most artistically distinguished reinventions in the mode of ironic distance and moral complexity. This holds for Goethe’s drama as much as for Mann’s novel. In fact, Goethe transforms the structural core of the mythic precedent with two richly significant inventions. He replaces the traditional pact with a wager and he grants his protagonist, despite the human wreckage left in his wake, an ambiguous salvation. Interpretive controversy surrounding these two innovations continues unabated.

Each reader will arrive at her own understanding of the wager between Faust and Mephistopheles, but a few general observations may usefully highlight its structural significance. Goethe’s recasting of the traditional pact as a wager transforms the temporal horizon of the mythic story line. The pact not only fixed a definite time limit to Faustus’ devil-enabled exploits, it also rendered the final outcome, damnation, ineluctable. The crucial property of a wager, however, is that the result is not settled in advance. Futurity thus acquires an insistent presence in the poem. In observing this, we are not merely viewing the work from the outside, but addressing one of its most pervasive thematic concerns. Goethe’s Faust is about being in-time, about the dynamics of process and the way desire propels us beyond whatever moment we happen to occupy. According to the conditions laid down in the wager, what will decide the winner (and loser) is Faust’s relationship to time:

If I should ever say to any moment:

Tarry, remain!—you are so fair!

then you may lay your fetters on me,

then I will gladly be destroyed. (1699–1702)

The semantic density of the passage defies explication. Faust is clearly betting on the unquenchable character of his striving, on the drive thrusting him ever onward. However, by rejecting what to his eyes appears as stasis or merely finite satisfaction, he may be foreclosing the possibility of experiencing the fullness of life (happiness), or beauty, or love, all of which require wholehearted investment in the present. Striving contains the potential for destruction and betrayal, and this potential too is built into the terms of cooperation to which Faust and Mephistopheles agree. In this sense, the wager ties the knot of tragic complication that leads to Margarete’s horrible fate in Part One and to the death of Philemon and Baucis in Part Two.

Because it lays down criteria for deciding the dramatic outcome, the wager focuses the reader’s attention especially on those aspects of the action relevant to the question of Faust’s desire and its relation to time. In the course of the play, three scenes occur when the fullness of the present moment seems close at hand. They are the moments of the play’s greatest dramatic urgency. In the “Prison” scene of Part One, Margarete, summoned out of her madness by the voice of her beloved, echoes the language of the wager with her plea: “Don’t hurry! Stay!” (4479). Her love, in contradistinction to Faust’s, seems capable of unconditional investment in the present moment. Of course, the day of her execution has already begun to dawn and hers is a wild, unrealizable wish. Nevertheless, it fleetingly evokes the possibility of the experience of time Faust had excluded for himself. And the final vision of the play will transform Margarete’s love into a spiritual-cosmic force, as if love lived completely were the very source of salvation.

Love in a more classical and idealistic (albeit no less erotic) register is at the center of the second experience in which fulfillment, although so near, slips tragically out of reach. It occurs in Act III, the very apex of Part Two. There, Faust and Helen spell out the temporal theme as a lesson in rhyme:

FAUST. There is no past or future in an hour like this, The present moment only

HELEN. is our bliss. (9381–82)

Just as in the “Prison” scene the executioner’s approach had compelled Faust to flee, in Act III the advance of Menelaus’ troops prevents the moment from achieving fruition. The dramatic parallelism is further secured by the fact that in both cases it is Mephistopheles who plays the role of interrupting messenger, suggesting that this sort of fulfillment is not the one he was betting on. Suffice it to remark that the union of Faust and Helen does finally take place after a bit of colonial warfare has dispersed the jealous Menelaus’ warriors. The site of the couple’s accomplished bliss, however, is a transparently fictional Arcadia. In Faust, even imaginary idylls must be shattered. The issue of Faust’s and Helen’s mythic-historical embrace, the high-spirited Euphorion, rejects the artificial enclosure and endeavors—Faust-like—to break out. The result is that Euphorion (in a scene reminiscent of the Faustian cataract) falls to his ruin from the cliffs of Faust’s Arcadian refuge.

The final emphatic reference to the terms of the wager occurs in Faust’s dying words. The blind and aged Faust mistakes the clanking of the gravediggers’ shovels for the realization of his land reclamation project. His vision of a free people on open ground (kindred to the vision tradition attributed to the blind and dying Moses) culminates in a counterfactual surmise that repeats the formula of the wager:

If only I might see that people’s teeming life,
Share their autonomy on unencumbered soil,
Then, to the moment, I could say:

Tarry a while, you are so fair—(11,579–11,582)

Is this, as Mephistopheles claims, Faust’s “final, mediocre, empty moment” (11,589) or can we make out here, and in the other comparable moments (Margarete, Helen), the shape of meaningful human aspiration? In each case, the ironies are rich and Mephistopheles is quick to supply a deflationary interpretation. Mephistopheles’ assessment, however, is vitiated when Faust’s soul (if that’s what it is) is snatched from Mephistopheles’ grasp in the burlesque scene of Faust’s interment. Then the misterioso coda of the scene “Mountain Gorges” ends the play in a vision of endless becoming. That seems to confirm, post-mortally, Faust’s claim to ceaseless striving while showing that wager and salvation, Goethe’s major innovations to the Faust myth, are inextricably intertwined. But the picture of salvation at the conclusion of Faust comes so unexpectedly, and is so ironic and tentative, that a straightforward interpretation in terms of institutional religion is foreclosed. Goethe’s Faust is held together by a synthetic religious-philosophical conception, but it is a conception unique to the poem and therefore accessible to us only via the poem’s imaginative network.

The poetic thinking that achieves itself in Faust operates with parallelisms that mirror one phase of the poem in another. This structural device solicits a process of comparative reflection that gradually draws conceptual clarity out of the similarities and differences the focused parallelism brings out. We saw this with regard to the figure of the “cottage,” metaphorically applied to Gretchen and literally applied in the case of Philemon and Baucis. In fact, though, the entire poem is an intricate weave of “answering counter-images,” as Goethe himself called such correspondent moments, and this is what makes its interpretation at once so exhilarating and so difficult.

The instance of parallelism to which I wish to call attention conjoins the scene of Faust’s near suicide at the end of the long scene “Night” and the account of Homunculus’ self-sacrifice in Act II of Part Two. Phrasing the matter this way already highlights the comparability of the two moments, but of course the concrete linkage—the signal of similarity—is provided by the “vial” (690) that in “Night” contains the poison and in Act II (6870) harbors the incorporeal Homunculus. The correspondence can seem contingent (an accident of word choice) until one realizes that Faust’s suicide fantasy imagines release from the clunky encumbrance of corporeality. He envisions himself elevated to a state of “pure activity” (705). Suicide, then, is the wrong term. It’s not death he wants, but a higher life, a life as mindedness, as the sheer movement of light. And this, of course, is just what Wagner has produced in his laboratory, obviating the “old-fashioned” (6838) folly of natural procreation. Faust’s suicide fantasy is an attempt to escape finitude, not overcome it, and it is one of the most profound ironies of this irony-laced poem that the Easter message of Christ’s resurrection—a message Faust can no longer believe in—pulls him back from death, renews his investment in earthly life. Homunculus’ self-sacrifice moves in the opposite direction. In what is clearly figured as erotic ecstasy, he shatters the ensconcing vial on Galatea’s foam-borne shell, pouring his luminescent essence into the sea’s fecundity. Faust would negate the body through suicidal fiat; Homunculus merges with the source of living corporeal forms. Faust’s retreat from the vial’s temptation is figured in the language of Christianity; Homunculus’ breaking of the vial is accompanied by the Sirens’ hymn to Eros, “creator of all” (8479).

The poetic juxtaposition of Faust and Homunculus ramifies into other regions of the drama, but enough has been said here to make plausible the thought of a post-mortal purification with which the drama closes. There is divinity in Faust, but it has its being as the infinite self-origination of ongoing creation. Salvation is not a single event that transports souls to another world; it is an immanent process of purifying transformation. One may see in this conception a version of Spinoza’s God as the immanent and eternal (not transient) cause of all things, hence as self-creative activity. Or one may identify here the outlines of the creation myth Goethe concocted out of hermetic, Cabbalist, and Neo-Platonic sources, as reported in the eighth book of his autobiography Poetry and Truth (1816/17). The more compelling task, however, is to see how these sources achieve the richness and specificity of poetic thought. For example, our brief consideration of Homunculus along with the post-mortal coda of “Mountain Gorges” accentuates the significance of love within this entire complex. Briefly phrased, love is the force that carries creation toward the divinity from which it springs. The word “love,” however, must be understood as embracing the full spectrum of amorous forms, from the all-creative Eros celebrated in Homunculus’ self-outpouring to the gentle caritas of the penitent Margarete. The mythic-religious syncretism of Faust is deeply ironic throughout, but nowhere more so than in the scenes “Classical Walpurgis Night” and “Mountain Gorges.” Such irony, however, is not exclusively negative. It is a component of what might be termed the post-traditional or poetic religion that marks the furthest horizon of Goethe’s response to modernity.

Ironic distance also characterizes the representation of Mephistopheles, who is, as he remarks himself, a blatant anachronism. A pressing question that any serious reading of Faust must seek to answer is why Goethe elected to bring the devil—or one of his vicars—onto the stage in an age that had disabused itself of such superstitions. Our gloss on the suicide scene as dramatizing Faust’s fantasy of escaping finitude suggests the beginning of an answer. In fact, the scene “Night” contains two other such attempts, the visionary contemplation of the sign of the Macrocosm and the conjuring of the Earth Spirit. Both fail, of course, casting Faust back into the dusty reality of his study and the miserable limitations of his mundane existence. Indeed, the encounter with the Earth Spirit is succeeded by Wagner’s visit, in whom Faust must see—for the audience or reader certainly does—a biting parody of his own scholarly life. This humiliation, a last straw added to his scathing rejection at the hands of the Earth Spirit, motivates Faust to lift the vial of poison to his lips.

The important fact to hold onto here is that the series of failures to escape or transcend conditionality not only precedes, but also motivates Faust’s turn to Mephistopheles. Faust agrees to the wager, in other words, only after realizing that immediate access to the Absolute is foreclosed to him. The fraught alliance between Faust and Mephistopheles that the wager institutes, and which holds constant throughout the play, shows that Faust’s life unfolds within the dimension of finitude. Finitude is the coincidence in humankind of free and spontaneous aspiration, on the one hand, and thoroughgoing conditionality and limitation, on the other. It places man, as Goethe writes in the passage from Poetry and Truth referred to above, in the situation of Lucifer and makes of us at once the most perfect and the most imperfect, the happiest and the unhappiest of creatures. It is a mistake to sever in thought Faust from Mephistopheles, to distinguish high ideals from evil machinations. This would be to betray Goethe’s basic insight in the play: the insight that, like Prometheus to his rock, we are free beings fettered to our finitude.

The pairing of Faust and Mephistopheles generates a dramatic vision characterized by three structural tensions. Mephistopheles’ doings bring to light the dependence of modern striving on instruments and mediations it does not fully master. He provides the enabling means for Faust’s every project, from winning Gretchen to the evacuation of Philemon and Baucis from their idyllic hut. Precisely these means, however, eventually overwhelm each enterprise with murderous consequences. Second, Mephistopheles embodies the fact that the Faustian drive toward ultimate ideals, however elevated its avowed intentions, is intrinsically entwined with a violent, destructive tendency, which Goethe traces even to the core of Faust’s erotic desire. And third, Mephistopheles’ inveterate cynicism—a feature that earns him all the cutting, comic lines in the play—illustrates the duplicity of modern consciousness, the ability to step outside itself and see, even in its highest aspirations, baseness; in its deepest convictions, mendacity. Under the conditions of finitude, every love is also a seduction and betrayal, every creation implies destruction, every truth averred is eventually belied. Conceived as constitutive of human existence, the contradictory structure of finitude becomes the sponsoring matrix of modern tragedy. That is, as noted above, the generic term that Goethe employed in titling his work. Faust is tragic in this sense: that it shows our actions taking place in a world we did not make and bearing consequences we can’t foresee; that it understands human impulse as a monster of tenderness and destruction; and that it demonstrates the susceptibility of every intention to ironic reversal. Worst of all: the ineluctable necessity of this dual structure affords no exculpation. Gretchen’s end is horrific and unacceptable, and Faust’s hands are bloodied.

Faust is the dream of poetry in its totality. This summary characterization from which we began doesn’t simply call attention to the fact that the work is allusively rich. To be sure, it interweaves the legend of Faust with the Book of Job and the Gospel of John. The section on Gretchen recapitulates the structure of Enlightenment or bourgeois tragedy with a generous use of Shakespearean technique. In Part II, ancient myth, Homeric epic, Attic tragedy, medieval love poetry, the operas of Monteverdi, renaissance pastoral, Calderon’s plays, the courtly masque, and Dante’s heavenly comedy all make their expressive possibilities felt and are integrated within the course of the whole. The poem is a vast archive in which reticulate patterns of cultural memory come alive. The most significant synthetic achievement of the Faust poem, however, lies elsewhere. It is the poetically and intellectually compelling articulation of a double vision of modernity. Goethe gives us the modern world to see at once as tragedy and as encompassing poetic-religious vision. Reading Faust, we comprehend that these are two aspects of one reality, a reality that is both infinite self-creation and conflict-laden finitude. Faust is the poem of the immanent world in its irresolvable tension, and just for that reason it dreams poetry as totality. Perhaps for the last time.

David E. Wellbery

University of Chicago