Faust Read online

  FAUST

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam Dual-Language edition published November 1962

  Bantam World Drama edition published February 1967

  Bantam Classic revised edition / May 1985

  Bantam Classic reissue / September 2007

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 1962 by Bantam Books

  Revised translation copyright © 1985 by Peter Salm

  Cover photo © Robb Kendrick/Getty Images

  Cover design by Elizabeth Shapiro

  Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-75497-4

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  A Note on Using this eBook

  A Note on the Translation

  Goethe Chronology

  FAUST: ENGLISH

  DEDICATION

  PRELUDE IN THE THEATER

  PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN

  THE FIRST PART OF THE TRAGEDY

  Night

  Before the Gate

  Faust’s Study

  Study

  Auerbach’s Cellar in Leipzig

  Witch’s Kitchen

  A Street

  Evening

  Promenade

  The Neighbor’s House

  A Street

  Martha’s Garden

  A Summer Cabin

  Forest and Cavern

  Gretchen’s Room

  Martha’s Garden

  At the Well

  By the Ramparts

  Night

  Cathedral

  Walpurgis Night

  Walpurgis-Night’s Dream

  Gloomy Day—Field

  Night—Open Field

  Dungeon

  FAUST: GERMAN

  ZUEIGNUNG

  VORSPIEL AUF DEM THEATER

  PROLOG IM HIMMEL

  DER TRAGÖDIE ERSTER TEIL

  Nacht

  Vor Dem Tor

  Studierzimmer

  Studierzimmer

  Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig

  Hexenküche

  Strasse

  Abend

  Spaziergang

  Der Nachbarin Haus

  Strasse

  Garten

  Ein Gartenhäuschen

  Wald Und Höhle

  Gretchens Stube

  Marthens Garten

  Am Brunnen

  Zwinger

  Nacht

  Dom

  Walpurgisnacht

  Walpurgisnachtstraum Oder Oberons Und Titanias Goldne Hochzeit

  Trüber Tag • Feld

  Nacht • Offen Feld

  Kerker

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  A MAN WHO called himself Faust, or Faustus, lived in the early part of the sixteenth century and left his traces in cities like Erfurt, Leipzig, and Wittenberg. We have the testimony of Martin Luther, for example, who in the context of one of his “Table Talks” (1536–7) incidentally referred to Faust, his contemporary, as a conjurer and necromancer who was wont to refer to the devil as his brother-in-law. In the mid-sixteenth century, about ten years after Faust’s death, Philipp Melanchthon, Luther’s close friend and adjutant, spoke of Faust with a mixture of awe and fervent repugnance:

  Once upon a time [Faust] intended to put on a spectacle in Venice and he said that he would fly into the heavens. Soon the devil took him away and pummelled and mauled him so terribly that, upon coming back to earth, he lay as if dead. But this time he did not die. (Faust, eine Anthologie, Reklam, Leipzig, n.d., p. 16, translation mine)

  There are other bits of documentary evidence, but while Faust’s goings-about are not ascertainable in detail, the legends proliferated and in due time began to envelop the scanty verifiable facts. Whatever contributed to the object lesson in the necromancer’s reprobate life was worthy of being singled out and enlarged upon for the benefit of pious souls who lived in hope of salvation.

  Magic and alchemy were related endeavors, and their practitioners inspired both awe and suspicion; awe because they could produce near-miracles in their vials, alembics, and retorts. They were, after all, in pursuit of ancient and persistent dreams: transmutating base metals into gold, discovering the elixir of eternal youth, achieving human flight, finding panaceas for the plague, and, finally, the dream of possessing superhuman wisdom. There were reports that the alchemists Paracelsus and Agrippa had performed feats that came close to attaining those wondrous goals, reports that, along with other fanciful tales, often became transmuted into Faustian lore.

  On the other hand, the alchemists and necromancers were regarded with suspicion because to bring about their marvels in the laboratory they “obviously” had to resort to black magic and hence had to be motivated by evil purposes, much like the powerful “evil scientist” of our day as he appears in animated cartoons on Saturday morning television. In the sixteenth century, an age of great religious turmoil and fervor, the alchemist-magicians were seen as tampering with the divine order of things. They furtively took minerals, crystals, and waters out of God’s nature and carried them off into their laboratories and, by compounding, boiling, distilling, and filtrating, forced them to minister to their dark purposes. They were “speculating the elements,” illicitly prying into deeply hidden mysteries. In our own century, rather more tolerant of scientific probings into nature’s inmost recesses, Thomas Mann put to good use a tenacious ambiguity still embedded in the language. In his novel Doctor Faustus (1947), he has the narrator play on the common root in the German words versuchen, meaning to try or test, Versuch, experiment, and Versuchung, temptation—all by way of evoking the alchemists’ suspect trade. Here is the passage in English:

  But the enterprise of experimenting on Nature, of teasing her into manifestations, “tempting” her, in the sense of laying bare her workings by experiment … that all this … was itself the work of the “Tempter,” was the conviction of earlier epochs. (Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, New York, 1960, p. 17, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)

  Surely where there is temptation, the devil, or Mephistopheles, cannot be far behind. After all, Jesus himself, having been led into the wilderness by the Evil Spirit, had to confront three temptations, and three times he stood fast against their lure (Luke 4: 1–12).

  The stories that were circulating about Faust were excellent raw material for the newly established printing shops. It should not be forgotten that during the sixteenth century printers were on the lookout for new, preferably sensational stories that might be offered to the public. After Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type, the books printed during the remainder of the fifteenth century were largely of a religious nature: editions of the Bible, collections of religious songs, and prayer books. But printing presses constituted a big investment and became economically interesting only if they were also used for nonreligious ends. There were the medieval legends about Virgil, the Roman poet and author of the Aeneid, whom the Middle Ages had endowed with superhuman wisdom and prophetic powers; and much entertainment was found in the rude tricks perpetrated by the arch-prankster Till Eulenspiegel. The printers produced cheap, pamphletlike chapbooks and hawked them
at street corners and country fairs. The hair-raising episodes in the life of the mighty conjurer Johann Faust, who in the end paid in full for his impious life, quickly captured the imagination of people looking to be both entertained and edified. The first Faust book, marketed by the printer Johannes Spiess in 1587, was a popular and financial success, which soon spread to the north of Europe by way of an English translation. It appealed powerfully to Christopher Marlowe, who was moved to compose The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus sometime between 1588 and 1593. Marlowe’s drama, in turn, became the basis for puppet and marionette shows that were given at various communal festivities, a ready market for slapstick versions of the damnable life of Faust.

  In his autobiography, Goethe noted that “the important puppet fable [of Faust] continued to echo and buzz many-toned within me” (Poetry and Truth II, 10). While Goethe’s and Marlowe’s dramas arose from the same folklore, there is a spiritual and emotional distance between them that reflects a seismic shift in cultural history. To be sure, in one respect all the stories—the puppet-theater versions and the crudely written Faust chapbooks—were alike: in order to acquire limitless riches and power, Faust had succumbed to the blandishments of the devil; for twenty-four years Mephistopheles would do Faust’s bidding, after which he would collect his soul to be roasted in Hell. It was a plot made to order to be a warning not to do as Faust did—not to reach for powers that lay beyond one, not to “speculate the elements,” but to rest content with the approved answers that were provided by the Scriptures and by the inspired and approved ancient philosophers.

  To the eighteenth century, however, the interpretation of the Faust story in the dim light of old biases and medieval superstitions must have seemed quaintly picturesque, superannuated, and irrelevant to the sensibilities of modern man. Faust’s chafing at his human limitations could no longer in itself be regarded as sinful. A new pride in the grandeur of the individual, fed by a rekindled confidence in the capacity of human reason to unravel nature’s mysteries, made it possible to see in Faust not only the sinner but also a representative example of what is noble and divine in man: an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and an inborn need to explore—by spiritual as well as sensuous means—the limits of human potential. Indeed at the end of the second part of Goethe’s drama Faust has earned the right to divine Grace.

  In 1773, as a twenty-four-year-old law student at the University of Strasbourg, Goethe sketched out the first doggerel verses of the opening monologue of Faust—intentionally “bad” verse, a reminiscence of the puppet theater. From then on—though with many interruptions—the ever-growing poetic edifice of Faust remained Goethe’s chief preoccupation, running like a red thread through an immensely productive life.

  A momentous Goethean departure from the old legend occurred in Goethe’s version of the transaction between Faust and Mephistopheles. The traditional twenty-four-year contract was done away with and transformed into a wager. Faust says to Mephisto:

                 If ever I should tell the moment:

                 Oh, stay! You are so beautiful!

                 Then you may cast me into chains,

                 then I shall smile upon perdition!

  (1699–1702)

  In his long life as a scholar, Faust has reached the melancholy conclusion that he will never know what is truly worth knowing, that he would be blinded by the light of truth, and must therefore be resigned to live with mere reflections and counterfeit images. Since he has little faith in even the devil’s ability to satisfy his craving to the full, he is confident—though by no means cheerfully so—that he will win the bet. He fully expects that he will continue to live as he lived before, not truly advancing beyond the condition that made him say in the opening monologue:

                 yet here I am, a wretched fool,

                 no wiser than I was before.

                 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

                 I don’t pretend to know a thing worth knowing,

                 I don’t pretend that I can teach,

  (358–72)

  Faust’s prospects are grim. Despair and the idea of suicide are ever his close companions.

  But suppose that Faust were to lose the wager and that through Mephisto’s machinations he indeed were to experience the supreme Moment, the incomparable, all-encompassing pinprick of time. In that case, for a single instant of usurped divinity, Faust would look upon even hellfire as trivial punishment. The stakes of the wager—no doubt by design—are not what they seem to be at first sight. They require “speculation” in the alchemical sense, meaning intellectual probing and testing. As it turns out, an accounting of who won or who lost is not finally at issue in Faust. All is secondary to the quest for the transcendent Moment. It is Faust’s irrepressible striving to extend the human potential and to break through the restrictions inherent in human nature that finally tips the balance in favor of Faust’s salvation, even though, in legalistic terms, he may have lost his bet with Mephisto.

  The first part of the drama, Faust I—offered in this volume in an English translation as well as in the original German—sparkles in its manifold poetic modes and impresses us with a substantial integrity. It stands on its own dramatic feet without Faust II and is frequently performed, even though it leaves the hero’s destiny and the outcome of the wager in abeyance. At the end of our play, one sees Gretchen lying on her prison pallet uttering, Ophelia-like, deranged shreds of truth that pierce Faust’s inmost being. She is guilty of murdering her illegitimate baby, whose father is her seducer-lover, Faust. We, as readers of the play, know that Gretchen was moved by love alone and was driven to despair by love. Having seen her despised and humiliated by her own people, we are relieved to see her find mercy in God’s eyes and grateful for a hint that she will be given a luminous place in Heaven. Faust, on the other hand, must continue to live, bound to a minion of Hell and inextricably enmeshed in Evil.

  The modes and moods of Goethe’s dramatic discourse are never for long the same or reliably predictable. There is the solemn and metrically uniform celebration of divine majesty manifested in the rolling planetary spheres of the “Prologue in Heaven,” immediately followed by the irregular, doggerel-like verses of the opening monologue. Shakespearean blank verse is never far removed from medieval hymnic chants. Strictly composed four-foot stanzaic lines may still echo in our minds when, near the drama’s end, we reach the ragged and harsh shreds of prose in “Gloomy Day—Field.” It is apparent that we must not look to verse forms as such to provide us with any unifying principle in Faust. The mood may shift from high seriousness to levity, from profound sentiment to callousness, from optimism to despair, oscillations that seem almost instantaneous, like an alternating current. They soon reveal themselves as important reflections of the theme or content of the drama; for are not the ambivalences and paradoxes inherent in human existence—and the absence of absolutes—important aspects of Faust’s frustration, and are they not near the source of what Goethe explicitly named a “tragedy”?

  Even before the “Prologue in Heaven” ends, the vision of celestial magnificence is suddenly cut short by the ironic colloquialisms of Lucifer-Mephisto:

                 From time to time it’s good to see the Old Man;

                  I must be careful not to break with him.

                 How decent of so great a personage

                  to be so human with the devil.

  (350–3)

  And a bit later, when we witness Faust bemoaning his painfully futile encounter with the Earth Spirit, there is a knock on the door
. It is Wagner, his disciple and assistant, who had listened to his master’s outcries as they echoed through the corridors. As a devotee of traditional scholarship and loyal defender of the sanctity of venerable texts, he says upon entering the study:

                 Excuse me, but I heard your declamation;

                 was it a passage from Greek tragedy?

                 I should like to profit from such elocution,

  (522–4)

  Wagner radically misjudges his master. By his ludicrously inappropriate reference to the travails of Faust’s soul, he reveals himself—through an ironic shaft directed at the audience—as a prototypal philistine.

  Often there is no temporal sequence of contrary positions, but a simultaneous presence of mutually exclusive polarities. Consider the following: when Faust tells Mephisto that he is bent on a life of all-encompassing experience beyond the reach of ordinary men, Mephisto answers mockingly:

                 Make your alliance with a poet,

                 and let that gentleman think lofty thoughts,

                 and let him heap the noblest qualities

                 upon your worthy head:

  (1789–92)

  The lines are deceptively simple. Actually they contain multi-leveled ironies. The poet with whom Faust is to ally himself here stands for a person who conjures up empty illusions of the kind Faust continuously creates for himself. The reader realizes—perhaps in a double-take response—that the images of Faust’s fantasy are indeed the stuff of poetry and are constitutive elements of the Faust poem itself. It is a case of involuted paradoxes: Mephisto, the no-nonsense materialist contemptuous of poetic imagination, scoffs at Faust and recommends that he make himself over into a dramatic character—only in this manner could he hope to find fulfillment. It is a provocation directed not only at Faust but at the reader-spectator as well. And it is the Faust drama—itself a poetic battleground between poetry and anti-poetry—that continuously generates provisional answers to Mephisto’s challenge. After all, acting counter to Mephisto’s corrosive stance is our realization that Faust need not bother himself to make an “alliance with a poet.” Surely, in his case such a step would be redundant. For the public, on the other hand, Mephisto’s suggestion may be only partially ironic, because it is aware of the “as if” condition of the stage. Mephisto’s radical critique opens unsuspected avenues into our minds and nerve centers. We are compelled to measure the distance between fantasy and quotidian reality and “get inside” the process of poetic transformation. We might indeed take upon ourselves a share of Faust’s own frustration: