Goethe’s Faust, Part 2, with lemurs

A few weeks ago, Tom (from the Wuthering Expectations blog) and I decided to read Part 2 of Goethe’s Faust at the same time, hoping that our joint efforts could throw more light on a difficult work. Tom’s posts on this poem may be found here, and here.

The extracts from Goethe’s “Faust”, Parts 1 and 2, in this post are taken from the translation by David Luke, published by Oxford University Press.

It’s the lemurs that got me. In Act 5 of the Second Part of Faust, Mephistopheles enters with, we are told, “lemurs”. Translator David Luke explains in an endnote:

Lemurs (Lat. lemures): restless souls of the dead. Goethe had seen an ancient tomb near Naples on which they were portrayed as skeletons wit still enough muscles and sinews to enable them to move.

Pretty sinister and gruesome, in other words. However, I found it difficult to remove from my mind an image of Mephistopheles accompanied by ring-tailed lemurs – not quite what Goethe perhaps had intended. But then again, what had he intended? Is the grotesquely comic image lodged in my mind really so out of place when this entire epic second part is infused with the grotesquely comic? The image I have of Goethe is that of a lofty and Olympian seriousness, and while I don’t doubt that Goethe’s artistic intentions are very serious indeed, the general tenor of this second part of Faust is that of the bizarre, the outlandish, the preposterous. This second part, written mainly in the last few years of his long life (and some twenty years and more after the publication of the first), Goethe gave free rein to a very strange and uninhibited poetic imagination, and produced a work that is as puzzling and as enigmatic as it was, no doubt, meant to be.

Faust had occupied Goethe for, on and off, some 60 years of his life. It was some time in the early- to mid-1770s that he first conceived of it, and the First Part was published in 1808. He had always planned a continuation, and had worked at one – again, on and off – over many years. In 1827 he published a dramatic poem Helena, which was later to form the bulk of the third act of this Second Part. But it was only in the last six years of his life that he focused hard on this, and, in July 1831, he declared it finished, and put his seal on the work. It was, at his own request, published only after his death in 1832. In short, Faust is, quite self-consciously, the major life’s work of a poet who is generally reckoned to be one of the towering figures of the western literary tradition: the two parts, taken together, form one of the greatest and most monumental peaks of western literary culture. Which makes things somewhat difficult for the humble blogger – especially one who, despite a couple of earlier readings of the work, finds himself very much in unfamiliar territory.

True, I have written posts before on such great literary monuments: there are many posts in this blog on the plays of Shakespeare, or on Don Quixote.  But these are works I have lived with: although I do not pretend to be a scholar, these works are now part of my mental furniture, as it were, in a way that Goethe’s Faust isn’t. There is also a mountain of critical writings on Goethe that I haven’t even set foot upon. But, proceeding on the reasonable assumption that no poet wrote to be read only by experts, perhaps it isn’t entirely a waste of time to record what this lay reader made of it all.

In brief, I was dazzled. This second part is very different from the first in a number of ways. The first is a play, and, with a few cuts (it seems too long to be accommodated in a single evening’s performance), can easily hold its own on the stage. The second part, despite being set out like a play in five acts, isn’t dramatic at all: at no point is there any dramatic tension or dramatic momentum; the dramatic continuity between the five acts seems questionable; and, most importantly, it lacks human interest. Never does the reader (or the audience, should it be staged) wonder what is going to happen next. Every scene, every character, seems allegorical: each element of the work seems like a symbol of something else, though what those something elses may be isn’t at all clear. Often, I got the feeling that Goethe, in his old age, wasn’t really writing for any readership, as such: he was writing for himself. We know from his conversations, for instance, that the character of Euphorion in the third act represents Byron, but I could find nothing in the text to indicate this: this was simply Goethe’s private association that, in the text at least, he preferred to keep private. I imagine there are many more such private associations scattered throughout the work, but since Goethe chose not to reveal them to us, I don’t know that it serves much purpose to look outside the text to discover what they might have been.

(This second part too has been staged, I gather, but reading it in my study, I could not imagine it in the theatre. In any case, there must have been quite extensive cuts to get it to fit in a single evening’s performance.)

But it’s dazzling. I do not know whether Goethe’s imagination has always been this weird, but it seems quite demented here, in this product of his old age. But a question arises: if a work of art is to have both a diversity and a unity, is there really a unity here? Is there some unifying factor binding together all the wild exuberance? One answer could be that it is held together by the story of Faust itself: the scholar, dissatisfied with his life, makes a pact with the Devil, gets what he wants for a limited time, but then, at the end of the allotted time, forfeits his soul. However, between the making of the pact at the start of the First Part, and its resolution in the last act of the Second, there seems little (if any) reference to it. The famous pact-making scene in Part One is worth recalling:

FAUST:

If ever to the moment I shall say:

Beautiful moment: do not pass away!

Then you may forge your chains to bind me,

Then I will put my life behind me,

Then let them hear my death-knell toll,

Then from your labours you’ll be free,

The clock may stop, the clock hands fall,

And time come to an end for me!

MEPHISTOPHELES:

We shall remember this; think well what you are doing.

But do we remember this? This pact is not referred to, directly or indirectly, till the very last act of the second part. All through the famous tragic tale of Gretchen that occupies the rest of Part One, through the phantasmagoric episodes that make up most of Part Two, this entire episode seems, as it were, set to one side. But it does lay out what may be the central theme of the work. Faust is only damned if he is ever satisfied with the way things are at any given moment; and its corollary is that he is saved if he strives, and continues to strive, in search of that satisfaction that his earthly moments cannot give. And it is this eternal striving that is could be, perhaps, the work’s central theme. But striving for what, exactly? There can be no direct answer to this: it is perhaps inevitable that Goethe is drawn into a world of symbols and abstractions.

Part Two opens with a scene of the utmost lyricism: even in translation, it is exquisitely beautiful (and of course, translator David Luke has to take the credit for that). Faust is asleep, and spirits around him sing of a new beginning. Part One had told us the traumatic tale of Gretchen, and if Faust were simply to forget about her, he would appear merely heartless, which he is not; and if he were to carry with him the emotional scars of that tragedy, that would get in the way of Goethe’s artistic purpose. The only way out is to have the whole thing erased from Faust’s mind, so he could start anew. When Faust awakes, he speaks, surprisingly, in terza rima. This Dantean reference cannot be accidental: here too, as in the Commedia, we are concerned about the progress of the soul. Except, as David Luke tells us in his introduction, Goethe did not like the use of the word “soul”, (possibly, I’d guess, because of its religious associations): he preferred a term derived from Aristotle’s metaphysics – “entelechy”, which Luke describes as “the unit or monad of discarnate force which survives the death of the body and precedes physical existence”.

This opening scene of Part Two is a sort of prologue leading into the main action of Act One: we are now at the court of an emperor, whose financial means are straitened. Faust and Mephistopheles solve the problem with the introduction of paper money (and hence, inflation), but there are two things along the way that don’t seem to be part of what is, in essence, a comic story. Firstly, there is a long scene featuring a carnival masque, in which all sorts of figures appear – figures who may just be carnival revellers in costume, but, then again, who may really be as they seem. This scene is remarkable in that it is long but doesn’t lead anywhere: it throws no further light on the dramatic situation, or on the characters; it dissipates rather than enhances what dramatic tension may have existed. It is there purely for its own sake, and the effect it creates – that of a mad jumble, a wild exuberance and a colourful zest – serves no purpose in the wider scheme of things. What matters here is the texture of the scene itself. The other feature in this act that seems extraneous to the essentially comic tale presented is Faust’s descent into the underworld to visit some mysterious, primeval beings called the “mothers” (and much scholarly ink has been spilt on what exactly they are, and what they signify), and his subsequent glimpse of the pure ideal of beauty – Helen.

His longing for Helen, for pure beauty, is met in the third act: here, Goethe takes us into what is ostensibly classical Greece, but is, rather, a fantasy world suspended seemingly both geographically and in time. Here, he marries Helen, and fathers a child with her – Euphorion. This Euphorion (a representation of Byron, as we gather from Goethe’s conversation) is a spirit of Romanticism, and falls and dies by trying to reach too high; and Helen, more mirage than person, does not so much die as will her passage into the afterlife. It is a very strange act – a sort of play within a play – that, in presenting a marriage between Faust and Helen, presets also on a symbolic level a marriage between the medieval Gothic and the classical, the Christian and the pagan. Euripides (whom Goethe had described as the most tragic of the Athenian tragedians) is very much to the fore here: Goethe makes use of the legend Euripides himself had used in his play Helen, in which the true Helen is spirited away, and only her double is abducted by Paris. In metrical terms, too, Euripides is evoked. All very fascinating, but nonetheless deeply enigmatic. There is no point asking what this is all leading to: as with so much else in this work, it appears to serve no end but its own. But what is its own end? I don’t know that I could even try to answer that without delving deep into Goethe scholarship.

Similarly enigmatic, though for different reasons, is the Second Act that had preceded it. Here, we have another mad Walpurgis Nacht, as we had in Part One of Faust, but this time, the figures that appear are all from the classical world. (And even those reasonably versed in classical mythology would be well advised to read an edition with copious notes.) And this time, the Walpurgis Nacht scenes are bigger, longer, and even madder than they had been in Part One. We find ourselves in a very surreal world, where anything can happen. Figures seem to appear and disappear at will. Inanimate objects speak. Philosophers Thales and Anaxagoras argue over what is the most potent force in shaping the world – water or fire. A seismic eruption causes a mountain suddenly to appear, and new life forms inhabit it. And, perhaps strangest of all, there is the Homunculus. The name, I take it, is derived from the early chapters of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, where it refers to the spermatozoa – life awaiting creation; but while Sterne’s comedy is bawdy, Goethe’s seems to me merely grotesque. His Homunculus is also life awaiting creation: it is a creation of an alchemist – a life still in a glass retort, waiting to be embodied into earthly life. This glass retort containing life not-yet-born also travels through the Aegean during this classical Walpurgis Nacht, also speaking lines of poetry.

What are we to make of this mad disorder – this maximum entropy, as it were? It has certainly been very influential: one can see its influence quite clearly in, say, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (although Ibsen’s dramatic focus, unlike Goethe’s, was always on the human), or in the “Circe” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses. It seems to stand outside time, and, despite the stage directions speaking of the Peneus or the rocky inlets of the Aegean, it seems to stand outside space too. Is it simply a wild burst of exuberance, and nothing more? It’s certainly a lot of fun, but once again, I suspect I’d have to delve deep into Goethe scholarship to understand something of Goethe’s symbols, and what exactly this allegory is allegorising. But even without any of that, it is easy to enjoy the fantastic, uninhibited nature of Goethe’s imagination.

We are with the Emperor again in the fourth act, this time in a military campaign; and in the final act, there is the reckoning. The pact made early in Part One, and which had seemingly been forgotten since, now reappears. In Faust’s last speech, he refers back explicitly to the terms of the pact:

Only that man earns freedom, merits life,

Who must reconquer both in constant daily strife,

In such a place, by danger still surrounded,

Youth, manhood, age, their brave new world has founded.

I long to see such multitude, and stand

With a free people on free land!

Then to the moment, I might say:

Beautiful moment, do not pass away!

Faust might say that, but he doesn’t; and he hasn’t. He has kept his side of the bargain. He says he will wish the moment to stay when all mankind has earned its freedom, but not till then. Instead of ever being satisfied with the moment, he has always striven, and so, his soul – his “entelechy”, the essence of what he is – is saved. But striven for what? In this last act, we see him an old man, but an active an, involved in all sort of improving projects, such as reclaiming land from the sea. But in his way stands the cottage of an elderly couple – Philemon and Baucis, the gentle, hospitable couple from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. And, in the process of carrying out Faust’s orders, their cottage is burned, and they are killed. He had not meant them to die, any more than he had wished Gretchen’s tragedy in Part One, but their deaths, nonetheless, are a direct consequence of his striving: “Well, do it – clear them from my path!” When Faust hears of their deaths, he proclaims that this was not what he had wanted, which certainly is true; but is this the striving to be rewarded with salvation? Nothing seems straight-forward.

In Goethe’s version, Faust is saved – either because he has kept his side of the bargain (he has never asked for any moment to stay); or, perhaps, he is saved through the grace of God. The former seems to me more likely, as God has been curiously absent from this story of salvation and damnation (except in the Prologue in Heaven before Part One). Christ has been strangely absent too: no blood of Christ streaming through the firmament here, as in Marlowe’s play. But for all that, the final scene, titled “Mountain Gorges”, is surprisingly religious in feeling. “Surprising” because I could find no evidence elsewhere in the text of a Christian underpinning, or any adherence to Christian doctrine.

However, the imagery Goethe uses in this final scene is very Christian (though, once again, Christ is curiously absent). Though neither God nor Christ appears, the Virgin Mary does – perhaps rather surprisingly so given Goethe’s Protestant background. But it isn’t clear to me whether this final scene is explicitly Christian, or whether Goethe is, rather, using imagery from the Christian religion as symbols for his own different ends – just as he had used classical imagery as symbols towards his own ends earlier in the work.

Disembodied voices declaim ecstatically as Faust’s soul is saved: even Gretchen, whom Faust had wronged (albeit unwittingly), joins in what is essentially a vast song of praise:

Virgin and mother, thou

Lady beyond compare, oh thou

Who art full of glory, bow

Thy face in mercy to my great joy now!

This explicitly echoes Gretchen’s prayer from the first part:

O Virgin Mother, thou

Who are full of sorrows, bow

Thy face in mercy to my anguish now!

There, she had been pleading for mercy for her own sake; now, she is rejoicing in the mercy shown to another, even to another who, in earthly life, had wronged her. In her earthly life, she had sinned, but now, as a penitent in the afterlife, she too has been saved. But saved in what sense? Given this work has not been a Christian work, can these tropes of salvation and damnation be seen in Christian terms? Or are these, once again, symbols for something else? And here again, we are left trying to interpret – trying, perhaps, to put into words that which can not be put into words – not even by Goethe.

The knots in this complex work are too intricate for me to untie. This seems one of those works that need to be lived with, so that, over the years, it seeps into the brain, and becomes part of one’s consciousness. Me – I have only dipped my toes in. But even doing that has proved a most enjoyable experience, mainly because of the wild exuberance of Goethe’s poetic imagination. After all, though much has eluded me, I’ll always treasure the image of Mephistopheles with the lemurs.

Comic errors, dark forebodings

The Comedy of Errors is a very early Shakespeare play, possibly even his first, but one need make no allowances: it is a fast-moving comedy, and still very funny. But it’s one of those early plays that tend, perhaps, to get overlooked – a bit like that other very early play The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Neither is often revived, or, I suspect, often read. But whereas The Two Gentlemen of Verona is, to my mind at least, frankly tedious, The Comedy of Errors is never less than entertaining, and there are some elements to it that, on my recent re-reading, quite surprised me.

I had remembered little more than a light-hearted farce. And, for the most part, “light-hearted farce” sums it up well. It has formed the basis of a well-known musical (The Boys from Syracuse); the Royal Shakespeare Company have presented their own musical version of it; and even Laurel and Hardy made use of it, as the basis of their film Our Relations. As a light-hearted farce, it works well. There are two sets of twins who are, unwittingly, in the same town at the same time, and naturally, there are all sorts of comic misunderstandings. The plot, as I gather, is taken from the play Menaechmi by Plautus; but Shakespeare had increased the complexity of the plot by introducing two sets of twins rather than one; and he had also introduced to the characters a certain depth who, in Plautus’ play, existed only to serve the plot. (I make this latter observation somewhat gingerly since it is gleaned merely from various learned accounts I have read of Shakespeare’s play: I won’t pretend to have read Plautus’ play, tempting though it is to do so.) Shakespeare presents the complex plot with a clarity that bespeaks a technical skill quite astonishing for a novice playwright, and the pacing seems well nigh perfect. But what really surprised me on this reading was the sense of darkness and of violence lying just under the surface. This was not necessary for the plot to work: if the plot were Shakespeare’s sole interest, he need not even have hinted at anything at all under the surface, especially as the surface itself is more than sufficient to hold the audience’s attention. But that darkness, with its potential to break out and to take the play into more disturbing regions, is most certainly present.

This underlying sense of darkness looks forward to his later, tragic works in ways that Shakespeare himself was unlikely, so early in his career, to have foreseen. The chaos lying just below the surface is very apparent in Othello, say: as Othello himself knows, when he loves Desdemona not, “chaos is come again”. Of course, in The Comedy of Errors, we know that order will prevail in the end – not so much because the disorder we see is a consequence merely of misunderstanding (Othello’s tragedy, too, is a consequence merely of misunderstanding), but because we are assured, both by the title and by the general ambience, that what we are seeing (or reading) is a comedy, and we know comedies don’t end in disaster; but the intensity of the disorder that does break out, and almost prevails, goes well beyond what may have been expected from a farce.

Consider for instance these lines spoken by Antipholus of Ephesus to his wife:

Dissembling harlot, thou art false in all;
And art confederate with a damned pack
To make a loathsome abject scorn of me:
But with these nails I’ll pluck out these false eyes
That would behold in me this shameful sport.

He calls her a “harlot” for no reason (as Othello does Desdemona); and threatens even to pluck out her eyes – a horrific image that, famously, becomes all too real later in King Lear. Did Shakespeare really have to accentuate the potential violence, or, rather, Antipholus’ potential for violence, to such an extent in what is, after all, a light comedy? The other characters are sure he is mad, or perhaps possessed by some kind of evil spirit, and, if we make the concession of seeing this evil spirit possessing him as a metaphor, they aren’t wrong.

Or take the violence inherent in the master-servant relationships. It is not, indeed, clear whether the two Dromios are servants, as we would understand the term, or slaves. Dromio of Ephesus is specifically called “slave”, but we shouldn’t perhaps make too much of that, given “slave” was a common derogatory term, like “knave”, and not necessarily to be taken literally. However, Egeon, in his narrative in the first scene (which is surprisingly dark for a farce), clearly says that the twin brothers Dromio had been purchased at birth (“Those, for their parents were exceeding poor, I bought…”). We see both Antipholus of Syracuse and Antipholus of Ephesus beating their respective Dromios, and Shakespeare, happy even at so early a stage in his career to give voices to his downtrodden characters, gives Dromio of Ephesus a rather affecting speech expressing the misery of an existence in which he has to take beatings merely at the whim of his master. He goes so far as to imagine being driven out of door to become a beggar once, thanks to the beatings he takes, he is no longer capable of service:

I have served him from the hour of my nativity to this instant, and have nothing at his hands for my service but blows. When I am cold, he heats me with beating; when I am warm, he cools me with beating; I am waked with it when I sleep; raised with it when I sit; driven out of doors with it when I go from home; welcomed home with it when I return; nay, I bear it on my shoulders, as a beggar wont her brat; and, I think when he hath lamed me, I shall beg with it from door to door.

This is all way beyond the realms of light comedy. If light comedy were indeed Shakespeare’s primary purpose, he would have had masters and servants on gentler footing; or, at the very least, he would have suppressed a passage such as this. But he doesn’t, and we are free, I think, to ponder why.

None of this is to say that The Comedy of Errors is a tragic play: it isn’t. It is a light comedy, a farce, and it works superbly well as such. But there are, I think, intimations of the darkness of vision, of a disorder that spreads fast, and of a chaos that lies under the surface of our everyday lives, and of a cruelty and a violence in our everyday relationship, that seem to indicate that the seeds of his later tragic vision had always been present, even in a light farce such as this.

POSTSCRIPT: It was remiss of me not to provide a link to a post on this play in Di Nguyen’s blog. She provides a more detailed account of the characterisations, especially of the sisters Adriana and Luciana. So here it is.